[I'm using Survivor as my style guide]
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| Do-it-and-How |
Hello world.
This will be posted to a blog on the internet and hosted by some computer somewhere. There will be redundant backups. There will be cross-posting. It will live forever. Or at least as long as there is electricity flowing down wires.
Testing. Hello.
If you're reading this, then know that everything worked out fine. No one was hurt. No one was punished in any real way. The teacher was not at his desk. The classroom was empty. Only the window broke. That and the balloon.
I've only got so many words. They you will lose interest and move on to some other part of your life. Probably the laundry or preparing food or (God help us) cleaning. And that will be it. You will never come back. So. Getting on with it.
It was not my idea. It was one of the other three: Brian or Ralph or Gabe. I can't remember. Somehow, the rubber tubing and funnel just appeared. It was there in the hallway in front of our lockers being grasped in hands. There was no plan. These things get brought to school to be shown: look what I have! They are not seen as resources. Not at first.
But then they are there. At school. And now that they are there, they must be used. Twenty feet of quarter inch surgical tubing became two five foot loops. The funnel had two holes punched in its rim, one on either side. The tubing was passed through the holes and tied off.
Balloons are both easier and harder than the tubing and the funnel. Schools have balloons. There is access to anyone who can kiss up to the front desk or the principal's secretary. Or the librarian. We spent most of our time in her domain. She knew us. Knew that we rarely caused trouble. At least not in the library. We asked and she gave. Balloons acquired.
The hard part was filling them. Schools in the eighties went out of their way to source balloon resistant faucets. The hose bibs did not have handles but required a key. Which left drinking fountains. At first, to fill a balloon with water at a drinking fountain may seem impossible. And it is if all you have is the balloon and the fountain. The trick is the pen. You need a pen. Or most of one. The ink and the ball tip are useless. Discard them. What you need is the body: a hollow tube that can be jammed into the fountain with the balloon's opening held to the other side. Voila. Filled balloons.
Off to the back parking lot.
The school was a quadrangle. We students liked to think that the same architects that built close-by San Quentin also built the school. Being a quadrangle, it had a courtyard in the middle. Our goal was to launch our water balloons from the back parking lot over the two stories tall building and into said courtyard.
I'm sorry: that was not the goal. That was the plan. The goal was to impress chicks. Do not ask why high velocity water balloons might impress chicks. We were guessing. Nothing else we tried had worked, so why not this?
Ralph and I were pillars. We were tall, so we held the tubing while Brian pulled back on the funnel's spout. He crouched close to the ground and Ralph and I stretched our arms up. Gabe loaded a balloon. Brian let go.
The balloon exploded in the funnel.
Take two. The balloon impacted on the upper corner of the building. The parapet if it were a castle. Weather striping because it was a school.
Take three. My arms are tired and I can't hold them as high. The balloon does not go over the building. It goes through a window. A closed window. A closed window made of some strange mix of tempered glass and plastic. The window disintegrates.
We run but not together.
An hour later I am in the principal's office. My first time. I was the only one identified. The principal is there with the teacher. The teacher who normally sat in front of that window and graded papers. The teacher who is the least liked math teacher in the school. The one you don't ever want to get.
The teacher expresses his rage with math. He explains the momentum of the balloon. Collision physics. Terminal velocity. I know this. I'm glad that there is a real world example but I do not tell him I'm glad. I am also glad that we hit the window during lunch. I'm glad that he drank too much coffee and was at the restroom. These things I do tell him.
What I do not tell him is who helped me. There is much pressure to give names. To tell. But these are not interrogators from a Rambo movie. These are suburban teachers with morals. I keep my mouth shut.
Parents are called. Lectures are listened to. Windows are paid for. Records are opened, consulted. This is my first offense. I'm sent home for the day.
Upon returning I am not a hero. We all still hang out. It would be suspicious if we did not. But we talk with less volume and more intensity. What happened, they want to know. I tell them. There is relief that no one else will be punished. Brian and Ralph and Gabe may not be first offenders.
Testing. Hello.
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