Random acts of destruction

[jgorham]

In high school, I was pretty much a douche. This manifested itself in many ways, the most relevant one being a desire to create panic in people simply because I felt that they were foolish to panic in the first place.

My friends and I used to regularly get drunk and go down to the street corner in front of a friend's house with duct tape. We both sorta lived in the middle of nowhere, and at 2am there were seldom any cars.

The game involved laying several long strips of duct tape on the ground sticky side up near the stop sign. Cars would roll over the tape at a relatively low speed and the tape would stick to their wheels and the bottom of their cars. When they would accelerate, the tape would then be ripped from where it was sticking, only to then stick to a different portion of the car, rip off again etc.

This process produced a very loud noise, similar to the noise one might expect an exploded tire to make. Victimized motorists would then panic, get out of their cars, see that it was far better than they expected in that it was only tape, and then proceed to get even more pissed off than they would have been at a flat tire at the nerve of punk kids for making them feel panicky. I think this is the part from which I derived pleasure.

We had good hiding spots, assuming there was enough time to rush to cover. But if a car approached while we were laying the tape, we had makeshift hiding spots which we hoped were enough. Sometimes they were, as in the case where Clint and I laid face down in the dirt for 20 minutes as police officers sent their searchlights directly over our heads.

Sometimes though our hiding spots were insufficient. One night as we were laying tape, we heard a car coming and rushed to the crappy hiding spot. A jeep pulled up to the stop sign - on top of our tape - and I was able to see 3 men and 1 woman. 3 of them were drinking, the car was loud, and I really wished I had a better hiding spot.

When they hit the tape, they didn't have to pull over to see what had happened, they just looked out the open top of their jeep. Seeing tape and concluding that some punk kids had done this, they stopped their car close enough to Clint and I that we couldn't move safely from our crouched position behind some bushes.

In what is still one of the scariest moments of my life, a man from the jeep saw us and threw a beer bottle directly at where we were hiding. Leaving one of my sandals behind, Clint and I ran desperately into an orange orchard, knowing only that we were running from the constant profanity of angry, drunk men knowing they had a chance to both beat someone up and impress the girl who was with them.

After hiding in the branches of a tree for about a half hour, Clint and I finally saw them leaving and returned to the safety of his house. At one point a man had run directly under our tree. I am glad he didn't stop to think that he had seen us a moment before, and yet we were nowhere to be found as he scanned the terrain in front of him.

Anyway we turned 18 shortly after that, and stopped the practice. But talking to Clint tonight made me think of it again. So any of you all have similar stories of random destruction?