“Gotta keep an eye on this one!”
There is much truth to the expression “idle hands are the devil’s tools”. This I know from personal experience.
As a kid I had plenty of free time on my hands, perhaps too much, since I wasn’t into sports, scouting, music lessons or any other extracurricular activities for that matter. Lots of missed opportunities for exploration and growth — I know. What’s done is done, but a do-over would sure be a cool option.
I wasn’t a complete dullard, however, and would pursue and nurture my own eccentric interests, such as forming an ‘Insect Collectors Club’ with my neighbor friends, proselytizing anyone willing to listen that UFOs were proof of extraterrestrial visitation, and trying to make sense out of my very intimidating chemistry set.
I wasn’t a particularly bad kid, but sometimes I could be very mischievous (perhaps, even bordering on homicidal), especially when I was bored stiff and there were no adults around. Left to my own devices, I would occasionally stray into the dark side.
The following three anecdotes are true and factual as best as my memory can recall them in my old fartage. Fortunately, no one was maimed or killed in these incidents but — boy-oh-boy — was the potential ever there!
Bullseye!
I acquired my first slingshot during a summer vacation visit with my older brother in Altus, Oklahoma, where he was stationed while serving as an Airman in the Air Force. It wasn’t your average, cheaply made toy either. This was a particularly well-designed instrument of mayhem constructed of high impact, molded plastic and surgical-grade rubber tubing. It was love at first sight.
My marksmanship got rather good as I practiced knocking tin cans off their perches. I don’t recall targeting small animals or children, but it’s quite possible I did.
Back home in Brooklyn my second-floor bedroom window overlooked my mom’s strawberry patches in our small backyard and the adjoining yard of the house behind us. There was a chain link fence separating both properties.
Usually around dinner time I would see a family of five congregate around a kitchen table for their meal. Privacy, apparently, was not an overriding concern for them as they never bothered to cover the window with blinds, shades, or curtains.
One night, I seized upon the opportunity to practice my marksmanship and ruin their sacred familial ritual. I got a nice and heavy nut and bolt from my father’s toolbox to use as the projectile, shut off my lights, assumed my best sniper posture on my windowsill and took aim.
Bullseye and Bedlam! Plates, glasses, and chairs tossed aside as they stood up to investigate the cause of the sudden loud pop and shattering glass.
They were looking upward, so apparently, I had made a direct strike of an upper windowpane. I instantly ducked below my window and dared not look up in fear of being discovered.
I had immediate regrets and, in the darkness, engulfed by shame and guilt, crawled out of my bedroom.
I don’t know the extent of the damage caused. Did glass shatter onto their meal or get in someone’s eye? Did they call the police? Were they ever able to enjoy a relaxing dinner after that?
I’ve never admitted this to anyone until now. Fifty years after the fact, I confess my crime and apologize for terrorizing them.
Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if…
(Twilight Zone theme in background)
NARRATOR: Imagine, if you will, that you’re driving along an isolated, narrow, country road late on a sultry summer night when you suddenly come upon and nearly crash your vehicle into a makeshift barrier of bamboo rods that someone has left across your path. You slam the brakes in the nick of time, and in your headlights a few yards ahead, you catch someone or something, scurrying away and dodge quickly into the driveway of a home.
You make the connection and conclude that person or entity was probably the culprit who put up the roadblock. Shaken and enraged you drive up to the home, jump out of your car, and bang on the door.
You furiously complain to the occupants that you and your passenger could have been killed or seriously injured. A boy of about 10 is quickly identified as the perpetrator and severely scolded.
This happened one summer when I was visiting my grandparents in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. I should have gotten a really good thrashing for that one, but somehow came away with just a humiliating public berating from my favorite uncle, Manuel.
Jiminy Cricket! What the hell was I thinking?
Can baby hamsters fly?
Patrick, a newly enrolled pupil in our eight-grade class at St. Gabriel’s in Brooklyn, had a disability which required him to wear leg braces and use crutches.
Since going down two flights of stairs to the basement cafeteria for lunch and then back up was too much effort for him, our teacher allowed two or three of us to collect our lunch trays and bring them back to the classroom where we kept him company during midday recess.
Everybody liked Patrick. Despite his condition, he had easygoing, upbeat manner and liked to joke around. While our classmates were away at recess, we’d eat, watch TV, listen to the latest Jackson Five hits on my cheap transistor radio, and engage in plenty of horseplay.
Once, our pet hamsters, which we kept in a cage on a wide windowsill, gave birth to a litter of 5-6 pinkies and the whole class was pretty excited.
I don’t know where the inspiration came from, but I told my fellow ‘caretakers’ to spread the rumor among the returning classmates that I had taken one of the helpless, blind newborns and callously tossed it out the window.
The results were predictable — Horror and Pandemonium.
“Sister Joan! Sister Joan!” one of the girls wailed to our homeroom teacher, “Wade said that Ricardo threw a pinkie out the window during recess!”
Up until then I had been an average, unremarkable, and well-behaved pupil but suddenly my classmates and teacher perceived me as evil incarnate and, quite honestly, I rather enjoyed the attention my new persona afforded me. I felt special — crazy and dangerous special.
A visibly distraught Sister Joan called me over to her desk and asked me if it were true. I told her ‘Nah—we were just kidding around’. She seemed relieved, but probably very disturbed that I would even imagine such a scenario. “Gotta keep an eye on this one,” she likely thought to herself.
FINIS
Making a Spectacle of Myself 
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