How did they do it? My inquisitive mind needed an answer. It took a little more snooping but I finally figured it out. And to their credit, it was almost flawlessly brilliant. The keyword being “almost”.

Within the confines of the drapes, tucked away in the upper corner of the pale-green painted, cinderblock wall, sat a small, rectangular, three-pane casement window. It was held open by dad’s missing screwdriver. Placed prominently on the wide windowsill was a small, metal-bladed fan that had expanding panels on either side to close off the open space—probably a contribution from Fitzy. I plugged it in. The blades slowly spun, initially clanking in complaint, but soon accelerated to a frenetic hum. Wow! At max speed, its blades rotated at about two trillion revs per second. It may have been extracted from the innards of a jet. It could mince carrots into juice if given a try. One thing was certain, it generated a powerful draw for its tiny size. The draw was exactly what the boys had in mind. Get that lingering brown smoke out of there. Eliminate the smokey fingerprints.

The set-up was very inventive and quite effective for the most part. In fact, it would have been the perfect solution had it not been for one small law of nature. Summer meant sleep-depriving heat. And the first sign of sleep-depriving heat triggered dad to fire up his patented Dad's Air Disbursement System (a.k.a., DADS).

Regarded as an expensive indulgence and an instrument of weakness, dad disdained air conditioning. Instead, he designed DADS, an intricate airflow network, which utilized the precise placement of big window fans to draw stagnant, warm, indoor air out and suck cooler, evening, outdoor air in. When it came to fan-powered cooling systems, the old man was in a league of his own. The design included deploying a large fan to the first floor dining room window, where it was set to intake level “4”, the highest. Another design component required placing an equivalent window fan in the master bedroom, setting it to outtake level “4”. The rest of the design consisted of a complicated series of opened and closed windows throughout the house. Once fired up, it was a blue-collar success, sucking in the cooler air outside the dining room window, pulling it through the living room, and drawing it up the stairs to the steamy bedrooms above.

Ah, yes, that dining room window—the old beer-basket, dining room window. Now it was the intake window for DADS. It was also directly above a basement window, but not any basement window. It sat five feet above the same basement window where the stupidmentors’ steel-bladed jet engine roared nightly.

It was a Friday evening, when the systems conjoined for the first time. A night of wild teen merriment in the den of the stupid below and a quiet evening of tv above. It didn’t take long before it all played out like a lost episode of “Married With Idiot Children”.

Let me offer a visual to help. Imagine that aerodynamic test during which smoke is blown through a wind tunnel at a sleekly designed sedan to show air drag. Take that image and now visualize the dull yellow cloud of smoke building up from a dime bag’s worth of pipe play. Imagine that cloud sucked out the basement window, creeping up the side of the house and then pulled back into the house, blasting across the dining room into the adjoining living room where it stops to regroup—where the folks are settled in to watch a night of tv humor after another long week of human office trials.

What the dynamic duo managed to pull off without much effort was push the thick pungent cloud—made of the finest hash smoke south of the border—from their basement digs into the living room over head, where it re-strengthened like a tropical depression to a Cat 4 hurricane in Gulf of Mexico.

By the time I came home from the movies that night, it was about 11:30, just in time to hear Ed McMahon bellow “Heeeeres Johnny!”. As I walked through the front door to join the folks for Carson’s monologue, the first warning sign that something was afoot was the drab beige air that filled the living room. It reminded me of the burnt amber haze I once saw at the Garden during a “Yes” concert. Of course, the more telling indication was that scent. It was like being greeted by a ten-foot tall joint at the door. However, none of that prepared me for the interaction I was about to have with the folks.

I cautiously greeted them as I walked in.

“Hey,”

Dad replied with a goofy smile plastered across his bleary-eyed face. “Hey, it’s Bobby C. How are ya Bobby C?”

“Hey honey. How was the movie? Was it groovy?” mom asked.

“Was it groovy? Is that what she just said?” I thought to myself. I looked over at her. Her eyes where slits and she had that grin, the same grin dad had. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

“Hey Bobby C wanna watch some Johnny C with Mommy C and me?” He burst out laughing. Mom joined right in. It wasn’t even that funny. Something was definitely wrong.

“Hey, before you sit yourself down Bobby C, why don’t you refill that bowl with some more chips. There is an open bag in the kitch. I’m a little hungry.” He turned to mom. “How about you my little canary, are you a little hungry?”

“Oh, I’m a little hungry all right.” She smiled and started to giggle.

Mom did a lot of things. Giggle was not one of them. I apparently had stepped onto the set of an Ed Wood movie. It was disturbing. It was about to get worse. My eyes looked down as not to make any more contact with those of the people I called parents. I scanned the coffee table for the chip bowl. I spotted it immediately, but my eye also caught something else. The bowl was resting on a strange clump of straps and white material. What was it? It wasn’t a place mat. I walked over and looked down.

“What the heck is that?” I asked.

“Oh that’s my bra. I’ve decided to burn it. Well, I'll burn it later. Women’s Lib you know.”

“What? What is she talking about?” I asked dad, hoping to make some kind of sense of it all.

Dad smirked, “No bra Bobby C. No 'B', 'R', 'A'. I think you kids say far out, huh?” They looked at each other and started to laugh again.

My stomach began doing flips. I had seen and heard enough.

“I’ll be right back!” And with that, I picked the bowl up off the bra, marched down to the basement, unplugged the exhaust fan, picked the needle off Ten Years After, and confronted the guilty.

“Hey man, what’s the matter with you?” Doug complained. “You’re spaced out man. Chill.”

“You freakin’ idiots. Dad’s got the fan on in the dining room! All your smoke is going right into the living room. They’re stoned outta their minds. Ma took her bra off you dicks!”

Doug and Rick looked at me as if I was insane. I was but not at that moment. I was quite clear headed. They studied their silent little exhaust system for a moment. Then they looked distantly into the ceiling where the dining room fan roared above. Their bee sting eyes traced the path into the living room. I followed their eye movement again as they replayed the trail of their folly. Finally, the light bulbs went on in their empty little heads. They looked at each other and instantly exploded into uncontrolled laughter. Soon the whole bunch of them, including a few faces I had never seen before, were rolling around, tears streaming down their cheeks, gasping for air. All of them in the throes of a contagious mass laugh fest.

Everyone was having fun except for me.

Rattled and disgusted, I stomped up the basement stairs, making a detour into the “kitch”. I grabbed the open bag of chips, filled the bowl, and delivered it to my wasted parents as requested. I glanced at the discarded bra once more to verify the crime. Sadly confirmed, I retreated up to the third floor where I reflected on the last fifteen minutes and the far-reaching impact it was sure to have on my life and those around me.

I figured the boys were going to get killed. They didn’t. I thought mom would never wear a bra again—something I would never be able to deal with. She returned to full dress the very next day. I concluded dad would start saying “far out” to my friends—something that would push up my plan to move to New Zealand and live off the land by a year. He didn’t. As it turned out, absolutely nothing happened to anyone, if you discount the setback to my emotional development. Also, nothing changed. Doug and Rick continued to use the exhaust fan successfully, but they were mindful to turn the dining room fan on exhaust mode (versus intake mode) when the need arose.

Yup, it was a large bullet they had dodged that Friday night. It was also just another episode in a long series of stupidiments they executed routinely. They truly were legendary.