Barry claimed that the family added their dead goat to the assemblage of animals around the manger. “So it was a Merry Christmas after all, at least until the thaw came.”
Here’s my moral for this story: Always keep a stable relationship with your pet.
Urban legends differ from fables in that many legends with completely different plots have essentially the same moral. What is taught (among other lessons) in lots of urban legends is that “He/she/they got exactly what he/she/they deserved.” And what “they” get is pretty gross—dead cats, dead grandmothers, a urine specimen, and worse. In only a few legends is good behavior rewarded; of course it’s just as poetic that way, too. These brands of poetic justice are illustrated over and over again in modern legends, extending beyond the prime examples of just deserts included in this chapter.
* * *
“The Fallen Angel Cake”
Most everyone in town knows these two ladies, so they will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. [So reported a small-town Canadian newspaper in 1982.]
The first lady was to bake a cake for the church ladies’ group bake sale, but she forgot to do it until the last minute. She baked an angel food cake, and when she took it out of the oven, the center had dropped flat.
Oh dear, there was no time to bake another cake, so she looked around the house for something to build up the centre of the cake.
She found it in the bathroom, a roll of toilet paper. She plunked it in and covered it with icing. The finished product looked beautiful, so she rushed it to the church.
She then gave her daughter some money and instructions to be at the sale the minute it opened and to buy that cake and bring it home.
When the daughter arrived at the sale, the attractive cake had already been sold. The lady was beside herself.
A couple of days later the same lady was invited to a friend’s home where two tables of bridge were to be played that afternoon.
After the game a fancy lunch was served, and to top it off, the cake in question was presented for dessert.
After the lady saw the cake, she started to get off her chair to rush into the kitchen to tell her hostess all about it. But before she could get to her feet, one of the other ladies said, “What a beautiful cake!”
The first lady sat back in her chair when she heard the hostess say, “Thank you, I baked it myself.” [The same story was published around 1980 in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald.]
* * *
“The Loaded Dog”
It Just Goes to Show, There Are No Lifeguards at the Gene Pool
From a radio program, true report of a happening in Georgia.
Guy buys brand new Grand Cherokee for $30,000 and has $400+ monthly payments.
He and a friend go duck hunting and of course all the lakes are frozen.
These two Atomic Brains go to the lake with the guns, the dog, the beer, and of course the new vehicle. They drive out onto the lake ice and get ready.
Now, they want to make some kind of a natural landing area for the ducks, something for the decoys to float on. In order to make a hole large enough to look like something a wandering duck would fly down and land on, it is going to take a little more effort than an ice-hole drill.
© Tribune Media Services, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Out of the back of the new Grand Cherokee comes a stick of dynamite with a short, 40-second fuse.
Now these two Rocket Scientists do take into consideration that if they place the stick of dynamite on the ice at a location far from where they are standing (and the new Grand Cherokee), they take the risk of slipping on the ice when they run from the burning fuse and possibly go up in smoke with the resulting blast. So, they decide to light this 40-second fuse and throw the dynamite.
Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns, and the dog?
Yes, the dog: A highly trained black Lab used for retrieving, especially things thrown by the owner.
You guessed it, the dog takes off at a high rate of doggy speed on the ice and captures the stick of dynamite with the burning 40-second fuse about the time it hits the ice. The two men yell, scream, wave arms, and wonder what to do now.
The dog, cheered on, keeps coming.
One of the guys grabs the shotgun and shoots the dog. The shotgun is loaded with #8 duck shot, hardly big enough to stop a black Lab. Dog stops for a moment, slightly confused but continues on. Another shot and this time the dog, still standing, becomes really confused and of course scared, thinking these two Nobel Prize winners have gone insane. He takes off to find cover (with the now really short fuse burning on the stick of dynamite)…under the brand new Cherokee.
BOOM!
Dog and Cherokee are blown to bits and sink to the bottom of the lake in a very large hole, leaving the two candidates for Co-leaders of the Known Universe standing there with this “I can’t believe this happened” look on their faces.
The insurance company says that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is not covered. He had yet to make the first of those $400+ a month payments.
This story was rampant on the Internet in nearly identical texts during late winter and spring 1997, when it was forwarded to me by several Internet friends. My title is borrowed from the classic version by Australian author Henry Lawson, written about 1899. Jack London penned his own treatment, “Moon-Face,” in 1902, but the basic plot, involving an animal set afire, occurs in the Bible (Judges 15:4–5). Appropriately enough, there’s a similar Aesopian fable called “The Burner Burnt.” Another retold version is in New Zealander Barry Crump’s hilarious 1960 book A Good Keen Man. The animal in the story may be a rat, rabbit, raccoon, possum, hawk, coyote, or the like, and there is even a shark version. Underscoring the “Just Deserts” theme is the moral stated in a version published in a book titled America’s Dumbest Criminals (1995): “that little coyote, although doomed, had at least managed to give them a small taste of what they deserved.” Less preachy, and much funnier, is a version written in 1990 for the Lewisburg (Tennessee) Tribune by columnist Joe Murrey, who claimed that the hunters’ dog was named Napoleon. Murrey’s punch line, from the dog’s tombstone, was “Napoleon Blown-apart.”
“The Plant’s Revenge”
There was no way roommates David Grundman and James Joseph Suchochi could have known, on that winter morning in 1982, that their desert cactus-plugging expedition would one day be turned into an anthem by an Austin, Texas, rock band called the Lounge Lizards.
They also could not have known that their outing would eventually be documented for the world by urban-legend sleuth Jan Harold Brunvand.
And they certainly had no way of foretelling that Grundman would meet his ignominious end that day, literally at the hands of a giant saguaro.
Had they known all that, they might have gone, anyway. Such is the world view of cactus-pluggers—dumb shits who make sport out of blasting desert plants with firearms.
The facts of the case, according to Brunvand (who copped an account for his book Curses! Broiled Again! The Hottest Urban Legends Going from stories in the Phoenix newspapers), are simple: Grundman shoots saguaro limb. Saguaro limb falls and hits Grundman. Grundman dies. The cactus was approximately 25 feet tall, and likely well over 100 years old. Grundman—in his mid-20s at the time—was described by the Lounge Lizards in their song “Saguaro” as a “noxious little twerp.”
An added wrinkle in this tale was some early confusion over Grundman’s last words. The first news reports of the happy accident claimed that Grundman was yelling “Tim-ber!” at the time of impact, and had actually only managed to spout the first syllable, “Tim…,” when the fatal blow came. Follow-up stories in the papers later speculated that the deceased more likely used his last breath to call out to his roommate, Jim.
From Dave Walker’s article “When Cactus and Civilization Collide: Trifling with saguaros can be hazardous to one’s health,” in the Phoenix (Arizon
a) New Times, March 3–9, 1993, p. 36. OK, I admit that my book Curses! Broiled Again! created a legend out of inconsistent news reports and a rock song, but there’s also the parallel theme to the preceding story to consider: both stories illustrate how just deserts may be served up in the natural world. Plus there’s a curious parallel story from Vermont in which a hunter shoots at a porcupine in a tree and the animal falls on him, puncturing him fatally with its quills. As with other people who have learned the story one way or another, I’ve become very fond of the account of Grundman’s demise. Walker’s lively summary appeals to me, too. The article was promoted on the cover of the New Times with this wonderful line: “Cactus Courageous: A pointed look at the saguaro, Arizona’s signature succulent.”
“The Dead Cat in the Package”
In December of 1992 a friend of mine told me about two friends of a friend of hers. They worked at the Mall of America in Bloomington [a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota]. They got off work at about 7 p.m., and they went to their car to share a ride home. When they started the car it didn’t seem to be running well, so they let it idle for a while, thinking it was just the cold weather. Then they noticed a bad smell coming from the engine, so they shut off the car and investigated. When they opened the hood, they discovered that a cat had climbed into the engine somehow while they were at work. The cat had gotten caught in a belt or something, and it was dead and mangled. The women found some sticks and poked the pieces of the dead cat loose.
They didn’t want to just leave the cat there on the ground, so they put it in a shopping bag and started walking back towards the mall to throw it in the garbage. But before they got there, a woman ran by and swiped the bag, presumably thinking it was full of Christmas gifts or something. The two women thought that was pretty funny. They decided that they should report the incident to mall security, because next time the thief might steal something of value.
As they were walking to the security office, they noticed a big hullabaloo. They stopped to see what was going on, and they saw that a familiar someone—the dead-cat thief!—had fainted and she was being loaded into an ambulance. Then a bystander saw the shopping bag and told one of the paramedics that it belonged to the sick woman. So a paramedic put the bag on the woman’s chest and secured it with a bungee cord. Of course, nobody had any firm details about what happened next, but my friend thought the thief probably had a pretty rough time of it when she woke up and the dead cat was still there.
I know I have heard or read this story before, but when I pressed my friend for details she kind of bit my head off. She was upset that I didn’t believe the story, so I just dropped it. But it’s been driving me nuts ever since. Was this a Twilight Zone episode or something, or was it just one of those stories you collect?
Sent to me in 1993 by Maria Westrup of Indianapolis. Many other readers, including several Midwestern newspaper columnists, confirmed that the old “dead cat” legend had found a new home at the gigantic Mall of America. And why not, since just about every other mall and department store in the United States, plus some abroad, have had the same story told about them? I’ve traced the version in which the cat-package is accidentally switched with one containing food—steaks, a ham, or the like—back to 1906, and both versions continue to pop up. It’s an especially popular legend during the Christmas shopping season. Often the victims observe the thief faint twice, once when she feels into the bag to check on her loot, and again when she returns to consciousness while on the paramedics’ stretcher and sees the dead cat staring her in the face. Ann Landers published a version in a letter signed “The Okie,” in 1987, and she merely thanked her reader for “letting the cat out of the bag,” evidently willing to believe the tale. An English music hall song, “The Body in the Bag,” retells the legend, and this musical treatment has passed into folk-song tradition. Yevgeny Yevtushenko included a Russian version, in which the cat-package is switched on a commuter train, in his 1981 novel, Wild Berries. That dead cat really gets around, and the thief always gets what he or she deserves.
“The Runaway Grandmother”
One of the worst (or best) horror travel stories I’ve heard is of the American family traveling by Volkswagen through Spain. The two children were in the back seat of the car with Grandmother when she died. The parents decided to phone the American Embassy for advice, but first had to find a phone.
The children became hysterical with Grandmother still in the back seat, and there was no room in the front of the Volkswagen for all four of them. So the father wrapped the grandmother in a blanket and put her in the luggage rack on top of the car. (In emergencies you do what you have to do.)
They came to a filling station and all piled out of the car to make the phone call, leaving the keys in the car. They returned to find the car had been stolen, along with Grandmother and their luggage and passports. They never did find any of their possessions.
From a letter to the travel editor of the Washington Post, December 23, 1990, from Wilfred “Mac” McCarty. Another letter published in that column on May 26, 1991, described a family from Frankfurt, Germany, who also lose their dead grandmother on a car trip in Spain. When Americans repeated this story, they were told that “this is a scenario that is commonly presented to first-year law students in Germany with instructions to determine and list all possible infractions of local and international law.” Using families of different nationalities traveling in various foreign countries, “The Runaway Grandmother” is popular all over Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and Great Britain; it has migrated to Australia as well as to the United States. In American versions the family is motoring either in Mexico or Canada; in the latter setting, the grandmother’s body is put either into a canoe on the car’s roof or into a boat towed behind the car. Although the stolen corpse is the functional equivalent of the dead cat in the preceding legend, the grandmother story seems to have originated in Europe during World War II, whereas the cat story is older and of American origin. Elements of this widespread legend are echoed in sources ranging from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to the film National Lampoon’s Vacation. Novelist Anthony Burgess justified using this story in a 1986 book—The Piano Players—by making the unlikely claim that he had invented it in the 1930s. Whatever its source, “The Runaway Grandmother” legend offers an apt metaphor for the uneasiness modern people feel about aging and particularly death. Like a mortician in real life, the grannynapper takes the problem off the hands of the living.
“The $50 Porsche”
The men in the insurance office propped their feet on the desks, puffed cigars and perused the classified ads. It was a Monday morning ritual. They were all talking about the eye-stopper.
Mercedes 280 SL For Sale. Sun Roof. Loaded. Burgundy, Leather Interior, Stereo. $75.
Their mouths watered. But their eyes moved on down the column. It had to be a misprint. No one, but no one, would sell that car for $75.
Finally, the talk turned to other things, and the car gradually was forgotten.
One salesman didn’t forget it though. He kept looking at the ad, and finally he dialed the phone number listed.
A woman answered.
“I’m calling to inquire about the Mercedes,” he said. “Is it still for sale?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s still for sale.”
“And the price is $75?”
“That’s right—$75.”
“Well, I’d like to come out and look at it.”
He drove out to the address given him. It was a large, split-level brick home with a swimming pool and tennis courts. The manicured shrubbery and lawns bespoke the presence of a gardener.
An attractive blonde woman answered the door.
“I’ve come to see the Mercedes,” he said.
She waved her hand at the double-car garage. “It’s out there. Here’s the keys. Just lift the door and crank it up.”
The sight of that car took his breath away.
He could see his reflection in
the hood. Its wheel covers gleamed. The interior was all plushy, shiny, tan leather and dark wooden paneling.
He tried the sunroof. He tried the stereo. Everything worked.
The engine ran like a dream. The car was perfect.
He went back to the door.
“The price is still $75?” he asked one more time.
“Yes, it is,” the blonde said firmly.
His hand was shaking as he wrote the check.
But he couldn’t leave without asking. “Lady, I just want to know why you’re selling this car for $75. Nobody would sell that car for that.”
She hesitated just a moment, but then she smiled just a little.
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “About five years ago, I met and married the perfect man. He was tall, well-built and good-looking. He was an engineer. He brought home about $200,000 a year and that’s how we could afford this house and all you see here. Our marriage went well. Everything seemed fine.
“There was just one flaw. One of our neighbors was a beautiful, sexy woman. And last week, the two of them ran off together.”
She paused and smiled again.
“He called me this week.
“‘Now don’t hang up, Honey, just don’t hang up,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a good sport, and I know you’re going to be a good sport about this, too. I know I did you wrong. You deserve better, and I’m sorry. But I just want you to do me a favor: Sell the Mercedes and send me half the money.’”
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 7