Halloween Pranks I’ll Admit to Now
(Originally published October 27, 2008.)
Those nights I spent as a teenager trick-or-treating were nights I spent mostly tricking. Not in the prostitution sense of tricking, I’m talking Halloween pranks. The kind that only a wannabe popular teenager would do to win the approval of his peers. It was at the age before you realize you’ll never win their approval. These losers on my street would end up in jail, pregnant or dead. Looking back, it’s good I didn’t win them over.
Our most common weapon of choice was Vaseline. Coincidentally, Vaseline is also a common choice for other types of tricks.
Our usual prank was the car handle glob. We would take a handful of Vaseline and shove it under a car door handle. In the morning, the unsuspecting victim would grab the handle and get a hand full of goo.
If the door handle opened outward instead of upward, and there was no place to put our grease nugget, we would cover the windshield. We smeared it around until we coated every inch with Vaseline. Vaseline isn’t easy to wash off.
Some years we would throw eggs. We would buy them a week in advance and leave them in an abandoned car at the junkyard. We wanted the eggs to stay warm and rot.
Our egg target wasn’t random. She was the neighborhood gossip that always believed I was up to something, which is probably because I was usually up to something. To this day, I still check the obituary to see if she has keeled over. She’ll never die. Her evil keeps her alive, along with her testosterone. She had a moustache and I once saw a five o’clock shadow. She resembled Elton John, only manly.
During a moment of teenage genius, I thought we should create a giant spit wad to leave on someone’s door. We made tiny spit wads and shot them with straws, but this would be bigger than any spit wad we had ever made.
I took a handful of toilet paper … yeah; we papered trees too … and crammed it in my mouth. I chewed four a couple of minutes until I ran out of spit. I took the wad out and handed it to the next the person.
They placed the wad in their mouth.
Each person continued to chew, adding his or her spit. We passed the cesspool of oral bacteria around the eight or ten of us
By the time I got it back, it tasted like sweat, tobacco, peanut butter, Vaseline, bacon and morning breath. It had grown to baseball size.
The moment arrived. We found the door the spit wad would know as home. We passed the wad around for one last soak in saliva. I pulled my arm back and threw as hard as I could.
I missed the door and hit a blond Pomeranian. He sniffed our spit wad…
…and swallowed it.
YOU DID WHAT?!!!!!
When I was a kid we would put boogers on our neighbor’s garage door handles. (he told us stay out of his driveway once, that was our revenge.) It wasn’t even Halloween. We just needed justice.
BOTH these people are horrible human beings!!!!
No, the horrible human beings are Irritated Tulsan’s gossipy neighbor and the selfish get-out-of-my-driveway man. So…. a……where do YOU live Squirrely? TRICK? or TREAT?
If you lived in West Tulsa around the Webster area in the 60s well sorry can’t tell you what my cousin and I did I think the stature of limitation hadn’t ran out yet. But believe me it was bad. We couldn’t afford eggs so we rolled tires down a hill to hit cars . Hung a dummy from a tree and when a car came by drop it on there windshield, scare the hell out of them. I know everyone did this, poop in a bag and light it. Turn the light out on a ball game (we did that during ball season) Find an port-a-potty and drag it to the middle of the road. Can’t say anymore.
I once witnessed a couple of kids from the cul de sac throwing eggs at that house. I don’t think it occurred to them to let the eggs rot first. I don’t remember if I participated or not.
The only decent confession I can think of right now is that one day when I was 16, I had to be at school about an hour earlier than normal. I was up on the fifth floor, and it was totally empty. I thought about making one run around the floor totally naked. I realized that if I were to get undressed outside the restroom at one corner of the floor, I could grab my clothes and dash inside if I heard anyone coming. Before I reached the bathroom door, I just took my shirt off to sort of “test the waters.” and immediately chickened out. I’ve been regretting it ever since.
Did you know your blog is mentioned in an article from the November issue of Oklahoma magazine?
Yes. I was also in Urban Tulsa a couple of issues back. I’m giving autographed copies as Christmas gifts.
Now not only is he upset he didn’t go through with his prank he now knows what he is getting for Christmas. Way to go IT!
Lived near an apt. complex that had huge waterfalls & in one that had a water fountain inside a pond. We’d fill them with red dye or laundry soap. The bubbles would cascade all the way into the main roads. Was great. Of course the obligatory toilet papering….
Of course…
We would lard cars. Lard was about 25 cents a brick, so we could get lots of them. We would then cover them in dish soap. Watching someone go through a car wash with Dawn on their car was gut busting fun. On occasions we would stick clear plastic ware in the yards so you could not see them very well and it would be hit by the lawn mower. The worst think we did was make picket signs and hammer them into a yard insinuating the person was gay. We used clever sayings like “The gay way or no way”, “Sometimes you feel like a nut”, and a few others including the his name. The kid changed schools. Looking back, I was just a horribly mean teenager. I almost can’t believe I am that same person who did all that.