An anecdote of the confusing yet manic circumstances that can result from a little too much boredom on a warm Friday night in a mid-sized Southern city.

Copyright 1995 by Joel K. Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)

So there I was on a Friday night, attending a Durham Bulls game in 95 degree heat, surrounded by a veritable herd of Durham hoi polloi who'd come out to the ballpark to chatter and babble in the aisles, clog the concession stands, and get in my way every time I left my seat to wander around and attempt to shake off the clinging ennui that had settled over me.

The Bulls are a fairly awful team this year, and even though I love going to minor league baseball games and have visited no fewer than eight other teams' games in North Carolina, Virginia, and California this summer, I'm coming to be heartily sick of my hometown bunch of diamondeers. Remember how the manager in the movie "Bull Durham" characterized his players in that weird scene in the shower?

"What does that make them?"

"Lollygaggers!"

"That's right, lollygaggers."

I have to admit, the Bulls are lollygagging this year. It gets annoying watching them play, hitting dribbling ground ball after dribbling ground ball to the shortstop and getting thrown out at first by ten or fifteen feet.

This night's game was typical: no fireworks, no drama, no evidence whatsoever that the Bulls gave a damn whether they won or lost. I finally got up out of my seat around nine o'clock and wandered down to the public telephones, intent on locating someone, anyone, who would go do something interesting with me -- something, that is, other than sitting at the ballpark.

Once I finally got through to the phones -- the Durham Bulls Athletic Park has only two pay phones inside and the lines of people waiting to use them are usually quite long -- I telephoned my friend Eric.

"Eric," I said. "How's everything?"

"Fine," he said, tiredly.

Eric, it seems, had come in from exercising and was not very much interested in anything exciting; it was a hot night out and he wasn't interested in a movie or anything else I had to suggest. But since I had him on the line anyway, I asked if he'd gotten the postcards I'd sent to him on my recent California vacation; I'd sent him postcards from places like Death Valley and Las Vegas and the Bay Area and Disneyland.

"Yeah," he said. "I got that one from Las Vegas. So that was the hotel you were calling from when you hooted at me?"

"Hooted at you?"

"Yes. I woke up last Thursday night to hear this hellish hooting coming from my answering machine downstairs. I got downstairs just in time to hear you hanging up."

"Hooted at you?"

"Yes, hooted at me. It was around 11:30 in the evening and I was in bed and I was pretty peeved at you."

"Oh," I said. "Hmm. I don't recall doing that, but I had consumed a 45-ounce frozen margarita and did make calls to Geoff and Jim, so I guess I might have called you. I don't remember hooting, though."

"Well, I saved the tape for a few days but it's erased now, but you definitely hooted at me. It was annoying."

"Um, sorry. I guess I didn't pay attention to the time difference when I was inebriated and telephoning people from Las Vegas."

People were waiting to use the phone, so I finished up and bid Eric adieu; he said he was going to make dinner and I said I'd find some other way of entertaining myself.

Which I did. Something Eric had said had triggered my fey instinct and I knew what I must then go and do.

Before relinquishing the phone to the giggly teenaged girls waiting in line behind me, I placed a call to my friend Diane, who I knew to be somewhat bored since her husband and helpmeet, Jim, was out of town for the week attending a gaming convention in Philadelphia.

"Diane," I said, "It's important that you come over to Eric's place with me and hoot at him through his windows."

"Okay," she said, "But I have to finish watching 'Little Women'. Want to come over here so we can go in one car?"

"Okay," I said, and hung up.

Pleased with myself, I left the ballpark and stopped by my apartment to freshen up and have a cup of tea before going on over to Diane's townhouse. I hadn't expected her to acquiesce so quickly, but I wrote it off to her being extremely bored. I knew that she had been sufficiently bored that she'd actually spent three hours under her sink sawing away at the corroded metal of her old garbage disposal and installing a new one once she got the old one removed. I don't think I've ever been that bored.

Diane, 27 and bespectacled and wearing a sleeveless dress that appeared to have been stolen from Merlin's wardrobe -- it was covered with stars and moons -- was watching the last few minutes of "Little Women" when I arrived. I let myself in and took a seat in the living room, fending off the crotch-sniffing assaults of her dog, Hastur, and silently observing that it appeared that "Little Women" had been for its era what "Love Story" was for the 1970's. Winona Ryder as a wordy little bint aspiring to be a writer, or whatever the story was, did little to impress me and I was eager to be off and hooting at Eric.

When the movie finally ended, I bundled Diane into the car and we drove off to Demerius Street for an exciting evening of hooting.

We parked outside Eric's building and I crept quietly up to the lighted windows of Eric's flat. Eric, who resembles Fred Flintstone in general shape, being tall and bulky (but not fat), and possessed of cartoonishly large feet and calves, was stretched out, apparently unconscious, on his living room carpet. Only his feet and legs were visible. Music was playing.

I gave Diane a thumbs-up. She gestured at me as if to say "Okay, start."

I dismissed a mometary fear that she'd let me do all the hooting and stand there looking innocent and started in. "Hoot, hoot! Hoooooooooooooot, hoot!"

Diane chimed in. "Hoooooooooooooot! Hoot, hoot!"

We kept it up (Hooot! Hoooooooooot!) for a solid minute (Hoooot! Hoooot!) before movement was heard (Hoot!) in the apartment; we finally heard fumbling at the door and then Eric was peering out at us.

"Oh my god," he said, peering at Diane. "He got YOU into this?"

Eric has commented in the past on my apparent ability to persuade people into the most ludicrous endeavours, but he hadn't expected me to have convinced Diane, who normally shows better sense, into hooting at him through his windows.

"Well," I said, "anyway. What did you think when you heard us hooting?"

"Well," he said, "I knew it was you in a second, but I thought you had Geoff or someone with you. Not," and here he shot a confused and somewhat accusatory glance at Diane, "her."

Eric had us in and we sat on his couch and talked briefly. It seems Eric had had his dinner and been on the verge of going over to Chapel Hill and wandering around downtown. Chapel Hill, for those of you not reading this in central North Carolina, is the home of the University of North Carolina and one of the better downtown bar scenes in the South. Durham has nothing to compare with it; Duke students stay in their dorm rooms and send out for pizza with their parents' money instad of hanging around downtown in sleazy bars listening to loud bands. Or, alternately, they do what the rest of us in Durham do: they go to downtown Chapel Hill.

"Fine," I said. "Chapel Hill sounds like fun. But first, don't you think, we should go hoot at Geoff?"

"... Okay," said Eric in a rather cheerful tone of voice, as though suddenly coming to a conclusion.

We loaded up my car again and drove over to Club Boulevard, where Geoff makes his home with four women, a hyperactive dog, and a witch in the basement. Once again, I had the job of tiptoeing up to the porch to peer into a living room, and once again, the target was prone on his back, immobile in the heat. Geoff was, true to form, watching a movie on the VCR.

Parenthetically, it was not until later that it occured to me that peering into friends' living rooms at 10:00 at night was perhaps indiscreet or perhaps rude. Neither objected, so...

In any case, we began hooting on cue and kept it up for the thirty or forty seconds it took Geoff to get mobile and moving toward the door. "Hoooooot! Hooot! Hooooot! Hoot Hoot!" Eric hooted with the best of us and with, it should be noted, a considerable amount of zeal. "Hoooooot!"

"Hoot!" we chorused, as Geoff opened the door and peered blankly out at us, barefoot and already showing a healthy five o'clock shadow.

"What's going on?"

"We're hooting at you."

He had no immediate response other than "Oh." Beckoning us inside, he turned and plodded back into the living room.

We explained what was going on, and as you might expect from one of my friends, Geoff accepted it as just another one of those things that happens in Durham.

Geoff was suffering from considerable inertia, but we eventually got him shod and back out the door and into my car.

Obviously (Hoooot!) our work was not done, so we drove around trying to find yet a fifth friend, Keith, but he wasn't at his lab (Hooot!) on Duke's west campus and we didn't know precisely where he lived.

We worked out what apartment complex he lived in and on what street, but beyond that, we had no information and the phone book was out of date. Wandering his neighborhood hooting loudly was of course an attractive course of action but the night was wearing on, so we had to give the idea up and get on with the night's work -- heading to Chapel Hill for drinking of beer and socializing.

Hoooooooooooot!

We found ourselves at the Carolina Brewery on Franklin Street (Hoooot!), where Eric and Geoff split a pitcher of stout and Diane and I split a pitcher of Coca-Cola, and then went to Harry's Bistro or whatever it's called on Rosemary Street (Hoooot!) where Geoff and I had cheeseburgers and Eric had a beer and Diane had a water. We did not hoot at the waitress or at the clientele but the urge was there. We did remark at the waiter who walked into the men's room jovially tossing a single roll of toilet paper in the air and catching it again; presumably, that was his own private roll that he had had with him since he was a child and he was rejoicing in the simple pleasures of its company.

It was 2:30 in the morning before we headed back toward Durham, driving back roads between Chapel Hill and the Bull City and singing along with a Warren Zevon tape I popped in. It was discovered that while we certainly do a fine job hooting together, Eric and Geoff and I simply cannot sing worth a damn and therefore our chorus of "Werewolves of London" was not a pretty thing to behold.

This did not stop us, and by time time we'd delivered Diane to her doorstep, hooting at her in turn since she had not, thus far, been hooted at (Hooot! Hooot!), we had roared out the verses to "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Excitable Boy" and "Lawyers Guns and Money" as well. Diane, to her credit, said nothing and simply put up with us until we got her home.

Eric was apparently not ready for bed yet, though the hour was late, so we wended our ways to the Main Street Cafe, a new downtown pastry shop located next door to the Power Station, a discotheque of the sort that one would ordinarily expect to find in a bad neighborhood in Detroit. The Cafe had only been open for a month or so and was a welcome late-night alternative to the greasy-spoon diners located along I-85. Geoff and I had first visited the place the night before when we wandered by to watch one of Geoff's strange roommates performing improvisational dance. The owner, a nice guy who lets the local artists decorate the place (one expects they buy lots of coffee and walnut cake while they're there, of course), put up with Geoff and Eric and I as we sat quietly at a table, hooting amongst ourselves. In fact, the owner was sufficiently happy to see someone other than the normal weirdoes from the Power Station that he even told us all about the Cafe's new ghost, which had begun afflicting him with spontaneous chilly feelings when no one was around.

I tried hooting at the ghost but it did not respond, which did not upset me.

Hoooot!

I finally poured Eric and Geoff into their respective front doors at 4:00 in the morning and returned home myself thereafter, letting myself in and reveling in the 110-degree heat caused by the boiler in the basement and the prevailing weather conditions outside.

Before I could go to bed, something brought me up short. Something was wrong. I stood in my darkened living room, vaguely aware that something was amiss, but not certain precisely what.

Finally, it came to me, and I returned outside to the landing, where I faced my own apartment door.

"Hoot!" I said. "Hoooooooooooot!"

All was right with the world.

Through Time and Space with Joel Furr