I feel some sympathy for Plantation Key resident Jim Harris. I’m afraid people in South Puffin may have laughed a bit when they heard his story.
The Keys buffalo has reared its head again. The plummeting buffalo head, an only-in-the-Keys tale, resurfaced again in a “news of the weird” article. The last time was when a so-called reality television show aired a re-creation with some scant similarity to the actual event.
Mr. Harris, then 56, had to call 9-1-1 back in 2010.
The time was 1 in the morning. He had been lounging in a chair watching television. Minding his own business. Maybe drinking a beer. Out of nowhere, a water buffalo head jumped off the wall and crushed him.
“I think a f—— buffalo fell on me!” the battered fellow shouted to the dispatcher during his nine-minute call. “I’m crushed!”
The weight of the massive water-buffalo head, nicknamed Bubba, has been estimated at around 200 pounds. It belonged to Harris’ landlord.
The mounted head of a water buffalo on the wall is frighteningly familiar.
Soon after a Stevens Dean threw me out of the dorms, four of us went together to rent an apartment in downtown Hoboken. It was a perfect place for four struggling college students, advertised as a “two-bedroom penthouse apartment in a quiet neighborhood.” The price was right, for us. $80/month at first, although the landlord raised it to $110 when he found out there were four of us. It was a fourth-floor walk-up, cold-water railroad flat in an 80-year-old brick tenement on Bloomfield Street. It had a gas stove with a built-in space heater and a gas water heater in the kitchen. It had a bathroom with barely enough room for a tub and a toilet right off the kitchen.
Want to wash your hands? The kitchen sink is right across the room.
The second bedroom was about the size of the bathroom but the entire apartment had 12′ ceilings, so we painted it flat black and built a bunk bed there for Tom and Bill. Their dressers and closet were in the front bedroom.
I convinced our landlord, Sam, that we could renovate a bit. Our first job was the bath room because we all really wanted a shower and a sink. We also built a breakfast bar the size of an aircraft carrier deck in the kitchen. And Sam paid us for the materials with free rent. (We won’t talk about the concrete we poured in the bathroom for the shower.)
This story is about the living room, though.
I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired.
We decided that it needed a hardwood floor to showcase the green-flowered Castro Convertible sofa I had found on the street in Scarsdale.
My mother would never sit down in that apartment. I never understood why.
The living room needed better wall hangings than the posters college kids typically used.
Bill had a water buffalo skull acquired in some manner from a taxidermy shop.
We were engineering students so we knew that a 200 pound skull needed pretty good support. Tom and Bill distressed a couple of 2x4s and built the L-shaped frames you can see in the photo. Bill spiked it to the wall with 16d nails.
We nicknamed the skull Sam, in homage to the real Sam, the landlord who would stand under it in the arch and harangue us. Sam’s mother-in-law lived directly under us. I’m reasonably sure she was disappointed with those darned college kids who played rock-n-roll music, mixed cement in the bathtub in the kitchen, and dragged car engines up the four flights of stairs. I’m also reasonably sure she never said “darned.” And that she whispered a word or two to her son-in-law.
We had a lease.
Thankfully, Sam never saw Sam.
Sam never fell on Sam and, in fact, never even leaned toward that Castro Convertible. And we left the distressed frames when we move out because nothing short of dynamite would have gotten them off the wall. Bill and Fred and Tom and I went back to Hoboken a couple of years ago. The tenement was under renovation which is a fancy way of saying the builders had gutted it to the bare brick and started over. I’m thinking dynamite was involved.
Next month, how Rufus claims that I shot him with a pellet gun.