The Golf Cart, pt. I
My first 2.5 years of high school were spent in a tiny little private
institution
that locked down, er, educated a mere 100 kids from the 9th through 12th grades.
My freshman year, believe it or not, I was a pretty quiet kid--I didn't know
anybody and I felt very out-of-place. I was the strange
new kid on the block that nobody knew about. However, by the start of my
sophomore year, I got to know each and every one of my school mates (kinda hard
not to when there's only 100 of us!) and I began to loosen up. By my Junior
year, I was hell incarnate.
I quickly established the reputation of being the school clown, and my antics in class became a frequently discussed topic in teacher's lounges as well as in the cafeteria. I was the terror of the 9-12th grades and I knew it....so did my English teacher Mrs. Holland. Mrs. Holland was the Pastor's wife, which is probably the only reason she had a job as a high school teacher. We used to give her so much grief in class that on several occasions, we got her to storm out of the classroom balling her eyes out not to be seen until the next day. On one of my better days, I got on her nerves really bad for making sound effects and she threw me out (again). About 15 minutes later, one of the seniors (a transfer named Paul who was an even bigger screw-up than I) was kicked out of his English class next door to mine. What's worse than one screw-up? Two of them sans adult supervision...a synergistic combination of trouble-makers. Glancing to our left we saw the custodial golf cart, normally driven by the drooling Neanderthal-janitor Marvin (who by the way looked remarkably like Bill Murray in his role as the grounds keeper in Caddy Shack). What's better than an unattended golf cart? An unattended golf car with the keys in the ignition! I wasn't quite up to stealing the golf cart at the time as we really didn't have much time before classes would be let out and I wasn't in the mood to have Marvin chasing after us with a garden rake. So I improvised...I took a brick from the back of the cart, placed it on the accelerator pedal, aimed the cart carefully for the fence between our "campus" and the public high school next door, turned the key on and let her rip. Paul and I stood ther snickering like Beavis and Butt-Head (he had brown hair just like Butt-Head....we were way ahead of our time now that I think back on the incident) as we watched the cart fly across the soccer field and into the fence. The impact was great enough to raise the rear wheels off the ground. When they resumed contact, they started kicking up great clouds of dust and dirt so thick you couldn't see through. The cart just sat there and sputtered and spat up dirt for as long as we watched it--all the while sinking deeper and deeper into the ruts it was digging. We never got caught for that one and we never got to see ol' Marvin's face when he finally found his prodigal cart but just the thought of it makes me laugh aloud even today. Want more? Check out part II. |
Back to the halftime show