The First Time

Since I'm currently out of material, there's two ways I can go -- current events, i.e, find something ridiculous in the news and then make merciless fun of it, or I can jump in the wayback machine and talk about my childhood, and the one fact that still amazes me to this day: The fact that I'm still alive. Added bonus: I never killed anyone else, either. That last was a close thing.

We grew up in a suburban area, a growing series of developments that were basically surrounded by forest. As a result, we spent a lot of time out of the house, running around on the trails. There are many stories from these woods, so this time I'll just narrow it down and talk about The First Time We Almost Killed a Guy.

When we were probably ten or so, we got on a boobytrap kick. We loved the woods, and as little kids, we hated the big kids who also hung out there. Their single purpose in life seemed to be torturing us with their dirt bikes. If they caught us in the open, it was like hunting buffalo from a helicopter. They liked to surround us, and kick up dust until we were choking, or come cruising down the trail at an amazing rate of speed and try to get as close to us as they could before swerving. Apparently, their goal was to make us crap ourselves, and then laugh about it.

Eventually, we had enough of this. We started out simple -- doing things like pulling logs across the trail. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that if we did this on a blind curve, we could actually get the dirt bike assholes to slow down. We were hoping one of them would hit the log and mess up their motorcycle, but I don't think they ever did. For the most part, they just took a quick spin around the trails at a slow speed and removed all the obstacles before riding.

That all changed when we saw our first jungle warfare movie. The almost poetic simplicity and overall effectiveness of camouflaged pits with punji stakes at the bottom were not lost on us.

At the very first opportunity, we went out to the trails to dig a hole. We quickly realized that there was no way three kids under the age of ten armed with a single shovel were going to dig a hole big enough to swallow a motorcycle, so a new battle plan was quickly drafted. We would opt for something smaller.

Our ten-year-old logic told us that a motorcycle with a flat tire can't be ridden until it's fixed. Stands to reason, right? So we dug a 6-inch-deep, 16" wide trench across the entire width of the trail. We didn't really think through our goals here, but basically we were just after some light destruction, a flat tire at most. With that modest goal in mind, we took a bit of plywood, pounded some ten-penny nails through it, and placed this in the bottom of our shallow trench, points up.

Excellent.

Mini-punji stakes, specially designed for motorcycle knobbies. We then bridged the trench with small branches and placed a sheet of newspaper over this. The last step was to cover the entire thing in sand. We stepped back and looked at our handiwork.

It was perfect.

You could stand right on top of it and never see it. Now all we had to do was hide in the woods and wait.

So we did.

We sat there slapping at bugs, all three of us jacked up on adrenaline and unable to stay still. It was pure torture.

Just when we couldn't stand it any longer and were about to leave, we heard the whine of a dirt bike approaching. We recognized the sound of that particular bike. It was Victor Bradford, our most hated of enemies, and he was coming right towards the boobytrap. We waited, holding our breath in anticipation, our hearts pounding in our scrawny chests.

I think it was right about then that my brother, who was actually two years younger than me and just one year younger than our friend Marky, put the entire picture together. He was the first of us to figure out that maybe, just maybe, someone could possibly get hurt with this plan, and that it was a very bad idea. I don't think that was what he was really worried about, however. I think it had more to do with the fact that if someone got hurt, we would be...."In Trouble."

The one thing my brother did NOT like to be was "In Trouble." He feared it completely. It was like a miniature death sentence for him -- it totally freaked him out, and I still have no idea why. I'm sure that whatever the reason, it had a lot to do with why he's an attorney now. In retrospect, he was the smart one, but at the time, we all just thought he was a big pussy who had nothing better to do than hang out with us until things went south, and then figured his duty was to run home and tell our parents about how it was all our idea and he didn't have anything to do with it. It didn't take much of this behavior for him to solidify his reputation as a "Teller," and make us think twice about not ditching him.

At any rate, he panicked, stood up, and tried to wave Victor off.

By this time, however, it was too late. He was too far away, and Marky and I were still crouched in the woods. The motorcycle was coming fast, in reality probably doing no more than 30 or so, but it was so loud that it seemed to be almost flying.

The collision happened in slow motion, exactly like it did in one of the Vietnam movies we had been watching. The bike's front tire hit the pit, the tire punctured, and Victor went flying over the handlebars, followed closely by his airborne motorcycle. He landed hard on his back, the bike crashing down inches from his head.

Time had stopped. We were frozen in place, our mouths hanging open, our eyes as big as ping pong balls. On the one hand, we couldn't believe it had actually worked. On the other hand, we were scared shitless. Victor's bike had shut itself off, and he was lying there, not moving, not even breathing. We didn't know what to do. We were absolutely sure he was dead. The only sounds were the ticking of the cooling motorcycle engine, and the buzz of Cicadas in the distance.

My brother was the first to break the silence. Of course, he did so by whispering the oft-repeated mantra of the hated Teller. In a shaky voice he said, "We're In Trouble, you guys." Marky hissed back, "You better not tell!"

We stood up, and started slowly walking toward Victor. We were about half way to his dead body when he sat up abruptly, and turned his helmeted head to look directly at us. We completely freaked. He jumped up, and screamed, "You little fuckers are dead! DEAD! " and started running after us. Marky screamed, "RUN!!" which was totally unnecessary, since we had started doing that the exact microsecond Victor had been miraculously resurrected.

Like good little soldiers, we had our contingency plan, and unbelievably, we managed to stick to it either by luck or circumstance. If we were being chased by a single enemy, SOP was to split up. He couldn't catch us all. If he caught one of us, the others would either circle around and attempt rescue, or run home and Get An Adult, which was always the back-up plan if things went to shit on a mission. If we managed to escape clean, we were to meet at the tree fort.

In this case, it worked. Although he was a lot older, Victor was a chunky kid. We all got away, and as agreed we met up at the tree fort, climbed up and pulled the rope in after us. This tree fort was parent-approved, in that it was really high, so my dad insisted on checking it to make sure it was structurally sound. We compensated for this indignity by making it virtually inaccessible without a rope ladder and an iron constitution. Once inside, we collapsed in relief, both in knowing that we had gotten away, and that we didn't kill Victor after all.

A few minutes later there was a huge BAM! on the side of the fort.

Victor was smarter than we figured. He had followed one of us.

Marky and I both looked at my brother.

"What?" he said, instantly fearing the dreaded noogie. "It wasn't me, you guys. I got away clean."

We didn't buy it, and figured my brother had sold us out in exchange for his own life. But right now we had more important things to worry about than pummeling him. That would come later. Regardless of who it was Victor had followed, we were now treed like raccoons.

He couldn't climb up without a ladder, but he was patient. The first noise we heard was him throwing rocks at us. We poked our heads out of the fort, and he immediately tried to take them off with another rock. He had a pile of them by his feet. Clearly, he had thought this through, unlike us, the treed idiots. Each granite fastball was punctuated with obscenities that all seemed to revolve around our respective moms and our supposed sexual escapades with them. And apparently none of us had fathers, either.

Eventually, Victor tired out, or ran out of rocks, or both. To this day, I'm not really sure why he left, but he did. After we heard his bike start up, we figured the coast was clear. Apparently the damage to his bike was limited to a flat front tire, and the tire had stayed on the rim, because he was still able to ride it home. After the sound of the motorcycle faded away, we dropped our rope ladder and ran like hell to our respective houses.

To my brother's credit, he didn't tell on us. I'm not sure whether he was too scared to actually implicate himself in this one, or if he took our threats of a savage beating to heart, but either way he kept his mouth shut.

Of course, our parents got a call from Victor's parents the next day, and we were all grounded for a month. Worse than the grounding was the fact that we had to listen to the "What the HELL were you kids thinking" speech from our fathers. (The answer, of course, as everyone who has ever received this speech already knows, is: "I don't know." This is immediately followed up by "You WEREN'T thinking, and that's the PROBLEM.") Kids are stupid.

So Victor lived. We lived. We paid for a tire out of our allowances. There was an uneasy truce. Victor didn't screw with us much after that, although we always suspected that he was the one who flung the fresh dog shit at the side of our fort. We couldn't prove it though, so we just scraped it off with a stick and waited for the stink to fade.

You'll notice that I started this tale by saying, "...the First Time We Almost Killed A Guy." Unfortunately, we weren't very fast learners, and there were quite a few other close calls, one of which involved Marky's stepfather.

But those tales are blog fodder for another day.