The Legend of Slappy Slappy

What you are about to hear is a story – a tale of swift, shocking debauchery. Is it true? I don’t know – I wasn’t there to see it. This comes from a friend of mine who heard it from an employee at a bar, who may very well have been present the night it happened.

And yes, I know that on the surface this might sound a little bit like the “Who Wants to Sex Mutombo?” thing, where at least three people you know have told you that they heard the story from their friend, who was there when it all went down. When in reality so many people have claimed to be second-hand witnesses to Mutombo walking into a bar and screaming out those famous words that there would have had to have been about 25,000 people in the bar that night for all of our friends’ friends to have heard it.

But the difference with the story you’re about to hear is that it doesn’t seem like many people out there know about it, and if they do, they're not writing about it – Google searches have turned up absolutely nothing.

So in all likelihood, you haven't ever heard this story before. And whether or not it's fact, myth, or some combination of both, this is a tale that needs to be told...

The Legend Of Slappy Slappy

The setting: A bar formerly known as Thady Con’s, 49^th Street and 2^nd Avenue, NYC. The decade – The 1980's.

On this particular night, a bus boy who spoke almost no English (we’ll call him SpeaksNoEnglish) was cleaning up, as bus boys are known to do from time to time. And while performing said cleaning duties, he was required to go to the basement, where the bathrooms were located. No big deal.

Yet soon after descending into the basement, SpeaksNoEnglish suddenly and swiftly came sprinting back up the stairs, yelling out “Slappy slappy!” in a distressed tone.

The bar's bouncers asked what was wrong, but SpeaksNoEnglish could only respond “Slappy slappy!” as he smacked the back of his hand into his palm, apparently indicating that he had witnessed some kind of impact.

When next he spoke, he added a crucial piece of information: “Down! Slappy slappy! Down!” he yelled, as he pointed in the direction of the stairs to the basement.

The bouncers immediately and logically concluded that “slappy slappy” meant there was a fight going on in the basement, so the two of them ran to break up the melee, and got about halfway down the stairs before they suddenly stopped dead in their tracks.

Because there in front of them was a keg of beer, and bent over that keg of beer was a woman, and standing there rogering the woman from behind was Keith Hernandez.

The bouncers, understandably stunned, quickly composed themselves, apologized to Keith Hernandez for having disturbed him, and returned to their post upstairs.

And so it was on that night that a great but heretofore underutilized term came to life, born from the confused linguistic stylings of a frantic, panicked bus boy who happened upon a scene that would have left most people speechless but left him destined to give new meaning to a two-word gem of a phrase. Ladies and gentlemen: slappy slappy.