There is a direct correlation between (and sometimes, but only very rarely, betwixt) your age and the appropriateness of pulling a prank. You are born with great privilege and wide latitude with regard to what you can get away with. Taking a whiz while some unsuspecting victim is changing your diaper, bricking in the bathtub, scribbling in crayon on the wall (this is so overdone it’s downright cliché, but try telling a toddler that… insolent little bastards) or playing with Daddy’s lighter… there are, it seems, no boundaries when you’re that young.
And it’s all downhill from there. The frequency and severity of this behavior is expected to decrease as time marches on. By the time you’re my age, you can’t even strategically plant a whoopee cushion without being regarded by your peers forever afterward as some kind of Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child.
The decline in tolerance is steady until you reach high school graduation, at which point a crossroads is reached. If you attend college, you buy yourself a solid four-year pass to continue pulling pranks unabated, although Old Man Jenkins Down the Street Who Always Yells at You To Stay the Hell Out of His Yard, Even If Only Your Freakin’ Shadow is Moving Across His Grass is now strictly off limits. Your victims must now be chosen from the ranks of your classmates and the slow-moving members of the faculty and administration, and even then, only on campus. But once you’ve either graduated or dropped out, or if you don’t even bother to attend college, Game Over.
Thankfully, during my capricious youth I managed to squeeze in a healthy amount of pranks before my number was called. Most were your garden variety pranks, including:
-the “Sugar in Your Gas Tank” prank;
-the “Whizz in Your Gas Tank” prank;
-the “Yogurt in Your Gas Tank” prank, which I actually just made up;
-the “Flash Paper in Place of Your Rolling Paper” prank;
-the “Have Ten Big Dudes Move Your Car a Couple Hundred Feet” prank;
-the “Pull Someone’s Pants Down While They’re Giving a Presentation on Ponce De Leon in Sixth Grade Social Studies, Who You Cannot For the Life of You Now Remember What He Did That Made Him So Goddamned Important” prank;
-and many more.
However, there was a glorious time in my young life during which, it seemed to me, I committed some of the most epic and awe-inspiring pranks to ever have been executed during the span of human history: camp.
Camp for us American youth comes in all shapes and sizes. Mine was a weekend camp that happened five times a year, and the campers were 6th, 7th and 8th graders. The hierarchy, from top to bottom, was as follows: the camp coordinators (who ran the show), the adult staff (who did the heavy lifting), the youth staff (high school kids who mostly ignored everyone and tried to find empty rooms in which they could make out with each other), and the campers. I attended this camp as a member of the youth staff for many years.
No one remembers how it ever even came to be, but during one of those fateful weekends we found ourselves deep in the opening salvo of a diabolical prank war. It was between the adult staff and the youth staff. We considered the campers civilians in keeping with the war metaphor. And in further keeping, there was collateral damage, which usually involved egg yoke. For the youth staff, the prank war rapidly became the lone reason to attend camp – to devise and execute increasingly wicked pranks and crush the adult staff with our mischievous malice aforethought.
And so, I present to you, without a whole lot of embellishment, and in classic David Letterman last-to-first style, the Five Greatest Pranks We Ever Pulled:
Numba’ Five: Each night after “lights out”, the adult staff would have their nightly meeting in the staff lounge. The staff lounge was in a lodge on the far south side of camp, and the dorms were on the north side. The staff parking lot was directly in front of the lodge.
We would often strike out into the chilly, moist spring nights, sprinting through the inky darkness towards the lodge and the parking lot. All that could be heard was the squish of tennis shoes into the soft, wet earth, choked-back giggling, and murmurs about “how awesome this is going to be.”
While a good deal of our pranks were carefully planned and executed with spectacular precision, sometimes it was quite fulfilling to treat a given scenario as a blank canvas. Artistes that we were, on these expeditions we would bring along a backpack full of our puckish paints: toilet paper, plastic wrap, various condiments in easy-squeeze bottles, rotten eggs and other spoiled foodstuffs, a crossbow, sodium pentathol, etc.
One night, full of verve and caffeinated soda, we embarked on one of these “anything goes” jaunts to the parking lot. Was it an “egg bombardment on the witless staff leaving the meeting” sorta night? A “fill an entire car with pea gravel” sorta night? Personally, I think that the stroke of genius we settled for was vastly more fiendish than either of those. We found one of the camp coordinator’s cars and smeared Vaseline over every square inch of her windows. Windshield, rear and side windows, and side-view mirrors. We plied it on thick, too. Do you know how hard it is to wipe Vaseline off a smooth surface?
Numba’ Fo’: We embarked on another of those infamous late-night excursions to the parking lot, but this time we had a very specific plot in mind. We took one of the cartons of rotten eggs that we had so dutifully been allowing to fester, whipped them into one of the most fetid mixtures I have ever seen or smelt, and delivered the payload on the roof of the victim’s car.
You may well be thinking that this is far from inventive. Anthropologists, I am sure, have solid proof of Australopithecus throwing reptile eggs at the caves of rival monkey-men. Carl Jung egged Sigmund Freud’s Austrian villa after Freud referred to him as “that nard-sucking Communist douche” in one of his papers.
However, we were like the Wes Anderson of the practice – we had our own signature style and flair. So, following our stinky baptism of the poor horseless carriage, we very tightly wrapped the entire vehicle in plastic wrap.
We were told by our hapless victim (whose was dyslexic, and whose last name was Webb – we called him Mr. Wedd, and Spiber Man – this is true) that the resulting pressure forced the foul smelling yoke into the window seals, where it remained forever. He told us at the next camp that he had to sell the car, as he put it “if [he] ever wanted to take a girl out on a date again.” We felt a little bad about this, as it was never our intention to cause any lasting harm or damage. But later, upon further reflection, we all agreed that given the blistering fucking hilarity of it, we were glad to have bent the rules a bit.
Numba’ Three: Even casual acquaintances of mine can comment on my views on plastic wrap. “Oh yes,” they will tell you. “I was on the main concourse trying to get to my gate before my final boarding call, and out of nowhere this bedraggled, bearded freak wearing a grey wool robe with mustard stains on it runs up to me, shakes my hand, hands me a pamphlet called “The Moriarty Plastic Wrap Manifesto: Plastiwrapifesto!” and then disappears in a puff of greasy white smoke.”
Plastic wrap became something of a weapon of choice for our little faction during the Great Prank Wars. But we did not merely unleash its power on cars. We found that it also acted as a powerful paralytic agent. We plastic-wrapped a good dozen or so campers to their beds in the night if we felt they were unruly, or if we felt, well, like it. But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Yearning for a greater challenge, we sought out an upright and mobile target.
Most of the pranks we pulled were truly in the spirit of fun, competition and creativity. We had a ball pulling them off, we looked forward to (usually with a slight undercurrent of dread) seeing what our enemies would cook up in retaliation, and we had a blast scheming up our next naughty pursuit.
But not this one.
There was a member of the staff named Jeff. Jeff was what we called in camp-speak a “big fat stupid asshole dickhead buttwad.” C’mon, we were teenagers. Of course, NOW I would call him something very Churchill-esque, like “a corpulent, obtuse nincompoop,” but I would still be tempted to drop “fuckwit” in there somewhere.
Jeff was a staff member of the nonprofit organization that hosted the camp. We are pretty sure that he was forced to volunteer at camp as a staff member as some type of punishment, because he spent most of the weekend heaping abuse and criticism upon the campers, youth staffers, and his fellow staff members. He had wiry brown hair, a patchy unkempt beard and glasses with lenses so thick that, by all rights, they should have set his eyeballs on fire on a sunny day. He weighed, I am guessing, around 500 pounds. I will admit that I often exaggerate certain facts and figures when I relate these real-life stories, but I assure you that in this instance I am probably right on the money, if not a little low. The mere sight of Jeff boggled the mind and his existence in this universe strained the very laws of physics. The only explanation for Jeff’s ability to stand or move would be that his bones were actually made of titanium.
After suffering through Jeff’s misanthropy and morbidly obese malaise for many a camp weekend, Jeff announced one weekend that it would be his last. No one remembers if he offered an explanation as to why, and even if he did, no one cared. All we knew is that fat, smelly, wretched Jeff would be gone forever. No longer would we have to fear the sight of his grotesque ass in the showers, or the smell of his hideous ass in the latrine. No longer would we have to endure his constant browbeating or stupid rants about, well, everything. No longer would we have to witness him inhale inhuman amounts of sloppy joe, canned peaches and other assorted camp “foods.” Oh happy fucking day.
From a prankster’s point of view, Jeff was now just as impotent from a retaliation standpoint as he surely was in the more traditional sense of the word, owing to his veins being crushed under mountains of fat and clogged with the unholy grease of a million fistfuls of various fried meats and cheeses, rendering him wholly unable to deliver even a drop of blood to Jeff Junior, if you know what I mean. I am operating under the bold assumption that Jeff even had a Jeff Junior. There’s a great line in Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk that reads: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Well, at camp, on a long enough timeline, the your chances of avoiding seeing any given person naked in the shower (in our case, and sadly, only males) drops to zero. Hence, I can assure you with great veracity, that Jeff’s dick, if present, was invisible.
Back to the scheme. The plan was to waylay Jeff after he disrobed and prepared to enter the shower (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1: A diagram of how we totally punked Jeff’s fat ass
We wore our bath shoes so we wouldn’t slip on the slimy shower floor. He was sleepy and a little confused at first, but after the third revolution of teenage bastards, orbiting his monstrous ass like two twisted, cackling satellites, he started to hurl invective. Loudly. His lung capacity was surprisingly robust, given that he had enough fat crushing his pipes that he might as well have had a bag of concrete strapped to his chest. His breath smelt of sewage and battery acid.
We knew that we had to get a solid five layers of plastic wrap around him before he would being trying to pin us against a wall with his girth. We only wrapped his torso, not his legs. We wanted him to have to walk around to find help. A few whirls later and we were through. We met the remainder of the youth staff (the boys only, of course, as we were in the boys’ dorm) in the hallway. They were in various forms of seemingly impossible contortions of laughter. Their faces were blue. Some of them looked a little panicked. I think this is because blood vessels were bursting in their heads.
Luckily, as the sound of Jeff’s rant and thunderous footfalls rapidly grew closer, they managed to get their wits about them, and my accomplice and I led the charge to the door. We exploded through the doorway as though we were being chased by the shockwave of an explosion in some action movie. And Jeff stopped there at the threshold, shaking his fist and gnashing his teeth. We did it. And we emerged on the other side, unscathed, living to tell the tale.
We were a bit out of line in the eyes of the camp coordinators, though, and there were consequences, which I won’t go into here. We had decided, however, that we were all willing to be put in front of the firing squad, or quite likely the Jeff sitting on our chest squad, for love of the game.
Numba’ Two: Before we went to camp, we had plans. Mission objectives, if you will. We had pranks already picked out. We had backup pranks if we had to abort the main pranks. We had specific targets that we assigned code names. We had GPS, suitcase nukes, Humvees. We were at war, people.
There was a kid on youth staff for a while named Matt. Matt was extremely strange. Part of it was the way he looked: he was “Jeff-sized,” despite being only 15 years old. Part of it was the way he talked: imagine Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and Diane Rehm all rolled into one. It caught most people off guard for the first time, hearing this slow, mousy, lispy voice come from this man the size of a Ford Festiva. And then, of course, a big part of it was the crippling social effects of being that fat. He was always crying at the mildest slight… he often ate his food in private because he was embarrassed about the size of the portions… and he was constantly paranoid about what people were saying about him, his voice and his size behind his back.
Even for as cruel as teenagers can be, especially boys, we actually never ripped on Matt about his size, voice or neuroses. In fact, we never ripped on anyone in any meaningful way, for that matter. That’s part of the spirit of American youth camps. It’s a safe place where you can go and be yourself, far away from the judgment of your family, your teachers, and your classmates. Sure, you would get a good-natured ribbing if we found a New Kids on the Block tape in your Walkman, or if someone recognized your feet under the stall door while you were taking a big, noisy, smelly deuce, or if they caught you holding hands with some girl with braces, but that was about the extent of it. No one got it for being fat, poor, ugly, tall, short, smart or stupid.
And so Matt, for all of his oddities that made him a miserable sod in real life, came to camp and was treated with a deference that he likely never received anywhere else. And then he threw it all away.
One camp in particular we lost a lot of ground in the prank war. The staff seemed to know all of our plans. They kept their rooms locked during the day. The night watch kept an unusually close eye on the back door of the boys’ dorm. They peered cautiously from the windows of the lodge during their nightly meeting. They knew everything we had planned. We were disheartened, baffled and frustrated.
Saturday afternoon, a few of us were having a chat with Spiber Man. He was the Switzerland of the war, taking neither side, but he was sympathetic to ours, even after what we did to his car. He told us something that explained how the staff had been able to so easily thwart our every scheme. On Thursday night, the staff – damn their oily hides–bribed Matt with junk food in exchange for a detailed account of our plans for the weekend.
All bets were off. I know that what I’m about to write is a paradox, but it is no less true: we took our fun seriously. Matt had become a liability. We had to send a message that we wouldn’t tolerate this type of treachery. And it was gonna be smelly.
Matt was known for striking off to the boys’ dorm between activities to “snack.” That is, he would shove unimaginable amounts of junk food down his throat over the course of a few minutes, wash it all down with a few greedy gulps of soda, and return to the fray. He would always try to inconspicuously slip back into the flow of things, but trying to convince people that you stepped outside for some fresh air ain’t so easy when you return with your face covered in Doritos residue, a gummy bear stuck to your neck, and your hands glistening and sticky.
Knowing this habit of his, we thought it prudent to add a very healthy dose of Castor oil – we had to account for his overwhelming girth by quadrupling said dose – to his beverage of choice, and simply waited for him to retire to the dorm for his post-dinner/pre-lights out snack. We hoofed it to the dorm once we saw him leave, and saw that he had polished off the remaining swigs of the two-liter of Mountain Dew that we had tainted. Point, set, match.
About four hours later the fireworks began, as we were engaged in the nightly lights-out camper wrangle. It was one of the great traditions of camp. While the staff were at their nightly meeting, it was the youth staff’s responsibility to make their way through the dorm and get the campers in bed. This mainly consisted of us sticking our heads in the bathroom and showers and yelling:
“Alright! Let’s go! Lights out! Let’s hurry it up! C’mon! Lights out! Hurry it up in there! Let’s move it!”
While some youth staff checked the rooms, others would walk up and down the aisles with that sorta big-fish-in-a-small-pond-mall-security-guard swagger, swinging our arms way out behind us and clapping our hands in front of us, shouting:
“Alright! Lights out! Let’s get in bed and get those lights out, people! Quiet! Lights out!”
Occasionally we would pop into the rooms and begin rooting around the campers’ personal effects for candy, even though we all had copious amounts of our own candy. They would object, and begin to get out of bed to defend the plunder of their sweet, sweet booty, which we would answer with threats of calling their parents right now to tell them that we are sending your son home because of his bad behavior, and we need to send him home right away, so you’re going to have to come pick him up at midnight on a Saturday, way out here in the lower east side of nowhere, to which most kids promptly shut the hell up and just helplessly watched us eat their coveted sweetmeats. We were such dicks.
If they didn’t have any good candy, we would ask if anyone in the room had “scored” so far that weekend, where “scored” means “given or received an awkward peck or sloppy tongue-kiss from a girl.” The responses were inevitably laced with gross exaggerations and/or flat-out lies. We would usually respond with hilariously lame and equally mendacious stories to put the campers in their place, replete with our own gross exaggerations and embellishments. “Yeah, well, last camp there was this girl on staff, her name was Veronica, and she was like 24 or something, and she was all like, ‘meet me behind the girls dorm at midnight’, and so I went out there, and she was all like, ‘I have a boyfriend and all, but I just can’t resist you,’ and then we french-kissed until, like, dawn or something, and I got to touch her boobs, and they were, like, humongous, and now she’s going to homecoming with me.”
And then we would pat the campers on the head, like the amateurs they were, as if to suggest, “I am a black belt at scoring with chicks. You’re so young and naive. Just you wait until you’re my age. You’re still not going to get as much tail as me.” And then we would return to our dorm rooms, wishing we could spank it, but knowing we couldn’t with all the other dudes in the room, though we could try in the bathroom stall in the morning while we’re taking our AM dump, but that would never work, because the bathroom smells like a sewage treatment facility staffed by rotting zombies, which really throws us off our stroke, which means we’ll just have to wait until the weekend is over and we’re home, at which point we’ll jerk off before we even unpack our bags.
Anyway, Matt. The rest of the story won’t surprise you. As we were on patrol, he started complaining about a sour stomach, and then he disappeared into the bathroom for a little over an hour. All we could hear were periodic bursts of sound, which combined painful moaning, flatulence like thunder, and the dull roar of a stream of liquefied doo-doo hitting the toilet water so heavily and steadily that it sounded like Niagara fucking Falls. There was a lot of Matt, so one could only surmise that there was a lot of Matt to clean out.
We told Matt the next morning that we caused him his gastrointestinal distress, and why. We explained that now that we had finished exacting our revenge and we were all good. He could have played it cool, but instead he ratted us out to the staff. Matt never came back to camp after that. I think he knew that the next step in the escalation process quite naturally would have forced us to disembowel and hang him from a balcony Hannibal Lecter-style. But he was wrong. We were just gonna do the Castor oil thing again. Except next time, we were going to lock him in the girls’ dorm afterwards.
Numba’ One: The best prank we ever pulled qualifies as such because it was a) so very simple, and b) utterly spontaneous.
There was an enemy faction on the staff of young men and women who we duked it out with one weekend in particular. It consisted of a guy, Jody, and girl named Sherry, Spiber Man, and some other people who were obviously pretty forgettable, because I forgot them. The penultimate prank in this particular match-up was of their doing, but the final blow was ours. And it was glorious.
Remember the order of things each night? Staff goes to meeting, youth staff put campers to bed, staff returns. Each Saturday night, after the staff returned, the youth staff went to another building on campus for the “youth staff party.” This will blow your mind – it was unsupervised. Yes, eight teenage boys and eight teenage girls, away from home, filled with a sense of independence and adventure, allowed to cavort in a huge empty building far away from intervention of adults. If any of us had ever had the balls to do what we all wanted do to with each other, we would have had our own little campers the following year. Instead, it was a lot of making out and groping in dark corners, or crying about how the person you wanted to make out with and grope was making out with and groping someone else, eating junk food, drinking pop, making prank phone calls, and a whole lot of that emo, Breakfast Club-esque dialog about how everything we do is a cry out for help and our parents just don’t understand us and at least if we cut ourselves we can feel something.
One of those magical nights, locked away in our fortress of debauchery and/or misery, the enemy struck. We returned from our party to find that the every single item in our dorm room was gone. The whole room was empty.
The campers were sound asleep and the entire dorm was quiet – we couldn’t go on a rampage. We quietly skulked about the dorm, flashlights in hand, wondering where the hell they could have stashed our belongings. And then it occurred to one of us to check the courtyard between the two boys’ dorms.
It was all there, laid out very neatly on the grass. And like the grass, it was all covered in frost.
We hustled to get everything back inside, our faces red with anger and embarrassment. How could we not have seen this coming? We began to chide ourselves for our foolishness, but quickly resolved that the past was the past and we were getting nowhere by rehashing it. We had to strike back.
We didn’t know where the enemy was sleeping, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. There were two boys’ dorms and two girls’ dorms. Each one was connected to the other, hence the courtyard, but only one of each genders’ dorm was used during any given camp. A lot of the staff couldn’t bear the thought of sharing a room with a bunch of smelly teenagers, so they would congregate in one of the unoccupied dorms, and their sleeping arrangements were often coed. So we struck off into the empty dorm next door and found a room with a bunch of Abercrombie & Fitch clothes strewn about, all these haircare products and about ten pairs of women’s shoes littering the floor. Boom. This must have been Jody & Sherry’s room. And they were on night watch.
What to do, what to do? We packed the two suitcases, took them outside, opened them back up, and chucked each item individually onto the roof of the dorm. As we rifled through their belongings one item at a time, we found some very, shall we say, personal items that belonged to Sherry, including some very slutty underwear, lacy bras, and some tampons.
The following morning, as the boys preened and prepared to head to the dining hall for breakfast, we held a public auction of sorts for each of the pilfered items. I think we made a little over $30, and that wasn’t including the bartered candy and food that we accepted as legal tender.
Boys this age (ages 12-14, remember?) have all the subtlety of Tsar Bomba. By noon, they were wearing the bras and panties on their heads or over their own clothes, letting the tampons hang out of the corner of their mouths like cigars, or dipping them in soda to see how much liquid they would absorb. The best part was that Sherry was like a ghost that day. She was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t have the huevos to go and collect her belongings. I would have at least tried for the underwear. They looked expensive.
Ahhh, yes. The glory days of my youth. Pranks that I am involved in today tend to be about as exciting as an oil change. They usually involve farting in bed and fluffing the covers towards my wife.
Still, I had a good run. I wish I had done that panty thing more often, though. That was fuckin’ boss.
