Causing Trouble
© 2012 by Mark Dice and The Resistance
All Rights Reserved
Published by The Resistance
San Diego, CA

No part of the text within this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form and by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher and the author.

Visit www.MarkDice.com

ISBN: 09673466-9-X

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62346-360-1

Table of Contents

Introduction

High School

College Craziness

Middle School

Moving to California

Looking Back on it All

Introduction

Kids always cause trouble when they’re growing up, especially boys, but not like my friends and I. We didn’t steal cars, commit armed robberies, or burn down someone’s house. Our trouble was different. It was more creative. It was more fun. It still landed us in handcuffs, in the newspapers, and for me, ultimately getting kicked out of high school and featured on the evening news. But there was a style to our trouble. It was often misguided creative energy that we didn’t know how to handle in our youth, and would manifest itself in our outrageous schemes, our over-the-top pranks, and a life that was more exciting than something out of a movie.

Years later, whenever discussing high school pranks or stupid things people did growing up, I always had the best stories. Always. And not just one epic story that became legendary at the school for years afterward. I had story after story of the craziness. My stories were so entertaining to those listening that occasionally people said I should write a book about them, so I did.

I’ll tell you about every detail: Painting obscenities consisting of 30-foot-tall letters in the snow on the football field using food coloring mixed with water in a giant weed sprayer; sending hundreds of magazine subscriptions to a teacher and checking the “bill me later” box; replacing the magazines in the school library with old pornos from the 1970s that a friend of mine found in her dad’s basement; sending a fake college rejection letter to a former friend informing him that the school had changed its mind about enrolling him; and that’s just the beginning.

Two years after getting thrown out of high school for a prank I orchestrated that got out of hand, I moved to California with one of my best friends and the craziness continued for about a year before I really started to grow up and channel my energy into more positive things. You could say that immediately after moving to California was the lowest point in my life as you will discover in this book. Within two weeks I found myself in jail for a DUI and later helped turn my roommate’s closet into a marijuana growing operation hoping we wouldn’t have to spend money on pot anymore since we smoked it every day. Instead of getting jobs, we started selling fake IDs to people at my college in order to make money because we didn’t want to work since we came to California to become successful and “live the dream.” We were headed on a crash course with complete disaster.

I don’t know what it was that caused all of this craziness to manifest itself in my brain and in my life. Maybe it was because I never had cable TV growing up, so instead of mindlessly sitting in front of the television for hours on end, I had to come up with things to do to entertain myself. In the 1990s there was no high-speed Internet yet, there were only dial-up modems that took hours to download even small files. Maybe it was because I lived in Wisconsin, and for six months out of the year the weather was too bad to go outside and I was stuck indoors for months on end, so we had to do something for fun. Maybe it’s genetic, because from what I understand one of my grandfathers was a trouble maker when he was young. Or maybe it’s because my mom wouldn’t let me take karate class. I’m not really sure.

My trouble making crew mainly consisted of Fred, Diego, Ken, Rick, as well as Marty and Brent. Fred and Diego are my two best friends and we have all known each other since the first grade and lived on the same block growing up. Ken and I became good friends in the fifth grade after he moved to the area with his mom and brother, and I met Rick, Marty, and Brent freshman year of high school.

This book is 100% true. Everything that is written about here in this book happened just the way it is described and nothing is exaggerated or fabricated. Everyone who knows me and grew up with me is familiar with a lot of these stories since they witnessed them first hand. The names of some of the people involved have been changed to maintain their privacy, since you’ll find a lot of craziness occurred that I’m sure they don’t want to be connected to, even though the statute of limitations is probably passed and nobody can be prosecuted. If anyone has the same name that is used in this book, it is merely a coincidence, and is in no way referring to them.

And keeping in line with the typical cliché to avoid any legal problems (both for myself and for you) from people attempting to copy anything that my friends and I did, I insist that you please do not try any of this stuff at home…or anywhere…ever. You’ll have enough fun living vicariously through me just from reading about what we did, so there’s no need for you or your friends to do it too. And before you get all judgmental and think that I’m a completely terrible human being for some of things I’ve done, please read through the entire book before coming to judgment, and remember that it’s tough being a kid.

High
School

Fake Pregnancy Test Results

Rumors started going around that two particular teachers at our school were having an affair. Mr. Bell and Mrs. Hartnett. One of them was divorced, but the other one we thought was apparently still married (as far as we knew). They also somehow convinced the school board to let them “team teach” a course combining art class and geography in what they called “global studies.” It was the dumbest class ever, and we didn’t really learn anything and pretty much just drew a bunch of pictures and did childish arts and crafts. I hated Mr. Bell and his dumb class that was probably just an excuse for him to spend more time with Mrs. Hartnett. He was an obese man with a fairly normal looking upper body, and then around his stomach and waist, his body just inflated into a massive blob, making him look like an oversized bowling pin or pear.

Anyway, a lot of us students believed that they were having an affair, so I sent an envelope to the school addressed to Mrs. Hartnett with large letters printed on the outside that read, “PREGNANCY TEST RESULTS ENCLOSED. PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.” As you may know, most teachers have their own little mail slots in the school office and whoever receives the mail has to go through it all and put it in the appropriate slot. The words “PREGNANCY TEST RESULTS ENCLOSED” were so large and noticeable that whoever was separating the mail in the office couldn’t miss it, and I’m sure they couldn’t help but gossip about this strange piece of mail that came in addressed to Mrs. Hartnett, and that was exactly what I wanted. Inside the envelope I put a piece of paper that said “Fuck You” written across it. Not as creative as the outside of the envelope, but hey. Of course, neither she nor Mr. Bell ever mentioned anything about this envelope after she had received it, but it wasn’t the last I would hear about it.

Probably six months later, maybe even a year later, my mom—who usually never approved of my antics—came home from grocery shopping one afternoon and told me that she bumped into Mrs. So & So, who worked in the office at the high school, and my mom started smiling excitedly like she had heard some incredibly funny news and went on to tell me that this woman told her about the pregnancy test results letter that Mrs. Hartnett had received and figured it was my doing. She also told my mom that she thought it was hilarious. My mom and I started laughing, and she went on to say that the office lady had figured that it was my handiwork (and she was right).

Oh yeah, at some point, Mrs. Hartnett had divorced her husband and that summer married Mr. Bell, and became Mrs. Bell. We were right. They had been in a relationship, and this was certainly not the end of me tormenting them.

Magazine Subscriptions to Teacher

You know how when you pick up a magazine, about 20 subscription cards fall out every time you flip through the pages? You know those little postcards that you put your name and address on and send in to subscribe to the magazine? Well, I noticed that you didn’t have to send any money in with your subscription and you could just check the “bill me later” box and they would start sending you the magazines without having to pay for them right away because they would send you a bill later. It was very generous of them, so I figured Mr. Bell could use some of that generosity.

I drove to the mall a few days later and went to the magazine section of the bookstore and started collecting the subscription cards for every magazine on the shelves. Since each magazine has about 5 of these little cards fall out every time you open one, sometimes I collected two or three of the subscription cards for the same magazine. My stack of subscription cards kept growing and growing. I had cards for magazines I never even knew existed. I figured Mr. Bell could use some of this interesting reading material, so I spent an hour or so filling out his name and the school’s address on the cards and marked “bill me later” and dropped them off in the mail and started laughing out loud. I didn’t even have to put stamps on them because the postage was all prepaid by the magazines! It was great!

It must have been around 200 different cards. I subscribed him to Good Housekeeping magazine, Time, Newsweek, Cosmo, all the fashion magazines, arts and craft magazines, fitness magazines, celebrity gossip rags, and even Penthouse and Playboy. The stack of cards was over an inch tall by the time I was done collecting them.

I could already see what was going to happen. In just a week or two, Mr. Bell’s mailbox at school would be flooded with new magazines, probably 10 or more a day, every day, every week, for who knows how long, all with his name on them. Not only this, but a few weeks later he would also be sent the bill for them all. Even though I wasn’t able to see this with my own eyes, I knew this would happen and that was satisfaction enough. He would know it was me. Only I would come up with such a devious, yet creative, idea and actually put it in motion. I figured he would never mention that this had happened to him out of embarrassment, and he wouldn’t want to encourage more subscriptions or have it happen to other teachers, but this wasn’t the last I would hear about the magazines.

Months later, my mom had to come to the school to have a conference with Mr. Bell, the school principal, the vice principal, the guidance counselor, and myself, because of some other trouble I was causing Mr. Bell which involved me drawing a picture of someone holding a gun and shooting a fat man shaped like a bowling pin that resembled him. (Oh, I popped a bunch of inflatable globes he had hanging from his ceiling, too.) The school was not happy about my drawing (or the globes). The picture didn’t have his name on it, so I didn’t see what the big deal was.

During the meeting I said, “Do you think this resembles you, Mr. Bell? What makes you think that?” I was trying to get him to say he was basically a fat blob like the guy in my drawing. He looked like a moron, and instead of my mom being mad at me for her having to come to the school for our big meeting, she was mad at him and thought it was a waste of her time. He wouldn’t even admit that the picture was of him, and he insisted he was just concerned because it was “violent” and even asked if I had any issues with the local bowling alley because the guy in my drawing was a human bowling pin because that was one of our nicknames for him since that was basically the shape of his body.

It was during this meeting that Mr. Bell mentioned that he had been getting countless magazines sent to him that he didn’t subscribe to, and he said he had to send a letter to every single one explaining that he had not subscribed to them and asked for his subscriptions to be canceled and the bills voided. The coalition seated across from me asked if I knew anything about it. I’m sure from the look on my face they had their answer, but of course I denied it. They couldn’t prove anything and they knew it. The meeting was a complete waste of my time, and my mom’s, so I had to pay Mr. Bell back.

A few days later I started taking up a collection to enroll Mr. Bell in the “Assholes of America Club” which was something I had found in a magazine somewhere. You could pay something like $30 and enroll someone and the company would send them a T-shirt that says “Official Member of the Assholes of America Club,” along with a membership card with that person’s name printed on it, and a nice letter explaining that someone had enrolled them in the club because they are an asshole. This time, instead of just sending his membership kit to the school where I would not see the look on his face when he opened it, I decided to send it to my parents’ house so I could then place it on his desk before class.

When the package came, I brought it to class the next day, and before he arrived, I set the T-shirt, letter, and his membership card on top of his podium where he would be standing in just a few minutes. Some of my friends knew exactly what I was doing and anxiously awaited Mr. Bell’s reaction. I have to give the man a little credit, because instead of flipping out and asking who did this and making a scene, he simply removed it from the podium and put it on the shelf underneath it without saying a word. It was still funny.

My plan was almost ruined because my mom usually got the mail every day, so she received the package addressed to Mr. Bell, and opened it up to see what was going on. She hid the shirt and things, and left the empty package sitting on the kitchen table and confronted me about it when I came back from school. She almost wouldn’t give me the stuff because she pretty much knew what I was going to do with it, but I somehow convinced her to turn it over to me so I could bring it to school the next day.

I basically threatened to do something even worse to Mr. Bell if she didn’t turn over the goods, so she reluctantly returned them to me. Sometimes I was me who deserved to be in the Assholes of America Club, I know.

The Underwear Check

Because I kept messing up the computers at school and causing them to display pictures of girls in bikinis and then freeze up, a policy was implemented where the school made all of us sign an agreement that we would pay $25 an hour for a computer technician (really just the computer teacher) to repair any damage we caused, or else we couldn’t use the computers anymore. One day instead of doing my usual thing of installing new files on the computers to mess them up or formatting the hard drives, I simply reversed the mouse and the keyboard cables to two different computers—that’s it—and the teacher charged me twenty-five dollars to switch them back! I couldn’t believe it.

This was during a computer programming class, and there’s not much I could do just sitting there, so I had to pay the money so I could use the computers again. At first I sat through class for a few days in protest doing nothing, telling the teacher I’m not going to pay, but I soon realized he didn’t care and wasn’t going to budge. At first I thought about bringing in a large box of twenty-five hundred pennies all dumped loose inside, but I came up with an even better idea.

I had learned somewhere that a check didn’t need to be written on any official paper like money did, and that you could technically write a check on anything as long is it had your name and account number on it and you signed it, so I decided to write the school a check using my Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities underwear. I stretched the underwear over a square piece of cardboard and used a black magic marker to write in the checking account number and all the details, and the next day I put them in an envelope and handed it to the vice principal and told her it was payment for my “damages” to the computers.

A few years later I was trying my hand at some stand-up comedy and a local paper wrote up an article about me that mentioned I would be performing at a certain comedy club one Saturday night, and who did I see in the audience, but Mr. Marvin, the computer teacher whose life I made miserable. I thought it was a coincidence but after my routine he came up to me and handed me a pair of underwear that had “To Mark, from Mr. Marvin” written on them with black magic marker! I couldn’t believe it.

He had seen the article in the paper saying I would be performing there and thought he would be funny and try to get me back for the underwear check I gave the school for the trouble I caused in his computer class. I didn’t really think his check was funny, I thought it was creepy, and I left the underwear laying on one of the tables. We always thought he was gay and this kind of reinforced that idea for me.

There was a small office in the back of Mr. Marvin’s classroom that was shared with the science room right next door and we noticed occasionally Mr. Marvin and other teachers would hear the phone ringing and tell the class they would be back in a moment and go into the office to take the call. Well, we got a hold of the phone number, which was written on the side of the phone, and we would occasionally call it from a payphone in the hallway and when another teacher answered it we would say, in the gayest voice possible, something like, “Hey, is Mr. Marvin available? This is his boyfriend and I’m sorry to interrupt him, but I really needed to speak with him for a moment.”

Sometimes Mr. Marvin would answer the phone himself and we would make some rude comment and hang up, usually something along the lines of him being gay. He was actually married to a woman and had a son, but we still thought he was a closet homo and he certainly acted like one.

Food Coloring in the Snow

You might be familiar with the large weed sprayers that consist of a two or three gallon plastic jug that people fill with weed killer and pump up and carry around their yard to spray weeds with. Well, it was winter time, and there were no weeds, but one night I still came up with a use for the weed sprayer that ultimately led to giant obscenities being painted in the snow on the football field behind the school and on the tennis courts that everyone would see the next morning when they arrived.

I bought some food coloring at the local grocery store and filled the weed sprayer up with water and made a late-night visit to the school after it had just snowed. Using my boots I dragged my feet on the ground and drew huge 30-foot-tall letters in the snow, spelling out the word “Fuck” on a large slope facing the school on the edge of the football field. I then took the bright blue water I had mixed up in the weed sprayer using the food coloring and filled in the letters by spraying all around them, turning the snow blue. I wanted to spell out “Fuck You Mr. Mueller” (the name of the principal) but I soon realized there wasn’t enough water for this, although the effect would still be the same. A simple “Fuck” would still do. The lines making up the word were probably three feet wide and about 30 feet tall.

The next morning as I walked from the parking lot to the school entrance, there in the distance, on the side of the pure white, snow-covered football field was a huge “Fuck” in bright blue letters. You couldn’t miss it. It was enormous. The slope it was on was so steep that you could see it as clear as day from the school. The janitors were out there with shovels and rakes trying to move the snow around to cover it up, but the letters were so large that it wasn’t really doing any good. Everyone saw it. There was a large staircase inside the school that almost everyone would walk down to get from the upper level to the lower level, and there in clear view through the windows was a gigantic blue “Fuck” starring you in the face.

The principal’s office overlooked the tennis courts on another side of the building, where a slightly smaller “Shit” was spelled out that couldn’t be missed. I didn’t even get called to the principal’s office because Mr. Mueller knew I would just deny I had anything to do with it. A lot of people figured it was me, and when the other students asked me if I did it, my face would light up with a huge grin giving them their answer.

Sidewalk Chalk

Sidewalk chalk, if you don’t know, consists of huge sticks of colored chalk that kids use to draw on sidewalks and driveways. The chalk sticks are about the size of a large carrot and come in a variety of colors. While a lot of people use cans of spray paint to put graffiti on buildings, this is vandalism and was crossing the line I had thought, but somehow the idea popped into my head that I should buy some sidewalk chalk and then write a bunch of obscenities all over the outside of the high school. I mean all over the outside.

I bought a literal bucket of jumbo sidewalk chalk at Toys “R” Us that contained 20 or 30 different sticks and I rounded up some of my crew and late one night we chalked practically every square foot of the outside of the school on every wall around the entire building. It took more than an hour to finish and we had a bunch of us out there that night. We drew large pot leaves using the green chalk, we wrote “Fuck You,” “School Sucks,” “Smoke Weed” and just about every other offensive thing we could think of. There were also ten-foot-long penises and derogatory statements about the principal and several of our least favorite teachers written in three-foot-tall letters. While none of us were artists, we sure did put a lot of detail into our drawings.

Let me be clear that this was not on the sidewalks around the school. We did this on the outer walls and it was so noticeable that even people driving by could see our handiwork when we were done. There were no 24 hour security guards, or even any surveillance cameras. This was in the 1990s, remember, in a small town in the middle of nowhere. The next morning, the janitors were out there with sponges and buckets of water washing it all off. It must have taken them hours to clean off our masterpiece, possibly even all day.

As clever as this was, the one thing I overlooked was the fact that this was a Friday night and there was no school in the morning so hardly anyone got to see our work. There was a track meet that Saturday, so the track team saw some of it, but it would have been much better if we had done it on a different night so everyone would have seen it in the morning before school. Nobody’s perfect, you know.

Shoes on the Telephone Wires

I’m sure you’ve occasionally seen a pair of shoes hanging on some telephone wires above the street, a scene that looks very odd and always makes people wonder why someone would toss them up there and whose shoes they were. I always had to do things a little extreme, so instead of just throwing up an old pair of shoes over some telephone wires, I put the word out at school for people to bring me their old pairs of shoes because I was going to do something cool with them, and everyone knew that meant I was going to do something crazy.

Over the next few days people brought me dozens of shoes and I gathered them up in a trash bag at the end of the day and brought them home and tied the laces together for each pair. A few days later, on a Friday night, my friends and I drove through the town and would pull over on the side of Main Street every few blocks and throw the pairs of Shoes up on the wires right in the middle of the road so they would catch and just dangle there. We did this on almost every single wire that crossed Main Street. I’m talking about 15 pairs in the span of just a few blocks and we were just getting started. After a while we were laughing so hard, as we tried to throw the shoes up to get them to catch on the wires, we were too weak to toss them high enough.

It wasn’t even that late at night when we did this, and a lot of times there were cars in the distance approaching as we stood in the middle of the street trying to toss them up. We didn’t care. If a cop saw us, we would have taken off on foot and enjoyed the chase. After we were done filling up the wires on Main Street, we drove over to the other major road that went through town and flung shoes on all those wires, too. These were the only two roads that came into town, and no matter which way people came in or out, they saw the shoes. A lot of shoes. Shoe after shoe after shoe. One pair hanging on practically every single wire that crossed the street. It looked very weird and the entire town couldn’t miss them the next morning.

A few days later the shoes were all taken down, a task that must have taken a cherry picker and the entire day. I still had a bunch of shoes that we hadn’t used, so my friends and I went out that same night and put them all back up again! One pair we tossed up was a pair of boots that a girl gave me, and since they didn’t have any laces to tie together, I took a piece of rope and punched a hole in each boot and tied them together so we could still hang them. For some reason someone gave me a large doll when I was collecting the shoes and so I tied a rope around it and tied the other end to a block of wood and we even tossed that up and got it to hang from the wires.

We were laughing so hard we could hardly muster the strength to throw some of the pairs high enough to get them to catch and wrap around the wires. It was the middle of winter and absolutely freezing outside and that didn’t make it any easier. This time we would park the car over on a side street and each grab a few pairs of shoes and then walk over to Main Street and spread out and do our thing. We did it again. Both major streets coming into the town were full of shoes right in the middle of the road. When we were done we couldn’t help but think of the poor city worker who was told to take the shoes down earlier that day, and we envisioned him getting yelled at by his boss because they were still up.

“Bob, I thought I told you to take down all of those damn shoes yesterday!”

“I did boss.”

“Then why are there still 20 pairs hanging over Main Street?”

Just imagine their bewilderment. It wasn’t a few days later, or a week later that the shoes went back up. It was later that same day. They must have been pissed.

The local paper covered the story and said it was a mystery as to why it was happening and claimed the hanging shoes were dangerous because they distracted drivers and could cause an accident or fall onto a vehicle and break their windshield. Of course, we never really thought about that possibility, because, well, you know, we were dumb kids. I was able to call in and get on the air of a local rock station and told the audience that we were a group called the “Instigators” and that the shoes signified our desire to legalize marijuana. They really had no meaning, but I thought we could encourage others around the area to start tossing up shoes too. We then traveled to the radio station later that night and threw a bunch of shoes on the telephone wires in front of their building.

Since our small little town was covered with shoes (again), we decided to branch out and expand the operation to the neighboring cities. I specifically wanted to get shoes in the middle of every major intersection so they would be seen by the most people. This was extremely difficult since there was rarely a time when no cars were stopped at the light at the intersections, so we would just toss them up right in front of the cars stopped at the red light. We didn’t care. Who would have thought that shoes could be so fun?

Donating Pornos to the Library

One of my friends found a large collection of her dad’s pornos from the 1970s in her basement, and she just knew I could put them to good use so she asked me if I wanted them. Of course I did, so she brought them to school the next day so I could donate them to the school library. Pornos from the 1970s, as you can imagine, are very different from today’s pornos. The girls were not exactly the most attractive women, and let’s just say there was plenty of hair down there. Nevertheless, I thought the school library could benefit from having a better selection of magazines, especially some vintage 1970s porn.

Most of the current magazines were placed in protective plastic covers which were labeled accordingly, so one afternoon during study hall I went to the library and switched a bunch of that month’s magazines with the pornos and placed them back on the shelves to give people a pleasant surprise (or perhaps unpleasant, because the women were not exactly what I would call attractive according to today’s standards, but you get the picture).

I also tore out several pages of some nasty looking pictures and slid them into the trophy cases that adorned the hallways around the school. The trophies were in locked glass cases, but there was a small opening where the two glass panels would overlap each other when they were slid open. I stuck the pages inside the cases through these tiny slits, knowing they would stay there until some janitor was called to unlock the case and take them down.

While I was usually very careful when scheming, I made a terrible mistake this time. I had accidentally left one of the pornos in my locker. Within a few hours I was summoned to the principal’s office just as I expected. When I arrived and sat down, I saw a half a dozen of the pornos sitting on Mr. Mueller’s desk. I commented that it looked like he had some good reading material there. He asked me if I knew where the magazines came from, and I told him I thought they were his. He was not amused. He then informed me that he searched my locker and found one of the pornos there. “How do you explain that?” he asked. I had already told him that I didn’t know anything about any old pornos and that I had never seen them before, so I was caught in a lie. I was busted and he knew it. I was suspended immediately and sent home.

Before I was allowed to return to school I had to have a conference with him and my mom. It was very embarrassing. When we went in for the meeting, he had the pornos sitting on his desk and he held one of them up and started flipping through the pages showing my mom exactly what was inside. She was disgusted and so was I because the people were pretty gross. I told Mr. Mueller he had to admit that it was funny, not only that, but it was harmless. He still didn’t find the humor in it and said he was really getting sick of my antics. As my mom and I left his office I told him to enjoy the magazines. I just didn’t know when to stop.

The Disappearing Furniture

Most schools and office buildings have a dropped ceiling which consists of the white panels that are about 2 feet wide and 4 feet long that can be lifted up so you can access the lights and plumbing pipes and other things that these panels cover up. A lot of times the actual ceiling is 10 or 20 feet above these panels, and dropped ceilings are a staple of modern buildings.

One afternoon in literature class a few of us got to go across the hallway into another room to work as a group on a class project. This room was barely ever used and was pretty much only for student council meetings and test taking. It was full of desks and some small tables and extra books from other classrooms, and somehow we got the idea to remove one of the panels from the dropped ceiling and started putting desks up on top of them. Since I’m tall, I stood on top of a table in the back of the room and Fred would hand me one desk at a time, which I then set on top of the ceiling panels and put the missing panel back in place.

When we filled that area of the ceiling, we moved to another part of the room and did the same thing over and over again. Someone was standing watch at the door to make sure that the teacher didn’t pop in to check on us, and for the entire period we put as many desks up in the ceiling as we could. We also put the podium up there; we put the small tables up there; we even took all the books off the shelves and threw them up there too. Like magic, most everything in the room seemed to disappear, including the garbage can. If you looked carefully you could see many of the ceiling panels were drooping from the weight of the desks and the other furniture pushing down on them. One table was fairly large and heavy, and we worried it would break through the panels while we were still there, but fortunately it held.

I can’t imagine what the teachers must have thought the next time they used that room, because almost all of the desks were missing along with the books, the podium, and just about everything else! The stuff was up there for the rest of the year and nobody found out. In another class someone had thrown a desk out the window which landed on a section of the roof below, but in this case, dozens of desks just seemed to disappear into thin air.

A Billboard of Me on the School

After the principal realized that detentions didn’t bother me, after a while, he found a punishment that did. He started banning me from attending the school sporting events on Friday nights. This sucked. This was my social life he was messing with here. He had finally found my weakness. Detentions didn’t matter. Not allowing me to use the computers during study hall didn’t deter me from scheming. Even throwing me out of the weight room after school didn’t discourage me, but not allowing me to go to the basketball games on Friday night was like a kick in the balls.

I tried to think of a way to convince him that the school needed me at the games because I was the loudest person in the audience and I encouraged school spirit. Me just being there really helped our team. I scanned a picture of myself from the school yearbook and using a computer graphics program I enlarged it to about 5 feet wide and 5 feet tall, and printed it out in sections. It probably took about 50 different pieces of paper, and I taped them all together to make a huge billboard of myself.

I then typed up a banner that said, “Let Mark attend the basketball game on Friday night,” and I called Fred and asked him to bring a ladder to school in the back of his truck the next morning so we could put them up. We arrived early and hung my picture over a sign that was above the student entrance that had our school name on it. It was probably fifteen feet up in the air, and instead of showing the name of the school and our mascot, it was now a gigantic picture of me with a banner below urging people to demand I be allowed to attend the game on Friday. Everyone in the entire school saw it when they arrived that morning since it was above the main entrance in the parking lot.

In a perfect moment of synchronicity, I happened to be walking behind the principal in the hallway on my way to first period when the strangest thing happened. Another teacher approached him and said, “Mr. Mueller, there is a gigantic picture of Mark Dice on the side of the school above the entrance that I think you should know about.” I sped up my walk and patted him on the shoulder when I got next to him and said, “Good morning, Mr. Mueller, such a beautiful day, isn’t it?” and gave him the biggest smile. He rolled his eyes and shook his head.

I’m sure he didn’t know if I had done it, or if one of my friends did, all he knew was there was a huge picture of me on the side of the school above the entrance. Later on that morning I got called to his office. I pretended I was surprised by the picture and had just found out about it that morning when I got to school. I told him it was clear evidence that the student body wanted me at the game and it was important I go. I pleaded with him to let me attend and he actually changed his mind! I came to the game that Friday wearing a red cape and a sign taped on my chest that said “Spirit Man” (as in school spirit), and I riled up the crowd more than any other game I had been to and everybody had the best time. I even think Mr. Mueller was actually glad that he changed his mind and let me come.

Running for Class President

Senior year I decided to run for class president and a few of my friends joined me in the campaign and ran for other positions like vice president, secretary, treasurer, and other offices. We decided to call our group the “Dream Team,” which was named after O.J. Simpson’s team of lawyers who got him off for murder. This struck fear in the heart of the principal and the teachers because the possibility of me being the class president was probably one of the worst things that they could think of for the image of the school. I would be a complete disgrace to the office, which is exactly why I wanted to win.

The only contender running against me who was remotely capable of beating me was the school’s beautiful tennis star who was very popular, but I was sure I could gain more support than her and win. The Dream Team put up posters around the school promoting ourselves, while our opponents did little or no campaigning at all. We were sure victory was ours, but when the election results came in, I did not win. The tennis star beat me. I was shocked. There was no way I could’ve lost. Everyone wanted me, the class clown, to also become the class president just for the fun of it. When the results were announced, the principal said it was a close race, but the tennis star had won senior class president by two votes. Two!

I demanded to see evidence of this loss and wanted to witness a recount. Mr. Mueller, the principal, told me that the voting ballots were thrown out! This was ridiculous. That meant there was no real proof that she won. I demanded a new election. He said no, so I typed up a petition the next day and got probably 70% of the senior class to sign it saying that they voted for me and believed there was election fraud and wanted a new one.

I presented the petition to the principal and told him that he can’t steal the election from me and deny me my rightful place as class president. He said there would be no revote and I threatened to call the local television station and alert the newspapers of this fraud. He didn’t care, and I let it go. I really should have made a bigger deal out of this. I probably really did win the election and the school screwed me. This just pissed me off and made me want to cause more trouble, and that’s exactly what I did.

The Food Locker

There was a locker near mine that didn’t have a number on it, which was weird, and we noticed nobody ever used it. The mysterious unmarked locker was unlocked and when I opened it up one day I realized there was a plumbing pipe going through the middle of it from the floor to the ceiling. For some reason it must have been a design flaw in the building and the pipe wasn’t built inside a wall so they had to cut a hole through the top and bottom of the locker so it could go through. Instead of having this poor locker sit there all lonely and not get used, I decided to turn it into a trashcan. But not just any trashcan.

I put out the word to my friends that they should bring their leftover food from the lunch room and dump it in the locker for fun. After just a few days it started filling up with food scraps and garbage, and you could smell it when you got close to it. I had to put a cardboard retaining wall inside it a few days later to hold the garbage in and prevent it from falling out all over the floor when we opened it to add more because it was stacking up so high.

Even though the locker smelled like a dumpster, I thought it would smell worse than it actually did. I thought the stench of rotting food would fill the entire hallway but it was only noticeable when you were close to it. I don’t remember whose lockers were right next to it but I feel really sorry for them.

I thought about what I could put in there that would really smell since the rotting food scraps just weren’t stinking enough, and I figured the best thing to do was to pour some beer in there, so one morning I brought a can of beer to school and cracked it open and dumped it in. The beer poured out and filled the bottom of the locker and spilled down below through the cracks underneath and I’m sure spread out underneath the surrounding lockers. It smelled immediately. That whole area of the hallway reeked of beer. When you’re at a party and everybody’s drinking beer, you don’t really notice the smell that much, but apparently when you’re in a nice clean school, the stench of spilled beer can practically fill an entire hallway. The food locker was quickly cleaned out after that and a lock was put on it so we couldn’t put anything else inside.

Going out for Lunch

We didn’t have an open campus in high school, which meant we couldn’t leave for lunch. Well, it wasn’t that we couldn’t leave, it was we weren’t supposed to leave. My friends and I had a habit of ditching lunch and smoking weed and then sneaking back into the school, but after a while they realized this was happening and thought they could stop us. They started locking all the school’s doors from the outside, except for the one right next to the principal’s office, so they could only be opened from the inside once school had started. They thought they were really smart, but I was smarter. What they didn’t realize was that if you folded up a sheet of paper like you were passing a note, you could prop the doors open with it so they wouldn’t latch.

All you had to do was set the folded up paper on the ground in such a way that the door would close on it, but it would keep it propped open just enough so it wouldn’t latch and nobody could tell. So once the school started locking the doors, every time we skipped lunch I would just jam one of the doors with a folded up piece of paper and we could easily get back into the school without anybody usually noticing.

I say usually, because after a while they did notice because from a few classrooms certain teachers could see us walking back to the school from the parking lot every day through their windows and they realized what we were doing so the vice principal would keep an eye out every day during lunch period trying to bust us. I was too good to be outsmarted by some vice principal and have her ruin my fun and kill my buzz, so I started thinking of a plan. I remembered there were a set of doors in the locker room that led out to the football field which was in the back of the school, and there were no windows back there so no spying teacher or vice principal would be able to see us, so we started parking across the street from the school and then walked along the side of the football field to the locker room doors and then would sneak back inside the building that way, and the fun continued for the rest of the year and we never got caught once.

Sometimes if we lost track of time and were running a little late getting back to the school we wouldn’t have the time to park the car a block away and walk across the side of the football field to sneak in through the back door, so we would just park in the teachers’ parking lot and boldly walk in the door right by the principal’s office since it was the only one unlocked from the outside. No teachers or office workers would imagine that any student would have the balls to ditch class and come back in through that door. Sometimes the best place to hide something is right under someone’s nose. We would each walk in the door at about ten second intervals so we didn’t all walk in at the same time, and occasionally a teacher or someone in the office saw one of us walk in the door, but they never said anything because they always assumed that we must have been coming back from a dentist appointment and had some legitimate reason for coming in late. It’s an interesting phenomenon that if you act like you belong somewhere, you won’t raise any suspicion.

If someone less skilled in the art of fighting the system were to attempt returning to school through this door and were spotted, a look of guilt would have flashed upon their face giving them away, but when I walked in the door I just acted like there was nothing unusual happening. One afternoon, a teacher was walking right past the door in the hallway when I came back inside the school and he looked at me and shook his head. He knew exactly who I was and what I was doing and made some comment about how I was just getting back from skipping lunch, but he didn’t get me in trouble. He probably figured it was no use.

Perfect Attendance and the Disappearing Detentions

In one of my favorite movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the main character uses a modem to hack into the school’s computer system to change his attendance record in order to reduce the number of unexcused absences he had accumulated. Even though that film was from the 1980s and things still weren’t very high tech then, my school’s attendance system was even less high tech in the 1990s, which actually worked to our advantage.

If a student was absent from class, the teacher would just simply use a pencil to fill in the bubble next to their name on the attendance sheet which would be taken to the office every day. There was a slot on the outside of the classroom doors where the attendance sheets would be put at the end of class or at the end of the day, and someone would come around and gather them all and take them to the office where they would be processed. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you could just have one of your friends use a hall pass to come by and take the attendance sheet out of the slots and erase the bubble next to your name when you decided to skip class so your absence wouldn’t be recorded.

The same attendance sheet was used all week so if you did this on Tuesday, the teacher might actually notice the following day when the bubble was mysteriously not filled in anymore, so it was to our advantage to only do this on Fridays, which would be the last day they would receive that same sheet, because on Monday they would have a completely new one. This little scheme worked particularly well when there was a substitute teacher because the following day, when the regular teacher came back, they wouldn’t notice that the attendance bubble had been erased because they were not there and wouldn’t know that the student was gone the day before.

Little did the high school know, but we had several Good Samaritans who worked in the office who could occasionally prevent us from having to serve detentions that teachers had written us. These Good Samaritans were students who worked part time for the school as office assistants. When a teacher wrote a detention for a student, they were set in the top tray on the vice principal’s desk at the end of the day where she would see them the next morning when she got a chance. She would then compile the detention list for that day, and put the detentions in the students’ files. Our Good Samaritan students would keep an eye on this tray and whenever a detention with my name on it or any other friends of theirs found its way into that tray, they would simply take them and crumple them up and throw them in the trash before the vice principal had seen them. The teacher who wrote them had no way of knowing that the detentions weren’t actually filed, because they confidently assumed that once the detention was on the vice principal’s desk, it would be taken care of. Well, they were wrong.

Our Good Samaritans would always find us at some point throughout the day to let us know that our detention had been thrown away so we could enjoy ourselves after school with everyone else instead of sitting in detention hall. Those of us who knew about this detention tray would always keep a close eye on it whenever we were in the vice principal’s office. Occasionally myself or one of my friends would be sitting in her office after getting in trouble when she would get called out for a moment and we would take that opportunity to look through the tray and could steal the detentions or throw them in her trash can so it was like they never existed at all.

Science Class

Every once in a while something will happen in a class that’s so hilarious or outrageous that word about the incident is passed down from one grade to the next year, after year, sort of like ancient folklore that was told to every new generation around campfires thousands of years ago. One of these legendary stories in our school had to do with the science teacher, Mr. Powell, who was locked in a closet by a student a few years earlier. The closet was located at the front of the classroom and had a paddle lock on the outside to prevent students from stealing the toxic chemicals and expensive science equipment kept inside. As you can imagine, one day when Mr. Powell went in the closet to retrieve something, a student ran up, closed the door, and locked it shut. Immediately after that, Mr. Powell took a leave of absence for the rest of the semester. He was said to have never been the same since.

While we didn’t lock him in the closet again despite the same paddle lock and latch being used, we did make him cry once and had fun using the Bunsen Burners to melt pens and light things on fire, but nothing too crazy ever happened. Probably the funniest thing I did in Mr. Powell’s class—other than contribute to his emotional breakdown once in a while—was when I scooped a couple of goldfish out of the fish tank in the back of the room and slipped them in the jacket pockets of another student. I don’t know how long it took him to discover them, but it could have been days, and by that time I’m sure the jacket had the stench of rotting fish emanating from it. Surprise!

Just for fun sometimes I would set my science book on the table standing on its end with it propped open at a 90° angle so it acted as a barrier blocking Mr. Powell’s view of me, and I would roll joints behind it while he was giving a lecture at the front of the room. A guy who sat behind me, who will remain anonymous, went through a stage when he was snorting coke for a few months and thought he would one-up my joint rolling, so he set up his book as a barricade and cut a line of coke on the table and snorted it right in the middle of class. A few students who were seated in the row behind him saw him cutting up the line and ducking behind his book to snort it, but he didn’t care. Neither did they. That’s high school.

Literature Class

For a project in literature class one year, Fred and I made a video depicting the 1955 play Inherit the Wind which we had to read for an assignment. The play is about a man being put on trial for teaching Darwinism in a school in Tennessee when it was against the law to do so because only creationism could be taught. Everyone else in our class were doing serious projects and presentations, but Fred and I decided to use some of my old Legos that had been stored away in my closet to make a video depicting the play. We teamed up with a straight edge kid and before we started filming I met a pot dealer in the parking lot of a local park to score some weed and Fred slammed a six pack of Zima in a matter of minutes. Then we went back to my house to make our video.

Fred was so drunk when we got started that he was slurring his lines horribly, and I was so stoned that I couldn’t recite my lines without laughing. Our other group partner thought we were insane. When the time came to show it to our class we were worried that the teacher was going to fail us for doing such a pathetic and childish project, but when we played it she absolutely loved it. Everyone in the class could tell we were wasted by the way we sounded in the video, but Mrs. Boswell didn’t have a clue and loved it. For some reason she thought it was brilliant. She also didn’t catch the F-word being used in the soundtrack playing in the background, although a few students who were fans of Pantera heard it loud and clear. At the end of the video we had set the Legos on fire with a blow torch and Fred started spitting on them with the massive saliva his chewing tobacco was generating.

Even though making our video was fun, I hated literature class because of all the dumb old books we had to read, so I wrote a large “Fuck Mrs. Boswell” in one of the books, and after we turned them back in she flipped through the pages and inspected them all and found my graffiti. She literally cried in class and told everyone how upset she was and it ruined her entire week. It wasn’t really Mrs. Boswell that I didn’t like, it was having to read all those dumb books, so I felt kind of bad since she took it personally. She was obviously emotionally unstable.

Underage Drinking

In Wisconsin, people like to drink. They drink a lot. The state’s baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers, refers to beer breweries. That’s right. The baseball team is named after people who brew beer, that’s how much people there love beer. If you drive through downtown Milwaukee, you’ll notice tons of different breweries; Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, Leinenkugels, and more. They’re practically the largest buildings in the city. Milwaukee’s nickname is “Brew City” because of all the breweries. Drinking beer is as much a part of the culture in Wisconsin as sunny weather is in Southern California. This is part of the reason everyone in Wisconsin is so fat. Not just fat, but grossly obese…man are they huge. Some of the most disgustingly fat people in the world live in Wisconsin. It’s so cold there for half of the year, there’s really nothing to do but sit inside and drink, and that’s what everyone does, and that’s what we did growing up.

Freshman year of high school I made my first fake ID, and it wasn’t long after that I got my first underage drinking ticket (what a coincidence), which was the first of many to come in the following years. This fake ID was not a fake driver’s license. It was not a fake passport or student ID from a local college either. No, this fake ID was a “boating instructor’s license.” Yeah, a “boating instructor’s license.” Most clerks wouldn’t accept it, but one lady at one particular liquor store apparently thought it was perfectly legitimate (or just appreciated my efforts) and so that’s where we got all our alcohol from, at least for a while. I made the ID from an actual boating license I had, since in order to legally drive a Jet Ski or other boat if you didn’t have your driver’s license, you had to take a class and pass a test to get your boating safety permit. I did this because Fred’s dad lived on a lake and had a couple of Jet Skis he let us use.

Anyway, using my computer I modified my boating safety permit, and changed the birth date and added the title of “boating instructor permit.” I told the lady at the liquor store that I taught boating safety classes and I had forgotten my driver’s license at home, but somehow, I had my boating safety instructor permit in my wallet. She probably just admired my creativity so she sold me the beer.

I had only used the ID a few times before getting busted and having it taken away by the cops, but it was fun while it lasted, and it would not be my last fake ID. Basically, a car I was in got pulled over and we had a bunch of booze in the back seat because we were slamming beers and hard liquor on the way to the school football game, and we were all ticketed for underage drinking. For me, since the cops discovered my fake ID because I wasn’t smart enough to stash it under the floor mat after we were pulled over, I got a ticket for not only underage drinking, but also for having a fake ID, and a separate charge for using the fake ID to buy the alcohol (called underage procurement), and then I was given a fourth ticket for possession of alcohol by a minor. I was 15 years old and it was hundreds of dollars in fines. I was pissed! So were my parents when they had to pick me up from the police station.

Since I didn’t have my fake ID anymore, I had to come up with a new way to get alcohol, so I just started trying to buy it from everywhere I could at every gas station around town, hoping to find someone who wouldn’t card me. Sometimes I would just stop people outside the gas station and ask them if they would buy us beer if I gave them the money. Surprisingly, a lot of people did (this was Wisconsin, remember). One night in a gas station parking lot some guy sitting in the passenger side of a car started talking to me as I walked past him like he knew who I was. I soon realized that he was confusing me with some friend of his named Gary. The guy was extremely drunk. I immediately noticed a bracelet on his wrist that said “Dennis” so I pretended to be surprised and said, “Dennis! How have you been man, I haven’t seen you in so long!” and continued to talk with him for a minute, all the while he was thinking I was someone else. I was able to fool him pretty well (he was wasted like I said), and a few minutes later I told him I forgot my ID at home and asked him if he could go buy me some beer, and he did.

My friends and I luckily found one particular gas station where the Indian who worked there never carded anybody. Word quickly got out about this, and Fridays immediately after school got out we’d drive over there to get our beer for the night and I would often see three or four other people from our school pulling up to the gas station at the same time doing the same thing.

There is a stereotype that Indians and Arabs always own gas stations and “Kwiki Marts” in the Midwest, and it’s kind of true. This particular Arab, or Indian, or whatever he was, had an extra thumb on his right hand and was known as “the guy with the extra thumb who didn’t card anyone.” When he would give me my change, I didn’t want to get touched by his extra thumb so I always had to keep lowering my hand, hoping he would just drop my change into it instead of setting it there, where I would have to feel his extra thumb touching my hand.

After a few months of taking advantage of “the guy with the extra thumb who didn’t card anyone” (also known as Habib), we got pulled over with beer in the car, and we threw him under the bus and told the cops he sold it to us without carding us. We were so stupid. We should have just said we got some random stranger to buy the beer for us, but our dumb asses told them the truth. The cops actually let us go because they were friends with one of the kid’s dads who was with us. (Hey, it’s who you know, right?) It was a close call, but they must have warned the guy about selling to underage kids because he started carding everyone from that point on. We knew it wouldn’t last.

We didn’t know what to do at first now that our source was dried up and he was asking for ID. We needed beer, so one night I pulled a case out of the refrigerator, slapped the money down on the counter, and when he asked for my driver’s license I said “that’s okay don’t worry about it,” and started heading for the door with the beer tucked under my arm. I knew how much the case of beer cost, including tax, and I had left enough money on the counter to cover it, so it wasn’t like I was stealing the beer. As I continued making my way to the door, the guy ran around the counter and tried wrestling the beer away from me yelling that he was going to call the cops.

I didn’t know what his problem was. The money was sitting there on the counter, but he really didn’t want me to have that beer. I broke loose from his grip and ran out of the gas station and jumped in my parents’ minivan where Fred was sitting in the driver’s seat with it still running, and we sped off with the beer. We had anticipated the guy may flip out and try to get our license plate number and call the police, so before I went in we taped a fake license plate on the back of the minivan. It was a novelty plate from the Back to the Future movie that Fred had gotten at Universal Studios which read “OUTA TIME,” so even if the guy wrote it down, it wasn’t going to do him any good if he gave it to the police.

The guy remembered me the next time I went to the station to get some gas, and he started saying something about calling the police and me stealing beer. (I actually paid for it, remember, I left the right amount of money on the counter, so I didn’t “steal” the beer.) I told him I was sorry and that I was just in a big hurry that day and I must not have been able to understand him with his thick foreign accent. I needed a new fake ID, and fast!

Drinking and driving in Wisconsin when I was a teenager meant drinking while driving, not just drinking and then later getting into your car and driving home. We called it road tripping. A lot of weekends, if we didn’t have anywhere we could go to drink because no one’s parents were gone that night, we would just get some beer and drive around all night drinking and smoking pot. Looking back, this is extremely stupid, but one night our drinking and driving helped save a man’s car and all of his tools from going up in flames. Not that it justifies our stupidity, but at least something good came out of it!

We were driving around out in the country—in the middle of nowhere—when we came across a car on the side of the road with its engine on fire, so we drove to the nearest house about a half mile down the road and got a fire extinguisher and some buckets and we rushed back and put the fire out with the help of water from the drainage ditch on the side of the road. The guy, who was a mechanic, was very thankful since we stopped the fire from spreading to the rest of the car and he said we saved all his tools from being destroyed which were in the trunk. We never imagined our drinking and driving could have helped save a guy’s car from going up in flames which would have ruined his career, but we did.

One night we were driving around while drinking in my friend Toby’s truck when it was absolutely freezing outside, which is common in Wisconsin since the weather sucks for most of the year, when a girl got sick from drinking too much and puked inside the truck as we drove down the freeway. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and she was sitting between Toby and I, and she leaned over me and mumbled “open the door” as she started puking in that direction. I cracked the door open a little bit and at least she was puking in that direction, but she had gotten it all over the door panel, the window, and my leg. We pulled off at the next exit and went to a gas station so we could clean her up and remove the puke splattered on the inside of the truck (and on my jeans). It was disgusting. As if this wasn’t bad enough, it was so cold outside that her puke froze almost instantly on the inside of the window, and we had to use an ice scraper to get it off!

One Friday night when we couldn’t find a place to party, a big group of us all met up in an abandoned house and hung out there all night. The house was in great shape, it just happened to be on a plot of land that was going to get turned into some commercial real estate, so they were going to tear it down. The electricity still worked and everything! It was awesome! We had the whole house to ourselves and didn’t even have to clean up the mess!

After Ken narrowly avoided an open intoxicant ticket by stashing his open beer in the center console between the two bucket seats in my dad’s car when we got pulled over one night, I had an idea. (The cop found my open beer when he searched me, which I hid in my inside jacket pocket, so I did get an open intoxicant ticket that night, but the cop didn’t give me an underage drinking ticket for some reason. You can’t argue with that at least!) Anyway, the summer after high school graduation I bought my first car, a hideously ugly 1981 AMC Concord, but it did the job, and it was all mine. I bought it with my own money, all $900 dollars’ worth. The car had bucket seats in the front and didn’t have a center console between them, so I went to the junkyard and bought one from an old abandoned junker and installed it in my car and added a special false bottom so I could stash beers and my bag of weed under it, so if my car got searched by the cops after getting pulled over, they wouldn’t find anything.

This was a great insurance policy that paid off one night when I got pulled over for speeding and the cop happened to search my car. Just a few minutes earlier we were smoking weed from a small portable water pipe that was now stashed under the false bottom in the console along with a small bag of weed. There was also an empty beer bottle in there from several nights earlier that I forgot to throw away, so I was at risk of getting another open intoxicant ticket, and arrested for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Fortunately, the console had served its purpose. The cop searched the car probably because he smelled marijuana, but he never found anything. I was always very proud of my false-bottom console, and knew it would work just fine if bad luck ever fell upon me.

In order to reduce any suspicion my car may arouse, I went to the local police station and got a D.A.R.E. To Keep Kids Off Drugs bumper sticker and another one that read Back The Badge which showed support for local police officers and I stuck them prominently on my rear bumper. That way if a cop was behind me when I had a carload of people late on a Friday or Saturday night, they would be less likely to think that we were up to no good. It didn’t look like a teenager’s car with a Bob Marley bumper sticker on the back, it looked like a nice innocent family car that must be coming home from a late dinner at grandma’s. It was also a great inside joke among people who knew me since I was a big pothead, yet I had a D.A.R.E. sticker on my car. I’m pretty sure my stickers prevented me from getting pulled over numerous times, when most likely we were drinking beers or smoking pot.

Sometimes when we went to the mall on a Saturday afternoon to mess around we would go to the Taco Bell drive through and order a couple extra-large waters that they gave us for twenty-five cents or something, and we would dump out the water and fill the cups full of beer so we could walk around the mall and still drink. One time we bumped into our friends’ mom and had to talk with her for a minute while we were holding our undercover beers and we tried to keep our distance from her so she wouldn’t smell our breath. We thought about making fake labels to wrap around beer cans to make them look like cans of Pepsi or Mountain Dew so we could drink them in public or when we were driving around so we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone noticing. Did I ever mention that our creativity was usually focused in the wrong direction? You probably figured that out by now.

I narrowly escaped another underage drinking ticket when Diego and I turned the power off to a large billboard overlooking the freeway one night. I know this sounds weird, so let me try to explain. We noticed a house had been moved which is a pretty complicated task that involves literally putting a house on the back of a semi-trailer and driving it to another location. (They really do this sometimes.) We were very curious to see where exactly this house went since we had seen it jacked up a few days earlier as they were preparing to move it.

The house was so heavy that we could see the tire tracks pressed in the blacktop from the trailer carrying it. We followed these tracks for several miles down a long winding country road that led us to a new subdivision being built right next to the freeway. We were drinking, of course, and when we got to the subdivision we couldn’t help but notice a billboard off to the side of the road overlooking the freeway. I usually carried a Swiss Army Knife with me and so I pulled it out and used it to unscrew the cover of an electrical panel on the back of the billboard that revealed a simple switch inside. Well, what would you do when confronted with this situation? I would flip the switch to see what would happen, which is exactly what I did, and the lights illuminating the billboard suddenly turned off. It was the difference between night and day. The whole area was now pitch black and you couldn’t even read the sign.

Diego and I laughed all the way back to the car and started to drive off when we were faced with the red and blue flashing lights of a squad car. The cop must have happened to been driving down the street and noticed the billboard mysteriously turn off and saw us running away from it back to the car.

When I stopped the car and pulled over, the cop turned his spotlight on and yelled for us to put our hands on top of our heads. He walked up to my window with his hand on his gun and asked us what the hell we were doing, so we told him we were just trying to see where the house went when we saw the billboard standing there and just decided to turn it off for fun. He thought we were insane or on drugs, because we were talking about following a house, which didn’t make any sense to him at first. “You wanted to see where the house went?” he asked in a patronizing tone. We tried to explain to him that some workers had moved a house so they could expand the road a few miles back, and we were trying to figure out where they took it. It’s understandable how this would sound insane, since houses don’t usually move.

The cop made me pop the trunk and found nearly a full case of beer sitting back there that we intended to drink that night. He then told me to dump it all out, which was almost a full 24 pack since we had just started drinking. I took a beer out of the case and cracked it open and started pouring out it on the side of the road until it was empty. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.

I then grabbed another one and did the same thing. I cracked it open and started pouring it out. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug…it takes probably 10 or 15 seconds to empty a beer just from pouring it out, and the cop got mad at me and started cracking a bunch of them open himself and setting them upside down on the ground one by one so they would all empty out. “Do it like this!” he yelled, as he cracked a few more open doing the same thing. We would’ve been there all night if I had done it my way, pouring out one beer at a time. I didn’t know how he wanted me to pour them out. There were probably around 20 beers still in the case, so I poured the rest of them out like he had shown me. I told him it was alcohol abuse and he should be ashamed of himself for wasting beer and making me do this.

Diego and I both got disorderly conduct tickets for turning off the billboard, but the cop surprisingly looked the other way about the beer. The worst part was that the cop didn’t even know we had turned the billboard off until we told him! He had pulled us over because we were leaving the construction site for the new subdivision and apparently there had been some problems with people stealing the workers’ tools a few nights ago so he wanted to see what we were doing there. He said, “What the hell are you doing,” so how were we supposed to know that he didn’t just notice the billboard turning off a few seconds earlier and the whole area going dark? He just wanted to make sure we didn’t steal anything from the construction site, which is why he made me pop the trunk.

I’m very embarrassed to admit this, but one of my underage drinking tickets came from two police officers who were riding mountain bikes! It’s pathetic, I know. Fred and I were standing in a parking lot next to my car slamming beers before going into a local festival, when out of nowhere two police officers pulled up on mountain bikes right next to us. We were screwed. We were both holding open beers and were caught red handed. They gave us both underage drinking tickets, and instead of going home discouraged, Fred and I went into the festival as planned and continued drinking. We figured, since we already got tickets for underage drinking, it would be double jeopardy if they ticketed us again, so we figured there was nothing they could do to us if we got caught a second time. We were stupid of course.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin the biggest party of the summer is called Summerfest, which is a beer and music festival downtown, with the emphasis on beer rather than music. People drink so much at Summerfest that halfway through the night, practically every step you take anywhere on the grounds, you crunch or kick a discarded plastic beer cup. They are littered all over the ground, everywhere. Beer at Summerfest, just like most baseball games and other outdoor festivals, is ridiculously expensive, so we would always get drunk before arriving so we could save money on beer once we got there. We were all under 21, but I had a new fake ID so I could just buy four or five beers at a time and hand them off to my friends and nobody would really notice or care. This is Wisconsin, after all.

The ride to Summerfest was often just as fun as the festival itself. We would always leave our car at a Park and Ride and take a shuttle to the fairgrounds, and we would always smuggle beer onto it and slam them on our way. We were the loudest, most intoxicated people on the shuttle. Sometimes we would just throw our empty beer cans out the window right on the freeway. We didn’t care. One time we even smoked a joint when sitting near the back, assuming the smoke would blow out the windows, but the driver smelled it and pulled over on the side of the road and started yelling and screaming at everyone. Oops.

As everyone knows, when someone’s parents go away for the weekend and leave the kids home by themselves, the parents are morons, because their kids will probably have dozens of people over drinking large amounts of beer, hard liquor and smoking weed, and doing who knows what else in the house while they’re gone. Any parent with teenagers who leaves them home alone for the weekend and thinks that their kid isn’t going to do anything crazy is completely naïve. This includes my parents. They never left for a vacation that my brother Stew and I weren’t forced to go with them on, but one summer they left us the whole house all to ourselves. Since it was summer time and there was no school, I threw a party three days in a row, each day getting bigger and bigger, culminating in the sheriff and several deputies showing up on the third night, issuing underage drinking tickets, and giving the town sheriff a personal first-hand look at the inside of my bedroom.

The most interesting part about this was that I had went to my neighbor’s house with her to grab some of her parents’ wine coolers, and as we were walking back to my house I couldn’t help but notice several police officers standing in my kitchen! This was not good. I could clearly see them through the kitchen windows from the backyard. They were cops. Tyra and I crouched down behind some bushes and watched. There were about three or four different police officers walking around inside my house. Everyone who didn’t get out and run was screwed, I had thought. As you probably know, when the cops come to an underage drinking party, people run, and most people get away, so I was hoping that most people were able to get out of there and not get busted.

I certainly wasn’t going to go walking back in there because I had been drinking and there was a keg of beer in my garage, so Tyra and I just hung out in the backyard and watched. It was very surreal. The weirdest part was actually seeing the sheriff standing in my bedroom. My curtains were open, and I could see him standing there as the other officers searched the house. It wasn’t just an ordinary police officer in my room. It was the head of the police department, Sheriff McDonald. Hanging on my walls were various street signs that I had stolen, including the sign from High Street and Eighth Avenue, along with 69th Drive and a student crossing sign that I painted over to make it look like the student figure was crawling on all fours holding a bottle of booze like the popular poster.

After a while, the cops all left and the coast was clear so we went back to the house. Practically everyone had gotten away and the only people busted were my friend Toby and the girl he was making out with in the basement. Obviously there was no place for them to run, and imagine their surprise when they were getting busy on the sofa downstairs, and in walk the cops! Everyone else had gotten away. It was a miracle.

The craziest thing about it was when it was all over, even though the party was at my house and several police officers and the sheriff were able to walk right in through the garage door, and the sheriff found his way to my bedroom, I had gotten off scot-free. It was amazing. They never came back to the house later that night, or even a few days later when my parents were back in town. They never called the house telling my parents what had happened either. They seemed to have forgotten all about it.

There was, however, a little blurb in the local paper in the police report section explaining that the police were called to my address because of a report of a noise violation and an underage drinking party. It even said that several people had gotten underage drinking tickets. I hoped my parents didn’t notice this, and I don’t think they did, but the one thing they did notice was that we had vacuumed the house. My brother and I never vacuumed the house. Ever. As far as my mom knew, we didn’t even know how to work the vacuum cleaner, yet she realized that the carpeting had been freshly vacuumed and knew that something was wrong.

My parents weren’t really mad. They kind of joked about it and said that we must have been so bored while they were gone that we decided to clean the house for something to do. They were probably just glad that nothing was broken and that I didn’t get thrown in jail while they were gone. They probably just thought it was me and a few friends laying low and couldn’t have imagined what actually happened. When it grew to more than a small group of people, I contained it mainly in the garage and basement because I didn’t want people running all over my parents’ house because I didn’t want any dumb drunk people to accidentally break anything or spill beer all over. I wasn’t stupid. I had been to plenty of parties where the house had been completely trashed because the host let it get out of control.

The summer after graduation a friend of mine named Khloe was a passenger in a car that got into an accident on the way home from a party at (name withheld)’s and she was in a coma for several days. We learned of the accident when the police arrived and walked right in the house because the door was unlocked and they claimed they had probable cause to enter the residence because they saw us drinking alcohol through the window. They told us that someone who had left the party got into an accident and was seriously injured and it didn’t look good. We could tell by the looks on their faces that they were serious. They didn’t tell us who it was, which added to our concern, but they made it clear that the person might not live. It wasn’t until the next day that we learned it was Khloe, who remained in a coma.

To make things worse, my older brother Stew had bought the keg for us that night, and if Khloe would have died, then surely there would have been a massive investigation into who bought the beer, and that could have resulted in my brother Stew being charged in connection with manslaughter. (Name withheld)’s parents could have gotten sued too since the party was at their house, even though they were out of town and didn’t know anything about it. Luckily Khloe woke up from her coma after a few days and was okay.

The night of the party a lot of people slept over at the house, sleeping on couches and wherever, because they were too freaked out to drive home drunk after learning about what happened. That next morning on my way home was the first time that I had ever worn my seatbelt in my car. I lived out in the country, remember, and there wasn’t a lot of traffic, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. I had gotten my own car that summer finally, (the 1981 AMC Concord) but I didn’t even know if it had seatbelts because they were stuffed under the seat and I was never concerned with wearing one. From that night on, I would always wear my seatbelt whenever I got into a car.

Juicy Lucy’s

One of the only fast food restaurants open after midnight near our small little town was one named Juicy Lucy’s, which we made a habit of stopping at when we had the munchies on our way home from a night of partying. One of the things we really liked about Juicy Lucy’s was that there was a seating area in the back of the restaurant where no one could see us so we could screw around, throw food, and openly drink beers at our table that we would bring inside.

We also made it a tradition to decorate the windows with ketchup, barbecue sauce, and our leftover chocolate shakes. Practically the entire set of windows in the back would be splattered with something before we left. Half the time we couldn’t contain our laughter as we walked past the cash registers on our way back out to the car. Sometimes we were so stoned when we first arrived, that we could barely even order our food because we were laughing so hard in anticipation of what was about to occur.

One night Rick ordered an extra-large chocolate shake, not to drink, but specifically to throw on the windows. He ordered a Coke or something else to actually drink. As we were getting ready to leave, he took the lid off his cup and flung the ice cream at the window, leaving a chocolate shake trail spanning across multiple different windowpanes that must have been ten-feet-long. One time the manager headed to the back of the restaurant as we left, probably because he recognized us from the last several months and knew we were up to no good back there, and as we were getting into the car, he came running out of the place chasing after us with a mop. We all hopped in the car as fast as we could and took off, and he continued chasing us half-way down the block with that mop still in his hand, probably hoping to beat us with it if he caught up to us.

Aside from throwing chocolate shakes on the windows at Juicy Lucy’s, sometimes we liked to throw our half drank sodas at parked cars as we drove by. These were not cans of soda, so they wouldn’t do any real damage to the car like putting a dent in the side of them; we just thought it was funny to see the paper cup smash into the side of the cars and have soda splatter all over them. One summer evening when Fred threw his extra-large soda at the side of a parked car as we drove past it, the cup went right inside the car and splattered on the dashboard because the driver’s side window was rolled down. This wasn’t just an empty soda cup. This was a half full, extra-large cup that probably soaked the entire front seat of the car. We didn’t intend for this to happen, but at the time we couldn’t stop laughing.

There was one instance when my friend Toby threw a Gatorade bottle at someone riding their bike on the side of the road and hit them in the back. A few days later we heard from one of our friends that someone they knew was talking about how they were riding their bike down whatever road that was, when some car threw something at them and hit them. What a small world.

You’re Never Too Old to Go Trick-or-Treating

Since I could be extremely juvenile and immature, I never really thought I was ever too old to go trick-or-treating. I’m sure most kids stopped when they were in sixth or seventh grade, but senior year Fred and I decided it would be fun to be kids again and go trick-or-treating. I was 6-foot-three inches tall, and certainly didn’t look like a kid who should be trick-or-treating, but I thought it would be fun anyway. I put some black makeup all over my face, got some black leather gloves and a fake knife and went as O.J. Simpson, and since we didn’t have too much time to put costumes together, Fred painted his face black too and decided to go as Johnny Cochran, O.J.’s lawyer.

After we put our costumes on we drove around in his truck waiting until trick-or-treating started and tipped back a few beers and smoked some weed, and I can’t tell you how many strange looks we got from people. When trick-or-treating began, we went all over town collecting candy door-to-door, and happened to bump into several honor students who were dressed up too. We were surprised, not only because we weren’t the only immature ones to go out trick-or-treating senior year of high school, but these were honor students, and we never would have imagined that they would be so immature too.

When we stopped to talk to them, we realized that they weren’t trick-or-treating for candy, they were part of a program that was trick-or-treating for canned goods to then donate to the Salvation Army or some other charity. Wow did we feel dumb! Of course they weren’t so immature that they would go trick-or-treating like us! There we were, being complete jackasses, drunk, dressed up in blackface, collecting candy from all the houses, and there they were helping the needy. It really highlighted how messed up we were in the head.

We were a little embarrassed. They didn’t even think it was funny what we were doing. They looked at us like we were insane. They smelled the beer on our breath too. They were the only people we knew that we had bumped into that night, and I’m sure that they couldn’t help but tell others that they found us trick-or-treating when we were drunk and dressed up as O.J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran.

Marijuana Use

As you may have gathered, I was a big pothead in high school. I always looked at it as a spiritual experience, not like I was doing drugs. I wasn’t a burn out, I pretty much was considered a prep, but I hung out with everyone. I was friends with the preps, the jocks, the burnouts, the nerds, and the loners. I liked everyone, I just happen to like to smoke a lot of pot, and so did Fred and Rick.

Rick had his own car, and he was often the driver for our weekend partying, and since it was his car and not his parents, we didn’t have to worry about it smelling like smoke the next day like I did with my parents’ car. By the time senior year came around the seats in Rick’s car were absolutely covered with countless little burn marks from when the cherry fell off the joints we were passing around and landed on the seat, singeing the fabric. We called them potholes as a play on words, because that’s what they were from. Get it? Duh. We were so clever.

If you’ve ever smoked a joint before, you know that sometimes the burning weed can fall off the tip of the joint onto the ground. This is called the cherry, and if you’ve smoked joints in a car, you know that it’s bad news when the cherry falls off because it will most likely burn a small hole in the fabric of the seat (or through your pants). Rick’s car didn’t just have a small hole burned in the seat, it had dozens of them. Actually more than dozens. Seriously, probably more than 100 of them from our years of road tripping and pot smoking.

The first day of class senior year I arrived at school a few minutes early and Rick pulled in and parked in the spot next to me and hopped into my parents’ minivan, where we then smoked a bowl before heading into class and beginning our senior year. A few hours later in study hall, the teacher, Mr. Michaels was taking attendance and when he called my name I raised my hand and said “here,” to which he answered, “better be careful what you’re doing in the parking lot before school,” and then went on to call the next name on his list.

I immediately knew what happened, because there was a window just outside his classroom in the hallway that overlooked the school parking lot. He must have been standing there watching in the morning, and saw Rick pull up next to me, hop into the passenger side of my parents’ minivan, and moments later saw plumes of smoke wafting out of the windows.

Mr. Michaels was pretty cool, and most teachers would have told the principal, or perhaps even called the police to have me or my vehicle searched to find the weed, but I think Mr. Michaels just wanted me to know that he wasn’t stupid. He lived just four houses away from me too, just around the corner.

I did a lot of dumb things involving weed (go figure) but I never got caught with it. While I had tremendous bad luck with underage drinking tickets and other alcohol related charges, I only had two close calls with marijuana, but never got busted. One time I was in a car with a bunch of people at a park smoking a bowl when a cop pulled up. It was late at night and the park was closed, and a car full of four teenagers on a Saturday night is obviously something that should be looked into. I had what I called a “dope bag,” which was a small black bag made of a thick fabric with a zipper on it that I carried my pipe in, rolling papers, and of course, the baggie of weed. I carried all contraband in the dope bag for a good reason.

As the cop pulled up and flicked on his lights, I had whoever was holding the pipe at the time pass it back to me and I put it out by wetting my thumb and capping the top of the bowl for a moment, and then put it in the dope bag and then crotched it. If you don’t know what “crotching it” means, I slid the bag down inside of my underwear near my balls and it was held there by my tighty-whitey underwear so if the cop searched us, he would most likely not find it since my pockets would be empty.

It’s a good thing I did this, because he searched all of us (he obviously smelled the marijuana smoke that was still lingering in the air), and if the contraband was in my pocket, he would have found it and I would have been arrested for possession of marijuana. The one thing in my pocket, however, that I forgot about, was a small cap for the pipe that we were smoking. This cap screwed on the top of the bowl and had resin (pot residue) on the threads, and the cop found it when he searched my pockets and asked me what it was. I told him it was a part for my lawnmower which I was fixing earlier that day (a complete lie), and he didn’t think anything of it. It was a close call, but the dope bag worked. You know, I learned in Boy Scouts to “be prepared,” although I’m sure this was not what they had in mind.

I remember one time, a friend of mine named Benjamin and I actually smoked a joint inside the school. There was a place underneath a staircase where there was a soda machine, and if you were standing in front of this machine, you couldn’t be seen from anyone in the hallway. We really wanted to get high, but we couldn’t skip class that day without getting an unexcused absence, so we each got a hall pass to go to the bathroom and met by the soda machine and quickly smoked a joint there. There was a door leading to the tennis courts right there that we cracked open and tried to blow the smoke outside so it wouldn’t stink up the hallway, but the breeze really just blew the smoke inside the school, instead of sucking it out the door. The whole hallway quickly smelled like weed, and we later heard that one of the teachers was searching the hallways trying to find out the source of this strange stench. Luckily we sucked down our joint and got out of there pretty quickly.

An idea we got from the movie Dazed and Confused involved smoking a joint on the 50-yard-line on the football field, which we did late one night after we carried a five-gallon gas can on the field and poured out “Fuck You” in the grass, killing it in that area, so for the rest of the year there was a huge ten-foot-tall brown Fuck You in the football field. Hey, at least we didn’t light the “Fuck You” on fire, so you gotta cut us some slack! I mean, we thought about it, but came to our senses realizing it might burn more than just some letters in the grass.

I remember one day after school I was hanging out with a stoner from the grade ahead of me because I didn’t have any weed so I went to his house with him to smoke a bowl on my way home. There were a couple other people who came with us, and as we were passing it around his mom walked into the living room! I don’t remember who was holding the bowl at that time, but Gavin didn’t seem to care and neither did his mom. We just kept passing it around and smoking it while he introduced us all to her. As if smoking weed in front of some kid’s mom in her living room wasn’t weird enough, she somehow knew my mom and had worked with her on some community project at one point.

“So how’s your mom doing?” she asked. “Oh she’s great,” I responded as I took a hit off the pipe. We continued chatting for a minute about whatever project my mom was doing at the time. This was weird. I was talking with one of my mom’s friends, or at least an acquaintance, while I was smoking weed with her son and a few other guys in her living room. I guess it could’ve been worse, like if she actually cared and busted us, because then she could tell my mom what we were doing, but she was totally cool with it. I was a sophomore or a junior in high school at the time.

After I was thrown out of school senior year (a story I’ll get into later), the gym class I was in had a bike riding session where everyone would bring their bike to school and the class would go out riding around town for an hour with the teacher. Since I only lived a mile or so away from the school, they rode past my house one afternoon yelling my name and I heard them through the window, so I hopped on my bike and joined them. I also brought a joint with me, and a few of us smoked it as we were driving around the town, passing it to each other from bike to bike.

The gym teacher was at the head of the pack, and all the smoke was blowing behind us, so he didn’t notice. I don’t think he would have cared even if he knew. One time at a basketball game I was talking to him at the concession stand, and he said, “You smell like alcohol, get away from me.” He didn’t tell the cops, which were always there, he didn’t tell the principal, he just wanted me to get away from him. Everybody always liked Mr. Birch. He liked to call people boneheads when they were being stupid. “You bonehead!” he would always yell, and then it would usually echo bouncing off the walls or the ceiling. Gym teachers are always the coolest.

Posting New Traffic Signs Around Town

A lot of kids steal street signs and hang them in their rooms, which of course I did with the Main Street sign, 69th Drive, Eighth Avenue, High Street, and a student crossing sign, but one night we thought it would be funny to move some signs around, instead of just stealing them, so we unbolted a stop sign and decided to put it up somewhere else where there wasn’t even an intersection. We took the stop sign from a small four-way stop in the middle of nowhere on a road that no one used so nobody would blow through the intersection and get into an accident (safety first, you know), and we took it over to Main Street right where it entered the town.

We unbolted a speed limit sign, and then put up the stop sign in its place and hid in the corn field along the side of the road to see if cars would stop, and they actually did! There was absolutely no logical reason why a stop sign would be in this spot, and there wasn’t even an intersection or a cross street for another mile, but most cars still obeyed the sign and stopped right there in the middle of the road. The next day some city workers removed the sign.

A few weeks later on another night when we were bored, we took down a dead end sign and put it up in the same spot we had put the stop sign. We figured it was fitting, since we hated our small town and thought it was a dead end to life, so the new sign seemed very appropriate. Another time we changed the name of Main Street at the central intersection in the town. We scaled the telephone poll that the street name was posted on, and switched it with another sign. That one was up for weeks before anyone switched it back. I also used a black magic marker to add a bottle of booze to all the student crossing signs around town so they looked like the figures crossing the road were carrying large bottles of alcohol.

We also unbolted a handicapped parking sign from the school parking lot that was right by the entrance and moved it to the very back of the parking lot. Of course, it didn’t make any sense for a handicapped spot to be so far away from the door, which is why we moved it, and it stayed there for months before it was moved back. The funniest part was that nobody would ever park there because it was a “handicapped zone” and nobody wanted to get a ticket so that parking spot stayed empty every day.

Climbing the Radio Towers

Probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done (aside from drinking and driving) was when Diego and I decided to climb up a radio tower one night even though we were drinking and it was almost freezing outside. I’m sure you’ve seen these types of towers. They’re usually in clusters of five or more, and they have a series of red flashing lights on them so that airplanes won’t crash into them at night. They’re several hundred feet tall, and out by us, they were often in the middle of a clearing in a farmer’s field somewhere. These towers look pretty tall when you’re driving past them off in the distance, but when you’re standing directly underneath them, they seem to go on forever. We noticed the towers had ladders built into the scaffolding on the outside that led as far up as the eye could see, so we somehow got the idea to climb one.

The built-in ladder had a special railing on the side of it that was used to attach a safety harness for workers who would climb them so if they lost their grip they would only fall about 10 feet until the harness would catch and save them. Of course, we didn’t have any safety harness, but we didn’t care.

We weren’t drunk, but we had been drinking a little, as usual for a Friday or Saturday night, and it was winter time and so cold outside that we were wearing jackets, hats and gloves. Climbing a ladder while wearing gloves is probably not the smartest thing to do since you’re not as dexterous, and gloves can probably slip off the rung easier than your bare hand would, and climbing a ladder that’s located in the middle of a farmer’s field attached to the side of a radio tower extending hundreds of feet into the air after you’ve been drinking is even dumber.

I went up first, and Diego began climbing just a few feet below me. These towers had about four or five different red flashing lights spaced out at equal distances, and when we got to the first light we were so high that we could see for miles. It felt like we were 20 or 30 stories up, but we wanted to get to the very top of the tower, so we kept climbing. After a while, we made it to the second light and stopped for a moment to rest. As we looked down below, the first light was so far beneath us it was just a tiny speck. It felt like we could see half way across the state we were so high. The landscape was filled with countless tiny illuminated dots from street lights, porch lights, lighted signs on businesses, and headlights from cars on the freeway off in the distance.

We couldn’t believe how high up we were, and we actually started to get a little freaked out. We were getting pretty tired from the constant climbing, and we worried that if we went much higher we might not have the strength to get back down, so we rested for a few minutes by the second light and then slowly began our descent. When we reached the ground we breathed a sigh of relief and tipped our heads up, gazing at the sky in awe of the amazing height of the structure we had just climbed. Our forearms were tight and we had a slightly hard time opening and closing our hands from the climb.

After we got back in the car and started driving off down the country road that led us to the towers, we looked back at them marveling at their awesomeness and realized that we had only made it up about 2/5 of the way, because there were another three lights above the point where we had reached. We also reflected on how risky that just was, and realized how dumb we were.

Cliff Jumping

There was a huge rock quarry in a neighboring city that was filled up with close to 100 feet of water after workers unexpectedly struck an underground spring, so it was turned into a local swimming spot since it obviously couldn’t be mined anymore. There was also a secluded area at “the quarry” where people would go cliff jumping at night, which was very illegal, but during the hot summer nights in Wisconsin this was always a good time. One night when we were out there cliff jumping, a bunch of cops showed up and we all scattered into the surrounding woods to escape. Instead of being satisfied that they stopped us from cliff jumping, the police searched the woods for several hours looking for us in the darkness. There weren’t just one or two cops; there were a half dozen or more who made it their mission to find us that night. They had flashlights of course which gave away their position, so we could usually tell where they were and we snuck off in the opposite direction.

There was an urban legend that if you got busted for cliff jumping you would get a ticket for attempted suicide or reckless endangerment or something, and none of us certainly wanted that. At the very least we would probably get ticketed for trespassing since the quarry was closed and we had snuck in by hopping a fence. If you’ve ever seen the first Rambo movie when Sylvester Stallone is on the run from the police in the middle of a forest somewhere, that’s how we felt. Wisconsin is a very wooded area full of trees, bushes, and weeds, which we were able to disappear into once we saw the cops.

It was as if we were escaped inmates from a prison and the police had to find us. They just wouldn’t give up. The police chase was a lot of fun, and I never got caught, but a few of my friends did and were charged with trespassing. The cops left a note on my brother’s car, which was parked at a restaurant across the street, where all cliff jumpers left their cars when they snuck into the quarry late at night. The note said something about how they knew who he was and that he would be hearing from them shortly, but he never did. They were just trying to scare us in order to prevent us from coming back. It didn’t work, and the police chase only made cliff jumping more exciting knowing that at any moment we could be on the run again.

That night was also the latest I had ever come home because we were stuck in the woods for several hours evading the police. I didn’t really have a set curfew, but I usually made it home by around 1:00AM, and that night I don’t think my brother and I got home until about 3:00 o’clock in the morning. Our mom was not happy, but at least we didn’t get tickets like some of the others. And since we actually did come home, and weren’t dead or in jail, my mom forgot about it after briefly scolding us the next morning about being out so late.

The Spud Gun

No kid with a garage full of tools and any sort of engineering abilities should grow up without building a spud gun, I had thought, so one evening some friends and I all went to Home Depot and bought the necessary PVC pipes and fittings, along with the lantern flints to fire them. We got enough parts to make three or four different guns and even decorated them with paint so they looked really cool. I painted “Mr. Potato Gun” on the side of mine.

After our guns were assembled we went out and bought some Aqua Net hairspray, which is used as the fuel, and got a sack of potatoes and headed out to a clearing in the middle of a farmer’s field to test them out. They worked great! We would just shove a potato down the barrel with an old broom handle and spray some Aqua Net hairspray in the chamber and with one flick of the lantern flint—boom! The potato would shoot out like a cannon ball. There was nothing really to shoot at in the middle of a farmer’s field, so a few days later after school we took mine out in my parents’ minivan to test it in a more urban environment. We didn’t wear any eye protection in case the PVC pipe blew up in our face. No, we just figured it would hold, and thankfully it did.

I was driving, Fred was in the passenger seat, and Ken was in the back seat with Mr. Potato Gun as we headed into the neighboring town to have some fun. Ken would load up the gun in the back seat and just like a scene out of The A-Team, he would pull open the sliding door, take aim at a road sign, and fire away. He would then slam the door shut as we drove off laughing. Potato guns are not exactly quiet, and it wouldn’t have been that difficult for someone to get my license plate number after they heard a loud boom and saw what looked like the barrel of a cannon sticking out from the side of the minivan. We didn’t think of this at the time, because, well, you know why. We were dumb kids.

We did this for perhaps fifteen minutes or so, and when shooting road signs lost its novelty, we started shooting at parked cars and houses until we broke someone’s window and then figured we should quit and get the heck out of there. The window was from someone’s house that Ken shot and we all heard it shatter. I can’t imagine what the people must have thought, especially if they were home at the time, when all of a sudden one of their windows shattered and when they looked to see what had happened they would find a splattered potato lying in their living room. They probably thought one of the neighbor kids did it. I don’t think anyone could have imagined it was drive-by shooting with a spud gun.

A few nights later we took some of the extra potatoes and shoved them up tailpipes on people’s parked cars because we heard that if you did this, the car wouldn’t start. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but we thought we would give it a try.

Instead of just shooting potatoes, I discovered that my spud gun could also be turned into a deadly dart gun. By taking a large 3 or 4 inch nail and wrapping a cardboard cone around the head and hot gluing it in place, the darts could be slid down the barrel of the potato gun and would shoot across the entire distance of my parents’ basement and still stick into a piece of wood or lodge themselves into the wall. I shot one dart almost straight up into the air in my backyard to see how high it would go, and when the dart came down it stuck into the neighbor’s roof. Better than landing on someone’s windshield, which it would have smashed, and certainly better than landing on someone’s head which would have probably killed them instantly. I neglected to think about these dangers at the time.

We had occasionally talked about creating a semi-automatic spud gun that could shoot 8 or 10 potatoes, one right after the other, but we never got around to it. I did, however, make a blowgun out of a small PVC pipe and the mouth of a two liter soda bottle that was a lot of fun to shoot at rabbits in my mom’s garden. I also made a miniature dart gun that worked pretty well by attaching a small blowgun to a CO2 powered BB gun. I can thank The A-Team for inspiring those creations. Who says television doesn’t give kids bad ideas? It certainly gave me plenty.

Swiss Army Knife Fun

I always liked to carry a Swiss Army Knife with me wherever I went, not as a weapon, but because the knife and other tools came in handy to fix things, open things, and to try all kinds of things I saw on MacGyver. When using the toilet in the bathroom stall at school, I happened to notice that the door and wall panels were connected using brackets fastened with large screws, so after I was done doing my business, I whipped out the handy screwdriver gadget and I unscrewed the hinges from the door, and was able to prop the door back in place so when the very next person who used the stall would walk up to it and give the door a shove to swing it open, instead of opening, it would completely fall off!

As I’m sure you know, bathroom stall doors are very heavy, and are often made of large steel panels and sometimes when I was only 20 or 30 feet away from the bathroom, as I walked back to class, I could hear the door come crashing down to the floor, hitting the toilet on its way down because somebody had went to use the stall. I can’t tell you how loud a bathroom stall door is as it crashes on the floor and bashes against the panels in the stall on its way down.

Sometimes using my handy Swiss Army Knife I would remove almost the entire stall itself and set the panels up against the wall. After a while, the school janitor started using one-way tamperproof screws to put them together so once they were tightened, they couldn’t be removed. These screws only had an edge that would catch the screwdriver if you turned them to the right to tighten them, but if you turned the screwdriver left to loosen them, the screwdriver wouldn’t catch, so you couldn’t remove them. It was a good idea on their part.

I also liked to turn the water off to all the sinks and unscrew the nozzle and take the screens out of them to use in my marijuana pipes. You have to admit that to your average teenage boy, the idea of people finishing taking a crap and then when they try to turn on the sink, nothing comes out, it is pretty funny. It is disgusting, but it is a little funny. Some of the bathrooms had small plastic trash cans, so occasionally I would cut the bottom out with my knife so when the janitor would pick it up to dump it out, all the discarded paper towels and trash would fall out on the floor. I was an asshole, I know.

Jamming Drinking Fountains

A fun and extremely childish (and dangerous) thing that I would occasionally do involved tampering with the drinking fountains so they would spray on the floor, filling half the hallway with water. Most of the drinking fountains shot out two streams of water that joined together into one, and I noticed that one of the streams was a lot larger than the other, so I would clog it with a spit-ball and then jam a folded up piece of paper into the panel that you would push to turn it on, which would leave it running. Once the large hole was clogged, all the water was forced out the small one which caused it to shoot over the edge of the fountain and onto the floor because of the increased water pressure.

I would do this sometimes when I had gotten a hall pass to use the bathroom in the middle of class and on my way back I would jam the fountains and they would go on spraying for 20 minutes or so without anybody noticing, and by that time the hallway was completely full of water. There was really no way to prevent me from doing this and every time I did, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I walked back to class and I could hardly keep the smile off of my face when I sat back down in my desk. People sitting around me often knew that I had done something by the look on my face, but they weren’t sure what.

After a while the school changed all the fountain heads to ones that only had one stream of water, so my little trick wouldn’t work anymore. Looking back on this, I realize how dangerous it really was because someone could have easily slipped on the thin layer of water on the floor and thrown their back out or broke their arm or even their head. That certainly was not my intention, and thankfully this never happened. Thinking about the negative consequences of my actions was not exactly one of my strong points back then.

A “Kidnapping”

Fred, Brent, and I were out shopping one Saturday or Sunday afternoon when we got the idea to pretend to abduct Brent in the parking lot of a store right in front of a bunch of people. He left the store a minute before Fred and I did and as we walked out of the door I yelled “there he is” and we ran over to him, pretended to assault him by throwing fake punches and then threw him in the trunk of my dad’s car and sped off. There were several people about 10 or 15 feet from us when we had done this and nobody said a thing. We had hoped someone would try to stop us, but they just stood there frozen. Nobody ever yelled at us or yelled for help as it was happening.

We didn’t think about it at the time, but someone could have easily written down the license plate number and the cops could have put out an APB for the car, or the police could have shown up to my parents’ house shortly afterwards investigating a reported kidnapping. Thankfully this never happened. Years later I saw an episode of MTV’s Jackass where they staged a kidnapping of Brad Pitt, who was playing along, where a black van pulled up and snatched him in front of a crowd of people, so we weren’t the only jackasses to think of this kind of stunt.

Smashing Mailboxes

I think every kid in a small town knows what smashing mailboxes is. I’m sure that kids have been smashing mailboxes for decades, but I think the film Dazed and Confused probably multiplied the instances of this practice immeasurably—at least for my generation. Basically, for fun on occasion we would drive past people’s mailboxes and throw things at them like beer bottles, large rocks, garbage cans or construction barricades, and knock the mailboxes off their stands. In some instances we would just stop the car and get out and kick the mailboxes over when we didn’t have anything to throw at them. We just didn’t do this to one or two mailboxes. We did it to dozens of them, and one night we must have smashed every mailbox on every street in a several mile radius out in the country. It made the newspaper a few days later. This is what kids did before they had the Internet and Facebook to waste all their time on.

Our usual method for smashing mailboxes involved the driver pulling the car over near the edge of the road and the person in the passenger seat would sit on the window sill and grab a garbage can that was set out for collection, and then the driver would speed up and pull over close enough to a mailbox so the passenger could hit it with the garbage can (or whatever we were using as projectiles).

One night, Fred almost broke his arm and Ken’s passenger door got a large hole poked through it because the construction barricade Fred threw at a mailbox flipped around after hitting it and smashed into the side of the car and smacked Fred’s arm. Of course Ken’s mom wondered what the heck happened to his car so he made up some story I’m sure she didn’t believe. That put an end to our mailbox smashing spree and we found other things to keep us entertained.

Pouring Salt Water in Vending Machine

We heard an urban legend somewhere that if you pour saltwater into the coin slot of a vending machine, it will short out and start dumping free sodas and quarters out of the coin return. The theory was, that since the saltwater is electrically conductive, as it’s flowing inside the machine, once it hit the electrical components it would cause all sorts of problems and short it out, dumping its contents. It seemed like a logical idea, and what kid doesn’t want free sodas and handfuls of free quarters to play arcade games with? We sure did, so one night we thought we would test this theory.

We took a cup of water and mixed in several tablespoons of salt and brought it to a soda machine outside the local car wash and poured it into the coin slot. We were ready to run because we feared that the machine would start sparking or blow up, but nothing happened. We thought maybe there wasn’t enough salt in the water, or maybe we didn’t use enough water, so we went back to the house and got a huge pitcher and mixed in a bunch of salt and went back to the machine and tried it again. This time, we even used a paper funnel to make sure as much water as possible went into the coin slot, but still, nothing happened. It looks like we would have to continue paying for our sodas after all. We didn’t think about it at the time, but we probably ran the risk of getting electrocuted just by trying this stupid stunt.

Apparently an episode of MacGyver in the early 1990s showed this trick being done, and from doing a little research on the Internet after I wrote the first draft of this story, it looks like the salt water trick actually worked in some machines in the 1980s and early 90s, but eventually the manufacturers changed their designs to prevent this from happening.

Creating an “Earthquake”

We knew one of the neighbor girls was home alone and her parents were out of town for the night, so we thought it would be fun to climb on her roof and start jumping up and down to scare the crap out of her. I knew from when my dad was walking around on our roof cleaning out the gutters, I could hear his every step and it would rattle the house, so I figured jumping up and down would create quite a disturbance—and it did. It shook the whole house and we could hear her and her sister screaming from inside. She said she thought it was an earthquake. I’m surprised the plaster on the ceiling inside the house didn’t crack. That would have been hard to explain to her parents, not to mention hard for me to pay to fix it!

We tried the earthquake thing again to a different girl in the neighborhood one other night, and her neighbor saw us climb onto the roof and once we were up there he started screaming at us thinking we were Peeping Toms. “You perverts!” he kept yelling as he ran over carrying a broom. “What do you think you’re doing!” We jumped off the roof and took off running into the corn field behind her house. He ran right after us, just repeating himself over and over again. “You perverts! You perverts!” At least he didn’t think we were trying to break into the house. We lost him in the cornfield, so thankfully we didn’t get beaten by his broom.

Tapping Telephones

Another idea I got from watching The A-Team involved opening up the telephone boxes located in the back yards of various neighborhoods, and using an old telephone with alligator clips attached on the wires I was able to clip them onto the telephone terminals inside the box, essentially tapping the telephone of that home. There was approximately one telephone box per 10 or 15 houses, and they were always located in people’s back yards where the property lines met. Inside these boxes were two columns of terminals with each pair connecting to the phone line of a different home.

Late one night I brought my make-shift telephone tap and opened up one of the boxes and attached my device to a pair of terminals. To my surprise, I heard a dial tone, and my phone actually worked! It was just like I had seen on TV! In order for me to hear anyone’s conversation, they had to actually be on the phone at that time, but this wasn’t the only cool thing I could do. I was also able to make long distance telephone calls that would then show up on that person’s bill.

We thought it would be funny to call a few 1-900 psychic lines that charge your phone bill a few dollars a minute and mess with the psychics for a while since we didn’t have to pay for it because whoever’s phone line we were tapping into would get the charges on their next bill. We sat in the grass next to the box and laughed thinking how strange it would be when whoever’s phone line we were using got their next bill and there would be a $30 charge to a 1-900 psychic hotline. We also made various prank phone calls, not worrying if the recipients had caller ID, because it wasn’t our parents’ phone number that would appear on the display; it would be the person whose phone we were tapping into.

I downloaded instructions one time on how to make a blue box and a black box, which are phone phreaking tools (phone phreaking is a slang term for basically hacking telephones). Back in the day, a black box enabled people to call you from long-distance and have nothing show up on their phone bill, and a blue box enabled you to make long-distance phone calls to anywhere you wanted for free. The blue box was too complicated for us to build at the time, but we did toy around and make the black box, but we’re not sure if it worked because we didn’t know anyone that could call from long distance to test it out. These devices probably wouldn’t have worked anyway because by the 1990s the phone companies were well aware of phone phreaking and had implemented safeguards to prevent people from messing with their system and getting free phone calls.

Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built blue boxes that actually worked back when they were in college in the late 1960’s, something I didn’t learn about until years later when I saw the film Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Video Game Crimes

Like most kids, I enjoyed playing video games quite a bit. I had an Atari, then a Nintendo Entertainment System, and later bought the Sega Genesis. My junior year of high school the Sega Saturn came out, which was the most advanced video game system at the time and instead of using cartridges, the games were on CDs since they could hold more information. The Sega Saturn was a videogame player’s dream come true. It was also $400, which I didn’t have, but I really needed a new video game system because the Genesis was becoming a thing of the past, so I came up with a plan. It was sort of luck at first, which I then turned into a full-blown enterprise.

While looking around at a Best Buy electronics store, I just happened to notice that the UPC barcode on the box for the Sega Menacer light gun (for shooting games) was just a sticker. The Menacer was selling for $99.99 at this time, so I peeled the UPC off the box and stuck it over the UPC on the Sega Saturn and carried it up to the counter and bought it. I just saved myself $300. I was amazed. It didn’t feel like I really stole anything since I technically bought it. I just bought it at a discount. A 75% discount. Hey, $100 bucks to a teenager in the 1990s was a lot of money! The cashier didn’t notice anything. They just scanned the barcode and took my money and let me bring my brand new Sega Saturn home with no questions asked. I suddenly saw a whole new world of possibilities.

A few days later I went back to the store with Fred and did the same thing and he bought a Sega Saturn for $99.99. The video games themselves were $49.99, and I thought that was too much, so I found some other products that sold for around $10, which also had barcodes that were stickers and I peeled them off and stuck them on the video games I wanted and bought them at a discount too. A few other friends of mine wanted Sega Saturns too but didn’t want to pay $400, so I went back and bought a few more over the next week or two, and then sold them for $200, which was half price from the cost at the store, so I made $100 from each one, and my friends got brand new Sega Saturns for half price.

Few products had barcodes that were made of stickers that I could just peel off and put on something else. Most products have the UPC code printed on the package, but I did notice that the information tag for each product that was stuck on the shelf not only listed the price and product information for each item, but they also had the UPC code printed right on them as well. I slid some of these information sheets out of their clear plastic sleeves and stuck them in my pocket and took them to Office Depot and photocopied them and glued the new UPC onto a mailing label sticker so all I had to do was walk into Best Buy and use my own homemade UPC code to stick on whatever product I wanted.

Equally shameful was the fact that we took the scissors, glue, and mailing label stickers off the shelf from Office Depot and used them to make the fake UPCs, and then put everything back on the shelves and only paid for a few 10-cent photocopies.

The first thing I bought was a brand new $2000 computer for $75. That’s about a 96% discount. It was a pretty good deal. Since my parents’ bought my first computer, they knew how expensive they were, so I couldn’t just walk into the house carrying a brand new one, so I went to my room, opened the window and pulled out the screen, and Fred came around back with it and handed it to me from outside. Just in case my dad realized the brand was different than the one he had bought me a few years earlier, I cut out the logo from the old computer’s user manual and glued it over the name of the new one.

The following week I went to a different Best Buy with one of my homemade UPC stickers and purchased a $1000 scanner for another $75 bucks. I also bought a few more video games and a copy of the Windows 95 operating system, which I paid $10 for. I figured Bill Gates had enough money already. If I didn’t like a video game after getting it home and trying it out, I would shrink wrap it and return it as if it were new. I would tell the store I lost the receipt, and they would give me in-store credit and then I would just trade it for another video game to see if I liked that one.

For a while I was taking the old video games to a local hobby store that had a shrink wrapping machine and they would charge me a few dollars to shrink wrap each game. Most of the guys there didn’t care and probably knew what I was doing, but after a while they implemented a new policy, and they wouldn’t shrink wrap my games anymore, so I came up with a way to do it myself by using window insulator kits and a heat gun. A window insulator is a sheet of thin plastic that you put over the windows in your house during the winter that helps to prevent cold air from coming in and saves you money on your heating bill. Once the plastic is in place and taped around the window frame, you use a hair dryer to heat it and it shrinks tightly around the window so it doesn’t obstruct the view. Just as I figured, it also worked as shrink-wrapping material as well.

What clerk is going to imagine that a 17-year-old kid played a video game for a month and then had the thing shrink wrapped in order to return it for a different game? You have to admit, it was a genius idea. The insulator kits had enough plastic to shrink wrap several games and only cost a few dollars. After a while, I started returning empty boxes to the stores and would keep the game. They never opened the box to check to see if it was in there because it looked like it was still factory sealed, so how were they going to know it was missing? They didn’t, well, that is until I returned too many empty video game boxes to one particular Toys “R” Us location and then they must have implemented a new policy to check all video games to make sure that they were actually in the box when someone brought them back.

Imagine my surprise when I was returning another game and the clerk opened up the box and found there was no disk inside! There I was, in the middle of Toys “R” Us standing at the customer service counter clearly caught red handed. I could have stayed there and pretended like I was just as surprised as the lady at the counter, but they could have easily called the cops and I didn’t want to deal with that, so I said, “I’ll be right back,” and I walked away and headed for the exit. As soon as I got outside I started running to my car, jumped in and took off. I had just gotten the car a few weeks before and hadn’t received my license plates yet, so I was relieved that even if they had followed me out to the parking lot, they couldn’t have gotten my license plate number since there were no plates on the car! While I was glad that I had gotten away, I was disappointed that I still didn’t have any new video games since I was bored with the ones I had.

It’s interesting that while Fred and I were driving around smoking weed and “pulling scams” as we called it, we were usually listening to Eazy-E rap about pretty much the same thing: partying, hustling, screwing the system, and in the words of Eazy-E, just not giving a fuck. It was like we were living the kind of life he was rapping about. We felt like untouchable rock star gangsters.

I continued to push the envelope with my homemade UPCs and traveled to different Best Buy stores in the area because I wanted more computer equipment. I really wanted a laser printer but they were very expensive, so I made another UPC and went to buy one at a discount. This time, the clerk actually realized it was an expensive laser printer but the cash register showed it was only $50. She knew something was wrong and called a manager for a price check. I knew this would turn into a problem so I told her I left my wallet in the car and I would be back in just a second, and I calmly walked out of the store and got in the car and took off. The car wouldn’t start right away and took a few tries before the engine started firing so I could get out of there, which wasn’t very fun.

All I needed was a laser printer, and I felt my computer collection would be complete. Imagine the possibilities. The best scanner on the market, a brand new top-of-the-line computer, the newest software, and a laser printer. The possibilities were endless and I really had my heart set on that laser printer so I went to a different Best Buy and tried it again. You have to understand that in the 1990s this type of equipment was not common place in every household. In fact, back when I was a kid, only businesses and schools had laser printers and scanners because they were so expensive.

This time the cashier didn’t notice the price was suspiciously low. She didn’t even really look to see what product it was. She just mindlessly scanned the barcode and asked for the amount the cash register showed. I paid $50 cash, and she thanked me for my purchase. “No, thank you,” I said, grinning as I picked up my brand-new laser printer and headed for the door. To my unpleasant surprise, the security system started beeping as soon as I passed the checkpoint on my way out. Apparently one of the security tags had not been neutralized at the cash register.

The guy at the security desk asked to see the receipt and I nervously handed it to him, but when he compared the item number on the receipt to the item number on the box, they didn’t match up. The printer had two UPCs printed on the box, one on the front and one on the back, and I had only stuck my fake UPC over one of them which I strategically placed in view of the cashier when I set it on the counter so that would be the one she scanned. The security guy was confused at first, and the cashier, who was just a few feet away, acknowledged that I had just purchased it 10 seconds earlier.

I could see this was not going to go well so I said quietly to Fred, who was standing right there with me, “Go. Just go,” and I darted my eyes at the door. He wasn’t sure what I meant so I took off running, leaving the printer on the guy’s counter and my $50 in cash register and Fred ran out the door right after me. It was too close of a call. It was the second time that trying to get the printer caused a problem, and this time the guy followed us out to the parking lot so we couldn’t go to Fred’s truck because he’d get the license plate number, so we just kept running down the block and had to come back later to get it.

We waited about a half hour and then Fred went back to the parking lot to retrieve his truck while I waited down the block. As he was backing out of the parking space he saw the security guy standing right behind the truck and he was writing down the license plate number on a pad of paper! Fred stepped on the gas and almost backed right into the guy, causing him to jump out of the way and then took off and came down the block to pick me up and we got out of there.

I then retired from creating my own UPCs. It wasn’t long after this that Best Buy started sticking the security tags over the top of the UPC codes, and they started putting the video games in security cases that had to be unlocked at the register using a special key. So even though we had gotten a bunch of discounted computer hardware, software, and video games from them, I figured we actually helped Best Buy by showing them a major flaw in their operation and prevented other people like us from taking advantage of them on an even larger scale.

Thankfully the cops never did show up at Fred’s house. It was a stressful few weeks after that close call. The security guy at Best Buy must not have been able to get the entire license plate number, or the cops didn’t have the resources to investigate a possible theft of a computer printer. Whatever reason it was, we were extremely lucky and it was too close of a call for us to continue our operation. We quit while we were ahead.

Fun at the County Fair

In every small hick town around the country, the county fair is one of the highlights of the summer. It’s the place where farmers show off their livestock, kids enjoy rides assembled with duct tape that can fall apart and kill anyone at any time, and people seem to enjoy whatever kind of fried food will get them one step closer to a heart attack—like deep fried Snickers bars or chocolate covered bacon. The county fair is always fun, but when you’re a teenager working for minimum wage, the tickets can be very expensive, especially if you end up going there five different times. Today most county fairs have sophisticated ticketing systems complete with barcode scanners and individually numbered tickets to make sure no one can print up their own counterfeit ones and get in for free. But not our county fair, at least not when I was a kid.

The ticket booths sold different color bracelets each day that could easily be faked. Once we found out what color was being used each day, I would simply take colored construction paper, cut it into thin strips, and using a leather punch I poked holes in it around the entire bracelet just like the originals. Then my friends and I taped them on our wrists and would walk past the ticket counter like it was no big deal, flashing them to the ticket taker. It saved us each about $30 in entrance fees over the course of the week and nobody ever noticed.

I’m sure in larger cities we wouldn’t have been able to pull this off because the bracelets had barcodes on them that would have to get scanned, but in our small little town in the 1990s, nobody could have imagined that a couple of teenagers would’ve been making fake bracelets so they could get into the fair for free.

One year I was able to get access to the microphone for the announcement system that covered the entire fairgrounds and told everyone to “smoke marijuana.” Over the course of that evening, several people I knew asked me if I was the one who said something about smoking marijuana over the loudspeaker. I couldn’t help it. The microphone was sitting right there on the desk at the fair office and no one was around, so how could I pass up this amazing opportunity to say something stupid to every fairgoer that night?

Making a Fake Report Card

One of my older brother’s friends went to a local technical college, but he wasn’t doing so well. He had some deal with his dad where if his grades were to fall below a C then he would have to pay rent, or his dad might even throw him out of the house or something. Since his grades sucked one semester and things weren’t looking good for him, he asked me to make him a fake report card so he could show his dad and not get thrown out of the house.

I was honored that he would ask me if I could do such a thing. It was very easy, as you can imagine, but remember this was in 1996 when the only people who new how to use computers were businesses and computer geeks. I just took his original report card to Kinko’s and photocopied the school’s logo onto a blank piece of colored paper and then using a simple word processor, I typed up a fake one and gave him all A’s and B’s. He was very thankful, and I made a quick hundred bucks.

T-shirts My Mom Wouldn’t Wash

I always liked to have funny T-shirts, but some of my best ones I could only wear a few times because my mom wouldn’t wash them, and if I threw them in the laundry hamper, they would just stay there laying at the bottom indefinitely. I had a great shirt that was a parody of Wheel of Fortune that showed Vanna White standing by a bunch of letters that spelled out, “G_F_ck Y__rs_lf” and the caption below it said, “Want to buy a vowel?” I thought it was great since I could wear it to school and the teachers and principal couldn’t do anything about it, because technically, it didn’t have any obscenities on it.

I had another shirt that showed George Washington with bloodshot eyes, smoking a joint on the front, and on the back had a quote attributed to him that said, “Make the most of the hemp seed, sow it everywhere.” I figured if George Washington wanted people to grow cannabis, then there was really nothing wrong with it. I had another shirt showing President Bill Clinton smoking a joint which read “Bill doesn’t inhale. He just sucks.” Another one had a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb printed on the front and read “Made in America. Tested in Japan.”

I didn’t know how to do laundry since my mom always took care of this. I would just drop my dirty clothes in the hamper and they would magically appear clean in my closet a few days later, so it took me a while to realize that my favorite shirts were disappearing every time I put them in the hamper because she refused to wash them and she would just leave them sitting in there.

Prom Night

My prom date was a very cute, sweet and innocent girl, who didn’t really party, and didn’t smoke weed, but I still liked her because she seemed to be very entertained by all of my antics and trouble making. The teachers knew we would all get drunk before prom, so they spread the rumor that they were going to give us breathalyzers at the door when we arrived. We couldn’t go to prom sober, what fun would that be, we thought, so a bunch of us went out and bought flasks so we could enter the event sober, and then go in the bathroom and slam a few shots and catch a buzz since we would have already made it past the checkpoint.

The school had organized a bunch of limos to pick us all up and take us to and from prom, hoping to eliminate people from drinking and driving, but the strange thing was, some of the limo drivers went out and got smashed after they dropped us off at the prom! Our driver could barely stand as he opened the door when we got back in the limo to head home at the end of the event, and he was so drunk that he got lost on the way back to the school and we had to tell him where to go. He was blowing stop signs and swerving all over the road the whole way. It would have been safer if one of us had driven. Another limo carrying some friends of mine actually drove off the road and got stuck in a ditch because the driver was so drunk, and the five or six couples in the back had to all cram into other limos. It made for an exciting ride back to the school.

After the drunk limo drivers dropped us off at our cars in the school parking lot, we all headed to someone’s house for an after party until the early morning hours of the next day.

The summer after graduation I started dating an extremely attractive girl who also happened to be very intelligent as well. We were certainly the odd couple no one could have imagined would have hooked up. Me, the class clown who got thrown out of school (a story I’ll get to later), with one of the smartest, most mild mannered girls in our entire class. It was great. She must have liked the excitement of being with a “bad boy.” The best part was, that she didn’t even try to change me! I think she liked my trouble making.

One night we snuck into the Sheraton Hotel to use their hot tub and I stopped at a Seven Eleven on the way to buy some dish soap which I dumped in the hot tub to turn it into a bubble bath. The whole thing started overflowing with four feet of soap suds rising from the top, so we got out of there. Not long after this she got an underage drinking ticket because of me since we were at a party when the cops came. I felt really bad at first, but she didn’t seem to care too much. I thought about offering to pay for it, but she came from a successful family, so I figured she could afford it. Besides, I had already paid way too much money in underage drinking tickets as it was.

Decorating the School with Beer Cans

Every kid goes toilet papering when they’re young, and it’s a lot of fun and pretty much harmless. Sure it’s annoying for the homeowner to clean up the mess the next day, but you can pretty much spray the hose in the trees and it will fall down and the toilet paper doesn’t cause any real damage. It was because of this easy cleanup that I thought we should decorate the trees at school with something else that would last a little longer. This “something else” was beer cans. A lot of beer cans.

For several weeks I saved the beer cans from our parties and late-night drinking binges, and I spent a considerable amount of time in my basement cutting sections of three foot string, and tying one beer can to each end in pairs. I would then feed this string inside one of the empty beer cans and place the two tops of the cans against each other and I wrapped a piece of tape around them, taping them together so the strings wouldn’t get tangled up with each other. I then put each of these contraptions into two large black plastic garbage bags. The idea was to get on top of the school roof, crack the tape and pull the pairs of cans apart, and then fling them into the large tree in front of the school so they would get caught in the branches.

When I say it was a large tree, I mean enormous. The upper level roof of the school was about three stories tall and was just about the same height as the tree. Sometime earlier I had noticed one area of the school that had a poll holding up an awning that I could climb up and access almost any part of the school’s roof. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities, so on the eve of April 1st, we headed up to the school with the bags of beer cans and backpacks full of toilet paper for an April Fools prank that everyone would be talking about.

When we got to the school that night, Rick and I scaled the poll and hopped on the roof and another friend of ours stayed on the ground to throw toilet paper rolls into the smaller trees and to get the bushes. Once on the roof we made our way to the upper level and headed for the front of the school by the tree and started flinging the beer cans into it. My invention worked perfectly. The strings would get caught on the branches and tangle up, and the cans would hang there, blowing in the wind.

We also threw rolls of toilet paper over the top of the tree and the guy on the ground would pick up the remaining roll and throw it back up into the tree finishing it off. Occasionally a car would drive by and we’d all hit the deck, ducking down on the roof so nobody would see any shadowy figures lurking around up there.

The next morning I brought a camera to school so I could get a picture of our handiwork in the daylight. It looked great. Of course, the janitors had been out there since first thing in the morning trying clean it up, but the tree was so large that the hose wouldn’t reach most of the toilet paper dangling from the top and certainly wasn’t going to do anything for the dozens of beer cans tangled in the branches. It looked like the tensile from a Christmas tree and each can sparkled in the sun. You couldn’t drive by without noticing it.

The funniest thing was that there were a bunch of classrooms upstairs that had windows looking out over the front of the school and the tree was directly in front of these windows, so when you were sitting in class—there just 20 feet away outside—you could clearly see dozens of beer cans of Miller Lite, MGD, Icehouse, and others dangling in front of the windows. The school had to get a cherry picker from the city and hoist a worker up to cut down the cans one by one. It took them all day. Of course there was no evidence that I had anything to do with this, even though my proverbial signature was written boldly across it and sparkled in the sun. Well, no evidence yet.

Getting Kicked Out of High School

I should have quit while I was ahead, but I always had to push the envelope. The April Fool’s Day prank of filling the school’s tree with beer cans was historic. Every car that drove by the school that day couldn’t help but practically be blinded by the sparkling cans shining in the sun. Most of the toilet paper was dangling from so high up that the hose wouldn’t spray far enough to reach it in order to knock it down. It was awesome. So awesome, in fact, that one week later we decided to toilet paper the tree again.

It was Tuesday night April 9, 1996, when my friend Bobby’s parents were out of town, so he threw a huge party because we were on spring break and didn’t have school for the next few days. Ken, Rick, myself and brothers Brendon and Byron, took every roll of toilet paper from Bobby’s house and we ventured off to the school to give an encore performance.

It felt like I was having déjà vu, although this time the evening would turn out very differently. As we were doing our decorating, someone from a house across the street had seen us tossing the toilet paper up into the trees and called the police. Two or three cop cars tried to sneak up on us by approaching without their lights or sirens on but we noticed them and scattered. The guys on the roof were able to make it to the ground and four out of the five of us met at the back of the school and continued running east across the football field.

Byron was missing because he ran in the opposite direction of everyone else when the cops came. We didn’t know this at the time, but as he was running away, he was tackled by the guy who lived across the street—the same guy who happened to see us and called the cops. Byron was a star-athlete and we were confident that he could outrun any cop so we weren’t worried about him getting caught. More police were arriving and got out of their cars and headed on foot shining their flashlights around looking for us as they came running across the football field in our direction.

Immediately behind the football field to the east were countless acres of farmers’ fields that went on for miles, so we took off running. We could see four or five cops off in the distance with the beams of their flashlights bouncing up and down as they ran after us. We had a pretty good head start, and there was no doubt in my mind that we would be able to evade them, but they still kept following us into the middle of nowhere.

I was very familiar with these fields because Fred, Diego and I had a childhood fort nearby and I knew how we could get back to town through the fields, so we started heading south and crossed through a small creek by our old fort and continued on into the next farmer’s field. That field led to the edge of town and the house where the party was at was just one block from where this field ended and the neighborhood began. We couldn’t see the cops’ flashlights anymore, and we figured they gave up chasing us because there was no way they could have caught up to us. We were too fast and had way too much of a head start. We all made it back to Bobby’s party in one piece, all except one of us, that is, but we still figured Byron had gotten away and was on his way back to the house and we were home free. There is no adrenaline rush like running from the cops. We weren’t scared. We loved it. The police chase had made my night and it certainly wasn’t the first time I had police chasing after me on foot.

Just as we started cracking our celebratory beers back at the party because we successfully evaded the police, several squad cars pulled up to the house. “Cops!” someone yelled. “Lock the doors!” We had dealt with this before and knew that if all the doors were locked then the cops would go away eventually. We weren’t sure if it was a coincidence that they had arrived at the house, or what was going on. We were 100% sure we had lost them in the fields, and there was no way they had followed us back to the house. No way. I could outrun and outsmart any cop, even if I had been drinking.

Perhaps one of the neighbors called them because of the party, we thought, which was a common thing we faced. Whatever they were doing there, we were pretty sure we were safe. After all, they couldn’t come in without a search warrant so we figured they would just leave after a while, and we would be okay like we always were in the past. A few minutes later there were cops storming the house. Somehow they had gotten in.

My shoes were covered with mud from running through the fields, so I took them off and hid them in a cabinet under a bathroom sink because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself and have them figure out I was one of the kids leading them on the chase a few minutes earlier through the muddy fields. I hoped there was no connection between their presence at the party and our stunt at the high school, but I was wrong.

Byron had been caught and told them everything. He told them who else was there at the school, and he even told them we were at a party at Bobby’s house right before. It was despicable. He broke the cardinal rule we learned from Good Fellas: Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut. Byron wasn’t one of my crew. He was an acquaintance, not a friend. If it was one of my crew who got busted, they wouldn’t have told the cops a word, but this pretty boy sung like a canary. He probably told them it was all my idea too.

The cops were able to get into the house because one of the emergency contacts listed for the alarm company was Bobby’s uncle, who also had a key to house and gave that key, and full authorization to the police to enter the house. The uncle lived just a few blocks away so it only took the police a few minutes to get the key.

Once inside, the cops immediately asked which one was Mark, and I knew I was screwed. They placed me in handcuffs with my hands behind my back and sat me down in the kitchen. “How am I supposed to finish my beer with my hands behind my back?” I asked the one guarding me. He wasn’t amused.

Over a dozen people got underage drinking tickets, and everyone who went up to the high school that night ended up getting charged with felony vandalism because some of the guys on the roof kicked over a few ventilation ducts. I would not be allowed on school property ever again, including graduation. The school board made me sign a contract agreeing never to step foot on school property again, and in return, my homework for the remaining two months of school would be sent home with my friends and I would still be allowed to technically graduate, although I certainly wasn’t allowed to come for the ceremony. They just simply wanted me to go away.

I pushed them too far, but this time it wasn’t really my fault. I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t. It was the guys who broke the ventilation ducts, which I had no part of. This went against my prankster code of conduct. I was a prankster, not a vandal. I was completely against vandalism (with the exception of smashing mailboxes, which at the time I didn’t really consider vandalism because they could be easily put back up, and who cares if their mailbox has a dent in it? Of course it is vandalism, but when you’re seventeen-years-old you don’t see things too clearly sometimes).

I was pretty pissed that the guys had gotten out of control and broke the ventilation ducts. Not only were we all charged with felony vandalism, or in my case, party to felony vandalism, since I wasn’t on the roof at night, but we had to pay $3000 in restitution for the broken ventilation systems. We also had to pay for the city workers to clean up the tree again. I’m 100% convinced that the “estimate” the school had gotten for the ventilation systems was fake. Complete bull. After talking with the guys and finding out what they did on the roof, all they did was kick over three or four of the ventilation duct covers that prevent rain and leaves from getting down into the ventilation ducts. These covers must have cost about $30 each, if that. The school had screwed us. A few days later on the front page of the town paper was the headline “Students suspended for vandalizing school.” It gave all our names and told all about the whole deal.

I was the only one who was not allowed back to school since I was the ringleader, and this was the last straw in a long, long list of problems that I had been causing. I still felt this was extremely unfair, especially since I wasn’t even on the roof that night and I didn’t participate in any of the vandalism, not to mention there was no way the ventilation covers cost almost $3000! The actual “vandals” were back in school, yet I was thrown out. The school board didn’t care. They had it with me and this was their opportunity to cleanse themselves of my perpetual problem causing…or so they thought.

My Final Revenge Against the School

Me getting thrown out of school was such BS that I couldn’t just sit by and accept it, so my mind started racing and I came up with an idea to piss off the school even more. One of my favorite films was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as I’m sure you can see why, and the movie gave me an idea. I remembered a campaign from the film which resulted in the words, “Save Ferris” being painted on a water tower because the school thought Ferris was deathly ill, when in reality he was playing hooky and having the time of his life.

I printed up a bunch of “Save Mark Dice” flyers that explained my unfair punishment from the April 9 incident, and then I listed the school’s phone number and the home phone numbers of all of the school board members. “Call any time and voice your opinion,” the flyers read. I gave them to Fred to bring to school the next day so the students could pass them around and that night we went out and stuck a bunch of them in people’s mailboxes all around town. This was just the beginning of the Save Mark campaign, and the humiliation I would cause the principal and the school, even though I wasn’t even there anymore.

They say that there are 5 to 7 major turning points in someone’s life. These are major events that alter the course of the rest of your life from then on. These are things like graduating college, getting married, the unexpected death of someone close to you, things like this. They are events that change your life forever, and without even realizing it, I was on the verge of one of those events.

The Save Mark campaign was about to go supernova. All it took was one phone call to a local television station and me telling the news director about what was happening to me and how I was unfairly kicked out of school. The next day a news crew came to my parents’ house and interviewed me about it. Not only did they interview me, but they tracked down one of the school board members and got her on camera too. I had given the reporter the names and addresses of all the school board members to help them with their story. Imagine this woman’s surprise when she answered the door and it was a news crew asking her about why she threw me out of school!

They also interviewed several students right in front of the school to get their take on it. Some of the students had Save Mark flyers taped in the windows of their cars and were posting them around school. This made for great footage for the story, which aired later that evening. It was awesome! There I was on the evening news broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of people in the surrounding cities and towns telling everyone about how the evil school board and principal had it out for me and were denying me the memory of a high school graduation. The segment also mentioned that students were posting flyers around town, in the school, and on their cars showing their support for me.

Mrs. Vandyke, the school board member who was interviewed for the segment said that instead of having a large disciplinary file, she insisted that a large box was needed to hold all of my detentions and the evidence of my past pranks and everything I was suspected of participating in over the last four years. I’m sure the pornos I put in the library were in the box, along with Mr. Bell’s Asshole of America shirt, and who knows what else. I was very proud. They didn’t just have a file on me, they had a box.

The news segment still didn’t change the school board’s mind, and I still didn’t get to come back to school or attend graduation, but this skyrocketed me to a whole new level of popularity that I could have never even imagined. I must say, and very honestly and humbly, that I was already one of the most infamous students in the school, but now I was on the evening news and this took it to a whole new level. It also taught me the power of the mass media, and how easily someone could get on the news.

All television stations, newspapers, and even some magazines have tip lines and ask people to phone in news items that they think are interesting, and that’s what I did. Years later, I would polish my skill of getting into the news, as you may be familiar with, but this is how it all began. This was how I learned that simply calling the news and pitching a story idea could quite often get them to cover it. This was an amazing revelation that shaped the course of the rest of my life and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Aftermath

My entire locker was cleaned out and everything in it was sent to my parents’ house. Fred and Diego would bring my homework assignments to and from school for me. The principal, Mr. Mueller, along with the entire school board pleaded with Fred to convince me not to do anything else to retaliate or get even with the school for what they had done to me. The school really worried that their decision to throw me out might put me over the edge and cause me to do something even more dramatic and destructive. They just couldn’t wait for the end of the year fast enough. My appearance on the evening news was somewhat favorable to me, and I’m sure it blew the principal’s mind that it happened.

Under our signed agreement I was allowed to technically graduate, so that wasn’t so bad, but it did get pretty boring sitting in my room all day by myself while my friends were at school. Even though I didn’t have to actually go to school anymore, my mom would still wake me up and not let me sleep too late since she said this was supposed to be a punishment, not an excuse for sleeping in, and she wouldn’t let me play video games until after 3:00 when school got out.

Most of my homework was pretty easy, but I did pay a girl to write book reports for me for English class to save me the trouble of having to read the dumb books. I would then rewrite them in my handwriting and turn them in. I had applied, and was accepted to a local technical college in the fall, but I didn’t really have any serious plans about the future. I was just looking forward to the summer.

I happened to be taking a drafting class when I was thrown out of school, and while doing most of my school work at home was fairly easy, producing drafting drawings without the help of the teacher was very difficult. This was not a computer aided drafting (CAD) class, this was old school pencil and paper drafting where you would draw three-dimensional objects using only pencils, squares, compasses, and rulers. I didn’t even have any of the proper equipment at home, so how was I supposed to produce the last few drawings required of me for the class?

I did have the drafting book, which showed a thumbnail image of the items I was supposed to draw, so using my high resolution computer scanner that I scammed from Best Buy, I scanned the tiny images and enlarged them by 1000% and then taped the printouts onto my window, and then traced them onto the drafting paper. It worked fantastic. There was just enough sunlight shining through the window and I could see each and every line in the diagrams, so I would just trace them onto my paper. A drawing that normally took several hours now only took me ten minutes.

Later that summer I was told by a friend of mine in the class that the teacher held up one of my drawings as an example of the kind of work the students should strive for! If you’ve ever taken a drafting class, you know that it’s fairly difficult, and you sometimes draw lines in the wrong place or at the wrong angle and set the point of your compass off-center, and most drawings have a fair amount of erasing that has to be done on them before they are complete. Well, not my drawings. They were practically perfect, and even the teacher took notice of my handiwork, never even imagining how I had done it. He thought I was very gifted. I guess I was gifted, just not in drawing. My gift involved “beating the system,” as they say.

The Dildo Present

Since I wasn’t allowed at the graduation ceremony and I couldn’t pull off one last jackass move to humiliate the principal, I decided to have one of my friends do it for me. This final prank would take balls, quite literally. I got a large black dildo and put a sticker on it reading “To Mr. Mueller, from Mark Dice,” and called my friend Brent and asked him if he would give it to Mr. Mueller at the graduation ceremony. He was cool, and thought it was a great idea, so he came on over to pick it up on his way there.

He put the dildo in his back pocket, hiding it under his gown, and when his name was called to walk up and shake the principal’s hand and get his diploma, he reached out like he was going to shake hands and placed the dildo in Mr. Mueller’s right-hand and then snatched the diploma from him and walked off the stage, leaving him holding it in front of the entire audience. Mr. Mueller quickly turned around and set the dildo down on a chair and laid a clipboard on top of it trying to hide it from view. One of my friends’ parents were videotaping the ceremony, and they got this on tape so I was able to watch it later which was pretty cool.

I had also given my graduation hat to Rick to throw onstage for me at the end of the ceremony since I couldn’t be there. I had written “Fuck You!” in large letters with black magic marker on the red hat and underneath it wrote, “From Mark Dice.” The school had told the students not to throw their hats in the air, which has been a graduation tradition for who knows how long, and anyone missing their hat at the end of the ceremony would get in trouble they claimed. So my hat would be the only one being thrown that night, and Rick snuck it in under his gown and threw it on stage as one final “up yours” gesture from me to the school. Even though I was not there in person, I wanted them to know I was there in spirit. They just couldn’t escape me.

I had also done one other thing trying to throw a wrench in the ceremony that night. A small number of honor students were given a gold rope (called an honor chord) to wear around their neck, signifying they were the smart ones. It had something to do with an extremely high grade point average or something, so the afternoon before graduation I went to the local craft store and bought an entire roll of gold rope that looked practically identical to ones the honor students would be wearing, and cut it into small three-foot sections, the same length as the authentic honor chords, and I gave them to Rick to pass out to everyone before the ceremony, so instead of just a handful of people wearing the honor chords, there were dozens. Certainly not as cool as the dildo or my hat, but it was something.

Fake College Rejection Letter

I was very mad that Byron had gotten caught the night we decorated the school’s tree again, especially since he ratted us all out and got me kicked out of school, so I had to get him back. Instead of doing something criminal like slashing his tires or keying his car, I decided to type up a fake letter from the college that he was going to attend in the fall, informing him that due to a recent evaluation of his criminal record they had decided to revoke his acceptance.

This was in 1996, and I didn’t have a color printer at the time so I couldn’t just copy the logo off the school’s website and put it in a Word document and print it out to make an official looking letterhead, so I called the school asking for a packet of information which they sent to me. Once the brochures came, I cut out the school’s logo and brought it to Kinko’s and photocopied it onto a blank piece of paper so it looked like official school letterhead. I also made an envelope with the logo in the upper left corner so it looked nice and official too.

I then typed up a professional sounding letter explaining the school’s decision to change its mind about his acceptance. I explained that the school had certain standards for their students and that he had failed to live up to those standards due to the recent vandalism charge from that infamous night at the high school. I knew that when he received the letter it would absolutely crush him. It was already too late to apply to other schools, so what would he do?

I included a sentence at the bottom of the letter that said if he wished to appeal the decision, he could call and schedule an appointment to plead his case. The phone number that I listed was a 1-800 number to a phone sex line that I got out of the back of a porno magazine where they advertise such numbers. This particular 1-800 phone sex number was advertised to specialize in anal sex talk and it was a 1-800 number (and not a 1-900 number) because you had to call in and give your credit card number so they could charge you per minute to talk dirty to the girls on the other end of the line.

There was a very nasty recording that played before you were asked to enter your credit card number. I will never forget this recording, at least the first sentence, which said “Hey baby. You’ve reached the Back Door Entry, the hottest anal sex line in the world.” It then went on to say some very nasty things about what you could expect for your $3.99 a minute, or however much it cost to talk to one of the girls.

I made up some fake name who I said was the college administrator and then signed a signature in pen at the bottom of the letter and folded it up and put it in the official-looking envelope, put a stamp on it, and dropped it in the mail. Later that summer I bumped into Byron’s brother Brendon at a party and I asked him how his brother liked getting thrown out of college before he even started, and then I laughed. He acknowledged his brother and his parents were freaked out when they first got the letter and then were confused when they called to schedule their appeal and got a recording talking about anal sex. They probably thought they dialed the number wrong at first. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when this happened would have been awesome.

One of my very best prank phone calls would also include Byron, and interestingly enough didn’t result from me calling someone, it resulted from someone calling me who had a wrong number. I received a call one afternoon from a woman who thought she had called a bank to see if her loan was approved. Seeing a fun opportunity when she asked if this was Wells Fargo (or whatever bank it was), I said, “Yes it is. This is Bill speaking, how may I help you?” She went on to tell me that she wanted to know the status of her loan application. She sounded like an African-American woman, and I told her I was sorry, but the loan officer in charge of her account turned her down because she was black.

“Excuse me?” she said. “That’s right, I’m very sorry ma’am, and I’m going to do everything I can to correct this,” I assured her. “But Mrs. Wilson who was in charge of processing your loan doesn’t like black people.” I went on to tell her that of course this was against company policy and said I was going to do everything I could to get that loan approved. I also told her that Mrs. Wilson was under investigation for racism and that we were going to be firing her soon. Mrs. Wilson was Byron’s mom of course, and none of this was true.

I told the poor woman on the phone that I was going to give her Mrs. Wilson’s home phone number and I wanted her to call and tell her how disappointed she was that she would turn down a customer’s loan just because they were black. I assured her that the bank would call her back in a few days with the new results of her loan application, but I stressed that she really should call Mrs. Wilson right now and tell her what a piece of garbage she was, and then I gave her Mrs. Wilson’s home phone number.

Just imagine how confused Byron’s mom must have been because not only did this woman have her phone number, but also knew her name! I’m sure Mrs. Wilson tried to say that she didn’t work at the bank and she didn’t have anything to do with loans, but the woman on the phone probably said that she just got off the phone with the bank, and they were the ones that gave her Mrs. Wilson’s phone number! I wish I could have been there to witness this conversation, but it was fun enough just coming up with this story off the top of my head and talking with the woman.

The Weed Cutter

The summer after high school graduation (I was allowed to technically graduate, remember) Fred and I got a job on a weed cutter, and I’m sure you don’t have any idea what this is, so I’ll try to explain it to you. In the Midwest, a lot of lakes have problems with weeds growing up from the bottom and tangling in the propellers of boats, so it’s fairly common to have a huge weed cutting boat drive around the lake and cut the weeds. It looks like a floating combine like the ones used for harvesting corn. Fred lived on the lake, and his dad had gotten us the job as the two weed cutters which turned out to be one of the greatest jobs ever.

One of us would ride around the lake on the boat cutting the weeds, often for several hours at a stretch, while the other one would sit in a dump truck on the shore just waiting for the weed cutter to fill up and unload. When the weed cutter was full of seaweed, we would drive it ashore and using a series of conveyor belts we would unload the weeds into the back of the dump truck. It was then the truck driver’s job to take the weeds to a nearby dump site and dump them. It was very often several hours between loads, and we would switch off every other load so one of us would drive the dump truck for half the day, while the other one would operate the boat.

Our first day on the job we were out test driving the dump truck when Fred put it in the ditch when making a u-turn. This was an omen of what was going to happen for the rest of the summer. The truck was stuck and wouldn’t move but luckily some guy drove by in a pickup truck and had a tow rope and was able to pull us out and our boss didn’t find out about it. This happened on a country road in the middle of nowhere, so we flagged the guy down for help as he approached us. He was drinking a can of Old Style beer (right in his truck while he was driving) and had the rest of the twelve-pack sitting in the truck bed. This is what happens out in the country in Wisconsin.

Our supervisor for the weed cutting project was a retired senile old man named Barney. He was a scatterbrained man probably suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and every single time he would address Fred or I, he would call us by the wrong name and then correct himself. If he was addressing me, he would say “Fred, ahh, Mark.” He could never get our names right. Ever! A lot of older grandparents do this. They just keep rattling off the names of the grandkids when talking to one until the right name pops into their head. Barney was no different. Even if he called us by the right name, his brain would still have a glitch and he wasn’t sure if he had used the correct name or not, and he would say something like, “Mark, umm, Fred, ahhh, Mark,” every single time.

Nobody in their right mind should have let either of us drive a dump truck. We were 18-years-old and smoked weed constantly. The dump truck was just under a certain weight limit so we didn’t need a special driver’s license to run it. It was a stick shift, and I had never driven a stick shift before, so imagine how fun it was to learn using a dump truck! I’m surprised we didn’t destroy the transmission in the first two weeks. We beat the crap out of that truck. I did get the hang of it pretty quickly though, and soon was able to fly down the road steering with my knee while holding a hamburger in my left hand and a soda in my right. I would set my drink down on top of the shifter to shift and would take bites of my hamburger and puff on joints as I drove down the road like a maniac, never once worrying about getting pulled over.

Little did I realize when I first started that job, that it would be a changing point in my life. I could only smoke so many joints sitting in the dump truck waiting for the boat to come ashore to unload, so I had to do something to keep me busy. I soon learned the amazing power of books. I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a book called the Psychology of Persuasion, and it was amazing. It opened up a whole new world for me. When it was Fred’s turn to sit in the dump truck and wait for the boat, he read the book too, and we would discuss what we had learned after work every night.

The second book I bought was Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins, which changed the course of my life forever, and remains one of my favorite books of all time. Here I was, 18-years-old, in a small little town in Wisconsin, and I had found Anthony Robbins, the biggest self-help and motivational guru in history, and his book began to open my mind up to the true power of my potential.

Fred and I felt like Jedis in training. It wasn’t long after reading this book that I began dating a hot new girl who was super smart too, and I also started looking ahead in my life, and began coming up with goals and milestones along my desired path. I had never thought too much about the future. I pretty much just lived for the moment and never really looked ahead in my life more than a week. This was my first coming of age moment.

Working on the weed cutter did offer other perks too, other than ample reading time in the dump truck. Since Fred lived on the lake at his dad’s house, after work we could go jet skiing whenever we wanted and his dad would let us take out his speed boat by ourselves. We would fill a cooler full of beer and go out waterskiing until sunset with some girls from the neighborhood and smoke joints on the boat, and felt like we owned the lake. There was a water patrol police officer stationed on the lake, but we never worried about getting pulled over for speeding or reckless driving since we worked on the lake and we became friendly with the officer. His name was Malcolm, and we would drive by him with beers in our hands and wave to him and he would wave back, and he was never suspicious or perhaps never cared about what we were drinking.

One time when we were drinking and waterskiing officer Malcolm approached us and waved us down and we thought he was going to bust us for reckless driving or something. We all had open beers, of course, and there was a bag of weed in the boat, and probably not the legal number of life jackets either. We thought we were screwed, but officer Malcolm just wanted to thank us for doing a good job keeping the lake clean and asked us if we would be sure to keep the area around his dock free of weeds!

When we were cutting the weeds by people’s piers, sometimes the homeowner would run out and flag us down and toss us a beer or two trying to bribe us to make sure we really cleaned up the lake in front of their house. They probably never assumed that a couple of 18-year-old kids would be operating the $150,000 weed cutter, and since almost everyone in Wisconsin loves beer, they figured this was a good incentive for us. We weren’t getting drunk on weed cutter, it was just a beer or two once in a while, and usually a Miller Lite or something we’d sweat out after a few minutes working in the sun.

At one point during the summer, Fred and I had a contest to see who could go longer without showering. It started one day when Fred happened to mention that he hadn’t showered for a few days since he figured waterskiing in the lake after work kept him clean enough. I remarked that it had been a few days since I had showed too, to which Fred responded, “and I’m not going to shower today either,” as he laughed out loud at his blatant violation of social norms.

“I’m not showering today either,” I said chuckling. The next day when we arrived at work I proudly announced, “I didn’t take a shower this morning.”

“Me either,” Fred responded.

We both grinned and went to work, repeating this same smelly game of chicken, day after day to see who would finally flinch first and give up. I went a week or maybe ten days without showering, and then I gave up after I did some work on my car and got all covered in grease. I also smelled like seaweed and there were pieces of it stuck in my hair and it was getting nasty so I figured it was time.

The lake we worked on was part of a park, and the park ranger was an extremely obese woman who drove around in an electric golf cart that we joked was her heavy duty electric wheel chair because we thought she was too fat to walk. We called her “tons of fun.” She was off on Mondays and Tuesdays and on those days we would always see a county vehicle pull into the parking lot and sit for several hours and nobody would ever get out. We realized the city worker would park there and sleep. People always joke about how county and city workers slack off all the time, and this seemed to be true. One of my friends worked for the county that summer and confirmed this, but his job still wasn’t as fun as ours.

Our supervisor, Barney, the senile old man who always wore a hat like Gilligan on Gillian’s Island and always had a look of confusion on his face, would always complain that we never wore our life jackets when operating the weed cutter. I didn’t wear a life jacket because it was going to ruin my tan. He complained about it all the time and would occasionally threaten to fire us if we weren’t wearing them. Barney lived on the lake and would watch us with binoculars, and taking care of the lake was his life’s mission in his retirement. We thought about “accidentally” driving the weed cutter into his boat to poke a hole in it and make it sink, or running into his dock to smash it just for fun.

One of the dump sites for the weeds was on a guy’s land who lived on the edge of a farmer’s field, and he let us dump the weeds there so the farmer could use them as mulch in the field. We met this man several times and thought he was extremely bizarre. One afternoon we saw him pulling out of his driveway with a black woman in the passenger seat who we assumed was probably his wife. I don’t mean to sound racist or anything, but a white guy with a black woman is extremely rare, especially in Hickville, Wisconsin, and we were pretty surprised by this. Fred started joking that she was his slave who he kept locked up in the basement, and somehow this idea started becoming something we considered may be true. The guy looked like a complete psycho, and we wondered how in the world he was able to even attract a wife at all, and it was even more strange that he had somehow hooked up with a black woman.

We never saw his wife again, so one day we decided we should sneak into his house and investigate to see if Fred’s delusions had any basis in reality. This was out in the country where most people don’t even lock their doors, so after we dumped a load of weeds we parked the dump truck in his driveway and walked up to his front porch to see if he was home. We came up with some dumb question to ask him about where he wanted us to dump that week’s loads, just in case he was home. We rang the doorbell, and when no one answered we thought this was the perfect opportunity to sneak inside his house and look around.

I slowly opened the door, and Fred stood on the porch looking out to see if his car would pull into the driveway. I made it just a few steps into the house, and I just couldn’t do it. This was too weird. We were in insane. What the heck were we doing? We were snooping around some stranger’s house because Fred was delusional and thought he kept a black woman locked up as his prisoner. I turned back and ran out the door and we got in the dump truck and left.

The weed cutter was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. We would show up late, cheat on our timecards, smoke joints and occasionally drink a beer right on the boat. I did the same job the following summer, but Fred decided to work for his dad doing construction so I got Barney to hire my friend Marty as Fred’s replacement but we screwed around so bad that Barney told us he wasn’t going to hire us back again the next year. He really meant it too, so I ended up working at a gas station instead. I blamed Marty because he was horrible at operating the weed cutter and even fell asleep one time while he was driving it and hit a buoy and almost crashed into someone’s dock.

Barney our boss had a sign hanging off his mailbox that said, “Barney’s Golden Pond,” a reference to the movie On Golden Pond about some senile old man who lives on a lake or something, so it was very fitting of him. To get our “revenge” against him we later ripped the sign off his mailbox a few nights before I moved to California and brought it with me in the car, and later threw it off the edge of the Hoover Dam.

Ideas Not Carried Out

Chicago 69 Sign

While I was able to pull off most of the crazy schemes I had come up with, there were still a few that I just didn’t get around to or logistically were too difficult. People had always talked about stealing the “Chicago 69” sign, which is a large sign on the freeway signifying that Chicago is 69 miles away. While I did steal a 69th Drive street sign, stealing the Chicago 69 sign would have been truly historic since people had talked about it for years, and there was only one. Since most people only talk about doing crazy things, my friends and I decided to go out and actually steal it. We brought a battery powered saw so we could just cut down the posts in a matter of seconds and throw the sign in the back of Fred’s truck. It would have taken too much time to climb the posts and actually unbolt it, since hundreds of cars would have seen us and possibly a cop, so simply cutting the sign down seemed like a much better idea.

We parked on a frontage road parallel with the freeway and then walked down the embankment to retrieve our sign. As we approached it we came to realize that the sign was three times larger than we had thought. When you’re driving by on the freeway, it doesn’t look all that big, but when you’re standing directly underneath it, it was huge. It was probably 25 feet long and 8 feet tall, and there was no way it would have even fit in the back of Fred’s truck. We had to abort the mission. At least we had tried.

The 7 Day Plan

I had an idea for what we called the seven-day plan, which was a series of seven pranks, one every day of the week right after the other, with some of them being spin-offs of the previous one. For example, we were going to list the principal’s house for sale in the local newspaper saying that it had an in-ground swimming pool and a new roof, and then the next day we were going to have Diggers Hotline come to his house and spray paint all over his yard showing where all the utility lines were buried, and then the following day we were going to have a pool company stop by his house to schedule an estimate for a new swimming pool to be put in his backyard. We were then going to schedule a roofer to come to his house the next day to give him an estimate for some new shingles.

For some reason we were going to put a dead squirrel in a box and leave it on his front door because in the listing for his house we were going to put in the real estate section, we planned on mentioning that there were a lot of squirrels and other wild life on the property.

The plan would culminate by taking a mannequin dressed in a school letter jacket and hanging it from its neck by a noose from the school so it looked like a student had killed themselves on the upper level of the school roof. We were hoping this would cause school to be canceled before the police realized it wasn’t really a person. The dummy was also going to be holding a copy of the real estate listing for the principal’s house in its hand. I was thrown out of school before we could put the seven-day plan in motion.

Cementing the School Gate Shut

If we would have had a little more money, we would have cemented the gates shut to prevent anyone from having access to the school parking lot just to cause chaos when everyone arrived in the morning for school. We were going to go in the middle of the night and chain them shut and mix a few bags of concrete on the ground around them so by morning it would have hardened enough so the gates couldn’t open and the school would have to make a decision to cancel classes that day or have everyone park in the surrounding neighborhoods. Whatever they decide we thought it would have been hilarious but we never got around to it because nobody wanted to spend the money on the concrete.

Coveting An Arcade Game

There was a small outlet mall near us that had a few arcade games in the hallway for people to play and both Fred and I had always wanted an arcade game at home, so we thought about stealing one from the mall. We figured since no one would really have the balls to steal one in the middle of the day, we could probably actually do it quite easily. We discussed making fake T-shirts with the name of the video game company printed on them and then we were going to use a dolly and just load up the arcade game and roll it out to Fred’s truck. Who would suspect we were stealing it? We would have looked like a couple of repair men.

We were also going to print up fake lettering for the side of the truck that spelled out the name of the video game company. That way if anyone saw us wheeling it out of the mall and loading it onto the truck, the door would read “Video Games Unlimited” in large letters (or whatever the company’s name was) so nobody would think anything of it. We were even going to print fake license plates for the truck just in case there were security cameras that got us on tape. The reason we never did this was because of the close call we had scamming video games and computer equipment from Best Buy using our homemade UPCs. Aren’t videogames supposed to keep kids out of trouble? Not us.

Trying to Tap into the Announcement System at School

We really wanted to tap into the announcement system of the school with our own microphone so we could say offensive things like telling the principal to go screw himself and voice our opinions about our least favorite teachers, while the whole school was listening, but we just couldn’t figure out how to do this. We did realize that there was a microphone on the principal’s desk with a large button on it that we figured could accomplish this task, but there was no way that this could be done without getting caught since his secretary or someone else would definitely see us running out of there and it was such a small school that they would probably know who it was or at least be able to identify them the next time they saw that person in the hall.

Unfortunately there was no way of tapping into the system without having access to the central unit, which was located in the school office. We also thought about taping into the loudspeakers on the football field, but this also proved too difficult. It seems that sometimes dreams don’t come true.

Dumping Dead Fish in the Ventilation System

We wanted to put stink bombs in the ventilation system of the high school to stink up the entire building so they would have to close it for the day. It was something the Joker in the Batman movies would do so it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. After thinking about this for a while, instead of just throwing a stink bomb in the intake, we decided it would be much better if we would dump a bucket of dead fish in it instead, because they would provide a continuous supply of stench instead of just one burst of it. We found an unmarked door in the school that had a ladder leading up to a room where all the ventilation ducts came from, but we couldn’t find the intake so we resorted to dropping stink bombs in the hallways instead but it didn’t have the same effect.

Years earlier Ken threw a lit smoke bomb into the middle school on the last day of class and dropped another one into a ventilation duct somewhere hoping it would get sucked into the school. Kids and their smoke bombs, I’ll tell ya.

Stealing Dead Cats from Biology Class

After the Advanced Biology class got done dissecting a bunch of cats for a project, we thought about going in the school dumpster and taking the bodies and then throwing them all in a teacher’s front yard. We knew from our friends in Advanced Bio that the cats had just gotten thrown out after their dissection experiments were completed, and about a dozen of them with their guts cut open were lying in the dumpster behind the school.

We would have actually done this, except nobody wanted to put the dead cats in the trunk of their car so we could drive them over to a teacher’s house because we thought the blood and guts would leak out of the trash bags. We realized how bad these cats must smell, and nobody was willing to risk having the trunk of their car smell like a dead body after we were done.

Hanging a Pot Flag on the Flagpole

I took a large piece of white fabric and painted a green pot leaf on it and I was going to hoist it up on the school flagpole one night, but I ended up getting kicked out of school before I could do it. I was planning on going in the middle of the night and would lower the American flag and replace it with the large pot leaf and hoist it back up to the top and then climb the flagpole and cut the rope so the flag could not be taken down. This was one of the pranks next on my list. I had the pot flag already made and ready to go, but my early departure from school caused me to abort this mission.

Building Our Own Float

Senior year we came up with the idea to make our own float for the homecoming parade that would have consisted of a trailer covered in beer cans and a large pot leaf displayed on the top, but we didn’t have enough time to build it. We talked about how it could be done and we found someone with a truck who was willing to pull the float, but the parade was a day or two away when we had come up with the idea. We were going to park the float a block away from the school and then in the middle of the parade just pull up from an adjacent street and join the procession. It was a great idea but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to build it since homecoming was only a day or two away and we were seniors, so we couldn’t do it the following year.

A few people did, however, bring eggs and stink bombs to the homecoming pep rally in the gym and raised a little hell that way. We even discussed setting off a bunch of stink bombs in the gym and then chaining all the doors shut from the outside to lock everyone in there so they couldn’t get out. We were terrible kids.

The Shit Box

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to own my own business, invent a new product, or do something on my own so I didn’t have to work for anybody, and of course I dreamed of making millions and retiring at the age of 30. One of the first ideas I came up with was to sell boxes of shit. Literally, boxes of cow manure that I called the Shit Box. Of course, you wouldn’t buy one of these for yourself. The idea was that people would call me and give me the name and address of someone they hate, and I would send them a box of cow manure along with a nasty letter explaining why someone decided to do this to them.

This wasn’t just a wild idea I had, I actually purchased the phone number 1-888 Shit Box (744-2269). (I had to get the 888 number because the 1-800 number was already taken, but the 888 number was still toll free.) I then looked into having a 24-hour answering service take the orders and researched what it would take to get a merchant account setup so I could accept credit cards. I even spoke with a sales rep from the local rock station I was planning on advertising the Shit Box on. I also wrote up a thirty second commercial I planned on using. Obviously, you can’t say shit on the radio, so the sales rep said they could just bleep it out, and people would get the idea.

My commercial went something like, “Do you hate your boss, a teacher, your principal, or ex-lover? Send them a box of (bleep) in the mail. Call 1-888 (bleep) box, and we’ll ship them a box of cow manure anonymously along with a letter telling them that they’re receiving a box of (bleep) because they are a piece of (bleep). That’s 1-888 (bleep) box. 1-888-744-2269. Call today.”

We even painted up some huge cardboard signs that said, “Send your boss a box of shit. Call 1-888 Shit Box.” We had planned to put them up all over town on telephone poles and on the side of the highway to advertise our new service.

I would have done it all to, except I decided to save my money and move to California at the end of the summer. The radio advertising was very expensive and I wasn’t sure if the idea was going to take off or not. You have to admit, in a weird sort of way, it seems like a good idea, and years later I found several other websites that were doing exactly the same thing, so I wasn’t the only crazy one with the idea!

Of course it wasn’t the most respectable business model, and sending people boxes of cow manure in the mail certainly wouldn’t get me any awards from the Better Business Bureau, but it still could be considered a legitimate business, and there are certainly worse businesses to be involved in.

College
Craziness

Let the Higher Education Begin

Freshman year of college I lived at home with my parents and commuted to school, and the year was rather uneventful because most of my friends had all moved away to different schools and lived in the dorms. Since this was a rather boring time, sophomore year I moved into a three story, four-bedroom house with a group of guys (John, Nick, Bobby and I) and we partied at least three nights a week like there was no tomorrow. Bobby would bring home a bottle of tequila every single Friday night after work for months on end, and within several hours the bottle would be empty and then placed on a narrow 4-inch wide shelf that went around our entire living room half way up the wall. I don’t remember how many bottles of tequila were stacked up there by the end of the year, but I think there were dozens. This was in Wisconsin after all, where everybody drinks like a fish.

Throughout the course of that year, we probably had the police come to our house at least a half-dozen times, and every time this happened we would lock the door, turn off the stereo, and they would just leave after a while. We did have one problem, however, that wouldn’t go away…our landlord.

Our landlord lived in the house literally right behind us. Our backyard was their front yard, and they were probably less than 75 feet away from us. We knew this would be a problem when we moved in, but we had waited too long to rent a house and the school year was just around the corner, and there were hardly any available houses near campus by this time, so we had to take what we found. When we signed the lease we assured them that we were a bunch of studious young men who didn’t party and got good grades. They soon realized how big of a lie that was.

The Picnic Table

My house mates and I were able to scrounge up most of the furniture we needed from our parents’ basements, but there was still one thing missing. We got a couple of old couches from Nick’s parents, John had a nice stereo system and Bobby had a decent sized TV that he brought to the house, and by the time school started we had just about everything we needed except a kitchen table. None of our parents had an old kitchen table lying around, and we certainly didn’t want to go and buy one, so I came up with a plan.

The public park that Fred and I worked at operating the weed cutter was full of picnic benches so we went there in the middle of the night and loaded one in the back of his truck and brought it to my new house. It fit perfectly in our kitchen. Of course this qualified as having stolen property in our house and there was a huge stamp that looked like it was burnt into the wood on the top of it that said “Property of the County Park System,” but we figured since it was a public park paid for by our tax dollars, the table was, in a sense, ours. We didn’t think the park would miss one table since there were plenty of them around and we even thought about bringing it back at the end of the year when we were done with it. We were just borrowing it, we weren’t stealing it.

The picnic table was a nice touch in our house. Not only did we use it to eat on, but it also served as entertainment during our parties, which happened practically every week. It became common for people to take pens and magic markers, and draw funny pictures on the tabletop and on the benches where people sat. Sometimes people would take knives out of the drawer and carve things into the table as well. We encouraged this. After just a few months, practically every surface on the thing was covered with graffiti, little cartoon images, and a lot of penises for some reason. People really liked to draw penises on the table.

At the end of the school year when we all moved out and went our separate ways, we carried the picnic table across the street and set it in a grassy area next to the apartment complex there and within just an hour or so, we saw some people sitting down at it and enjoying it. I’m sure they were also enjoying the two semester’s worth of artwork that was on it too. I thought about returning it to the park I had taken it from, but that would have been too much work, so abandoning it across the street was good enough.

Don’t Puke in the Flowers

On St. Patrick’s Day, Bobby bought a bottle of Everclear which is 90% alcohol (190 proof), and contains a warning on the label specifically stating not to drink it straight, and insisting that it be highly diluted with a non-alcoholic beverage. We didn’t care about this warning, and poured a couple shots. We all clanged our shot glasses together above our heads, said cheers, and downed the shots. Within seconds John and Nick ran out the front door, leaned over the railing surrounding the front porch, and started puking. I felt a little queasy too, but was able to hold mine down along with Bobby, who outweighed me by 70 or 80 pounds. The only bathroom in the house was upstairs, and there was no way anyone would have been able to hold it down until they ran up there, so luckily the front door was only a few feet away.

A little while later as our party began to get in full gear, some other people wanted to take shots to see if they could hold it down, so I took another one with them, my second, their first, and one of them ran out the front door and puked immediately after taking it. The stuff tasted terrible, kind of like gasoline in my mouth, but I still was able to keep my second shot down. Then a little while later, Bobby and I took another shot, my third, and his second, and this time it was my turn to run out the front door and start puking over the railing. Bobby followed right behind me. The ground was covered with several inches of snow, and I could see where the others had puked because their chunky and colored vomit was splattered on the clean white snow that covered the grass and flowers on the ground right next to the porch. It looked nasty. Like someone had spilled rotten fruit salad all over the front of the house.

The next day, the four of us sat in the living room on the sofas like a bunch of zombies watching movies. We were practically brain-dead. We realized why the bottle of Everclear said not to drink it straight, after all, just one shot made almost everyone puke immediately. I was very proud that I was able to hold two of them down, and only puked after my third. Our heads were throbbing as we watched movies trying to recover from the night before, when all of a sudden we heard pounding on the front door. This was angry pounding, not pounding like one of our friends was seeing if we were home.

Everyone was too dead to even want to get up, but I managed to stagger my way to the door to answer it and realized it was the landlord. This couldn’t have been good. As soon as I opened the door she started yelling at me saying something about puke and ruining her flowers. I had no idea what she was talking about. She started pointing at the puke stains in the snow from people throwing up on the front porch over the railing and was freaking out that the acid in the puke was going to kill her hibernating flowers and they weren’t going to bloom again in the Spring.

There were five or six different enormous puke stains at different points around the front porch where people had thrown up the night before, and it just so happened that her flowers were lying dormant underneath the snow right in that area. I apologized to her and came back inside the house and sat down on the couch with my roommates looking bewildered because they overheard someone all pissed off about flowers after I opened the door and didn’t know who I was talking to or what the heck was going on. I reminded them what happened the night before and where we had all puked, and we all went out to have a look at the puke splatter. There must have been gallons of puke splattered all over the front of the house. It was epic, and just one more reason for the landlord to hate us.

Attack of the Lesbians

I’m the kind of guy who likes to be the center of attention, and there’s no better way to get attention than to have a microphone in front of a large crowd of people. There was a stage set up one afternoon in the quad at my college, complete with a set of drums, a keyboard, a bunch of speakers, and of course, the microphone which looked lonely sitting in its stand with nobody using it. The band hadn’t taken the stage yet, and the quad was full of people so I jumped on stage to see if the microphone worked so I could speak to the crowd.

I started rapping a parody of an Eminem song that I had written, since I was trying my hand at some comedy at the time which I performed on open mic nights at the Comedy Store, but me hijacking the microphone didn’t really go over that well with the band members, who happened to be a group of butch-looking lesbians.

A couple of them ran up on stage as I was performing my song, and one grabbed me by the arm and the other grabbed the microphone and yanked it out of my hand. I walked off stage not thinking anything of it, when all of a sudden a few more lesbians came up for reinforcements and they all surrounded me, yelling and complaining. Whatever. I turned and started walking away when one of them grabbed onto my forearm with both hands and wouldn’t let go. I peeled her hands loose and continued walking away and she followed me and grabbed me again and wouldn’t let go. She was a manly lesbian, and for some reason thought she would act like a bouncer at a bar or something and detain me. It was very weird. She just wouldn’t let go of my arm. What could I do? I couldn’t give her a shove with my other hand, because even though she was a manly lesbian, she was still a girl. I couldn’t push a girl, even if she did look like a man.

I kept walking away and wiggling my arm back and forth trying to break her grip as the other lesbians approached me again. I was able to break free but my watch band broke and it fell to the ground. I didn’t care. I took off speed walking in the other direction before more lesbian reinforcements came and the wannabe bouncer lesbian picked up my watch as I left. While I did lose my watch, I avoided getting further assaulted by the lesbian gang which was quite an awkward situation.

A few days later I was approached by a security guard at school and asked to come with him. I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted until I saw some of the lesbians off in the distance talking with a second security guard. I couldn’t believe it. Now they were trying to get me in trouble with campus security for some reason. What was the school going to do for me jumping on stage? It wasn’t like the band was playing and I interrupted their show, they weren’t even up there yet. I went with the security guard to one of the offices, where he then introduced me to the dean.

Apparently the crazed lesbian band members thought that the reason I jumped on stage and took over the microphone was because they were lesbians! I don’t know how they could have come to this mentally ill conclusion, especially since I had no idea what band was playing or that they were lesbians, and I certainly didn’t say anything about gay people on the microphone, but somehow in their dysfunctional brains they felt so persecuted by society for being lesbians, that they saw my jackass stunt as an attack on their sexuality.

The dean realized they were insane, and I explained to him how they assaulted me and broke my watch, and then he opened up a drawer and pulled it out and set it on the desk in front of me. He made it clear that he had to “investigate” the possible “hate crime” that was supposedly committed against the lesbian band members so they wouldn’t accuse him of discriminating against them for being gay or something. I picked up my broken watch and went on my way. It’s not every day that you get attacked by an angry gang of lesbians.

Crashing the Wrong Party

There was some random Friday night my sophomore year of college where I didn’t really have anything to do, so two friends of mine and I decided to walk around our neighborhood and crash someone’s party. As you probably know, in college towns on practically every block on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, some house is having a huge party with dozens of people, and the hosts certainly only know a fraction of them and don’t really care who’s there since it’s not a small intimate gathering of just a few friends.

At a lot of large college parties almost anyone is welcome, and friends always invite friends who invite friends, and it’s not uncommon to have 50 or 80 random people partying at someone’s house. We didn’t know of any particular parties going on that night so we went to take a walk in order to find one. Just a block away from my house we saw a bunch of people standing on a balcony holding red plastic party cups in their hands, so we headed up there to join them. Nobody knew that we didn’t know anyone there, and nobody cared. We hung out for a while, drank a few beers from their keg, and since there weren’t any hot girls there, we ventured off down the block to find another party.

It wasn’t long before we found a huge three-story house that we could see through the windows was full of people so we headed up the stairs to the porch, opened the front door and walked right in. I knew immediately that this wasn’t just some random party. This was a jock party. All the guys were pretty huge, and all the girls looked very tough as well. It turns out this was a rugby party, and everyone there was a member of the guys or girls rugby team and knew everyone else.

Most people just thought that we were friends with someone at the party, since they knew we weren’t on the rugby team, and whenever anyone asked who I knew there, I would just drop the name of the person that I had been talking to a few minutes earlier. “Oh, I know Sara over there,” I would say, pointing in the direction of the girl I was just chatting with who I had just met. It was a little awkward at first, but we managed, and thankfully nobody really called our bluff.

After a while we thought we should get out of there in case they realized that none of us knew anyone there, so we slowly made our way to the door and took off. Directly across the street were a couple girls standing on the second story balcony and I hollered out to them and chatted them up for a minute, and one of them invited us up and we ended up hanging out there for the rest of the night. It wasn’t even really a party. It was just four or five girls all by themselves. I got one of the girl’s phone numbers, whose name was Sheila, but there was only a week left of school and I was going to be moving back home with my parents for the summer so I could save up some money for my move to California in a few months, so I never ended up calling her, but this night revealed to me that if you make yourself feel like you belong somewhere, and you actually believe that you belong there, then people will react in a way that confirms your beliefs. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The night was an interesting social experiment that went much better than any of us had expected. If you put your mind to it, you can probably party anywhere.

Applause is Contagious

You expect people to applaud at the end of a play or a live concert, but it’s not something that usually happens in a movie theater. That is, unless I’m in the audience. It was during the digitally re-mastered re-release of the Star Wars films in 1997 that I learned a powerful lesson about how large crowds of people can easily be manipulated. It was a Friday night and the theater was packed since it was the opening for the re-release.

Rick, Marty and I had been partying on the way to the theater and as many Star Wars fans do, we often joked about “the Force” and using “Jedi mind tricks.” I told Marty that I would show him how the Force worked, and as the curtain opened for the film to begin, I started applauding and cheering in excitement. Practically everyone in the entire theater joined me. I felt a tremendous sense of power surging through my body at that very moment. I had just caused the entire theater to start applauding for the movie. I had accidentally stumbled upon the power of applause a year earlier during the film Independence Day because when the aliens blew up the White House in the movie, I started cheering and applauding and half the theater joined me.

Every time we went to see a movie we were usually stoned and drunk, and a lot of the times we would fill our jackets full of as many beers as they would hold and sneak them into the theater so we could drink during the movie. If we brought in bottles of beer, you would often hear the empty ones accidentally get kicked over and clang into the other empty ones that we had set on the ground, and you could hear them rolling down the sloped concrete floor of the theater as they banged into the chairs below. Everybody in the theater knew what was happening. The sound of clanging beer bottles is a very distinct sound.

Anyway, when we were seated in the theater to see the re-release of Star Wars I recalled the incident during Independence Day when I caused the theater to erupt in applause when the White House was blown up by the aliens, and I decided to test this power again.

Aside from getting people to applaud when the curtains opened, at multiple times throughout the movie I would shout out things like, “You can do it Luke!” and “You’re going down Darth Vader!” and other people in the theater would yell in agreement. It was fascinating. I felt like the entire theater was under my control. At the end of the movie, once again, I started applauding and cheering and the rest of the theater followed suit. As we walked out of the theater that night we could see the look of joy on everyone’s face. None of them had ever been to a movie so exciting and with such a great crowd. Little did they know, but I had caused it all. For years after that night, Marty and I would reference “the Force,” and talk about how we were becoming Jedi masters.

No Final Exam Please

I can’t help but say smart ass comments when they pop into my head, and I especially loved to say things out loud in class that nobody else would have the guts to say because I thrived off getting giggles from my fellow students, but I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone on the last day of class when my smart ass comment took on a literal meaning just seconds later.

This was a Group Communication class, and in the beginning of the semester we were divided into small groups which we worked with on various projects for the rest of the semester since the entire class was focused on group dynamics and communication among group members. When our groups were first formed, we each had to name our group and draw a picture that represented us. My group consisted of myself, a guy named Chaz, and three girls. Chaz and I were both alpha males and would later have races to see who could finish our tests first in the classes we had together, and we became friends in a competitive sort of way. Our group name had to reflect our dominating type-A personalities, so we decided to call ourselves the Alpha Bitches. Since there were girls in the group, we couldn’t call ourselves the Alpha Males, so the Alpha Bitches worked just fine.

There’s nothing like hearing a college professor say something like “it’s time for the Alpha Bitches to give their presentation.” It was hilarious. We dominated the class for the entire semester. We even gave our final presentation on leadership, and we arrogantly explained to the rest of the class that we chose to teach them about leadership because we were the class leaders. It was a great semester.

Getting back to my strange smartass comment eerily becoming true…it was the last day of class and we had all arrived to take the final exam after several days of cramming. The previous week we were given a study guide of possible material that would be included on this exam, which is pretty standard for a final. After everyone got seated that morning and just before the professor started handing out the tests and wrapping up the semester, I raised my hand and said in a condescending tone of voice, “Dr. Moffitt, instead of taking a typical final exam, I think we should draw another picture of our group to show how we’ve changed and grown over the course of the semester.”

The group picture we had drawn earlier that year had been a laughing stock for us. This was a junior level college course, and we were drawing pictures like we were in a middle school art class. We couldn’t believe it. Our group picture assignment at the beginning of the year represented how easy this class was, and what a joke it was to us. My patronizing comment about not taking a final exam and drawing a new picture instead was a thinly veiled insult to the professor indicating the lack of challenge her class provided us.

Instead of laughing off my comment, or even being mildly offended by it, she replied saying, “It’s very interesting that you would say that, because that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” The class gasped in surprise. “What?” everyone said in unison. Dr. Moffitt went on to tell us to get into our groups and she handed out a blank sheet of paper to each one and had us draw a new picture of our group. That was our final exam! Nobody could believe it. It felt like I pulled a Jedi mind trick on her. It’s one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me.

How to Crash a College Class

Everyone who goes to college is familiar with crashing classes, and many people have tried to crash a class, some successfully, others not so successful. Crashing a class means that you are not able to register for the class because it was filled up, but you still show up there on the first day hoping that if a few people who were registered for the class didn’t show up that day, the professor will drop them and you can take their place on the roster.

It’s not uncommon for ten people to try to crash the same class on the first day, but usually there is only room for a few, so the teacher will tell the remaining crashers they’re sorry but there just isn’t any room and they should go try to add another class somewhere else. The remaining would-be crashers then frantically leave the room scrambling to crash another class, hoping to find a spot somewhere else. I have successfully crashed numerous classes, but for one particular class I was not so lucky and wasn’t one of the handful who got their names pulled out of a hat to be added that day. (That’s seriously how some teachers choose who gets to crash when there aren’t enough open spots.)

The other unlucky students whose names weren’t chosen left the classroom, but I stayed sitting at my desk and pretended like I belonged there. I took notes, participated in the discussion, and kept coming the next several weeks as if nothing was wrong. I did the homework, and when the time came for the first quiz, I took that too. I was a model student. The only problem was, my name was not on the roster, and the teacher realized this when he tried to mark my grade for the quiz in his grade book but couldn’t find my name. The next day at class he asked which one was me and I raised my hand and he came over and said that I wasn’t on the roster.

“That’s weird,” I said, pretending to be surprised. He then told me to go down to the office and get a late registration form and fill it out so he could sign it and add my name to the official roster. My plan worked perfectly. You know what they say, where there’s a will there’s a way, and all the other crashers from a few weeks earlier just didn’t want to be in that class bad enough, but I did. I had to have that class. My whole schedule would have been messed up if I didn’t have it, and I would have been stuck there an extra semester to get the credits that I needed to transfer to another school.

A year or so later I realized that if I couldn’t get added to the roster by crashing the first day of class, then instead of leaving like all the other crashers, I would just stay in my seat anyway and log onto the school’s website every night trying to add the class while there was still open registration, which usually went on for the first two weeks of the semester, because I knew the odds were that someone would hate the class or would have a work conflict and would drop it, and so there would be a spot open in the computer, and I would get it. This worked for me several times and I always got the classes I wanted. Where all of the other crashers lost hope and left when the teacher told them there were no openings, I knew otherwise, and knew that after the first few days of class someone was going to drop it, and I could get their spot, and that’s exactly what I did.

Most Likely To Succeed?

One of my favorite college professors once told me that I was going to be the most famous and successful person to ever graduate from my college. She told me this during a conversation we had in her office my senior year when I showed her a compilation of years’ worth of notes and journals about my adventures in dating and my philosophy on meeting and dating girls. (This would later turn into THE Book on Dating which I published and is available on Amazon.com in paperback or in e-book on Kindle) She thought I was a genius.

This was in 2004, before Neil Strauss’ book, The Game was published, and before Mystery (Erik von Markovik) had gotten his Pick-up Artist show on VH1 and when professional dating coaches for men were pretty much nonexistent in the mainstream. Dr. Downey saw the potential, not only in my idea to write a book and become a dating coach, but she saw that I had the personality and drive to actually do something with it. Her endorsement and her assessment of me meant a lot, but a strange turn of events that I can’t really be blamed for would later result in her asking me to please never contact her again.

About six months after I graduated I began writing a book about how secret societies pulled the strings in our world and hold the true power in politics, banking and business and how many of these secret societies have occult beliefs and rituals. I’m talking about The Resistance Manifesto, my first book of several on this topic. I won’t get into it here, you can check out my other books for yourself on Amazon.com, Kindle or Nook and I hope you do because it’s a very important subject, but this is what led to Dr. Downey’s complete 180 turn on her views of me.

I returned unannounced to her office to consult with her on my new project since my entire world view had changed after learning about the New World Order and the Illuminati. Instead of being excited about my new project and life’s mission, and giving me the guidance and wisdom I had expected, a look of horror immediately came to her face. She informed me that her father was crazy and thought the government was watching everything he did and had hidden microphones in their house in order to listen to him, and that he blew his brains out when she was a little girl. What can you say to that? She then told me that I was bringing back all kinds of horrific memories for her from her childhood and her father’s suicide, and she asked me to leave and never contact her again. I was devastated.

It wasn’t like I had done something wrong, it just so happened that this subject matter touched a nerve with her. I felt really bad for how I had made her feel, and how she had changed her feelings towards me from just a few months earlier. She once thought I would be the most successful student she ever had, but now I was the one that she wished she never met.

The Gas Station

You may have noticed that the people who work at gas stations are usually the scum of the earth. They look like they just got out of prison, have done way too many drugs, or are homeless. If the gas station is owned by an Indian or an Arab, that’s a whole other story. I’m talking about the white trash that always seems to work at gas stations. One of the most pathetic jobs I ever had in my life was actually working at a gas station during the summer since I wasn’t allowed to work on the weed cutter anymore. The gas station was located in the heart of Main Street, and it actually turned out to be a pretty cool job because it was a party every single night. It seemed like I was living in the film Clerks.

The manager was never there, and I never met the owner, and every night I would come into work about four o’clock in the afternoon and work until closing time at 11pm all by myself. All my friends could see when I was working because my car was parked out front, and everybody would stop in and say hi or hang out for a while. I had an endless supply of beer from the cooler and we would drink right there in the store and even get stoned. We didn’t even bother to go outside to smoke pot, we smoked it right there behind the counter.

I brought in my own stereo so I could listen to CDs, and I would just blast it all night and my friends and I would smoke cigars we had taken off the shelves and pretended like we owned the place. One night I forgot to lock the front door when I left because I was so buzzed, and the manager also informed me that she found empty beer cans strewn around the station and asked me if my friends and I were drinking there the night before, and asked if that was why I had forgotten to lock the door. “Of course not,” I said, “I must’ve just been tired.” I felt really dumb. Any normal person would have fired me immediately, but she soon forgot that it happened, and my partying continued.

The layout of this particular gas station was very strange. There was a gigantic pole right next to the cash register that helped support the roof, and I can’t tell you how many times people would turn away from the counter after paying and then smack their head right into it. It was the weirdest place for a poll and every few nights someone would turn around full speed from the counter and smack right into it. The manager realized this was a major liability so she wrapped a foam pad around it to try and prevent anyone from getting seriously injured.

Every time someone would turn around and smack their head into the poll I couldn’t help but bust out laughing. Often, I would have a friend or two hanging out with me and we would all bust out laughing at the person and they would just duck their head in shame and walk out. As a joke I printed up a sign that said, “Warning: Pole. May cause serious injury,” and I taped it up over the foam pad. I only worked at the gas station for one summer, but that sign stayed up for probably ten years. I realized this when I happened to pull in there to get some gas when I was visiting my parents and when I went up to the cash register to pay, I saw the sign still attached! Apparently the manager thought it was a good idea to keep it up.

The thing I learned about life while working at the gas station was that there are a lot of losers who come to gas stations, not to buy gas, but to buy cigarettes. These same people come to buy one pack of cigarettes at a time, day after day after day. These people could buy a carton of cigarettes from a grocery store for a heck of a lot less than they did if they bought individual packs, but they chose to come to the gas station practically every day and buy one pack at a time. They probably felt like they were saving money since they were only spending $4 or $5 dollars at a time, instead of dropping $50 bucks or however much a carton cost. The other losers that came to the gas station every day were people who buy lottery tickets. Most of the people who bought scratch-off lottery tickets look like complete bums who had run out of hope in life.

Most normal people don’t buy scratch-off lottery tickets, or maybe they’ll buy one or two a year, but the people who buy them every day are some of the dumbest and ugliest people I’ve ever seen in my life. The only thing they had to look forward to in life was winning the lottery. Night after night, they would spend $5 or $20, and almost always lost. Most of them would come back a few days later to do it again, hoping to one day win the jackpot. Half of these people couldn’t even wait to get home to scratch them off, and would do it right there at the counter. Some of them would occasionally win $5 or $10 dollars and then immediately spend it all on more scratch-offs, which were all losers.

One of my coworkers worked at two different gas stations. He worked part time at the one I worked at, and he worked part time at another one in the next town. His wife also worked at a gas station just down the street from ours. Rusty was pure white trash and a felon who hung out with the Hells Angels. When he laughed you could hear the air wheezing from his lungs through the tar built up in them from decades of smoking. I bought an ounce of weed from him once, which was OK, but other than that I kept my distance from him.

Middle
School

Sleeping in the Tent

Whenever kids come up with the idea to set up a tent in the backyard and have a bunch of friends over to sleep out there, it’s really just a cover story for being able to sneak out that night and go cause trouble in some form or another. Sure it’s kind of fun to pretend like you’re camping out in your own backyard when you’re a kid, but what’s more fun is being able to sneak out of the tent and go wreak havoc around town after your parents go to bed. After all, you just can’t sneak out of the house most of the time without your parents noticing, even after they go to bed, because it’s still likely that they will hear the front door of the house opening or closing as you sneak out or return. Some kids, if their room is on the first story of their house, can pull the screen out of their window and sneak out that way (which I did a few times as well), but it’s much less noticeable to simply unzip the tent door and disappear into the night.

Every time my friends and I slept in the tent in my backyard, houses around the neighborhood would mysteriously get toilet papered, and dozens of people would have their doorbells rung ten times in a row in the middle of the night. Doorbell ditch, as it is called, is the most fun very late at night when everyone is sleeping and you can stand on their front porch and ring the doorbell repeatedly a dozen times to make sure you wake up the resident, and then run off and duck behind some bushes at the neighbor’s house to watch them answer the door and look around to see what happened. Doorbell ditch is extremely fun when you return to the same house a few minutes later and do it again after the person has gotten back in bed after having been woken up from a good night’s sleep.

When we slept in the tent, most of the time I would run an extension cord from my parents’ house out to the tent and I would bring a small television from my room out there so we could play video games all night until my parents went to bed and then we would sneak out. Sometimes in the morning we continued playing video games when we woke up, and I remember one time I was playing Double Dragon II for Nintendo, and I had never been able to win the game, but that morning I systematically beat one level after the other, making it to the final fight, and I delivered the death blow to the boss with a hurricane kick and as he flew back in slow motion, the television suddenly turned off! The picture instantly shrunk down and disappeared into a white dot in the center of the screen as the old picture tube televisions did when you turned them off. I frantically grabbed the power button and clicked it on and off repeatedly, but the television was dead. Even the Nintendo had no power. I had no idea what happened.

Then at that very moment, I heard my mom yelling from the back door that lunch was ready. We had stayed in the tent all morning, and it was approaching noon. She had yelled out earlier to come in for lunch, but I was busy trying to win Double Dragon II. I unzipped the tent and started heading to the house and saw the extension cord that had been plugged in to an external outlet on the side of the house was laying there on the sidewalk unplugged. I picked it up in bewilderment and asked my mom through the screen in the kitchen window if she unplugged it. “I told you lunch was ready,” she answered. “You stupid bitch!” I responded. “Why the hell did you unplug that, I just won Double Dragon II for the first time and I didn’t even get to see the final scene!”

I had never called my mom a bitch before. Ever. I was just so angry. The timing had been so horrible. At the very second I killed the final boss, she unplugged the TV. I worked so hard to win that game, and I was so mad. Video games mean the world to teenagers (and even some adults). She didn’t take too kindly to being called a bitch. I was twelve-years-old, and that’s not the kind of language anyone should use with their mother. She was in a bad mood for the rest of the day. I was a terrible kid.

Other Video Game Trouble

Since I spent so much money at the arcade playing video games, I tried the old “string on a quarter trick” to see if it would fool the machines so I could play them for free. I drilled a tiny hole into a quarter and tied a thread on to it that I got from my mom’s sewing cabinet, and lowered it slowly into the coin slot waiting for a credit to register on the machine so I could then just pull the quarter back up through the slot or just dangle it at that point and bob it up and down repeatedly so it would continue to add credits to the game so I could play for hours, but this didn’t work. Maybe a few years earlier this little trick worked, but when I was a kid in the 1980s and 90s, the video game companies had apparently figured this out and designed some device that the coin would pass through before the machine would register it, and once it got past this point, there was some lever or something that sprung into place to prevent it from being able to come back up through the slot. Did this stop me from thinking of other tricks to try hoping to play free video games at the arcade? No.

I went through my dad’s shop drawers and found some washers that were the same size and thickness of quarters and brought them to the arcade to see if they would work, but they didn’t. I figured it was because they were made of steel and were magnetic and there must be a sensor that gets tripped whenever a steel coin gets dropped into the slot, so I found some aluminum washers that were the same size as quarters, but they didn’t work either. Perhaps they were not the same weight as a quarter. I’m not sure why they didn’t work, but looking back on it now, I’m sure that the video game companies are a lot smarter than a 14-year-old kid, and I certainly wasn’t the only one who tried to trick the machines like this, so of course there are safeguards built into them to prevent it. You have to give me some credit for trying though.

Kids go crazy over video games. My friend Rocky’s older brother would threaten to beat him up if he lost certain video games because he wanted to see what the final levels looked like, or he would have Rocky get to those levels so he could then play them because he wasn’t good enough to get there himself. One time, Rocky’s brother locked us out of the game room while he was playing a certain game because he didn’t want us to see what the final level looked like. We tried to see what was happening through a vent in the wall, and when his brother realized this he came out of the room and went berserk. Rocky grabbed a hammer and threatened to hit him with it in self-defense.

Rocky’s mom thought that the Nintendo video game system was bad for the television and wouldn’t let him or his brother play it on the large TV in the family room and made them play it on a smaller one downstairs. For a few hours after school they would play the Nintendo on the big TV upstairs until just before their mom got home from work, and they would put it back downstairs. After all, playing video games on a small TV isn’t as fun.

One afternoon his brother was playing Metal Gear on the big TV upstairs and wouldn’t let Rocky or I play, so he went and got his mom’s camera and started taking pictures of his brother sitting in front of the television holding the controller so he had proof he was using the big TV. “I got pictures! I’m telling mom you were using the big TV!” I’m sure they got into a fight after this. They were always fighting over something, but usually it was video games.

Rocky was a tough kid and one time he challenged our principal to a fight saying “I can take you,” when we were in seventh grade. We were both called into Mr. Vought’s office for various reasons and I remember he thought Rocky was my “bodyguard” and believed that the two of us ruled the middle school. Apparently he could see our budding leadership qualities back then.

Fred had purchased a console copier out of the back of an electronics magazine which allowed him to copy Sega Genesis games onto 3 ½ inch floppy disks and play them that way. The copier plugged into the slot where you would insert the videogame cartridge and had another slot on top of it were you would then plug the game into, and using a built-in 3 ½ inch floppy disk drive it would copy the games from any cartridge you wanted. Once you copied a game onto a disc, you didn’t need the cartridge anymore because you could play it off the disk from then on. This was a kid’s dream come true!

You could borrow any video game from any one of your friends and then copy it and play at whenever you wanted! This was practically unheard of in the early 1990s, and of course this was illegal, but we didn’t care. There was a video store downtown that we could ride our bikes to and we would frequently rent a video game and ride back to Fred’s house, copy it onto a disc and then return to the store 15 minutes later telling the guy that we had accidentally rented the wrong game and he would let us exchange it for a different one. This way we could copy two games for the price of one. The console copier was a lot of fun, but as video games got more sophisticated, the Sega Genesis soon became a relic whose graphics and games didn’t compare to the newer systems, but we definitely got our use out of it, and it paid for itself many times over.

Making Crop Circles

People often think it’s a big mystery about where crop circles come from, but I can answer that question with firsthand knowledge. They come from people like me, because my friends and I made them for fun. They weren’t the most complex crop circles, but they were crop circles, nonetheless. To accomplish this mysterious task, we just brought a rope and a wooden stake out into the middle of a corn field on the edge of our block and pushed the stake in the ground with the rope tied around it and straightened it out as far as it would go and flattened all the corn in the radius of the circle it made. One crop circle just wasn’t good enough, we thought. We really wanted this to get in the news so we decided to make two other ones so the three of them would form a triangle in the middle of the cornfield.

We didn’t do this during the middle of the night under the cover of darkness like one may assume. We didn’t really see a reason for this, so we just did it when it was still light out in the early evening. What we didn’t expect was that an airplane flying overhead would happen to see us right in the middle of making our masterpiece. It was a small airplane like a Cessna and it immediately started circling the corn field obviously checking out the bizarre formation in the field. We all ducked down underneath the corn to hide so the pilot hopefully wouldn’t see us. I’m not sure why we thought we should hide, because it’s not like he could really identify us from up there; it must have just been our instincts to hit the deck when someone spotted us when we were doing something wrong. I guess it was because we were worried that he could radio into the police that there were some kids making crop circles and they could be waiting for us when we made our way back to the street.

The plane kept circling the field and we figured the pilot had spotted us so we all just took off running. We left our bikes on the edge of the field near the street and as soon as we got to them we hopped on and started to ride off. We never would have imagined that the airplane would start following us all across town. It’s tough to lose an airplane when you’re riding on a street since they can pretty much see everything. We didn’t know what to do. Was he in communication with the police and keeping track of where we were so they could come and surround us? I guess technically we ruined some of the farmer’s crops, so we could get in trouble for that and we were also trespassing on the land. We just kept riding and riding all over town, but the plane kept following us and circling around wherever we went, keeping his eye on us the entire time.

Luckily it was near sunset and about a half hour later it was getting dark so it finally left. What the heck had just happened, we thought. We just got chased by an airplane on our bikes for making crop circles! This corn field was right next to a fort we had built that we would spend a lot of time at in the summer afternoons, and after we made those crop circles, I can’t tell you how many airplanes would fly by that field and circle around for a few minutes taking a second look at our handiwork before going on their way.

Our crop circles could have made the evening news for all we knew, or been in the local paper, but our parents must have missed it if they had, because they certainly would have mentioned to us that crop circles had appeared in our small little town if they saw something about it on the news. They probably would have realized who was behind them too. Only a handful of people would even consider doing such a thing, and of course it was us.

Fun with the Paper Towel Dispenser

Since I liked to build things when I was growing up, I made a key that would open the paper towel dispenser in the school bathroom. I also made one that would unlock the toilet paper dispensers too and I would regularly steal the rolls of toilet paper so we could go toilet paper people’s houses because we didn’t want to spend money buying the toilet paper ourselves since that money could be spent on candy or video games at the arcade. The paper towel machine held other fun possibilities though. I would pull the lever and dispense ten feet of paper towel and then using a black magic marker I would write obscenities on the towel, and then open the machine up and roll it back inside so that the next few people who would come into the bathroom and pull the lever to get their paper towel to dry their hands would be surprised with a nice “Fuck You” written on it. I also liked to write mean things about the principal, Mr. Vought, like the standard middle school insult, “Mr. Vought Sucks” or “Fuck Mr. Vought.”

One day after I got done writing a bunch of trash about Mr. Vought and rolling the paper towel back up into the machine, Mr. Vought himself came walking into the bathroom as I left! I can only imagine the look on his face when he went to dry his hands and as he pulled the lever to dispense the paper towel, out came a piece that said, “Fuck Mr. Vought.” I laughed all the way back to class just thinking about it. The next time I opened up that paper towel dispenser there was a note taped inside that said the mirror to the left was a two-way mirror and behind it was a video camera and that “you will be hearing from us shortly.” How dumb did they think I was? A two-way mirror and a hidden camera in the bathroom? Yeah right. I wrote “Fuck You” across the entire note with a magic marker and closed up the machine.

I thought about taking the roll of paper towel home and feeding it in my printer and printing all sorts of crazy things on the entire roll and then putting it back in the machine so that everyone who dispensed a piece of paper towel would be pleasantly surprised by having their paper towel come out with something like “Fuck Mr. Vought” printed on it, but I soon lost interest in the paper towel machine and made a key that would shut off the lights in the hallways, and had fun with that for a while. I also took an old electrical cord with a plug on the end of it and tied the wires together and brought it to school and would plug it into the wall to short circuit the system which would flip the circuit breaker and knock the power out to the room. Yes, I was an evil genius in the making.

Free Cable TV

I never had cable TV growing up, but Fred did for a period of time, and back when we were kids it was very easy to steal cable television. There was no digital cable, digital tuners, or video On Demand, or anything like that. If you ordered cable TV, then the cable guy would go out to the cable box in the back of your neighborhood and then just simply connect the coaxial cable leading to your house into the main feed. There was a special screw on these boxes to keep them locked, but Fred’s older brother made the key in shop class and after Fred’s mom stopped paying for cable TV, we simply opened up the box and re-connected the coaxial cable labeled with his address back into the main feed, and bam, he got free cable.

There were also several channel blockers on the coaxial cables that ran to the different houses that subscribed to cable TV, which would filter out channels like HBO and Showtime, unless someone paid for them, so we removed the channel blockers and Fred got those channels for free as well. Years later at his own apartment, Fred would climb a telephone pole out front and do the same thing and got free cable TV for about ten years. Yeah, ten years! A decade of free cable TV!

Our Own TV Station

It was dumb luck and a complete surprise to discover that (old analog) camcorders actually broadcast a weak signal like a miniature television station that could be picked up by a television set. Let me try to explain. Old analog camcorders from the 1980s and 90s used coaxial cables to connect to the television, and not RCA or USB cables like future models, and one time when I reached behind the television to screw in the coaxial cable leading from Fred’s camcorder so we could watch what was on the tape, the picture showed up and we started hearing the audio before it was even connected to the TV. This was weird. I hadn’t even touched the coaxial cable onto the receptacle on the TV, but the tape was already playing on it. It turns out that the camcorder was actually broadcasting a signal and if you placed the male end of the coaxial cable near the female receptacle sticking out of the back of the TV, then the signal would transmit through the air and the camcorder’s tape could be seen playing on the TV. To a couple of fifteen-year-old kids who loved electronics, this was amazing.

We then had an idea. There is a device (or at least there was years ago before digital television when all signals were analog) called an antenna booster that people used to increase the strength of the antenna on their television sets for picking up the analogue broadcast channels if they didn’t have cable TV or a satellite dish. These antenna boosters have two coaxial connections on them where you plug one end into the back of the television set and the other end into the antenna itself. It then magnifies whatever signal the antenna picks up, so the channels would show up more clearly on your television set.

Fred and I went out and bought an antenna booster and took the coaxial cable coming from the camcorder and screwed it into the booster, and then screwed the output cable into the antenna on the top of Fred’s roof. When we pressed play on the camcorder, to our amazement, the tape showed up on the television. The antenna booster amplified the output from the camcorder so the signal would shoot through the air so the camcorder didn’t even need to be physically wired into the television set for the tape to play on it. We were basically broadcasting the signal from the camcorder through the airwaves to the television!

This worked from the antenna on the top of the house to the TV in the basement, but we wondered just how far the signal was going. Fred had a small portable television, so we set it on channel 3, the channel that televisions needed to be on in order for a camcorder or VCR to play on them, and we went outside and started walking down the block to see how far it would pick up the signal from. It slowly faded out as we got halfway down the block, but we were still amazed.

We went out and bought two more antenna boosters and daisy chained them one right into the other to boost the broadcasting power even more. Using the antenna on top of Fred’s roof as a transmitter, we broadcast a signal strong enough to be picked up by all of the neighboring houses on the block. From a little experimentation we realized that our TV broadcast was showing up on numerous stations, not just channel 3 because it was so strong.

Our little discovery wouldn’t only broadcast the tape from the camcorder, but if you turned the camera on, our system would broadcast whatever the camera was seeing live! We basically had our own television broadcasting station. We called it, WMAD, since we were as mad as hatters. We set the camera up in the basement with it broadcasting using the large antenna on the roof, and Fred, Diego and I started putting on our own skits and acted crazy like we were on Saturday Night Live. We knew that if any one of the neighbors were channel surfing, they would inevitably come across our station and see us.

Sometimes we videotaped our “shows” and played the tape back over and over, hoping that some of the neighbors would see it. I then started calling the neighbors pretending to be someone working at “WMAD” and told them I was wondering if they were picking up our signal since we were measuring the signal strength in their area, and I would ask them to turn on their TV to whatever channels were airing our show. Yep. They were getting it all right. WMAD was broadcasting to the entire block.

One of Fred’s neighbors was a year older than us and he happened to find our show when he was channel surfing, and didn’t quite know what to think. After all, how could you possibly explain that we were on TV? He mentioned this to us the next time he saw us and was very confused about how this was happening.

Even though we were having fun with our own new television station, we weren’t satisfied with a potential audience of just several surrounding homes around the block near Fred’s house. We wanted the entire town to get our station. A friend of Fred’s dad was an electrical engineer, and one Saturday afternoon Fred’s dad took us over to the cell phone store he owned so we could talk with him about our project (i.e. WMAD). When we told him what we were doing and said we were interested in building a super powerful antenna booster so the whole town would get our show, he pretty much freaked out.

This was the first time I ever heard about the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission), the government agency that is in charge of overseeing all television and radio stations, as well as products that broadcast electrical waves through the air such as walkie-talkies and CB radios. The FCC sells and regulates the licenses that broadcasting stations and other companies have to get in order to ensure that their broadcasts or devices don’t interfere with each other. Fred’s dad’s friend went on to tell us that messing with the FCC was like messing with the FBI, and that broadcasting illegally, which is clearly what we were doing, could result in us getting fines of several hundred thousand dollars for each incident.

We had been broadcasting WMAD several times a week for close to a month, and sometimes for hours on end. The man then went on to tell us that if people called the local television stations to complain that the signal wasn’t coming in clearly and said that they were picking up images of a bunch of kids acting stupid instead, then the FCC would surely be investigating this with sophisticated equipment, possibly in vans that would drive around the town in order to detect the source of this interference. Whoops!

This kind of spooked us. Fines of several hundred thousand dollars? Wow. The FCC sounded too much like the FBI. Did this discourage us from wanting to build our amplifier? Not at all. We thought about tapping into one of the neighbors’ antennas and broadcasting from theirs instead of the one on top of Fred’s roof to throw the FCC off so they couldn’t track it back to us. We even thought about building an amplifier and then putting it in a car and driving around town so the FCC wouldn’t know where the signal was coming from. We also talked about how funny it would be to broadcast a porno to the entire town since if we were on the move, the FCC couldn’t track the signal back to Fred’s mom’s house, but we were too young and didn’t quite have the engineering capabilities to build a strong enough antenna booster. We soon pulled the plug on WMAD.

Trying to Kill the Neighbor’s Trees

One of my neighbors clearly had an advanced case of obsessive-compulsive disorder which caused him to mow his lawn every few days, whether it needed it or not, and he would sweep the floor in his garage practically every night for what seemed like an hour. We thought he was completely insane. His garage was as clean and sanitary as an operating room in a hospital. Practically every garage I’ve ever seen has tools hanging on the walls, shelves that hold a variety of automobile fluids, cleaning supplies, yard tools and other junk, but Mr. Steven’s garage walls had nothing hanging on them at all accept one weed wacker which he also used compulsively. The only things in his garage were the two family cars, and the lawnmower. It was very strange. He was a nice guy, we just didn’t like him because his constant lawn mowing disturbed our peace and quiet during our lazy summer days.

One night my brother had a container full of waste oil after changing the oil in his car, and instead of taking it to the recycling site downtown to properly dispose of it, he walked across the street and dumped it around the base of a tree in Mr. Steven’s front yard. That summer, Mr. Steven’s trees became the disposal site of all waste oil, radiator fluid, transmission fluid, and even some stale gasoline. Stew likes to work on engines, so there was no shortage of toxic waste. Those trees were strong but after a while some of the leaves started to lose their color and wilt long before fall. We thought for sure all those chemicals getting absorbed by the roots would have killed them all, but Mother Nature is surprisingly resilient and the trees still lived.

Prank Phone Calls

Every kid who is normal makes prank phone calls. Some kids are better at them than others, and I was one of the best. I had polished my pranking skills from getting calls from telemarketers at my parents’ house. Instead of just hanging up on them or telling them to remove our number from their calling list like most people did, I would keep them on the phone as long as possible and come up with the craziest stories I could think of.

If a telemarketer called and my mom or dad answered the phone, they knew I loved to mess with them, so they would call me over and hand the phone to me and we would all sit around and listen to whatever story I would fabricate at the time.

As I’m sure you’re aware, telemarketers usually start their call by saying “How are you doing today Mr. Dice?” and instead of just saying I was fine, sometimes I would pretend to be really sad and tell them I’m not doing very well because my dog had just died.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. The reason I’m calling tonight is because…” (I would cut them off)

“I really loved that dog. I had him for 15 years. The smartest dog in the world.”

“I understand sir. I love animals too. We’re having a special on long distance calling plans this week…” (I’d cut them off again)

(Pretending to sniffle) “That dog just loved to steal people’s shoes and run around the house so you’d chase after him, and sometimes he’d even take the Dr. Scholl’s padding out from inside the shoe and start chewing on them. He was such a silly dog.”

“I’m sure he was. Sir, we’re offering a special long distance plan where you can call family and friends for a low price any time after 5pm Monday through Friday…” (cutting them off again)

“That’s interesting, because the dog used to like to talk on the phone with grandma and grandpa and we’d hold the phone up to his ear and they’d say things, and he’d bark through the phone back at them. That dog was so smart, I bet we could have taught him how to use the phone himself, and I’ll bet he would have.”

It was about at this time that they would hang up, but sometimes they’d stay on the line for five minutes because they didn’t want to be rude. It was great. If a telemarketer called trying to sell newspapers, I told them there was nothing but bad news in there anyway and it wasn’t worth reading, and then I’d start giving them story suggestions about what kinds of things I would like to see in the newspaper instead. If they were calling trying to sell long distance service, I told them that I was going to cancel my phone service soon and become Amish, so I wouldn’t need a phone anymore. Since they were always trying to sell me something, sometimes I tried selling them things and would tell them I was having a rummage sale that coming weekend and started telling them all the nice things they could find.

It wasn’t just telemarketers I loved to mess with, of course I would make prank phone calls to my friends’ houses and even random phone numbers around the area. When I couldn’t think of anyone to prank call, I would resort to calling the Hooked on Phonics company which sold reading programs for children whose phone number was 1-800-ABCDEFG. I would often call them and pretend to be a parent inquiring about their reading programs for my child, and would make up crazy stories saying something about how my two-year-old was already reading at an eighth-grade level and had just finished books like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and I was wondering if Hooked on Phonics had any programs to help him advance any further. They were always amazed that my child was so intelligent.

Sometimes I would tell them that I was interested in getting a program for my unborn child so I could teach it to them while they were still in the womb under the assumption that they would be able to understand it and would then have a higher IQ once they were born. The operator never seemed to think it would work, but I insisted that I had read some studies that proved unborn children in the womb could understand people if they spoke to them, and could even start learning to spell.

One night I was able to get through to Larry King Live on CNN when the guest was Ron Popeil, the infomercial guy who used to sell the Chicken Rotisserie Grill, the Ronco food dehydrator, and a whole list of other infomercial products, including Hair in a Can which is that weird spray-paint for balding people that enabled them to cover up their bald spot with washable paint. I have always been fascinated by infomercials, and I thought of a great question for Ron Popeil. I gave the phone screener a bogus question asking what kind of advice Ron had for young inventors, and then as soon as my call was live on the air I said that I heard his food dehydrator was good for drying marijuana buds so you could smoke them. The screener hung up on me immediately, but my call made it on air. Instead of realizing it was a prank call and going on to the next caller, Larry King asked him, “Is that true?” to which Popeil answered, “It is true. Yes.” Larry King responded, “It is? Well marijuana may be legal someday, [and] may be able to help people.”

The phone call is shown on the official transcript for the show which aired live on April 13, 2001, and if you Google “Ron Popeil Larry King Live Marijuana” you can find it. I had videotaped the broadcast on the VCR and my friends and I watched it over and over again laughing our butts off. The funniest part was this would not be the last I would hear about this phone call.

About nine years later, Ron Popeil was being interviewed on CNBC about his infomercial empire and the host mentioned my phone call! My jaw dropped. The host said something about one of the most interesting questions Ron had ever been asked about his products was when he was on Larry King Live in 2001 and a caller asked if the food dehydrator could be used to dry marijuana buds from pot plants! I had never guessed that my one phone call would have been so memorable. Looking back, sales for the food dehydrator probably skyrocketed since people who grew their own marijuana would want one to dry the buds. While I was able to find the official transcript for my call on CNN’s website, at this time I have not been able to find the video clip on YouTube and the VHS copy I made got taped over eventually.

Soda Guns

Every kid in America, and perhaps the world, may know how to make a soda gun, I’m not sure. It’s interesting how kids figure these things out. Somehow we found out if you take a ballpoint pen and position it on the top of a soda can in the small round piece of metal that connects the opening tab to the can itself, you could poke a hole through it by pounding your fist on top of the pen and then if you held the soda in your hand and plugged the hole with your index finger and shook it up, when you let your finger off of the hole, soda shoots out in a stream about 15 feet like a squirt gun.

A soda gun is only good for about three or four blasts and wastes half of your soda, but it sure was fun, and we must have covered the floor in study hall with sticky soda on numerous occasions, not to mention leaving people smelling like Pepsi or orange soda. And we wondered why they stopped allowing us to drink soda during study hall!

The Jelly Donut Incident

Industrial Arts (shop class) has got to be every guy’s favorite class in school because we get to build things and play with power tools, but Industrial Arts at our school was extremely special because the teacher, Mr. Norton, had a short fuse and just a little screwing around would get him to absolutely flip his lid and start yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs. It was very common for students in the surrounding classrooms to be able to hear him yelling at students, but what do you expect when you take a bunch of seventh and eighth graders and give them access to power tools?

Several years earlier a student ground up some Ex-Lax pills and put them in Mr. Norton’s jelly donuts that he had in his desk drawer, and after he ate them you can imagine what happened. This wasn’t just an urban legend, it was something that actually happened, and so ever since that day if you mentioned anything about jelly donuts in Mr. Norton’s class, you were in big trouble.

I happened to know this because one of my older brother’s friends was the guy who put the Ex-Lax in his jelly donuts, but not everyone was familiar with the jelly donut story. The very first day of class we all came in and sat down around the shop tables while Mr. Norton was still standing in the hallway chatting with other teachers, and I thought it would be funny to get someone to ask him if he would like some jelly donuts. The kid’s name was Nolan, and he just happened to be sitting at my table, so he was the one I convinced that if he wanted to get on Mr. Norton’s good side, he should ask him if he wants Nolan to bring in any jelly donuts tomorrow for class because he lets students bring in food once in a while for snack day and he really liked jelly donuts. (There was no such thing as snack day in shop class, of course, but it sounded good.) It wasn’t more than five seconds after the teacher walked into the classroom that Nolan turned around and said, “Hey Mr. Norton, how would you like some jelly donuts?”

“Get the hell out of here right now!” Mr. Norton shouted as he grabbed Nolan by the arm and dragged him out of the room and down the hall to the principal’s office. Poor Nolan didn’t know what he did wrong, but my friends and I knew the story, and we knew the one thing you should never, ever mention in shop class, were jelly donuts.

This sort of set the pace for the chaos to come the rest of the year. While we were supposed to be building things like lamps, clocks, pen holders, etc, we spent almost as much time destroying things. We especially liked to drill holes in everything, like the cabinets, tables, and people’s text books from other classes. I had to leave to get stitches in my hand once, not from a power tool accident, but because I went to punch Ken in the stomach when we were screwing around and he blocked it while holding a tape measure and it sliced my knuckle open pretty bad. We told the teacher he was just handing it to me and it accidentally cut me. I dripped a trail of blood all the way to the bathroom and my mom had to pick me up and take me to the doctor to get it stitched up.

A lot of handheld power tools can be set to stay on so you don’t have to keep the trigger pulled the whole time you’re using them, and so we often liked to lock the trigger for the belt sander so when Mr. Norton would set it on the table and plug it in, the thing would drive right off the table and crash onto the ground. He would catch on to this little trick and tried to make sure he would check the switch before he plugged it in, but every once in a while he would forget and it would go flying off the table as soon as he plugged it in.

Mr. Norton had a bad case of dandruff, which we like to add to by sprinkling saw dust in his hair every chance we got. Poor Mr. Norton. We really put him through a lot. It’s really amazing that he didn’t stab one of us with a screw driver or something for all the trouble we caused him. He was a nice guy and we were all complete punks.

The Crossing Guard

We would occasionally torment a poor crossing guard on our way to middle school who was probably volunteering his spare time to help make sure the kids would cross a busy highway safely on their way to and from school. He was an older gentleman, who most likely retired from his job and just wanted to help look out for the students’ safety. It’s a very noble thing to do, but at the time we were not very appreciative of him and occasionally when we were riding our bikes to school, instead of waiting for him to stop the traffic, we would just cross the highway anyway and he would start yelling and screaming at us as we drove off laughing. Yes, this is extremely childish, but when you’re 13-years-old, disobeying a crossing guard and having him yell and scream at you was the highlight of your morning.

One afternoon on the way home from school Ken pretended to have an accident on his bike and tipped over in the middle of the highway and just laid there pretending to be unconscious. There was no traffic coming because this was when the crossing guard stood in the middle of the highway with his hand-held stop sign, so there was no danger of any cars driving by and hitting him (we weren’t that dumb).

Instead of the crossing guard getting concerned thinking that he had been hurt, the old man grabbed Ken by the jacket with one hand and hit him in the head with his hand-held stop sign that he carried in his other hand. Ken was able to get away from him but he had an enormous bump on his head from getting hit and he was pissed. He wanted to bring water balloons to school the next day and pelt him as he drove by, and even considered throwing a large rock at him, he was so mad. The bump on his head was the size of a large grape and looked horrible, so you can probably understand his desire for revenge. During the wintertime it was very common for us to hit the crossing guard with snowballs as we drove by. Kids are so dumb.

My Friend’s Mom was our Substitute Teacher

The one day I realized that I can accomplish almost anything if I actually applied myself was the day that Diego’s mom was our substitute teacher at our school. Ordinarily I facilitated the personal hell of every substitute teacher that ever came to our school and there were a handful of other students who eagerly joined in. Having a substitute teacher was almost better than going on a field trip. We were truly out of control and there was little that they could do to keep us on task. Most of the subs would never return, probably because we made their lives miserable, but one day our sub was one of my best friends’ moms. Not only was she Diego’s mom, but she was actually pretty cool, and everyone liked her.

This was a history class and we had an in-class reading assignment that day and we all had to read through a bunch of crap and then answer questions about it. This sucked. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing, because not only was the teacher Diego’s mom, but she was also good friends with my mom, and I couldn’t have her tell my mom that I was a screwball, so I actually read through the assignment and answered the questions. Not only did I actually sit there quietly and do the assignment, but I was the first one done!

It was really the first time I had ever applied myself in history class, since I really hated it at the time and didn’t see the point of it until many years later, and ironically the History Channel would become my favorite channel to watch on television, but I’ll never forget the day that Diego’s mom was our substitute teacher because that was the day I was the first one to finish the assignment in class, and I got a pretty good grade on it too. It was amazing. If only I cared this much when our regular teacher was there, I would have got straight A’s.

Joyriding

Every teenager dreams of taking their parents’ car out joyriding, especially if it’s a cool car with balls. Diego’s dad’s car was a blue Firebird that looked pretty cool, and one afternoon his parents were gone and had taken their minivan somewhere, so Diego decided to take the Firebird out for a joyride. Of course, Fred and I were there and thought it was a great idea. Not only did we take the car without his dad’s permission, but none of us even had a driver’s license at the time, making it that much more fun.

We lived kind of out in the sticks, and so we took the car out onto the country roads to see how fast it could go. Diego spun the tires repeatedly, did brake torques, and would drive in reverse going 15 miles an hour and then slam the car into drive and step on the gas. We even caught air when we used a sharp incline over a particular set of railroad tracks as a ramp. Going probably 80 miles an hour we hit the ramp and our heads all smacked into the ceiling and sparks flew out from the back of the car from the muffler or something scraping on the ground.

It’s amazing we didn’t cause the transmission to dropout, blow a tire, or put the car in the ditch from Diego’s insane driving. We actually made it all the way back to the house with ourselves and the car in one piece. Then, as we were pulling back into the garage, Diego’s foot slipped off the brake and onto the gas pedal. The car launched forward after squealing the tires and crashed into a table against the back wall, causing it and everything on it to fall onto the hood of the car. This was bad. Surprisingly, there was only a small dent in the hood, and some slight impressions in the wall from the back legs of the table, so we set everything back up and just hoped his parents wouldn’t notice.

Aside from the small dent in the hood and the damage to the wall, we had another problem. The engine was so hot from us speeding around that the fan kept running trying to cool it down. We knew Diego’s parents would arrive back home at any moment, and not only was the fan spinning, but there was a loud ticking noise coming from the engine too. The neighbors had also seen us pull back into the garage and heard the tires squeal and must have heard the table crashing. They were standing right in their driveway 30 feet away.

Just as we had feared, Diego’s dad figured out what happened, but we weren’t sure if it was because the neighbor said that he saw us take the car out (he knew we were all too young to have a driver’s license) or if he noticed the dent in the hood, or the dents in the wall, or if his dad heard the engine’s fan when he got back, or a combination of these factors. However he did it, he figured out what Diego had done. This time it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even my idea! I just went along for the ride.

Family Vacations

I don’t know of any kid who can sit in the back seat of a car for hour after hour on a family vacation without acting up and pissing off their parents. Maybe today kids can since they have their video games, iPads and wireless Internet, but when I was a kid we pretty much had to just sit there and stare out the window or listen to our Walkman portable cassette tape player. This got boring after a while, but one thing my brother and I found that always entertained us were whoopee cushions.

We couldn’t set inflated whoopee cushions on people’s chairs since we were in the car most of the time, so we came up with what we called “drive by farting.” To be effective, drive by farting could only be done in cities or towns where there are people walking on the sidewalks next to the roads. Whenever we passed through these areas, we would roll down the windows and “fart” at people who were walking on the sidewalks. Even my mom and dad couldn’t help laughing sometimes. Some people would literally jump and look over at our car as we drove past them, and some people would start cracking up themselves laughing at what had just happened.

Sometimes during long drives when there was no one to fart at with the whoopee cushion, we would raise hell from the backseat and my dad would occasionally threaten to turn the car around and go home. What were they going to do? Ground us? Maybe when we got home, but not at that moment.

Whenever we stayed at the hotels, Stew and I would hang the paintings upside down before we left and we would occasionally dump buckets of ice onto people from our second or third story balcony. When we found someone’s door that had a “do not disturb” sign put out, we would flip it over so it read “needs housekeeping” so they would get woken up first thing in the morning by a maid. We were punks.

When we stopped at fast food restaurants for lunch, by the time we left, several chairs would have ketchup packets set under their legs so when someone would sit down they would burst and shoot ketchup all over the floor (and their shoes). Of course we enjoyed pulling the old salt and pepper shaker trick where you would spin a quarter on the table and slam down a salt or pepper shaker on top of it so the quarter would break through the plastic bottom so the next time someone picked it up, all the salt or pepper would fall out of the bottom onto the table. I also had a habit of scratching “Mark Was Here” in the bathroom stalls with my Swiss Army Knife before we left. Little did our parents know, but we left a trail of destruction pretty much everywhere we went.

Grandma and Grandpa’s

My grandparents on my dad’s side lived an entire day’s drive away from us, and every summer we would go to visit them for a week or so and this was always the highlight of my summer. Just because I was on vacation didn’t mean I took a break from causing trouble. This was a whole new town (and state) where nobody knew who I was, so they couldn’t call my parents to rat me out for something I had done.

One of my dad’s friends had a stepson my age named Noah and while our dads were hanging out and catching up, Noah, my brother and I would go out and do what we did best. Noah lived on a highway, and every summer when we hung out we would tie a bunch of empty aluminum cans onto the two ends of a long piece of fishing line and then string it up across the road so when a car would drive by, the fishing line would get caught on it and the cans would all be dragged behind it as it continued down the road. Just like a car carrying newlyweds leaving a wedding in the movies, the cans would immediately start clanging and make a bunch of noise as they were drug down the road going forty miles an hour behind the cars. We would hide in the bushes on the side of the road and watch, and most of the time the cars would stop at some point down the road to see what all the noise was. We called it “canning.”

The local college in my grandparents’ town opened up their swimming pool to the public during the summer, so we enjoyed going there a few times a week to not only go swimming, but to cause trouble around the college. My grandpa would drop us off for a few hours and leave us, so we were completely unsupervised. Sometimes Noah would come with my brother and I to the pool and we liked to bring our leftovers from lunch and throw it on the steamer in the steam room so it would stink up the place.

When we were done swimming and waiting for my grandpa to pick us back up, we liked to take a bunch of metal folding chairs and stack them in the elevator leaning towards the door and press the button to send the elevator to another floor, so when the door opened, all the chairs would fall out. We would stand outside of the elevator and lean all the chairs towards the door and hold them there, and just before the elevator door would close we would quickly pull our arm away so the chairs would all lean up against the door as it closed. That way when the elevator stopped on the next floor and the door opened, there would be nothing supporting the chairs and they would all fall over onto the ground. Imagine if you were the person waiting for the elevator and when the door opened up, a pile of five or six different chairs all fell out and crashed onto the ground. OK, so it might not seem that funny to you, but to us when we were thirteen-years-old it was a great time.

We usually went to visit grandma and grandpa around the Fourth of July, and grandpa always bought us bags of fireworks and we enjoyed shooting bottle rockets at passing cars and lighting smoke bombs off in the middle of the road around the neighborhood. Grandma and grandpa’s neighbor was a massively obese woman we called “fatso” and we often enjoyed harassing her with our whoopee cushions from our bedroom window when she would come home from work late at night as she walked from her car to her house. We could hear her pull up since it was summer time and the windows were open, and from the upstairs bedroom where we slept we would hide behind the curtains and “fart” at her with the whoopee cushions practically every night. Sometimes she would sit outside on her porch with her skinny boyfriend and smoke cigarettes late at night, and we would “fart” at them repeatedly with the whoopee cushions. One night fatso yelled up to my window that she was going to tell my grandpa what I was doing, but I was leaving early the next morning to go back home, so even if she did tell on me, it wouldn’t have mattered. My grandpa would have thought it was hilarious anyway.

When we weren’t causing trouble, my brother and I got to enjoy watching cable television. We never had cable TV growing up, but grandma and grandpa had it at their house, so we enjoyed watching as much MTV as we could while we were there. Whenever grandma would see some scantily clad women dancing in the videos she would ask us in a disturbed tone, “What are you’s guys watching?” and I would always answer that we were watching the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon. That’s not a type-o in the last sentence. She would always say “you’s guys” when she meant “you guys.” We always got a kick out of it, and I think she believed me that it was the Disney Channel we were watching.

Grandpa Dice was quite a troublemaker himself when he was young and I believe he caused a train to be derailed by setting something on the tracks or messing with the switching station when he was a kid, so he understood our need to cause trouble. He also made sure there was an endless supply of ice cream bars in the freezer that we could eat whenever we wanted. He knew what kids wanted. He was kind of like a kid himself. He was still quite a jokester too, and when we got back from an afternoon of “bumming around” as we called it, and my grandma asked what we did all day, he would say something ridiculous like telling her that he taught me how to drive his car or that we went gambling at the local Indian casino. (I was probably thirteen years old.) Grandma’s response was always the same. “My God!” I think she actually believed him most of the time, or perhaps she just didn’t know what to believe anymore after the decades of his antics.

When my dad was a kid he wanted a BB gun for Christmas one year and my grandma wouldn’t allow it, but my grandpa thought it would be fun to mess with her a little bit so he cut a piece of wood in the shape of a rifle and covered it in wrapping paper and put it under the Christmas tree to make grandma think he had gotten my dad the gun. He sure knew how to have a good time.

Miscellaneous Middle School Madness

A few other miscellaneous or minor things we did in middle school include folding ourselves up inside a hide-a-bed (three people at a time was the record with some girls from the neighborhood and it almost broke the sofa), putting a metal plate on Fred’s chest and taping a firecracker to it and putting a sandwich bag full of ketchup over it and lighting the firecracker to make our own blood bag like in the movies so it looked like he got shot. We videotaped this of course.

My brother bought some new tires for his car and before he put them on, he spun the old tires right in front of our parents’ house, causing a plume of smoke stinking like burnt rubber to fill our entire block. The smoke was so thick it just lingered in the air and didn’t really disperse for several minutes. This was in the middle of summer when everyone had all of their windows open, so I’m sure a lot of people smelled it from inside their homes (and probably almost choked to death). My brother did a break torque and the car didn’t even move, but the tires kept spinning and spinning, all the while emitting the burnt rubber smoke cloud until eventually one of the tires burst and practically disintegrated. I’m sure the neighbors really loved us.

My brother really likes engines and mechanical stuff, and one time he took an old lawn mower and drained the oil out of it and replaced it with water and filled the gas tank with racing fuel and let the lawnmower run until the engine seized up because he wanted to see how long it would take. Growing up, my brother was not as crazy as I was, but he certainly had his moments. One time his jacket got snagged on the mailbox and ripped a huge hole in it as he walked by, so he went up to the house and got a baseball bat and smashed the mailbox repeatedly to teach it a lesson. “The mailbox ripped my jacket” he insisted.

Diego and I spray painted some obscenities on a local bridge one summer afternoon for something to do. It seemed like a good idea, and it wasn’t like we were going to ruin it or anything since it was already covered with graffiti anyway. It was a fun thing to do until we found out that his mom or dad had somehow overheard us talking about it afterwards. They weren’t too happy about that. Usually we were pretty careful about not letting our parents overhear us plot our schemes so this was a surprise to us. Diego just denied it, and said we were talking about spray painting the bridge, but claimed that we never actually did it. Since it was already filled with graffiti, they couldn’t really tell if we had added anything to the artwork or not, but I’m sure they knew we were lying.

Before we had starting drinking and partying (which was freshman year in high school), we found a stash of beer at my brother’s friends’ fort nearby that was out in the woods where they would party, and instead of drinking the beer ourselves and getting drunk, we brought the cans back to my house and shook them up and smashed them on the street so they would explode and spray beer all over. It was a lot of fun. Just a few years later if we had found a stash of beer in the woods, we certainly wouldn’t have wasted it like that; we would have gotten drunk.

Fred, Diego, and I had our own fort that we frequented during the summers and it was in a fantastic location in the woods along the side of a cornfield that had a small river running beside it. The first time we discovered the location we had to wade through the river in order to get to the other side and our shoes got all wet and covered in mud. There were a bunch of large rocks making up the riverbed, so we started picking them up and throwing them in the middle of the river piling them up so we could walk on them and get to our fort without ruining our shoes.

The water wasn’t very deep and before long we had a few stable piles of rocks that we could walk on to get to the other side of the river. Somehow we got the idea that it would be cool to completely dam up the river, so every time we went to the fort we would pile up more stones, slowing the water flow little by little. After a while our dam worked pretty well. It didn’t completely stop the river, but it certainly slowed it down a ton and caused it to rise considerably higher in the area on the backside of our dam. Later that summer we realized that a local sewage plant relied on the water from the river, and when the water flow was dramatically reduced because of our dam, they must have sent someone out to see what was happening. When we returned to our fort one afternoon we realized that someone had driven a backhoe out there and dug up our entire dam and cleared the river!

Fred got a water balloon launcher one summer and we had fun with it but ended up denting the aluminum siding on my neighbor’s house because the water balloons shot out so fast. They were not very happy about it. After we used the launcher to hit an annoying neighbor girl, her dad freaked out because she had a large bruise over her entire back from getting hit so hard by the water balloon. Who would have thought that a seemingly harmless water balloon could cause so much damage? We also liked to shoot golf balls out of the launcher, but we knew better than to shoot them at people so we just shot them up in the air over a corn field down the street to see how high they would go. You’d be surprised how powerful (and dangerous) a water balloon launcher is.

In the lunchroom at our middle school there was always someone selling half pint cartons of milk and there was a small metal tray sitting on a table where you would set your 35 cents and then you would grab your own carton out of a crate sitting right next to it. We realized that you could pretend to set your money in the tray and by just tapping the other coins sitting in there it would sound like you dropped yours in there, and then you could just take your milk for free. The person attending the milk counter would even let us pick out our own change from the tray, so if we put in fifty cents and needed to take out a dime and a nickel for the change, we would just do it our self. After a while we would walk up to the counter, tap the tray so it looked like we put in our fifty cents, and would then take out a dime and a nickel for our change, so not only did we get a free milk, but we would make fifteen cents. (Hey, fifteen cents back then could get you a decent sized piece of candy from the store.) We stole the milk really just for the thrill of it rather than not being able to afford it. Our parents could certainly afford the extra 35 cents for a carton of milk, we just liked “beating the system.”

Occasionally we would bring four or five empty milk cartons into the bathroom immediately after lunch before the next period began, and we would stomp on them one right after the other, popping them all. Boom, boom, boom, bam! We’d then calmly walk out of the bathroom and off to class as if nothing happened. We were obviously trying to make people think there were gunshots from inside the school. This was way before the Columbine High School shootings in 1998 and the trend of school shootings had infected America. You know, the good old days.

There was a massive food fight in the lunch room one afternoon when for some reason all the teachers had left for a few minutes which turned out to be one of their biggest mistakes. This was not just a food fight between a few different people, this was an epic battle among the several hundred kids in the lunch room. The interesting thing about a food fight is that the more people there are involved makes even more people want to join in and start throwing things. Monkey see, monkey do. Within just a few seconds there was so much food being thrown that no matter where you looked, there were countless pieces of something flying through the air. Probably 80% of the students had thrown something, and most of us kept scooping food up off the table that was thrown our way and tossed it somewhere else in the lunchroom. It was better than any food fight I had seen in the movies. After the teachers returned they absolutely flipped out and told us that an “ice cream social” they were planning the following week would be canceled because of our misbehavior. Whatever. We had more fun having the food fight than we would have had eating ice cream.

My mom always packed a Granny Smith apple in my lunch since I really liked them, and on another occasion I convinced a kid to throw it at someone across the room, hoping to start a food fight. Granny Smith apples are extremely dense and heavy for their size, and the apple hit a girl in the head and probably caused a lump it was flying so fast. Unfortunately the incident did not start a food fight. The principal did interrupt me and others at my table, suspecting I had something to do with it, but of course we didn’t know anything about it.

During study hall we were able to get a pass to go to the weight room in order to work out, and the greatest part was that we were unsupervised the entire time because the gym teacher always had a class to teach right next door. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that since we weren’t allowed to talk in study hall we would all get passes to go to the weight room and just hang out there. It was like our own social club. We wouldn’t even change our clothes or put on workout gear, we would just go hang out there so we could get out of study hall. There was a staircase in the weight room that went upstairs to another room filled with all kinds of ventilation ducts, so we couldn’t help but go up there and explore. Some of the vents were absolutely huge and had small access panels on them, so for a period of time we had fun climbing inside of them hoping they would lead throughout the entire school, but we couldn’t get very far because there were duct covers that blocked us.

Periodically Mr. Jenson, the math teacher, would come into the weight room and go upstairs for a few minutes, which we thought was strange. Why would the math teacher need to go up there every day? One afternoon, we found out why. Diego happened to be up there exploring when Mr. Jenson walked in and headed up there and when Diego saw him coming up the stairs he was able to duck down and hide behind some ventilation ducts where he witnessed Mr. Jenson light up a cigarette and have a smoke break. Smoking on school grounds was illegal, and apparently Mr. Jenson couldn’t make it through the day without his nicotine fix, so every afternoon he would go up there to have a smoke. From that day on every once in a while in math class we would make loud comments about how the weight room smelled like smoke, or as Mr. Jenson would walk by our tables we would ask the person next to us in a loud voice, “who smokes in the weight room?”

Poor guy was probably just trying to relax for a few minutes from all the stress of having to deal with punks like us, and here we were making it worse.

Moving
To
California

The Ultimate Road Trip

My 1981 AMC Concord was packed and ready to go. It was early in the morning in the middle of August 1998, and for the entire summer my dad helped make sure my old car was road worthy for my long trip to California. The original plan was for Fred, Diego, and I to move out west together at the end of the summer, but Diego hung back for a few months and would later join Fred and I in January.

We all hated cold weather and after my Spring Break trip to Miami sophomore year of college, I put out the word to my friends that I wanted to leave the cold, miserable state of Wisconsin and head back down south to Florida. Diego’s college roommate Curt was originally from San Diego and both Fred and Diego had stayed with Curt at his parents’ house for a vacation the previous year, so they suggested we move to San Diego instead of Miami since there was no humidity or bugs, so that’s what we decided to do at the end of the summer. We were 20-years-old.

We didn’t have any jobs lined up; we didn’t have an apartment rented; we just had a road atlas that I got from the gas station I worked at that summer, along with a bunch of beef jerky and cheese sticks for food along the way. We also had two ounces of weed and a cooler full of beer. That was all we needed to start our new lives as we headed out west California dreaming. Of course our parents strongly advised we not move, but we didn’t care. We had to get out of Wisconsin. Everyone always complained about how much it sucked, so we were going to do something about it and leave. Even all our friends thought we were crazy, but they didn’t have the balls that we had to break free from our small little town and see what else the world had to offer.

By the end of the first day on the road we made it to Omaha, Nebraska and decided we would stay there for the night and head on to Denver the next day. We didn’t want to spend any money on a hotel room, so we were going to just sleep in the car somewhere, possibly at a campground. We located a campsite on the map in Omaha, but instead of turning in early and resting up for the long journey ahead, we decided to go drinking in the bars downtown. (We both had fake IDs.)

Fred and I went bar hopping until almost closing time and just before we headed to the campground, we decided to steal the beer mugs we had been drinking out of as souvenirs. We finished our beers and walked out the door, hiding them by our sides from the bartender. A little while later we arrived at the campground but there was no attendant in the office because it was closed, so we stopped the car in the parking lot and decided to sleep there. Fred passed out in the passenger seat, but I couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep sitting up in the car and I couldn’t recline my seat because the entire backseat was filled with stuff, so I got out and laid on the blacktop right next to the driver’s side door and fell asleep there.

The next thing I knew it was six or seven in the morning and a police officer was standing over me asking what the heck we were doing there. I told him we were moving to California and we got there too late to get a camp site because the park was closed so we decided to sleep there. He seemed very understanding and left us alone. A little while later we smoked some weed for breakfast and continued on our journey.

That evening we made it to Denver and again went bar hopping downtown. Instead of looking for a campground again, we decided we would hook up with a couple girls at one of the bars and sleep at their place, and that’s exactly what we did. We met two girls at one of the bars and at the end of the night we all went back to one of their places. I slept in one of the girl’s beds with her and we messed around a little bit, but she wouldn’t have sex with me. Contrary to popular belief, not every girl who goes home with a guy from the bar has sex with him that night. I didn’t care, I was just happy to be sleeping in a bed instead of in the car or on the ground. Fred got lucky though, and my girl and I heard him having sex with her friend on the futon out in the living room. The next morning we all went to Denny’s for breakfast and later said goodbye to our new friends and headed for Las Vegas.

Since we got a late start getting on the road that morning because we slept late in the comfort of the girls’ beds, we stopped at a campsite in Utah to sleep there. We didn’t even have a tent, so Fred just slept in the car and I slept on the ground again, and we headed for Vegas the next day.

It was the middle of the afternoon when we arrived in Las Vegas extremely excited (and high from all the weed we had been smoking the entire trip). We had some 40-ounce bottles of beer left over in the cooler from the night before, so we poured ourselves some beers into the mugs we had stolen from the bar in Omaha a few nights earlier. We were driving down the famous Las Vegas strip smoking a joint and drinking beer out of our mugs like we owned the place. We even took pictures of each other with the mugs up to our mouths inside the car since we figured no one would believe that we were slamming beers on the Vegas strip, out of beer mugs nonetheless. What kind of a person drinks beer from a glass mug in a car while they’re driving on the strip in downtown Las Vegas? Us, that’s who. We had no fear.

Using our fake IDs we went to a club and had a few drinks and then explored the casinos and played a few slots hoping to win some gas money to help pay for our trip. Normal people would have gotten a cheap hotel somewhere at the end of the night to sleep in, but we were far from normal. I only had $3000 to my name, which was all the money I had saved that summer, so spending $50 or $100 on a hotel room was just not in the budget, so at the end of the night we went back to the car which was parked in the lot behind the Pioneer Casino, and we crashed there.

The backseat was still full of stuff and my seat wouldn’t recline, and I still couldn’t sleep sitting up, so I took a blanket and a pillow and walked over to a small plot of grass where some trees were growing and slept there. Yes, I slept outside on the grass in the middle of the parking lot of the Pioneer Casino right behind the strip in Las Vegas like a homeless person. Actually, homeless people probably knew better than to sleep right out in the open like that, but I didn’t care. I was wasted and exhausted from being on the road for days. I woke up when the sun rose early in the morning and got back in the car and we took off for the final stretch to California.

Just as we were leaving the city of Las Vegas, the brakes on my car failed! The pedal dropped to the floor and lost almost all pressure and to get the car to stop I had to slam on the pedal as hard as I could and hold it down. Driving in the mountainous terrain of Colorado the day before had put so much stress on the brakes that we blew a brake line. We didn’t know this at the time, so we stopped off at a mechanic shop in the city of Baker, California which is an hour and a half outside of Las Vegas. A strange looking man, perhaps the owner, jacked up the car, pulled off the rear tire and inspected the brakes telling us it would be several days until he could get the parts that we needed to fix them. I told him we didn’t want to wait and that we would take our chances on the road, and then he reached inside the brake drum and purposefully pulled loose the brake pads, the springs and all the other parts holding the brake pads in place, flinging them to the ground. “Oops,” he said. “Don’t think you’re going to be able to drive it like that.”

Fred and I looked at each other petrified. This man just sabotaged my car, stranding us literally in the middle of nowhere in the desert. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. This man knew we were a couple of kids with a piece of crap car filled with our entire belongings with out-of-state plates 2000 miles from home. With the rear passenger side of the car still jacked up in the parking lot, the man went inside his office to order the parts he claimed we needed. This was too creepy. This psycho was trying to screw us, or kill us, or who knows what. We had to get out of there.

We picked up the miscellaneous parts from the ground, put the tire back on, lowered the jack, and sped off while he was still inside. While the brakes had basically failed (and one of the rear tires didn’t even have any brake pads anymore), there was still enough pressure to stop the car if I pushed the pedal really hard and gave myself enough breaking distance. There was no way we were going to stay stranded there in the desert for days leaving my car in this psycho’s garage in the middle of nowhere. We called my dad and he told us to cut the break line for that tire and crimp it to minimize the leak so the pressure would be enough to depress the other brake pads. We did this and continued our journey completely spooked from the creepy psycho at the garage who tried to strand us.

We arrived in San Diego pretty late at night because the brake problem held us up, and we had planned on sleeping at our friend Curt’s parents’ house and staying there for a few days until we found an apartment, but it was too late in the evening and we didn’t want to wake them up so we drove to Pacific Beach just north of downtown San Diego and Fred slept in the car again on the side of the road, while I took a blanket out and slept on the beach. I didn’t realize how strange this was until I was awoken in the morning by the lifeguards asking me if I was alright. “Of course I’m all right. I’m in California!” I answered. They informed me that it was illegal to sleep on the beach, but they didn’t give me a ticket. I wouldn’t have cared if they did.

We had made it. We were in California and at the very edge of the continent. The dream was coming true. After five days of madness and living off beef jerky and cheese sticks, and smoking probably half an ounce of weed and drinking every night and sleeping in parking lots and some random girl’s apartment, and even with the brakes failing and almost getting stranded in the desert, we had done it. We were ecstatic.

The Unexpected Guests

We spent our first morning in California driving around checking out the beach for a little while, and later ventured off to find Curt’s parents’ house. Fred insisted that Curt said we could stay there for as long as we needed until we found an apartment. He and Diego had stayed there a year earlier when visiting him, and Fred said Curt’s parents were totally cool…and rich. Their house was a beautiful multi-million-dollar pad on top of a huge bluff overlooking the ocean. Their backyard literally led to the edge of the bluff with the ocean below. This wasn’t just a house with an ocean view. This house was right on the ocean. It was the most amazing house I had ever seen. We knocked on their huge twelve-foot-tall front door and when Curt’s mom answered she immediately recognized Fred from his previous visit and was extremely surprised to see him again. Fred introduced me and she asked what we were doing in California. “We just moved here,” he said. “Oh, where are you living?” she asked. This is where things started to get uncomfortable.

Curt had never told his parents that we were moving to California, so of course he never asked them if we could stay there until we found an apartment. You can imagine the look on his mom’s face when Fred answered, “Curt said we could stay with you.” She probably thought he was joking, but of course he wasn’t. She invited us in and told her husband that we would be staying with them until we found an apartment. He looked just as puzzled as she did. Talk about imposing on someone! They were really nice about it, and even cooked us dinner that night and we ate it out on the patio overlooking the ocean in their back yard.

After they went to bed we kept drinking their beer and wine and enjoyed watching their 60 inch flat screen plasma TV while sitting on their white leather furniture feeling like we owned the place. A 60 inch plasma TV in 1998 was practically unheard of and probably cost about $5,000 dollars. Curt’s parents let me sleep in the guest room upstairs which had an ocean view and its own balcony, and Fred slept downstairs in Curt’s sister’s room because she was off at college.

When I got up the next morning Curt’s mom and dad were off to work and we had the whole house to ourselves. Sure we looked for an apartment for a few hours, but then came back to the house to hang out and enjoy the amenities. When Curt’s mom came home from work she found us drinking their beer and watching their big-screen TV like a couple of low lifes.

“Did you find an apartment today?” she asked. “Nope, not yet. Nothing we could afford at least.” We hadn’t realized how expensive rent was in California, especially near the beach. Most of the apartments were about twice as expensive as we had thought. After freeloading off Curt’s parents for another five days, we actually did find an apartment, and I had to trade in my ocean view bedroom, the big-screen TV, and a house fully stocked with expensive wine for a completely empty apartment about seven miles away from the beach. It wasn’t what we had planned, but we were in California, so we were still pretty happy.

Curt’s parents were glad to get rid of us and wished us well, but little did any of us know at the time, us entering their lives would be one of the worst things that had ever happened to them. More about this later.

Our New Apartment

You don’t know how much you take for granted in life until you have nothing. We did have a roof over our head, our clothes, and my old car, but that’s about it. That, and a computer and the scanner we had scammed from Best Buy several years earlier, and a box of dishes that Fred’s mom bought for us before we left. That’s pretty much it. That’s all we had. No furniture, no mattresses, no TV, no lamps, no decorations, no nothing. Our apartment was nice and had a lot of potential though. It was a spacious two-bedroom place with lofted ceilings and also had a community hot tub and pool. The day we moved in we went to Wal-Mart and each bought an inflatable air mattress to sleep on and two plastic patio chairs so we at least had somewhere to sit.

After sunset, we grabbed a 12-pack of beer and went to hang out by the pool. We were immediately approached by a security guard who was sitting at one of the tables asking us who we were. We told him we just moved in and arrived from Wisconsin, and he informed us there was no alcohol allowed at the pool. We offered him a beer and sat down at the table with him and he immediately forgot about this rule and we all tipped back a few cold ones as we told him about our crazy adventures on our trip there. When we got to the part about the brakes failing, as luck would have it, he turned out to be a full time mechanic, only doing the security job part time at night. His name was Jax, and he offered to help me fix them the next day. Everything seemed to be falling right into place.

It’s very strange living in a completely empty apartment with only two plastic chairs, and we desperately needed furniture but we hardly had any money so it would have to wait. Lucky for us, just as the universe provided us with a nice place to stay in Colorado with the girls we met at the bar and united us with Jax the security guard/mechanic at our apartment complex our first night there, the universe also began providing us with the furniture we desperately needed, and it was all free.

Every few nights when we carried out our bags of empty beer cans to the recycling bins, we would notice sitting right next to the dumpster was some old discarded furniture that people had thrown away after moving out. It was incredible. We first found an old desk so we carried it upstairs and set up the computer on it, and seemingly every time we went to throw away our beer cans we would find something else. We called it the magic dumpster, and it provided almost everything that we needed. Aside from the desk, we got a kitchen table and chairs, a laundry bin, an oscillating fan, shelves made of cardboard that were designed to hold cartons of cigarettes as a store display, and we even found some old picture frames with artwork in them that we hung on our bare walls.

Just when everything seemed to be going our way and our California dreams were beginning to come true, our lives would take a quick detour leading us into a downward spiral to depths we had never imagined.

Getting a DUI

About two weeks after I arrived in California to start my new life and pursue my hopes and dreams, my plans hit a large speed bump in the form of a DUI. It was Labor Day weekend and the police were out looking for drunk drivers as they often do on holiday weekends, and my piece of crap 1981 AMC Concord with out-of-state plates probably looked suspicious driving down the road at 1:30 in the morning as Fred and I were coming home from the bar.

You can probably guess what happened next. After getting pulled over for “swerving” and failing a breathalyzer I was handcuffed and put in the back of the cop car and taken to the police station. A different cop took Fred to the drunk tank. When I arrived at the police station, the arresting officer emptied my pockets and found my fake ID stuck in my money clip. He was confused at first, because when he had pulled me over and checked my ID, he realized I was only 20-years-old, but the ID he found when he emptied my pockets said I was over 21. When he realized what it was, I told him I really needed it, and asked him if he would let me keep it instead of confiscating it. I told him to please stick it in the bushes next to the front door of the police station and when I got out of jail I would come back and find it.

“I just moved here,” I told him. “And I don’t know anybody, and I need that to get into the bars in order to meet some girls,” I explained. I continued to tell him that drinking in Wisconsin is a way of life, and that if he confiscated my fake ID it would be devastating to my social life. “Everybody in Wisconsin drinks,” I said. “I really need that fake ID.” The cop seemed rather sympathetic and told me he would set it on the top of the rear driver’s side tire on my car which was left abandoned on the side of the road where I had been pulled over.

He then gave me a plastic cup and asked me to pee in it for a urine analysis. I had already failed a breathalyzer, but I didn’t want to give them any more evidence against me, so I told him I didn’t have to pee at the moment. He put me in an office with a water cooler and told me to drink a bunch of water so I could pee in a little while.

The cop left me there all alone for a few minutes to gulp down some water, when I noticed a sink in the room. This was not a bathroom, and there was no toilet, but there was a sink for whatever reason, and since I really did have to pee (I just told him I didn’t have to go and held it so I wouldn’t have to give him a pee sample), I decided to pee in the sink so I wouldn’t have to give him the sample. Once I relieved myself, I knew it would be hours before I had to pee again, and my blood alcohol level would have dropped significantly by that time, and he probably would just give up on wanting his pee sample after a while. Luckily he didn’t walk in and see me peeing in his sink or I probably would’ve gotten charged with something else, like indecent exposure or something. Just as I thought, not long after this, he gave up on me peeing and a police officer drove me to the county jail.

It was probably about 3 AM by now and I was placed in a jail cell with about 15 or 20 other guys, most of which looked like hard-core drug addicts or criminals. I certainly did not belong there, I thought. One guy was lying on the bench having withdrawals from heroin, and some of the other guys were passed out on the concrete floor. I felt like I was in hell. To make things even worse, the toilet was clogged and filled almost to the top with urine and feces, and stunk up the whole jail cell. The guards didn’t seem to care, and I’m sure they thought this was funny. It smelled like we were locked up in a sewer.

The prisoners all realized that if anyone flushed the toilet, the rushing water coming in would cause it to overflow, spilling out onto the jailhouse floor, so every time someone was using the toilet people would remind them not to flush it or it would overflow. These suggestions worked for a few hours, until someone out of habit flushed the toilet when they were done using it. The water started flowing into the toilet bowl, and then the urine and feces soup that had been stewing began overflowing onto the floor. This jail cell was fairly small, probably only 20’ x 20’, and the sewage spilled out half way across the floor. Everyone jumped out of the way and huddled up against the wall on the opposite side of the cell and we all put our shirts over our noses trying to cover up the smell. There on the floor was an enormous puddle of poop, probably five feet wide and ten 10 feet long. We started clamoring for the guards, telling them what happened and they came over and looked, but didn’t care. Hours went by with the sewage still on the floor, and we were still huddled up against one side of the jail cell, and we still had to breathe through our shirts to filter out some of the stench.

There were no clocks in this holding cell, and of course my watch was confiscated when I was booked, so I had no idea what time it was. It seemed like time was standing still. Eventually, my turn came to be released late the next morning and I got a ride home from one of my cellmates’ girlfriends, who came to pick him up after he was released. He had also been arrested for drunk driving the night before. When they dropped me off at my apartment, I saw my car in the parking lot and I figured Fred was let go and drove it home using the spare key. A feeling of great disappointment then came over me because I remembered what the police officer had said the night before, when he promised he would put my fake ID on top of the tire where we had abandoned the car.

It was great that Fred was not in jail, and it turns out the cops just took him to the drunk tank and released him in the morning without even giving him an underage drinking ticket, and he got a ride from someone back to my car and drove it back to our apartment using the spare key. I explained to him that the cop promised me he was going to put my fake ID on the tire, so we drove back to the road where we had gotten pulled over and parked on the shoulder in the approximate spot. We then started walking up the street with our eyes locked on the ground, hoping to find my fake ID, which would have fallen off the tire as Fred drove away if the officer stuck to his word.

This was certainly a long shot. First of all, what are the odds that the same police officer who arrested me for a DUI would actually give me my fake ID back? This was of course the very fake ID that had led to my arrest, allowing me access to alcohol, so what kind of a cop would actually give that back to a 20-year-old kid so he could drink some more? I had to hope for the best. I had to hope that the cop had actually done this insane, illogical, and illegal thing like he had promised. Without my fake ID our lives would be completely ruined.

As we continued walking down the gravel shoulder on the highway with our eyes fixed on the ground, there it was! My fake ID! The police officer actually did what he said! I couldn’t believe it. I bent over and picked it up and let out a shout of joy with my prized possession back in my hand, but my problems were certainly not over.

Getting a DUI sucks. Of course it’s dangerous drinking and driving, and a stupid thing to do, so the punishment fits the crime. While the cop did give me my fake ID back, he kept my real one because my license was immediately suspended. Right before moving to California I went to the DMV in Wisconsin and got a duplicate driver’s license just in case I lost my wallet. A few days before my DUI arrest I had applied for a California driver’s license, and when I did, the DMV took my (duplicate) Wisconsin ID and said they would mail me my California one a few days later. So, while the arresting officer had taken my remaining Wisconsin driver’s license, I had a brand-new California driver’s license in the mail on its way to me and I received it a few days later. I still had a driver’s license! Ha ha!

I didn’t know if the computer systems from California and Wisconsin communicated with each other, but I had a suspicion that my Wisconsin driver’s license would be suspended in the Wisconsin computers, but the California computers would show that I had a valid California license, so I just kept driving. Most people who get a DUI are supposed to get an occupational permit, which allows you to drive only to and from school or work during specific hours, but I didn’t want to pay for this so I just kept driving like there was nothing wrong and luckily never got pulled over until several years later when my license was valid again. My California license probably was suspended, but I didn’t care, so I still drove as if nothing happened.

I did have another problem, though, because after a few months my Wisconsin license plates expired, and there’s nothing like driving an old beat-up car with expired out-of-state plates to raise suspicion when a cop sees it. Since I was most likely driving with a suspended license (along with my now expired registration), I used Photoshop to make a fake registration tag with the current year on it and glued it on my license plate.

As if driving with a suspended license after getting a DUI wasn’t bad enough, I was now driving a car with fake registration stickers on it. I thought it was pretty creative, and luckily I never got pulled over, and the following year I was able to get valid California plates and could drive without getting nervous every time a cop was behind me.

Getting the DUI really spooked me, especially being thrown in a jail cell with an overflowing bowl of feces that night. I also had to pay expensive fines, take alcohol education classes once or twice a week for several months, and attend a couple Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I was not an alcoholic, but this was all part of my punishment by the court. This whole experience actually helped me realize the dangers of drinking and driving. Where I was from, the odds were the only thing you would really hit if you were drunk driving was a cornfield, but in California, there is so much traffic and so many lanes going in different directions and crazy intersections with curvy winding roads that it is very dangerous to drink and drive. Of course it’s dangerous to drink and drive anywhere, even surrounded by a bunch of cornfields, because you could hit an oncoming car or a tree, but we were too dumb to think about this at the time.

After this experience I was fairly careful to not drink too much and then drive, and alcohol lost a little bit of its fun for me. Marijuana, on the other hand, had not. I still enjoyed smoking weed on a daily basis.

Where Can I Buy Some Weed Around Here?

Our marijuana supply was rapidly dwindling after we arrived in California and we desperately needed to find a regular hookup so we could get more. We figured weed can’t be that hard to find in California, especially the dumpy area where we were living, so we walked around the streets by the beach asking random people if they knew where we could buy some pot. You may be thinking this is a completely ridiculous thing to do, but we were desperate. It didn’t take long before we found a group of kids our age who said they could help. This was before medical marijuana was legal in California so we couldn’t just go and get a prescription for it and pick some up from the local dispensary.

These were certainly not the most clean-cut group of kids, and one of them was carrying a cordless telephone that he was hoping to sell to someone so he would have money for his own weed, and even though these weren’t exactly our type of people, they know a guy who lived just a few blocks away who was the local pot dealer for the neighborhood so they introduced us to him. He seemed like a friendly guy at first and sold us a bag of some pretty decent weed and gave me his number for all of our future transactions.

Over the next few months this dude was the most reliable pot dispenser I had ever found. He was always home after five o’clock in the evening and he always had some good weed available for sale. One thing I did notice about the guy was that he and his friends liked to play video games, particularly shoot ‘em up games. I would never hang out at his place for more than ten minutes, and it was always a quick and simple transaction, but it seemed that every night Fred and I stopped over there to score some weed, he and his friends were playing these games.

“Shoot them in the fucking head!” he would always yell at the person playing the game. He seemed to have a real obsession with shooting people in the head. I didn’t think anything of it really until one morning before school I was watching the morning news and saw a report that showed his picture and mentioned that he was arrested the night before during a party at his apartment for shooting his girlfriend in the head and killing her. It was very surreal. I didn’t usually watch the news, it just happened to be on that morning. Not only did he just shoot his girlfriend and kill her, but he shot her in the head, just like he was always telling people to do when they were playing video games. It was quite disturbing. I shook off the weirdness and soon found another pot hookup at my community college who wasn’t a psycho.

Stalking Tony Robbins

“Stalking” may not be the right word, because we didn’t mean Tony Robbins any harm, we just wanted to meet him and get his autograph in our copies of Unlimited Power. Anthony Robbins, of course, is the world-famous motivational speaker and self-help guru, and his book, which Fred and I read in the dump truck while working for the weed cutter the summer after high school graduation, changed the course of our lives and opened us up to the world of self-improvement.

In Unlimited Power, Tony said that he lived in a castle in Del Mar, California, a beautiful and wealthy beach community in San Diego County. Since we largely credited Tony with giving us the confidence to move to California to pursue our dreams, we wanted to meet him and have him autograph our books, so we set out to Del Mar to find the castle. We just asked random people walking on the street where Tony Robbins’ castle was, and to our surprise, somebody knew and pointed us in the right direction! We parked the car outside and walked up to the front door and both Fred and I had our copies of Unlimited Power in our hands as we anxiously awaited to meet our idol. A construction worker opened the door, and we asked him if Tony was home. He informed us that Tony had sold the castle and now lived in La Jolla, the next city south, so that’s where we went.

While finding the “Del Mar Castle” was fairly simple, we wondered how in the world we would find Tony’s house in La Jolla. All we knew was that he lives somewhere in the city. We stopped at a local gas station and asked some people if they knew where Tony Robbins lived. It seems like a crazy thing to do, after all, what were the odds that some random stranger is going to happen to know where he lived? La Jolla is not exactly a small town. Someone told us he probably lived on La Jolla Farms Road, because that’s where all the richest of the rich live. The homes on this street are absolutely incredible. It feels like you’re in Beverly Hills. Most of them are gigantic and have beautiful and immaculate landscaping, and some of them you can’t even see because they’re hidden behind massive gates. Just driving down the street, truly is an incredible experience, especially for two Midwestern boys who had no money and lived in a dumpy part of San Diego. This was definitely where the richest of the rich lived.

We randomly pulled over and parked on the side of the road in front of one of the houses, and walked up to the front door to pretend that we had confused their house with Tony’s house, and acted like we were friends of his. When someone answered the door, I said nonchalantly, “Is Tony around?”

“Tony?” the man responded.

“Yeah. Tony and Becky” (his wife at the time).

“Oh, you have the wrong house,” the man told us. “They live across the street.”

“Across the street?” we thought to ourselves.

“Thanks,” I said, as we turned in astonishment. What were the odds, we thought. Out of all the houses on this long and winding road, the one that we randomly chose to approach was the one directly across the street from his very house! Things soon got weirder.

As we walked over to the house, which was hidden behind a large brown gate, a dark colored Porsche drove up and pulled into the driveway, stopping for a moment as the gate opened. We hurried over and approached the driver’s side and there he was, our hero, Anthony Robbins! I don’t know how he fit into that tiny car, but he did. “Tony!” I said, as we approached, holding our copies of his book.

“Hey guys,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“We just moved here to follow our dreams thanks to you and your book, and we wanted to meet you and say thanks,” I told him. He extended his hand to shake mine, and when they met, mine practically disappeared as he wrapped his gigantic fingers around it. People often joke that Tony has big teeth, but he also has a big head. The guy’s head was enormous, and so are his hands. He really is a giant.

We talked with him for a minute and then he autographed both of our books and drove off down his driveway, disappearing behind the closing gate. We walked back to my car stunned. We had done it. We just met Tony Robbins. Not only that, but we had somehow telepathically honed in on his exact location. What were the odds? Of all the houses on the street, we randomly chose the one directly across the street from him, and not only that, but as we were walking up to his driveway, he pulled up in his car!

Tony’s teachings don’t get too much into the metaphysical, the mystical, or the spiritual, it’s mainly about strategies for creating habits that will ultimately lead you closer to your goals, but he does touch on some esoteric spiritual principles, and Fred and I drove back to our empty apartment with no furniture but two plastic Wal-Mart chairs astonished by what had just occurred. Different spiritual teachers, and even Jesus himself, spoke about the power of belief and said that if you simply believe enough, you can metaphorically move mountains, and that’s what we had done. We wanted to meet Tony Robbins so bad, and were so amped up on our new life in California after having just drove over 2000 miles with no apartment ready, no job lined up, no nothing, just our hopes and dreams of what lies ahead, and our focus was so sharp that we somehow metaphysically altered the course of our own reality causing our paths to cross with our inspiration, Tony Robbins.

While I still look back on this in amazement, I must advise you that you should never just show up at the home of your favorite celebrity, ever. This is extremely creepy and if you feel that you “have” to meet them to thank them or to talk to them, then you have some mental problems. You might be saying, “but you did it, Mark.” Yeah, I did, and I was high as hell and out of my mind, and as you’ve figured out by now, I was completely insane.

Using Dish Soap in a Dishwasher

How was I supposed to know that you’re not supposed to use dish soap in a dishwasher? This didn’t make any sense. I found this out the hard way after moving to California. My mom always did the dishes when I was growing up, and nobody ever told me the difference between dish soap and dishwasher detergent, and unfortunately I had to find this out on my own. When I first moved out with John, Nick, and Bobby, in our house in Wisconsin this was never an issue, because we didn’t have a dishwashing machine in the house, but our apartment in California luckily had one, even though I didn’t really know how to use it.

One morning I loaded up the dishwasher and turned it on right before leaving for the afternoon because it was loud and I didn’t want to be home when the thing was running. A few hours later I returned home to a flooded kitchen with a foot of soap suds everywhere.

Later that afternoon, the maintenance guy came over to see what had happened because the neighbor below had reported a leak was coming through their ceiling. I told him my dishwasher must have broke and it overflowed. He rolled his eyes and immediately knew what happened. He asked if I used dish soap, and I said of course I used soap, how are the dishes going to get clean without any soap? He then informed me that you’re not supposed to use dish soap in the dishwasher, and you’re only supposed to use dishwasher detergent. Seriously, how was I supposed to know about this? Dish soap, dishwasher soap, how am I supposed to know there’s a difference? Luckily I didn’t have to pay for any of the damages. I felt like a complete idiot.

Ruining Thanksgiving Dinner

Three months after we moved to California, Thanksgiving came around, the time when friends and families all sit around the dinner table and enjoy a good meal together. It’s the one night of the year when nobody likes to eat dinner at home all alone, and if a person doesn’t have any family in the area, then someone is bound to invite them over to their place. Since we didn’t have any family in the area, Curt’s parents generously invited Fred and I to join them and their friends at their house for Thanksgiving dinner. They would soon regret this.

To our surprise, they apparently had forgiven us for showing up on their doorstep unannounced when we first arrived in California and shamefully imposed on them, essentially forcing them to let us stay at their house until we got an apartment. We showed up for Thanksgiving dinner high as hell after having smoked a bunch of marijuana on the way there, and I’m sure Fred was drunk, and we were in no shape to be socializing with sophisticated adults.

Early on at the dinner, Curt’s parents asked us what we thought of California. I spoke up and told them San Diego was fantastic, and I was glad that I moved here, but I really hated Los Angeles and thought it was a complete dump and everyone who lived there were fake, shallow, materialistic, scumbags—especially people in Hollywood who worked in the entertainment industry. I also said that I hoped God would wipe Los Angeles off the face of the earth in a massive earthquake. One of my favorite songs at the time was Aenima by Tool, which is basically about this kind of event and the singer’s hatred of Hollywood. An uncomfortable look crept onto their faces as Curt’s dad then informed me that their friends who were joining us that night, seated just across the table from me, lived in Los Angeles!

I could feel the embarrassment rising up from the pit of my stomach. I tried to recover from this historic foot-in-mouth moment by asking them what they did for a living, assuming it was not something in the entertainment industry so I could then say that people in their industry are okay, it’s just the people in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles who I hated, but as it turned out both of them happened to work for Paramount, a major motion picture company. There was no recovering from what I just said. I basically just said they were scum and I hated them and hoped they died. I had pretty much ruined Thanksgiving dinner. There were a few moments of extreme uncomfortableness at the table, and I was so stoned I wasn’t sure if my anxiety was from the weed I was smoking earlier, or from insulting Curt’s parents’ guests, or both.

I just started drinking more wine and forgot all about it until as Fred and I were leaving walking back out to the car, Fred started laughing uncontrollably. “You basically said you hoped the Langdon’s friends would die in an earthquake, at Thanksgiving dinner!” he cackled. He said it took all his strength and concentration not to bust out laughing uncontrollably at the table after I said it. We still laugh about it to this day. As bad as this was, it would pale in comparison to what we would later put the Langdon’s through. Ruining Thanksgiving dinner one year is fairly easy to forgive and forget. What happened to them later because of us is not.

The Wrong Max

Just a few weeks after my DUI, Fred was driving my car home from the bar one night and put it in the ditch, ruining the radiator. I had gotten a ride home from a girl I was trying to hook up with that night and left my car with Fred, but he was so drunk he crashed it on his way home. The car had been towed and impounded for being abandoned in the ditch, and we needed a ride to the impound lot on the other side of town to get it. Since we didn’t have any friends, this was extremely difficult. My one beginning friendship was with the kid named Max N, who was in my philosophy class at the local community college, but I didn’t have his phone number. I did know his full name, however, so we looked him up in the phone book, but realized there were pages of listings of people with his name because it was so common.

What did we do? We started calling the listings in the phone book one by one. This was in 1998 and most people still had home phones (land lines) back then because cell phones were just starting to take off. Each time someone would answer I said, “Hey, it’s Mark from philosophy class.” The first dozen people I called had no idea what I was talking about, because obviously it was the wrong number, but after a while the person on the other end of the phone acknowledged that he was Max N from philosophy class, but when I said it was me, he didn’t know who I was. Not only did this Max N have the same name as my friend, but he was taking a philosophy class at the same college too!

When I realized it wasn’t the same Max N that I knew, I told him why I was calling and explained that Max N was the only person we knew and that we had to go get my car from the tow yard. He was very sympathetic to our situation and offered to give us a ride! I gave him our address and twenty minutes later he came over and picked us up and drove us to the tow yard to get my car. This was amazing. This kid was a complete stranger, but he still offered to help us out. He didn’t even seem like a complete weirdo. He was a normal college kid who felt sorry for our situation and decided to help.

It was over $100 bucks to get the car out of the impound lot and Fred had left his keys in the ignition, but I had my set with me so we unlocked the car, got inside, and sped off. Hey, it was my car, so it wasn’t like I was stealing it or anything. It was still registered in Wisconsin, so how were they going to find us?

As we drove home, the radiator leaked completely dry and the car almost overheated. The release valve on the bottom was ripped off, and in order to get the radiator to hold any water, we had to jam a towel inside the hole. Water still leaked out really bad, even with our make-shift plug put in the hole, and the car looked like it was going to overheat and ruin the engine, so we had to stop on the way home to add more water. We pulled into a parking lot somewhere and found an old cup on the ground and used it to scoop up water from a puddle and poured it into the radiator. It needed to be replaced anyway, so we figured how much more damage could some muddy puddle water do to it?

Going to The Late Late Show

Fred, Max N, and I got tickets to be in the studio audience at The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn when he hosted it in 1998, so we drove up to Los Angeles where it was filmed and smoked a big fat blunt on the way and anxiously awaited seeing one of our idols in person. Before we got to the studio we decided that we would do two things during the show. First, when Craig was introduced and the show began, we would applaud and holler like every audience did, but we wouldn’t stop because we wanted to see how long the crowd would go along with us; and second, we decided to start laughing and applaud after the setup for one of his jokes during the monologue, before he even got to the punch line.

When the announcer said “Here’s your host…Craig Kilborn,” the audience erupted with applause and whoops and hollers, but just when everyone was starting to quiet down, all three of us would get even louder and kept yelling “yeah, Craig! Whooo!” and we kept applauding, and the audience would all join back in and we were able to keep this going for an abnormally long period of time, leaving a confused look on Craig’s face as he wondered why this was the most excited audience he had ever seen.

After he did a few jokes in his monologue, we all agreed now was the time to laugh at the setup, and so as soon as he finished the setup for his next joke and paused for a second before delivering the punch line, all three of us started laughing and applauding, and others in the audience followed like lemmings. The setup wasn’t even funny because the joke wasn’t finished, but most people still applauded with us! Morons! Like most late night comedy shows, the show was taped in the late afternoon or early evening and then aired later that night, so we were able to watch the show after we got back home. When it got to the part when we applauded at the setup, we realized that because so many people started applauding with us and because of our yelling, you couldn’t even hear the punch line for the joke at all! It was the weirdest thing to watch and Craig looked baffled as he continued on to the next joke, no doubt wondering why people were applauding when his joke wasn’t even finished.

Free Food from Complaining

Sometimes I’m very attuned to details, and I noticed that practically every food product you buy at the grocery store has a quality guarantee that says if you are not completely satisfied with the product, you can return it for a full refund or a replacement and they list an 800-number for you to call if you want to complain. I didn’t have much money and what little I had I was spending on weed and beer, so I didn’t really have much left over to buy food—especially good food. Fred and I pretty much ate peanut butter and jelly, romen noodles, and spaghetti with no sauce because the sauce cost too much. We needed to eat, but more importantly, we needed beer and weed, so one afternoon I called the phone number listed on a pizza box and complained to the company about it hoping they would give me a refund. I told them it didn’t look like the picture, which it didn’t, and I was very disappointed.

On the box, the pizza looked fantastic with all kinds of cheese and pepperoni spread all over the top, but the actual pizza didn’t look anything like that. The robotic customer service person on the other end of the line read a scripted response off their computer screen telling me, “I’m sorry sir for your dissatisfaction. We are committed to providing a quality product to our customers and you are important to us,” and they told me that they would like to send me some free coupons for a replacement. I gave them my address and a fake name and they sent me some coupons for free pizzas! Who doesn’t like pizza, especially when it’s free? My plan worked just as I expected.

I then went through our kitchen cabinet (what little food we had) and I called all the 800 numbers on every package and complained about them all. I would just tell them I didn’t like it or that it looked better on the package and I was very disappointed. Their response was the same every time. “I’m sorry sir, we are committed to providing a quality product to our customers. We would like to send you some free coupons for reimbursement, bla bla bla.” The only thing we had to eat in the apartment was pretty much peanut butter and pizza, so I took a notepad and pen to the grocery store and started writing down the 1-800 numbers from every different kind of product I had an appetite for.

The customer service person always asked for the specific lot number or item number that’s stamped on the particular product when I called to complain, so along with the 800 number I would write down the product name, the size, and the specific item number. I did this for just about everything you can imagine. Bread, meat, cookies, peanut butter, jelly, frozen dinners, milk, cereal, soda, spaghetti sauce, I even started calling and complaining about the beer that we drank, telling the company it tasted stale and they would send me free coupons for beer! That’s right, free. One beer company even sent me a check for seven or eight dollars to compensate me for the six-pack that I said I didn’t like! They certainly didn’t want me switching my brand of beer and lose me as a customer for life, so they sent me some money to keep me happy.

The cashiers at the grocery store would always look at me funny when they rang up $250 worth of groceries, including beer, steaks, juice, cereal, and just about everything else in the store, and then I would hand them a large stack of coupons they would have to scan one by one, and the balance would be reduced to zero dollars. They had never seen anything like it and were always surprised. I felt a little weird sometimes, but we were eating like kings without paying a dime. I even got Levi’s to send me a few pairs of free jeans because I called them and complained that mine had worn out. People always complain that companies have terrible customer service, but I can’t praise the food industry enough. They were more than generous and kept me from starving to death.

Custom Compilations

While burning your own CDs filled with your favorite music became commonplace in the 2000’s, in the late 1990s, CD burners were very expensive and few people even knew about MP3s back then; but we did. We were on the cutting edge of technology and were downloading MP3s before anyone heard of Napster, and three years before Apple had released the iPod or iTunes. Fred and I came up with the idea to start a “company” we called Custom Compilations where we would burn people compilation CDs of their favorite songs for only $9.99 — less than the cost of a new CD itself.

While the idea of Custom Compilations was genius and ahead of its time, our business practices were a bit unorthodox. We didn’t have the money or the resources to acquire the proper licensing to buy the rights to popular songs (we were only twenty-years-old) so that we could legally make copies by burning them onto CDs, so we decided to download the songs from the Internet for free and then just use them anyway. I made up some nice fliers that explained our service and had a section where people could write in the songs in the order that they wanted them to appear on their CD, and we made a large color sign and brought a table out to the quad at my college and set up a booth trying to promote our idea.

We figured people could fill in their desired songs on the order form and then we would go home and download them and burn them onto a CD, and the very next day we would meet them in the quad and they could pay us when we gave them their CD. This idea really was ahead of its time because hardly anyone had CD burners or knew that you could download mp3s of practically any song you wanted, but our “business” was slow to take off and we needed money fast, so we quickly abandoned the idea of Custom Compilations and launched another operation that would become immediately profitable.

Selling Fake IDs

Every college kid wants a fake ID so they can buy beer and get into clubs and bars, so we decided to tap this enormous market to help pay for rent and fund our weed habit. I went out and bought the best color printer on the market at the time and a Polaroid camera, and using Photoshop we went to work. (Digital cameras were very expensive back in 1998, so we had to use a Polaroid.) We found a template on the Internet of the driver’s license from Georgia, the only state whose license didn’t have a hologram on it, so we could easily replicate it.

Fred and I already had fake IDs, but we needed a sample of our work, so we took my picture with the Polaroid camera and scanned it into the computer and shortly after printed out my new Georgia driver’s license. We bought a laminating machine and small lamination cards from Office Depot, and we assembled my new ID with the precision of a surgeon. It looked pretty good, so I brought it with me to school the next day and in between my classes I would approach random groups of students and ask them if they wanted fake IDs. I would show them the one that we had just made and take a picture of whoever wanted one with the Polaroid camera and wrote down whatever name and birth date they wanted on their ID and scheduled a time for them to meet me the next day where I would exchange their new fake ID for $100 cash.

We were very proud of our fake ID business. After all, where could you possibly get a fake ID within 24 hours? The best part was that the students wouldn’t even have to pay us until after we gave them their ID so they knew it wasn’t a scam just to take their money. Business was good. Some days we made $400 or $500 dollars a day. We did this only for about a month or two before we had marijuana-fuelled paranoia that the FBI was going to bust down our door early one morning and raid our apartment. We still had absolutely no furniture at all, except for the two plastic Wal-Mart chairs and a few odds and ends we had found out by the dumpster. We looked like spies, or terrorists. We had a large map of California taped on the wall because we didn’t have the money for decorations, and we each slept on inflatable camping mattresses. Our apartment didn’t look like a home, it looked like a temporary command center for some kind of illegal operation.

Because we were so short on money, when we abandoned the ID operation, we boxed up the expensive color printer and returned it to Circuit City as if it was brand new for what I expected would be a full refund, but what I didn’t realize was that the store had a policy that if you waited more than 14 days to return certain electronics, they would only give you in-store credit. I didn’t want in-store credit, I wanted the money, so I hung out in the store parking lot approaching people who were walking in, and told them that I would buy what they were looking for with my in-store credit slip, if they would then give me the cash. It was embarrassing.

We also returned the laminator machine and the Polaroid camera to Office Depot and were able to get a cash refund for them. We had opened each package very carefully and sealed them all back up as if they were brand new. It was reminiscent of the days a few years back when I would return used video games by re-shrink wrapping them.

Part of the reason we abandoned the fake ID operation was because if the authorities found out about us and raided our apartment, they would discover something else we would rather keep to ourselves.

Growing Weed

Since our biggest monthly expense next to rent was our weed habit, and we didn’t have jobs and our savings were rapidly depleting, we did what any economically fiscal pothead would do, and decided to start growing our own. We didn’t want to sell the weed and be drug dealers; we just didn’t want to spend any more money on it since we smoked it every day.

Fred spent an afternoon researching on the Internet how to start an indoor grow room, but we were disappointed to find out that you needed special light bulbs in order to give off enough light for the plants to grow properly. These lights were fairly expensive, at least to us they were, but we thought we would try growing weed anyway, and instead of using the proper lights we just bought a few three-foot-long florescent fixtures from Home Depot and thought we would try them instead of using the recommended lighting.

While I was actually enrolled in college and gone for half the day, Fred had nothing to do and didn’t even have a car since we shared mine, so he spent his afternoons transforming his closet into the grow room. Fred is a genius when it comes to engineering, and if he actually applied himself, he could have put his skills to work in college, but Fred didn’t like college. He did like the idea of unlimited free marijuana though, so he figured out how to mix up the soil and built an adjustable lighting system and meticulously constructed his masterpiece.

We saved the seeds from the pot that we were smoking and Fred nursed them like they were his babies until they started sprouting. Within just a few weeks the plants were growing up out of the soil and looked beautiful. There were probably a dozen or more, filling the entire inside of Fred’s closet. He wore the same blue T-shirt every day anyway, so he didn’t really need the closet for his clothes. We anxiously awaited our garden’s maturity so we could sample our homegrown weed and start reducing our expenses.

Christmas time was just around the corner and we had gotten plane tickets to fly back to Wisconsin for a week and a half, so we wouldn’t be at our apartment to water the plants or raise the lights, so we gave our only friend Max N the key to our apartment and trusted him with the task. Max liked to smoke a lot of pot too, so we had something in common.

Since I wanted to have pot to smoke when I was back in Wisconsin, I brought some with me on the airplane because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to score some once I got back there. Carrying drugs onto an airplane is pretty stupid, especially when this was the first time I had ever flown in my entire life and I didn’t know if they used drug dogs to look for people smuggling drugs or what kind of security measures were in place, so I taped the bag of weed inside my pants just in case any drug dogs smelled it and security made me empty my pockets or searched my carry-on bag. Luckily it was no problem, and I got on the plane just fine carrying about a quarter ounce of pot.

Our original plan when we moved to California was to have myself, Fred, and Diego all move out together at the end of the summer, but Diego decided he would join us a few months later at the end of the year so he could finish the fall semester at college. After Christmas, we all flew back to California for some more adventures, now involving the three of us. Diego didn’t smoke pot, and even though he knew Fred and I had been potheads for years, he was a little uncomfortable with the fact that we were growing it in our apartment. It didn’t really surprise him, he just shook his head at our stupidity.

The pot plants grew for the next few months, but because we weren’t using the proper lighting, the buds (the part you smoke) were very thin and practically useless. Our operation had failed. We couldn’t really throw a dozen 5-foot-tall pot plants out in the dumpster because that would be a little difficult to explain to the neighbors, so we cut down the plants one by one and stuck them down the garbage disposal. It ground them up pretty well at first, but the stems on some of the plants were so thick that after a few minutes the garbage disposal got jammed up. We couldn’t call maintenance to come over and fix it, because once the guy took it apart he would realize that it was full of pot leaves, so luckily we were able to fix it ourselves and finished disposing of the evidence.

I continued being a pothead for several years after this, and smoked so much over the years that I had a chronic smoker’s cough because of it. I didn’t smoke cigarettes at all, only weed, which is probably 10 times worse for your lungs if it’s not filtered with a water bong, especially if it’s the old, rotten, moldy “Mex” weed shipped in from Mexico in bricks, as opposed to the home grown hydroponics that has become the California standard and widely available at medical marijuana dispensaries and grown in closets by hobbyists. When I finally did quit smoking weed every day a few years later, I joined 24 Hour Fitness and started working out five days a week to get in shape. Every morning in the shower I would cough up some tar and spit on the white shower wall to see how nasty it was. Within several months the tar balls were much smaller, but I could still see black residue in my spit.

For over a year I would still cough up black tar in the morning. A year! And this was with me working out five days a week. I started worrying that I had a tumor or something in my lung that was producing the black stuff I was coughing up because it just kept coming. Finally after a year or so my lungs were clean. I’m not saying I won’t take a bong hit or eat a brownie ever again, but the wake and baking and 24/7 pot smoking had to come to an end.

Working as a Telemarketer

One of the first real jobs I got in California was at a shady telemarketing company that promoted timeshares. Fred and I and my new friend Max, who I met at school in a philosophy class, all got hired at the same time. There was a group interview and the company hired a bunch of people, and their lack of standards caused them to hire us.

You can probably imagine what a telemarketing company is like, it’s mainly just a huge room full of desks and phones and people making unsolicited phone calls all day to promote whatever crap it is they’re selling. The job was a weekend job only on Saturdays and Sundays for about six hours each day, and the first day on the job we smoked a huge blunt (a cigar filled with marijuana) on the way to work and arrived nice and high.

We were all given phone lists of people to call to try and rope in to buy a timeshare, but nobody really seemed to be interested. 99% of the people would hang up on us or yelled at us for calling them. This just wasn’t going to work, so we started making prank phone calls to random people and enjoying ourselves. It was much better than pitching timeshares.

The three of us just sat around laughing all day, and it was clear that we were not doing our job. On our break we would go out back and smoke more weed by the dumpster and would come back in reeking of marijuana and just screw around for the rest of our shift. One time the manager came in and started yelling at us, and we all just started laughing uncontrollably at him because we were so high we couldn’t contain ourselves. Right to his face! We all got fired. What a surprise.

Telling My Boss Off Over the Loudspeakers

Once I recorded an audio CD of me telling a story about how messed up the furniture store was that I worked at and how incompetent most of my coworkers were. I laid my audio track on top of the creepy theme song for Unsolved Mysteries and burned it onto a CD and brought it to work the next day and put it in the company’s stereo system and set it on repeat. After turning the volume up all the way, I closed down the building and went home for the night while the CD was blasting on repeat inside throughout the entire building—my several minute rant, repeating, over and over again. I was yelling pretty loud in the recording since I was venting months of frustration. It was awesome.

The next morning the manager came to work and unlocked the door only to be greeted by my voice yelling over the loudspeakers how pathetic he was and how pathetic the company was. It was a good three minute rant detailing the failures of the company in a shocking and vicious attack set to music which multiplied its effect. They didn’t fire me because they needed me since I was a great salesman, and like I said, pretty much everyone else there was incompetent. The company went bankrupt a few months later. I saw the writing on the wall as clear as day and my CD was an omen for everyone else to hear.

Turning Twenty-One

A funny thing happened when I finally did turn twenty-one, after six years of hardcore drinking and partying since freshman year of high school. Fred, Diego and I went to our favorite grocery store to stock up on plenty of beer to celebrate, and the girl at the cash register made a comment about how we must be having a big party because of all the beer we were buying. “Yeah it’s my birthday,” I told her. “How old are you?” she asked. “Twenty-one,” I responded.

“Twenty-one?” she said with a puzzled look. I had been buying beer from her regularly for the last four months ever since I moved to California. I was such a frequent customer that we were on a first name basis and she didn’t even bother to card me anymore because she knew who I was. She looked at me with a strange face after I told her it was my twenty-first birthday. “I was using a fake ID all of this time,” I told her as a grinned. “But I’m twenty-one now.” She just shook her head and rang up my beer. I think she just wanted to sleep with me.

Miscellaneous California Craziness

A friend of Diego’s from work named Demetrios invited us over for a party one night that he and his roommates were having and it was a good time until I offended one of his roommates by saying that Mexico was a complete dump. (I think I called it a complete shit hole to be exact.) Have you ever been to Tijuana? It is a complete dump, and when I happened to mention this fact, before I knew it, Demetrios’ roommate was holding a knife to my throat. He was a Mexican and took great offense to me saying that Mexico was a shit hole. I told him I was new to California and that I was a hick from Wisconsin and I didn’t mean anything by it and thankfully he put the knife away and told me I better not say anything bad about Mexico again. The truth hurts sometimes, you know.

We didn’t know it at first but Demetrios was a complete scumbag and liked to snort crystal meth and hang out with strippers who also enjoyed doing drugs. One night when Diego was hanging out at his place a couple guys walked in and pulled guns on them and started yelling about the money Demetrios owed them. That was pretty much the end of our friendship with Demetrios.

My 1981 AMC Concord was having some problems since it was getting old. The power steering pump was leaking pretty bad, and since power steering fluid was fairly expensive, I just started pouring motor oil in it and the pump would start working again for a week or so and then I would have to add more oil, but after a while even that got too expensive, so I just starting filling the power steering pump with water. It actually worked. (If you don’t know anything about cars, this is a completely asinine thing to do.) If there was no power steering fluid in the unit (or in this case, it was now water) then I could barely turn the steering wheel. I could still drive the car, but it was very difficult to turn, especially when getting into (or backing out of) a parking space. Conventional wisdom would say that doing such a dumb thing as pouring water into a power steering pump would cause it to rust and seize, but it actually worked fine and I was able to sell the car a few months later before things really started going wrong with it.

Diego came running back up to our apartment after taking out the trash one day frantically saying that the dumpster was on fire, and he grabbed a bucket and filled it up with water from the kitchen sink and ran out there and dumped it on the flames, and I grabbed a pitcher from the cabinet and filled it up with water and followed right behind him. We called 911 to tell them what was happening because the flames were getting pretty high. As we waited for a fire truck to arrive, we continued running back and forth from our apartment to the dumpster with buckets of water throwing them on the flames. Luckily we were able to put the fire out.

If Diego hadn’t went out there to throw something away and saw the flames, then it would have only taken a few more minutes before they spread, lighting the car port on fire, and then who knows what else. Just as we breathed a sigh of relief we noticed that another dumpster across the parking lot was on fire too! We frantically put the flames out with more buckets of water from our kitchen sink. The fire department didn’t arrive until after we had put the second dumpster fire out. Some idiot in our complex had deliberately set them on fire! I don’t know if they ever found out who did it, but when they tried to raise our rent a few months later I sent the rental agency a nasty letter telling them how we had saved the complex from burning down and they decided to keep our rent the same.

Somehow despite my constant pot smoking, my lack of money for the first few years after I moved to California, and living in a crappy apartment in a dumpy part of town seven miles from the beach, I was able to hook up with two out of the three hottest girls at my college. I made only slight progress with my number one choice who was the most beautiful girl on campus, but she had a boyfriend who she had met on vacation in Cancun or the Bahamas or somewhere, and she planned on moving to Tennessee to be with him. She was crazy, and her roommate thought she was crazy, and since she barely knew the guy, I figured I could convince her not to make the foolish move to Tennessee to be with him.

After making it clear I was perusing her, she invited me to come and work out with her at 24 Hour Fitness one afternoon, so I worked out with her and her two friends, but I didn’t get anywhere with her. She was actually the reason I joined 24 Hour Fitness so I could go and workout with her, so at least something good came out of me perusing her, and landing two out of the three hottest girls on campus still isn’t bad.

The Fun Couldn’t Last

After Diego moved in with Fred and I in January, he was the voice of reason we had been missing. He had always been the most responsible of the three of us. Where Fred and I fed off each other’s insanity, Diego could see we were out of control. He had gotten a real job at a business nearby, and I was going to a community college looking to transfer to a university in a few semesters, but Fred still held onto the hope that we could come up with some business opportunity so we would not have to get real jobs.

While all three of us drank frequently, Fred’s drinking was getting out of control. Since he didn’t go to school or have a car or job, he would just surf the Internet all day at our apartment and drink and smoke weed. When I would arrive home from class in the afternoon, he was already pretty wasted. Even though I was smoking weed every day and wasn’t the most responsible person in the world, I could see that Fred was spiraling out of control. He would pass out on the floor every night at about 6 or 7pm after drinking all day and was just a mess. Since we were all running out of money, we were drinking boxes of Franzia wine since it was so cheap. Franzia is that bargain box wine that everyone makes fun of. We would buy three or four boxes at a time because beer was getting too expensive.

I ended up getting a job at a bookstore at the mall, and after a few more months Fred moved back to Wisconsin. His dad offered him a job with his construction company and wanted him to take over the business in a few years when he retired. It seemed like a good gig, and Fred didn’t want to turn it down. Diego and I were both relieved that we did not have Fred in our lives anymore. Even though I had been a large part of the madness and Fred was one of my best friends, even I realized that he and I were going down the wrong path. Even though I still liked to party, I was beginning to learn how to balance it with being a responsible student and started thinking about my future career. Shortly after Fred moved out, Diego moved in with his girlfriend who he would later marry and I got my own studio apartment and transferred from the community college to a university to get my bachelor’s degree in communication. The most insane chapter of my life was finally over.

I would not entirely leave the madness of the past behind me, however. In the coming years it reared its ugly head a few times like the ghost of Christmas past reminding me that I still had some work to do to straighten myself up.

New Year’s Eve 1999

By the end of 1999 Fred had been living back in Wisconsin and working for his dad but came back to San Diego for the historic New Years Eve of 1999 as we left the twentieth century behind us and entered the year 2000. Curt, Diego’s old roommate from freshman year of college, was also in San Diego for winter break and all of us decided to go to downtown San Diego for New Years. Diego had bought a small Ford Ranger truck by this time, and I was too messed up to drive by the time we left for downtown, so Diego decided to drive his truck that night because he was worried if he drove my beat up old car with the out-of-state license plates on it that it may draw suspicion causing him to get pulled over by the cops. I told you he was the smartest out of the three of us.

Diego and Curt rode in the cab of the truck, and Fred and I ducked down in the back as we headed downtown since all four of us couldn’t fit up in the front. There’s nothing like laying down in the bed of a truck looking up at the night sky when you’re wasted as you’re flying down the freeway to reinforce the idea that you’re not normal. We ended up going to a bar and grill called Dick’s Last Resort to celebrate the big event. Fred got thrown out within an hour or so for saying something insulting to a bartender because she was too slow in getting him a drink, but he was able to sneak back in without notice. I brought a few pre-rolled joints which we would occasionally smoke outside in the courtyard and we did this a few times without notice, but our luck later ran out.

The four of us were standing around out there smoking a joint (except Diego who didn’t smoke weed) when the bouncer who threw Fred out spotted him and grabbed him, pushing him towards the exit. Another bouncer who came over for backup noticed Curt was holding a lit joint and so he grabbed Curt and threw him out too. Curt had a drink in his hand which spilled on Diego as the bouncer grabbed him, so Diego started swearing at him and so he signaled to another bouncer and he grabbed Diego and literally pushed him out the door too. Three out of four us had just gotten thrown out in a span of about 15 seconds. I then followed after the bouncers as they shoved everyone outside and we decided to call it a night and go home. At least it was after midnight and we had made it to the New Year.

Almost Missing College Graduation

Since I didn’t have a high school graduation technically, since I was not allowed at the ceremony, my college graduation was extremely special to both me and my parents. After all, I had never worn a cap and gown before so this was a big occasion. My parents had flown to California from Wisconsin for the ceremony and before I arrived, a bunch of friends and I met at a local bar to tip back some beers and get a nice buzz on to celebrate. An hour later I led the procession to the ceremony, and just as I was pulling into the parking lot, I rear-ended the car ahead of me and both of my airbags blew out.

I wasn’t going that fast, but it was still fast enough to trigger the airbags. The plastic flap covering the airbag on my steering wheel practically sliced into the side of my arm as it flew open and I immediately had what looked like road rash covering part of my forearm from it scraping me. The airbags also stunk really bad and were very loud when they deployed. The car I hit had been pulling into the parking lot too, and so I followed it in and parked alongside of them. As we got out of our vehicles and inspected the damage, which was barely noticeable, I was in my cap and gown so they knew I was graduating, but I doubt they had any idea that I had been drinking. I’m sure I was over the legal limit, and I started worrying that the cops were going to come over to investigate and realize I was drunk.

I started to have visions of my parents sitting in the audience waiting for that proud moment when their son finally walked across the stage and got his diploma, but when my name was called, I was nowhere to be seen. I had to get out of there and get into the ceremony before I got arrested. Ever since my DUI years earlier, I had been very careful not to drink and drive, but this was graduation, and the ceremony was only a mile or so away from the bar, so I didn’t think it would matter.

I had a few hundred dollars on me and I offered to give it to the driver of the car if they just forgot that this happened, and I told them I had to get going for the ceremony. The guy driving the car wanted to take it in to get an estimate for the stupid little scratch I left on his bumper, so we exchanged information and I told him that I would just pay for it out right if they sent me the bill because I didn’t want my insurance company to get involved. Word spread at the ceremony that night to everyone in my department about the accident, and everyone kept asking me if I was ok.

Aside from the scratch on my arm from the airbag, I was fine, but I was a little shaken up and started having flashbacks of my DUI arrest several years earlier. I really had been careful not to drink and drive since my DUI, but like I said, this was graduation, and I was only driving a mile down the road so I didn’t think it would matter. This was almost the last straw that scared me straight once and for all. What would happen two weeks later would make sure I never returned to my reckless and irresponsible ways.

The Bachelor Party We Would Never Forget

Diego, who had been living with his girlfriend for some time, was getting married. His relationship with her had helped save him from wasting his life away like Fred and I had been doing when we were all roommates. By this time, Fred had moved back to Wisconsin several years earlier and had a steady girlfriend and a job, and I just graduated college two weeks before the wedding, so it felt like we were all finally growing up. Almost all of the craziness we were involved in was a thing of the past. Normal life awaited us.

Family and friends of the bride and groom all flew out to California for the beautiful outdoor wedding. Two days before the big day we had Diego’s bachelor party, and since he was the first one of us to get married, it had to be epic. Our crew was finally reunited for the first time in years. It was Diego, Fred, John (my college roommate from sophomore year who was involved in the puking in the flowers incident with me), Carl (the guy who wanted to steal the dead cats from the dumpster at school and throw them in a teacher’s yard), Ken (whose car door got a hole punched in it when Fred threw a construction barricade at someone’s mailbox as we drove by), Curt (Diego’s roommate from freshman year, whose parents let Fred and I stay with them when we first arrived in California), Diego’s younger brother (who didn’t really cause any trouble), and myself.

We decided to go to downtown San Diego and hit up a club, and we got a stretched Ford Excursion limo for the ride. We would be getting extremely drunk this night, so we wanted to make sure nobody would get a DUI, and who doesn’t like to party in the back of a limo?

Before we arrived downtown, we stopped off at a strip club first. On the drive downtown there was a porno playing on the television located at the front of the limo, and we were drinking and batting around a blow up doll that Ken had bought for the party. When we got out of the limo at the strip club we could see the porno playing on the TV through the tinted window. Because the TV was fairly bright and right next to the window, the picture clearly shined through since it was dark outside. We all started laughing, wondering what the cars had thought that were driving next to us on the freeway since they all could see the porno playing though the window. It was turning out to be a great night.

We did the strip club thing, and almost got thrown out after Diego did a back flip on stage after the strippers pulled him up there when they learned it was his bachelor party. Fred then commented that, “This is the kind of night that could end up like some fucked up movie.” Little did we know at the time, but he was right. What would transpire later in the evening was even more fucked up than anything we could imagine.

After the strip club, we had a good time at On Broadway, a club downtown, and on the way home we enjoyed sticking the blow up doll out the window and yelling at people walking along the streets. The limo dropped Diego off back at his apartment, and a few other guys at their hotels, and Curt, Ken and I crashed at Curt’s parents’ house since they were out of town. This was the beautiful multimillion dollar place on top of a huge bluff right next to the ocean where Fred and I stayed (freeloaded) for a few days when we first arrived in California. Curt went to bed and Ken and I sat out on the patio furniture near the edge of the bluff admiring the view. It was pretty late and we were wasted from a great party. Ken had his feet sitting on top of the table and was slouched back in his chair, looking like he was about to pass out soon. After a little while I got up to go to bed and told him not to fall asleep out there because it was pretty chilly.

I crashed in Curt’s sister’s room since she was out of town with the parents and the next thing I knew the door bell was ringing and it was morning. Early in the morning. Nobody was answering the door and it kept ringing so I got up to see who it was. To my surprise there stood a police officer. “Was there a party here last night?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “We had a bachelor party, but we just took a limo downtown, we didn’t party here,” I added. It was only the three of us, Ken, Curt and myself who came back to Curt’s parents’ house, and we weren’t loud at all, so I didn’t know why the cop had come over.

“Somebody fell off the bluff last night,” he said, “and we think it was from a party at one of the houses up here.” I still didn’t know what he was talking about and wondered why he was telling me this. He then went on to tell me that the person who fell off the cliff had died.

I was still pretty much drunk, and this was real early in the morning so I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t understand what he was getting at. The cop then asked me to make sure everyone in the house was accounted for, so I opened the guest room door to see if Ken was sleeping in there, but the room was empty. I found Curt upstairs sleeping in another bedroom, and I looked around the house to see where Ken had crashed but I couldn’t find him. I thought maybe some of the other guys had picked him up and went out to breakfast, so I tried calling his cell phone but he didn’t answer. The police officer then started describing what the guy looked like who had fallen off the cliff. It sounded like Ken. “I’m really sorry,” said the police officer, “but I’m pretty sure it was your friend.”

My eyes started welling up with tears as I remembered him sitting out there at the table, which was only 10 or 15 feet from the edge of the cliff. There was no railing at all, just a huge drop-off to the ocean below. I started having flashes of images pop into my mind imagining Ken getting up out of his chair to come inside and stumbling and falling over the cliff. I then had a wave of images flood my mind of the wedding that was scheduled for the very next day.

Curt was in such a stupor from the previous night, he wouldn’t wake up. I would shake him and he would just mumble incoherently and groan. I called Fred on his cell who was with his girlfriend at their hotel room and I told him to get back to Curt’s house immediately. Of course he asked why, and I told him I would tell him once he got there, but that he needed to get there ASAP. He could tell by my tone that something was very wrong. What was I going to tell Diego? Ken was one of the groomsmen, and one of our best friends. How could we explain this to Ken’s mom? How could we tell everyone who came for the wedding? Would there still be a wedding? It didn’t even make any sense to us. We were in shock and weren’t sure what happened. Fred cracked a beer and started drinking to relieve the stress. It was probably 7:30am. A bunch more police and firefighters came to the house along with forensics people, and they were able to determine that Ken decided to walk down the bluff to go to the beach and fell to his death at the point where the cliff drops off in a concave cutout from the crashing waves below. With no railing to deter anyone from walking down the back yard toward the beach, and in the fog and in the dark in of night, nobody could see where the hill suddenly drops off. The coroner said alcohol was not a factor and that visual conditions on the horizon where the water meets the sky causes an optical illusion making it difficult for a person to get their bearings straight in the dark because there are no points of reference. As he made his way down the moderately sloped back yard in the fog, he was unable to determine where the cliff dropped off until he already stepped off with one foot, losing his balance, and falling to his death on the hard sand below.

The homeowners were really negligent for not having any kind of railing to discourage people from walking down towards the beach there. Pretty much every other house on that bluff had railings. This one had nothing. The backyard just led to a slope which later dropped off. It was very deceptive and it’s hard for me to describe if you haven’t seen it for yourself. The bottom line is, if there was a fucking railing like there should have been, then this would have never happened. Those dumb fuck negligent homeowners!

I decided to call Ken’s brother instead of his mom, since it would be easier to break the news to him. He was a few years older than us and was in my brother’s class. How do you call one of your best friend’s moms and tell her that her son, who just flew out to California for a wedding, died at the bachelor party? Calling Ken’s brother was the most difficult thing I had to do in my life. Shortly after I told Ken’s brother what had happened, Ken’s mom called me to try and piece things together. We weren’t even sure what had happened at this point, so it was very difficult for her to make sense of it. It was hard for all of us to wrap our minds around what had just happened.

The next most difficult thing was calling Diego to tell him what happened. After I told him he asked me if I was serious, and when I said I wasn’t joking, he smashed the phone against the wall and rushed over to Curt’s house. After all the forensics investigators were done tracing Ken’s steps down the bluff, they all left and we stood in the back yard dumbfounded.

Ken had already picked up his tuxedo from the rental shop, so on my way back to my apartment I brought it with me, unused, still in its plastic to return it. “Why didn’t you need it?” the guy at the store asked. “He’s dead,” I answered. What else could I say. He must have seen the dazed look on my face and knew I was serious.

The wedding went on as planned, and surprisingly we had a good time. Ken was always the life of the party, and he certainly wouldn’t want us to get all depressed and have a bad time at the wedding, so we partied it up to celebrate Diego’s wedding and to remember all the good times and trouble we had gotten into with Ken when we were younger. I ended up hooking up with Diego’s cousin, who was single and extremely beautiful, so that really helped me get through the night too. She was a hot blonde who flew in from the Midwest for the wedding and didn’t have a date.

A week or so later we all gathered back in Wisconsin for Ken’s funeral. It was like a class reunion. Almost everyone from our school was there. Ken was pretty popular and everybody loved him, and our whole town was in shock at what had happened. Everyone felt bad for us too, and especially Diego and his wife.

The whole thing was so surreal, and it was so messed up, I just didn’t know how to deal with it. I couldn’t get it out of my head. The bachelor party, the bluff, the police, Ken, the funeral, it all just kept swirling around in my brain. This happened around the end of May, and for that entire summer I just smoked as much pot as I could to try and get my mind off it. I didn’t even go to the beach that summer, since Ken had died on the beach; just being there made me think of his dead body lying in the sand. I had loved the beach and went there at least once a week for years, but that summer I didn’t go at all and I was as white as a ghost from not getting any sun.

We had done everything we could to be safe that night. None of us drank and drove like in the past. That’s why we got the limo to make sure everyone was safe, but somehow, the night still ended in tragedy. I wondered for a long time what the message was in this tragedy. What was the lesson to be learned? Why would God allow this to happen? I realized that you never know when you’re gonna die, or when the ones you love are going to die. Despite every precaution, when you least expect it, and in the most unanticipated way, someone’s life can be lost.

You know they say that shooting stars burn out bright, and Ken certainly was a shooting star. He was the life of the party, a ladies man, everyone’s friend, and an all-around great guy. I was very lucky to be friends with him. He really knew how to get the most out of life and after I was able to shake off my depression, that’s what I started doing.

Looking
Back
On It All

Of course it was extremely juvenile, immature, reckless, disrespectful, dangerous, stupid, rude, foolish, moronic, idiotic and illegal to do some of the things I did growing up, and one may even argue that writing this book is almost just as bad. Regardless of how bad some of the more questionable activities were that I was involved in, you gotta admit that a lot of them were pretty cool, and if they entertained you by just reading about them, just imagine how cool it was for my friends and I to actually do them!

Writing this book was really just a trip down memory lane for myself. As I would write down the stories and review them and edit them, they were so clear in my mind it was like they just happened yesterday. And who wouldn’t like to relive their childhood, a time when you had no responsibilities and you didn’t have to worry about things like your job, bills, retirement, scumbag politicians, insurance, your health, and the dozens of other things that can bring you down when you get older.

When I was working on this book some people asked me what the point of it was. The point is, it was fun for me. The point is also to entertain you; to bring you back to your own childhood for a few hours; to show how creativity that is not properly channeled can be dangerous and illegal, and also to let parents know that if their kids seem to be crazy and out of control, there is hope for them that they can find a way to use that energy to better themselves, make a decent living, or even change the world in a positive way.

In movies and comic books, super heroes and villains could almost always be the same person, but one of them took the wrong path at some point in their life. If Batman took just a slightly different road in life, he could have been a very dangerous criminal mastermind. If the TV serial killer Dexter had a different moral code, he would have ended up killing innocent people instead of killing murderers who slipped through the justice system and had gotten away with their crimes.

Great men throughout history like Martin Luther who initiated the Protestant Reformation, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, founding father Benjamin Franklin, and countless other men and women we see as heroes today, were actually trouble makers who caused trouble for the right reasons. Trouble making is a talent and a skill that can be used for either good things or bad.

I’ll never forget an old guy named Laurence who was a pharmacist at a local pharmacy that I worked at when I was in high school who years later told me, “I always thought one day you’d be famous or in jail.” He said this when I had bumped into him ten years after we worked together. Laurence saw that I had a lot of potential when I was young, but he wasn’t sure how I would use it. You may think that because I worked at a pharmacy when I was in high school, that I would steal all kinds of pain killers because I liked to party, but honestly I never stole a single pill ever. I respected the owner, and I would never do anything to cheat him or steal from him. I did have a conscience and a code of conduct, believe it or not. Popping pain pills never really appealed to me either.

I was also a late bloomer. I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy before finally shaping up, and could have gotten into much more trouble than I did if I hadn’t been so lucky not to get busted for the numerous stupid things I had done. In the hilarious film National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, the main character, Van, (played by Ryan Reynolds) has been in college for seven years and still hasn’t graduated yet. Seven. He’s not a loser, in fact, he’s the furthest thing from it, and everyone at his school loves him. At one point he is asked by an adult, “Surely you have a career in mind,” to which he answers, “Not really. I’m still looking for that dare-to-be-great situation.”

Later on, Van Wilder loses faith in himself for not finishing college after so long and says he hasn’t accomplished anything and almost drops out before realizing his true potential and his purpose in life which was to inspire others and bring the best out of them. While Van Wilder took seven years to graduate and figure out his purpose, which he had been doing all along without realizing it, I took 8 years (and a summer school session) before the big day came for me. I didn’t finish with a master’s degree or a doctorate, but with a simple bachelors in communication. In my defense, I did attend four different colleges in five years and changed majors twice so a lot of credits didn’t transfer from one school to the next. I had attended three different schools in three years, and then two years later I transferred again to my fourth and final school. My point is, I was like Van Wilder, and I almost lost hope for myself as he did as the years went on.

In the past there was no message behind my madness, but as I grew older and wiser and through the tragedy of Ken’s death, my legal troubles from my DUI and underage drinking, my personal failures and my quest for spiritual understanding and inner peace, I was able to find a new direction in my life. As I started to finally grow up and calm down, all of the trouble in my past began to feel like it wasn’t even me. While some of the things I’m proud of, some of them I’m completely ashamed of too. My only defense is that I was young (under 21 for most of the madness) and I was stoned for probably 80% of it.

Luckily I found an outlet for my creative energy in the form of writing books and making YouTube videos about politics and pop culture. I certainly never “grew up” and stopped causing trouble. I just found a worthwhile cause that I could put my creative energy into. A lot of the things I studied in college about mass media and communication were exactly what I needed to understand the world around me and provided fuel for my fire. Your “cause” doesn’t necessarily have to be exposing political corruption or pulling back the curtain of the mainstream media propaganda machine that shapes our culture like I have been doing. You could channel your energy into a skill, a career, a hobby, a relationship, art, education, or any number of other positive things that could be very beneficial for you and others.

Just think about how big of trouble makers actor Jim Carey or Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs must have been before they fully developed the ability to channel their energy into something productive or were provided the proper outlet for their creativity and energy.

After I grew up and finally started to get my life on the right track, I also realized how smart my dad really was. My brother and I always thought he was old fashioned and out of touch when we were kids, but the older I got, the more I realized how wise he was. He was able to provide a nice house in a good neighborhood in our small little town, my mom was a stay at home mom for our entire lives after leaving her career as a teacher to raise us, and we took a family vacation pretty much every year to somewhere different around the United States. Don’t think we were some first class jetsetters or something. The family car was a Chrysler K car with vinyl seats and no air conditioning, so some summer vacations were not exactly pleasant at times when the temperature was in the 80s or 90s! We didn’t have that much money and were only average middle class, but the wisdom and frugal decisions allowed my dad to provide for us, and enabled him to retire in his 60s, which not everyone can do. I could only hope to accomplish what he did in life, and create and manage a family like he and my mom did.

My mom is equally fantastic and loving. She’s done a lot of volunteer work around the community with various gardening projects and events, and is just a great person. My mom and dad are also fantastic moral examples of what good people are like. None of my trouble making should be blamed on them or their parenting. It was all my fault. Sometimes there’s nothing a parent can do to prevent their kids from doing crazy things no matter how loving, intelligent, or harsh disciplinarians they are. Boys will be boys. Most of the time parents don’t even have a clue what their kids are actually doing and couldn’t stop them anyway if they tried.

My parents are the nicest, most loving parents anyone could ever ask for, so maybe I just couldn’t contain myself from the normalcy at home when I had so much energy and so many ideas bouncing around my brain I just wanted to scream. I feel really bad for putting them through everything that I did—from them having to pick me up at the police station, having to come in for conferences with the school principal, not to mention my countless detentions and having to worry what the heck I was up to when I didn’t come home until 2 o’clock in the morning on the weekends. I have since apologized to them and they accepted it and actually said they were glad the way I finally turned out!

Looking back on it all, there’s not much that I would actually do differently, believe it or not. I had a lot of fun. I wouldn’t have been so careless with certain things like drinking and driving, and I would have kept the pot smoking under a little more moderation. I certainly spent too much money on marijuana, but perhaps like many others, I needed the self-medicating because of my over-active mind that raced with the possibilities of my future, yet I was stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere. If I was more focused on school I could have earned a master’s degree in less time than it took me to get my bachelors, but then again I did attend four different colleges as I tried to figure out what I wanted to study and where. Who attends four different colleges? Well, I did. I know you shouldn’t dwell on the past, and I certainly had a lot of fun, I just wish I was able to bridle my energy sooner than I did.

So if you are young and on the same path I was, I warn you. It seems those older than you always try to tell you some great bits of wisdom so you don’t make the same mistakes that they did when they were young, but it seems that the ears of the young never listen to this wisdom and only realize how right their elders were when many years later, they are the elder and having missed the boat they then try to impart that same wisdom onto the youth in their life, which also tends to fall on deaf ears as it did on their ears when they were told so long ago by someone trying to help them in this mysterious cycle of life.

Despite most teachers hating me, or just hoping for the day when they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore after graduation, there was one high school teacher who saw the potential in me and did what he could to help me find an outlet for my chaotic energy. He was my homeroom teacher, Mr. Garett. For whatever reason, he treated me with respect and seemed to take special notice of me by delegating minor tasks to me during homeroom sessions. Instead of feeling like he was poking his nose in my business or trying to keep an eye on me, he was always cool.

When I was in a study hall during final period, oftentimes he would write me a pass so I could get out and go use the weight room which helped keep me out of trouble, not to mention, in shape. I couldn’t sit quietly for the final hour of the school day in study hall! I would have gotten a detention every few weeks, so Mr. Garett really saved me some extra aggravation I didn’t need, and I really enjoyed working out, so it was a win/win situation. It’s teachers like Mr. Garett who go the extra mile for the “troubled” or “at risk” kids that most other teachers have written off as bad apples with no future who help kids like me realize that we are not worthless trouble makers destined for jail or a lifetime plagued with problems, we’re often just kids who need an outlet for the abundant energy surging through our minds and bodies.

Well, I hope that you were entertained by my stories, and I hope that you learned something from them too. They say you learn more from others’ mistakes than you do from your own, and if that’s true, then you just got an incredible education! There’s almost 250 pages of mistakes right in your hand, one right after the other! Anyway, may your own trouble making be balanced with a conscience, respectable boundaries, and style! And make sure your trouble is designed to be creative, funny, and thought provoking; never dumb, dangerous, or destructive. Now put this book down and get out there and start Causing Trouble!

Also by Mark Dice:

-The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction

-The New World Order: Facts & Fiction

-The Resistance Manifesto

-Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare

Come True

Connect with Mark on:

Facebook.com/MarkDice

Twitter.com/MarkDice.com

YouTube.com/MarkDice

MarkDice.com

Connect with Mark on:

Facebook.com/MarkDice

Twitter.com/MarkDice.com

YouTube.com/MarkDice

MarkDice.com