Poetry Prose Anything goes

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Nuts

This is one of my favourite stories. My Uncle Hugh told it to me when I was about seven. In our family, he was the one you called upon to be the MC at weddings, that sort of fun loving, hard drinking, chain smoking, kind of guy. He lied about his age to get into World II. He ended up in the RAF as a navigator and flew on missions during the Battle of Britain.
After the war he earned a degree in engineering from University of Toronto, graduated in the top ten of his class. He could remember millions of stories, lymerics, and jokes. Much to the chagrin of my mother, he would entertain my two brothers and me at family get-togethers with stories such as this one. This is one of my favourite stories, his too. If you've heard it before, to quote my clever Uncle in prefacing a story, "If you've heard it before, I don't care, I like this story and I want to hear it again."

One dark and stormy night ..... a salesman from the city traveling through the countryside gets a flat tire ...... As chance would have it, he happens to stop outside the gates of an Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It is raining very hard and this, coupled with being late for a meeting, causes him to rush changing the tire. The work is tough going in the slippery mud. The thunder is startling, but even more jolting is that a flash lightning reveals just inside the high fence of the institute an inmate is standing under a tree smoking a pipe. Anxious to get away from the inmate's intense stare, the salesman frantically changes the tire. He is almost done when he slips in the mud and accidentally kicks the lug nuts down a storm drain.
The situation being hopeless, the frustrated salesman walks up to the fence to ask the inmate if he could use a phone.
The inmate calmly asks, "Why do you want to use the phone."
Humouring the pipe-puffing lunatic, the salesman replies, "Well, I would like to use the phone to call a tow truck."
"Why do you want to call a tow truck?" invokes the inmate.
It is pouring rain; the salesman is soaked through. He is infuriated by the inmate's lack of cooperation.
"Listen, you stupid nut-bar, I haven't time to stand here playing twenty questions with you. Get them to let me in so I can call a tow truck"
The inmate gives a quick puff on his pipe and with a concerned look answers, "It seems like calling a tow truck this time of night might be a waste of time. Besides I think I can help you."
The inmate taps his pipe out on his boot-heel and coolly packs it with fresh tobacco.
"You can help, how so?"
Through the iron bars the inmate explains, "Well, the problem is you can't get the tire changed because you lost the lugs nuts that hold the tire on the car.
"Yes", the salesman interjects impatiently.
"Mine is a simple solution that will save you the time it takes to wait for a tow truck and this solution will also save you the cost of a tow truck."
"O.K. I'm all ears," the salesman responds skeptically.
"The problem is you're short the lug nuts to keep the tire on the car. So here's what you do. Go around the car and take one lug nut off each of the other three tires and then the four tires tire would then end up having three lug nuts each. That should be enough to hold you to drive to the service station to get your flat fixed."
The salesman is stunned and humiliated by the inmate's solution. In surrender he offers, "That's amazing, how did you figure that out?"
"Well, my good friend," replied the inmate as he light up his pipe, "In here we may be crazy, but we're definitely not stupid."
The salesman smiles sheepishly.
"Have a nice day." And the inmate turns and walks away leaving the salesman in the soaking rain. Suddenly, a crack of thunder, and in the flash of lightning the bewildered salesman witnesses the inmate cackle manically as he heads back to the institution on the hill.