Mischief

Night falls on a quiet, suburban neighborhood. Inside one of the well-kept houses, a man reclines in a La-Z-Boy, a pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth as he reads the evening paper. Suddenly, the doorbell rings. Looking around for his wife, and then hearing the vacuum cleaner running upstairs, the man grumbles and rises from his chair.

“Who could that be?” he mutters, “We’re not expecting visitors.” Slipping into a pair of house-shoes, he folds the paper beneath his arm and walks to the door. He unlocks and opens it, only to see a ball of flame on the front porch. His “lizard brain” takes over, and as instinctively and reflexively as any rhinoceros; he raises a foot and stamps on the fiery bundle. Scraps of burning paper fly in all directions and – what’s this? It’s – It’s slippery! And what’s that smell? Why it smells like – It smells like –

Dog shit!

A cacophonous braying of juvenile laughter erupts from across the street, and he looks up just in time to see a group of young teen and pre-teen boys burst from the neighbors’ hedge and flee in all directions, laughing and shrieking hysterically. Little bastards! Well, he thinks, at least we got off easier than the Johnstons. They’d put a strip of “lady finger” firecrackers in his ”package”…

During my college days, as part of an expository writing course, I was forced to read an essay entitled The Serious Intent of Practical Jokers. It was trite, long-winded, overly serious, and written by someone who was obviously a killjoy, and probably a repressed panty-sniffer. Some years later, I noted that Ayn Rand had taken a very dim view of practical jokers as well, a fact which – given her anal retentiveness and tendency to take herself entirely too seriously – didn’t much surprise me. It is, after all, rather difficult to imagine John Galt announcing “I am the man who stopped the motor of the world!” while scraping dog shit and ashes from the sole of his shoe.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am a man. A guy. A dude. One of the “empeckered” sex. Ergo (as, with the exception of my circumcision, surgical equipment has never made it anywhere near my “unit”), it goes without saying that I was once a boy. As the statement “Boys are inclined towards mischief” is virtually axiomatic, I find it impossible to separate mischief, pranks and various shenanigans from the very essence of the critter we call a “boy.” Provided, of course, that he’s the kind of boy who plays with GI Joe and not Malibu Barbie.

As I’ve stated in earlier posts, I was often sick (in more ways than one?) as a child, but when I wasn’t, I was very “energetic” indeed. Given this, my career as a prankster and budding hooligan was begun at a very early age. I enjoyed all the usual “greasy kid stuff,” but I’ve also had a fairly bizarre sense of humor for as long as I can remember. Sometimes, instead of merely going for cheap sight gags, I’d try to take my victims on a trip into the surreal, to freak them out, if you will. This enters the narrative a bit later, so just tuck it away for now, gentle reader.

My first conscious memory of “messin’ wit’” other people dates back to 1972. I was a few months shy of five years old, and my brother, my mother and I were staying at my great grandmother’s apartment in Arlington, Virginia, while Dad made the necessary arrangements to bring us over to Germany. One evening, my brother and I were out on the quad behind my great-grandmother’s building. Chris was standing there staring at something, with his back to me. He still had a good bit of “baby fat” on his legs and for some reason I thought: Target! Stealthily, I peeled a switch from what I believe was a willow or forsythia, crept up behind him, and whacked him across the calves. With a loud caterwaul, he leaped into the air. I began roaring with laughter (insofar as a four-year-old can be said to “roar”) at which point he began bawling like an air raid siren. My mother came racing outside, immediately figured out what had happened, and hit me in the face hard enough to give me my first black eye. I sure as hell wasn’t laughing then, and learned that humor does have a limit of sorts. I think the lesson stayed with me about as long as the black eye took to fade…

I began the second grade in 1974, at which time I was attending Karlsruhe Elementary School in Paul Revere Village. My best friend/partner-in-crime at the time was a kid named Richard. He and I both had the beginnings of very warped senses of humor, and for some reason, we took great delight in hooking horns with a pretty, feisty, freckle-faced little girl named Judy.

I’m pretty sure I had a crush on her, for all that I also had crushes on her friend Joan, a girl named Ellen who lived in another building on our quad, one of my babysitters, another classmate named Stacy, and a moody teenage girl who used to sit on the front steps of the AYA (later re-christened “DYA”) smoking cigarettes. And of course, I still drew the occasional crude picture of the raven-haired hippie chick with whom I’d become smitten a year before, at a snack bar in Vicenza, Italy. Oh yeah, babydolls! I was one romantically inclined li’l cavalier/hillbilly “mutt”!

At any rate, Richard and I would seek Judy out, and then walk past her with grotesquely exaggerated, tippytoe sneaking movements. We’d then point at her and chant “You’re the one! You’re the one!” She took it in stride, and “gave as good as she got.” Other people, however, were often “freaked out” by this kind of thing. Naturally, I made a note of it.

I also learned a thing or two about boundaries when I attempted to prove my ardor to the aforementioned Joan, if you’ll pardon the digressions that will certainly follow. I’d developed a wild crush upon her, so I rounded up two of my buddies. Richard, if I’m not mistaken, and another lad named Larry, who, if his expression and posture in our old class photo are anything to go by, is probably either a used-car salesman or has been convicted of “insider trading” these days.

When first I brought him home from school, my mother shook her head and said: “That one’s a rounder” after he’d left. I had no idea what a “rounder” was at the time, but I now know that she was right. Oh, it’s also only fair to mention that when I went over to his house to play, I developed an immediate and wild crush upon his mother. She was relatively young, either French or German (can’t remember exactly which, unfortunately. Little o’ both? Alsace-Lorraine, maybe?), had wavy, light brown hair and sparkling blue eyes, and answered the door in a flowing, pleated knee-length skirt and what I suppose was a “leotard-type” top. Black, of course. Beautiful lady. Simply "drop-dead" gorgeous.

Well there she is again,
Standin’ over by the record machine.
Lookin’ like a model
On the cover of a magazine.
She’s too cute
To be a minute over seventeen

Meanwhile, I was thinkin’
If it’s a slow song, we’ll omit it
If it’s a rocker, that’ll get it!
If it’s good, she’ll admit it…
Come on, Queenie! Let’s get with it!

Apologies to Chuck Berry.

She kept an immaculately clean house, just as my mother did. The differences, though, were interesting. Mom’s own taste in decor varies from room to room. It is – and always has been – a mix of Colonial, “down home”, Enlightenment and medieval, brought with her into the modern age. Mom can take a cast metal statuette of an armored knight and a wooden sculpture of a Minute man, set them both atop a very modern modular plastic shelf, hang a replica Tommy gun and a saber – for example -- on the wall behind them, and somehow make it all work. For her, past, present and future are an uninterrupted whole. Larry’s mother, on the other hand, was ultra-modern. Huge aquarium. Squarehead-looking furniture. A study in contrasts. I was even more fascinated.

Larry had twin crushes on two girls named Stacy and Lynn, so that first visit was spent in his room, plotting ways to secure their affections. For Larry, this was top-secret, “cloak and dagger” stuff, so we had to sit in his room with the door locked, coming up with all sorts of hare-brained schemes. For my part, I’d have been just as happy out in the living room, staring at his mom and wishing I were something like twenty years older… For the record, and for all that I haven’t seen him in over thirty years, I’ll wager dollars to doughnuts that Larry gets laid three or four times a day. LOL! Any man who’s willing to put that kind of planning and effort into his romantic conquests simply can’t fail.

But debts must be paid, so I enlisted his aid when I had to have my taste of the sweet and lovely Joan. Concealing ourselves with great caution and forethought, we waited for her and Judy to leave school and walk home. As the aforementioned duo strolled up the sidewalk, we leaped from our hiding places. Larry and Richard grabbed her, and I fell to one knee before her, seized her hand, and kissed it.

As a seven-year-old boy, I was simply following my instincts. As a thirty-eight-year-old man, however, and having read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed – this in the wake of a cultural anthropology class or two – I have to burst out laughing when I see the two dominant cultural streams whose confluence resulted in my very existence merging during that childhood incident.

You could smell the whiskey burnin’ down Copperhead Road… Well, maybe not exactly. But the casual observer could certainly have seen my face burning when her older brother and a few of his friends showed up…He could also have seen Larry, Richard and meownself hauling ass as if the devil himself were on our heels… Ah, the wonder of it all.

I discovered another “wonder,” if you will, that same year. In front of the school building grew a number of roses of some European variety. They were really more trees than bushes, and produced large, bright orange hips when the flowers faded. Now rose hips are not only a fantastic source of vitamin C, but a fantastic source of amusement, to boot. When a ripe specimen is crushed to pulp and smeared upon the skin of an unsuspecting “mark,” said mark will begin to itch like crazy as the water in the pulp evaporates. Use your imaginations.

In 1975, Dad landed a job at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. We flew back to the states, lived in that sweaty, sub-topical hell for a year or so, and with the exceptions of a few less-than-noteworthy run-ins with some of the flatlanders, my career as a prankster/mischief maker was put on hold.

Well, wait. There were two noteworthy incidents. In the summer of 1976, my brother, myself, and our best friends (two brothers named Danny and David) were sitting on my front porch in the subdivision of Edenwood. We were bored, it was hot, and as there’s no such thing as wind in South Carolina, we were taking refuge in the shade of the immense pine trees in the front yard. Being bored, we decided to heckle passing motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. As each “mark” made his/her way down Melody Lane, we’d shout: “Hemorrhoid! Hemorrhoid! You’re a hemorrhoid!” This lasted until my mother finished vacuuming, at which point she heard our taunts and all hell broke loose. Hell, for the record, hath no fury like a 5’2” cavalier/Irish woman whose kids are acting like complete savages…

The second incident was pretty awful, actually. There was a kid named Timmy who lived in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, Timmy’s mouth had a tendency to write checks his ass couldn’t cover, and wrote a good many of them, indeed. Older readers may remember those shippers of 8mm and “Super 8” movie highlights that were available at every K-Mart in the country during the pre-VCR/DVD Paleolithic era. Well, Timmy used to claim to have nearly every one of them, and would always invite us over to see them, only to cancel the invitation whenever we actually showed up. After a month or two of this, we little redneck bastards began to get riled.

Dad was entertaining the notion of going to law school, and had begun accumulating large numbers of law books, which I occasionally scanned out of sheer curiosity. Not that I understood much of what I read, mind you. Chris, Danny, David and I were all ardent watchers of Star Trek reruns, and we happened to see the episode(s) entitled “The Menagerie” one night. It was 1976, and we’d all taken part in Claude A. Taylor Elementary School’s Bicentennial pageant. Ye’ with me so far? I didn’t think so.

Well, the four of us decided that a trial was a dandy idea, and as we’d all just learned about Benedict Arnold and those oily, nefarious Tories, we decided to try Timmy for treason. It was a true Kangaroo court, as the verdict was predetermined. I sat down and wrote my very first script, we all memorized our parts, and then grabbed Timmy and hauled him into my garage. I was the “judge.” My “bench” was a Mayflower moving carton, my “gavel” a plastic hammer from a toy Playskool tool kit. Can’t remember what I used for a robe. Probably just put my bathrobe on over my Sunday clothes.

David was the “prosecutor,” and Danny was the “defense,” for all the he kept smacking his “client.” My brother was the “bailiff,” and did what he could to maintain order. For the most part, this also consisted of smacking Timmy. Well, ol’ Timmy wasn’t having this shit for even a second, and he managed to break loose and skedaddle. I threw down the script, hollered: “Guilty!” and we all chased after him yelling, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” as I bonked him with the plastic hammer, and the other boys tossed pinecones at him.

Hey, don’t look at me that way! I already said it was pretty awful, now didn’t I?

Later in ’76, we moved to Roswell, Georgia. Here, my pranking career began in earnest. It began during the fourth grade, with prank phone calls. It began innocently enough; calls to the local drugstore asking about Prince Albert in the can, or to the local bowling alley, asking about thirteen-pound balls, but deteriorated steadily from there. Soon, classmates were our targets.

Later in the year, though, I developed a crush upon a certain young lass. My best friend at the time knew that I had a crush on her, but insisted upon prank-calling her anyway. He then had the temerity to call me up one day and ask for her number, as he was going to pull his stunt come hell or high water, with or without me. What could I do? Aha! My tiny brain formulated an evil plan at that very moment!

“Just a minute,” I said, “I’ll have to look it up.” I then grabbed the phonebook and gave him the number of the Roswell Police Department. To say that he was less-than-amused when next we saw each other would be an understatement. I, however, thought it was hilarious. This, by the way, brings us to the “golden rule” of pranking: Everyone is fair game, even your best friends. All boys understand this instinctively, and it keeps us humble and imparts a sense of humor.

I’ll probably write an entire post on prank phone calls in the future, so for now, I’ll share only this last one. During the late ‘70s, Atlanta’s Channel 46 featured a duo named Valerie and Ginger, who hosted a program called The Goodtime Gang. It was after-school programming, aimed at the 6-10-year-old set. Provided that mommy and daddy were willing to shell out a few bucks to register their sticky-faced brat, said brat could then qualify to win a prize of some sort during their daily drawing.

Neither Jim nor I had any use whatsoever for this manner of bullshit. When we weren’t reading comics or making prank phone calls, we were usually playing with our chemistry sets or his printing kit. (“Brian _____ Sucks!” ran one of our earlier efforts…) At any rate, one of our neighbors – a kid whom neither of us liked for shit – was a member of this farce, and spent his afternoons glued to the tube, drinking the Kool-Aid.

As Jim and I were both nine or ten years old, we still had relatively high voices, and could imitate Valerie and Ginger very well --even if I say so myself. One day, while Mom was busy with housework, we sat in my kitchen, watching the other kid’s house through the picture window. We then called and misidentified ourselves. The kid was ecstatic. According to plan, Jim then informed him that he’d win today’s prize, provided that he’d run around his yard in the buff, screaming: “Stardust! Stardust!” I have no idea where that one came from, for the record. I (playing either Valerie or Ginger) then cut in and confirmed the instructions. The kid went on excitedly about something for a moment or two, at which point his mother snatched the receiver and demanded: “Who the hell is this?”

Curses! Foiled again!

The only other real highlight I can remember was one incident during which another kid (who was probably the only kid in class who was weirder than I was) decided to sit under our teacher’s desk for some twisted reason. I took a look over in his direction, and immediately turned into a cat. My pupils dilated to black moons, and I swear my ass started twitching as I went into a crouch. The fool wasn’t wearing a belt! He was sitting Indian style beneath the desk and his pants had ridden down so that all I could see was “rear cleavage” a few inches above the floor. How disgusting!

Determined to remove this affront to my aesthetic sensibilities, I immediately took out a brand new No. 2 pencil, and hied me to the sharpener. Using the finest setting, I honed it to a needle point, and then jabbed the offending butt-crack with said. The kid howled and then tried to leap to his feet, forgetting that he was on the floor beneath a desk… Jim and I about died laughing.

Unfortunately, Jim moved. At that point, I began hanging around with two guys named Billy and Mike. We really didn’t accomplish much, aside from selling a few of one guy’s dad’s “spankhouse” magazines and running a poker game or two, which were broken up (and the three of us sent to Mrs. Bradley’s office) when we won some other kid’s brand new mechanical pencil.

By the sixth grade, my current buddy J.R and I had become fast friends, and we got into more shit than you can shake a stick at. Mudballs, prank calls, smarting off at our elders, you name it. We were awful! That’s a post in and of itself, though. About the same time, the girl who would one day become my first love moved into the neighborhood from Boca Raton, Florida.

Needless to say, I really didn’t care for her at first. Didn’t like anything about her, come to think of it. Her attitude struck me as “hoity-toity”, and I guess the fact that she was actually kinda cute gave rise to conflicting emotions on my part. Only one way to deal with that, by Gawd!

One day, she and her sister were swatting tennis balls back and forth in her driveway, and a few rolled out into the street. J.R. and I picked them up and wasted no time pelting the girly duo as they ran shrieking into their garage. My silly ass followed them, and I had just cocked my arm back, about to whip one at her, when her mother came through the door.

This, Gentle Reader, is what is known as an “‘Oh, shit!’ moment.” There I stood, paralyzed, tennis ball at the ready -- for all of about a millisecond. (Glad I’d just taken a leak in the neighbor’s bushes, for the record). I quickly found that one pair of heels, under these circumstances, was indeed worth two pair of fists – er, make that tennis balls. After reaching the presumed “safety” of J.R.’s house, I turned and found that the old dame was still after us. I beat a hasty retreat into the woods, and didn’t return for some time.

The next noteworthy incident with this young lass occurred down at our neighborhood pool, around the sixth or seventh grade. I’ve no doubt that it’s unpardonably crude of me to mention this, but you know me, right? This girl, as it happens, “developed” rather early, if you will. Just bear that in mind. After a day of making her miserable (I’d “bombed” her from the diving board as she was swimming across the deep end of the pool, and done all manner of other horrid stuff), I spotted her in the shallows. Submerging, I swam up behind her, took in a mouthful of water, moved in front of her, surfaced, and expelled said into her face. Like Queen Victoria before her, she was not amused. She nailed me with a slap/grab move, directly on my scrawny (and bare) shoulder. Her nails tore out little gouges of skin that took years to heal properly, as there ain't a whole lot of meat on the human shoulder.

Not that I gave rat’s ass at the time. I was in range, buddy! I began splashing her, and as I did so – being the li’l “horndog” I was at the time -- grabbed the shoulder strap of the one-piece she was wearing, pulled it aside, and got me a gander at some you-know-what. By the time we began dating, some years later, she still hadn’t figured out what I’d done, and I doubt she’s figured it out even to this day.

Knock, knock(er)!
Who’s there?
That scruffy li’l Bean bastard, that’s who! Yeehaw!

About a year later, I made friends with a kid named John, but I think I’ll save that for another post, as well. Suffice to say that he came back from trips to Gatlinburg with a good stash of fireworks every few months…

In early ’81, Dad transferred back from HEW to the DOD, which necessitated a move to Germany. ‘Twas in Germany that I found my true calling, and in which my skills at “gettin’ into shit” were honed to the master-level. For the record, my first couple months were awful. We were stuck in a three-room BOQ in Patrick Henry Village, not far from the Officers’ Club. My parents, two kids, a dog and a cat. The cat was so upset by his ordeal on the plane, that the first thing he did was leap into my suitcase and take a leak.
And things went downhill from there…

And that’s where I’m gonna leave you, Gentle Reader. I have to get up early tomorrow and go to work.

To be continued

Comments

[IBBIT]

YOU SOUND LIKE A DICK. NICE TO HEAR THE BULLY'S POV

[Jeff Bennett]

Hi, I found your comments when I googled AYA and Karlsruhe. I guess we were in Karlsruhe about the same time. My name is Jeff Bennett and I was there with dad between 1973 and 1976. We lived at 19-F Tennessee.

[Mulberry Bags UK Factory]

Now we have a great walkway that goes to the beach and to the canals that came from the partnership of community with government