I’m the eldest daughter in a family of six and four of my siblings are brothers.
Now that we’re all grown up and have family reunions, I’m hearing about all the ways my brothers tried to kill themselves and their friends through macho “games.” For example, apparently my brothers were the inventors of a game called “fireball” that involved a gasoline-soaked tennis ball that was then lit afire and kicked at the nearest person. It now comes to light that the practice of this olympian sport was the cause of the field next door burning down (which was blamed on the baby brother playing with matches, who wasn’t old enough to defend himself properly.)
Another brother, the cowboy, turned up with a broken pelvis when he was 18. For the last twelve years we all believed that it was a rodeo bull-riding accident. Turns out he and another brother were drunk driving one night and getting a kick out of running over 4’ traffic reflectors on the side of the road. One particularly tough reflector sproinged back up and through the floor of his pick-up truck . . . you can fill in the rest. He swore brother #2 to silence, and the confidence wasn’t broken until this summer.
Anybody else have demented brother activity stories you haven’t heard until you were an adult? Now I’m wondering if most of the local, unsolved petty crime in our town was perpetuated by these fiends.
I’m the youngest of six, the youngest of four girls. Of my two brothers, the younger is nearly a saint and the escapades of the other are unprintable. Now my sisters…
-Lil
My brother either just did minor stuff or only confessed the minor stuff… like the time in elementary school he was sent to the principal’s office for trying to pick a lock with a hair pin, and breaking the lock. Or the time in high school he and his best friend were banned from the school library for some game they were playing there. He didn’t tell our mom till just recently, and he’s in his late 40’s now.
It is because of the “Why” gene. As in why did you think you could get away with riding on the car roof rack that had a sticker LIMIT 100 LBS when you weigh 200lbs?
Why!
My mom found out about 10 years to late that my older brother didn’t get “poked in the face by a sharp stick.” Turns out he accidentally shot himself in the face with a BB gun. It’s okay, though, because he managed to dig out the BB with a rusty screwdriver he found in our neighbor’s garage.
During the long lost days of Evil Kineval my brother and I were playing in our back yard and I guess we were rough housing a little more than we should…when one thing led to another and there was a broken clavical in volved.
Fast forward 20 years…
Hey ma…You know how I little Philly broke his clavical when we were kids??? LOL !!!
He put a towel around his neck, like a cape, and hoisted his banana seat Huffy on top of the shed and rode off the roof of the shed thinking he was evil kineval. Dumb shit fell and broke his colar bone. LOL!!!
I don’t have any good ones about my brother, but I do have a fairly good one about my father and his two brothers.
At least one time, the older two (my dad was the middle kid) convinced my youngest uncle to get into a cardboard box and they shoved him down the basement steps. Yes, this sounds horrifying, but if you knew the steps in question, it’s even worse. Steep, steep, steep, covered with linoleum or something else hard, the edges of the steps lacking any sort of padding whatsoever, and a nice concrete floor to land on!
That one reminds me of something we used to do in my house when I was a little kid. Being a latchkey kid, I had to find ways to entertain myself and my friends/siblings while my dad was away at work. One thing we found to do was to wrap yourself in a sleeping back and slide down the stairs. It never really bothered us that the stairs broke into a T-intersection at the bottom, so we were really just sliding into a wall.
It was almost as fun as piling every damn pillow in the house on the floor and diving headfirst into it from the 3-stair landing.
When I was about 15 and my sister was 11, my friends and I started sending her into convenience stores to buy beer for us. We’d always give her enough extra money so she could get herself some gum or candy. Told her if they asked her age she was just supposed to say, “Eleven, my mom sent me for the beer.” They usually didn’t ask her, and the few times they did, when she said she was eleven and the beer was for her mom they sold it to her anyway.
Then one time I was supposed to “keep an eye on her” on a Saturday night, but I wanted to slip into a bar and hear this cool band…Took Sis with me (she was 13 then) and they didn’t check ID on either of us. Sis got crocked on rum and coke and I had a helluva time getting her even partly sobered up before we got home. Got lucky that time, as we beat Mom home and Sis was asleep before Mom came in.
Sis ratted me out to our mom when I was 40 and she 36. I still caught some hell about all that.
I don’t have any good dirt on my brother; except for literal dirt - he confessed recently that all the holes he dug in the yard as a little kid were in search of dinosaur bones! He might just be as good at keeping secrets as I am…fifteen years later, I still haven’t told my parents or him how I really cut my hand badly enough to need 7 stitches. I don’t want them to know that what I really did was even dumber than what I claimed to have done
I be surprised to hear of any male who hasn’t, at one point in his life, held a tennis ball and thought “gee, this would burn nicely if we soaked it in gasoline.”
A gas-soaked tennis ball is an actual, honest-to-god fireball you can kick at your friends! How cool is that?
Note: Nerf products are not good substitutes for tennis balls. Apparently, when you kick a flaming nerf ball at your buddy, it is basically like throwing napalm on him. Much “stop drop & roll” will ensue.
Launching flaming tennis balls to burn down a grassy field is fun too. Lighter fluid has a more even burn, not as much of a whuuuuump as gasoline.
I’ve tales of my own teenage stupidity, but the OP asked about brothers. I just found out my uptight brother the Pastor smoked hash in Germany areound 1980 when he was in the Army. I almost fell out of my chair and asked why am I finding out now?
I don’t have any brothers, but I well remember when we had a family reunion when my grandma was 85, and my mother and her five siblings were all there. One evening they started confessing to all the stuff they’d hidden growing up. All of it brought laughs except when my mother’s youngest brother (who was well into his 50s at that point) revealed that as a kid he’d played in the 14th Street dump and gotten this foot-long cut on his leg. Which, in spite of the dump being full of rats, germs, and who knows what other nasties, he had to hide since he couldn’t come up with a convincing coverup story. My mother, well into her 60s at that point, completely lost it and started absolutely shrieking in outrage. The rest of the family, of course, laughed at her more than at Uncle D. for his youthful indiscretion.
Moral: Saving the confessions for 40 or 50 years doesn’t lessen their impact upon siblings.
