I remember one summer day, I had to be about 8 or 9. My friend and I were playing in his backyard and we found a hollowed out aluminum chair leg that was broken off of the chair. We also found a pail of nails. We discovered that you could launch the nails at a very good velocity from that chair leg. There was about 100 nails embedded into the fence, side of his deck, and even into the window sills that were facing his back yard. His mom wasn't too pleased when she came out and saw what we were doing.
In my backyard we could climb up onto the shed roof (and onto the garage roof too if we wanted to). We would jump over to my neighbour's shed roof and pull off the shingles and chuck them like frisbees, pretending that they were gigantic throwing stars. I don't think anybody ever knew that we would do that, because once we broke a car window and nobody ever came to question us or our parents. They probably thought it was my neighbour's teenaged son, who was always in trouble with the police. We could whip those shingles quite far though. The car window we broke was two doors down, but we were really proud of how far we could throw the shingles when we got it three doors down and hit or at least scared our friend's black lab. I remember his dad being confused as to where the shingles they were finding in their backyard was coming from.
Oh those were fun days. I kept my friend out of trouble (well big trouble), and he got me into trouble... we did get away with mostly everything we did though. We only got caught for stupid things, like throwing clumps of dirt onto the road. We would throw them as high as we could and see them explode on the pavement. We would ride our bikes around from park to park, and we'd be playing nicely with whomever else was there, then suddenly he would decide that one of the other kids wasn't playing by his rules and beat them up. I don't think I ever got involved in any fights this way, but I don't think I was ever sympathetic to the poor kids who got in my friend's path.
The thing about my friend, is that we both shared the same first name. To differentiate between the two, people often just called him Trouble. If somebody said I did something, his mom would get the call from some other kid's parents, and he'd get in trouble.
His mom gave us old syringes to use for water fights. They were big syringes, probably from a vet clinic or something like that. They could shoot water much farther than the dinky little water guns most other kids on our street had. One day he got the wise idea to pee into it. He got some unsuspecting kid too. After that nobody wanted to water fight when he was around. Which reminds me of another time, at the zoo, as we're standing in line to get some food. We were probably around 5 at this time. He just turned around, dropped his pants and peed on some lady's leg. Now that I'm a parent, I can just imagine the horror his mom felt as she turned around to see what her son was doing.
I moved to Lethbridge when I was 11. All in all I was a well behaved kid, but I'm sure some of the people in my neighbourhood in Lethbridge couldn't figure out where I suddenly came up with some of the antics I would pull off. They were few and far between (compared to my days in Calgary) but they no doubt shocked people that I was the one to do such things. They were just a result of the influence of my old friend from Calgary. He helped me to realize that I could get away with more things than I thought/wanted to.
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