Beer Machine Bomb

The following story is entirely hypothetical for all you know; and furthermore I would never do it again.

Suppose just for the sake of argument that when I was in college, my fraternity house had an old Pepsi machine from which our brotherhood generated a few extra dollars in revenue by selling beer instead of Pepsi (this alleged college being the only state university in Kentucky situated in a dry territory at that time). And picture if you will that some unidentified person not having the key to said beer machine while yet suffering from a compulsive sense of thirst, smashed off the existing lock to gain entry to the wonderful contents inside. Now later, as the brothers wanted to continue vending beer through the beer machine, but being unable to secure it given the broken lock, imagine that they affixed a hasp to the machine so that it could be padlocked shut. Picture all these things if you will.

Now imagine that later the machine fell into disuse. It was relegated into storage in a glassed in greenhouse room just off the main living room at the front of the house where it sat, sad and lonely for a year or so. Nobody paid it much thought; at least not until finals week in my senior year. Consider a warmer than average spring in an un-airconditioned house, and the subtle smell of putrefaction beginning to permeate the living-room area. Nobody understands from whence the smell of death was issuing until the weekend after finals and someone ventured to open the door of the office. As soon as the door opened, the overwhelming, sickening stench of rotten flesh poured with a vengeance from the glass room. The hapless victim who had opened Pandora’s Box of Stink immediately slammed the door, but noticed that the beer machine had a brand new Master’s padlock on the hasp just before closing the door.

It turns out that this (hypothetical) situation was a grim sort of prank. Some unidentified person had killed some poor vermin in the woods, taken its lifeless carcass, and stuffed it deep into the beer machine, before affixing a padlock for which only he had the key. This course of events was about six weeks in the past by the time it was discovered.

Did I mention that it had been an unusually warm spring?

The situation proved a difficult problem to solve. No one could remain in the glass room long enough either to saw off the padlock, pry off the hasp or attempt to move the very heavy beer machine. And yet as long as the machine remained in the office, we anticipated that the stench would continue to intensify. Isn’t this quite the conundrum?

Someone once said that there are few problems in life that cannot be solved with the suitable application of explosives. This little dictum became our salvation. Picture for just a moment if you will, an anonymous person who owns a CO2 pellet gun, and being a thrifty sort decided to recycle the spent CO2 cartridges by fashioning them into bombs. The process is quite simple if you think about it. Take a nail and enlarge the puncture in the nozzle so that it is large enough to hold a small funnel; pour in an ounce or two of very fine black powder (available at many sporting goods stores); insert plastic coated cannon fuse (also available at many sporting goods stores); and seal it with epoxy glue. If someone were to do such a thing, it would make quite a nice, waterproof miniature bomb.

Let me add here that I have never, ever owned a CO2 pellet gun; for real. If someone else made such a bomb, it wasn’t me. Seriously.

Let’s pretend that on a sunny Sunday afternoon in May, a small group of fraternity boys gathering in the front yard of their house and discussing what to do to get the lock off the beer machine. Brother Boom (you might remember this name from my Cats blog) might have suggested, “Why don’t we blow it off with one of my bombs?” (Ergo the nickname, Boom). To this suggestion, I could have replied, “If we can blow off the lock, I will get the dead animal out of the machine”. There probably was a handy wheel barrow and shovel nearby to facilitate this awful task.

So the group reassembles just outside the glass windows to watch while I and one other brother hold our noses and venture into the charnel house with a roll of duct tape and a bomb in hand. Holding our breaths, we tape the bomb to the side of the beer machine just underneath the lock. Just as my face began to turn from red to purple from oxygen deprivation, I gave a quick flick of a lighter and touched off the end of the plastic fuse, which began to burn furiously. The other brother and I ran for the back door.

By this time the group of witnesses had retreated through a gate and was hiding behind the wooden privacy fence skirting the house, laughing and giggling hysterically. Now about this time, imagine that it was such a pleasant sunny Sunday afternoon that an elderly lady came walking down the sidewalk, on her way to church or perhaps to the grocery. No one noticed that she was passing slowly right in front of the fraternity house as the fuse was lit. We knew that it was way far too late to go cut the fuse, and she was moving awfully slow…

KABOOM!

The bomb detonated just as the old lady was directly in front of the fraternity house, about 100 feet away (imagine a rather large front yard). The resulting blast caused a deafening boom accompanied by the crash of broken glass as shrapnel shattered the windows of the glass room. Fractured steel and broken glass sprayed across the gravel parking lot.

The old lady had stopped frozen in her tracks when the bomb went off. She stared at the front of the house in horrified silence, mouth agape. Perhaps she may have been mystified that a half dozen laughing college boys would have come pouring out through the wooden gate so soon after such an alarming explosion, but if she had lived in the neighborhood for any length of time, this really shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

If of course any of this actually happened; which I’m not really saying it did.