Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (68 page)

“You really want to know what they get up to down there, eh?” Reg said, looking for all the world like some working man’s Long John Silver.

“Well, take a good look.”

Then Reg Mellor let his trousers fall around his ankles.

FUR-COATED EVIL

A word is in order concerning ferrets, a weasel-like animal well known to Europeans but, because of the near extinction of the black-footed variety in the American West, not widely known in the United States.

Alternatively referred to by professional ferret-handlers as “shark-of-the-land,” a “piranha with feet,” “fur-coated evil,” and “the only four-legged creature in existence that kills just for kicks,” the common domesticated ferret—
Mustela putorius
—has the spinal flexibility of a snake and the jaw musculature of a pit bull. Rabbits, rats, and even frogs run screaming from hiding places when confronted with a ferret. Ferreters—those who hunt with ferrets, as opposed to putting them in their pants—sit around and tell tales of rabbits running toward hunters to surrender after gazing into the torch-red eyes of an oncoming ferret.

Before they were outlawed in New York State in the early part of the century, ferrets were used to exterminate rats. A ferret with a string on its leg, it was said, could knock off more than a hundred street-wise New York City rats twice its size in an evening.

In England the amazing risk of ferret-legging pales before the new popularity of keeping ferrets as pets, a trend replete with numerous tragic consequences. A baby was killed and eaten in 1978, and several children have been mauled by ferrets every year since then.

BITE OFF THE HAND THAT FEEDS

Loyal to nothing that lives, the ferret has only one characteristic that might be deemed positive—a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts. That usually entails biting
off
whatever it bites. The rules of ferret-legging
do
allow the leggers to try to knock the ferret off a spot it’s biting (from outside the trousers only), but
that is no small matter, as ferrets never let go. No less a source than The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
suggests that you can get a ferret to let go by pressing a certain spot over its eye, but Reg Mellor and the other ferret specialists I talked to all say that is absurd. Reg favors a large screwdriver to get a ferret off his finger. Another ferret-legger told me that a ferret that had almost dislodged his left thumb let go only after the ferret and the man’s thumb were held under scalding tap water—for ten minutes.

Mr. Graham Wellstead, the head of the British Ferret and Ferreting Society, says that little is known of the diseases carried by the ferret because veterinarians are afraid to touch them.

MUSKRAT LOVE?

Reg Mellor, a man who has been more intimate with ferrets than many men have been with their wives, calls ferrets “cannibals, things that live only to kill, that’ll eat your eyes out to get at your brain” at the worst, and “untrustworthy” at their very best.

Reg says he observed with wonder the growing popularity of ferret-legging througout the seventies. He had been hunting with ferrets in the verdant moors and dales outside of Barnsley for much of a century. Since a cold and wet ferret exterminates with a little less enthusiasm than a dry one, Reg used to keep his ferrets in his pants for hours when he hunted in the rain—and it always rained where he hunted.

“The world record was 60 seconds. Sixty seconds! I can stick a ferret up me ass longer than that.”

So at 69, Reg Mellor found his game. As he stood in front of me now, naked from waist down, Reg looked every bit a champion.

ENQUIRING MINDS...

“So look close,” he said again.

I did look, at an incredible tattoo of a
zaftig
woman on Reg’s thigh. His legs appeared crosshatched with scars. But I refused to “look close,” saying something about not being paid enough for that.

“Come on, Reg,” I said. “Do they bite your—you know?”

“Do they!” he thundered with irritation as he pulled up his pants.

“Why, I had ’em hangin’ off me—“

Reg stopped short because a woman who was with me, a London television reporter, had entered the cottage. I suddenly feared that I would never know from what the raging ferrets dangle. Reg offered my friend a chair with the considerable gallantry of a man who had served in the Queen’s army for more than 20 years. Then he said to her, “Are ye cheeky, luv?”

My friend looked confused.

“Say yes,” I hissed.

“Yes.”

“Why,” Reg roared again, “I had ’em hangin’ from me tool for hours an’ hours an’ hours! Two at a time—one on each side. I been swelled up big as that!” Reg pointed to a five-pound can of instant coffee.

I then made the mistake of asking Reg Mellor if his age allowed him the impunity to be the most daring ferret-legger in the world.

“And what do ye mean by that?” he said.

“Well, I just thought since you probably aren’t going to have any more children...”

“Are you say in’ I ain’t pokin’ ’em no more?” Reg growled with menace. “Is that your meaning? ‘Cause I am pokin’ ’em for sure.”

FREE SHOW

A small red hut sits in an overgrown yard outside Reg Mellor’s door.

“Come outta there, ye bah-stards,” Reg yelled as he flailed around the inside of the hut looking for some ferrets that had just arrived a few hours earlier. He emerged with two dirty white animals, which he held quite firmly by their necks. They both had fearsome unblinking eyes as hard and red as rubies.

Reg thrust one of them at me, and I suddenly thought that he intended the ferret to avenge my
faux pas
concerning his virility; so I began to run for a fence behind which my television friend was already standing because she refused to watch. Reg finally got me to take one of the ferrets by its steel cable of a neck while he tied his
pants at the ankle and prepared to “put em down.”

A young man named Malcolm with a punk haircut came into the yard on a motorbike. “You puttin’ ’em down again, Reg?” Malcolm asked.

Reg took the ferret from my bloodless hand and stuck the beast’s head deep into his mouth.

“Oh yuk, Reg,” said Malcolm.

Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer. Claws and teeth now protruded all over Reg’s hyperactive trousers. The two bulges circled round and round one leg, getting higher and higher, and finally...they went up and over one to the other leg.

“Thank God,” I said.

“Yuk, Reg,” said Malcolm.

“The claws,” I managed, “Aren’t they sharp, Reg?”

“Ay,” said Reg laconically. “Ay.”

RETIRED “FER-LANTHROPIST”

Reg Mellor gives all the money he makes from ferret-legging to the local children’s home. As with all great champions, he has also tried to bring more visibility to the sport that has made him famous. One Mellor innovation is the introduction of white trousers at major competitions (“shows the blood better”).

Mellor is a proud man. Last year he retired from professional ferret-legging in disgust after attempting to break a magic six-hour mark—the four-minute-mile of ferret-legging. After five hours of having them down, Mellor found that almost all of the 2,500 spectators had gone home. Then workmen came and began to dismantle the stage, despite his protestations that he was on his way to a new record. “I’m not packing it in because I am too old or because I can’t take the bites anymore,” Reg told reporters after the event, “I am just too disillusioned.”

FERRET DIPLOMACY

One of the ferrets in Reg’s pants finally poked its nose into daylight before any major damage was done, and Reg pulled the other ferret out. We all went across the road to the local pub, where everyone but Reg had a drink to calm the nerves. Reg doesn’t drink. Bad for his health, he says.

Reg said he had been coaxed out of retirement recently and intends to break six—“maybe even eight”—hours within the year.

Some very big Yorkshiremen stood around us in the pub. Some of them claimed they had bitten the head off sparrows, shrews, and even rats, but none of them would compete with Reg Mellor. One can only wonder what suffering might have been avoided if the Argentine junta had been informed that sportsmen in England put down their pants animals that are known only for their astonishingly powerful bites and their penchant for insinuating themselves into small dark holes. Perhaps the generals would have reconsidered their actions on the Falklands.

But Reg Mellor refuses to acknowledge that his talent is made of the stuff of heroes, of a mixture of indomitable pride, courage, concentration, and artless grace. “Naw noon o’ that,” said the king. “You just got to be able ta have your tool bitten and not care.”

*
      
*
      
*

RANDOM “THOUGHTS”

“We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees.”

—Jason Kidd, on being drafted by the Dallas Mavericks

“It’s like an Alcatraz around my neck.”

—Boston Mayor Menino, on the shortage of city parking spaces

“It is bad luck to be superstitious.”

—Andrew Mathis

The werewolf is one of the most recognized movie monsters in history, thanks in large part to the 1941 film
The Wolf Man,
starring Lon Chaney Jr. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the making of that classic film.

F
RIGHT FACTORY

The early 1930s was the golden age of movie monsters. In 1930, Universal released the classic
Dracula
, starring Bela Lugosi; a year later it had another huge hit with Boris Karloff’s
Frankenstein.
Inspired by their success, Universal decided to make a movie about a werewolf. In 1931, they handed writer/director Robert Florey a title—
The Wolf Man
—and told him to come up with an outline.

A few months later, Florey submitted notes for a story about a Frenchman who has suffered for 400 years under a witch’s curse that turns him into a werewolf during every full moon...unless he wears a garland of wolf-bane around his neck.

The studio approved the idea and scheduled the movie as a Boris Karloff vehicle for 1933. A shooting script was written...and rewritten...and rewritten several more times. By the time it was finished, the script was about an English doctor who is bitten by a werewolf in Tibet, then turns into one himself on his return to London. Universal renamed the picture
Werewolf of London.

BAT MAN

By now, however, Boris Karloff was too busy to take the part....So it went to a Broadway actor named Henry Hull.
Werewolf of London
hit theatres in 1935.

The movie wasn’t very good: One critic has called it “full of fog, atmosphere, and laboratory shots, but short on chills and horror.” That was largely because Hull didn’t
look
scary. He refused to cover his face with werewolf hair, complaining that it obscured his features. Makeup man Jack Pierce—already a legend for creating Bela
Lugosi’s
Dracula
and Boris Karloff’s
Frankenstein
—had no choice but to remove most of the facial hair, leaving Hull looking like a demonic forest elf.
Werewolf of London
was a box office disappointment. It was also Hull’s last werewolf film.

SECOND TRY

In the early 1940s, Universal launched a second wave of horror films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, and other classic monsters. They decided to give the werewolf another try, too

This second werewolf film started the same way tht first one did: with the title
The Wolf Man.
This time the scriptwriter was Curt Siodmak. He started from scratch, researched werewolf legends himself, and used what he learned to write the script. The story he concocted was about an American named Lawrence Talbot who travels to his ancestral home in Wales and is bitten while rescuing a young woman from a werewolf attack.

Once again, the studio wanted to cast Karloff in the lead...and once again, he was too busy to take it. They considerd Bela Lugosi, but he was too old for the part. So they gave it to newcomer Lon Chaney, Jr., son and namesake of the greatest horror star of the silent movie era. Chaney, Sr. was known all over the world as “the Man of 1000 Faces,” for his roles in
The Phantom of the Opera
and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Chaney, Jr. had recently starred in Man
Made Monster
, and Universal thought he had potential in horror films.