Triangle Man and the Useful Word

Surviving the Seventies, Episode #79

My grandfather, GD, was apparently a great trickster and we would find all sorts of gags up in the attic in Summerville - plastic ice cubes with a dead a fly in the middle, Chinese finger traps, and my favorite, a set of impossibly long fake ashes you could attach to the end of a cigarette and walk around at a cocktail party to make the hosts nervous.

So I came by pranks naturally. After school, Ian Douglas and I used to tie a string to an old purse and put it out on the corner of Battery Lane and Glenbrook. We’d hide behind a fence and when a car stopped and the driver got out to pick up the pocket book, we’d reel it in and watch them jump with surprise. Most of them laughed and waved back at us as they drove off. One woman got on a car phone of some sort - this was the late 70’s - and presumably called the police. I’ll never know because we booked it back to Ian’s.

Of course in Boy Scouts we’d pull all sorts of pranks on the Tenderfoots, sending them off for left-handed smoke shifters and dehydrated water pills. One of them got the best of us though when he returned with a bona fide left-handed smoke shifter in hand. The Scoutmaster had pity on him and constructed one quickly out of sticks and aluminum foil.

But the prank that most stands out most in my mind, though, is undoubtedly the one involving Triangle Man. We were latchkey kids who had frequent sleepovers, so naturally, we’d do Ding Dong Ditch and the like in our suburban Maryland neighborhood. After that got old, we enhanced it with pullstring firecrackers I had bought off the highway in South Carolina. We’d carefully tie one to a front door, ring the bell, then run. When the owner opened the door - “BANG!” They were not dangerous in any way but they sure provided a good laugh.

One night, Tommy, Evan and I went down a couple blocks from where I lived on Park Lane. Tommy and I hid under a car across the street from a randomly selected house, while Evan crept up and tied the firecracker to the front door. He rang the bell and ran. Immediately, and I mean, immediately, the door opened - “BANG!” - then the door shut just as quickly as it had been opened. A fraction of a second later, the door opened again and to our terror - in an image seered into my memory - a figure loomed in the doorway, silhouetted in the hallway light.

The silouhette was a huge man with a bushy mustache - and I kid you not - wearing absolutely nothing but a tiny, red speedo. His body rippled with muscles, all greased up and shiny in the hallway light. But what I will remember more than anything else was his shape. He had a massive torso and tiny waist, so that standing in that door frame, he resembled a perfect, inverse triangle. In his hands, this triangle held a baseball bat.

Triangle Man spotted Evan and began sprinting after him. Evan panicked and booking past Tommy and me, who were still afely hidden, he yelled at the top of his lungs, “RUN!” And like idiots, we did. Now there were three of us running for our lives from Triangle Man terrified out of our minds.

We did not where to go so we ran into the alley behind the Methodist Church. Evan led us down an outside stairwell. Which dead ended. There was nothing down there but a few trash cans we meekly hid behind. Triangle Man was not fooled. He stood at the top of the stairs and hollered down, “You boys come on up.” And after we said nothing - “I know you’re down there. Come on up or I will call the police.”

So there was nothing for it - after a brief, whispered chat, we agreed to surrender. We slowly ascended the stairs, each one of us recounting the blessings of our short lives, step by step. When we finally reached the top, there loomed before us the greased giant with his porn mustache and red speedo.

Triangle Man gripped his bat and asked us one question - “Where do you kids live?” We only lived two blocks away but I did not want him to know that.

So I uttered a word that I had never used before and have never used since. I pointed vaguely up the street and said, “Yonder.”

Triangle Man paused, looking perplexed. Then he laughed and relaxed his grip on the bat. He asked if we were the kids who had put a rock through his window the week before. No! We wouldn’t do anything like that! We just do pranks and stuff. Which was true.

Somehow, remarkably, Triangle Man believed us. He let us go. But we had learned a valuable lesson. In the future, when chased by a giant near naked man bearing a blunt instrument, run for your lives and keep running. Don’t try to hide in the dead end stairwell at the Methodist Church.

This is literally the United Methodist stairwell we tried to hide in. This very one.