Or, ‘I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass’
Starting in fifth grade, we changed from collecting candy to collecting candy and raiding. Raiding, suburb-style consisted of: throwing hard corn and/or cobs at windows and (especially) metal awnings, soaping cars (with or without profanities), and, if you were hard core, eggs.
Corn was easily obtained , as a huge field of 7 foot tall stalks was two streets up. It was so dark in there you could have buried a Chevy and no one would see it. You waded, took your time, filled up your bag, and split. Eggs were a bit of a bitch to carry, so I didn’t use them.
Good thing, too. A guy up the block who was illegally running a business out of his house, paid off three kids to egg the neighbor’s house (said neighbor was pressing borough officials to issue him summons). The eggs really fucked up his aluminum siding. But of course, suspicion fell on the sneaky guy and it didn’t take long for one kid to tell another, and another, etc. Kids got sweated by the cops, the sneaky guy was arrested and made restitution. His family (especially his son) were shunned by the entire neighborhood, and he gave up and moved after a year.
Kids on the hill did their houses, we did ours until……one year, both packs decided to go to other’s turf. We met near the baseball field. Someone said we should all attack one house nearby. So there we stood in a backyard–Twelve juvenile-deliquents-for-a-night in a semi-circle, handful of corn right hand, cob in the other. On signal, the corn flew, sounded like Omaha Beach 1944. Then the cobs–thump, thump, thump, CRASH, tinkle.
From next to me, whispered: “Oh, fuckkkkk.” Broken window, we vanish into the night.