Stealing enough $20 bills out of my Dad’s wallet and Mom’s purse over a several-month period to buy a round-trip ticket from St. Louis to UMASS Amherst to see my girlfriend who was a Freshman there. My parents didn’t like this relationship, nor did her parents. I was 17 at the time, and used my brother’s Driver’s License (which I also stole) saying I was 21. It was a three-day weekend and I kept calling pretending to be at so-and-so’s house spending the night, so my parents never got suspicious. (They had some family friends in town anyway, so were distracted). I took a Bus to her Dorm and spent the whole weekend with her.
I never heard anything about the missing money, my flimsy excuses for not being around, nothing. At no time did I ever get questioned by the airlines - a small-bill paying customer with no credit cards and one photo ID, who looked about 12. I don’t even think the ticket agent looked up at me. I put my brother’s license on the floor of his car when I got back where he found it a day or so later, cursing himself.
Looking back, I cannot imagine what would have happened had something happened to me. So many things could have gone wrong as to beggar description. To this day I have never told any member of my family.
Heck if I didnt tell my mom about the time I spent a night with a bunch of gay actors at an opening night party, smoking a stick of Hashish, doing a few lines of cocaine, with all the joints I could light and suck then had to drive home in my brothers borrowed car thru one of the most prejudiced police town in Los Angeles (Signal Hill) and drive under heavy influence of said drugs thru 25 miles of LA freeway at about 2:30 in the morning… well I certainly wouldnt be telling YOU guys.
Well, I have far too many scary “experimenting with drugs” stories, but most of those I’ve shared with my parents.
As the (female) OP, I find it interesting that the guys (boys) leaned toward vehicles/heights stunts. **ouisey’s ** tale, though, was way scary.
sycorob – you ran across the highway at night?!! That’s just insane! It’s much more of a rush in the day, when you you can clearly see the vehicles hurtling toward you…
My older sister ran away with the roadies for Foghat after the concert (sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s). Of course, my parents noticed she was missing (duh) and dragged her ass back to Dallas. I will never forget my dad calling the Austin hotel where the band had gone – and asking the desk clerk: “Can you connect me to Mr. Foghat’s room?”
The stupidest thing I ever did under the influence of youth:
Once when I was seventeen, extremely angsty and desperate to get out of my rents’ house for some - any - reason, I went into a chatroom and hooked up with a 45-year-old guy. I met him in a local café, and, abandoning all notions of common sense acquired to that point, got in his car and let him drive me to the parking lot of a far-off park.
About midway down the highway it occurred to me that this was the stupidest thing I had ever done. I casually mentioned that I had taken judo in my last year of high school.
Though I won’t tell you what he did (suffice to say it was consensual), I spent the entire time thinking, “Okay, if the moon is over there, that means that’s east, so if La Verendrye Blvd is there, the metro must be up there somewhere.”
Then after he finished, he drove me to a block away from my house and let me off as if nothing had happened.
I don’t know what part of my depressed teenage brain “driving far away with a perfect 45-yo stranger to make it in a park” failed to alarm, but that was my breathtakingly stupid stunt I survived that I won’t be telling mom about anytime soon.
I have an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation. I often just don’t think that some stuff might not be really safe. In college I used to go walking around on the paths late at night. I went to UC Santa Cruz, which is basically a huge forest with university buildings in the occasional clearing. So I’d be walking along the paths through the forest, alone, at midnight. It didn’t occur to me that this might not be that smart until a friend freaked out.
Similarly, I used to walk a couple blocks to do my laundry at 2 am in East Jerusalem. I once got in a yelling match with some obnoxious guys doing this, too.
The one thing I’ll really never tell my parents I did was that I busked on the street in Jerusalem. I’m a flutist, I couldn’t work legally, and I was too proud to ask my parents for money, so I played the flute on the street. I made fairly decent money, too! Since there were usually a lot of people around, I didn’t really fear for my safety, but I’ll still never tell my parents.
Man - I am now officially freaked out for my children - they are never leaving the house.
Also, reading these reminds me of a couple of others - the obligatory shoplifting phase: Did it for the “rush” (what an immature idiot) fortunately never got caught, but did stupid things like chat up the barely-olde- tha- me girl clerk while surreptiously dropping leather goods into the bag my friend was carrying. I am so glad I actually thought about this and realized “this is really really stupid” and stopped doing it.
Also - went with friends to the beach, lit a bonfire (can’t remember if it was legal or not) and threw cans of spray paint into the fire to watch them explode. At least a couple of times. There we were, 20 feet away in a hastily-dug “bunker” waiting with baited breath for the big “whoosh!” and flame flare. If anyone with any authority had seen it, we’d’ve been busted for sure - and deserved every bit of any punishment we got. Teenagers are truly dumb sometimes.
For both of these, I was never caught, so never told my parents. I have no idea how I am going to handle this phase with my kids. I guess more than anything, it will be “look - be as safe as you can be, but when things go wrong, I swear I care more about helping you than punishing you or saying I Told You so - call me and I will do whatever I can, okay?”
Just thought of another one. During college, driving back and forth between Chi and C-U on I-57, you got pretty used to the road. Just south of Kankakee, there is a portion that runs absolutely straight and level for a few miles. We used to see how long we could drive that with our eyes shut.
Not totally risky, cause we’d have someone else in the car, but not the kind of thing that strikes a mature mind as completely reasonable. It is curious how time slows down when you are speeding down the road with your eyes closed!
In ten years from now, you will be respectible. So, basically I have lots of interesting stories to tell, but only one other person to swap them with my co-conspirator.
So officially, pure as driven snow. Unofficially-- another round for my poor overworked guardian angel. :eek:
Well, the time I pointed the 13-year old massively huge Pontiac down the road that led off of these mesas in a late evening snowstorm while rather intoxicated on marijuana and beer, knowing the alternator to be dead and the battery to be close to it. Sure enough, the battery died just as I rolled over the crest the hill, and I descended the mountain with engine dead, no power brakes, no headlights, no power steering, no brake lights, in rush hour going-home traffic in a snowstorm.
Crawling around in the storm sewers in our suburban neighborhood was pretty crazy. 3 foot or smaller diameter pipes that ran everywhere under the streets. They only opened up at the bottom of the development, which just happened to be in back of our house. Who knows what freaky crap was lurking in there. Interesting footnote is that our cats learned to cross the street using the same pipes.
I have many of these stories, most involve near drownings. I was at the beach and saw a pod of dolphins frolicking at a point that looked like it was just beyond the breakers. I figured it would be a bright idea to get as close to them as I could. Being young and stupid I didn’t realize that distances are severely distorted from shore.
I kept paddling and paddling and they always seemed to be a few yards away. I would estimate I was a mile out to sea by the time I reached them. Paddling back took several hours and I had something that had gone beyond a mere sunburn. I was covered in festering blisters and had to spend the next week with gauze padding on my back.
Thinking back on it, there seems to be some sort of correlation between stupid stunts and being drunk off my butt, such as throwing .22 bullets in a camp file. Ah, good times, good times . . .
The one that sticks in my mind was in London when I was 18 on a chartered trip with some school mates. We stayed four to a room in a old hotel (I don’t remember the name of it, this was back in 1975, but it had a manually operated elevator. I kid you not; the poor elevator guy had to pull on a rope to get it started, than grab it to stop it. They were rather proud of the elevator, actually. However, this elevator has nothing to do with my story. Put it out of your mind).
There was only one key for the room, so courtesy demanded that if you had the key, you dropped it off at the front desk when you left the hotel, so it would be available for any roommates who might come in. For some reason, I always forgot to drop off the key, which made me somewhat unpopular with my roommates. I don’t remember exactly, but it was some sort of big deal to get in your room if you didn’t have the key. Generally, it was easier to wait for the jerk with the key to return.
Anyway, I was the victim of poetic justice when I came back from a night of drinking (I was legal there) to find that there was no key at the front desk and no one in the room to let me in. All I can really remember from that point is knocking on doors until I found someone in and talking them into letting me out their window.
I crawled on the ledge (about 18 inches wide, I think; it seemed about 6 inches at the time), on my hands and knees, dead drunk, four stories up, until I got to the window of my room, jiggling with it until it opened, then pouring myself in. I then proceeded to try to get in my bed, which had been short-sheeted as retaliation for habitually forgetting to drop off the key. I slept that night in a fetal position.
A couple of my friends and I (they were boys, but I was a pretty butch little girl) explored some storm sewers for miles. We had to walk hunch over and with our feet on either side of the10"-12" of water than ran down the center of the round tunnels because it was so freakin’ slippery from mossy stuff. We wore whatever helmets we could find (it was hard not to scrape to top of your head from time to time).
Although these sewers were for rainwater run-off, we’d consvinced ourselves that they were disgustingly filthy, so there were some interesting obstacle challenges such as a thin stream of water spritzig across our path. “Ew! Ick! Don’t let the waer touch you!!!”
A manhole cover that must’ve been in the center of an intersection created a spooky sound effect when tires hit in rapid succession – dunno if it was driver side or passenger side, but each car would make a big, boomy “BOM-BOM” sound.
We also had to get past a teensy, weensy garden snake. Drama queens that we were, one of us held a Rambo knife toward the snake while the others dashed past trying to keep our legs as far from it as possible. You’d have thought it was an anaconda!
It was a long trip with flashlights, snacks and chalk (in case tunnels branched we could mark our way). Four hours each way. I still think it was a cool adventure.
I was about 6, or maybe 7. I used to climb up on the garage of my grandmothers neighbors house. This garage was cool… it had a set of power cables that ran from a pole in the alley, along the roof of the garage and then out to the house. I would hang on that cord for as long as I could, sometimes climbing along it towards the house like something out of the dirty dozen.
When I was older, I got into smoking pot in a big way. I was the biggest burnout in the 6th grade. I played lookout for my older bad influence while he creeped his way into the largest Pot Dealer in Black Eagle’s house, and lifted his smokes (which had weed in it). The entire time, the guy is asleep on his couch, mere feet away from my companion. I could actually see the gun under his pillow…
Carrying a gun around Choteau, in the off chance I could shoot any number of people…
This reminds me of another thing I did, although it doesn’t really count because we failed to appreciate how dangerous what we’re doing was.
Our old garage had collapsed during the winter. Come springtime, my father told my brother and me to clean it up. This basically consisted of us going through the rubble, sorting out anything worth saving, cutting up the wood with chainsaws, and then piling the wood up and burning it. Our friend from down the street usually came by to help and hang out. After a while, we built a little bench so we could sit a few feet from the fire and watch it burn while we sat there smoking, drinking sodas, and talking about girls and cars.
We found that if we screwed the empty soda bottles tightly shut and threw them in the fire, they’d usually explode with a small bang. From there we began planting empty bottle inside the wood before setting it on fire. When we found other containers in the garage rubble, they’d go in too. Then we’d light the bonfire and sit around listening to them blow up one by one.
Then we dug up an old fire extinguisher. Into the fire pile it went. We lit the fire and sat around on the bench for a half hour or so waiting for the bang, but it never came. We therefore concluded it wasn’t going to explode and went back to work.
My father came home a little while later and was talking to us by his car, when there was this huge BOOM. The fire exploded and flaming debris was thrown all around. We were sixty feet away and safe, but the bench we had been sitting on earlier was destroyed. As would we have been if the extinguisher had gone off earlier.
When we lived out in the country, I used to lie down on the highway and see how close I could let a car get before chickening out. Plus there was that whole swimming in the All-American canal a couple of times. It’s a miracle I didn’t drown, but the chemicals might explain why I’m this way.
Whoa! I had totally forgotten that I had done that. 30 seconds. I was by myself but thankfully the road was basically empty excapt for me. And I had those bumps between the lanes to alert me when I drifted.
Storm drains are just fun. You got all these rooms and stuff. We loved exploring them. When my dad was a kid he and his friends found a big room under Nimitz Highway and they furnished it with chairs and lamps and had parties there until a big storm flushed the room bare.
Of course those pales in comparison to what my mother confessed to me a few months ago. One which she’s never told her mother about. My Grandparents had just bought a condo in Waikiki on the 14th floor. There’s an extended balcony and a ledge set back in the building which is about a foot wide. My 17 year old mother climbed over the railing on the balcony, lept across the 3 feet of air to this foot wide ledge and strolled around on it for a few minutes before leaping back. Holy fuck that scares the fell out of me to think about. Which I guess is wierd because we used to hike together and we’ve sat on the edge of several thousand foot cliffs and had lunch. But over cement? shudder
