I guess my friends and I were 15 or 16 years old when I came up with this sick and twisted little bit of ‘fun’.

I had made a dummy as a Halloween decoration. I just stuffed an old pair of jeans and a shirt with newspaper, and put on one of those styrofoam heads they put wigs on, and I put a wig on it after painting it to look more like a person. The dummy just lay around on the stairs leading to our door on Halloween, but I thought it was a waste to not find a better use for it. I stuffed in more newspaper to sort of stiffen it up. I also sewed the old tennis shoes I used for his feet to the bottom cuff of the jeans, and sewed the gloves that were his hands to the end of the long sleeves of the shirt. Then I tied the neck of the styrofoam head to the collar of the shirt. The dummy was now one piece so you could move him and do things with him. And what did I think would be a good use for this new friend?

I decided that we should tie him to an old rusty tricycle that was stuck away  in our garage. We used fishing line to tie his hands to the bars and his feet to the peddles. Now you could push the tricycle and it would roll for quite a ways. The dummy was the size of a 10 year-old child, and when the tricycle was moving, he really looked like he was peddling and steering. So what would three young boys do with such a thing as this? If you had me for a friend, you might think that it would be fun to hide in some bushes beside a road and push it out in front of cars.

I hear you all mumbling. I know it was a jerky thing to do. This is one of the reasons I had to give up practical jokes. For the sake of all mankind.

We waited until just before dark. Remember from my earlier stories that this is the time when people’s eyes are switching from day to night vision, and they do not see as clearly. We picked a spot right in front of Andy’s house, where the hill is rather steep. At least I was smart enough to realize that we should only do this ‘joke’ to people coming up the hill, so they would be able to stop quickly. I hate to think of someone losing control going down the hill with all that momentum and mass and gravity.

It went pretty much like you think it would. We scared the living daylights out of some people for no good reason whatsoever. Nobody crashed. Nobody got hurt. The little guy would go wheeling out and either the car would avoid him, or a few times they hit him and the dummy would go flying. Then we would run out and apologize.

But to cap the evening off, I just had to outdo myself. So the last time someone hit the tricycle and sent the dummy flying, we came out of the bushes. Then I pulled a big wooden mallet I borrowed from my dad’s workshop out from behind my back, and said to the stunned driver, “That’s my little brother… but he’s not dead yet.” Then I brought the wooden mallet down on the styrofoam skull and it crunched flat with a very skull-crushing noise.

The guy jumped back in his car without saying a word and sped off. We hid, but no cops ever showed up. Once again, I am not proud of this joke because it is cruel. But it was a pretty damn good piece of theatre.

Later in life, after I settled down, I tried a couple of times to pull practical jokes. But I still tended to take even the simplest ones too far. Once we lived on a rather busy street, and for Halloween I decided to jam some fake legs under my car. I guess it looked too much like a fatal accident, and also almost caused some real fatal accidents, so I took them back and laid them on the porch again after about a half an hour. Nobody minds some severed limbs on Halloween, as long as they are placed properly.

My last joke was perhaps my cruelest and most needless. It was also the easiest and required me to do absolutely nothing. And it is the one that made me give up this kind of joke.

Jessica was a small child, and San Diego gets hot in the summer. So we had, in out backyard, one of those little vinyl pools. My wife and Jessica were out shopping, so I was just laying in the pool trying to keep cool. It wasn’t very deep, and I couldn’t get all of me under the water… I have the same trouble in bath tubs… I came up with this idea that I could lay on my belly and stick my head in the water if I used one of those bendy straws as a snorkel. And it worked if you didn’t need too much air.

So I was just laying there in the pool, face down, breathing through a straw. The straw was hidden by my then long hair. And I heard my wife come home, and then I heard her come out on the back porch to see what I was up to. You can see the temptation, right? All I had to do was lay there and not move except for slow shallow breaths. My wife knew I had a thing for messing with people. She thought I was holding my breath. But it was just waiting game at that point. So I won… if you can call that a victory.

Let me just say that fooling your wife into thinking you are dead is not a good idea unless you have a couch that is at least as tall as you are.