The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  It was a Saturday, so I knew that I’d be meeting up with friends later for another night at the bars. This usually involved pre-drinking at Lenis’s place, so I’d have a chance to drop off the robot on his rightful owners’ porch on the way. Ideally, I’d get a chance to set him back in his chair without his owner recognizing me and kicking my ass.

  If I was going to go to the trouble of returning the robot, I figured that I might as well bring him back in better condition than I had found him. Part of a metal hanger was attached to the top of the robot’s head, so I held onto it and shook him around. As I expected, this caused a ton of spiders to scurry out. I shook harder so they’d fall off the exterior of the robot, and eventually dropped the whole thing with a girlish shriek once a couple of spiders crawled onto my hand. He didn’t break apart or anything, so I brought the newly spider-free project back into my apartment until it was time to head to Lenis’s place.

  When the time came to head out, it would have been easier to toss the robot in the trunk of my car. However, I never went anywhere near my car when I was drinking. I opted to heave the robot over my shoulder and walk several blocks to Lenis’s while looking like I had kidnapped a mechanical child from the future and returned to my time.

  After walking about halfway there, I realized something: I had no idea which house I grabbed the robot from. We had been extremely drunk when we stole him, and it had been in the middle of the night. All I remembered was that it was from somewhere near Lenis’s. I wasn’t about to turn back around at this point, so I figured that I’d just patrol the block for a bit and hope that something triggered my memory.

  It had to be somewhere near the corner of 12th Street and Ohio Street, so I focused on that area. Nothing was looking familiar and I was starting to feel a little nervous about being so conspicuous. I decided that the best course of action would be to leave the robot on Lenis’s lawn in a very visible location. Ideally, the rightful owner would spot him before too long and take their robot child back home.

  As soon as I decided on that course of action, I heard a voice ring out from the house to my right.

  “THERE IT IS!”

  I turned to see three guys who were roughly the same age as me. They had been drinking on a porch, and in that moment I instantly realized where I was: I was standing right in front of the house that I stole the robot from, holding him in clear view as his presumably drunken owners approached me.

  I’m usually pretty good at reading people and situations. My gut instinct was that these dudes were mad and also seconds away from beating my ass. Some part of my brain subconsciously ran through possible scenarios and determined that running away wouldn’t work. Instead, my brain assumed that the best thing to do was to stare at them, continue to hold the robot, and make some dumb “UHHH” noise. I didn’t yet know what I was planning on saying, but trying to talk my way out of this was apparently the route I was heading down.

  “Where the fuck did you get that?” one of them asked.

  “Oh!” I said as possible answers spun around in my head. “Yeah? This is yours? Oh man, I’m glad to find you.”

  They stared at me, fully ready to be pissed at whatever my excuse was.

  “So yeah, I’ll be honest with you guys. Last night, my roommate and I were really drunk after the bars when we were walking home. He can be kind of an asshole when he’s been drinking, and he stole this. I saw it this morning when I woke up, and it looks like it must have taken a lot of work, so I wanted to walk around and try to find its owner. He said it was around here, so I’m glad I was able to find you guys!”

  Two of them looked like they weren’t buying my story, but one of them seemed to come to some kind of realization while I was talking.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Aren’t you that guy that makes the comedy show on channel six?”

  Holy crap. I rarely got recognized around town for my sketch show. If there was ever an ideal time for it to happen, it was right now.

  “Yeah!” I said. “That’s me. You guys watch?”

  All three of them smiled, and the tense situation immediately took a 180-degree turn.

  “Holy shit, yeah!” the initial talker of the group said. “Dude, we always come back from the bars late at night and get stoned and laugh our asses off at that show.”

  Instead of kicking my ass or accusing me of stealing their robot, all three of them started thanking me profusely for being “so nice” by bringing it back.

  “We’ve still got a ton left in the keg from earlier this week. Wanna come in?”

  I agreed, handed the robot off to the guys, and headed into their house. We joked around for a couple of hours as I drank free beer, and then I thanked them for their hospitality and headed out to the bars.

  Of all the people I annoyed in college, Brad got it the worst. It would range in severity, from a variety of minor pranks to more elaborate ordeals. Small things included dipping a sandwich in orange Fanta at the cafeteria and smashing it into his face, or waking him up by slamming an ice cream cone into his ear. He wasn’t one for pulling his own pranks, so his retaliation was typically along the lines of a stiff punch to the arm.

  Brad fancied himself quite the ladies’ man, and would often brag about his conquests and unwillingness to contain himself to just one girl. He fully subscribed to the “love ‘em and leave ‘em” philosophy, and would always cut things off with girls when they started having feelings toward him. It’s worth noting that he is now married with children and running a daycare center with one of his more frequent college partners.

  After almost a full school year of hosting a revolving door of ladies in his room, Brad seemed to take a genuine liking to a girl named Monica. Considering how loudly opposed he had been to relationships or expressing feelings for girls, I knew I had to give him shit in some capacity.

  One of our usual house party nights ended with Brad and Monica retreating to their dorm room. I wanted to grief him a bit, so I grabbed the phone book. For a couple of hours in the middle of the night, I called dozens of florists, wedding planners, limousine services, and other businesses to leave messages on Brad’s behalf.

  “Hello! My name is Brad and you can reach me at [phone number]. I’m getting married to the love of my life soon, and I’m going to need your best [assortment of flowers, catering package, fleet of limousines, massive assortment of heart balloons, etc.]. Money is no concern. Please give me a call tomorrow.”

  All through the next day (and bleeding into the next couple), Brad received calls with offers and congratulations from every Kansas business that was remotely associated with wedding preparation.

  One of the harshest pranks I’ve ever pulled came after another long night at a house party. Roy and I were very drunk, and Brad was light years ahead of us. We got back to McCollum at about two or three in the morning, and I jumped into my top bunk to pass out. Brad apparently wasn’t ready to call it a night, as he burst into my room in an attempt to rally me to continue drinking. He grabbed the supports of my bunk bed and rocked it back and forth, eventually pushing me in the face when that didn’t work.

  I resisted enough for him to leave the room, but I wasn’t able to fall asleep afterward. It sounded like plenty of people were still up and hanging out in the lobby, so I threw on some pajama pants and joined them. By the time I got down there, Brad had grabbed a few floormates and retreated to his room to drink. He was in rare form as I entered the room, joking and laughing and passing drinks around while wearing a foam cowboy hat.

  We drank more until the late night and copious amount of alcohol caught up to Brad. In the span of seconds, he went from giving people shit and preparing beer bongs to passing out face-first in his lower bunk. His cousin Derek was back in Europe for a week, presumably having sex with women on top of dryers overseas.

  With Brad passed out hard—still wearing his cowboy hat—it was obviously time to fuck with him. Lenis went to town with a Sharpie, covering him in a cornucopia of penises. Roy grabbe
d a huge roll of duct tape, and we prepared to trap Brad in his bunk with it. Scooting the beds away from the wall gave us room to maneuver as we repeatedly passed the roll of tape over and under the bed, creating a silver cocoon that encased Brad.

  Next, we put a cigar in his mouth and gathered all the laundry from his and Derek’s hampers. We tossed it all on top of him until it piled all the way up to the underside of the top bunk. Then we took Derek’s blankets and draped them down over our makeshift tomb to keep any light from getting in. None of this was annoying enough, so we grabbed chairs, couches, and loveseats from the lobby and surrounded the bed with them.

  At this point, Brad was already going to have a really rough time when he woke up. He’d be hungover, unable to move, unable to see, and even once he wriggled free of the tape, he’d have to find a way to escape the furniture jail we had created around his bed. This was all a terrible idea in hindsight, but I’m glad that we at least taped him up on his side in case he vomited.

  His room was already filled with obstacles, but Roy and I continued to brainstorm other things to add to this elaborate setup (everyone else had gone to bed).

  “Ooh, I got an idea!” Roy said. “Let’s throw a bunch of knives in his bed.”

  “What?” I asked. “Knives?”

  “Yeah, it’ll be hilarious!”

  “Why is that hilarious?”

  “He’ll get all scraped up! Come on!”

  I was game for setting Brad up to have a tremendously confusing morning, but throwing a bunch of knives into someone’s bed seemed several steps too far. In lieu of Roy’s idiotic plan, I offered a different idea. I turned on Brad’s computer and downloaded the tremendously annoying “Yakety Sax” song from The Benny Hill Show. Before leaving the room, I made sure that the volume was loud and the “repeat” setting was on so that it would continue indefinitely.

  When I got back to bed, I kept imagining what it would be like for Brad when he woke up. There was zero option that included him getting out of bed and on with his day without incident. He wasn’t going to wriggle free of that tape in his sleep, the blankets wouldn’t suddenly fall and let light in, and that damn song sure as hell wasn’t going to stop playing. Whether it was at 4 a.m. or noon, Brad was destined to get hit with a wall of sheer bewilderment.

  I woke up the next morning to my roommate Bryan laughing so hard he was almost in tears. He had been on his way to the floor’s elevator when he heard yelling coming from Brad’s room. We had left the door unlocked so that somebody would be able to get in and help him if he needed it, and he certainly needed it in that moment. Bryan entered the room to find Brad squirming around and mumbling a lot of four-letter words. With the help of some scissors and a lot of furniture reorganization, Bryan freed Brad.

  “There’s something I gotta show you,” Bryan said before leading me to Brad’s room.

  Brad’s whereabouts were unknown at this time, but he wasn’t in his room. I was tip-toeing around the floor in an effort to avoid him, because I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if he was in the mood to kick someone’s ass.

  Peering around the corner of the door frame, I glimpsed the scene of the crime. Brad’s blankets and sheets had been completely removed from the bed. All that was left there were some crumpled-up balls of duct tape and an odd puddle of red liquid that sat dead-center on Brad’s mattress.

  “He told me that he had been laying there awake for almost an hour before I came in,” Bryan said. “He didn’t have any choice but to keep peeing.”

  We had anticipated a lot of confusion, but the seemingly obvious potential for hilarious and repeated bedwetting hadn’t even occurred to me. His fitted sheet was responsible for giving the pee a red tint as the puddle lingered on his bed.

  Talking to Brad about his morning was extremely tempting, even though I knew he’d be in some kind of mood. I just had to hear his beat-by-beat explanation of what it was like to wake up like that. Thinking that he had left the dorm at some point in the morning, I started walking back toward my room. Just as I was about to pass the door to the restroom, it opened and Brad shuffled out.

  It was like a far less dramatic version of Sarah Connor seeing the T-800 round the corner in the hospital hallway in Terminator 2. Like her, I fell back directly on my ass. I laughed hysterically on the floor as a clearly disheveled and confused Brad stood before me, his face and arms still covered in penis drawings.

  Part of me was bracing for him to kick me in the head or the crotch. Either would have been understandable. He went the opposite route, which involved acting like nothing weird had happened. Stepping over me, he casually walked back to his room and sat down at his desk.

  Once I had caught my breath, I went into his room and asked him about his morning. His response was predictable. As it turns out, it’s baffling to wake up immobilized, blind, and hearing only the repeated and frantic tune of “Yakety Sax.” Adding to his confusion was the fact that Brad had zero recollection of getting back to the dorms the previous night.

  “The last thing I remembered was being at the party,” Brad said. “And then I woke up like that.”

  He was calmly explaining his morning to me, but I knew that retaliation would be coming sooner or later. I actually think both Roy and I got off easy, considering what Brad had gone through. While Roy was asleep, Brad grabbed an empty full-size trash can from the lobby and filled it more than halfway with water. He jimmied Roy’s door open, hoisted the heavy trash can above his bed, and yelled “HEY ROY” before dumping gallons of water directly onto his face. For over a week, Roy slept on a couch in the lobby as his mattress dried.

  My punishment was even less severe, and I’d like to think that it was because I stopped Roy from throwing a bunch of damn knives into the bed. While I was asleep, Brad simply broke into my room and put superglue into my hair. For the second year in a row, I found myself in a dorm shower late at night while trying to rid my hair of glue. I didn’t want to shave my head like I had to do with my chest, so I took some scissors and snipped off a few patches of hair.

  Each year at the University of Kansas felt unique, but my sophomore year in McCollum was a turning point. I had never felt like I fit into any particular group in elementary school, junior high, high school, or even in that first year in Hashinger Hall. There were plenty of great moments throughout those years and a few close friends, but starting with McCollum, I finally felt like I had a real circle of friends. We were all drunken morons, but we hung out constantly and were always making each other laugh.

  On November 25, 2015, I got a text from my father saying that McCollum Hall had been imploded by the university. I went to YouTube and pulled up clips of the demolition, and couldn’t help but think of how pivotal that building had been to my social life. That seventh floor hosted so many funny moments, late-night editing sessions for my TV show, Mario Kart: Double Dash showdowns, hungover mornings in the bathroom, and a few awkward make-out sessions. There would be a lot more college left to go, but I don’t think any one year had more of an impact on changing the course of the rest of my life.

  Over the Edge

  In early 1993, I was an eight-year-old who had never been exposed to professional wrestling. I was somewhat aware of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant through their status that transcended the wrestling industry and bled into pop culture, but I still had no idea what occurred inside the squared circle. A year later, I was combing through local TV listings on a weekly basis, desperate to figure out a way to watch even more wrestling than I already was. It became a driving fascination in my life, and Owen Hart was one of the main reasons for it.

  When I first stumbled upon an episode of Monday Night Raw in 1993, it seemed to me that there were defined, unchangeable character alignments. Razor Ramon was the coolest guy in the history of the world, “oozing machismo” and beating his opponents while still being affable enough to high-five fans on the way to the ring. Shawn Michaels was the opposite: a cocky, flamboyant showboat with nothing but disdain for
the fans. Good people don’t suddenly turn evil (or vice versa) in real life, and I had no reason to expect that this alternate dimension of pro wrestling would be any different.

  At this time, I saw Owen Hart as a good dude for all intents and purposes. Nothing about him seemed malevolent to me, even as he grew increasingly jealous of his older brother, Bret Hart, throughout 1993. Bret was one of the biggest stars in the World Wrestling Federation and a former world champion. Owen frequently made remarks that made it seem like he was tired of playing second fiddle. I thought Owen had a tendency to be a bit of a crybaby when he lost, and his clear jealousy of Bret was off-putting, but he was still firmly in the “good guy” column of my brain.

  My view of Owen took a sharp turn in January 1994 after the Hart brothers lost a tag team title opportunity against the villainous Quebecers (the “bad guy” Canadian tag team) at the annual Royal Rumble event. Bret’s leg gave out during the match, and he attempted to finish it regardless. Ultimately, the referee stopped the match as a result of the leg injury and rewarded the Quebecers with the win.

  I was saddened enough by Bret and Owen losing, but the post-match events kicked my wrestling fascination into a higher gear than ever before. With Bret writhing on the mat, Owen berated him instead of helping him. He screamed “why didn’t you just tag me?!?!” about 800 times before Bret finally made it back to his feet on his own. As soon as Bret was fully standing, Owen pivoted around to Bret’s injured leg and kicked it out from underneath him. He left his brother on the mat as he exited the ring and screamed into the camera about Bret’s selfishness.

  Wrestlers had made me hate them before, but this was different. In my mind, bad-guy wrestlers were born evil and stayed that way. Now, I had watched a wrestler whom I used to cheer for do something so heinous that I wanted nothing more than to see him get his comeuppance. My positive feelings about Owen were dead and gone, and Bret deserved revenge.