So two Saturday's ago, karma hit me in an annoyingly funny way. I walked out to my car around 4pm, only to discover that the previous evening the Altima had been egged. The prank - probably performed by some Everett High knuckleheads - had been capped quite well by the fact that 80 degree sun had been hitting the car for about 4 hours now, making sure that 18 car washes or so probably wouldn't get the yolk off. Naturally I was pretty angry at first, but then I had to laugh, because a decade ago it would have been me chucking those eggs at cars and passer-by'ers alike. So what goes around, comes around...blah blah blah.
We were all idiots in our own ways during our younger years, and I expressed that need through mild suburban vandalism. As I ran to the car wash, I waxed poetically to myself about all the stupid pranks I'd pulled back in the day. Teepeeing Gretchen Grossman's house with 250 rolls of toilet paper, saran wrapping people's car doors shut and accenting the job with maple syrup and chocolate sauce, peeing on the home door handle of the girl that had broken up with one of your friends: all memories that get better with age like a fine wine. But none compare to what I consider-with understandable bias-the greatest prank ever pulled at Everett High School
Flashing back to this spring day in 1996 , it was like most I’ve experienced in my Northwest existence – cloudy and cold with a drizzle heavy enough to nearly be considered rain. I remember sitting in the Senior lot after school getting ready to organize a two-hand touch football game.
That’s when my boy Mark Allen approached me.
A well renowned mountain climber who by the age of 17 had already ascended McKinley, Mark found exploration and escapade in anything from installing a car stereo to free climbing a 200 foot wall.
I’d known him since freshman year, and while we didn’t share a terrible amount of interests outside of water sports and the Doors, we quickly became good friends out of our shared passion for zany stunts and exploits.
As I was about to ask him to play, I noticed he had a certain gleam and giddiness that usually led to beautiful, mischievous action.
“B, I think I’ve got the granddaddy of all our pranks in the truck, it’s time we become legends.”
Walking to Mark’s Isuzu Trooper, I thought of those before us that had reached immortal status with their escapades.
First to mind was the ‘85 seniors: these guys bought a trashed ’67 VW Bug, decorated it in blue and gold spray paint, disassembled it, broke into the school one night, then reassembled and welded the car together on the 3
rd floor of the “A” building: a pretty classic achievement.
Or how about the outgoing class of 1990: they put a wall of cinder blocks in front of every entrance to each building on campus, then poured a quick drying cement mixture over each structure to ensure that no one could enter school the next day.
It turned out better than planned: special equipment was needed to bring down each created wall, leading to the cancellation of school.
What kind of logistics had to go into the planning of a spectacle of that level?
It was this height of status I wanted to achieve with whatever Mark had in mind, and inside I knew he wouldn’t be coming at me unless he possessed the master plan.
Sitting down in the troop, he turned on his CD player, and slipped in the new Adam Sandler disc I had not yet listened to (BTW, anytime there's any remotely relevant reason to post a pic of Bob Barker giving Happy Gilmore the business, I'm gonna do it).
“This is it right here,” he deadpanned.
I attentively tuned in as Sandler began impersonating an Assistant high school principal; only this guy wasn’t your typical example of executive secondary education leadership.
The bit has him giving a school wide address in a drunken, horny state, openly discussing masturbation habits and his “fondness” for the school’s gymnastics team.
Yes, by American Pie and Superbad standards, not the most heinously hilarious item of all time, but as a 18-year-old in 1996, it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard.
Mark hit me with his concept.
“B, we’ve got to get this on the intercom.
Can you imagine the main office going bonkers while this played to the whole student body?
They’d be running around pissing themselves while they try to figure out how to shut our principal off.
And if we closed this with a message stating it’s from our class, the debate is over: we go down as prank champions.
But this can’t happen without you.”
Mark was right on about that.
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Being ASB President brought many perks Senior year, and looking back on the experiences I went through makes me thankful I had the position. That being said, the job definitely required a certain un-biased nature towards every school issue that caused school debate. At times, it was difficult to apply the “presidential” face in every discussion with faculty, students I didn’t know very well, and members of the community. I really just wanted to crack jokes in class and speak candidly on school issues, not just MC school assemblies and be the voice behind the daily announcements on the intercom...aha, the intercom. Mark’s plan obviously required someone who knew the school’s intercom code, and while the code was listed in some school manuals that students could access, I was the only student who knew how to make it work, so I had to be the one.
I agreed to help pull the job off without much thought of the consequences that would ensue if we got caught. Mr. Van Winkle (the real principal) had warned during the first week of school that anyone found guilty of committing a senior prank would receive a 2 week suspension, and far worse, not walk at graduation. For some reason, failure never consciously crossed my mind, but instead it drove us to insure that a confessional inquiry would never take place inside Van Winkle’s office.
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The days after our meeting in the parking lot saw Mark and I planning and making decisions about how our idea would come off without a flaw. Almost immediately we decided that since I knew the code, I needed to have an alibi while the prank was being carried out, so he would have to be the one that performed the deed (“Just like free jumping off a skyscraper: you might get caught, but looking back you’d never regret jumping,” I remember him saying). My job was not only to show Mark how to use the access code, but to direct the recon work that was required for success. Every morning I did announcements about the chess club and sports results from a handset in Van Winkle’s office. By testing the same code out on different phones in different buildings every day after classes ended, we discovered a perverted principal could spew disgusting comedy from any phone. I would sit in the lunchroom after last bell, and wait for the daily 3 or 4 “test run” beeps. This meant Mark had typed the code, prompting over the intercom system that an announcement was on the way. After he would get back and tell me he’d made 3 test runs that day, I would tell him I’d heard 3 beeps, and we would jump around like 12 year olds that just won the Little League World Series. These celebrations became a daily ritual for two weeks, as our excitement suddenly turned from “If we could only pull this off...” to “This is absolutely gonna work...”
Once we were confident the message could be delivered from anywhere, we had to decide where it would be carried out from and at what time of the day we would do it. We immediately decided that the ideal time was the middle of 4th period, simply because everyone is in class between the two lunches. More importantly, Mark was a teacher assistant during this time, and his “slave master” always made a point of running my man all over campus performing her errands: that was the perfect alibi. It was then decided that the teacher’s lounge in the lunch room would became the stage from where the drama would unfold, again because it would be empty during the two lunches.
Some luck – in the form of two stupid freshmen – helped our planning along the way. Because of a prank call from a classroom to the nurse that got them suspended, I found out that each of the phones on campus had built in tracing mechanisms that would give away the location of our message. To combat this, we were forced to “borrow” the phone from the teacher lounge in the Math building, and as Mark and I decided, this would become the phone we’d use. After examining the teacher’s lounge, we decided to disconnect the phone line from that phone, then connect it to the Math phone we now had in our possession. This functioning receiver would be hidden in a nearby drawer along with the $3.00 tape recorder we had since picked up at a garage sale that would relay the message. With this plan in place, Mark and I envisioned a group of administrators running frantically to the Math lounge as Adam Sandler was parading on about “an infectious rash” on his rear, only to find the phone missing, then scurrying all over campus from room to room, only to come across our home base where the “functioning” phone was resting idly on the counter.
With everything going so smoothly, we now had “Ocean’s Eleven” confidence: we couldn’t be stopped. Monday would be go-time.
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Walking into 4
th period, it’s easy to say the perils of the day had me as on edge and as stressed as I’d been during any student body speech, basketball game, or big test.
Mr. Merrick had the innate ability of drawing the maximum level of academic fear: the grizzled bald man with his articulately groomed goatee demanded the utmost efforts out of his AP English seniors.
If you didn’t perform, he let you know about.
Bluntly.
If front of everyone.
Knowing that Monday always meant an in-class essay commanding Shakespearean-type mastery of a given topic, the “Oxford West” atmosphere surrounding my four legged desk of horrors was often more than I could handle.
And while MacBeth would normally be enough to make me physically ill, it was the uncertainty of what was about to occur that left me trembling.
I guess helping orchestrate the greatest senior prank ever was enough reason, but visualizing everyone’s reactions also had me nervous.
Would Carol Bailey, seated to the left of me, fall over laughing hysterically or give a cynical smirk – the type that pierces your high school insecurities of being “stupid” – and dismiss the action altogether?
What about Matt Ballou?
He had all but booked one of the top G.P.A’s
in our senior class, and his business-like demeanor meant he always rolled his eyes and looked the other way when people made dirty jokes.
I knew I’d have a fan in Chris Bowman: he was the intellectual stoner with humor who was always laughing at something.
The fact he looked ripped today told me I’d have an ally.
Just as I began to dissect how incredibly appalled Merrick would be, and the process I’d enduring in making this gag a reality…Exit Shakespeare, cue Adam
Sandler*.
MacBeth became a forgotten afterthought. There weren’t just reactions of laughter, or expressions of disgust: just perplexed expressions that knew not one singular emotion. I first looked at Carol, who I could tell wanted to laugh, but her disbelief had temporarily suspended her breathing pattern. Matt Ballou looked like he was watching “Sex In The City” with his great grandmother: he was shook. My boy Chris? Man, just blaze! The paranoid nature of his high was on full display, because he didn’t comprehend the comedy at a fast enough rate. Mr. Merrick? I saw a little smirk initially, trying to stay in the mold of mature superior, but it eventually gave way to laughter. He looked at me sensing my involvement, giving me a nod I still consider as appreciation and respect.
The electricity created continued throughout the school day. The satisfaction that came with pulling off such an elaborate task was only topped by the high of everyone’s curiosity: who had pulled this off? Everyone was in full detective mode, trying to figure out who possessed such gall. As for the administration, people told me they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to find the source. As for any consequences for our actions...simply put, we beat the case like Snoop & Diddy. The fact that both Mark and I had alibis led people to never question our involvement in the prank; in fact, the administration was so clueless as to who could have been the culprit that they never openly questioned anyone. So while we had performed many stunts and tricks on unsuspecting individuals in the past, the fact remains that unless filled in after a long night of drinks, no one knows who performed the Sandler incident, and we consider this our absolute masterpiece of prankdom.
*Sorry it's only a sample, I'll try to find the complete track...
