Stealing the elephant
Late in the fall of 81 my heart was broken in that way only seems to happen to teenagers. That Christmas season I was very depressed as I was sure I’d never love again. (I had just turned 18. Give me a break.)
Some of my friends saw I was still sad when I got back to school decided to help get me out of my sad mood. They thought the best way to do that was to teach me to drink.
So, one morning they invited me over to their place and we spent the day drinking.
The city of Worcester is built on hills. So, the train that goes north out of the city runs through a train tunnel.
After 12 or so hours of drinking my friend Ed (toilet seat Ed, not piss in me in the night Ed) suggested we go downtown and walk though the train tunnel.
It was well below zero, dark and we were totally drunk.
Off we went.
At the time the big auditorium downtown was still under construction. So, events were held at the smaller, older auditorium next to the Worcester court house.
As we walked past it, we saw the circus was in town. As it was very cold, no one was in sight and it was just circus trucks on the side of the road.
As we walked past one of the trucks, something grabbed me. I yelled and looked down. There was a big grey thing wrapped around me going into my pocket. I looked up and saw a young elephant sticking it’s head out of a truck and it’s trunk into my pocked from around my back. Only one small board blocked the elephant from getting out and it easily reached around it.
“Help and elephant has me!” I shouted.
“The first time Frank’s drunk and he’s already seeing elephants,” my friend Dave said.
“Help!” I shouted again. My friends turned to look.
“Holy shit!” Ed said. “It is an elephant!”
When they came back, the elephant let go of me to see if they had any food. None of us did. But, we had fun petting it as it searched us.
“Lets take it with us!” Ed said. “I’ve got the keys to the campus food center. We can bring it up there and put it in the salad bar.”
This was exactly the sort of thing that should have been considered when they made him a crew chief at the campus dining hall, but had been overlooked.
“But, we’ve got to walk through the tunnel,” Dave said. “We can’t take the elephant with us there because elephants hate the dark.”
At the time, that made sense.
“OK,” Ed said. “We’ll get the elephant on the way back.”
We walked off to the train tracks and the tunnel. We walked through it and back, then returned to the trailer for the elephant.
It was closed and locked. If the elephant was still inside, it gave us no sign. We had nothing to use to open the lock and it was very cold.
We went home repeating the lesson of the night over and over:
“Never put off stealing an elephant.”
The better part of 30 years later, I still have regrets about not taking the elephant when we had the chance.
But, I now have a very different idea of what would have happened.
At the time, very drunk, we had this image in our heads that the elephant would know we were bringing it to a salad bar a mile away in the freezing dark and would happily follow us there.
Now the image is of the elephant being cold and wanting to heard towards the brightest lights in the hopes of getting warm. That would be the Worcester court house right next to the truck.
I picture a cold, annoyed, elephant crashing into the Worcester court house followed by four drunk college students trying to convince it salad was in its future.
Most likely is that although we didn’t see them, there were circus hands watching us from just inside the warm auditorium and if we had done anything remotely endangering the elephant they would have charged out to stop us. They are almost certainly the people who closed and locked the truck after we moved on.
But, I can’t get the image of the elephant in the court house out of my head.
It’s good we waited. Or, we might well still be in jail for grand theft elephant. Certainly my life would have been vastly different if we did manage to get an elephant into the college food service.
But, I still think about it...