“He has what in his basement?” I asked, flabbergasted.
“A cow. He calls it Darla. Oh, and it goes up and down.”
I was visiting my friend Susan in her new apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of months ago. She was chatting away about her design plans for her new home, and we were getting our things together to go out for dinner. This is the point Susan told me how helpful the apartment block’s residential manager had been to her while she was moving in, and what a character he was. “His place is kind of crazy,” Susan said, off-handedly. “He has a mechanical cow in a stable down there, and all sorts of things.”
There is a phrase in journalism called “burying the lede”. It means that you have some powder keg piece of information that should be right at the top of the story, but somehow, the reporter doesn’t mention it until further down the piece, at which point, the reader might have already moved on.
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“Susan,” I said, in genuine wonder. “How can I have sat here for an hour, and you are only now telling me that there is a mechanical cow in a stable in the apartment underneath yours? And when can I get to see it?”
And so it came about that at 10pm two nights later, we descended the stairs of Susan’s apartment block in Cambridge to what was literally another world. Jeth is a man with a busy schedule, and when not teaching students guitar in person or remotely – he used to be in a famous rock band, some decades ago – he was carrying out his many duties associated with managing the building.
The kitchen had cow-patterned walls, floors and ceiling. The cooker and fridge had been also been painted over. There were curated groups of small cow ornaments everywhere
“Welcome!” Jeth said, appearing like a bearded magician from a door beyond which I glimpsed an astonishing amount of cow print. “Come in!”
There are not enough true eccentrics in the world these days, or at least, I have not met enough of them in my life. Jeth, I realised within seconds, is a True Eccentric.
First we were shown around his music room, where various high-tech equipment and customised guitars shared a space with roughly 40 stuffed animals of various sizes. I know Prince Andrew famously has a collection of stuffed teddy bears on his bed, and a laminated photograph of their exact position, so that the unfortunate people who clean his room can put them back in their designated position. This tells me more than I ever wanted to know about Prince Andrew.
Jeth’s collection of bears were not nice bears. They were not the kind of bears I could imagine Prince Andrew cuddling up with; his expensive vintage Steiff bears and the kind of soft floppy bear Sebastian Flyte carried around with him in Brideshead Revisited. Jeth’s bears looked kind of feral, frankly. He picked one up, which was white. It had red eyes.
“Look!” Jeth exclaimed, holding this bear out to me, while he pressed a button in its paw. And thereupon the white bear’s red eyes began to flash, his mouth opened, showing a set of sharp little shark-like teeth that snapped open and closed, a ungodly sound emanated from behind these teeth, and his entire bear body shook in frenzy.
This bear was just one of roughly a thousand similiarly bizarre, borderline creepy, but enthralling, items Jeth had placed in his apartment of 40 years dwelling as a kind of one-man installation. The main theme was bovine. The kitchen had cow-patterned walls, floors and ceiling. The cooker and fridge had been also been painted over. There were curated groups of small cow ornaments everywhere.
But the highlight of the apartment was the large living room which was dedicated to Darla the mechanical cow. Most people have couches and bookcases and armchairs in their living room, none of which were evident here. Jeth had personally constructed a classic American red-and-white wooden barnyard stall in his living room. There were also a score of clockwork monkeys with cymbals in a row atop a cupboard, which he had somehow wired up, and the walls were covered with masks. There were disco balls in the ceiling.
Jeth pressed a button and it was showtime. The many clockwork monkeys began to clap their cymbals in unison; the eyes in the masks on the wall lit up and flashed, the disco balls started spinning, and “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” started to play, as the red barn door opened, and a life-size model of a cow started moving out of the stall, cowbells around its neck tinging as it moved
Darla the cow travelled the length of the room and stopped in front of me. Then Jeth pressed another button, and Darla ascended several feet in the air via some pneumatic mechanism. The monkeys clapped on. It was one of the most memorable moments of my life to date. We were half a kilometre from the centre of Harvard’s campus, where some of the finest brains in the world assemble to teach, and be taught, and I bet not one of them could have bettered the creation I was now looking at.
“Why does she go up?” I asked.
“Why not?” Jeth replied briskly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Here’s to all the True Eccentrics among us, and long may they thrive. Especially those who have mechanical cows in their basements.
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