When I was a ‘youth’ I had some bad friends. They wanted to do bad things and If I remember rightly I wanted very much to go along with them.
Youthful Indiscretion #1: Stealing from the local supermarket (ASDA). I seem to remember that amongst the things we stole were toy walkie-talkies. We got caught and spent some time in one of the staff offices being lectured.
Youthful Indiscretion #2: Same friend involved, Smashing up someone’s greenhouses. It was a lot of fun, but we were found out and I was in a lot of trouble with my Mum (Dad never found out).
Youthful Indiscretion #3: Smashing up a disused coach. It was a lot of fun, but we were found out and I was in a lot of trouble with my Dad (Mum never found out).
Alas, the latter was the only one which resulted in a (Juvenile) criminal record. Because it was Juvenile it had a time-limit. And now I have no criminal record. I also have a well paying job, a bachelor of science degree, and a healthy sense of right and wrong (which comes from my upbringing and my innate senses. Not from a cult book)
I used to be quite the little shop lifter. Nothing big, candy bars, little trinkets, cheap cigars oooh, lighters, I had ALOT of lighters. I was actually pretty good at it. My methods worked really well. Ya know, until I got arrested for it. That was over 14 years ago, never stolen anything since.
Oh, fire. I was quite the pyro as well. I loooove(d) fire.
When I was in elementary school (early sixties), probably 3rd or 4th grade, some friends and I were walking past a construction site. They had some enormous hole dug in the ground which had a couple inches of water at the bottom and lots of mud. This was way back when construction workers left a lot of tools unsecured because, hey, who’s gonna mess with them?
My friends and I threw a huge amount of stuff into that muddy pit. Tools. Lots and lots of tools. Just to see em splash.
I hope they found em all. It was bad and I’m sorry.
As a kid I LOVED playing around at deserted construction sites. Specifically housing estates. One of my early explorations of sexual pleasure was determinedly breaking into one of the houses because there was a sun newspaper inside (For anyone who doesn’t know, the Sun newspaper has a topless busty blonde on page three of every issue) Unless I’m remembering it wrong and it was the Star (not topless, but still busty and blonde and more likely to be famous) or a Porn mag (but probably not because I think I’d remember that! My first remembered experience of a porn mag was at a friend’s house. I remember wondering why there was a slight bulge in the women’s groins since they don’t have willies)
edit: believe it or not… before that, when I was a little boy, I used to think that girls were skirt-shaped in the middle, because all I ever saw was girls wearing skirts. I was quite shocked to learn that girls are essentially the same shape as boys (with some rather minor differences)
Later on in life I was shocked to find out they only have longer hair than boys because of society, and that boy’s hair is just the same as girl’s hair if we let it.
Too late for edit: I didn’t actually ‘break’ anything by breaking into the house. My determination manifested itself in gaining entry WITHOUT leaving evidence of having done so.
1.) I’m sad to say that during junior high, my friends and I were those dreaded bitchy girls that were too cliquish for our own good. Thankfully when I moved on to high school I got better, although I’m still ashamed of some of the things my friends and I did and said. By my junior year I’d stopped being a mean bitch and started to distance myself from those who still were. I wasn’t TERRIBLE, but I had such a great time in high school and after reading about so many people who didn’t, it makes me ashamed if I had anything to do with anyone who struggled.
When I was about 12, a friend and I shoplifted for about three weeks. A mutual friend got caught and scared me straight.
After reading the title of the thread I crossed my fingers that we wouldn’t get a copy and paste from a word document of someone’s favorite story they like to tell of boys being boys.
You have commited something akin to suicide by saying that, because now I am curious. And as a result of that curiosity I am asking that someone that knows who’s favourite story SWB is talking about post it here.
There weren’t a lot- I didn’t do any illegal substances or even drink or smoke until I was well out of my teens. In my teens, I suppose I played with fire and firearms a lot more than I should have (I grew up in the country and there was no garbage pickup so we burned it in a pit, and I used to LOVE to throw aerosol cans or other things that made for cool explosions into the fire, and I used to love to do target practice out the back window, both things that really aren’t all that bright).
When I moved to town the biggest indiscretion was on a night when I was a bit irritated with various things anyway, and I was with a friend who’d been a juvenile delinquent a few years before when he lived in Detroit, and we were both pissed off at someone who lived in a ritzy area of town. One night we played “Huns” and trashed that area. I drove while he’d reach out the window (of the Yugo), grab a trash can on rollers and release it after the car started going fast, or take a big stick to the mailboxes, etc… No major damage, but a pretty thoroughly trashed neighborhood.
Hardly a record breaker, but it’s still one of those “Thank God I didn’t get caught” because even though it was only petty vandalism at the time I couldn’t have afforded any kind of bail or fine, I seriously doubt my mother would have paid even if she could have (if only for being pissed I didn’t take her with me), and with no money/no family connections/election year I’d have probably gotten a 20 year sentence. (What’s depressing is the realization that if I had received 20 years, I’d be out by now— damn, how old am I getting to be?)
In hindsight*, wearing an IRA t shirt while riding around East Africa probably wasn’t the smartest sartorial choice I’ve ever made.
*Hindsight being about .005 seconds after being stopped at a roadblock and escorted into a small concrete block building by two soldiers with guns pointed at me.
I too had a thing for fire when I was a very young teen.
We had a great expanse of woods to go run loose, and we found a real treasure of a place to experiment in. Some teenagers, doubtless like us, had dug a large pit, covered it with 2x4s, plywood, and dirt. Add a hinged piece of plywood for a hatch, and you have one king hell of a burn pit.
The place had been abandoned as near as we could tell, so we moved in with the gasoline, road flares, parrafin, napalm and magnesium tape. We never lit a fire we couldn’t end up controlling, although it got close a time or two. I am amazed we were never discovered or arrested. I know for sure I did not have an intact set of fingerprints at all that summer.
When I was 15-16, I went through an improvised explosives phase.
From crude things like combustible aerosol cans packed in flammable material and set alight (which made pretty mushroom clouds) to deafening remotely-detonated “bombs” that were made from scratch, I made dozens of the damned things and blew them up for the amusement of my friends.
These explosions never caused any property damage, but a good many of them took place on private property. We were chased a few times, but never caught.
It boggles my mind when I think about it. (I think some of the more ambitious ones had quite a bit of destructive potential. Lucky there were no accidents!)
I guess I was fairly boring as these things go, but I did get a fake ID when I was 18 so I could go to a concert in a bar in San Francisco–it was Sarah McLachlan so obviously I was going to do almost anything to get there. The ID said I was a foreign exchange student from Holland. I don’t drink at all, so I figured it wasn’t a terrible thing to do.
The problem was that the concert was on April 30, 1992, which in the Bay Area was the big day for the Rodney King riots. My own neighborhood was completely trashed and looted, and I had no business sticking my naive little nose out the door. But my friend and I gamely got on the BART train and headed for the city. A freaking-out bus driver dropped us off about 6 blocks from the bar and we ran the rest of the way.
The concert was great! I met Sarah! Totally unforgettable. Best concert ever.
By the time it was over, everything was shut down, including BART. We had no way to get home. Luckily for me, my friend was old enough to have a friend in SF who actually owned a car. He came and got us and drove us home. He couldn’t get near my place, so he dropped me off and I got home as fast as I could.
Probably one of the dumber things I ever did, possibly not the dumbest but pretty close. Going to a Toad the Wet Sprocket concert in the city completely alone was probably not all that smart either, and missing the last train across the Bay was definitely a bad idea.
Once, when I was young and foolish, a friend and I climbed to the top of a local microwave relay tower, about 300’ high. The tower was triangular in cross-section, built of tubular steel in an open lattice arrangement. The ladder ran up the inside of the tower.
That was alright as far as it went, but, just to show how stupid I was, I then went and climbed down the outside!
My dad’s friend did something like that to. From what I understand, he also unscrewed one of the light bulbs and hung a string of Christmas lights from it (though I question that statement). Supposedly there are pictures floating around somewhere of the police waiting for him…from his vantage point.
