Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Throwing a Dart

I started writing this post about dart-throwing while sitting in court a few months back watching a trial unfold -- it was something about how the attorney representing the accused murderer was moving his arm and hand toward the witness while asking questions, which was pretty annoying for the few minutes I sat there, that reminded me of dart-throwing ... if he did that in voir dire while questioning the jurors, the guy had no chance at all. It turns out he had no chance anyway with 39 stab wounds in the other guy and blood all over him.

Then, today, in my stuporous state brought on by some kind of upper respiratory thing that has been living in me the past four or five days, which I decided was not bird flu because I took no part whatsoever in the cock-fighting extravaganzas over there in the Tremont area that were the subject of a massive raid by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, I awoke momentarily; and on ESPN-222, there was a replay of the Northeast United States and Caribbean Dart-Throwing Championship, which I may or may not have imagined ... with a camera behind the dartboard (what happens if the dart hits the camera?) ... and two rather corpulent older fellows tossing darts like they knew what they were doing, grimacing and fist-pumping just like in the NBA play-offs. I don't know if I imagined the things I saw; but I felt that I should look through my little leather hand-made jotter that holds my Levenger 3x5 note cards and find what I had jotted down, which is, as follows:

My dart-throwing career began and ended in my parent's basement. The dart board was mounted on the cement-block wall of the unfinished basement, not that my dad was a dart-thrower of any repute. I think it was hung on the wall there to be out of the way. And there were five darts on top of the highest course of cement block, three with green-colored plastic wings made to look like feathers and two with red.

How hard could it be -- throwing darts at the dart board; after all, I could fire a baseball from behind home plate to second base while on my knees ... that's how I had to be able to do it in high school. Darts would pose no problem. I could enter dart tournaments at college and make some cash.

The scoring was weird, but I wasn't going to worry about that. I guess the little rings meant something ... double or triple score, kind of like Scrabble. And a bull's-eye counted 50 or 100 -- whatever.

So, I figured I'd mess around and see what the attraction was about throwing darts. I fired the first dart just like a throw to second, economy of arm motion, right from the ear ... and I expected the dart to thud into the dart board.

But it didn't.

This was not good. I was a good four feet off line. What the fuck was that all about. And a pointy dart thrown at a high speed hitting a copper water supply line makes a hole in the pipe ... do you realize that? ... water sprayed from the copper pipe above the meter where the shut-off valve was located. And the water ... I put my finger over the little hole, but the water sprayed out from around my finger; and I was getting wet. And so was the basement.

Damned if I knew what to do. I couldn't turn off the fucking water because the faucet for turning off the water was below the hole spewing a jet of water into the basement. Nobody else was home. Hell, by the time anyone came home, the whole fucking basement would be flooded. I needed to call someone ... my grandfather, he would be able to help, if he was home. So, I called him ... and he started laughing when I told him what happened, saying something in Croatian ... probably like, "Idiot! Moron!" or worse; and he said that he'd be right over.

And I met him outside, as he pulled his old Pontiac Tempest into the driveway several minutes later. He opened the trunk and told me to take the darkened wooden box. He grabbed the beat-up, gray metal tool box, carrying it without effort, while I struggled with the scarred, wooden box; and we went to the scene of the crime through the side door and down the steps where we were confronted by the plume of water erupting from the small hole in the 1/2-inch diameter pipe.

My grandfather set down his metal toolbox, flipped the latches on it and opened it. He told me to put the wooden toolbox on the ping-pong table. He pulled out a roll of black tape ... and he deftly wound the tape around and around the pipe, magically, because the roll of tape was bigger than the space between the pipe and the wall. How he did that I don't know, but this was a man who could grow figs in northern latitudes that I understand were better tasting than anything from anywhere else in the world. I suppose that qualified him to do most anything, perhaps ... a physical impossibility wasn't going to stop him from wrapping tape around a leaky water pipe to save his eldest grandson from certain death at the hands of his son-in-law, his daughter's husband.

And when the black tape looked like a gall on a tree limb, my grandfather announced that the water had stopped leaking ... well, it wasn't spewing out all over the basement, but just running a little down the pipe and over the meter and onto the floor. "You watch," he commanded; "I turn off water outside," he said in his thick Croatian accent, as he bounded up the steps, some tools in hand, which I hadn't seen any other man of 70+ years on the planet do.

Moments later, he rumbled down the steps. "Billy, take tape off," he said. I started unwinding the 17 miles of tape, as I watched him open the metal tool box, from which he took a bottle of gas and parts for a torch that he dexterously assembled as he had thousands of times before. He put the torch assembly on the wet floor, water draining away from the pipe down the sloped floor to where the washtub emptied into the hole in the floor across the cement floor, and took over unwrapping the tape. His hands moved quickly, like in a cartoon, whirring back and forth faster and faster as the rhythm took over.

"Get torch," he said softly, as he was finishing the unwinding, a huge pile of tape, like mummy windings, heaped on the floor. I handed him the torch and scooped up the tape without being asked. He was heating the pipe with the torch when I returned. He muttered something about "water in pipe," but he clearly wasn't talking to me because the rest was in Croatian. He pulled a roll of silvery metal wire from his pocket and touched it to the hole in the pipe. Nothing happened, and he said something in Croatian to the pipe ... or to the wire solder ... or to the torch. I wished at that point that I had learned some Croatian swear words from my grandmother. He put the torch to the pipe once more, patiently moving the rushing flame back and forth. After a few minutes, he again touched the wire solder to the pipe, and it liquified, filling in the hole. He continued with the torch and the solder until he decided, "Enough."

Without a word, he went back up the steps with tools in hand and returned a matter of seconds later and stood back from the pipe, looking. "No leak," he smiled at me. He took a piece of purple sandpaper out of the metal box and wrapped it around the pipe and sanded the pipe ... he removed the sandpaper and the pipe gleamed like new copper with a small silver dot where the hole had been. "Wow," I said, to which he replied, "Looks good."

He disassembled the torch and returned it to the metal toolbox with the tools, tape, solder, and sandpaper he had taken from it. He motioned at me to get the wooden tool chest on the ping pong table. We retreated from the scene of the debacle up the stairs and to the Pontiac Tempest. He opened the trunk and put the metal toolbox back in its place, and I hoisted the wooden tool chest over the lip of the trunk and into its reserved spot.

"Thanks, Grandpa," I said, meekly, embarrassed that I had been so stupid.

He smiled, lips parting to show his aging teeth, cornflower blue eyes twinkling with unspoken affection over his suntanned nose, larger than most, but slightly irregular from the chunk of cancer a surgeon carved out, which added to his tough exterior, which belied the heart of gold, "Our secret," he said, leaning forward and kissing my forehead.

Posted by Bill at June 12, 2006 11:47 PM