Childhood pranks shouldn’t lead to something that you feel guilty about for the rest of your life. Sometimes they do.When I was a kid, we lived on a small street where there were lots of other children. Much to the chagrin of the adults on our block, you could count on hooligans running around making some kind of noise or other from noon until dusk in the summer. Besides playing ball and “Release” – a kind of team-based game of tag – we would find all sorts of ways to occupy our time. Naturally, we would often do things that we weren’t supposed to do. But we had fun and it was a rare occasion when someone would get hurt.
Now, I was the kid who would play with dead things or bugs or whatever and frequently broke my toys for the hell of it. My friends would become especially exasperated when I would show off a new Hot Wheels car only to stomp it to bits. Or, when I was really bored, I would pretend to be crazy or weird in some way or other and the other kids would try to find ways for me to go as far with it as I could.
So, one day when some friends killed a pigeon in the basement entry beneath a porch, I was called on to dispose of it. We thought it would be great fun if I put it somewhere where someone would find it and then get grossed out. The first choice was the secret key-hiding place for one of our friends. He had walked over to his grandma’s house earlier in the day and we expected him back at any time. I climbed up on the railing of his porch and put the bird carcass on the little shelf of the awning where the key was. Sure enough, he came home shortly thereafter and as he reached for the key he saw the bird and got grossed out.
We laughed at him, of course. Then he wanted us to pull the prank on someone else so that he was not the only one who was pranked. It didn’t take long before I found another good hiding place for the dead pigeon – his neighbor’s car.
The family who lived next door to our friend consisted of an old woman, her three adult daughters and the husband of one of these daughters. I think the mother and the couple lived downstairs and the spinsters lived upstairs.
The thing about these ladies was that they were very much into animal’s rights. I believe one or two of them actually worked at an animal shelter. They definitely had more interaction with the menagerie they owned than with their neighbors. This being the case, I thought it would be funny to put the bird in one of their cars. Since we lived in a pretty safe neighborhood, everyone left their cars unlocked. I picked the car belonging to one of the unmarried daughters and deposited a little surprise for her. We didn’t stick around to see her reaction because we knew we would just get yelled at.
Before the week was out she committed suicide.
Now, I don’t know what else may have been going on in her life. But I’m pretty sure that my little prank pushed her closer, or possibly over, the edge. For any part that I may have played in her misery, I am truly sorry. If I could undo it somehow, I would. But I can’t. The woman is dead forever and one of the last events in her life was finding the lifeless body of something she held dear in her car.
It was just supposed to be a prank, damn it.
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