This story begins under a moonlit sky inside the stone and brick walls of a stately residence hall on a small college campus perched atop majestic bluffs overlooking the gently flowing Mississippi River. This English Tudor structure, designed to fit comfortably into any medieval fiefdom, was my “house,” which was what other colleges might call a dorm.
The time was around midnight and my eyes had just sprung open as if I had been stabbed in the ribs with a pointy stick. What woke me was not physical pain. Rather, it was a distant noise echoing through the hallway outside my door.
I knew it was Mr. Hoover.
Mr. Hoover was a large, industrial-sized vacuum cleaner whose productive days had long since passed, leaving him with no remaining purpose except to disturb peaceful slumber. This hulking mass of metal—about the size of a giant tortoise on growth hormones—had been stripped of all its knobs and switches so that, once its lengthy, heavy-duty electrical cord was plugged into an electricity source, it roared to life with all the subtlety of a sonic boom and could not be silenced except by being unplugged.
On this fateful night, it seemed, Mr. Hoover was destined to strike someone.
As I lay in bed, I heard Mr. Hoover roaring to life, becoming silent, and then roaring to life again. I assumed he was warming up his vocal cords for an attack, and I further assumed I was to be his victim. Reaching for my eyeglasses and putting them on, I braced myself for a coming crisis.
What I expected was for my door to fly open and for Mr. Hoover to roll inside assisted by his gang of four or five loyal enablers. Once inside my room, his gang would quickly leave the way they entered, slamming the door shut behind them with a penny jammed between the door and the frame. This would make the door effectively impossible to open from the inside, leaving me trapped and alone with Mr. Hoover, who would then be plugged into a wall socket in the hallway, allowing him to express himself freely in all of his earsplitting vim.
This was known as being “Hoovered” and it was a sick rite of passage sometimes inflicted on first-year students, such as I was at the time.
So, as I lay in my bed full of tension and ready to spring up and resist, I again heard the roar of Mr. Hoover outside in the hall. The sound lasted just a few seconds before he again fell silent. This happened a few more times, and then suddenly my door bumped open and light poured in from the hallway. I leapt out of bed and stood ready for the struggle.
But, nothing happened. Mr. Hoover did not roll into my room. Only light from the hallway and the murmuring sound of angry voices intruded into my space.
Unsure what all of this meant, I walked to the hallway and scanned up and down for any sign of Mr. Hoover. Instead of the cursed machine, all I saw was his gang of enablers walking away down the hallway sharing angry oaths. Looking on the floor, I saw Mr. Hoover’s thick power cord stretching from a hallway outlet to my left, along the floor in front of me and into the dorm room to my right.
It turns out, I had not been the target of a Hoovering on this night; rather, my neighbors had been.
My neighbors were two friends of mine: John Harlan and Rusty Butler. John was an older student with a mellow demeanor who liked to strum a guitar, sing John Denver ballads and philosophize. John was fondly referred to as “Mr.
Baseball” by some in our house because, upon seeing Game Six of the World Series being broadcast on TV, he was heard to say, “Are those teams playing each other again?”
Rusty Butler was a quiet, friendly fellow with a ready smile and a head covered in messy blonde hair that looked as if it had a mind of its own. Rusty was known for being a bit of an electronics wizard who was the only person I ever met who knew Morse code and had a license to broadcast his voice over shortwave radio.
I don’t know if Mr. Baseball was at home when the attack had come that night, but clearly Rusty was. As I stood there still wondering what had happened, Rusty appeared in his doorway, a pair of rubber-handled wire cutters in one hand and the severed end of Mr. Hoover’s power cord in the other. Standing in his underwear and smiling slyly, Rusty answered my confused look by saying in an even voice:
“Mister Hoover died tonight.”
Relief and joy flooded filled the air at this news. After congratulating Rusty for a performance not equaled since Dorothy splashed a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, I went back to bed with a light heart knowing Mr. Hoover would never trouble us again.
The next day, none spoke of what had transpired the night before. However, I think it’s safe to say, apart from his posse of soulless followers, no one mourned the death of Mr.Hoover.