You are pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchens . . .
Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO, ACT II, SCENE 1
End car-care worries forever by parking the thing in Manhattan with the windows down and the keys in the ignition.
Real bachelors do not feel the urge to put up Christmas decorations. Except sometimes when they get very drunk and sentimental on Christmas Eve. If this happens to you, paint your behind red and green and press it against the front window.
If you ever get the chance to have a house built to your specifications, here are several ideas you might keep in mind:
• Cement floors with central drains in every room will facilitate cleaning, especially if combined with waterproof walls and belongings. Put exterior-style garden-hose faucets along the baseboards.
• Install a commercial sprinkler system if you smoke and tend to doze off in armchairs. Sprinkler systems are also useful for quick showers during breakfast when you’re late for work.
• Put a built-in exhaust fan in every room. This lets you put off emptying ashtrays.
• Plumb the whole house with plastic tubing for beer taps.
• Make sure you have one cable hook-up for every major sports event that might be on TV simultaneously.
The toilet is a handy place for pet baths. Squirt liquid dish soap in toilet bowl and insert pet. Flush once for cats, hamsters, or guinea pigs, twice for dogs.
• Hide the outlet in the bathroom. Put it behind the athlete’s foot powder in the medicine chest, so you can use it for your electric razor but your date can’t find it for her hair dryer. This will keep the bathroom from being tied up for hours.
Use these if you hate your landlord and utility charges are included in your rent.
• Turn the hot-water heater all the way up so you can steam lobsters in the shower.
• Shovel the driveway with the electric stove. Turn the broiler on, lay the stove face down, and drag it back and forth across the snow.
Be sure to remember when Halloween is. Answering the door when you’re three-quarters crocked and finding a pack of midget He-Man, Master of the Universes, on the front porch can be a scary experience if you’re not expecting it.
You can’t put your VISA bill on your American Express card.
Avoid all home cleaning products that claim to be effective against grease. Grease is slippery and keeps dirt from adhering to kitchen appliances, dishes, and glassware.
Does your homeowner’s insurance give you full coverage for the following types of bachelor liabilities?
• Indoor car accidents
• Bedsheet grease fires
• Damage to wildlife from massive liquor spills
• Dinner guests stuck in the chimney
• Dirt tornados
• Explosions while playing with the microwave
• Electrical blackouts during important sports events
• Your cooking
No home should be without a complete first-aid kit.
• Large wagers placed on the Cleveland Indians while drunk
• Living-room dog polo injuries
• You can dry-clean your clothes at home by dipping them in gasoline. (Clothes will be permanently free of all dirt if you do this near an open flame.)
• Gasoline smell can be removed from clothes by sending them to the dry cleaner.
• Press wrinkled trousers by putting them between the mattress and box spring before going to bed drunk. In the morning you’ll frantically search the house for your pants, and when you finally remember they’re between the mattress and the box spring, you’ll be so happy to find them you won’t care that they’re wrinkled.
• An alternative to wearing your clothes in the bathtub is to bathe in the washing machine. Either technique saves hot water. Watch out for that agitator thing.
• If the local laundry repeatedly loses your shirts, you may want to try the traditional Third World method of dealing with laundry, which is to have your laundry man beaten on rocks.
• Ronald E. Burr, publisher of The American Spectator, writes in with this tip: “If you buy 121 2/3 pairs of boxer shorts, you’ll only have to go to the laundromat three times a year.”
Executive-length dress sock:
• dog collar
• sweat band
• blackjack (put roll of quarters in the toe)
• thermos cozy
• shoe buffer
• stuff it with crumpled newspapers to stop drafts under doors
• tie it around your arm to show you’re in mourning
White wool sweat sock:
• mitten
• tub stopper
• potholder
• mood enhancer (stuck on top of a bare light bulb)
Boxer shorts:
• party hat
One of the great pleasures of bachelorhood is naming the dog. Married men have to let their children do it, and as a result often find themselves in the hunting field, yelling, “Fluffy! Fluffy!” or “Heel, Puff, heel!”
Here are some decent red-blooded things to call your dog:
Regular checking, NOW account, or tinder in the fireplace? Setting fire to money can be an excellent alternative, considering how much trouble bachelors get into whenever they have cash.
(North of Maryland)
Grant
Sherman
(South of Pennsylvania)
Stonewall
Lee
FAVORITE PRESIDENTS
Ike
Cal
Hoover
Teddy
DOG IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE
Pero—Spanish
Kleb—Arabic
Hund—German
Dinner—Vietnamese
SPORTS FIGURES
Babe
Ty
Leon
Olga
HISTORICAL FIGURES
Genghis
Attila
Rommel
Stalin
Herod
MISC.
Harley
Vette
Skull
Hiroshima
And don’t forget the names of old girlfriends, your present girlfriend’s nickname, teachers you had in grade school, and the first names of your parents.
If you have a cat, you shouldn’t name it at all. You can’t call a cat.
Cockroaches have been given a bad rap. They don’t bite, smell, or get into your booze. Would that all house-guests were as well behaved. The ancient Egyptians even venerated the cockroach as a symbol of the sun. Well, actually, that was the scarab beetle, but worship one bug, and you’ll worship them all.
Don’t do anything about cockroaches. There’s nothing you can do anyway.
Don’t put cheese in a mousetrap. Mice are much more attracted to fat, suet, peanut butter, and book bindings. And if you examine this list, you’ll see that, if the mice got it, you probably didn’t want it anyway. So don’t do anything about the mice either.
Rats are another matter. You have to do something about rats. But don’t poison them because they’ll die in the walls. And a dead rat in the wall is the one thing on earth that can, I guarantee, make your bachelor home more disgusting than it is now.
Is this kind of thing covered by your homeowner’s policy? Check with your insurance agent today.
I once lived in a house that had rats. I took a handful of diet pills and sat up all night with a bottle of whiskey and a pistol waiting for them to poke their heads out of the woodwork. By four A.M. I was seeing any number of rats, many of them Day-Glo orange and wearing ballet costumes. This technique is not very effective.
Traps are not very effective either. If you check on your rat traps in the middle of the night, you’re liable to see the rats using them as Nautilus machines.
However, while researching this book I came across another method of getting rid of rats. It appears in a volume called Household Discoveries, Encyclopedia of Practical Recipes and Processes, by Sidney Morse, published in 1913. I have no idea if this works, but it does sound like fun:
Catch one or more rats in a wire cage. Take a pronged stick . . . wedge the fork just behind the animal’s ears, and pin him firmly to the floor. . . . Roll a bit of newspaper into a tight cylinder, set fire to one end and with the lighted end singe the hair from his back. . . . Fix a small paintbrush on a long stick . . . apply a coating of phosphoric mixture, slightly warm, to the animal’s back, and release him near his hole. Just what impression is produced by what seems to be the ghost of a departed rat reappearing in his old haunts would be hard to say, but those who have tried the experiment report that no rats remain in the vicinity to give an account of their sentiments.
Don’t. You should always be missing some buttons. It’s part of your boyish bachelor charm. Many a woman has sat down on the living-room couch to sew on a button and has wound up doing something more interesting on another piece of furniture elsewhere in the home.
If, however, you’re involved with one of those very modern young women who prides herself on being useless around the house, you can reattach buttons with a stapler.
Snow shoveling can be avoided by running your car up and down the sidewalk, packing the snow down and making it easy to walk on.
There’s no way to get a chair into the washing machine or even the shower stall. Upholstery cannot be cleaned. The best thing to do is cover the furniture with something such as the skin of a wild animal, a blonde, for instance.
Taking clothes off before getting into shower or tub adds unnecessary steps to maintaining personal hygiene.
