AnonymousCoworker

(PLD, I thought of this story when I read MooCow’s post here. You’ll see why.)

First part, here.

Luckily, we hadn’t backed into the hearse. Unfortunately, we had backed into the funeral home. We completely took out the gate on the side of the home. Before I had any time to say we should get out and see what damage we have have done, the guy who was driving us, T, sped off.

I checked the building over my shoulder, and there was no damage to the building itself, and it looked like the gate had sprung back to its original shape.

No biggie. T said he would call his mom when we got to swim practice and let her know what happened.

A few miles down the road, we were almost at practice, and we were ahead of 2 cars carrying our fellow swim team members. We let loose on the first 2 extinguishers, and the smoke powder billowed out the windows behind us. It was hysterical.

I grabbed the 3rd extinguisher, and I told the freshman to grab the 4th one. I sprayed another volley out the window, and the freshman couldn’t figure out how to operate his. I showed him where to pull the pin, and where to squeeze, and suddenly there was an explosion of yellow powder inside the car.

We pulled over, ditched the canisters on the side of the road, and T said he would clean out the car after practice. We we got to practice, T called his mom, told her where he had parked, and then jumped into the pool with the rest of us.

About 30 minutes later his mom stormed into the pool area and she was pissed. She yanked out of the pool by his arm, and draged him into the lobby. T never came back from the locker room.

Later that night, I got a call from T. He had visited the funeral home with his mom, and tried to explain what had happened. He apologized, and offered to pay for any damages. He told me the damage was limited to an aluminum gate, available at any hardware store. Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for the woman at the funeral home. She lost her shit, and told T’s mom that it sounded like an explosion went off and that the building was falling down when we hit the gate. I’m not sure how that could be true, since I was in the car, and it didn’t sound anything like that. Regardless, the woman wanted to sue T. So T’s mom calls her sister, a lawyer, over for dinner.

T explains about the accident, and the fire extinguishers. His aunt explains that fire extinguishers have UPS type codes on them that denote where they are supposed to be located. If anyone found those containers, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how they got to our swim practice location from our high school. She suggested we take a pre-emptive measure, and let the school know about it from us first.

The next morning, we went into the dean’s office, and let him know that we took 4 fire extinguishers, and where they probably were now. He gave us 5 days of detention a piece, and told us to pay for the fire extinguishers. We did not implicate the freshman, as I was a senior, and could care less about my “behavioral standing” and T just didn’t care. We didn’t want to but a black mark on the freshman’s high school career so early. So we made him pay for the fire extinguishers. That was the price of our support. $200.

The first day of detention, T and I wandered in and sat down. We were to remain silent, and weren’t allowed to do anything, not even homework. After about 10 minutes, our track coach came into the class. He looked at the teacher running detention and said, “I need 2 students to scrub the gymnasium floor.”

The teacher gestured to the classroom absentmindedly, “Have your pick.”

Coach looked at us and pointed with both hands, “You two. Come with me.”

We grabbed our stuff and followed him into the hallway. We started walking down the hall in the direction of the gym when he stopped us, “Where the hell are you two going?”

“Uh. The gym?”

“Go home. Dummies.”

He did the same thing to get us out of detention the next day.

The third day, we walked in and he was already sitting at the desk at the head of the room. We took our seats, and everything was quiet for about 10 minutes.

“I’m going to the bathroom. [My last name], make sure no one talks.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as he left the room, everyone began talking. Freakin’ delinquents. After a few minutes, the lookout at the door let us know that he was headed up the hallway at a quick jog. We were still taking out seats when he walked in. Busted.

“[My last name] was anyone talking or out of their seat while I was gone?” he asked, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Uh. No, sir?”

“T, is he lying?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. You can both go.”

The next two days he got to us even before we made it to detention, and told us that he had removed our names from the detention list. We wouldn’t even need to show up. He also called us dickheads, told us how dangerous it was to steal fire extinguishers, and then told us that we had used up our free passes.

That, combined with the opportunity to fling myself 12 feet in the air while holding onto a flimsy fiberglass pole, made for one of the best years of high school. That and all the teenaged sex.

P.S. T ended up buying the funeral home a new gate, when his aunt got all lawyerly on them.

I have* a humongous jock**.

I wasn’t the greatest athlete in the world, but I enjoyed pole vaulting much more than I enjoyed swimming. Probably because I was better at it.

My brother started pole vaulting his Sophomore year. He quickly went on to break records and become something of golden boy for the track team. Because the head coach thought talent might run in the family, he thought I should go out for the team as well.

I didn’t want to be lumped together with my brother as an indistinguishable unit, so I went out for long distance instead of pole vaulting. I strapped on my Converse, and ran for an hour and a half for one afternoon with the other distance runners. It sucked.

The next day I hauled my Converse wearing ass over to the pole vaulting pit, and I started practice the same day. The other vaulters had real running shoes, and during meets, they would wear track spikes. I always wore my Chucks, and they suited me just fine. There’s even a picture of me in the yearbook wearing my black Chucks as I clear the bar.

Anyway, we would spend most of practice sun bathing on the mats, and not doing much of anything. This would piss off the other guys on the track team, but the head coach didn’t care, because we consistently swept the scores, earing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd at every school we competed with.

Even though I say we laid on the mats all day, we did sometimes practice. And by practice I mean, we would vault. 2 hours, every day we would vault over and over an over again. It was wicked fun, and nobody could tell me that I was practicing for shit. I started out at the modest height of 9 feet. At my best I was able to hit 11′ 6″. My brother, on the other hand, unoffcially topped the school record at 13′ 6″. (As a comparison, in the Olympics, the men vault at about 20 feet.)

So what’s the point of all this? We scored lots of points for the team. And our coach loved us for it. And he used to be a cop. Rumor has it he was a dirty cop, and he was fired for taking bribes or something. I can’t say for sure, but after what I went through, I have a feeling the stories may have been true.

One day, on the way to swim practice (we did practice pole vaulting in the winter because we didn’t have an indoor pit) a fellow polevaulter/swimmer and I were talking about how easy it would be to take different things from the school. We talked about statues, chalkboards, etc. We weren’t stealing per se, but we wanted to see what we could get away with.

We hatched upon a plan to steal fire extinguishers. We had used them in the locker room after swim practice on more than a few freshmen.*** See, most fire extinguishers shoot powder, not foam. When you get out of the pool, and head into the locker room and get hit with powder, it sticks, and you look like shake and bake.

We had emptied the fire extinguisher in the locker room of all it’s powder (I know, I know. We were idiots.) So we needed new ones. That way, we would have something to jack from the school, and we would be able to continue our holliganism after practice.

At the end of the next day we met up, and we both had 2 fire extinguishers in our backpacks. We plunked them into the back seat, and then we headed off to practice. On our wayout of school, we saw one on the freshmen from the team, and he looked like he was waiting for a ride. We offered him a lift to practice (we weren’t complete dicks) and let him know about our caper.

He hatched upon the great idea to spray off the fire extinguishers on the way TO practice, creating a huge trail of powder behind us. Awesome idea. The only way it would be better was if we had some of our teammates in front of us so we coudl let loose on the extinguishers onto their cars.

There was only one way to get to practice, and only a few spots on the way where you could pass, so we sped down the streets trying to beat all the other guys who may have gotten a jump on us.

In our efforts to get ahead, we managed to get into the wrong lane, and were forced to make a turn counter to the direction we wished to travel.

We pulled into a funeral home, and did a quick 180 to get back on the road. As we tried to pull out the exit we realized it would be too hard to make a left turn into traffic, so we started backing up to make it out of the funreal home parking lot another way.

We backed up rapidly, and suddenly we heard a loud scraping sound on the side of the car. I was praying that we hadn’t sideswiped the hearse while we were backing up.

(the rest later)

*mentioned previously that I was

**in high school. But only if you count sports like swimming and pole-vaulting. I was JV and Varsity for both, and I did them year round. Swimming in the fall, winter and summer. Pole vaulting in the Spring and Winter.

***That really makes me feel like an ass.