Beware of ER Nurses Bearing Tales

Guy buys his first motorcycle. Excited and inexperienced — bad combo — he loses control as he approaches his house and crashes through the bay window.

His wife takes him to the emergency room to get patched up. They come home, he tends to the bike, she mops up the spilled gasoline and wrings out the mop in the toilet. Then he goes to the bathroom and, while he’s on the throne, decides to have a smoke.

He drops the match in the toilet, ignites the gas, gets blown off the bowl and lands back in the emergency room.

My friend Michael told me this story years and years ago. He heard it from a nurse at the medical center where he worked. Hilarious, right, in an “America’s Funniest Home Videos” sort of way?

A few weeks ago, Tales of the ER briefly surfaced as a dinner party topic. Out came the story of the guy with the new motorcycle, told by Michael’s wife Lea (Michael wasn’t there). Now a card-carrying folklorist, I didn’t hear it as a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story. I heard it as fiction.

“That sounds like an urban legend,” said I, pooping the party.

Lea called and gave her hubby the bad news. Michael stood his ground, at first. After all, he got it straight from the ER nurse.

I didn’t doubt that he did. But ER nurses are notorious purveyors of outlandish tales.

Years ago, I told him, a fellow reporter relayed a story that her ER nurse mom told her about a guy who had passed out on the dance floor. So tight were the guy’s trousers that the emergency medical personnel had to cut them off so he could breathe.

When they did so they found an Italian salami strapped to his inner thigh. To impress the girls, apparently.

Coda: The resourceful ER staff scrounged a box of crackers and a jar of mustard and made hors d’oeuvres.

That time I knew right away. “Urban legend,” I said. My reporter friend swore it was true. I told her to ask her mother if she actually participated in the scissoring and the salami eating. I was almost certain she hadn’t.

Michael wasn’t convinced. He’d been “dining out,” as they say, on his motorcycle story for decades. He wouldn’t let go of it without a fight.

So I broke out the big guns: Snopes.com, Urbanlegends.about.com, and fellow folklorist Jan Brunvand, author of 10 books about urban legends. My sources concurred: a classic urban legend.

Which doesn’t mean something like it never occurred anywhere ever. What typically happens with these stories is that they take on a life of their own and are reported to have happened in multiple locations on multiple occasions. But no one seems to be able to offer definitive proof that it happened in a particular place at a particular time.

The experts list a number of variants: The guy loses control of his lawnmower, not his motorcycle. The wife tosses paint thinner or turpentine into the commode after painting a room. Or she sprays insecticide into the bowl after doing battle with a giant cockroach.

In many versions, when the EMTs hear what happened they laugh so hard that they drop the stretcher and the guy sustains some broken bones in addition to the lacerations and the burned bum.

“And you think you’re having a bad day,” goes the punch line.

In an older version, a flammable substance is disposed of in an outhouse. Grampaw lights his pipe, tosses the match in the hole and kaboom!

“Musta been somethin’ I et,” says Gramps.

The story has turned up in newspapers in Israel, New Zealand and all across the United States, not to mention in Motorcycle magazine. Robert Service told the outhouse version in a poem published in 1949 called “The Three Bares.” Folklorist Brunvand calls it “a blast heard ‘round the world.”  

Not surprisingly, Michael was unhappy. I can’t say I blame him. Even when we pass along a story or a joke that we heard from someone else, we get the credit if it’s a good one.

And we deserve it: It’s not enough to have good material. The performance has to be good as well. We also get credit for having the discernment to recognize a knee-slapper when we hear one.

All this, I was taking away from poor Michael. I tried to console him. He could still tell the story. He just had to frame it differently: Tell the story, say he had always assumed it was true but recently found out it was not. Still a great yarn, though.

Michael said it wouldn’t be the same. Alas, he’s right. The story is only great if it really happened. As a fictional tale, it’s just silly.
Ain’t we folklorists stinkers?