The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  The stakes for counterfeiting were a bit higher than some social embarrassment. Scouting the available cashiers at Walmart that night, I found myself thinking that I should have researched the penalty if I got caught doing something like this. My confidence came from the fact that I was 16 years old. What was the worst thing that would happen to a 16-year-old for drawing some lines on a piece of paper? Teenagers have literally murdered people and been out of kiddie jail in time to celebrate their first legal drink. I was just trying to get (way) too much change for some damn Skittles.

  Only a few cashiers were present at this time of night, so I did a quick scouting run before I took the plunge on one. Some looked borderline lucid and that just wouldn’t do for these purposes. I landed on a girl who couldn’t have been much older than me, and she was staring glassy-eyed at her nails. When she didn’t even glance up to greet me or make eye contact when I entered her aisle, I figured that the ruse’s success was a lock.

  No matter how confident I was about this, it still felt like my heart was about to beat through my chest as I grabbed the red Skittles bag and placed it on the conveyor. I had received no verbal acknowledgment at any point thus far. Hopefully, her lack of interest would carry over into the process of distributing change. She grabbed the bag and scanned it, and I prayed that she wouldn’t bat an eye as I handed her the “hundred.”

  Taking the bill from my hand, her eyes immediately locked onto its face.

  “The fuck is this?”

  “Uhh…” I stammered, not having any explanation preloaded in case this happened. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you draw on this ten to make it look like a hundred?”

  I feigned shock as she showed me the poorly altered numbers on the bill’s corners.

  “Oh wow!” I said. “Nope! That’s crazy, I didn’t even notice someone had done that. Go ahead and ring that up as a ten, please. Because that’s a $10 bill, obviously.”

  Opening the register, she counted out my nine dollars in change while occasionally pausing and giving me the eye. In my mind, she was debating whether or not to call a SWAT team in to haul me off to Fort Leavenworth. A far less dramatic result occurred; she silently gave me my change and I scurried out the door. I didn’t want to look like I was sprinting to my car because that would look suspicious. Instead, I did one of those gliding walk-runs that you do when you need to poop but you don’t want to fully commit to a run in fears of bouncing a turd out.

  I needed to sit in my car until I calmed down, but I also wanted to be as far away from the Walmart as possible. Pulling into a nearby bank lot, I shifted into park and turned off the engine. My breath and heart rate were racing like I had never felt before, and this was all thanks to a complete nonissue. A girl took a bill from me, gave it pause for three seconds, and then did her job and handed me the correct change. No managers were called, no lights were shined in my face in an interrogation room, and no heavily armed SWAT teams arrived via helicopter. Even still, it took me the better part of a half hour to compose myself enough to drive home.

  This was the point in my life in which I realized where my “line” was. Slacking off at work and making managers and coworkers hate me was no problem. Skipping class and risking disciplinary action didn’t faze me. It was the prospect of actual trouble, jail time, that I couldn’t handle. I had seen Face/Off too many times, and those magnetic prison boots looked really uncomfortable. My blood wasn’t hard enough for actual crimes, so I’d be sticking to perfectly legal mischief going forward.

  My final bit of trouble at AMC was perfectly legal and even had management's express permission, but it was the one that had the most lasting ramifications. It involved our break room, where almost nothing of note ever happened. Outside of the time that the mushroom-dealing usher kicked in the glass of the vending machine to retrieve a stuck tube of Rolos, the break room was a historically uneventful area of the theater.

  I’m not one to care about the decor of a room, but even I noticed that our break room was clinical and cold. White paint covered the walls, and there was a healthy amount of nacho cheese and ketchup splattered around. Two vending machines sat on one end, a video camera was perched up in the corner, and the computer that served as our time clock was stationed near the door.

  At some point, management decided it was time to paint the break room to make it more inviting. AMC had yet to discover e-mail technology despite this being in the early 2000s, so we were informed of this the way we were informed of everything: on a piece of paper tacked to a corkboard. They were taking suggestions from employees about how the room was to be renovated, such as what color it should be painted and whether it should have a theme.

  I didn’t care about the colors or what the room looked like, but I did care about having a good excuse to do something stupid. My idea wasn’t simple enough to write into the provided spaces for color suggestions, so I went downstairs to talk to a manager.

  “Hey Jackie, I have an idea for the break room.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How about we buy a few buckets, a ton of tennis balls, and a bunch of different colors of paint. Then, anybody who’s interested can join up after work one night and dip tennis balls in paint and throw it super hard at the walls. It’ll leave a big colored splat and might look really cool by the end.”

  The correct answer would have been “no,” but Jackie said she’d float the idea to her higher-ups. Somehow, they wound up approving this. I was given a company credit card and told to go to the Home Depot to get supplies.

  As I write this, I’m trying to think of what gave me this idea. My first instincts are that it had to be something I saw on Jackass or in a Mario Tennis minigame. After some research, I found that neither of these things ever had a “throw a paint-dipped tennis ball at a wall” segment. Mario Power Tennis for the GameCube included a minigame called “Artist on the Court” that had a similar theme, but that didn’t come out until 2004. Perhaps word of this break room incident spread to Nintendo and they stole the idea.

  Home Depot was by no means an establishment that I frequented back then, and my knowledge of the store’s goods hasn’t really grown in the years since. I have a decent idea of what a two-by-four is (a wooden plank, and I believe the numbers refer to inches); I know the difference between a Phillips head screwdriver and the standard variety (one’s a plus, one’s a minus); and I learned the hard way about what a wall stud is after I had seven separate wall-mounted wooden DVD racks collapse and take down a good portion of my living room.

  Corporate credit card in hand, I hopped in my car and sped over to the cavernous, confusing, and very orange store. A thorough knowledge of its merchandise proved unnecessary, as it was simple enough to find a bunch of paint cans and empty buckets, although I had to make a separate run to Target to pick up the tennis balls. Management updated its corkboard notice to explain what we were going to do and when, and every employee was invited to take part.

  Once the night of the painting arrived, I noticed the only people who showed up were the young employees with nothing better to do on a weeknight. We now had a room full of two dozen teenagers, close to fifty tennis balls, and enough paint to cover an entire room and then some. Jackie brought in some tarps and asked us to cover the various electronics in the room before we started. Then she told us to have fun and she stepped out of the room. No goggles, no safety instructions, just “hey, put this thing over the clock-in computer so it doesn’t get messed up” and she was out the door. To be fair, I was the guy who came up with the idea and was tasked with getting the proper items from Home Depot, so maybe I should have thought of goggles.

  With Jackie out of the room, it was time for the paint to fly. Sure enough, a tennis ball covered in orange paint was whipped directly into Bryan’s eye within ten seconds. Through the bright blobs that were whizzing across the room, I clearly saw him staggering toward the door, arms outstretched, with his face looking like the Nickelodeon logo.

  Getting pa
int in your eyes is no fun, but I also learned that a tennis ball can hurt quite a bit if a 16-year-old football player throws it full speed into your temple. All of us were constantly getting pelted in every location—I thankfully avoided any crotch shots—and we weren’t the only victims. Our hastily placed tarps wasted no time in sliding off the various items in the room, so everything that was supposed to be protected was now fully exposed.

  A plastic bubble was supposed to protect the security camera in an upper corner of the room, but it shattered easily. Like a bank robber spraying foam over a camera’s lens in a movie, one of my coworkers beaned the exposed camera hard and obscured it. Vending machines made for a large target, and their exteriors and windows became completely covered. Once the tarp was knocked off of the clock-in computer, the keyboard only had a few seconds of life before multicolored paint seeped between every key and rendered it unusable.

  Everyone was in pain or at least half-blinded by the time Jackie re-entered the room. She had run into Bryan in the hallway as he walked out of the restroom with bloodshot eyes. After he informed her of what happened, she must have realized how ill-conceived this idea was and ran back to stop it. I’m not sure how long she was yelling for us to stop before any of us heard it, but we eventually turned and saw her as the tennis balls stopped bouncing and slopped to the floor.

  Every inch of that room was covered: walls, ceiling, floor, vending machine, camera, computer, as well as over 20 young AMC employees. Surveying the room, you could tell that Jackie immediately understood that this was a bad idea. She told us to clean ourselves up and go home, and said we’d later figure out what would happen to the break room.

  By the end of that week, Jackie was moved to another theater. I’m still not sure if this was a direct punishment for allowing the break room painting to take place, but it seemed suspicious that she was gone so quickly afterward. Someone had to be punished for the damage done to the items in the break room, and I wasn’t spared. At the beginning of my next shift, management pulled me into a room and informed me that I was being demoted back to regular staff status.

  I’m not sure why I put so much pride into my ill-gotten green epaulets, but I wasn’t about to go back to being a grunt. Instead of reverting back to a position in which I’d be easily bossed around, I quit without the slightest bit of anger. After all, I had been getting away with nonsense for years by then. They could have fired me at any point along the way, and I’d have shrugged my shoulders and said “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  My friends who still worked at the theater told me that within two weeks of my departure, management painted over the tie-dye vomit that covered the break room with an inoffensive shade of blue. The security camera and computer were replaced, the vending machines were thoroughly scrubbed, and everyone did their best to forget the tennis ball incident.

  I managed to cause residual trouble at AMC 30 even after I left. I had an usher friend smuggle out a walkie-talkie and we’d sit in the parking lot barking confusing orders to the staff until they realized what was going on. After buying a “TV-B-Gone” device that could turn off any TV, I’d stand in the concession line during rushes and stealthily turn off the screens that displayed all of the items and prices.

  Management never asked me to give my uniform back when I left, so I’d put it on friends who never worked at AMC and have them show up to the theater unannounced. I gave them elaborate backstories about how they were supervisors who transferred in from Nebraska. From afar, I’d see how long they’d be able to bum around the box office or concession stand giving orders (with hidden microphones in their pockets) before management realized they weren’t actual employees.

  I haven’t worked at AMC 30 for almost 15 years, but it’s still the theater I go to with my sisters whenever I’m back in Kansas. When I go there now, I don’t recognize any of the faces. A few of my fellow teenage employees went on to work for the company’s corporate office in Kansas City, but the staff of my old theater is now completely new. It’s still a great place to see a movie, but when I go back I can’t help but hope that there’s some insufferable teenage employee there that’s keeping management on their toes.

  Burying the Bucket

  Several periods of my life have been marked by obsessions that came and went. Along the way, a few have stood the test of time. A lifelong love of video games began with my first console—the NES—at the age of four, and I’ve been fascinated by professional wrestling ever since I first saw it on my television screen in 1993. Another longtime love of mine that has never seen my interest waver is pranking people. My brand of messing with people has run the spectrum of scope and consequence, ranging from innocent fun to potential legal proceedings.

  My early attempts at “pranks” make me think that I didn’t fully understand what a prank was supposed to be. When the idea of April Fools’ Day was first explained to me, I must have thought that it was simply an excuse to aggressively grief people rather than find clever ways to annoy them. Before each April Fools’ morning as a kid, I’d get up late in the night and wreak havoc upon my mother’s house.

  Every plate, bowl, and tray in her kitchen was removed and laid end-to-end across the floor with a single tortilla chip on each one, maximizing how annoying it would be to clean up. The living room TV was unplugged, leading to the “hilarious” consequence of it not turning on when she pressed the power button. Fake cockroaches were placed in her tubs of butter. Confetti was heaped upon the ceiling fan, set to shower down across the room whenever it was turned on. Clocks were set to a variety of incorrect times, many with random alarms primed to go off throughout the day. Every single movie in her VHS collection was removed and put back in the wrong box (the same went for all the bags of cereal). Incisions were made on the undersides of potato chip bags, and the packages were carefully slid back onto the shelf with all the chips still inside. When a bag was removed, the entirety of its contents would crash to the kitchen countertop or the floor.

  My mother took everything in stride, dealing with the cavalcade of annoyances and frequently—and rightfully—calling me a “little shit.” But one specific moment on April Fools’ Day 1997 was the final straw for her. Along with the other random stupid things I did around the house, I had placed a full bunch of bananas in her oven. My thinking was that she’d open the oven at some point and see a bunch of bananas, and that would be hilarious for some reason. The concept of a prank continued to elude me as I still thought that “random = funny = prank.”

  Once she had restored the majority of the house to working order, my mother wanted to relax with a frozen pizza. Setting the oven to preheat for a while, she went upstairs to use the restroom and get ready for the day. On a normal day, she’d have used the one downstairs near the kitchen, but I had set off a stink bomb in there earlier and its effects were still extremely potent.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, she was halfway down the stairs when she noticed a strong banana scent overpowering the horrific stink bomb stench emanating from the bathroom. The bananas had fully melted in the 425-degree heat traditionally reserved for a delicious Totino’s Party Pizza (I hope it was the Combination variety, but I can’t be sure). This wasn’t my intention, as I hadn’t considered that she’d almost certainly preheat the oven before using it. She had, and she opened the oven door to see flattened banana peels bleeding goopy, yellow sludge, quickly hardening into a thick crust on

  the floor of the oven. Turning the heat off, she fruitlessly attempted to clean the solidified banana goop once it had cooled. Residue remains almost twenty years later.

  I was at school while this happened, unaware that several years’ worth of annoyance had reached a boiling point in that moment. My history teacher’s words were falling on deaf ears as I mindlessly doodled scenes from GoldenEye in the margins of my notebook, wondering which of my “pranks” my mom was discovering at home. What I didn’t know was that she finally had enough and was currently enacting some revenge only a few hundred feet away fr
om me here at California Trail Junior High.

  The bell rang to signal the end of history hour, and I grabbed my books and headed back toward my locker. My friend Afshin had the locker next to mine, so I always bored him during this walk with my current thoughts on the world of professional wrestling. Sure, it was nice to see Randy Savage back with Miss Elizabeth, but it made no logical sense that he’d join the New World Order. After all, Hogan’s betrayal of him via multiple leg drops (exposing himself as the teased “third man” joining Scott Hall and Kevin Nash) at Bash at the Beach less than a year earlier was the catalyst for the very formation of the villainous group. If the stable continued to expand at this rate without logical storylines to support the reasoning, WCW was running a risk of diluting one of the true phenomenons in the industry and could possibly squander (ED NOTE: STOP)

  Sorry.

  From down the hallway I saw a cluster of classmates standing near the general area of mine and Afshin’s lockers. I didn’t imagine it had anything to do with me, but I was still nervous about the possibility of having to interact with a bunch of my peers. Unless the person was Afshin or one of the very few other people I regularly interacted with, I did everything I could to fly under the radar of anyone close to my age. Talking to these people was bad enough, but the reality of the situation proved to be even more terrifying. Like a scene from my most social anxiety-riddled nightmares, their eyes turned directly to me as I approached the locker.