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.
