YOUTHFUL INDISCRETION
Car’s Comin’
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
YOUTHFUL INDISCRETION
by Adam Carroll Draper
Did everyone do stupid [stuff] as a kid? I may be laboring under the very unfortunate misapprehension that my childhood was not all that different from other boys my age. At least that is the impression I got from several of the Friday lunch crowd (a group of lawyers – we came up with a couple of names for the group that can’t be used in polite company). They were not only amused, but somewhat aghast at what I thought was an innocuous tale of youthful indiscretion.
I think I was ten or eleven (definitely in the 5th Grade) when I got to stay over at my friend Don’s house one Friday after school. We went to Grace Christian School, a small, “spare the rod and spoil the child,” evangelical school just outside Sanford, North Carolina. Don’s mom had been my 4th Grade teacher. I think they lived out near Haw River in Chatham County, but that’s an old, unreliable memory. Anyway, it was out in the middle of nowhere, and there was not much to do on a Friday night other than mischief. I don’t remember how we came to it, but I blame it on my dad, who used to say, “Don’t you want to go play in the traffic?” when I got on his nerves. We decided to lay down in the road when an occasional car came by. When they stopped in obedience to human kindness, thinking there was someone hurt or dead in the road, we’d get up and run. It worked. We were having fun.
Hold on a minute. I can sense some opprobrium out there. You weren’t there! We weren’t in the same lane as the oncoming car. We were barely in the road at all. We had to be in the road some or they might not have seen us. Actually, I believe just one of us at a time did it at first. We had been at this for a while when one or all of us had to urinate, so we used the road. Then, we realized that might look like blood at night, so when the next car came by, one of us sprawled out next to the pee. That worked! The next car stopped, and someone even got out of the car. It was on then. Don’s brother, Lynn, even pooped in the road with the idea that it might look like guts or something.
I can hear it all now. Where was their momma while all this foolishness was going on, and why didn’t someone call the police and summon Social Services?
“Well, all good things gotta come to an end,” as Jim Stafford sang. As I recall, there was so much blood and guts (as it were) in the road that all three of us were out there when the next car came. I think it was a pickup truck. Anyhow, that guy slammed on his brakes and we got up and shagged @$$ into the woods because Don and Lynn knew who it was. The dude yelled, “Better run, mother @#$%&*@$%” and started shooting a shotgun into the woods. I was laughing. I mean, I assumed he was shooting up into the trees, but then I felt something hit my hand. It didn’t really hurt all that badly.
When the guy drove off, squealing his tires and yelling something like he knew who we were, we figured that we had squeezed as much fun out of that endeavor as we were going to, and went inside. We were all laughing, talking about where each of us hid when the shot was flying through the trees, when I noticed my hand was bleeding. It was right on top of my hand, below my thumb and index finger, just above my wrist. We just kind of looked at each other and went, “Damn!” Of course, that was the stuff of lore to us. Thinking back on it now, I could have just cut it on something while I was running through the woods. I still have the scar, though.
We never told our parents, of course. Getting shot at was not as bad as getting a whoopin’.
When I told this story to the Friday lunch crowd, they acted like that was the strangest thing they’d ever heard, like we were inmates on the loose from an asylum, playing dueling banjos. Stef said, “Boys are gross!” And the only reason I told the story is because one of my friends had just talked about how his cousin had accidentally shot some lady, who was out in her garden. He was shooting at a dove and some bird shot caught her by surprise. The funny thing was that his cousin didn’t get in trouble either. Apparently, a shotgun pellet didn’t hurt that lady’s rear end any more one of them hurt my hand.
What can I say? It was a different day. Shoot, we even rode our bikes without helmets back then. It’s just a wonder humanity itself survived that dark time before the nanny state. I guess I am thinking about this because I have a birthday coming up on Monday. I feel fortunate to have been a kid when I was. I’d probably be hauled to a juvenile home if I were growing up in current times. I thought the South of my youth was strict and overbearing, but it was comprehensible compared to the daily shifting draconian code of groupthink in our current age of the tolerant but incessantly offended.
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