Here I Thought I Was Normal: Micro Memoirs of Mischief

by Mr. Frank Rocco Satullo

  We stopped when they stopped.

  Everyone took notice of the gunfire.

  One of the men made a motion with his finger for us to come his way.

  We looked at each other and bolted the other way to “safety.”

  School Roof

  Eddie and I were bored now that we lost the last ball we owned. So, we did like any bored kids would do and climbed a tree.

  The tree happened to be at our elementary school. Our bikes were in the grass below us.

  “I wonder how many balls have been hit up on that roof during school recess?” I asked.

  I don’t know if you could see the “light bulbs” appear over our heads but we felt it.

  We dropped out of the tree and approached the front of the school studying it. Without a word between us, I hoisted Eddie up. He had placed his foot in my clasped hands, palms up. With a good thrust, he grabbed onto the inside of the letter “o” in the word “school.” He swung a leg and used leverage from another letter to twist his body higher and then onto the overhang of the front doors. Meanwhile, I managed to use a nearby window sill to maneuver to the letters, and with Eddie’s outstretched hand I joined him on the overhang. It took teamwork but we scaled the building to the rooftop where we found a ladder anchored to a taller brick wall. It led to the highest rooftop – the gymnasium.

  Jackpot!

  We were so giddy we couldn’t contain ourselves. We hooted and hollered and in retrospect, I’m sure our voices carried. We found baseballs, tennis balls, kick balls and even a football. It was Christmas in July.

  Once we punted the last of the balls to the lot behind the school we surveyed our score and returned to the ladder, grinning.

  “Oh no!” Eddie froze. “Cops!” he managed to blurt out even though it was just one.

  The officer saw us.

  “Get down here, NOW!” He yelled and we definitely heard, but we didn’t listen.

  Leaping without climbing all the way down that ladder to the main roof, we rolled to the opposite side of a pitched roof from the policeman’s location. Then we half-ran, hunched over, maneuvering odd obstacles from one end of the building to the other.

  With no more rooftop ahead of us, we turned around and cautiously peered over the low-pitched peak of this wing of the building. To our surprise, the policeman was still looking up from the front door area far-far away from where we now perched. His peculiar body movements suggested he was not at all happy.

  We made it. We actually made it.

  We hang dropped from the end of the building. Eddie yelped in pain. He hurt his ankle so bad he couldn’t put much pressure on it. So we made like Army men, using three legs and a shoulder to carry the wounded from the battlefield lickety-split. Once we arrived at the wood line, we looked back.

  The coast was clear.

  About an hour later, Eddie limping, we reached deep for the bravery that would take us back to the school to fetch our bikes.

  They were gone!

  Stolen?

  Eventually, we had to go home for supper. But when I arrived home, my mom and dad “greeted” me. The bikes weren’t stolen. They were taken by the policeman. You see, we used to have to register them at the police station and get a sticker license if you were a youth in our town back then. So, Mr. Policeman ran the tags and we were busted!

  I sat at the station much like a cops and robbers TV show. Looking back, I’m sure my mom and dad must have been laughing behind glass. I was in a chair, knees nearly touching the officer’s knees. There was no table, just two chairs and yes, a bright light in my face. He was spitting mad, leaning in, drilling me, lecturing me, showering me in lip spray as his mouth smacked open and closed.

  I never spoke a word – just stared. I was scared.

  When we left, Eddie was getting buzzed through the jailhouse door with his mom. He was already crying.

  Hurts So Good

  Standing deep in the outfield grass at Sunset Park, I was bored.

  It was my first year in little league baseball. I was young for my grade and small for my age. Most of the kids were one or two years older than I.

  The coach called out to me, the lonely right fielder, “Catch this and practice is over. Miss it and you all run laps.”

  No pressure, right?

  Damn, that ball was a towering pop-up. I could have run home, changed my underwear and returned in time to catch it. Instead, I stood there like the Statue of Liberty …waiting. When it fell closer, it grew in my eyes to the size of a softball, then a basketball and then …

  It skimmed the outer leather of my glove and ripped my ear lobe. Do you know how much blood is in a nice juicy ear lobe like mine? I didn’t either until that moment. I looked down for the ball and wondered why the entire left side of my shirt was red.

  People were running, yelling, “Call an ambulance.”

  By the time I was brought from the outfield to the street, an ambulance was there but my parents weren’t. So, they couldn’t take me anywhere. I was treated on the spot, hearing every gasp from everybody that got close enough to see the blood, including two paramedics. When my parents arrived, I went to the hospital and got stitched up.

  A few days later, I was eating lunch in the school cafeteria. We sat at long rows of tables, lunch monitors walking up and down the aisles like the Gestapo. I saw an older kid a few aisles over smack a ketchup bottle’s plastic bottom down on the table forcing ketchup to shoot up making his friends laugh. The Gestapo didn’t notice. Being a prankster, I did the same. Only, I really smacked that sucker hard! Ketchup shot nearly to the ceiling, but the cool thing was how it landed in a perfect line right down the middle of the table between lunch boxes. The line of splatter was so long, kids looked up, not knowing what just happened.

  But the head of the Gestapo did!

  The meanest lunch monitor marched at me with steam coming from her nostrils or so I imagined. She grabbed me by the ear – Yes! That ear – and dragged me to the office albeit I was on my feet trying to keep pace, pleading because of the pain.

  She had no idea.

  Standing before the principal in his office, she reported my misconduct but his God-awful expression made her stop and follow his line of sight right to my ear lobe pumping blood through the stitches.

  She nearly fainted.

  I caught on fast and clutched my ear, moaning, “Please stop hurting me.”

  Gemini

  Back when the Gemini was new at Cedar Point Amusement Park, my coach took our entire little league baseball team.

  I was borderline tall enough to ride roller coasters where-as most kids my age were veterans having beat the stick in height a year earlier.

  It was a hot summer night, nearing closing time. I finally worked up the courage to ride the Gemini. At the time, Gemini was the tallest, fastest and steepest wooden roller coaster on the planet. It featured two rollercoasters that raced side-by-side.

  My teammates knew I was a rookie about to ride my first real rollercoaster. So, they proceeded to tell me about the grisly death that happened earlier in the summer. Coincidentally, it was to a boy my age and size – barely big enough to ride. Of course, none of that happened but how was I to know. It seemed awfully convincing to me.

  The dark got darker. The creaky wooden ride got creakier. The screams overhead turned blood-curdling. And the taunts were unceasing. The boys knew they had me on the ropes. I was not easy to crack but they sensed I was cracking. They said I probably shouldn’t ride. If they let me on, it may truly be a death-defying experience.

  I felt smothered and vulnerable as the line snaked its way closer to the pavilion. Fear consumed my mind and spread throughout my body. My friends were determined to drive this home. The mission was to see me cry and I was close.

  My eyes welled up. The levy was about to break. Then …

  “That is e-nough!” sounded the voice of a guardian angel.

  I turned to see the prettiest woman I had ever laid eyes on in my young life. Then
her hand cradled the back of my head and drew me in. Before I could do anything, my face was nestled perfectly between her D-cups.

  She lightly scolded my buddies. I really don’t know what she said because my hearing was muffled. The time I spent with my head in the “clouds” was so long, I could barely breathe. I didn’t care if I suffocated.

  But all good things must come to an end. And I was released. She smiled big at me and said that everything they said was just to scare me – none of that happened. What she didn’t realize was that by that time, I could care less. I was ready to take on the world.

  I turned to face my friends with renewed bravado.

  The oldest kid, and star pitcher on our team, pulled me aside to whisper how awesome it must have been to be me for the past few minutes. The rest of the team was in shock and awe, too. They treated me like their hero and thought I should play it up more to see if I could get a second round at second base.

  When I refused, one by one, they started to whimper, “I’m scared to go on the ride,” with one eye on the pretty woman hoping she would comfort them.

  That night, I had experienced the most exhilarating thing in my young life, and the Gemini was a close second.

  BB Gun

  Christmas morning arrived. Mom let us open our stockings but Dad made us eat breakfast before getting to the presents under the tree. I already knew what I was getting. I found the stash deep in Mom’s closet weeks ago. Although the presents had already been wrapped, I peeled the tape back and bent the paper just enough to see what was inside one and then moved on to another. I even knew what my sister was getting.

  We always got a dozen or so presents each on Christmas, so I had to go through the motions with 11 of them just to get them out of the way so I could seize the only thing I was truly looking forward to getting – a BB gun!

  I didn’t anticipate having to compete with my dad for a turn to use it. He spent too long showing me how it’s done.

  “Daaaad! I get it. Now let me have a turn!”

  “One more shot,” he laughed, and then he took several more shots.

  The fireplace was roaring, the sliding glass door was open, the backyard was covered in snow and I was a sniper …for about 10 minutes before Dad said we needed to close the door.

  After all of the lectures, demonstrations and promises, I became the poster-child of why not to give a kid a BB gun.

  At first, I was a good boy. I’d line bottles upside down along the back fence. When I shot them to pieces, I’d put the pieces on the fence and shoot them. As my targets got smaller, I got better. I learned how to adjust the sights above a target knowing the BB would arch over distance. I became a deadeye!

  When I ran out of inanimate objects to shoot, I set my sights on a bird in a tree overlooking the neighbor’s driveway. First shot and I …missed it? I was too good to miss at that range. I put it back in my sights and just as I was about to squeeze the trigger, the bird fell upside down still clinging to the branch with his feet. I lowered my gun, stunned. The bird wouldn’t fall. I knew I couldn’t have a dead bird hanging upside down where the preacher would see it and surely raise hell. I spent the next 15 minutes shooting that poor thing full of holes until it fell – right in front of the preacher pulling in with his car!

  That was the first time my BB gun was taken away.

  When I got it back, I shot some more birds. One day, I grew impatient waiting for a target so I put bread out, sat in a lawn chair on the patio and plucked them off one-by-one until Dad pulled in. I nearly crapped my pants because there were bodies all over the backyard. I ran to the driveway to greet my dad and to walk him inside, thereby distracting him from looking out back as he walked out of the detached garage. I continued to escort him through the kitchen making sure he didn’t look out the back windows. He went to his bedroom to change out of work clothes and I bolted out the back door to fling my prey into the woods.

  I never did that again. It seemed too cruel. No sport in it. In fact, I never shot another bird after that. Instead, I’d get kicks by taking friends into my garage and shutting the door.

  I’d say, “Cover your eyes.”

  Then, I’d pull the trigger and you could hear the BB ricochet all around us. It sure got the adrenaline pumping. I was amazed it never hit us – ever. I must have done this “trick” a dozen times.

  BB guns became the rage in the neighborhood so we’d go play Army in the woods. We’d have forts and wars. Yep, we’d actually shoot each other. We wore shop goggles though – the plastic things that completely surrounded the eyes. These good times ended when I shot Denny. He went home and needed minor medical attention from his mom. He wasn’t a good liar. First, he told a tale of some older kids chasing him, holding him and shooting him in the woods.

  When the police showed up, he sang like a canary and said, “Rocky did it!”

  That time the police confiscated my BB gun.

  Stirring up a Hornets’ Nest

  We had been in position for 30 minutes, firing our BB guns at the hornets’ nest.

  It wasn’t just any hornets’ nest – it was the mother of all hornets’ nests! Our BBs seemed to have no effect. We shifted our strategy to the base where it hung in the tree but we were just too far. Granted, it was a safe position when calculating how far the hornets were seen buzzing around the nest. However, we needed to get closer since our target went from a huge gray mass to the base where it clung to the tree branch.

  Some of us dressed in green camouflage, others in white tee shirts, blue jeans and ball caps. We low crawled through the waist-high, light brown brush of the open field and found a new position much closer.

  It was close enough to put the sling-shot into action with more accuracy.

  “Wow! Nice shot!” was the consensus as the hole was visible and the flurry of hornets thickened.

  Twenty minutes later, several holes torn into the nest, we realized this could take all day to bring it down. We needed a bolder plan.

  “Manny, run up closer and throw this at it.”

  “Screw you!” was the reply.

  “C’mon, man,” the peer pressure poured on until Manny, the youngest of our group, went home.

  Down a man, we re-examined the pecking order.

  “Don’t look at me, you go,” Jacob said to Kyle.

  “Heck no,” said Kyle.

  “Wussies!” I yelled as I sprinted in an arch pattern at the nest with a chunk of shale and whipped it like I was skipping a rock. It missed.

  “Crap, I think I got stung,” I said when my adrenaline level came back down as I returned to our position.

  Like a dam giving way, the throbbing-stinging pain spread across my left hand. I tucked it into my gut, bending over.

  “Who’s the wussie now,” said Eddie.

  Jacob and Kyle laughed.

  Meanwhile, I had spotted what looked to be a section of telephone pole on my loop back. We low crawled to it. Weird as it was, indeed, a small cut section of a telephone pole lay in the brush. It was the perfect size to get two of us on each side and have room to spare. Plus, it was light enough to …

  “Ahh, this’ll be awesome!”

  “Did you fall and crack your head or something,” they replied.

  But when I really wanted to be persuasive, I could usually bring my friends around to doing the most stupid of stunts.

  So there we were, rushing at a mega hornets’ nest with what can only be described as a battering ram. We hit it solid, launching it straight into the ground where all hell broke loose.

  We scattered, running for our lives, running for our homes – more to the point, our moms – screaming bloody murder the entire way.

  At first, I was okay, running through the field. I laughed heartily seeing Jacob fall, get up and cry his eyes out he was getting stung so badly. Just when I thought I might have escaped unscathed, it felt like I was sprayed by tiny, potent bullets from a machine gun. From my fingers waiving frantically in the air, across my outstretc
hed arms to my head, neck and shoulders, even down my back, butt and legs, I went from thinking this prank was hysterical to being hysterical.

  I stumbled through my back gate, crying like there was no tomorrow.

  Playboy Collection

  Like any red-blooded American boy, I had a Playboy collection.

  Well, it was actually a collection of all the classics; Hustler, Penthouse, Playboy, etc. Our corner store, Lawson’s at the time, used to keep them on the magazine rack close to the door. The checkout was in the back of the store. Go figure.