MAY 6, 2023 – I’ll never forget the humiliation. Three of my college buddies and I were watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports on the eminently portable black-and-white TV in the common area of our dorm suite. On that particularly memorable occasion, it was a slow day for Jim McKay: the featured spectacle was the national mud-truck race championships. All four of us smug, New England undergraduates guffawed at the Southern hillbilly-like aspects of the affair—cheap bleachers about six benches high, mud-slathered pick-up trucks sporting Confederate flags, and the hayseed competitors wearing soiled “Bubba’s Garage” visor caps and talking “hick.” This was not your race of thoroughbreds at Belmont Park.
We had low expectations. So low, in fact, none of us was seated. The dining hall was minutes away from opening for dinner, and we were simply killing time before heading that way. As the dirt-ball trucks were on their final lap of the deciding race, we watched in disappointment that Wide World of Sports would stoop so low but with amused fascination that driving beat-up pickups in a quagmire could sink to the level of a nationally televised sport.
When the winner emerged from his mud-caked vehicle he was greeted by mic and camera. If navigating through mud and high water was his specialty, words were not. Jim McKay’s man in the mud tried unsuccessfully to get the driver to talk about his winning strategy. As the driver mumbled something unintelligible, his name and hometown appeared at the bottom of the TV screen. I don’t remember the name, but I remember the hometown: Anoka, Minnesota—my own hometown. My suite-mates burst out laughing. I was the only person they knew from Minnesota, let alone the river town that they’d learned from me was the self-proclaimed Halloween Capital of the World. One of the more considerate of the three guys slapped me on the back—harder than was necessary—and said mockingly, “Hey, Nilsson! Aren’t you from Anoka, Minnesota? Maybe you know that guy.”
“Oh no,” I said emphatically in a vain effort to keep to my reputation out of the mud.
“Yeah, right,” my tormentor said. “Isn’t Anoka the Mud Truck Racing Capital of the World? Everyone in town must know that guy.”
Just then the ABC reporter asked the champion what he did for a living when he wasn’t racing trucks in the mud.
My three buddies, I noticed, were watching intently—and smirking—as they awaited the answer.
“Solidwaste,” said the driver in a barely audible mumble. I cringed.
“What was that?” the reporter asked.
“Solid waste,” the champion said, this time unmistakably.
“What’s that?” asked the reporter.
“I haul garbage.”
By this time my suite-mates were laughing themselves silly.
“Come on!” I said, heading for the exit. “We’re gonna be at the back of the line if we don’t get down to the dining hall now.”
Fortunately, hunger trumped the end credits of Wide World of Embarrassment. But in the echo chamber of the elevator lobby, guffawing echoed up and down the building. Other riders of our elevator car got to hear—at my considerable expense—the cause of their puerile laughter.
“Not the Halloween Capital of the World,” my original tormentor said, “and not the Mud Truck Racing Capital either. But the Solid Waste Capital of the World! That’s where our esteemed fellow scholar calls home!”
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
Great story. Side note: I was surprised you had an elevator in a campus building.
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