The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  One of the guys said “looking good!” as the group dispersed, still laughing. I glanced down to make sure I hadn’t left my fly unzipped or worn my shirt inside out or something. Nope. Same old dorky stuff as usual, nothing to see here.

  When the group cleared out, I was able to get a glimpse of my locker. It was covered from top to bottom with photographs and I stepped closer to get a better look. There I was, wearing a shiny green vest from a Christmas program I had to sing in during Catholic school. Next to it was another picture of me, shirtless while wearing my grandfather’s fishing cap and oversized eyeglasses. Yep, that’s definitely a young me in a bathtub.

  In retrospect, none of these were particularly damning. They were innocent, silly photos, but even the most minor and harmless attention focused on me in those days was way too much attention. I took the pictures down with the haste of a teenage boy closing internet porn windows when he hears footsteps coming up the stairs, a feeling that I was very familiar with at that particular time.

  Afshin good-naturedly ribbed me as I scrambled to hide the photos, but it’s not like the school was buzzing about it for the rest of the day. All the other kids went back to their usual seventh-grade business, which at my school usually meant “quoting Ma$e interludes while wearing JNCOs.” Still, I wanted to scour the back room of tech class for a rocket ship that would blast me off into orbit until the day’s final bell rang.

  Riding the bus home felt like it took even longer than usual on that April Fools’ Day. It always seemed like an eternity, because I hated being “peers” with these idiots who sniffed rubber cement in the seats next to me and—far more damningly—preferred Saturn to PlayStation. Looking back, I’m not sure why I hated them while simultaneously putting so much worry into whether or not they’d make fun of me. Oh, right, it’s because they could all beat me up if they decided they didn’t like me.

  To clarify, I never got full-on “beaten up” in junior high. Jocks would punch me hard in the arm a couple of times a day in the hallway, but it’s not like they were beating me with socks that had bars of soap in them. One thing they did do that consistently infuriated me was this little “game” that always ended with me getting punched.

  “Hey Ryckert,” one of them would say in the hallway or locker room.

  I’d glance at them, then notice that they were trying to get my attention with one of their hands. Every time, they’d be making a tiny circle with their index finger and thumb. Sometimes they’d be holding this hand signal on their thigh, other times on their forearm. If I glanced at it, that meant I got punched. If I flinched during the punch, I’d get punched again. This recurring song and dance drove me insane as I never understood the logic behind getting punched for looking at a hand signal that they were clearly trying to get me to notice. Then again, I was in no place to question logic, considering that I had spent my morning putting a bunch of bananas into an oven.

  The bus finally got to my stop after a 20-minute trip that felt like three hours, and I prepared for some mild gloating from my mother. When I arrived home, I walked in to find her in the kitchen looking awfully proud of herself.

  “Still feel like fucking with me?” she grinned.

  “I’ll admit, that was a pretty good one.”

  “Just wanted to let you know that I can always fight back. I hope you don’t have any big plans for the rest of the night.”

  I asked what she meant by that, but she wouldn’t elaborate. Fearing that she was hinting at more to come, I ran upstairs to make sure everything in my room was in its proper place. My bed, computer desk, and gaming systems were all exactly where they always were, but thousands of additional items had found their way into my room.

  Seemingly every square inch of real estate on the floor was covered with pennies and nickels. This seemed like an annoying thing to clean up, but the sudden appearance of a large amount of free money—regardless of the denomination—is rarely a bad thing. I paced through the room for a bit, sweeping at the floor with my socks to form little mountains of change. Despite there not being any single coin worth more than five cents, the sheer volume of them made me think that there must have been hundreds of dollars resting on my carpet.

  There was. After her photo escapades at my school, my mother had gone to the bank that held my savings account. As a co-owner of the account, she was able to drain it entirely in whatever way she wished. When I went to school that morning, my bank account was nothing more than the number 500 in a computer system. When I got home, that intangible number was now very real and spread out across my bedroom.

  I’ve never worked at a bank, but I used a coin rolling machine enough during that week to get good at one aspect of the job. It was the perfect comeback. She didn’t take a single cent from me and she was able to create a monumental headache without actually harming anything. More importantly, it permanently got her off the hook as the target for my pranks. I knew she might not strike back every time if I continued to target her, but I was now aware of just how capable she was at striking back in a major way when the time was right.

  Going forward, I started to audition new targets like a sitcom producer dealing with a departing star. My grandpa was a good first choice, so I started rigging his house with traps when I’d stay over. Late into the night, I’d cover hallway entrances with Saran Wrap and create web-like obstacles around his living room with numerous spools of yarn.

  Barely anyone had a cell phone back then, so I’d utilize a trick in which you could make a home phone call itself. Knowing that he’d come out to investigate as soon as the phone started ringing, I’d turn off all of the lights and pretend to be asleep on the couch. I’ve always been good at keeping a straight face when I really want to laugh, but it’s never been harder than when I’d hear a steady stream of “goddammit” and “what the Sam hell?” coming from my confused and sleepy grandfather as he flailed through layers of plastic wrap and yarn.

  His reactions always made me laugh, but it seemed like he got genuinely annoyed at the pranks without seeing any humor in them. I didn’t want to torture my poor grandpa with something that he didn’t even find funny, so I moved onto my sisters.

  Katie and Kayla were eight years younger than me, and they certainly had the same propensity for mischief that my mother and I possessed. As a result, they’d surely see the comedic value in the various pranks I’d pull on them. While this seemed like a good fit, I had to worry too much about their nearly immediate retaliation. At one point, Katie fell asleep on my bed while watching me play Silent Hill. Naturally, I responded to this by putting shaving cream into her palm and tickling her forehead with a towel. Instead of slapping her own face with a palm full of shaving cream, she woke up and immediately smeared the shaving cream all over my sheets.

  After running everything through the wash, I went to bed assuming that we were even. She thought otherwise, shoving handfuls of Cheez-Its in her mouth and swishing them around with water as she chewed. When I woke up to my sister spitting a mouthful of soggy Cheez-Its into my face, I knew that it was time to move on to the next candidate.

  As a popular athlete at my school, Tom Saltzman was an unlikely candidate for me to mess with. Unfortunately for him, he was a heavy sleeper and was seated next to me on a flight from Kansas City to Washington, D.C. for an eighth grade field trip. Less than an hour into the flight, he fell into a deep, snoring sleep. I tapped a few nearby classmates on the shoulder to get their attention and went to work making Tom look stupid. I grabbed his limp wrists and flailed them around, putting on a little puppet show as people snickered. This graduated to making him slap himself in the face, which surprisingly didn’t wake him up.

  Tom wasn’t stirring in the slightest, so I started elevating things to see how much he could sleep through. Napkins and magazines were balanced upon his head followed by a number of ice cubes. After another game of unconscious “quit hitting yourself,” I rested his fingers in a glass of orange juice.

  He was the heaviest sle
eper I’d ever seen, but everyone has a breaking point, and his was rapidly approaching. I was running out of implements of annoyance and a quick inventory of my surroundings yielded nothing but literal peanuts. Always resourceful, I ripped a bag open and grabbed a few. Without even thinking about it, I instantly shoved a peanut in each nostril and each ear.

  All of my classmates in the nearby rows were laughing at Tom by now, with his magazine head, orange juice hand, and peanut ears. I reached for his forearms for another round of my puppet show, but I sensed him starting to rouse. Tom’s eyes fluttered as his breath attempted to squeeze past the peanuts in his nostrils. One forceful exhale later, both peanuts flew out of his nose and onto the tray in front of him.

  Slowly opening his eyes, he first saw me laughing hysterically and then noticed the eyes of the people in front of us peering over the top of their chairs. With peanuts still in his ears, he turned around, surveyed the nearby rows of classmates, and noticed their growing laughter. Not wanting to cause a scene on the plane, he casually removed the items from his head, wiped his hands off on the drink napkin, dug the peanuts out of his ears, and sat in silence for the remainder of the flight.

  At no point during the flight or the rest of the trip did he acknowledge that any of this had happened. If he complained about it, it wasn’t within earshot of me. Instead, his response would be prolonged and consistent, and would last until the end of high school. Every time Tom saw me in the hallway, he punched me hard in the arm. I’d been mad at classmates for senselessly punching me in the past, but there was no way I could blame Tom for this. Whenever I was walking down the hall and suddenly felt a blow to my shoulder, I’d wince, look up to see Tom, and think “Yeah, I can’t really be upset about this.”

  With Tom permanently crossed off the list of potential targets, I needed someone else. Before I settled on a particular target, something fell into my lap that virtually demanded that I use it to prank random strangers. My friend Shawn’s mother enjoyed making costumes and she had crafted an adult-size, realistic gorilla costume for reasons that I’ve wholly forgotten. I do remember my utter joy when Shawn told me about its existence, and my immediate pleas for access to it.

  His responsible, adult mother had no recurring need for a gorilla costume for some reason, so it was bequeathed unto me. For weeks, my friend Chris and I would rampage around the suburbs of Olathe, getting kicked out of numerous Borders bookstores and Targets. My favorite recurring gag involved going to various 24-hour drive-thru places in the middle of the night. Chris would order four large waters at the intercom, then intentionally pull up to the window with his car uncomfortably far away. As the poor late-night fast food employee attempted to stretch the tray of gigantic waters out of their window, I’d emerge from the bushes in the gorilla suit, sprinting past while slapping the tray high into the air and disappearing into the night.

  Looking back, I’m glad that Shawn’s mom asked for the gorilla suit back before somebody freaked out and put a bullet into whoever was inside of it during one of these pranks. I had somehow survived high school without anyone kicking my ass too badly; now it was time to bring my “talents” to college.

  The whole time I was in high school I should have realized that the perfect target for griefing was right in front of me. Despite my father’s seemingly permanent college-aged state of mind, I’ve never once seen him attempt anything resembling a prank. He’s past the age of 50, and he’ll still stay out all night drinking, laugh at fart jokes, and turn into a Tex Avery cartoon character whenever he sees a picture of Pamela Anderson. Pranks always seemed to be too juvenile for him, however. What made him an ideal target was the fact that he was far too lazy in these matters to muster any kind of meaningful retaliation. Like an ineffective, dumb version of a Terminator, I locked onto my new mark and planned for a full-blown attack.

  At this time, my father was knee-deep in one of the dumbest decisions he’s ever made. Despite his disdain for rich people, religious people, “fancy” things, children, and dogs, he had married a devoutly Catholic multimillionaire who associated with only the fanciest and most pretentious of company. She also had three children and about fourteen dogs. He lived with them all in a veritable mansion in Leawood, a city so up its own ass that its residents would return correctly delivered mail if the envelope read “Overland Park” instead of “Leawood” (Overland Park was the also-rich, but-not-quite-as-rich, neighboring city). Sharon, his wife, refused to set foot in restaurants like Applebee’s or Chili’s because she was afraid of someone recognizing her in such a “low-class” establishment and dropping her a few ranks in the Leawood Status Weekly publication that probably exists.

  My dad’s marriage to Sharon was his sixteenth or seventeenth, if I’m remembering correctly. She and I got along all right—or, at least, as well as a pretentious millionaire and a perennially farting college student could. She seemed keen on the idea of griefing my father, so I reached out to her before one April Fools’ Day to help me organize an elaborate prank on him.

  The prank involved getting to his house early in the morning, covering the floor of a necessary hallway of his house with over 800 cups of water, and watching him deal with it as he tried to leave the house to get to work. I also covered his car with Post-it Notes and filled it with balloons for good measure.

  While there’s a video documenting the water cup incident, the next elaborate prank I attempted to play on him didn’t end with a tidy YouTube clip. The water cup video blew up online and received hundreds of thousands of views at a time when I wasn’t yet publicly known for being an idiot on the internet. Naturally, my next goal was to top that one with an even more intricate plot.

  April Fools’ Day was out of the question; after the water cup incident, he’d clearly be on high alert during that time of year. I settled on a winter break while I was home from college. These trips home were extremely laid-back and stress-free, at least for me. I’d have a few solid weeks in which I didn’t have to work or even pretend to go to class. My father was in a trickier situation, wanting to go out to bars with me every night while still having to wake up and deliver mail during the busiest time of year. However, this didn’t stop him from joining me for almost nightly trips to the Red Balloon. He’d show up complaining about being tired, but then a few Red Bull vodkas would perk him up and fuel him until our traditional post-bar Taco Bell trip.

  Halfway through one of these nights, I realized that it was a rare instance in which he didn’t have to work the next day. Putting together an elaborate prank to grief him gives me great joy, but I didn’t want to risk him actually getting in trouble for being late to his job at the post office. He was drinking hard that night and I knew that he’d be asleep in no time once we got home. It seemed like the perfect time to rig up whatever I managed to think of.

  God knows what got me started on this train of thought, but I concocted the plan sometime after midnight. Here’s how I imagined that I’d pull it off:

  wait for Dad to fall asleep

  put his car/house keys in the microwave

  get a gigantic bucket

  fill bucket with cooked spaghetti, maple syrup, and salsa

  bury bucket in his backyard

  stick a shovel in the freshly dug mound of dirt, so it sticks straight up

  place a note where his keys used to be that reads “Check Backyard”

  Dad wakes up, sees the note, sees the shovel in the backyard

  He digs up the bucket, then sifts through tons of goopy crap to get to the bottom

  He finds the note at the bottom that reads “Your keys are in the microwave, dummy”

  It seemed foolproof. If Dad wanted to leave the house, he’d have to take a shovel to his backyard and spend a bunch of time getting his hands and forearms all sticky just to find out that his dumb keys were right there in the microwave the entire time. I’d have cameras set up to capture the action, and boom, there’s another successful prank and YouTube hit. He wouldn’t know it, but I’d be hid
ing in his house, peering around corners and through windows to watch his frustration firsthand.

  Thrilled with my plan, I texted my sisters from the bar and asked them to prepare a ton of spaghetti. I'd also need them to bring shovels, a bucket, syrup, and salsa to my dad’s house. They weren’t his daughters, but they knew him fairly well. Katie and Kayla were always game to screw with people, so they accepted and started getting the supplies ready.

  As was the case with most things involving my father, the rest of the night played out as I expected. His Red Bull buzz started to wear off as last call drew closer, and he shifted into the phase of Drunk Dad in which the only phrase he’s capable of uttering is “I’m so tired.” Last call kicked the next phase into gear, which usually consists of a brief surge of energy as he realizes that Taco Bell is imminent.

  Instead of calling a cab like we usually did, I planned on having my sisters show up as our ride home. Whenever my father is drunk and something is either saving him money or making something more convenient for him, he doesn’t tend to care about logic. My wholly unrelated-to-him sisters had magically shown up at two in the morning to pick us up and he didn’t bat an eye as to why they were suddenly our ride home. He didn’t glance into the back of their SUV as he stumbled in, but he probably wouldn’t have questioned the shovels and bucket at this point, either.

  We quickly replaced the suspicious smell of freshly cooked pasta with an influx of Double Decker Tacos, Triple Layer Nachos, and Chili Cheese Burritos once we got to Taco Bell. At least, those are the actual names for the items. Drunk Dad’s order typically consists of him mumbling “I wanna bunch of beefy crunchy cheesy thingies,” and then our driver or the poor late-night drive-thru employee has to decipher what that means. Thankfully, several dozen of Taco Bell’s menu items could classify as “beefy crunchy cheesy thingies,” and all of them would satisfy my father in this state.