While I was growing up, my parents had two deadly kid traps in the house. One was the refrigerator, which wasn’t that bad because I had no intention of crawling into it. It was never empty enough to do that anyway. The other trap, however, was much more tempting…
As a child in the 1960’s I was a big fan of shows like Star Trek and Lost In Space. The cartoons I watched also had space or science fiction themes: Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, and the awesome Herculoids. So, when I saw that gleaming white, front-loading 1960’s washer of my mom’s, with that big round glass porthole in front, I could only imagine one thing:
A spaceship!
It seemed to be designed specifically to trap kids such as myself inside. Why else would they engineer the latch handle the way they did? It could close and latch itself, but you had to yank on the handle to open it. And there was no way to open it from the inside. Also — and this is the part that convinces me — the damn thing was nearly soundproof. It was obviously designed to be a trap. Its primary purpose was to wash clothes, but the insidious real purpose was to capture kids and suffocate them to death.
One of my best friends at this age was a black Poodle/Cocker Spaniel mixed dog named Pepper. He looked like a black Poodle with hair that was just a little too long and too straight. My constant companion, he endured whatever boyhood tortures I administered to him and still loved me completely, with no reservations, still willing to go where I went and do what I did. Needless to say, Pepper was my co-pilot when I decided to take the washing machine spaceship on a trip to Planet 12.
I climbed in first, and he jumped in right after me. Then the glass door swung shut of its own accord and locked. I don’t recall if I panicked immediately or if I built up to it, but it was clear to me that I was in deep trouble. You see, I was perfectly aware that a kid I knew when I was even younger had been found suffocated to death in a refrigerator being stored behind an apartment building. I guess it didn’t occur to me until right then that it could happen in a washing machine as well.
I banged and screamed and yelled for quite a while, but Mom didn’t hear me. Dad wasn’t around, because he was at work. It was just me and Pepper there in that space capsule, marooned and running out of air. I don’t really remember what I was thinking. I just remember being very frightened in an I-might-really-die kind of way. I also remember beginning to feel sleepy, and that means (though I didn’t know it then) that suffocation was starting to take place.
Then I remember my older brother, Hank, walking into the room, and he looked down to see Pepper and I staring back out at him. “What in the hell are you doing in there?” he said, amused. With a quick flip of his wrist he popped open the door, and I can still remember how unbelievably sweet and cool the outside air was. Pepper and I fought each other to get out first; Pepper won. I tumbled out onto the floor at my brother’s feet, saved, given a second chance. I would have been dead if it wasn’t for him. I would have been another one of those sad child-suffocation stories, a warning and a caution to others.
The really sad thing is, I’m not sure I ever thanked him for it.
This was an excerpt from my book: All This and a Bucket of Toads