A Pickle Isn’t a Pickle Unless It Bounces 🥒

I am the reason Connecticut had to pass a law declaring that a pickle isn’t a pickle unless it bounces.

To understand why, you first have to understand mercury poisoning in Hat City.

I grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. I graduated from Danbury High School, Class of 2000. Our mascot was the Hatters, a callback to the early post-Revolutionary War period, when local hat maker Zadoc Benedict helped pioneer the felt industry, eventually making Danbury famous around the world.

Legend has it he accidentally discovered that stuffing rabbit fur into the holes of his shoes caused it to rub down into felt. He tried the same experiment with beaver pelts and found they worked just as well.

Early felt-making had one unfortunate side effect.

On hot summer days, when gentlemen wearing the hats began to sweat…

they smelled like rotting pickles.

A solution was found in a process called carroting, named because it turned the fur orange. It used a solution of mercuric nitrate that revolutionized the industry. Danbury exploded into America’s Hat City, eventually producing millions of hats each year.

Unfortunately, heating the treated fur released mercury vapor.

Workers inhaled it every single day.

Tremors, hallucinations, memory loss, personality changes, and anxiety became so common they earned a nickname:

The Danbury Shakes.

People often assume Lewis Carroll invented the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

He didn’t.

He simply borrowed an expression people already associated with mercury-poisoned hat makers.

The Pickle Incident

Fast forward to the late 1990s.

Paula Cole was serenading every skating rink in America with the Dawson’s Creek theme song, I Don’t Want to Wait. Marilyn Manson was terrifying parents everywhere. And, for reasons I still attribute to residual mercury poisoning, weird things were happening in Danbury, Connecticut.

Two groups began to emerge among my newly minted teenage brethren.

On one side, you had the goth movement made popular by Marilyn Manson. Our local trench coat mafia adopted Zadoc Benedict as their patron saint of gloomy adolescence. They called themselves the Z-Bens.

On the other, and in hindsight equally unbalanced and unhinged, was my crew:

The Fists of the Summer Solstice.

We believed Marilyn Manson was actually Josh Saviano, better known as Paul from The Wonder Years, trying to reinvent himself.

We had no interest in celebrating what we believed was simply a nerd trying to look cooler.

A dark chasm developed between our two groups at Danbury High School during this time.

I am ashamed to say I became an accidental general in the conflict that followed.

After a particularly intense battle of laser tag at Rollerland Skate Center, it was discovered that the Goths were using their long black trench coats to block the laser sensors on their vests, giving them a decisive, though hotly contested, victory.

During the ensuing war council, it was decided that it was time for our conflict to spill over onto school grounds.

I would lead an aerial assault on the Z-Ben Goths.

It is in my nature to be creative and particularly clever with insults, so I devised the perfect weapon:

Pickles.

It was my homage to Danbury’s past and an offensive jab at their adopted deity.

But not just any pickles.

I chose the particularly dense and disgusting canned pickles served in the cafeteria. Pickles so revolting they couldn’t even be used in the Subway Club sandwiches that already smelled like butts.

We would attack from the high ground.

I chose the roof of the five-story brick building that housed our science center. It perfectly overlooked the bleachers where the Z-Bens congregated to smear eyeliner, hiss at, and silently judge the jocks and cheerleaders practicing on the football field.

I assembled five of our best arms into my elite Fist squad. We weren’t athletes, but we held our own in a summer pickup game of baseball or flag football.

I had also commandeered a Costco-sized can of ancient pickles from the school’s kitchen. Judging from the dents in the can, it had already passed through multiple secondhand grocery bargain bins before landing in the capable hands of our mercurial lunch lady.

I opened our ammunition with my Leatherman tool, and I swear the stench formed a visible green cloud around us.

Our stomachs turned.

Our eyes watered.

The miasma of funk was overwhelming.

It was time to unleash our misplaced teenage angst upon our perceived enemies.

And unleash we did.

We launched a flurry of sodium-dense, shriveled cucumbers at the heads of our pale-skinned adversaries, knocking their lime-green-and-black-striped, alien-face-patterned felt top hats from their heads and exposing them to a debilitating dose of sunlight.

They shrieked.

They hissed.

They scattered from their steel-stepped perch.

Some dropped to the ground and lay motionless.

Sewage-logged pickles, lacking even the faintest trace of elasticity, wedged themselves deep into the rocky soil around them.

After throwing only two or three, I witnessed the devastation wrought by each marinated missile.

I stopped.

I stood back in horror at the uncontrolled hatred of my fellow Fists as they relished this brined bombardment.

What had I done?

What had I become?!

I was truly in a pickle.

I realized this was no longer just a prank but an actual case of assault.

Surely you can’t be prosecuted for hitting someone with a pickle…

right?

I fled the scene and became a deserter.

From that day forward, I refused to be defined by the generational trauma of my inherited mercury poisoning.

I changed my name and moved to Tampa... because everything is legal in Florida.

But from that day forward, a law went forth throughout the provinces of Connecticut:

A pickle isn’t a pickle…

unless it bounces.