Stupid Stuff We Did As Kids thread

On a dare from my best friend, we took my father's AMC Hornet and I made hot laps on the high school running track around the football field one Saturday night, until we realized the neighbors across the street had called the police. I knew the back way out of the school and we shut the car down in a cul de sac just as the patrol car got there. We figured if we crouched down below the dashboard, they'd never see us. I never thought about all the dust that had collected on the car.

 

If you ever saw a shit-brown-colored 1980s Chevy with white hand- and footprints all over it in the vicinity of Portsmouth, NH, you have seen firsthand my college friends’ and my full artistic potential.

 

Started smoking. Took me 18 years, off and on, to quit.

 

18 shots of tequila in 10 minutes so that I could beat the other guy who was trying to out-shot me on his 18th birthday.

Haven't had tequila since.

 

We had a small park across the street. One of the trees grew into a natural Y. We found some pine cones that hadn't opened yet, so they were like pointed hand grenades. We tied a fishing line to a tree across the street and the other end to the pine cone, which we inserted into the Y. Then we hid.
Here comes a car. It hit the fishing line and the pine cone became a torpedo which took out his passenger-side window. We stayed hidden, obviously.

Minor high school prank. We had a cement greek theater on our campus. There were also occasional unofficial midnight pep rallies. Somehow, all of the metal trash cans from that area of the campus went from the top to the bottom of the greek. Helluva clatter.

 

In my little corner of the world, bloody knuckles was a game where you just connected into another person’s fist real fast from about six inches until one of you quit.

a right of passage was jumping into the waters of a gorge on the edge of the city. Sounds harmless, but at least one person died about every two to three years. Basically, if the water was too shallow you hit the bottom. It too deep, you could drown because there was a weird undertow. I just googled. It’s well past 50 dead.

Since “the program” came out when I was in high school, we did the lay in the middle of the road thing. It took one car for all of us to freak out.

also, our football prank was to steal our rival’s school bell from outside their athletic fields. But then as a rival prank, the juniors “restole” it to freak out the seniors, who then thought they would all get arrested because it was missing from where they hid it. In doing so, a subset of juniors moved it again to add to the intrigue. It then went missing for real because the idiots hid it in a junkyard.

Does streaking count?

 

Senior prank. Gather three or four pickup beds worth of junk tires. Hoist one to the top of the school flagpole and let it drop to the ground. Repeat until the stack reaches the top of the pole.

It required two morons on long extension ladders, plus a rope through a pulley lashed to the pole near the top.

It was much easier to put them on than to get them off.

 

When I was 10 to 12 or so, we lived in a house on the corner of two roads, both of which were long downhill runs. We're talking 1966 or so here. I had a store bought skateboard (as opposed to a board with someone's sister's skates nailed on) with state of the art clay wheels. They were basically brick wheels. If you hit a piece of gravel in the road that was shaped right, the board would stop dead right. Law of motion said that I would not. If I was lucky I'd hit the ground running and try to run it out or at least make it to the grass instead of falling on asphalt.

Once we'd been riding those hills for a couple of years and had gotten a little bigger, someone came up with the bright idea of making a downhill run with a big guy on the board with a smaller guy (me) riding on his shoulders like chickenfights in the pool.

When the gravel made the board stop, the asphalt made quite an impression on both of us.


Same hills. We'd build a car model, then put a plastic pill bottle of gas and an M-80 in it, light the fuse and roll it down the hill. That one was big fun for a while.

 

The ticket wars! I was a master of the art. Now you just race to get your online order in before they sell out or throw money at the aftermarket.

There was a department store with a Ticketmaster booth close to my home. There was an outside entrance where directly inside the door was an escalator coming down toward the door. When they unlocked the door and opened, I'd sprint up the down escalator. The upstairs end was maybe twenty feet from the ticket booth. That one paid off for me many times.

I got burned on the spot several times in a row and found a new one at a record store in a very black part of town. I could roll in there at ten till ten with tickets going onsale at ten o'clock and be maybe number four or five in line. That worked great - unless you rolled up and Parliament-Funkadelic tickets were going on sale and fifty people had spent the night waiting in line.

Then there was the time that I bought Eagles tickets at the ticket windows of the Omni in downtown Atlanta, which was the only place they were being sold. I wasn't particularly early early and just staked out a spot in line. We'd been there a bit when we realized that there was another line also forming up for Grateful Dead tickets. There was a six ticket limit and we were only buying four, so I wandered up to near the front of the line for Dead tickets saying "I'm in line for Eagles tickets. If you'll buy a pair of Dead tickets for me, I'll buy a pair of Eagles for you." Worked like a charm, got the Dead seats, and he was so far up in line that we got 3rd row floor seats while the Eagles seats were good but nothing special. That's how I got to see the Dead on tour with the Wall of Sound, which was amazing.

 

It's funny, my dad had an "in" one time and I got some sweet tickets to see Alabama, The Judds, and Merle Haggard without waiting and in a prime location to boot - I paid face value - but I still felt dirty about it.

Then there was the time I drove to a Barenaked Ladies/Alanis Morrisette concert - bought lawn seats at the gate (it was far short of a sellout) and STILL had to pay a CONVENIENCE FEE. I asked the ticket seller - shouldn't YOU pay ME the convenience fee? Then there was the line where your had to walk through what felt like one of those cattle chutes in order get a wristband to allow you to buy a $10 beer and I knew then I was through with big venues.

 

I think I've done much stupider stuff as a grown-up. My wild time as a kid was spending $10 on arcade tokens.