Readers and writers blog

Thhhaaaaah crush-ER.

It was a weekend of crushers for my wife and me, one that ranged from humorous to horrendous.

Bonnie, who works at the local daily newspaper where I retired four years ago, asked me Friday night for ideas for a story she’s doing on area people with unusual occupations. One of my suggestions was someone who runs a car crusher at a local scrapyard.

Little did I realize we’d be visiting not one but two crushers the next day.

Jesus, it was a nightmare. Like something from Apocalypse Now — remember that scene where Martin Sheen’s patrol boat, traveling upriver to find Marlon Brando, motors beneath the tail section of a crashed B-52 bomber towering high above the tiny boat?

So there we were Saturday, sitting in our rental truck on a narrow dirt road between mountains of crushed metal at a local scrapyard. Towering high above us on the left was a pile of crushed cars being made higher by a huge crawler excavator dropping a nasty looking four-tooth grapple into the engine of a wrecked car, then lifting it by its innards onto other dead vehicles. That last bite punctured what appeared to be an air conditioning reservoir, sending a stream of refrigerant onto our windshield. On our right, not quite as high, was a pile of old appliances and other scrap metal being chewed on by another excavator, this one equipped with an enormous shear that looked like the mouth of a tyrannosaurus rex. Behind us, more trucks waited to feed the monsters.

We hurriedly pushed our offerings off the back of our truck — an old washer and dryer set that had been in storage for years and that we wanted to recycle. Those once-elegant appliances had hardly crashed to the ground when we jumped back into the truck and lurched out of the scrapyard, not stopping to collect the few dollars our metal would have brought.

Meanwhile, this whole subject had revived the humor we shared from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon about a wrestling match. The villain of ‘Bunny Hugged’ (1951) is an overmuscled but not-too-bright wrestler named the Crusher. The funniest thing to me is not the action, which is funny, but the way the wrestler is introduced.

Like most cartoons from the golden days of Warner Bros., “Bunny Hugged” has its caricatures drawn from real life. Crusher’s opponent, before Bugs gets involved, is Ravishing Ronald, a takeoff on an old West Coast wrestler named Gorgeous George. And the ring announcer is the cartoon version of a longtime Madison Square Garden announcer whose name escapes me.

What the announcer does with the introduction never fails to crack me up. And the best imitation of that introduction I’ve ever heard is done by a talented writer and funny guy named Ron Rosner, sports editor at the newspaper where Bonnie works.

What the ring announcer does with the introduction is done by people who give the same speech over and over — tour guides, for example. They give a different inflection to words that are all too familiar to them. In this case, the Crusher has pulverized so many opponents, his name is all too familiar to the fans.

So it’s not the CRUSH-er. It’s thhhhaaaah crush-ER. Cracks me up. Every time.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 28: The Garden of Eden of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard encourages Melanie to have sex with other men so that she’ll eventually agree to move in with Ginny and their friend Elliot. When the four of them finally get together, as Gerard says, “that was when the shit hit the fan.”

• Chapter 16 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess meets Brian’s father, and it’s an encounter that ends in violence. Brian’s father wants to make amends for years of cheating on his wife and ignoring his children. When he mentions having visited Brian’s troubled sister, Rachel, Brian beats him bloody.

– Sid Leavitt