Cyber Hobo

Okay, I’m not sure how some of these slipped my mind when wrote out the first post on this topic, but anyhow.

Okay, back in the day there was a club that my little circle of friends used to frequent quite regularly. It was called… Tequila Rock. Nice enough place, had a little faux beach part… no pool though, and a little outside place where you could sit and trip balls if you so chose. (In all honesty it was quite nice to sit out there and stare at the stares regardless of how high and or drunk you were.) Anyway, one night we had all piled into Craig’s white Toyota, (As usual) and zooted off to this place. Fast Forward a few hours and there I am, drunk as all hell, stumbling out of the club to get some fresh air. I sat on the pavement outside for a little while until I felt well enough to go back in.

Unfortunately, the bouncers decided that I’d had a few too many and refused me access. Muttering curses under my breath I decided to go and sit by Craig’s car until I was either sober enough to go in or everyone came out. So, I stumble about and eventually find this old Toyota, right where I remember Craig parking it… or the general areas anyway. The grass around the car was wet with dew so I decided that I’d sleep on the bonnet of the car for a little while.

There I am, sleeping merrily, when I hear people approaching the car. I thought one of my friends would poke me and tell me it was time to go. Nothing happened for a little while so I opened my eyes… only two find four very confused strangers looking at my in horror, keys to their white Toyota in hand, clearly wondering if it was safe to approach me. After drunkenly apologising to them, I then remembered that Craig had left to pick someone up halfway through the evening and had obviously found a different parking spot. Sure enough, I found his car a few minutes later and then had to relay the entire embarrassing story to my laughing friends.

There is another story that involves that particular club but I’m hesitant to mention it since it involves projectile vomiting.

What else… Oh, right! When I was… much, much younger, my friend Vito and I had a… childish rebellious streak. We caused quite a lot of trouble around our neck of the woods. One time comes to mind quite clearly.

They were busy laying new pipelines or something around the neighbourhood so there were these huge trenches dug into the pavements. One of these trenches was directly in front of his house. So, one night while all this was going on, we cooked up this huge batch of luminous green slime by combining… all sorts of crap we found lying around, nothing dangerous, but it was gross as hell. We creeped out of his house in the dead of night and started… pouring this shit on postboxes and welcome mats and… just about anything we could get our hands on.

As we were doing this, a car came around the corner, a neighbourhood watch car, a cop car, something, I swear that I saw blue lights but he doesn’t remember that. Anyway, we bolted, scared out of our wits and just before this car’s headlights hit us, we dived in spectacular fashion, slid across the wet grass and popped into one of those holes. We slammed our backs to the side just as this car pulled into his driveway, a mere meter from the hole.

I can remember looking over and seeing terror in his eyes, something I’m sure he saw in mine too. After what seemed like hours, but was probably closer to two minutes, the car pulled out and drove away, after which we vaulted out of the hole and scarpered back into his house.

That was rather scary, but the worst one followed soon after. Having forgotten our recent close call, we stayed up quite late one night designing these… silly little notes. Drawings and such, “Smiley says fuck you” was a particularly funny one to our minds. This was… instigated by a previous attempt at the same thing but with nicer cards that we called “Hauxmark” (Very droll back then, I’m sure, but now it just seems silly).

Anyway, these… angrier cards were soon ready and we set off to deliver them all over the neighbourhood. I remember going down one street and posting a few. There was a car way down the road that, for all the world, looked like it was parked and empty. As this one note dropped out of my hand into the postbox, I swear, the exact moment it left my fingers, the headlights of the car blazed to life. I screamed something along the lines of “FUCK! RUN!” and bolted, keeping to the shadows as much as I could, Vito close behind me.

The car followed us for quite some time. We were sure it we had given it the slip by the time we got to my house but it roared around the corner soon after. I dived into some shadows, forgetting that I was wearing a white shirt. Vito, who had a black jacket on, had the foresight to jump in front of me in an attempt to hide us both. Well, it failed, the car stopped right in front of us, this huge bastard that looked like the bastard offspring of Chuck Norris and a packet of cocktail sausages just sat there glaring at us until we quickly ran past him and into my house.

Neighbourhood watch and with a shotgun on the seat next to him. Rarely have I been that terrified. Heh, in hindsight, I’m surprised he didn’t just shoot us then and there, South Africa being what it is. We got up to a lot of similar pranks, including, but not limited to, the classic Tok Tokkie, and wandering around the streets at all hours of the night for no damn reason, (One time stopping a woman from being dragged into the veld and raped, so it wasn’t all bad.)

I sometimes miss doing those things… but then I remember the fact that kids doing those things is kind of obnoxious but a grown man doing that is… well, creepy.