Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales (7 page)

It was only because of an accident that John Q. Public ever even got a hint that such a car existed. One of the experimental models somehow got mixed in with a regular shipment of cars. It wound up in a dealership in Cleveland where a woman bought it. She kept driving the car and driving it, and the tank never seemed to empty. She thought there was something wrong with the car, and she took it back to the dealer for repairs!

Meanwhile back in Detroit, company bigwigs were frantically looking for the missing experimental model. As soon as they got wind of what had happened in Cleveland, they rushed down there. They gave the lady a new car and $30,000 for her "trouble." They told her to keep quiet about the car because it might give the company a bad name.

Of course, Detroit always denies that such a car has ever existed. What do you expect them to do?

—————

Would you like to buy a World War II vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle for $75? That may not mean much to the average person, but it makes a motorcycle freak's mouth water.

It seems that back at the beginning of World War II the army bought up thousands of Harley-Davidsons and stored them in a huge warehouse in west Texas. Then with typical army bureaucratic bungling, they just forgot about the motorcycles. All of those motorcycles had been sitting in the warehouse for nearly forty years before someone discovered them. They are in perfect condition.

The army has been discreetly offering the Harley-Davidsons for sale at $75 each. But you have to buy them in lots of five, and it's very hard to find out exactly which army department is selling them.

All of these cheap-wheels stories have become classic modern legends. The story that folklorists label "The Philanderer's Porsche" has not only been retold as true all over the country, but versions of it have also appeared in newspapers both here and in Europe,

Novice reporters have been known to spend hours trying to track down the source of rumors about the experimental car that runs on water, or about the mint-condition Harley-Davidsons or Model A Fords or whatever that had somehow been shunted aside and were now being offered for sale. While plenty of people have heard the rumors, the original sources never seem to be known.

Harry Eames was really crazy about his wife, Julie. He was always kind and considerate. He never forgot her birthday or their anniversary. All she had to do was express the slightest desire to have something, and Harry would move heaven and earth to get it for her.

The relationship wasn't quite perfect. Harry had one fault—he was insanely jealous. If Julie so much as smiled at another man, Harry would blow up. He distrusted the mailman, the milkman, the delivery man, the meter reader, the paperboy—every male that Julie might come in contact with when he wasn't around.

They had a thousand fights over his jealousy. Harry would always wind up admitting that Julie was right. She had never given him any cause to be jealous. Besides, this was the twentieth century. She could not be locked up in a harem or go about the streets with her face hidden behind a veil. Harry knew that his jealousy was irrational and destructive. He did everything he could to curb it. He made resolution after resolution.

Often weeks would go by and he would be just as sweet as could be. Julie would begin to hope and even to believe that he had finally conquered his mad jealousy. Then one day there would be some trivial incident. Julie might smile at the vegetable man in thc A & P, and that would set him off. He would explode, and there would be a big fight and the inevitable reconciliation in which Harry would abjectly admit to his bad behavior and swear that he would do better next time.

On this particular day, Harry was going through one of his regular periods of deep remorse. He felt that his jealousy was wrecking his marriage. Harry worked for a construction company. One of the several jobs that he did was to drive a ready-mix cement truck. On the day in question he was delivering a load of wet cement to a construction site not far from his own home. On the spur of the moment he decided that he would make a small detour and pop in on Julie to apologize once again for how badly he had been behaving.

When he came within sight of his house, he saw that there was a strange car parked in his driveway. It was a large, shiny Cadillac convertible, with the top down. It was the kind of car that you don't see very often anymore.

Whose car was it? Instantly jealousy rose in Harry's mind and pushed out all his previous feelings of remorse and resolutions of calm and trust. He parked his truck about a block away and snuck back to his house.

As he crept around the back of the house, Harry heard voices coming from the kitchen. He peered in the window, and there was his wife talking to a handsome and well-dressed young man whom he had never seen before. The couple were laughing and joking together. He could imagine whom they were laughing at.

"I knew it," he said to himself. "I knew it. All of these years she has been lying to me. I wonder how many guys like this there have been. I'll bet they're having a great big joke at my expense."

For a moment Harry thought about bursting into the house and confronting the guilty couple. But what good would that do? They would just lie to him. Julie had been lying to him for years. She might even be able to convince him that she was innocent, as she had so many times in the past.

Then Harry had a brilliant idea for revenge. He crept out of the yard and back to his truck. He pulled the truck up alongside the Cadillac convertible in the driveway. The truck made a lot of noise, but as Harry sourly observed, they must have been having such a good time back there that they didn't hear a thing. Then Harry dumped the whole load of cement into the convertible, filling it completely.

He drove away, feeling immensely satisfied with himserf.

When Harry returned home that evening, he decided to play it cool and act as if nothing had happened.

"Hi, honey, I'm home," he called out cheerfully. "Anything important happen today?"

As soon as Julie heard his voice, she broke down. "Oh, Harry," she wailed. "The most awful thing has happened."

And then she explained. The Cadillac was a present that Julie had bought for Harry out of a small inheritance she had received. She knew Harry was a real car nut and had always wanted a car like that, but they would never be able to afford one. So she bought it for him as a surprise. The strange man was the car dealer, and the two of them had been sitting in the kitchen signing the final purchase papers. They had been laughing over how surprised Harry would be when he came home and found the car of his dreams parked in the driveway.

This extremely popular urban legend is told all over the country in many different versions. In some the wife really is having an affair, usually with the man's best friend. The punch line in such versions is that the friend has the cement-filled car towed away and is never able to say a word about it, because then he would have to explain what he was doing visiting the man's wife in the middle of the afternoon.

The story is also told throughout Europe, though it apparently originated in the United States.

Willie, Kent, and George had all gone to high school together, and after they graduated, they all went off to the same college. First they had lived in the dorms, but later they found a nice little off-campus apartment to share.

Willie and Kent had adjusted well to college. They had managed to keep their grades up and still get around and have some fun. George was different. Suddenly being in college gave him a lot of freedom that he had never had before, and he couldn't handle it. He got heavily into drugs, and his work went down the drain. He barely attended classes anymore and certainly would not be allowed to continue in school after the end of the semester.

Willie and Kent felt very sorry for their old friend and roommate. They knew he was basically a good guy, but weak and immature. Perhaps the shock of flunking out and having to return home would help snap him out of his downward slide, so that in a year or so he would be able to go back to college. That is, if his drug problem hadn't already become too great.

George was a lot of trouble for his friends. He might disappear for days on end and then come back in the middle of the night and start banging on the door to be let in. He was always borrowing money, which he never paid back. And once he even stole Kent's typewriter and pawned it.

Most of all, Willie and Kent were afraid of the police. The local police as well as the campus cops were cracking down hard on drugs. Time after time George promised that he would never bring anything into the apartment, but neither Willie nor Kent really believed such promises anymore because they had been broken so many times. If George ever did something really crazy and the apartment was raided by the cops, and the cops found something, well, then they could all be in big trouble. Even if Willie and Kent were completely innocent, there was no guarantee that the police would believe them.

Time after time they had discussed what to do. Should they throw George out? Should they contact his parents or the school authorities? In the end they always decided against doing anything. George was, after all, an old friend. The three of them had been through a lot together. None of them were saints, and just because he was having a really hard time at the moment, that was no excuse for throwing him to the wolves. Besides, they rationalized, it was just a few weeks until the end of the semester, and after that it would all be over. George certainly would not be coming back to school, and Willie and Kent would be spared the unpleasant task of turning him in. Their big hope was that George could only keep from doing something completely crazy until the end of the semester.

But George couldn't. One evening he came back to the apartment after a three-day absence in the worst condition his roommates could ever recall seeing him in. Heaven knows what he had been taking or where he got it. He was completely incoherent. All he could do was mumble and grunt and stagger around the room bumping into things.

Willie and Kent tried to get him into bed, but he wouldn't lie down or even sit down. George rushed into the bathroom and locked the door. A few moments later, Willie and Kent heard wild screaming coming from the bathroom. The door flew open and George burst out. He had taken off all his clothes and started to run madly around the room, shouting at the top of his lungs, "There's a barracuda in the toilet!"

There was no way to silence him. Willie and Kent couldn't even catch him.

In a few moments the neighbors would be calling the cops because of the noise. Willie and Kent knew that then they would have a lot of explaining to do. They decided it was better to anticipate the trouble by calling the cops themselves.

"Hello, police? Listen, we got a big problem. Our roommate has gone crazy. I mean he's really freaked out. You better get over here right away, otherwise who knows what's going to happen," Willie said.

Within three minutes Willie and Kent heard the sirens scream to a halt in front of their building. They heard feet pounding up the stairs and then a loud knocking at the door. Kent opened the door, and there stood two uniformed policemen. The cops came in and looked suspiciously around the room.

While all of this was going on, George had not calmed down one little bit. He was still running around the room stark naked, yelling, "There's a barracuda in the toilet! There's a barracuda in the toilet!" as loud as he could.

The cops stood there looking puzzled and finally one of them said, "All right, where is this crazy guy?"

—————

A couple of policemen came to the local high school to talk about the dangers of drugs. At the end of the talk, one of the cops took out a box containing ten marijuana cigarettes.

"Now, I want you to know what these things look like, so in case someone ever offers you one you can turn it down. I want you to take a real close look, so I'm going to pass these ten joints around. But before class is over I want all ten of them back. If I don't get all ten back, nobody leaves the room and we'll have to conduct a complete search."

When the policeman collected them again, he counted. This time there were eleven.

The drug culture has spawned an enormous number of legends, some humorous, like the ones given here, which are designed primarily to show the foolishness of the police. There are plenty of darker legends as well. Because the drug culture is underground, it is a perfect breeding place for legends and rumors. The wildest rumors take hold and sweep the country.

There was a widespread rumor that banana peels dried and smoked produce a powerful narcotic effect. The product was called "mellow yellow." The rumor was completely untrue, but for a time it fooled even the police. There were also tales of an eccentric millionaire who used to give away free drugs in a San Francisco park. People lined up for them, but the millionaire never showed up because he never existed.

A North Carolina man named Samuel Jocelyn was out riding his horse when the animal was frightened by a dog, bolted, and threw Jocelyn to the ground. It was a terrible fall, and when the local doctor reached the scene there was nothing he could do but declare Jocelyn dead. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Jocelyn was given an appropriate burial.

A couple of nights after the funeral Jocelyn's old friend Alexander Hostler had a bad dream. He dreamed that his friend Jocelyn appeared before him.

"How could you let me be buried when I was not dead?" said the apparition.

"But you were dead," answered Hostler.

"No I wasn't," replied the ghost. "Open my coffin. You wil see that I am not lying the way I was buried."

Hostler tried to ignore the dream, but he had it again the next night, and the next. Finally he just couldn't stand it any longer. He convinced a friend to go with him to the graveyard at night. The two dug up Jocelyn's grave and opened the coffin. When they shone their light into the coffin they found that the apparition in Hostler's dream had been telling the truth. Jocelyn had been buried face up, just like everyone else. Now the corpse was lying face down. The body had somehow turned over in its coffin, after burial.