Getting caught egging cars
At 16 I was not a bad kid but I looked quite threatening. All the boredom of being riddled with hormones, stuck in a suburb, a chronically sensible and sensitive boy, you could read the frustration on my face. That, and I wore a piece of chain around my neck held together with a padlock, and I put glue in my hair to make it spikey.
By junior year in high school (that’s the third year of high school, to you non-Americans) I had been so often mistaken for a trouble-maker and even unjustly punished for trouble I hadn’t made that I set out to actually cause trouble. Why not? I’d be punished whether I did something wrong or not.
So I started throwing eggs at moving cars.
My friend Lorenzo and I bought two 40 ounce bottles of cheap malt liquor (the American equivalent of a flagon of Special Brew) and took them down to the parking garage underneath my parents’ apartment. A few weeks previously we’d bought four dozen eggs and left them to go off. Drinking our 40s we planned our course of action. The apartments sat next to a wide busy road where cars sped past. Between the apartments and the road grew a hedge. This hedge grew thick enough to hide in. Continue reading
