I’m not sure why, but this strikes me as hilarious.
mmm
I hung out with a group that resembled a bit of the Jackass troupe. We had made built a halfpipe in one of our friend’s backyards and we were all climbing up one side to sit down when we finished. I had some gum in my mouth and when I went and sat down next to my friend John, I pulled out the gum and squished it on top of his head. He tried wringing it out with his hand and created this unicorn of gum and hair on the front of his head which got us rolling. That’s when another friend Derek said that he felt bad and he knew how to fix it. John was relieved until it was too late and he saw the flash of scissors and the front part of his hair was gone. All the gum was removed and he had a frontal bald patch. He wasn’t allow to hang out with us for a month.
Let’s see:
Slashed tires: yup
Broke windows: yup
Shoplifted: yup
Trashed an old lady’s garden: yup (and got caught and deservedly thrashed)
Boys can be such assholes.
Baseball bat + car + mail boxes = fun night out? Yep.
Dog hunt not involving canines? Yep.
Riding motorcycle over Karmann Ghias? Yep.
What can I say? I was generally a shit.
That reminds me of another one. My friend’s next door neighbor had their driveway redone. We could have just put or initials our hand prints in some out of the way place, but noooo. We went in his back yard and lobbed handfuls of gravel over the fence into the fresh concrete because it made a neat sound, lots of handfuls of gravel. We honestly weren’t doing it because we thought it was wrong, we just liked the sound.
A few weeks later we started having contests to see who could make the longest skid marks with their bike. We did this for a couple of days until it started to get boring…and then we saw her nice new bright white driveway and we made skid marks all over that. Again, we certainly weren’t doing it to be mean, we were just having fun.
I am thankful you added those last three words.
mmm
We were a bunch of basically unsupervised 12-14 year-olds away from home on a “church trip”. We were staying in a high-rise hotel with a balcony on the back that directly overlooked a parking lot full of cars.
We dropped a lot of stuff on unoccupied cars. cringe Truly something I feel terrible about to this day. God, what a bunch of complete shits.
The one I remember getting in trouble for, was when a guy in our scout troop, whose parents were friends with my friends’ parents and their son was sort of a friend, had their 35th anniversary. I wasn’t terribly fond of them- the dad seemed like an ass-kisser to several of the other guys’ dads, and the mother was just passive and annoying. Plus, their 12 year old middle school jailbait daughter (makeup, tight clothes, etc…) wouldn’t leave me alone (I was 17 at the time) and despite having little to no experience with girls, was convinced (and still am) that fooling around with her was going to end badly.
Us boys were charged with going and putting rice in various parts of their house as a prank.
Most of the guys put some in the bed, some in the glasses in the cupboard, etc…
For reasons that are still kind of hazy, I went totally berserk and put rice in the laundry detergent, motor oil, mouthwash, deodorant sticks, gallon of milk, pancake syrup, etc… Pretty much anything liquid or anywhere it would be annoying, got a healthy dose of rice. I think I even put about half a pound in the toilet tank.
Needless to say, I got my ass chewed, and had the temerity to snort and laugh. My mother didn’t think it was funny at all, but my dad did.
My friend and I had quite a collection of mailbox flags.
My best friends parents were selling off part of their property to be turned into a small housing development. We were horribly angry about it as it was our favorite field to ride in, so for weeks we would barrel race around the survey stakes “knocking” them out.
We got caught one day and were forbidden to ride on that side of her property.
It wasn’t until years later that I put it all together. Her dad had a stroke a year earlier and they needed the money from the land sale to keep the rest of the property. We just about managed to sink the deal by the time they figured out it was us. They really were great people though, although we felt being banished to the other side of the ranch was bitter punishment that’s all they did. I don’t think they even called my parents.
I knew a dude/other kid once with enough United Methodist signs that he tried to make an entire car body out of them.
If you hit a golfball with an aluminum baseball bat, it goes forever. A group of us watched my cousin, who was probably 8 or 9 at the time, hit golfballs in random directions. This was in the middle of a very dense neighborhood in a huge city. One guy managed to find out it was him and talked to his mom. That didn’t go well.
I woke up a whole lot of people late at night on several occassions with my bottle rockets. I had a launcher made out of copper tubing and one house in particular got shelled heavily since it was in range of an overlooking hill. I think nowdays of how mad I get if someone wakes me up. Jeez what an ass I was. I also think how lucky the people were in my old neighborhood since we moved when I was 14 before I got into this type of fun.
Radley?
I needed to use the bathroom at my uncle’s house, but he was chatting with my father and they were ignoring me, so I pissed on his couch. Heh. That happened two weeks ago - does that count? Just kidding. I was about 8 at the time.
In school we had a Spanish teacher we hated, so the last day of class we stole all the Spanish books out of her class. We brought them to an abandoned store we used to hang out in, piled them up in the middle and set them on fire. I don’t think we intended for the building to set on fire, but that was the obvious consequence, the roof started to set on fire and after a few desperate attempts to put it out, we ran (dodging the police and fire officials who had been attracted by the flames and were on their way in). The whole (abandoned) building went up.
My friends went back to the ‘scene of the crime’ and got caught by the cops who were monitoring the place, so we ended up getting a few months of community service (oddly, we never got in trouble with the school for stealing the text books, though thinking about in now, it must have been several thousand dollars worth of books, and very well might have been worth more then the decaying building we got arrested for burning down).
While obviously I wouldn’t try and justify arson, the ugly, rundown abandoned store front that had stood empty for a decade or more and been a hangout for drug addicts and the like ended up being replaced with a nice community center pretty quickly after it burned down. So I like to think we earned at least some of our karma back for being a positive force for urban renewal.
I hid a perfectly good sprig of broccoli next to my plate, swore that I had eaten it.
I was an enthusiastic combatant in the neighborhood wars when I was a kid. We spent what seems now like our every free moment throwing rocks at each other, hitting each other with sticks, and trying to run each other down with bikes. The awful thing I did was when a few guys from my block captured a kid from the next block that we all particularly disliked. We stripped him down to his whitey-tighties and heaved him into a thick patch of thistles. He landed flat and got the wind knocked out him. He did considerable thrashing around getting to his feet and getting out. I don’t think there was an inch of him, other than his crotchal region, that wasn’t thick with urticating thistle hairs. We hurt each other a lot, so cries of pain didn’t normally bother us, but that boy just screamed in pain. Luckily for us, the belligerents in these wars respected a strict code of silence with respect to parents, so he didn’t run home and tell on us. He did swear dire vengeance, but his dad got transferred or something and he never got a chance to make good on it. In retrospect, we were wrong. We should have just heaved him on a pile of dog shit or something.
My 2nd biggest childhood regret: when I was in a middle school gifted and talented class, we were researching a special project in the library. We were browsing World Books because there was no wikipedia yet, and most of the internet of which I was aware consisted of homemade geocities pages and chat rooms. I ran across some picture of a horribly diseased third-world child (smallpox maybe). The guy sitting next to me was new to our school, and had horrible facial acne. You can guess… I’m not proud of it. I don’t even know why I said what I said because he was really nice and I had a crush on him. I guess before I said it, I thought it would come out more like affectionate teasing. But it didn’t 
Other than that, plenty of typical catty girl stuff, but no property damage or physical pain was inflicted.
Me and my friends used to tease this girl mercilessly. It turned out she had developmental issues and Tourette’s. I’ve always felt bad about that one.
Also one that has stuck with me happened when I was in 9th grade. Me and some friends went to a candy trade show thing at a hotel. You paid $5 and could sample candy. We couldn’t find the location of the trade show and were wandering around the lobby looking for it. I saw a fat kid and his mom and loudly said, “let’s just follow them; they’ll know where it is for sure.” They heard me and the kid looked like he was about to cry. I wish I could apologize.