When I was a kid, my brother was really tough on me. As a baby, I was in the front seat where mom could get ahold of me and stop me with the “mom belt.” (Your mothers instinctive reason before child safety seats were common, was to slap her hand across your body to “restrain you” whenever breaking hard. My mother nearly neutered me once when she applied the “mom belt” to a cup of hot chocolate I was holding. But that’s another story.) Cars were really big back then and for some reason, two doors were popular. When the door opened, it looked like a gutted whale.
My brother rode in the back where all “big boys” should. He would then bound over the seat and into the front to get out. Well one morning he forgot about his little brother and bounded over the seat before mom had moved me out of the way. He came down on the side of my head perfectly- with heavy corrective shoes no less. (Think Forest Gump here.)
Mom belts also came with an auto ejection feature and she immediately grabbed my brother and flung him skyward. His head smacked into the roof of the car and he was thrown into the back seat, mostly unharmed. However, we were both crying. There was now a perfectly shaped shoe mark on the left side of my head for several days and my mom just knew the police were going to hear about it. To this day, I feel my right brain works better than my left…
Not all too much more down the road, I was sitting in my high chair in the living room, minding my own business. I was the kind of kid that every parent hopes for. I only cried when I needed something and it was a plaintive, “Watson, come here I need you” sort of cry as opposed to my brother’s “WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNNN!” for 48 hours straight. The fact that my parents had another child after my brother is still something of a mystery to me. Thank God abortion was still illegal!
Leave it to Beaver reruns must not have been on, because my brother found it more entertaining to make paper airplanes and throw them at me. We are talking about the pointy tipped kind here. As the saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.”
After a few tries, my brother apparently found his mark, because my mother said I started screaming. She ran into the living room to find my brother scampering round my highchair and scooping up the evidence of a dozen paper airplanes lying around.
Things only got worse as I aged…
So suffice it to say that I had ample reason to play the trick I did.
My brother was in Junior High School. (Called middle school for all you young folks. “Junior” is apparently a politically incorrect term these days.) His school day was longer than mine and I got home an hour before him. This was enough time to conceive the most evil, most fiendish, most diabolical payback scheme I ever pulled. It was so good, it even scared me.
When we lived in the “old house,” we had a neighbor that was a welder by trade. He made side art out of welding wire and loose metal parts. He had some pretty cool stuff. He had given my brother and I metal sculptures that were quite heavy. My brother picked “The Red Baron” complete with an oil can helmet and nuts and bolts face. The wings were made from thin sheet metal. If you thumped it, it would make a most satisfying metal toned ring.
Now at the “new house,” I realized that if I could somehow rig my brother’s airplane sculpture to fall from his desk, it would be loud enough to scare the hell out of him. That’s when the idea came to me.
In the new house, my brother and I shared a common wall. His desk sat alongside our common corner. The “Red Baron” sat upon his desk, a most treasured sculpture apparently. It was then that my creative genius showed and I realized my mom had some tremendously long sewing needles. We are talking like eight inches or more. Yet they were as thin as regular sewing needles. I realized that if I passed these through the wall with an attached thread, they would make it through. I tried it and the tip came through about one inch- sufficient to grab the needle with pliers. Soon, I had three threads neatly wound around the base of the airplane.
I decide to test it, to make sure the threads had enough strength to pull the airplane off the desk.
It made a delicious dragging sound as I pulled it. Falling to the floor, the wings made a resounding “gong.” No Kung Fu movie ever had a better sound effect. And as I pulled, the threads unwound from the base of the sculpture. This added a terrifying “flopping” effect to the sculpture, once it hit the floor. I could feel the threads unwind and I knew that once I pulled them through the wall, only the tinniest of holes would remain as evidence of my evil deed.
Resetting, I forgot all about the trick that awaited me this night.
The night wore on and we went to bed, after watching an odd show from the 1970’s called, “In Search Of.” Think ghost chasers, UFOs and every other manner of weird things you can think of. (Invader Zim pays some tribute to “In Search Of,” with the Earth Boy “Dib.” Did is obsessed with the show “Strange Mysteries of Mysteries” with the voice of Robert Stack. It’s an allusion to Stack’s show called “Unsolved Mysteries,” I am sure. Stack’s show owes a lot to the ground breaking of Leonard Nimoy’s show in the 1970’s called, “In Search Of.” I can still hear the theme song for In Search Of playing in my head…)
I closed the door to my bedroom and locked it, just as I did every night. My brother had brute force on his side. He did not need anything imaginative to cause fear in me. He would sometimes just come in and slap me at night, then run away manically laughing. But tonight, ah tonight, I WAS THE ONE MANICALLY LAUGHING. Fiendish grin upon my face, I waited until I heard my brother flick the switch to his room light. I had precisely calculated how long it would take for my brother eyes to adjust to the darkness and waited for that time to pass. A silly, stupid grin threatened itself to appear upon my face. But I steeled myself so I could play the role of the innocent once the deed was done. There would no doubt be an investigation of the deed and if I smirked or otherwise let it be known I was enjoying myself, a good beating by my brother was in order the next time we were alone.
Picking up the threads, I pulled them taught. The metal airplane made its deep grumbling, evil drag noise across the surface of my brother’s desk. The desk was hollow and greatly amplified this fiendish sound. I did not laugh; this was very serious business here. Revenge is truly a dish best served cold.
And then I heard my brother’s light flick on and the sound of him sitting up in bed.
I panicked. If he saw the threads- I was a dead man.
Jerking hard, I now sought only to remove the evidence of my involvement.
This had a special added bonus feature I did not expect.
The plane flew off the desk as if something had smacked it. It then crashed into the wall with a tremendous thud and the wings made a loud “GONG!!!”
And then it came.
The blood curdling sound that only a 13 year old boy who just entered puberty can make. My brother screamed so loud and so frightfully, that my hair must have stood on end.
I added my own version of my brother’s scream and ran for the door.
Flinging it open, I saw my brother pass, still screaming that most unique noise of a boy scared out of puberty. His hands were raised up in a half-surrendered position and he was in full flight. I remember the sight of him as I fell in line behind him and we both ran screaming to my mother’s room.
In mere milliseconds, we were both clawing at our mother and screaming about ghosts in the night. My mother could hardly contain us and I was incoherent, likely babbling, “Hinggg Derwhodennn!” and other strange words.
It took some time for my mother to calm us enough to investigate. When she did, there was the airplane lying behind my brother’s desk. The threads had come off, just as I had designed and there was very little “trace evidence” of my involvement.
When my mother tried to reassure my brother that this was a simple accident and not a ghost, my brother gave a most lurid and detailed description of how the airplane had actually jumped into the air and spun around before crashing into the wall. His description convinced me most earnestly that it could not have been my doing. In fact I was so scared, I had not even remembered setting my brother up in the first place.
But with my mother’s multiple assurances that there were no ghosts and her instance that it must have been an earthquake that rattled the airplane off the desk, we finally did get to sleep that night.
It would be many, many years before I told anyone in the family that it was I that haunted my brother’s room that night. In fact, my brother has never spoken of it and may have actually blocked it out entirely. It was indeed a most bone chilling event for us both. And now, it’s a family secret, which no one has yet to reveal to him.
I shall save telling him for his funeral. We will need a funny story then. That is of course assuming he dies first…