My brother was bugging me for scissors so I said here, have them! and threw them at him. They stabbed him in the hip – we didn’t tell our parents.
My best friend and I were climbing up a big hill through the woods as a shortcut to our street, and dislodged a large rock which slid all the way down into the road below. We looked back long enough to see someone having gotten out of their car looking at it; I hope they stopped before hitting it but I don’t know.
Ooh, I thought of another one. This was an accident, but stupid, anyway.
I was waiting in 8th grade to get into our shop class, the door was locked, naturally, they didn’t want a bunch of kids running loose through the tools. For some dumb reason, I stuck my pencil into the lock. And the tip broke off. So of course, when the teacher came to unlock the door, it wouldn’t unlock. I don’t even remember how they resolved that.
Mom, you love me, right?
Umm, yeah?
How much? A lot right?
?
More than, say, the car? The garage door? The washer and dryer? The wall into the living room? And the TV?
I have never seen her run so fast. When she returned she somewhat sheepishly said “YES, of course I love you more than those things.”
Too much snow in our hands, too little snow on road. To even it out we shared with the road, except those pesky cars sometimes came by to try and steal our snow!
I did the exact same thing. I don’t see anything wrong or worrying about it though.
When I was in first grade, a group of us sneaked ketchup packets out of the lunchroom. We would take pins and poke a hole in one end, then squeeze the other to shoot ketchup at each other. One day, I was taking aim at a friend and squeezed just as a teacher came out the door. She had a nice red stain on her dress and I had a nice visit with the principal.
Some of your stories are hilarious (and some are horrifying). Kids are such shits.
I too stole coins from my mother, but I was a teen and I used the money for far worse things than candy.
When I was about seven my brother and cousin peed on a yellow chuckle (while I watched :eek:) and we gave it to my best friend. She didn’t actually put it in her mouth, as she quickly became suspicious but still, what a dick thing to do. The four of us still laugh about it to this day.
I used to steel those decorative zipper pullsthat you’d find on jackets. I must have had fifty of them. You rarely see them anymore or if you do they’re not removable.
BB guns on squirrels. Meh, except the time the critter just stood, frozen, under a tree and I walked right up and plugged him. It was only a spring loaded pistol. It didn’t kill him but it still had to hurt like hell. I know, having been shot in the butt at close range. I felt bad because he was so helpless. I never shot another squirrel after that.
Gasoline bomb into storm drain outfall pipe. Now, that was dumb. Probably a quart-sized Malatov cocktail into a 4 1/2’ diameter pipe. We weren’t expecting THAT much fire and black smoke. How we didn’t cook ourselves, I’ll never know.
Speaking of storm drains, when were weren’t setting fires in them we explored those things for pretty long distances. Sometimes the pipes were so narrow you had to belly crawl to get through them. Probably not the brightest way to spend your time.
Yeah, and here’s another one.
When I was 11 or 12 I convinced my younger sister to let me shoot her in the back with a BB gun (Red Ryder, single pump, from about 20 feet away). I told her it wouldn’t hurt, and actually believed it wouldn’t, because it was a pretty weak rifle and this being winter, she was wearing a parka over a sweater.
I aimed and pulled the trigger and she shrieked. It didn’t penetrate the outer shell of her coat, but left a red mark on her back. I felt like an asshole and told her she could shoot me too, but she wasn’t interested.
Some other kids in the neighborhood liked to have “BB gun battles” with each other, until one of them ended up blind in one eye.
Hmm, let me think, I may have done one or two bad things back in the day…
I must have been frustrated when we moved into our new house in the suburbs when I was 4. During the first week I put paint in my dad’s pistol-grip oil can and painted all 4 dining room walls. I brought our oscillating sprinkler in from the yard and watered the living room. I gathered dog poop from the neighborhood, placed a piece on each bay window shelf and invited the neighborhood kids and their parents over to look at my art show.
I played doctor with my girlfriend, Chrissy. She was epileptic and had a seizure mid-examination. Somehow all of her buttons popped off her blouse and her mother blamed me for it. Maybe I had something to do with it, but I’m pleading the 5th.
My neighborhood buddies and I used to rough up a kid down the street who was always trying to hang around with us. But, his name was Albert—who wants to hang out with a kid named Albert?! One day, his dad saw us roughing up his son, came out and gathered us into his backyard. He said it wasn’t fair to gang up on someone like that and said Albert would take us on, one on one. The expression on Albert’s face didn’t seem to look like he was in agreement with his dad’s solution. So, we beat Albert up one-on-one. Neither Albert nor his dad were happy about that.
I stole a hamster from a W. T. Grant store. I was planning to pay, but there was no cashier at the checkout, so I put the hamster in my pocket and walked out.
My friend Brian was at my house and refused to pick up my comic books which he’d scattered all over the floor of my bedroom. He said he had to go home for lunch and turned toward the door. I picked up my Crossman BB gun and trained it in his direction. *Hold on pardner, you ain’t going nowhere till you pick up those comics. *Brian turned around slowly, saw my rifle and picked up a plastic toy from the floor and cocked it behind his ear. Then it was like the standoff at the OK Corral. His throw went wild; my BB hit him right between the legs—a shot in the giblets. He went home crying and I caught hell from his mom.
I helped my brother and his hooligan buddies tie up my teenage sister and put her in my fire truck in the middle of the intersection at night. Luckily, they pushed her to the sidewalk before any cars approached.
One day, age 5 or 6, my friend, David, and I were playing under the bridge crossing the creek. We each gathered a pebble and popped up to throw them at a passing car. My pebble connected and the car came to a screeching stop. The guy ran down, caught us, held us by our collars and demanded, “which one of you hit my car!?” David and I pointed to each other. So, the clever guy found a pebble for each of us and told us to throw it in the water. David threw his pebble hard overhand. I figured out what the guy was looking for and threw my pebble soft and underhand. The guy carried David, fussing and kicking, to his car and drove off with him. Walking home, I figured I’d need to find a new best friend. But, the guy just drove to David’s home and got him in trouble his mother.
One winter night my buddies and I were engaged in a pitched snowball fight on my front lawn. Three guys on snowmobiles sped down the street, so we pelted them with snowballs. One of the guys lost control and crashed into the curb and broke off one of his snowmobile skis. We all dashed across the street into the woods and scattered. Unfortunately, about 100 yards deep, the only half frozen creek stopped us in our tracks and the snowmobile guys were approaching fast, making all kinds of vile threats. Then, I heard a yelp and one of the snowmobilers yelled, “hey, I caught one of them—this punk looks like he’s in the snow patrol.” Dang, they got Ralph (he was wearing a bulky white coat and white pants). “Let’s pore gas on him, light him on fire and throw him in the creek!” I think all of our pulses went tachycardic at that point. Luckily, they were just joking about the gas and fire, but they did push Ralph into the water before they left.
We streaked the local diner, but kept our underpants on because we were kind of modest.
Here’s my bad BB story. I was aiming at the branch a blackbird was perched on high up on our Maple tree. I just wanted to scare him away. I took the shot, it must have gone high, and the bird dropped like a rock, dead before my feet. That made me sad.
Having an older brother (9 years older) sucked in many ways: getting decade old hand-me-downs (“ha ha, you dress like an old man, Tibby”); getting to use only ~20% of our shared bedroom; equipping mom with an enforcer. Yeah, whenever I did something bad (obviously, not infrequently), I’d be out the door and heading to the horizon—I knew mom couldn’t catch me. But, then I’d look behind and see my brother closing in on me quickly. Oh, crap. And he never just brought me back for mom to administer justice…he administered a great deal of it on me on the journey back. He softened me up before mom had her crack at me.
On the other hand, having an older brother who was 6’7” and his high school’s star athlete had some advantages. When Long John would see me getting roughed up by some of the older toughs in the neighborhood (again, not infrequently), he would casually approach, look down, punch his fist into his open hand and say, “you guys aren’t messing with my little brother, are you?” “Uh…no…sir…” I could’ve gotten them to shine my shoes and give me their lunch money after that.
Now, karma’s come around to bite me in the ass. Last week my youngest daughter drove my car deep into our garage door—it cost $899 to repair. Lesson learned: if your 12 year old asks to drive the car up the driveway—say no.
There is so much, but this one was the meanest: I pushed my sister off my grandparent’s porch, causing her to break her arm. In my defense, she was in my way.
I stole silver half-dollars from my parents to play Pac-Man. Still love video games, but regret that. I did get caught, at some point they noticed the coin-bowl was looking pretty empty.
I used to live in a little suburb that was right next to farmland. My best friend lived on the farm and we used to ride our horses freely around their property. We could get lost for hours, it was huge.
Her father had a stroke and they had some money problems so her mom and older brother decided to sell off a chunk of land for another suburb. We still had tons of space to ride, but this cut off the direct route between our houses, so like the mature 12yr olds we were, we spent weeks riding around in the area up for sale, removing survey stakes and tossing them around. They had to have the entire thing resurveyed at a major expense. We never got caught, or at least we were never confronted with it, but both her mother and my parents talked in front of us about the cost of bringing the surveyor back in. We didn’t touch the second set of stakes.
I posted in a thread called “Bad Stuff you did as a child” so I’m admitting that the stuff I did was bad. I did not mean to elevate tomatoes over the lives of humans or animals. Rather, I wanted to acknowledge the addendum as adding insult to injury–using food that someone else (my grandfather) spent a lot of time, effort and affection to produce in order to commit our wayward acts, rather than, say, mud-pies or water balloons. I guess I wasn’t careful enough in my description of the events.
It’s quite obvious to me that Simmerdown is a tomato loving bird hater. I can’t imagine anyone or anything more vile and despicable than that. It’s bad enough to be a tomato lover. And, it’s equally bad enough to be a bird hater. But, to be both?!? Jumpin Johosifat, that’s pretty darn messed up!
I’m not advocating we ban him or anything…not just yet, anyway, but let’s all keep an eye on ‘im—he’s a person of interest.
I got another one: When I first met my next-door neighbor and soon to be girlfriend, Chrissy (the epileptic), I brought her upstairs in our house to introduce her to my dad (who I was pretty proud of). We walked into my parents’ bedroom, back to the master bedroom bathroom door, and I opened the door. Dad had recently gotten out of the shower and was shaving in front of the sink, bare assed in both Chrissy and my field of view; then he turned to see who opened the door. That’s when I pointed and exclaimed, “that’s my dad!”
Well, dad slammed that door closed pretty damned quick. Chrissy wanted to know what that dangly thing was between by fathers legs, and I asked, “don’t you have one of those?” I learned about the birds and the bees early on (so did Chrissy)…that’s why I don’t like bird-haters! I don’t like tomato lovers because I’ve always hated tomatoes.
To all my friends the bee-haters: Don’t come in here!
Used slugs found in home construction sites to get treats from the nickel gum and candy slots in the drug store entryway. It got us free giant bubble gum and jawbreakers. I’m not sure the Lions Club charities ever recovered from our theft.
My cousin and I were standing in my grandmother’s bedroom. We were very little. He was irritating me to no end. To stop him, I made a threat:
“If you don’t stop, I am going to pee on you.”
To which he replied:
“If you pee on me I’ll pee on you!”
That was IT! GAME ON! We both fumbled to get out of our little kid pants with our little kid hands. I drew first and got him with the initial shot, but he was quick and crafty, dodged out of the way and got up onto the bed. By the time I climbed after to continue my assault, he had worked his weapon free and returned fire. The battle raged all over the room. At some point fury turned to giggling, and we got the hell out of there lest the scene be discovered. No one ever said anything about it.
Oh, I should not admit to this…
I guess I was about 7, which makes my co-horts, my younger brother and sister, 6 and 4. The three of us hatched this dastardly deed and I’m very embarrassed about it. Our neighbors were a single mom and her two bratty kids. She stiffed me for a babysitting job and her son hit my brother on the forehead with a belt buckle. The injury required stitches.
So we found a pile of rabbit poop and convinced the kids that it was a new cereal that my mom brought home from her new job. I don’t remember them eating more than one bite or so, but my god, we were convincing!
Got in trouble for biting another kid (I was a little bastard), and I forged my mother’s signature on the disciplinary form that came home. Unfortunately I was about 7 years old, so it was written in blue pencil crayon and simply her first name.
I’d like to think that I got the lowercase “b’s” going the correct direction, but I almost never did at that age.
Another story wasn’t my particular act, but I was present and an accomplice:
I was in my very early teens, visiting a friends’ house along with a similarly aged neighbour buddy. We’ll call the neighbour buddy Craig, because that’s his name.
A group of us were hanging around a lit fire pit on the shore of a man-made residential lake, in the middle of the afternoon on a summer day. The host’s younger brother was pouring small trails of gasoline around the fire and watching them burn.
The younger brother moved a little slow with the giant, full jerry can, and the flame took the opportunity to leap up the gas trail and onto the nozzle! With the nozzle burning violently, we stood in shock for what felt like an eternity. Being educated on how gasoline and fire react by Hollywood, we figured we had mere seconds until the jerry can exploded, leveling the neighbourhood.
Quick thinking Craig grabbed the gas can one handed, and discus style threw it into the middle of the decorative suburban lake.
One thing Hollywood forgot to teach us about gasoline was; it floats on water. The fire wasn’t extinguished, instead it became exponentially worse by spreading into a thin layer across half of the lake, which was now doing its best impression of hell on earth.
Soccer moms by the coven were instantly coming out of their houses ringing the lake, alternately screaming in fear and screaming into cordless telephones, no doubt connected to 911. Dads running to gather stray children and try to save whatever was on the shore.
We got away scot-free (teenagers can run like the wind when legitimately in fear of arson charges) but I’ve never seen so many fire trucks, watching from my nearby bedroom window!
