The Terror Vacuum

Note to the reader:  This is a departure from the usual serious tone of my blog.  Unless you know me personally, you might not realize that I have a playful side and love a good laugh.  Especially at the expense of one of my siblings.

Throughout the history of mankind, some of the most fertile ground for pranks and practical jokes has taken the form of sibling rivalry.  Long before TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle raised such things to an art form, youngsters living under the same roof have continually sought unique and creative ways to torment their fellow travelers.  Such mischief can take the form of simple pranks like short-sheeting someone’s bed to more elaborate schemes such as immersing a sleeping sibling’s hand in a bowl of warm water to set them back a few years in the bedwetting department.  The victim’s reactions can vary from having a good laugh at oneself, to mild annoyance with the prankster to murderous rage that can only be conquered through intensive therapy and pharmaceutical intervention.

But occasionally a practical joke is conceived and hatched that serves to raise the bar of prankdom within a particular family line.  This is the tale of one such prank.

In the summer that I was seventeen, I had the misfortune of coming down with a case of full-blown mononucleosis.  What started as a sore throat quickly turned into a massive systemic infection that left me, for the only time I can remember, feeling so sick that I wondered if I might actually die.  It took me weeks to recover my strength to where I could resume my normal activities and that left a prankster minded 17 year old boy with a lot of time on his hands.

At one point of my recovery I was sleeping somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen hours a day with my waking hours taking place literally around the clock.  Late one night as I was trying to get back to sleep, I heard my sister Julie trip over the vacuum cleaner that had been left in the darkened hallway just outside of our respective bedrooms.  The noise of her knocking over the vacuum cleaner was to me the equivalent of an apple falling on Sir Isaac Newton’s head and the idea for a particularly innovative prank popped into my head at that moment.  I smiled to myself as I went back to sleep and allowed the idea to germinate overnight.

The next day while the rest of my family was going about their daily business at work or at play, I hauled the vacuum cleaner into Julie’s room and making sure that it was switched on but unplugged, I carefully placed it underneath her bed.  At this point I should explain that we were dealing with no ordinary vacuum cleaner.  This was my mother’s 25 year old Kirby upright and was not only one of the sturdiest vacuums ever built, but it was also one of the loudest vacuum cleaners I’d ever heard.  It would fire up with a roaring whine that could spook even seasoned flight deck crewman on an aircraft carrier.  For years it had terrified our family pets and had even frightened me as a young boy when I somehow got the notion that it could suck up small children if it chose.

Loud doesn't even begin to describe it

Once the vacuum was securely hidden under Julie’s bed, I carefully strung the cord behind her nightstand, out the door, along the hallway and into my bedroom.  It took a bit of trickery to camouflage the cord so Julie wouldn’t see it, but by unscrewing the light in our downstairs hallway the resulting darkness made it pretty tough to spot.  The cord stretched to just inside the doorway of my room where an electrical outlet was located.  Now all I had to do was bide my time and wait for Julie to go to sleep.  Because of my weird sleeping hours, it was fitting that I found myself wide awake at 2am; long after everyone had gone to bed.    

It was go time.

I slipped from my bed, turned on the light and knelt down by the electrical outlet with the vacuum cord in my hand.  I was already giggling uncontrollably with the anticipation of what was about to happen.  I plugged in the cord and left it plugged in for a couple of seconds then quickly unplugged it.  In the other room I could hear the Kirby come alive with its characteristic roar and then just as quickly fade back into silence.  In my mind’s eye I could imagine Julie’s eyes fluttering open and her heart pounding as it would when one is suddenly startled from a deep sleep.  

At this point I waited.  I wanted to give her just enough time to convince herself that whatever had woken her up was simply a figment of her imagination; a weird dream involving some unexplained sound.  I was shaking so hard with suppressed laughter that it took great effort to plug the vacuum back in again for the grand finale.  So about the time I figured her heartbeat had begun to slow down to normal, I plugged the vacuum in and let it run for a good long spell occasionally unplugging it and plugging it back in again for added effect.  

It should be noted that the Kirby upright had a large fabric bag that ran the length of its handle and as the vacuum cleaner ran the bag would inflate.  What this meant to my sister was that in addition to the horrendous noise underneath her bed, it felt as though there was something alive moving around down there as the bag inflated and deflated while pushing up against her box springs.  She was absolutely paralyzed with fear.

After about 30 seconds of sheer terror, Julie overcame her paralysis and dashed into my room sobbing, “There’s something under my bed!!”  I was so weak with laughter that I couldn’t even stand up let alone speak clearly, so I simply handed her the cord for the vacuum as if to say, “Here, this should fix it.”  With that, I turned off my light and crawled back into bed where I giggled myself to sleep secure in the knowledge that I’d just given Cain a run for his money as the world’s worst brother.

To Julie’s credit, I found the vacuum cleaner under my bed a few days later in an obvious attempt to exact an eye for an eye.  But as anyone who has pulled off a serious caper can attest; part of the price of success is learning to sleep with one eye open.  

Though it will have been 28 years next summer since the night of the vacuum terror, I still sleep with one eye open.  You see, I have children who love pranks.  And it’s entirely possible that some of them might just try to best me. After all, history does have a tendency to repeat itself.