Dating : Cowboy and teh Invention of the Windoor

This one is about my friend Mike. Mike I knew from High School, on account of we were both on the chess team. Mike was brilliant, possibly a genius, but damned if he wasn’t a complete idiot.

He wound up going to the University of Arizona, where he pursued a double major, in Nuclear Physics and also Russian.

He boughten himself a small house his freshman year where he moved in with a girlfriend, who later became his wife. This wasn’t as great a deal as it sounds, as the house was an old adobe, no running water, no air conditioning, and no swamp cooler. The adobe was about two feet thick, and the roof was low, so much that you sort of had to hunch over when you were inside. I could fit pretty well, being only about 5’9″, but Mike was a tall guy, over six feet. The house had a flat roof, which means flat, not level. The door at the front was about 5’10 », but it sloped down to about 5’6″ at the back, where the bedroom was. The house had a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom, and that was it.

There was a privy in the side yard.

Anyhow, Mike calls me up one day and asks if I could come over and help in installing a new bed that he had got. It was a drive, seeing how he was in Tucson and I was living in Tempe at the time, but all the same I went down to help him out.

He had started without me. This was a waterbed, about six feet wide, and eight feet long. A big bed. He had assembled it in the bedroom, only trouble was that the bedroom was itself only about six by eight feet big.

More like moderate sized closet, really.

He had also assembled it with the door closed, which was sort of a problem, as the door could in no way be opened with the bed inside.

We got the liner in the bed, and the mattress, and filled it up with a hose run through the window.

I should have checked the actual assembly of the bed a bit more carefully.

The only access to the room was the window, so we took out the window glass and made a sort of plywood door for the newly made windoor*

After the bed was moderately filled, it made a kind of sighing sound, and the frame sort of collapsed.

Seems that since the frame was just barely smaller than the room, Mike couldn’t get a tool in to fit the bolts that held together the frame, and it turns out that duct tape is wholly unsuited for this sort of enterprise.

Anyways, the collapsing frame punctured the water bed, which due primarily to the whole water-theme idea behind a waterbed, let the water out into the room.

Remember that the house was adobe?

For those of you who don’t know, adobe is mud and straw, packed and sun dried.

You put stucco over the outside of the house, to keep it from melting in the rain.

Since the house had no running water, the builder — I can’t really call him an architect- had not made allowance for flooding the interior of the bedroom with water.

Suffice to say that it was not so much a problem in getting the water out of the bedroom as it was a problem in keeping the roof in place after the water had politely let itself out through the sides of the structure. (using the word “house” here seems a bit optimistic)

Fortunately, the wooden sides of the now-defunct waterbed prove to invaluable in shoring things up, along with some bookshelves.

Please note that bookshelves in this context are actually milk crates, but that seems like a minor quibble.

So, Mike didn’t get his waterbed installed that day, and roof was now even lower than it had been, but there was a new windoor installed, and his girlfriend had not been home, so it wasn’t a total disaster.

We decided that the best course of action would be to go out for beers, and never talk about it again, and it was so long ago I am not really sure if there is more to the story or not. The whole “we went out for beers” may or may not have something to do with my hazy recollection at that point.

*Windoor” is a made up word, which I have full rights to, as one day I am going to manufacture windoors for fellows caught in this exact situation, so if you use the term “windoor”, each and every one of you owes me $ .25 royalty. Discount available for cash.