In the summertime, on the island where I grew up, we had a choice of swimming at the beach on the river’ side, or fishing on the canal’ side. Very often our “full schedule” would include both…

Fishing wasn’t that exciting to me. I wasn’t afraid of hooking up worms, nor taking the fish off the hooks, I just found it boring, all the waiting around… but I enjoyed the camaraderie of it all, going with my cousins, laughing, plotting, talking about movies we’d go see, bicycle trips we could take, etc… We didn’t eat the fish, none of us would’ve ever gutted them, nor prepared them, so it was mostly “catch and release”.

One day, one of my cousin caught this little fish and instead of throwing back in the water, he decided to throw it at my other cousin that was with us. He missed him and the small perch ended up in the middle of the small road behind him. Before he could get off the rock he was sitting on to go pick the fish up, a car made its way on the road and totally pancaked the poor little guy.

A new stupid teenager game was born.

We decided to keep the fish we’d catch for the rest of the day so we could take them to the boulevard, place them on the road and see who could get his fish flattened before the others by guessing exactly where the wheels of the incoming cars would go… As kids do, we thought it was the funniest things… and the grossest too.

That game quickly evolved and fish weren’t enough, we needed messier things… So one night, after it got dark, we started scavenging people’s gardens to steal tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, anything… the bigger/messier, the better…

On another night, it got out of control, we basically had a barricade 1 foot high in a dark location of the boulevard, people would pretty much see it last minute and ram through our vegetarian mess, most of the time driving through without stopping. But this one man, though red-neck, brick-house built type guy, did stop and saw some of us by the side of the road hiding in the ditch. He got out of his car yelling at us and all of a sudden, after spotting one, he took off running in our direction… Just like gazelles running away from a huge fucking lion, we darted in all sorts of directions and he pursued one. My cousin noticing that, still holding on to a tomato, threw it at the guy hitting him right smack on the chest, so the guy, took off after him… He still had another tomato, and using his nugget, decided to attack the guy’s car and threw it right at the windshield without stopping in his track. The man stopped and yelled some obscenities and walked back to his car, got in and drove away.

That was the last night we played that game.

And none of my father’s vegetables ended up on the road, that garden of his was sacred grounds. Poor neighbours.

I have forgotten this little series of anecdotes for too long, it’s time to come back to the stupid things I did as a teenager…

I grew up on a small island, with an equal mix of full-year round residents and cottagers. As kids, we always looked forward to the cottagers return as it meant that many more kids to play with… but when they left… it meant many more curious empty places to explore…

In the Winter, if I didn’t hang out with my cousins, I’d most likely hang out with my sister’s best friend’s brother, Eric. He was one year younger but we had a lot in common and always had fun together… Eric had an evil brother, one year older than me… he was a troubled teenager, smoking, drinking… oh and probably swearing too…

Eric and I loved to enter cottages and look around the places, we never stole anything, nor rearranged the furniture, we just liked the thrill of finding a way in without breaking anything, sit in their sofas, warm up a bit, look through the cupboards, see what records they had, what toys they had… and then go home again.

One particular Sunday afternoon in February, when I was 13, we decided to enter a cottage, there were 4 identical cottages on the lot and a big garage where they stored the boats and tools and shit. As we were leaving, the evil brother asked where we were going, and we stupidly told him. He decided to come along…

We arrived at the cottages and quickly realized that these ones were perfectly winterize, they had plastic stapled to all the windows and in between the doors too, there was no way to get inside without breaking these seals… That was it, we weren’t going to try any harder, it wasn’t worth it for us… but the evil brother had something else in mind, he wanted to get in… and he had his eyes on the garage.

We walked closer to the garage door only to find a huge padlock on it… once again, for Eric and me, it wasn’t worth it, but the evil brother produced a small axe from the inside of his coat, he was going to get in. We tried to stop him but within seconds the lock was lying on the ground, broken, and the doors were opening. We were curious of course, and the damage was done, so we walked in… There were two speed boats for water skiing, there was tons of fishing equipment, tools galore… and the sound of an engine running, a car parking into the driveway… HUH??? A quick look out the little window revealed that on this nice sunny Sunday afternoon, one of the four owners had decided to come in for a Winter visit, I guess to make sure everything was still alright… huh, no it wasn’t… not for us.

Little criminal minds thinking alike, we all knew we couldn’t run away, so we decided to hide… Eric jumped inside one of the boat, I hid under the boat closest to the wall and evil brother hid in one of the dark corner somewhere…

After a quick inspection of the cottages, they quickly realized someone had been around recently with the foot tracks in the snow, and it wasn’t long before they were lead to the garage to see the padlock laying in the snow on the ground… The father came in, I can vividly remember his shoes and small galoshes covering them, he wasn’t dressed for a snow walked, they probably had been to church or something else that morning and decided to venture to their summer place for a nice drive… Anyway, he came in, stood there for awhile, probably surveying the place for missing items… then telling the wife that everything seemed alright, that someone probably broke in just to get warm… He walked in some more, couldn’t see much with just the light coming in from the windows, and then walked out again and close the doors, using the broken padlock to hold the doors together… I never knew I could hold my breath for 5 minutes like this.

We could hear them talked for a bit and then finally the car doors shut and the engine starting. We heard the crunch of the tires on the snow and knew they were leaving… just a short visit for them… and a huge nightmare for us.

We thought for sure they were going to go to the police and come back… so we quickly got out of our hiding spaces and bolted for the door, which was now locked again… We shook as best we could to see if the padlock would just fall again… nothing… We had no other choices, either we broke the doors by force-kicking them open – or – we broke a window and made a run that way… We tried the doors twice, nothing, we tried the window just once, it shattered… We carefully pushed and pulled each other out of the place and then made a run for freedom through the thick woods surrounding us…

The evil brother said that we should take different paths in case they’d started looking for us… Personally I thought he was more scared than we were and didn’t want us to witness it in his face… so we parted, Eric and I one way and him on another…

We found out later that he did this because he didn’t want to share what he had stolen… a stash including some cigarettes… what an idiot… these cigarettes had been there since the end of the summer. Like they were going to be any good…

When I was 12, one fine morning, I woke up and decided I didn’t want to go to school. It wasn’t something I did often so if I feigned a bad stomach ache or bad headache I was usually allowed to stay home for the day…

That particular morning my imagination was running overdrive and instead of staying with a classic, I decided to improvise with a new method. I went to the bathroom and found my mom’s talc powder box I had bought her for mother’s day a few years back, opened it up and started using the huge fluffy ball to spread the powder all over my face to make me look white as a ghost, therefore “really” sick.

When I told my mom I wasn’t feeling well, she could tell right away, no only was there there a smell of lilac in the air, but I had a huge blob of powder in my ears. FAILED. I washed up and got ready for school. E for Effort.

In the summer of ‘77 I was 13 yrs old, I hung out with my cousins mostly, and we spent most of our time at the beach.

One nice warm breezy day, this girl, also my age, came to meet up with us, just returning from a week’s vacation with her family. While away, she bought some new clothes and came to model some of it for us… She was a beautiful girl, it’s true, but I really wasn’t into her myself (for obvious reasons I now know). She was wearing a bikini top with a pair of very flowy pants, the type that tied up at the waist and left the side of the legs all opened-up and then tied up again at the ankles, they looked fucking ridiculous. I turned to my cousin Mario and said: “She looks like a topless dancer”. We both laughed as 13 yrs old would at the mention of topless dancers…

Fortunately she didn’t overhear me but knew by the laughter that I had said something disparaging. She inquired but my cousin didn’t repeat.

That evening after dinner, I was back at my cousin’s place and his phone rang. He answered, listened a bit, tried to put in a word and then suddenly, started to tell the person to calm down repeatedly and then hung-up.

(loosely translated from the original French instance)
Me: What the?
Him: Someone told her what you said earlier
Me: Huh?
Him: Topless dancer
Me: Oh!
Him: She has her dad’s hunting rifle and she wants to shoot you
Me: Ah-huh…
Him: You really should talk to her and say you’re sorry
Me: Oh-eeeh-ahh

After a few minutes, I decided I should maybe call her back and tell her I didn’t mean it. When I got her on the phone, she was screaming at the top of her lungs, so insulted.

Her: You called me a topless dancer!!!
Me: Huh… no, that’s not what I said, you didn’t hear properly
Her: That’s what “Andre” said
Me: Well, he might think you look like one himself, but that’s not what I said…
Her: I have my dad’s gun and you better not be going out tonight
Me: What I said was that you looked like a Thomas Dancer, they’re the ones who keep their clothes on when they dance, I didn’t say Topless. Obviously he misunderstood what I said.

And believe it or not, that did the trick.

I was way too stubborn to apologize, I did think she looked like a Topless Dancer, but you see we were a bunch of French speaking kids using some English in our language not really understanding what we were saying sometimes, so coming up with the “Thomas” definition, although totally bogus and unexisting, couldn’t really be disputed at the time because, it was just one of those things she couldn’t really verify… But I often wondered if she ever asked her dad if he ever had gone to see Thomas Dancers…