A Theory of the Prank
A little gag'll do ya.
“It’s my favorite holiday,” the seven-year-old said this week.
He wasn’t talking about the one with chocolate eggs or the one with unleavened bread. He was talking about the one that falls on the first of this month, where you express affection for friends or family by lying to them and/or exposing them to mild discomfort.
“What pranks will we do, Daddy?”
I looked at Katie.
“This can be your holiday,” she said. “I’ve done all the planning for Easter.”
Fair enough!
—
“What pranks will we do, Daddy?” he asked again, later.
Several months ago, Ike started a notebook with a list of “good pranks,” so we consulted that first:
He has lost most of his teeth, and we didn’t have ready access to cows (the joke there, as I understand it, is that cows can go up stairs but not down them, so … you’re just stuck with a cow on your porch?).
We turned the page:
“Made you look” is a classic to be sure, but didn’t have quite the oomph we wanted. So I consulted people much cooler than I am: my students.
One said that his mother once made him a batch of breakfast muffins with laxatives mixed in and they “wrecked me.”
“Was it a school day?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said and, in response to my raised eyebrows, explained: “She was in the military.”
Another student, who is Black, said that he and his older sister “pranked” their younger, lighter-hued brother by convincing him that his real father was a “white man in New York named Andrew.”
While those tricks have an exhilarating streak of cruelty, we were on the hunt for something a little more pedestrian.
We came up with two pretty good ones: replace Oreo creme filling with toothpaste and switch the content of his mother’s and sister’s underwear drawers. (The former idea came from a student, the latter from Ike’s friend Josh).
The problem with having a seven-year-old as your prank partner is the age’s reduced capacity for delayed gratification. After we pulled off the contents-switch on March 31 (so they would wake up to find the mismatched delicates on April Fool’s Day itself), Ike needed to know it would work: “Annie, Annie, Annie —” accosting his sister as she emerged from the bathroom, “do you wear bras to bed?”
This tipped her off that something was up, and I had to redo our prank after everyone in the house was asleep. The Oreo trick was pretty satisfying, although many sandwich cookies were lost in the process. It’s not that easy to scrape out the creme filling, squeeze in a dollop of Colgate, and put the wafers back together without breaking them or arousing suspicion.
—
“Did you do a lot of pranks growing up?” Katie asked on April Fool’s Night, after the hijinks were exhausted (she’d gotten her son pretty good, by hiding his underwear in the morning, and replacing his milk with cold coffee).
My first instinct was to say no, but there were some. Once, when I was eight or so, I briefly convinced my younger brother that, by holding a lamp up to my face, he’d caused me to go blind. Then, when I was in eighth grade and he was in seventh, I stabbed him in the butt with a short-bladed scissors. I guess that’s not a “prank” so much as “assault,” but he was making fun of me. (In both cases, the overriding concern was “don’t tell Mom.”)
In high school, that fuzzy border — between fun-loving mischief and petty criminality, between “pranks” and “vandalism” — was often and easily crossed. There was the Summer of Mailbox Baseball, during which a crew of us piled into my 1975 Ford LTD1— we discovered it could fit up to 12, if you squeezed in just right — and cruised the gravel roads taking home run cuts at mailboxes. (I’m still sorry, neighbors).
We were not scared of the police. For one thing, there just weren’t that many patrolling rural Lafayette County back then. For another, the relationship between cops and kids back then (at least where we lived) was less “occupying force vs. occupied population” and more like “Dean Wormer vs. the slobs from Delta house.”
We learned this attitude growing up. My father, in an expansive mood, might of an evening tell about this prank from his high school days: Alma’s lone, part-time policeman parked his cruiser in the narrow one-car garage at his house. Dad and some buddies (a dozen? half-dozen? who knows) snuck in one night, lifted the car and just… turned it slightly so that the car now made a diagonal between the front left corner of the garage and the rear right corner, and would require something like a 300-point turn to get the car free.
I don’t know precisely how well-worn and/or apocryphal that story is, but the finger-in-your-eye attitude towards authority it evokes was still present 30-some years later in the late ‘90s. It was Halloween night, and it must have been 1995, because I was still driving that LTD. We were out and about in Waverly, another town that made up part of our consolidated school district.
I’m pretty sure I was on my way home when I was boxed in by two police cars. One turned on its lights and pulled me over, and then another came around the corner, lights going. This was troubling as Waverly typically only had one police officer. That was Al Crowell, a sort of weekend nemesis to us local high schoolers. He’d pulled up behind me. The cruiser in front belonged to a state trooper who was in to help, I guess, keep the peace. They asked to look in my trunk, where they found tomatoes, eggs, and shaving cream. Typical Halloween groceries. Then they “asked” me to follow them to City Hall (which was also police headquarters).
My friend Jeremy and his brother, who had also been headed out when I got pinched drove by City Hall to see what was going to happen to me. That’s when the trooper stuck his head out the door and waved them into the parking lot, too.
The Law “just wanted to know” who put a brick through some building on Main Street. It hadn’t been us, though the various supplies in our cars didn’t do much to advance the cause of our innocence.
The trooper called our parents. Jeremy’s mom turned out to know the trooper — from high school or elsewhere, I’m not sure, it’s just that kind of place — and she made enough “tsk, tsk I’ll give them a piece of my mind” noises for the trooper to let them go. But first he had to call my father (I gave him Dad’s number, not Mom’s, on purpose).
It went something like this:
“Hello, Mr. Stockman? This is Trooper [Marty Smith2], and I’ve got your son Sebastian… No, sir. No, sir, this is not a joke—”
The trooper looked at the phone in his hand, and then up at us. “He hung up on me.”
I dropped my head. Jeremy and his brother cackled.
The trooper called back. And this is how Dad said the conversation went:
Trooper: “Mr. Stockman? It’s Trooper [Smith], and I actually do have your son here at the Waverly Town Hall”
Dad: “Well, OK, is he under arrest?”
Trooper: “No sir, but—”
Dad: “OK, then send him home.” <click>
And so he did.
—
I’ve written elsewhere — as in this 2014 op-ed for The Boston Globe — about the many ways in which my interactions with police have always been less fraught, less fearful and yes, more privileged, than the police interactions had by people who don’t look like me.
There is no real “theory of the prank” here, then, just an observation that the line between “good clean, fun” and “a handful of misdemeanors” depends on … what? Homogeneity? Knowing each other?
Whatever it is, the willingness to let “kids be kids” (i.e. make dumb choices without suffering life-altering consequences) is probably something we can use a little more of. (Please refer to this section in seven years when my son hilariously lets the air out of your tires.)
If I were an op-ed columnist or a particularly laid-back preacher I might tie this all up with the shaky assertion that the week’s other holidays — Passover and Easter — were celebrations of God’s pranks (locusts! empty tombs!) on Pharaoh and the Pharisees, respectively. But I’m neither a columnist nor a sermonizer, and so I’ll just make that observation without bothering to defend it.
How Do You Finish a Book?
Again, some exciting interviews on the way. But for now, a little correspondence with some of you readers who have answered this question, sometimes more than once.
— Megan passed along the advice that a writer friend of hers once shared: “a page a day is a book a year.” That is straightforward and sensible, and Megan has won a Pulitzer Prize.
— After my interview with Marc Fitten, Matt wrote to say “I especially liked that he didn't remember writing one of the books. I think that's a good reminder that we put the idea of writing a book on too much of a pedestal.” He said that an adviser told him his dissertation would be the worst thing he ever wrote, then added “(Also applies to a first book — should be the worst large-scale thing you ever write, so what's the big deal?)” It’s interesting advice, but I’m not sure I’m ready to accept the idea.
My friend Seth sent me this tweet. Being Seth, he added, “Not sure if this applies only to books written over the past year (in which case, I’d approve of it) or just in general (in which case, I’d think it overly cosseting).”
Me? I’ll always opt for the cosseting.
Other Reading: Friends Edition
— “This is the part where the white girl cries.” Check out Amina Gautier’s great short-short story in the Southeast Review this week. Mean to Me is just four sentences, but the last one is a 416-word, virtuosic doozy.
— How Do I Define My Gender if No One is Watching Me? Alex Marzano-Lesnevich dropped another great op-ed in some outlet called The New York Times. I met Alex ten years ago, and it has been a privilege to watch them come to terms with how they understand themselves and navigate the world’s understanding of them with intelligence and grace. And the questions Alex poses here are universal: “We have all had to find our own paths over this year; we all learned more about ourselves. And have had to ask: Who are we, when no one is looking? Who are we, without what once both held us back and held us up? Whom do we wish to be?”
— Dan McQuade wrote in Defector about Lil Nas X and the Satan Shoes, which just has only ever seemed like a prank to me? But I’m still a little disappointed he didn’t try to buy a pair.
Thank you for reading! Do you know anyone who needs to read about sub-par pranks? Why not share?
Purchased for $100 the summer after I’d totaled an Oldsmobile, the LTD’s main flaw was a persistent radiator leak which required me to carry around a gallon jug of water at all times.
I don’t remember his name.