Disturbin’ Legend

Metro Police entered a new phase of police work last week when they set about protecting the gullible from themselves by debunking a persistent urban legend that many credulous Nashvillians have been passing by word of mouth. The legend involves gang members who, as part of an initiation rite, drive around at night with headlights out, waiting for a passing motorist to flash a reminder. A gang member then attacks the motorist, but, finding a bloody prosthetic hook on the door handle, leaps backward in fright, stepping on the gang mascot, a supposed chihuahua named Rex, who is actually a large Mexican rat. Rex’s loud cries then awaken a nest of spiders in the gang member’s dreadlocks, causing him (the gang member) to drop his Uzi, which discharges, raining bullets on several large albino alligators that had crawled out of a nearby sewer to see what the commotion was. The gang member is arrested for hunting alligators in the city limits and placed in the back of a patrol car, but on a lonely stretch of road near the county line, he mysteriously disappears from the backseat, leaving only a sweater that his mother tearfully identifies as the one he was wearing when he was tragically killed one year ago to the day by Satanists at his school who were inspired by backward lyrics in popular songs. “We have never heard of cases where that happened, especially locally,” says Metro Police Capt. Bill Hamblin, who adds, “But that part about the Mexican rat really happened to a friend of my sister-in-law. “The public needs the real facts on these things,” he continues. “I can’t wait to get to the bottom of that one about the poodle in the microwave. If that’s true, it’s prosecutable as animal cruelty.”