MythBusters
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| 5/15/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
There’s a TV program on the Discovery Channel called “MythBusters,”
hosted by two American special effects experts who use basic scientific
methods to test the validity of various rumors, urban legends and news
stories in popular culture.
While I’m not much of a scientist, I enjoy watching as they crash cars, shoot bullets into melons, and set off paint bombs to see the effects and determine the relative merits of such myths as “You can't teach an old dog new tricks” and whether or not a bullet fired straight up into the air could fall back to earth and kill the shooter or innocent bystanders.
I must admit one of the reasons I like the show is that it reminds me of the kind of experiments I used to try when I was drinking.
Like the time I let a mosquito bite me on the forearm and then tightened up my fist while the mosquito’s stinger was still embedded in the flesh. I was getting stoned in the woods with a couple of friends in high school and somebody said that if you let a mosquito bite you and then tightened up the skin so that the mosquito couldn’t pull its stinger out that it would slowly fill up with blood and pop.
It sounded plausible enough to me, so, I waited for the perfect test case. Before long, a compliant mosquito buzzed around my head a few times (probably soaking up the sweet aroma from the joint we were passing among us), flitted down on the soft flesh of my upturned forearm a few times before finding a comfortable location, and then, like one of the Seven Dwarfs swinging a pickaxe, jammed his stinger into my arm. It took all the restraint I had not to slap automatically, but I steeled myself to the task and slowly tightened my fingers into a fist, tensing all the muscles in my forearm to pull the skin as taut as possible. The mosquito didn’t budge and I felt a certain thrill run through me, as if I had just come face to face with a five-point buck I had been chasing hour after hour through the snow.
My friends cheered silently, raising their fists above their heads, giving me the thumbs up and mouthing things like “Way to go!” and “You got him now!”
As the first flush of victory began to subside, I noticed that the mosquito did indeed seem to be filling up with blood, puffing out slightly around the edges like a quill pen filled with red ink. It was only a matter of time, it seemed – and will.
As each second ticked past, it became clearer and clearer that this was going to be a battle to the end and the longer the mosquito drank, the tighter I clenched my fist, determined to force the inevitable outcome.
After what seemed about five minutes, with the mosquito growing visibly rotund and my grip starting to weaken, the mosquito abruptly withdrew his stinger with ease, bent at the knees and pushed up toward the sky. Like a B-52 cargo ship flying low and slow, the red-bellied mosquito lifted up into the air, wings abuzz, turning in mid air as if to face me, laughing no doubt, and disappeared slowly into the ferns that surrounded where we sat.
Stunned, we all looked at each other, then back to the spot on my arm where the mosquito had just been.
“What happened?” my friends asked. “Did you let him go?”
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. Looking down again at my arm, a large round welt had already started to form with a small red dot at the very center marking where the mosquito had struck. I looked once more toward the area of the ferns, but my nemesis was gone.
“Wow,” I said, still shaking my head.
“Guess that didn’t work,” said one of my friends.
“Guess not,” I responded.
With that out of the way, somebody suggested we smoke another joint.
“Good idea,” we all agreed.
Another of my experiments came a few years later, in college, when I was living in Rhode Island. I had taken up the flute and would often drive down to the beach and play by myself at night, sitting on the rocks overlooking the shore. One night I was feeling especially inspired and wondered as I drove back from the beach whether or not I could play the flute and drive at the same time. It seemed like the right thing to do, so I gave it a try.
Using my elbows to guide the wheel, it took a little getting used to, especially for a few of the longer turns I had to maneuver along Dune Road, but before long I pretty much had the hang of it and was jamming quite nicely. Of course it helped that it was the middle of the night and the roads were pretty much deserted, but I do remember the face of one of the drivers that did pass me, going the opposite way. It was an elderly man, on his way home from who knows where, and our eyes met for just an instant as we were side by side. His mouth hung open as he stared into my car, the notes from my flute flying through the air like a wet washcloth splashing into his face.
Some years later, living in New York City, staggering home at 4 o’clock in the morning after my favorite bar closed, I tried another experiment, this time involving a brick. It was a brick I had picked up at a construction site along the way and I tossed it from hand to hand, wondering what I could do with it. A few blocks from my house, across the avenue from where I was walking, two apartment buildings came together with a small alleyway between them. The alleyway seemed just big enough for the brick to fit through and there was an open garbage can a little ways back in the alleyway. From my vantage point across the street I knew it was a longshot, but it seemed a good challenge, like one of those half-time extravaganzas where the winner of a local contest gets one shot to make a basket from midcourt for a million bucks.
So I looked around, turned square to the alleyway across the street, and heaved the brick, fully expecting it to drop into the open garbage can. Unfortunately, drunk as I was, I didn’t even come close and was surprised to hear the sound of shattering glass as I realized the brick instead had flown through a window on the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings.
At the sound of the broken glass, I took off running, turning down my own street a couple of blocks later and staggering up the five flights of stairs to my apartment.
It wasn’t till a number of years later, after I had been sober a few years, that I even remembered that little experiment. I was walking down West End Avenue, near what was my old apartment one day when I looked across the street at the alleyway between the two buildings and remembered hurling the brick. Horrified, I looked at the window I remembered it crashing through. There were white lace curtains on the window and a couple of plants on the windowsill. I realized it could have been a baby’s room or the bedroom of somebody’s ailing aunt, or a toddler asleep in the crib when the brick came hurtling through the window at 4 o’clock in the morning like a mortar shell.
Filled with shame and sadness for what I had done, I thought with some measure of resignation about the phrase I have come to know and love in sobriety: If you don’t take the first drink, you can’t get drunk. This, I’ve found, is no myth. It has been a reality for me over the past 30 years. And I’ve discovered also that if I’m not drunk, the chances are good that I won’t be experimenting with mosquitoes, playing the flute while I’m driving, or hurling bricks through windows in the middle of the night.
I’ll leave all that to the MythBusters on TV.
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