Water Fight
A vasectomy seemed like a good
idea. My wife and I had determined that we had met our quota by means of
our two sons. We asked the pediatrician for a referral and he steered us
toward a Dr. Grady Harp in Pasadena
If vasectomies were common practice back
in the dawning of homo erectus, the technique would be identical to the manner
in which they are performed by today's physicians. The patient with his
pants and underwear down around his ankles is seated in a chair with an area to
sit on that is pitched forward at a forty-five degree angle. The patient
is then instructed to spread his knees, providing the physician easy access to
the scrotum. When the physician has his head positioned between the
patient's knees, he makes a small incision, reaches in and pulls out a
vermicelli sized tube, and snips it in two with scissors, a knife, his teeth –
whatever is handy. It was at this point, as I was looking down on the top
of Dr. Grady Harp's head, that I remember just who he was.
During the second week of my freshman
year the temperature in Los Angeles
Stewie was the upper-most of three men's
residence halls that ran down the same hill like an over sized set of
stairs. Each dorm sat on it's own terrace. Below Stewie was
Bell-Young, and below Bell-Young was Wylie. A water fight began when the
residents of Bell-Young began lobbing water balloons down onto the front patio
of Wylie where students had gone to escape the retched heat inside their
rooms. The raining down of water balloons onto the Wylie patio continued
for about twenty minutes. Bell-Young had the overwhelming advantage of
higher ground, sitting a good fifty feet above Wylie. Suddenly the
Bell-Young students tossing balloons from the edge of their terrace were hit
from behind. Wylie had launched a counter offensive. A Wylie Hall
brigade had made their way up the hill, circled around Bell-Young, and were now
drenching the balloon lobbers with waste baskets filled with water. The
Bell-Young students had to retreat back inside their dorm having been
out-flanked, out-numbered and out-gunned. As the Bell-Young students fled
back into the front lobby of their dorm, two of their own came running out,
struggling to control the fire hose they held between them it's heavy stream of
water blasting forth. They had unfurled the hose from the "IN CASE
OF FIRE" cabinet inside the dorm, and had now joined the fight, bringing
with them superior fire power.
Overseeing this drama from on high, was
the bulk of the freshmen residents of Stewie, who let out a coliseum style roar
at the sight of the fire hose. The Stewie freshmen wanted badly to
participate in the fray, but unwilling to face the fire hose, resorted to
dumping waste baskets of water on each other for hours on end.
Never being one who knew when to quit, I
continued throwing waste baskets of water into the open dorm room windows long
after sunset. One of these windows was directly above a desk at which a
studious freshman was finishing a paper prepared on his manual typewriter that
was due the next day.
With Dr. Grady Harp poised to slice and
dice my manhood, despite the passing of two decades, I couldn't believe that he
would have ever forgotten our first encounter. I'll never know for sure
because he never mentioned it, and given the circumstances, neither did I.