Whoomp! There it is!
Note: A version of this essay appears in the PeteBrownSays podcast, season 2, episode 4. An earlier version originally appeared on ColumbusCalling.com in 2013.
What’s your dream car?
Has anyone ever asked you this? Probably? If not, I’m asking you.
When people have asked me this, I always answer an El Camino.
You know El Caminos, right? A dilemma of a car made by Chevy from the 60s up through the late 80s? Looking like the unholy lovechild of a station wagon and a pickup, something I just learned is technically called a Coupe Utility vehicle, or CUV?
Nobody expects this answer when they ask you what your dream car is, by the way. I think they expect exotic answers like Lamborghinis or Ferraris or Corvettes. Invariably, they ask why an El Camino, and just as invariably I reply:
Because it’s a car that’s not sure if its a sedan or a pickup truck, I reply. Just like me.
Which always gets a laugh and a pause. The pause, I think, happens because the person is realizing how oddly apt comparing me to an El Camino actually is. I’m not quite a sedan and not quite a pickup. I’m not a manly-man, if you will, but neither am I unmanly. I’ve always been somewhere in the middle.
Bill Clinton, by the way, was an unapologetic El Camino driver.
Which is why the conclusion to today’s episode so interested me when I first wrote it. Because it definitely staked a claim on one side of the El Camino dilemma, and as I mentioned before, when I brush up against some of my limits, they utterly fascinated me.
The bulk of this piece, by the way, first appeared on the website Columbus Calling back in 2013, recreated here with permission, though I’ve made an update edit throughout. My thanks to the publisher Chip Midnight for being cool about me using it here.
The other day I was in the grocery store, trying to maneuver around a young mother, who had one in the cart and two rambunctious boys bouncing from side-to-side in the canned foods aisle. The young mother, in an attempt to corral the boys, advised them to “stop runnin’ around like chickens with yer heads cut off or I’ll whup ya.”
Whuppin’ ya is a phrase I’ve heard more than a few times around town, usually aimed at kids, and its usually intended to get them to change their behavior less they have a consequence, in this case, a whuppin’, which I assume is a kinder, gentler form of a whipping.
It always sounds to me, though I have no way of knowing this for sure, that the folks who use whup on a regular basis were raised by people who said the same, on account of people like teachers and coaches aren’t allowed to threaten a whuppin’, so far as I know. I’m guessing this phrase is handed down from parents to children.
One thing I’ve learned about parenting is that when you’re faced with a situation you haven’t thought through, you tend to default parent in the manner you were parented. Unless you’ve made one of those capital B Big Decisions to not parent in the way you were parented, in which case when faced with a new situation, you tend to stare blankly and quietly and hope things somehow resolve themselves quickly.
I can’t hear someone threaten to whup their offspring without thinking of the term whup ass, which is a noun, and such a noun it is that it can actually be canned, as suggested by the phrase open a can of whup ass, which I do like, but honestly, it always confuses me that you have to do it on someone. When I hear someone say “I’m going to open a can of whup ass on you,” I imagine having to open the can and then climb up a small step ladder to dump it down on someone. But I guess this preposition on is intended to differentiate cans of whup-ass from spinach, which, when canned (as it apparently was and possibly still is) was the whup ass of Popeye’s day. Possibly, the original can of whup ass, if you will.
If you’ve never seen a Popeye cartoon, I’m guessing you don’t remember what TV was like before cable came along. People of a certain age were subjected to a lot of Popeye cartoons (and even one regretable live-action movie with Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall.) Luckily, there was only one plot to follow for all Popeye cartoons, which was this:
In a situation that invariably arises because of his love for Olive Oyl, Popeye faces down one or more bad guys (at least one of whom was named Bluto, or Brutus, depending on when the cartoon was made) who also share affection for Olive Oyl. The bad guy or guys proceed to knock Popeye around for a bit until he somehow manages to ingest a can of spinach, which makes his muscles ‘roid all out and then allows him to swiftly kick their asses, often aided, for reasons I can’t explain, by the fact that the bad guys, when there are multiples of them, which is often, politely line up to fight Popeye one-at-a-time instead of what would surely be a more effective bull rush.
The only variable to any Popeye episode was how Popeye got the can open and ate the spinach. Sometimes he squeezed the can so hard that the spinach would fly through the air to his mouth. Sometimes another character like Wimpy or Sweet Pea got a can of spinach to him. Sometimes he had to use his pipe like a blowtorch to open the can. And sometimes, and this always freaked me out a little bit, he sucked the spinach into his body through the pipe.
I should point out here that whup-ass, as I hear it in the grocery store, is often spelled “Whoop Ass,” which is how Jones Soda chose to spell it when the term inevitably became the name of an energy drink. You knew that had to be coming.
I’m not a fan of this spelling, though, because Whoop is so close to “Whoomp!” as in “Whoomp! There it is,” which is a song from the early 1990s by an outfit that called themselves Tag Team and whose career has never eclipsed this one song. Also, in one of those so-weird-I-better-mention-it-in-the-show-even-if-I’m-only-going-to-link-to-it-in-the-shownotes side stories, there’s a whole delightfully weird conspiracy theory on the Internet that posits that a young Barack Obama actually appears in the official music video for Whoomp! There it is!
And I’ve looked and, you know, could be?
I have to admit to looking up the lyrics for Whoomp! There it is! online, where I learned that “these three words mean you’re getting’ busy!”
I’m not sure if “Whoomp” is included in the three words, or if just “there it is” are the three words they’re talking about. And since “getting busy” means what I think it means, I end up somewhat confused by that fact that they play the song at hockey games when a goal is scored.
For all the convenience of the Internet (Motto: “The full lyrics to Whoomp! There it is! in under 5 seconds”), I’m still confused about the actual meaning of Whoomp. While some dictionaries point out that whoomp represents a loud-but-muffled or possibly distant sound, but the Urban Dictionary offers up this gem:
whoomp: 1. (n)(obs.) the place where it is 2. (n) the place where it was.
I think the source of my confusion about whoomp, however, stems from its visual similarity to Whoops! which we all know well enough is something we say when we have made an unintentional mistake.
Like this writing this episode, for example. Whoops!
We start our kids out early with Whoops (I think as early as some other folks start threatening’ them with a whuppin’).
Whoopsies! we say at the occasion of a dropped sippy cup. A tumbling toddler might even elicit a “Whoopsie Daisies!” from an inevitably nearby helicopter parent.
Whoopsie Daisies, you may recall, is what Hugh Grant’s character in Notting Hill (a 1999 film that you should not admit to having seen) says when he tries and fails to scale the walls of a private garden while he is out gallivanting with an American movie star played by Julia Roberts.
She finds this whoopsie daisies so amusing and endearing that she decides that Grant and the little blue travel bookstore that he runs in Notting Hill are definitely everything she wants out of life, big movie star perks be damned.
I know I’m running a fine line here, starting out with whup ass and then transitioning into Notting Hill and all, but it’s about to get worse. Way worse.
See, back in the mid-aughts, I found myself in the UK with a weekend to spare between business trips, and on this weekend, somehow found myself in the Notting Hill area of London. I turned a corner and, sure enough, there was the little blue travel bookstore from the movie.
The proprietors confirm this with a historical marker-looking sign that confirms that this is the site of the bookshop from the film Notting Hill. Established in 1981, it explains. They do say you can really feel the history in England, after all.
So almost without thinking about it, I extended my arm, cellphone in hand, to take a selfie of myself in front of this landmark location in cinematic history. Also, in researching this post, I discovered the shop closed a few years back. So, you know, if you missed your chance to see it, your shit out of luck.
A quick aside, here: Selfie, meaning a photo you take of yourself, probably with a phone, really seems to have taken off as a word about six years ago or so, definitely aided by the rise of social media and our ongoing experiment in the brandification of self. The OED tracked about 36 references to selfie in 2012, but by the end of 2013, it had made it the word of the year. I can only imagine that the Catholic church is thrilled and relieved that selfie is a noun referring to a picture you take of yourself, given the other activity we might have chosen selfie to describe, the one you give yourself, you know, which can make you go blind.
Anyway, at the time I was in the UK, selfie had yet to catch on for either activity. This was pre-iPhone, and while my brick-like Blackjack phone did have a camera, to get a picture to someone else, you had to download it and email it from a computer. Which is to say that the prospect of taking and sharing a selfie at this time in history was daunting, so you only chose to do it when there was something really cool to share.
Which brings me back to me in Notting Hill, standing in front of the blue travel bookshop from the film Notting Hill, thinking I’ll take a pic and attach it to an email later that day that I can send home to my wife, taking care of our two little kids and posse of dogs in my absence.
In fact, I remember pausing in the morning sunlight and trying and remember what exact year Notting Hill came out, because I wanted to be 100% sure that the woman I saw it in the theater is in fact currently my wife and would-be recipient of the not-yet-called-a-selfie selfie, and that it didn’t come up in the pre-my-wife era, which is a time that nobody wins by bringing up, ever, just trust me on this one.
Also, in case you wondering why I didn’t just use my phone to google what year Notting Hill came out, you’re not picking up on what tasks like this were like pre-iPhone. At that time, that could take 20 minutes or more, and cost me a fortune in international data fees. Sometimes I tell my kids what it was like back when you’d get in a trivia argument with someone in a bar and leave for the night being pretty sure you’d never ever have a way to learn which one of you was actually correct.
In any case, I was pretty sure Notting Hill came out in the mid to late 90s, which means I either saw Notting Hill in the theater with my wife, or I was drugged by communists and taken there against my will. So I was cleared to take what was not yet called a selfie.
What happened next was the unexpected thing I mentioned earlier in this episode, the thing that brings back that whole El Camino dilemma.
Describing what exactly happened is not difficult, but understanding why it happened is trickier.
You see, as I was about to take the picture and was trying to remember the exact year Notting Hill was in theaters, I accidentally, which is to say entirely on purpose, threw my phone to the ground and stomped on it repeatedly. Then I clenched my fist, closed my eyes and shouted the following sentences across the English morning:
PEOPLE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM! I ALMOST TOOK A NOT-YET-CALLED-A-SELFIE OF MYSELF IN FRONT OF THE BOOKSTORE FROM THE FILM NOTTING FUCKING HILL! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY BALLS?
Ok, I didn’t do that, which you probably know because, as I mentioned, the word selfie hadn’t caught on yet. And also, in general, I retired references to my balls around the time I turned 25. After you’re 25, the only time you need to use the word balls is when you're talking about getting your dog fixed, and even then it’s pretty iffy.
But I did stand there in the bright morning light, thinking of that space between El and Camino, contemplating this newfound border in the comfort map of my life, not taking a photo, not going into the bookstore, not going anywhere in particular, just me standing in the middle of the street, staring blankly and quietly at everything and nothing at once, and hoping that the situation would somehow resolve itself.
It’s not a pretty picture of modern manhood, I’m afraid, but what else can I say?
I yam what I yam.
Whoomp! There it is.
