Tipping Calamity

Youth's innocent pleasures.
  May 7, 2006

My brother and I, we grew up in Wisconsin.  Have you ever been to Wisconsin?  Nice place: rolling hills, green pastures, lots of cows.  We used to go out cow-tipping at night—my brother Josh, and I, and our buddy Mike; we did it just for fun.  It was a hick pastime but at the time, I didn’t know that that’s what it was supposed to be so I wasn’t self-conscious about it or anything.  Only later did I realize I was doing something shameful; that was already after Josh and I had traded adventures outdoors for snorting coke.  I forget what happened to Mikey.

Shortly before the end of our childhood’s hillbilly phase, however, on a starry summer night, we snuck into old farmer Johanssen’s place.  We were all kinds of excited because he had the stupidest cows of them all: slow, and dumb, and lazy, and just begging to be splattered.  Come to think, they were a lot like old man Johanssen himself, except nobody has ever tipped him, so far as I know.

We had picked our target in advance.  Size is important in this line of business and so she was on the small side, all petite and dainty like.  Her name was Calamity.  She was her owner’s favorite, although it was only later that we found out by just how much.

It was in the middle of the night that we climbed over the fence and crept up on her. Our timing was right: she was sound asleep and standing upright, too.  Cows are light sleepers so we were quiet like the Injuns; not even the crickets heard us.  Mikey got on the one side of her; Josh and I on the other.  Mikey signaled to us to be ready and pushed her as hard as he could, and when Calamity, startled awake, tried to lean back towards him to compensate by instinct, Josh and I lent her a helping hand and sent her crashing down to the ground.  Mikey just barely jumped aside.

And would you believe what happened next?  The dumb thing let out one heart-rending, plaintive moo and then kicked the bucket right there in the grass before our disbelieving eyes!

“Shit!” said Mikey.  “I ain’t never seen one go so fast…  Hey, what’s this smell?  Shine a light on her rump for a second.”

We had discovered an inexplicable mystery that night; a mystery that later on, like many other things mysterious, turned out to have a tired old explanation.  The mystery: that cow’s asshole had been sown shut.

Investigation by the appropriate authorities later uncovered, and wagging tongues spread throughout our little town, the age-old story of love, hate and retribution.  Old man Johanssen had him a younger brother Jim. Over time they both developed an unnatural attraction to Calamity’s charms and had fancied her in romantic ways.  For a while, they had an agreement to share her (I forget the details; I think Jim had her weekends and old man Johanssen on weekdays; or perhaps it was the other way around).  In the end, however, Calamity was old man Johanssen’s property and he grew determined to have her all to himself.  In vain did Jim plead and threaten and implore; his older brother’s heart was set against it and he wouldn’t be reasoned with.

Crushed and lovesick, Jim devised a plan of desperate revenge.  Several hours before our visit that night, he had snuck onto his brother’s farm, pumped Calamity full of tranquilizers and local anesthetics, and sewn up all her points of rear ingress with coarse thread.  The poor animal was cursed with a quick metabolism (which explains her leanness) and she’d had a lot of food that day.  She probably had woken up several times during the night trying to have a bowel movement, failed, and gone back to sleep, still stupefied by the tranquilizers.  By the time we got to her, she was ready to burst—and by God, burst she did!

Oftentimes after I tell this story, people ask me what we all had learned that night.  My answer is: not a goddamn thing!  We were red-blooded young men brimming with youth’s vim and vigor and she was a sexually abused cow full of shit.  Any deeper meaning of this story, if it exists, best lies undiscovered.  Why is it that in the end, people always want a moral?

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