On a nice summer day in the 1970s, when we were about 12 years old, a friend and myself convinced another kid to steal a package of six Nestle crunch bars from a local convenience store while we waited around the corner. He was successful. After we split the candy bars, we told him to go get a package of Snickers bars. He gleefully agreed. This time he didn’t come out of the store, but a police car pulled up at the front of the store a few minutes later.
We took off and ran home in time to see the police car deliver him to his front door, where his mother was waiting. We watched from afar as she ripped him a new one. He was bawling his eyes out, but to his credit, never mentioned our involvement in this candy conspiracy. And we certainly didn’t volunteer that information to anyone. He came out of his house a couple of hours later and claimed that he wasn’t really crying, just putting on a show. Somehow he talked his way out of being grounded, which was pretty impressive. We never tried anything like that again, so I guess we all learned something. Today, we are all responsible adults, and we are all still friends.
My younger brother has not so forgiving. We had some kind of fight and I grabbed one of those long office Swingline staplers that opened up and swung it at him. Stapled his pants to his butt. Fight over. The little shit waited an hour for Mom to come home and promptly ran crying to her, “Mom, Denny stapled me!” as though it had just happened. Mom chased me a few laps around the house swinging that stapler at me. Somehow I wore her down and got away.
I can’t believe I got away with this one: My high school sent us home with mid-semester reports that consisted of forms about the size and shape of an index card, one for each class, onto which the teachers wrote a short summary of how we were doing.
All the teachers faithfully followed the precept of offering a little praise to soften the blow before getting into the negatives. So my forms all said something like, “CairoCarol has a keen instinct for literature, and her class contributions are insightful. But she doesn’t always read the assigned text, and she sometimes doesn’t pay attention.”
So, I took each slip of paper and simply trimmed off the negative sentences that followed the positive opening. Of course, the resulting form was no longer rectangular, as I had to snip in mid-line in order to keep the good sentences complete while fully removing the negative ones. Not only was that suspicious on its own, you’d think the fact that each slip of paper was cut to a different shape would have struck my parents as a bit weird.
But they fell for it and never said a word, to my enormous relief.
I think that was a one-time experiment that the school dropped, as I only remember having to commit surgery on those little slips of paper one time. Had they given us mid-semester reports all the time, I’d have had to do it regularly.
Growing up an only child in a small town in the 70’s, it was hard to get away with stuff but I still managed a fair bit. Like the time in my teens when a mate who’s step dad owned a pub bought a silencer and gave it to my mate. He cut the barrel down on a semi auto .22 rifle, took it to school and tapped the end to fit the silencer on the lathe in metalwork and cut the stock off behind the handgrip to make it into a pistol. Then I got to work on the mechanism with a file and turned a semi auto into a full auto, then we took turns taking shots out his (2nd story) bedroom window into a large glider mounted on a pole in a park across the road. When they pulled that glider down 20 years later they must have been going “How the fvck did it get bullet holes in it?”
Another more simple but sneaky, sitting in my bedroom when I was mid teens I noticed a massive Huntsman spider on the ceiling. Huntsmen are harmless but he was huge and I didn’t want to share the room with him, Problem was, the ceiling was 14’ high and pressed tin. So I grabbed a .22 rifle, loaded it with sparrow shot and shot the spider. Also blasted a bunch of paint off the ceiling. Oh Fvck. Went out to Dad’s shed, found a tin of paint that matched the colour, a small paintbrush, a broom and a spare broomstick. Using gaffer tape, taped the spare handle to the broom handle and the paintbrush to the end so I was able to do some quick repairs to the ceiling without needing to drag a ladder into the house.
