There were a few kids that my mother told me not to play with, but of course I did anyway. I was at his house after school and got bitten on the ankle by his dog. My mother saw the wound when I got home, and I told her I did it climbing over a fence, and she took me to the doctor, who treated it and sent us home. A few days later, my mother heard someone mention that the dog bit me, so she took me back to the doctor. Doc said “Sure, I saw it was a dog bite right away, an treated it as such.” It was a long time before I had any ice cream after that.
I was a pretty good artist at age 7, and drew pin-up type women in underwear on small pieces of paper, colored them, and sold them to other 2nd grade boys. A teacher saw one of the transactions and I was sent to the principal’s office.
I came by it honestly - my mother was an aspiring artist, drawing those Vargas type of 40s-50s style women. I still have envelopes and ephemera that she had doodled on. And I think every report card I took back to school had her red lipstick blots on them - she used whatever was handy. I don’t know what my teachers thought of that.
When I was 3 or 4 years old, my mom, my 5 year old sister, and I went shopping at the grocery store that was on the next block from our house in central Denver. My sister, being a brat, dared me to steal two candy bars and called me a bunch of names if I was too afraid to do it. That’s right, she was 5, and I was in preschool, and she dared me to steal 2 candy bars. So I did. I stole them and took them out of my pocket or pants or wherever I had hid them in when we go home. I immediately started eating mine and tried to give her the other one but she was horrified and gleeful and ran and told my mother. Mortified, I hid under the dining room table which was covered by a table cloth that went mostly to the floor. My mother called the police while I cowered under the table, crying and covered in chocolate from the half eaten bar. The police sent a car over and the policeman demanded I come out, which I did, and he gave me a stern talking to about stealing. Not that it made any sense to me at that age; but I was just mortified, afraid, ashamed and hated my sister with the heat of a thousand suns. After the nice officer gave me the talking too, my mom walked me back to the store and we gave the manager back the unopened bar I stole for my sister and the money for the half eaten bar and I got another talking to.
It is one of my earliest, if not my earliest, memory being dressed down by that policeman. I was lucky though, this was in 1972 and if it happened today they would probably shoot or tase me.
My buddy and I were about 6, there was a small freeway overpass right down the street from his house, we were out walking over the overpass and somehow decided to drop pebbles on the cars flying by below - to see if we could hit them (yeah, I know). Well, eventually the police showed up and took us down to the station. Needless to say we were mortified. Then the police took us home. I don’t recall my parents getting steamed up about it, but that is probably just because the shock of being taken to the police station wiped out any memory of what happened at home.
My nephew (who’s only two years younger than me) and I were in the back yard of a friend of his. In this back yard was a peach tree and a number of over-ripe peaches had fallen to the ground. The three of us had great fun throwing those peaches at the white picket fence in the back yard. The satisfying SPLAT of a peach hitting squarely in the middle of a picket had us in gales of laughter. We were caught by his mom.
Spent the rest of that afternoon scrubbing that fence.
When I was 10 and my brother was 7, the lake across the street was drained to be dredged out.
This was fascinating to our little cadre of misfits. So, we went on an expedition to the drained, muddy, silt and mud filled lake. We walked along a silt/sand bar to about the middle of the lake. We saw in the surrounding muck, a row-boat, several shoes and boots, and a bicycle. My brother wanted a bike badly, and against logic walked out to get it. Heh.
You know in those old jungle movies where someone gets into quicksand and can’t get out? My brother took two steps from the sand bar and dropped to his chest in mud. It took three of us to pull him out and he, of course, lost his shoes in the process.
So, my brother’s brilliant ploy to dodge Mother’s wrath was to take off his pants and shirt and reverse his underwear so he wouldn’t look like he had almost just been absorbed by the muck of the drained lake.
That didn’t go well at all.
This reminded me of probably my earliest memory of getting into trouble. Mom made home-made pies, and she would give us the leftover dough. We would roll it out into small circles, pat with butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Then she would bake us our own delicious little pastries.
One day she left us alone with our dough, and somehow we decided it would be fun to throw the balls against the ceiling. After a few tries, we flattened them enough so that they would stick for a few minutes, then fall. Same SPLAT…same gales of laughter.
At dinner that night, my father happened to look up and notice all the greasy circles on the ceiling. He had to repaint the ceiling to get rid of them.
Wow. In grade seven or eight, I used to make my own erotica by erasing and strategically redrawing (in pencil) the Sunshine Girls from the newspaper, but it never, ever occurred to me to sell them. Guess I just wasn’t socially savvy enough.
I snuck out of my room to eat some cheese in the fridge late at night.