It was the Bass player and Drummer, right? They loyal, but so slow!
I was once hanging out with some older kids who decided to break into a school. They smashed a window to get inside. I went inside with them. I was maybe seven years old.
Cops came to put the fear of God into us.
One of them asked me, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”
I said, “Yes.”
“You would?”
“With a parachute.”
I was just being a smart-ass but they were amused. My delivery was utterly sincere. I was never a trouble making kind of kid, but I was a bit of an arrogant snot.
For the most part I was a pretty good kid but my most noteworthy caper made the newspapers. We had a large field near my house, maybe 1/2 mile square. It was like an island within a city. I guess I was about 12 at this time. I knew every inch of this field and all the wildlife that lived in it. When I crossed the highway and entered the field each day I could feel a happiness come over me that I have never experienced before or since. I spent my entire childhood in this field often from morning till night moving boulders around and improving the rain ponds and mini creeks and drains that ran through it. It was often used as a dumping site for construction material and I would use theese to improve the habitats of lizards, snakes and amphibians that lived there. I always took a shortcut home through this field after school.
One day I left school to find a bunch of surveyors flags all over the place and I knew what that meant. It wasn’t long after that heavy duty construction equipment started showing up and they had it all parked in one section. I was furious and came back that night and cut every hose I was able to cut on those machines hoping to stop progress. Needless to say it didn’t work.
I absolutely love this. I’m sorry it was taken from you.
I spent a lot of time in nature as a kid, kicking over logs so I could see the squirmy things, catching frogs, picking clover. I wish I could give my son that but the best we’ve managed is weekends at the park.
Same with my son, I would take him and his friend out on weekend excursions but it’s just not the same as making it a major part of your life. Nearly all the stories I write come from this field.
I wasn’t a young child but this was something I didn’t tell my mother until she was in her 80s. She was horrified.
Immediately after school a bunch of us would get on our bikes and ride to the mall to play at the arcade. It wasn’t the playing that was the problem. We would ride 10-15 miles each way. Most of that was on actual highways. If I found out my kids were riding bikes there I would have lost my mind.
My nephew painted some graffiti on a school building. And signed it.
He has a very uncommon name, and this was in a small town. Probably no one in the county had the same name. Ooops.
So that was a detected one. Did not take Monk or Sherlock.
My friend’s son broke into an abandoned house with some friends. He did some graffiti and signed it.
I was at my friend’s house when the police came. My friend was more embarrassed than anything. The cop was a friend, which made it even worse.
Artist have a Need to be recognized.
It’s a failing.
College, moving out day from a big 7 story dorm.
Somebody no longer wanted a fire hydrant that they had absconded. They left it at the top of the steps to get it out of the dorm room.
Hmm, says my friend and I, that’s pretty cool.
Fire hydrants are HEAVY. No way he and i could carry it down the 20 concrete steps to the parking lot.
Well, every problem has a solution. Put my truck in low 4x4 and backed up the steps. Got the fire plug and drove off. This ‘moving’ arrangement would probably be frowned on by TPTB.
Had that fire hydrant on my apartment porch in downtown Denver. Somebody stole it, thank god.
I learned to pick locks in my youth and made a skeleton key for certain types of locks. I went to the local Junior HS and swapped the locks back and forth on a number of bikes in the rack.
Oh. I forgot about this.
Best friend and I did a lot of jeeping/4-wheeling when in high school. There was a place, in town next to a sandy creek that was great for dirt bikes and fooling around with your 4x4.
We where there one night. Sometimes just stop, listen to music and shot the shit.
Well one night the truck would not start back up. Dead battery.
This place was next to an RV storage lot. Fenced in. Barb wire on the top. Well we knew that it was chock full of batteries, and we had tools to take the barb wire down.
And that’s what we did. Thank god there where no security dogs. Popped a hood (this was before you had to get in the vehicle to open the hood) removed the battery and passed it over the fence. Got the truck started, and then took the battery back over the fence and installed it back in the RV.
“Honest officer, we where just borrowing it” No, we did not get caught, but sure was stupid.
So, why not give us some Street View links to your walls ?
Heard this story from my Mother in Law:
As a kid, she and her younger brother would sneak out of the house at night. They would then walk down the street, and climb over a wall to get into the Detroit Zoo. Into the animal enclosures, at night, when they were closed. Apparently you can collect fun stuff like peacock feathers and porcupine quills if you’re 12 years old and wandering around the rhino enclosure.
She told her dad about it when she was 30, and he completely flipped out on her and her brother. Confirmed by the Mrs. who said she recalled pretending to look at albums in the next room so she could hear the fireworks.
MIL also pretended to be a boy so she could have a paper route. Outraged parents would call her mom to tell her that her “nephew Dan” beat up their little boy, and GMIL would say “But I don’t have a nephew named Dan”. MIL got outed when she and her brother were tussling with other paperboys and her hat fell off. One of the little jerks snitched and she lost the job.
If @Chefguy and I had grown up in the same area and time, we would have either been competitors or compadres.
I was a full on juvenile delinquent. Jockey boxing cars, dealing drugs, stealing cigarettes from the local K-mart, alcohol was, somewhat oddly, one thing that could be difficult sometimes to get ahold of.
I was stupid and arrogant back then, for doing all that stuff and not getting caught.
Not if you steal a case of pints from a liquor store. Got busted for that, but luckily I was still 17, so couldn’t be charged as an adult. Had to go see a judge and make reparations, and it cured me of my budding criminality. The stupid shit you do as a kid.
What does this mean?
I’m guessing that it’s rifling through the glove compartments of cars. “jocky box” is slang for glove compartment.
OMG, the stuff we did. One time up at the lake in NH, one of my older brother’s friends had a new 22 rifle. I was only 7 years old, but had come home from Summer Camp with several prizes and ribbons for riflery. So when a deer showed up in the distance, my brother told this kid to hand me the rifle, I could hit it from here. The older boys laughed at this, and gave me the gun fully expecting me to shoot my own toes off.
Now, you have to understand, I had no intention of killing a deer. We regularly played tag with BB guns at the family farm down in Georgia. My parent’s only response to this was to buy us rubber BBs instead of metal. I was completely ignorant of what was about to happen.
So as these kids laughed at me, my brother said “Show them; hit that deer right between the eyes.” I did. The deer fell down. I froze in horror. The big kids grabbed the gun and ran. I went over to the deer and apologized through my sobs. Then I went back to the cabin and never said another word about it.
We got an allowance for all the yard work we did. But there were no stores we could walk to, and our parents didn’t let us buy candy or anything with the money. It was fairly useless with parental supervision every time we tried to spend it.
So we figured out that we could ride our bikes to a little one lane bridge in Burke, VA, and there hop a train into Springfield, where we could buy candy and hotdogs and sodas at the big gas station there. Then we had to hop another train back to our bikes.
Onetime there was no train heading home for hours, and the sun was getting too close to the horizon, so I started walking back down the train tracks toward my bike. When I got to lake Accotink, there was nothing for it but to walk across the railroad trestle.
Of course, a train came while I was on it. I was able to drop down and hold on to the supports until it passed. This thing was built in the 1800s, and shook like crazy, but fear makes you strong, and I got through it. I made it home all right, but got yelled at for being late for dinner. Lord, if they’d only known!
In all seriousness though, Three people died on that trestle just a few weeks ago.