Disclaimer: Keith, Pink and vic-K made me do it. If you ban me, they are coming down with me.
The Horse Vibrator, A True Story
So I got in from a long day at the barn around 7:00 p.m.with a nice big bottle of Cabernet in my horsebag that I’d picked up on my way home (thank GOD, it turned out). Traffic was a bear and I had to move my husband Ted’s 4-runner into the driveway after I pulled in, so I was exhausted and grubby and really looking forward to folding my hands around that lovely plastic wineglass of mine. I walked into our front porch, which is enclosed, set down my purse, grocery bags full of greens for the bunny, and my horsebag, and suddenly the entire porch started to vibrate beneath my feet.
What the HELL??
The door was, thankfully, unlocked. I raced in to find Ted coming towards me from the kitchen.
“What the hell is going on?”
He looked at me like I had two heads.
“What do you mean?”
“Come out here! The porch feels like it’s going to blow up! It just started, just now!”
Out he comes, and sure enough, the vibration is still going on: a heavy, hard rumble, something mechanical that sounds like an earthquake. We open up the front door, but no, it is coming from inside, from underneath, where there is just a crawl space.
“Call the cops,” says Ted. But I want to investigate, because I am a fearless moron, so I go careening down to the basement, shove aside a mountain of (you guessed it) horse equipment, crawl up on a box, open the tiny doors that lead into the crawl space on the NON porch side of the house, and then crawl in the darkness through that crawl space and through an even smaller hole in the concrete foundation into the crawl space directly beneath the porch, which is home to nothing but insulation and spiders. I can’t see a bloody thing, but I can’t hear anything, either. No vibration. I crawl out and grab onto whatever pipes I can–hot water, heating, plumbing–to see if any of them are vibrating too. Nothing.
Up we go to the porch again, and it is just as loud and rumbling as ever. I am starting to freak. We holler at Devin (my then-fifteen-year-old son) to come down out of his room and get out of the house. Ted catches the Hound from Hell and I go into the kitchen and call 911.
I report our address and what is going on. The cop on the end of the line says he’ll send someone out right away, he’s never heard of anything like that, and yes, in my position (because I asked him right away) he would have done the same thing, called 911. He offers to stay on the phone with me, for which I am grateful. We all tiptoe through the earthquake front porch and scamper for the safety of the front lawn. Ted locks Mickey the Mutt in the car so he won’t attack the nice officers who come to rescue us. Devin informs me he is leaving, which makes me immediately suspicious that he has something to do with this, but no, he just needs to get far far away from his parents right now, so he heads down the road for the local park.
It’s black outside. The nice officer on the other end of the line keeps me sane while we wait for the patrol car to arrive. In a few minutes it does, shining its beam through the night till it finds me jumping up and down and waving on my front lawn, and a young clean cut cop hero gets out. I tell him the story, then invite him into the rumbling porch. He stands there with the vibration surging under his feet and shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He asks what’s underneath, and I take him down to the basement, and he repeats what I did twenty minutes before, squeezing into the tight space, shining his flashlight around, shaking his head.
The doorbell rings, and it is his partner. I go out front and there is a young woman, shining her flashlight into the shrubbery. I invite her in to the vibration room. The first cop tells her, “I was just down in the crawl space. There’s nothing there. It’s totally empty, no pipes, no nothing.”
The young woman stands there thoughtfully for a moment, shifts from foot to foot, glances around the room, then walks directly over to my horsebag and picks it up.
And finds this inside, all lit up and vibrating merrily to beat the band:
(Which is really ALL my daughter and her boyfriend’s fault. Because a month ago, no, almost two months now, I helped Kiara move into her new apartment up at college. And that night we headed for Target, because she was minus some small details like a quilt, and a window blind, and a curtain rod, etc. So after forty-five minutes of domestic shopping, we are standing in the checkout line and I am exhausted, and there is a bin full of these darling little things, with that lettering near the top that says TRY ME (which you can’t see very well in the picture, but I am not going to take another one because I am too wiped to figure it all out again). So anyway, I push the button on the top and the thing starts to vibrate and I am cracking up, it is so cute, I really want to buy it, but it’s $9.99 and I think it’s a total waste. Until KYLE AND KIARA convince me to go ahead and get it, and I can use it on the horses. Because their little backs get sore when we take them on these brutally long endurance trail rides. And besides, it is so cute! Its little feet light up and everything when it vibrates.)
So I took it home and tried it about three days later on my young Arab filly, once, and then threw it in my horsebag, where it made its way to the bottom, and totally forgot about it.
Until tonight. When something must have pushed against that little button when I set it down and triggered it into its happy little pulsations.
STRONG happy little pulsations.
So there I am in the porch, my hands flying to my face. “Oh. My. God. I am SOOOOOO sorry!!!” People are being raped and murdered as we stand there, and I have Montclair’s finest tied up investigating a horse vibrator. I hasten to explain the fact. “It’s a HORSE vibrator! I’m so sorry. I totally forgot I had it. See??” I point out my filthy breeches and red wellies. “I just came straight from the barn. I am SOOOO sorry!!!”
They are cracking up as they tell me not to worry and make their way back out to their patrol cars. They stand there talking–or talking on their phones–for a long time. My husband gives me a long, cool look and then informs me that if I had not been so hysterical (HYSTERICAL?? I was totally CALM!! I was the one who crawled into the crawl space!!!), he would have been able to follow his rational instincts and figured out where the noise was coming from.
I point out that the calm, rational cop did not do so–it took his woman partner three seconds to zero in on the source of the noise. But then I crack up, too. I call Devin on his cell and tell him the coast is clear, to come on home. I refuse to tell him over the phone what it was–who wants all the boys from the hood who are on the ball court with him knowing what an idiot his mother is?
Then I call a final apology out to the cops, who are still standing outside their cars at the curb. “I swear to God. It was a horse vibrator!”
Truly.
Oh–and the horsebag that contained and hid this little monster? Well, it’s hard to get a decent horsebag. It has to be very strong, but lightweight as well, in order to carry a plethora of leg wraps, liniments, hoof picks, extra t-shirts, saddle pads, curry combs, first-aid books, extra shoes, yadda yadda. So when a fellow boarder turns up at the barn with a supply of exquisite FREE horsebags, because she is a nurse and a distributor at the local hospital was giving them out, I was not about to turn down the offer (though several other boarders inexplicably did).
Here is a picture of the horsebag the brilliant lady office picked up off the floor when she solved the mystery:
