Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Mechanical Mutiny - The Jock Strap & Dave and the Vacuum

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

“Morley thought she was the Athletic Support” We’re all about equipment failure on this week’s pod. Those everyday items that make life easier – until, suddenly, they very much don’t! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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from day one. It's gentle, soothing, and a small way to care for the ones we love most. Learn more at aleno.ca. You know that feeling when you finally step away from the noise, take a deep breath and feel everything slow down, that's New Brunswick. Here you can swap traffic for towering cliffs and crowded spaces for endless coastlines. Let the world's highest tides at the Bay of Fundy wash your stress away.

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It's the perfect summer road trip where the great outdoors and vibrant city life meet, and the only thing on your to-do list is to breathe it all in. Visit sensesnb.ca to start planning your escape today and get a sense of New Brunswick. From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Today on the show, two stories about equipment failure.

In our first story, Sam and Morley get to grips with an unfamiliar new piece of protective equipment. In our second, Dave wrestles with some vintage housekeeping technology bequeathed to him by his late aunt Elizabeth. But let's start with this one. This is Stuart MacLean with The Jockstrap. So this began as a novel, and it never got much beyond chapter six, so I thought I'd read you the first six chapters if you don't mind. Chapter one. Saturday was Sam's first day at hockey. The notice said he had to wear complete equipment.

Now Sam, I should tell you for those folks who are still wondering what they're doing here tonight, we got Dave who runs the Vinyl Cafe, the world's smallest record store. Morley is his wife, Morley. And they got two kids, Sam and Stephanie. Sam was seven years old when this happened, in the fall two years ago. The note came back, he was gonna play hockey for the first time, the notice said he had to wear complete equipment and Morley had been accumulating things

for the better part of a year. On the Wednesday night before that first game, she laid all those things out on the kitchen table, the blue pants looked too large for her son. She had rescued them from her nephew Scott. One of the thigh pads was missing, but she thought she could cut one out of cardboard and make do. So she looked at her list and she ticked off pants.

The skates she figured would hold up for another year. She ticked off skates and then she ticked off elbow pads. She had bought them from the lady across the street. The shin guards had come from a church sale. The kids had worn them on their shoulders for two years for playing dress up. They used to wear the shin pads on their shoulders and hit each other with hockey sticks. Sally said that she thought she had a helmet that would fit Sam and had promised to bring it to the rink. So Morley ticked off shin guards and she put a question mark beside the helmet and she stuffed everything

into two plastic bags and propped them by the door and she went upstairs. Bruce had phoned in sick, so Dave, her husband, had gone to open the record store. And Sam was alone in the back seat of the car holding onto his stick and they weren't talking. They had a fight after breakfast because Sam wanted to get dressed at home and the only thing that he had said in the last 30 minutes was that they were going to be late. The second time he said it Morley told him to get in the car and now she was regretting yelling. She was feeling bad about speaking to him like that. What why

did they have to fight before his first game of hockey? Is this what he was going to remember? In the dressing room, Sam slumped on the bench and morally stared at the two bags because for the first time in her life she had no idea how to dress her own son. She didn't know where to begin. The man beside her was lacing his boy into a set of shoulder pads, and they didn't have the shoulder pads because the list said the shoulder pads were optional. Well, we don't have those, said Sam. Accusingly, we don't have to, Morley said. You don't have to have the shoulder pads.

And then she started with the pants and then she was stumped. Do the shin pads, said the man beside her, and then put the socks over. Sam was the last kid on the ice. Chapter two. On Thursday after school, Sam said he needed a jock strap. What for, said Morley. She was frying sausages and reading a gardening magazine. Everyone has one. I have to. Who has one?" she said. Paul. He wore it to school. It's a penis protector. Morley phoned Paul's mother after supper. Chapter 3. Friday morning, Morley drove to Canadian Tire, and when she got there, she

sat in the parking lot because she wasn't sure what to ask for. She knew penis protector, couldn't be right, but she wasn't sure about jock strap. She didn't know if that was a word you could use in a Canadian tire store. It might be a little boy word like fart. She certainly wasn't about to say penis to a man that she didn't know. So she drove home instead of going in the store and phoned Dave. She said, Sam needs a jockstrap for hockey and that's your job. Chapter four.

Saturday morning, Morley took Stephanie to get her hair cut. Dave took Sam to the hockey game. How was the jock? asked Morley at suppertime. It didn't fit, said Sam. He was pointing at his father as if he was a witness in a murder trial. He didn't get the holder. Chapter five. Morley opened her son's equipment bag on Wednesday night and she fished out the jockstrap. It looked just like those masks that painters wear on their faces when they're sanding drywall. It was a size medium. She phoned Paul's mother again. That's just the cup, Maggie explained. There's a holder it slips into, kind of like a garter

belt. How could Dave watch all the hockey he watched and not get the holder? The way he hollered during those hockey games, you'd think at least he had a rudimentary knowledge of the equipment. How could he sit in front of the television set so full of opinions and come home with a cup and no cup holder? Morley felt resentment well up in her as she thought of the Saturday nights that she had struggled to get the kids into bed while Dave sank into the couch in front of the television set.

If he hadn't learned anything, what was the point? Chapter 6. Marlee went back to Canadian Tire on Thursday night and as she passed through the automatic door she realized that she still didn't know what the holder was called. She had looked over the equipment list again before she had left home. Jock strap definitely wasn't on it. She had had a tick beside everything on the list except for the shoulder pads and she had double checked there shoulder pads were optional. There were four aisles of hockey equipment. She had to go by them twice before before

she spotted what she was looking for. They came in three sizes, medium, large, and extra large. Exactly. All things considered, she was surprised to see how small the extra large one was. The package came with a cup identical to the one David bought plus the elastic belt he had neglected. Morley was holding the medium, the smallest one in her hand when she saw the salesman coming, and this was what she was hoping to avoid for your husband, he asked. My son said, Morley, how old is he?

Thank God, thought Morley. She thought he was going to ask how big it was. He's seven, she said. Seven years old. That one's too big, said the young man taking the package from her. You'll need extra, extra small. We're out. Try maybe Eaton's.

Morley was smiling when she got back to the car. Athletic support it said in big white letters on the red package. It was on her list after all. She had ticked it off. Morley thought that she was the athletic support. She got the jock at the bay, she went up there, she got an extra, extra small athletic support for a seven-year-old boy. He's playing hockey, she said nonchalantly. And then she told him a lie. It's his second year. She had no idea why she lied about it being his second year.

Just something she did. Sam put it on as soon as she got home, over his pants. Then before she could stop him, he ran across the street to show Alan. Well, why not, thought Morley. She watched them from the window. Sam standing proudly on the front lawn. He looks like a ballet dancer, she thought. Then Alan kicking him between the legs. Her son laughing.

Said, do it again. He wore the jock to bed that night. And to school the next day under his jeans Marley was gonna say no and then she thought why not For a week she kept finding it all over the house on the stairs on the couch in the TV room Slung over his chair in the kitchen She felt no compunction to put it away She was as pleased with it as he was

Thank you. That was the Jock Strap. That is a story from way back. One of the first ever Vinyl Cafe stories recorded and it's still so funny. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another story. So stick around. You know that one piece of jewelry that works with everything? I have two of those and both of them are majority.

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whenever you want. So go ahead, play, mix, stack, repeat. Shop in store, in app, or at majuri.com. or at madjuri.com. Welcome back. Time for our second story now. This is Stuart McLean with Dave and the Vacuum. So the Nova Scotia Vacuum Cleaner Company was born in the backyard shed of Elmer Tress in Dave's hometown of Big Narrows, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Elmer was the cousin of the coal magnate John W. Tress, and I will leave it to others to tease out what passive-aggressive spasm led Elmer to suck coal dust out of Cape Breton parlours while the rest of his family got rich digging the

dirty black devil out of the ground. I don't know what got him going, but I know that his first vacuum was an enormous horse-drawn, coal-driven contraption that looked like a fire wagon. It required three people to operate. You can still find old-timers and big narrows who will tell you they remember Tress's three sons in their white shirts and plaid breeches running enormous hoses across the sidewalks and over the lawns and through the windows of Big Narrow's best homes. If you get them gone, they will tell you that that smoke-belching monstrosity left behind more dirt than it removed. It was Trass's poor wife, Alana, who convinced Elmer to give up on the Weezer, which is what

she called it. Story goes it was Alana who told him that selling cleaning services would never be as lucrative as selling cleaning devices. Trass was an inventor. He wasn't really interested in selling anything, but he was intrigued by the idea of miniaturizing his vacuum wagon. He called his first attempt the dust bilge, which was essentially a pump on wheels, required two people to operate, as Elmer envisioned it, a husband and a wife.

Woman directing the brush, while the husband followed on the pump. Elmer made twelve bilges in time for Christmas 1916, and according to Eleanor's records, they were all snapped up. Bilge came to a sorry—some would say predictable—end that Easter, the bewildered priest called on Eleanor. He was distraught over the state of all twelve of those marriages. Elmer didn't discourage easily. There were numerous prototypes over the decades, most famously the Eel, a water-filtered vacuum

that humped its way around the house like a possessed bagpipe, which, due to a gasket flaw that Elmer never managed to correct correct appeared to stop and take a leak every few minutes. Then came June 1939, and Elmer emerged from his yard with the prototype of what would become his masterpiece—a machine that Nova Scotians, who were lucky enough to own one themselves, still speak of, in holy terms, the dirt dinghy. The dinghy was small and light and twice as powerful as any vacuum you could order from

the Eaton's catalog. And as it is with all things, its strength also proved to be its weakness. In order to manage the suction, truss had to make the dinghy's cloth dust bag seal tight to the machine. Otherwise it kept flying off. The problem was when it was full, a dust bag was next to impossible to empty. Some vacuum owners resorted to using other vacuum cleaners to suck the dirt out of the bag. People complained it took them as long to get the dirt out of the bag as it did to get it in. But the devoted, and there were many disciples in Big Narrows, were all happy to tack and jiggle the bag until there was at least enough room in there to use it

again. Dress probably had the largest funeral in the history of Big Narrows. He was buried in the little cemetery out by McCauley's Mountain. Certainly had the largest gravestone you can see it yourself today if you would get down there. It's a concrete steeple with a ball on the top and three words without apparent irony inscribed on all four sides for all to read dust to dust. Tress was still revered when Dave was a boy. Dave still remembers the class trip to Tress's backyard workshop, his grade five project on suction, and the fading billboard out by the highway, big, narrow, as it read, a town that really sucks.

No one knows for sure how many dirt dinghies Tress produced, certainly fewer than a hundred. So for those who loved them, they became a treasured possession and then a precious heirloom. Dave got his from his aunt Elizabeth. It arrived out of the blue some 20 years ago. It came on an autumn afternoon, and it came in the original maple crate. Dave home alone at lunch had it unpacked and plugged in almost immediately. Soon as he stepped on the starter, the dinghy emitted a familiar and comforting ear-piercing wail. Dave stepped back and grinned. There was a time when the entire town used to sound like

that. Then he looked down at the brush head, which had seized the little area rug by the kitchen table. It looked as if it was going to suck it right up the hose. Dave turned off the vacuum and tugged the rug free. The vacuum clearly had astonishing possibilities. The dinghy could probably suck up dirt buried deep in the cracks of the floorboards, dirt so deep it might have come off the boots of that World War I soldier who had once lived in his house. Ensau began one of the most difficult periods of Dave and Morley's marriage. The dinghy screamed like a banshee, and while it screamed, Dave followed it around as happily as a banshee's mother. It was like owning his very own Zamboni. There was a light gray carpet downstairs that he could make as smooth as a newly flooded rink.

But there was something else at play. The vacuum was encouraging Dave's deepest, darkest anxieties. He wasn't only sucking dust and smoothing carpets. He was waging a war. He was battling armies of microscopic invaders, dust mites and retroviruses, microbes and germs. Armed with a 50-year-old vacuum cleaner, Dave was sinking into a hypochondriacal mania. Before long he was vacuuming every day. Before long, that raised a troubling question. When does a hobby become an obsession? Or more to the point, when does an obsession become an illness? I'll tell you when.

When your wife says so, that's when. You are telling me I can't vacuum anymore?" said Dave. He was standing in the living room beside the dinghy. He was wearing rubber gloves and a white lab coat. Do you have any idea, he said, how many women would find it desirable to have their husband vacuum cleaning? He pulled a paper face mask up over his chin. He adjusted the orange ski goggles he had found in the cupboard.

What am I, said Dave, ten years old? He waited for a day until he had calmed down. During that day he mulled over what she had said to him and consulted Kenny Wong at lunchtime and decided he would deal with her edict like a man. He began to vacuum in secret. Vacuuming became his secret pleasure. It only took Marley a week to figure out what was going on. Oh, there were plenty of telltale signs.

She would come home from work and the carpet would be clean and smooth, or she would smell a pipe tobacco odor of vacuum exhaust. She decided she would allow Dave his little secret, but she decided she would monitor him. She left things on the floor, paper clips and pennies. If it got out of hand, she would step in. It was a spring afternoon. A year after his vacuuming privileges had been revoked, Dave was home alone. He was standing in the living room and he was staring at the guinea pig and her filthy cage. filthy cage. It happened so fast it's hard to describe. Dave didn't really see it himself. He just heard the soft whoomph over hitting the inside of the bag. He switched off the dinghy in horror. Remarkably, the pig seemed to have survived.

He had the bag laid out on the kitchen table. You could see her moving around in there. But he couldn't get her out no matter how hard he tried. He pushed and he pulled and he pried and he shook. He tried to lure her out with a carrot. When Morley came home, he was sitting there with a pig squirming around in his lap. He was sitting there with a pig squirming around in his lap. He was picking lint off it. Vacuum bag was on the table. Dave looked like he had been crying. He only said one word, caesarian. That weekend, Morley brought a new vacuum into their house, told Dave he was not allowed to touch it.

He promised, my vacuuming days are over, said Dave. Besides, with a bag cut cut what could he do? He wrapped up the dinghy's electric cord, he put the machine back into its maple case and he carried the whole kit and caboodle downstairs into the basement. Ten years passed. Was it ten years? I don't know. Maybe more. Time passed. World changed. One night Dave was fooling around on the computer and he stumbled on someone selling old dirt dinghy parts. And they had a dust bag. It arrived in a little cardboard box. The next day he slunk home at lunch when he knew the house would be empty. He began in the living room.

The moment he turned on that machine and heard that ear splitting wine, he felt the old bliss settle upon him. Back and forth he went, up and then down. It was surprising how fast it came back to him, the comforting, energizing push and pull. His arms extending and flexing like a varsity rower, like an athlete returning to his beloved sport. It was while he was working around the yellow blanket box at the foot of their bed that he was startled by the unmistakable vibration of metal being sucked up the long vacuum handle.

He stopped. He turned the dinghy off. He looked down and there on the blanket box lay one of his wife's pearl stud earrings. Clearly he had just sucked up the other. He looked at his watch. It was four-thirty. Good grief! How did it get so late? He took the bag downstairs and once again he sat down at the kitchen table. This time he got out a pair of kitchen tongs and worked them through the finicky seal. He wrestled out a dense clump of matted dirt. Took a fork and a knife and he slowly pulled it apart. He found a perplexing volume of weird-looking gray dust, a twist

tie, a safety pin, a few paper clips, a clump of feathers. Feathers? A cheerio. They hadn't had cheerios in the house for years. Maybe the chicken had brought the cheerios in. Some popcorn kernels, a button, a diamond, a nickel, and a handful of pennies, a screw, what looked like a piece of dehydrated carrot, but no, earring. He was sure it was in there. He had heard it going in, the rattle of it. He leaned back and took a deep breath. And that is when he heard Morley pull into the driveway. She was home early. People often report that in a time of crisis things move as if they reveal themselves in

slow motion. In slow motion, Dave rolled up the vacuum bag and the newspaper, pulled open the kitchen cupboard and stuffed his little pile behind the row of cereal boxes. He closed the cupboard and waved his hand in the air trying to disperse the hovering cloud of dust. He ran upstairs and rammed the vacuum cleaner into his closet. He shut the closet door and that's when Morley called him and she did not call him home. Or anybody here? Not even hello? Four fateful words.

You have been vacuuming. Dave looked down at his pants. He was covered in lint, feathers, and dust. He decided he'd deal with it like a man. He locked himself in the bathroom. Morley came upstairs and sat by the door, you're going to have to come out sometime, she said. He was pulling feathers off his pants and flushing them down the toilet. He knew she knew. She knew he she knew, he knew. But he just couldn't admit to what he had done.

It had to do with pride, as we all know, and pride cometh just before the fall. Came home early the next day and extracted another lump from the dust bag. Once again he came up empty. And once again with the exquisite timing that makes you believe the universe is a malevolent trickster. Morley pulled into the driveway early. This time he thrust the vacuum bag and the newspaper wrapped packet of dirt under the couch. Later that night, when Morley was obviously asleep, breathing rhythmically, he lifted the covers, slid out of bed, padded downstairs, and went right to the living room, pulled out the packet of dirt from under the couch.

Dave? Was there no peace? It was the middle of the night. The dust bag was still under the couch. He looked around desperately. Coming, he said, and she was too, coming down the stairs. And so he rammed the newspaper-wrapped packet of dirt into the umbrella stand. Morley was unusually rushed the next morning.

She said, You look great! When she came downstairs, she was all dressed up. She did look great. There was a press conference she was attending. Dave was hovering in the hallway. He was waiting for her to leave so he could reclaim the dust packet from the umbrella stand. Morley had her hand on the door, and for some weird reason time was slowing down again. Because it was raining, that's why.

And now Morley was on the front porch about to open her blue umbrella. And Dave was standing on his tiptoes at the front door peering through the front door window. He didn't say anything. He just watched as the folded packet of newspaper exploded on her head, an explosion of fine gray dust feathers and pieces of dehydrated carrot. Though not dimes, nickels, or that handful of pennies, David carefully plucked them out of the bag one by one, wondering, as he did, whether a man could make a living going through discarded vacuum bags at dump sites. Thought returned as he watched Morley turn slowly to face the door, blinking through the layer of dust that

clung to her face. I just might have a chance to find that out, he thought. Last thing he noticed before she came back in was the sheen from both of her pearl earrings glinting through the darkness. That was Dave and the Vacuum. We recorded that story in Huntsville, Ontario in the fall of 2015. And that, that was the second last story that we ever recorded, which means we started today's podcast with one of Stuart's very first stories and ended it with one of his very last. Pretty cool.

Can we unlock the power of nature to tackle microplastics? At the University of British Columbia, we believe we can. Dr. Orlando Rojasin team at the Bioproducts Institute are finding cleaner ways to clean microplastics from our drinking water, using filters made of natural, renewable materials. At UBC, our researchers are answering today's most pressing questions. To learn how we're moving the world forward, visit ubc.ca slash forward happens here. All right, that's it for today, but we'll be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories, including this one.

In his imagination, Sam heard the abrupt bark of a gun going off in the distance, and Sam was off, cutting along the sidewalk like a terrier around a newspaper box, zagging in front of a man talking on a cell phone, zigging past a lady carrying a fancy leather briefcase. So preoccupied with the wind on his face and the angle he was holding his hand so they would cut through the air with maximum efficiency. So captivated with the beauty of his new shoes, with how good his

new red canvas shoes with the white wings his new shoes, with how good his new red canvas shoes with the white wings looked against the gray sidewalk, that he ran right into a telephone pole. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. The recording engineer is someone who fixes all of my mechanical failures, Greg DeClute. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeClute, and me, Jess Milton.

Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now. Routines are a big part of our family, especially at bedtime. Eloise, Annabelle, and I have an elaborate bath and bedtime routine. Those quiet, cozy moments, warm water, soft towels, time together, aren't just about getting ready for sleep. They're about connection, comfort, and care. This is something we started when they were just babies.

I started our bath and bedtime routine when they were just a couple of weeks old. I'd bathe them and then I'd sing to them while I gave them a calm, relaxing baby massage. Their skin was so soft, so new, and I wanted to do everything I could to protect it. Skin is a baby's first line of defense, but did you know it's about 30% thinner than ours? That's why Aveeno Baby uses the power of oats to help nourish and strengthen it. Their healthy start balm is safe for newborns, moisturizing, comforting, and supporting baby's skin moisture barrier from day one. It's gentle, soothing, and a small way to care for the ones we love most. Learn more at avino.ca