The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  Arriving back at his place with the Taco Bell bounty, my sisters and I sat down on the couch with our food while Dad took up his usual post-bar spot on the floor. Now, it was just a matter of waiting out the next step in the process. It starts with him repeating things like “Taco Bell is the best food” and “if you don't like Taco Bell, you’re an idiot” in between bites of beefy crunchy cheesy thingies. Next, he starts to pat his stomach near the end of the meal before lying face-down on the carpet. He then mumbles about being tired for a solid 15 minutes in which he’s too tired to actually stand up and walk to his bed. This process can sometimes be expedited with a little prodding, frequently involving throwing things at his face or poking him in the stomach. When it’s time for him to actually make the move to the bed, he temporarily stands upright before crawling up the stairs at a sloth-like speed, using his hands to support himself on each step. After he disappears at the top of the stairs, the sounds of snoring emanate from his bedroom within seconds of his taco-filled body collapsing on the mattress.

  Katie, Kayla, and I took some time to clean up the living room while we waited for him to enter a deep sleep. Once the snoring started, we got to work. My sisters had taken my request seriously, making enough fresh spaghetti to fill the majority of a ten-gallon bucket. Before we dumped condiments into it to make it a sticky mess, I put clear shipping tape around the “YOUR KEYS ARE IN THE MICROWAVE, DUMMY” note and wiggled it down to the bottom of the pasta. The fresh pasta smelled great, but it became less appetizing when we took the bucket into the backyard and sullied it with full containers of salsa and maple syrup. Forks and spoons wouldn’t do the trick when it came time to stir, so we did our best to mix everything up with one of the shovels. This ensured that on top of the salsa and syrup that he’d have to paw through, there would also be plenty of dirt sticking to everything.

  With everything properly gooed up, it was time to put this thing in the ground. We probably should have considered checking into the placement of power cables before we started hacking away at the dirt, but we somehow managed to avoid electrocuting ourselves in the dumbest way possible. Outside of my revenge on Larry as a kid, none of us had much experience in the field of digging holes. Everything took longer than expected because of our inexperience. After working our way through some roots or skeletons or whatever it was that was blocking our path, we finally wound up with a hole big enough for our pasta bucket. We heaved it in, covered it up with dirt, and then stuck two shovels into the mound like the American flag on the surface of the moon.

  My sisters and I said goodbye, and they headed back to my mother’s house. When my dad woke up and found his house empty, he’d probably think that I went back with them. After all, my mother actually has extra pillows and blankets and beds at her place. By contrast, my dad has a terribly uncomfortable fold-out couch, no blankets, and a stained old pillow with no case. Also, from time to time, his house is known to be filled with wasps. Deciding where to sleep when I’m back in town is like trying to decide between having some nice Kansas City barbeque for dinner or getting stung by a bunch of damn wasps.

  On this particular night, I’d have to stay at his place if I wanted to document the results of the prank. His morning routine is predictable, so I set my alarm for 5:45 a.m. to have enough time to set up a camera before his went off at six. Minutes after his alarm goes off, he emerges from the bedroom like a hungover groundhog and ambles down the stairs in his robe and baseball cap. Next, he grabs a gigantic energy drink, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes before spending what feels like 45 minutes sitting on his front steps, smoking and playing Words With Friends (At least, that’s what he does now. Maybe it was Snake back then?). Most mornings, he’ll spot a squirrel that he deems is “up to something” and then text me updates about its suspicious behavior.

  On this particular morning, I knew his routine would go off the rails before he had a chance to light his first cigarette. You see, his brain shuts down entirely if he is not aware of the exact location of his pocket-sized necessities at all times. This consists of his cigarettes, lighter, phone, gum, and keys. With the last link in that chain nowhere to be found, his routine would have to wait until those keys were safely in his robe pocket where they belonged.

  When my alarm woke me, I immediately grabbed my still camera and placed it on the floor of his back deck. I adjusted its location so it had a clear view of the dirt mound in its viewfinder while still remaining inconspicuous. All of my stuff in the living room was moved to the basement to keep with the illusion that I had gone back to my mother’s house. With a couple of minutes left before he’d be performing his majestic robed morning shuffle, I perched myself at the top of the basement stairs and prepared to stealthily film him with my flip phone.

  As soon as I heard the deliberate, slow steps coming down from his bedroom, I hit record and anxiously awaited his reaction. My vantage point didn’t allow for much of a view, but I caught a glimpse of him heading toward the kitchen to grab his smoking accessories. He stopped in his tracks once he reached the spot where his keys usually were. Despite not being able to see him, I could definitely hear him.

  “Oh, god dammit, Dan…”

  His tone was the one that he reserves for when he’s genuinely angry about something. Considering that he thought that he was the only person in the house when he said that, I had little doubt about his anger’s authenticity. “Check backyard” was the note sitting where his keys should have been, and he immediately stomped to the back porch.

  The first sign that my plot wasn’t working came as soon as he stepped outside.

  “WHY IS THERE A CAMERA BACK HERE?”

  Well, shit. There went my plans for a candid shot of him digging for his keys. I barely had time to be disappointed by that thought before I saw the camera fly into the living room and land face-down on the couch. Well, there went my plans for any usable footage of this prank.

  “DAN, I FOUND THE CAMERA!” he yelled into the house. “I know you’re here! I’m not in the mood for this shit today! Where are my keys???”

  Even without being able to capture any good footage, I stayed silent so that I could watch the prank play out until the bitter end. YouTube might not be able to see it, but I’d be close enough to hear all the grunts and cursing as he voluntarily plunged his arms into the disgusting pasta bucket.

  “All right, Dan, I know you’re here,” he continued to yell. “Now this is happening until I get my keys back!”

  What was happening? I was out of sight and all of my belongings were down in the basement. At least, that’s what I thought, until I saw him walk past the basement doorway with a grocery bag full of my newest Xbox 360 games.

  Shit. I had left my 360 plugged into his TV, and at that point I was working as a video game reviewer for a local college newspaper and website. As the only gaming editor, I still had a ton of holiday releases to catch up on over winter break. They were now literally walking out the front door to face some unknown fate.

  After the door closed behind him, I could hear him yelling things from the front porch but I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. A quick moment later, I clearly heard the sound of a game case hitting concrete. What was he doing? Was he just throwing my games into the parking lot?

  It didn’t take long for me to realize what was actually happening. His roof was slanted, and he was unsuccessfully trying to throw my games onto it. One by one, they were hitting the shingles and then sliding off until they free-fell to the concrete below.

  *THUD, SLIDE, CRACK*

  There goes Left 4 Dead.

  *THUD, SLIDE, CRACK*

  That was probably Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

  Sliding off the roof and dropping onto concrete was actually worse than if they had stayed up there. One option required a ladder; the other could render the games useless. Dad had my number. I wanted to see my quickly deteriorating prank play out, but not as badly as I wanted to save my games from an undignified, gravelly death. Biting m
y lip, I stopped recording on my cell phone and ran outside in my socks and pajamas as more cases hit the pavement.

  “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, STOP,” I pleaded.

  “Aw, look,” he said. “Looks like it’s not that fun being on the other side of this, is it?”

  “This is totally different. I was trying to prank you and you’re just breaking my shit.”

  “And I’m gonna keep doing it until I get my keys back,” he said as he pulled another game out of the bag. “Gonna give them to me or is this one going too?”

  I glanced down to see Sonic Unleashed in his hand, and my unspoken thought was, well, that wouldn’t be much of a loss. Seeing him with the upper hand was killing me, however, so I relented. With no need to keep up the bucket charade, I walked into the house and anticlimactically grabbed his keys from the microwave. We made the games-for-keys trade and I dejectedly picked up the rest of the cracked cases off the pavement.

  My attempt had failed miserably, so I explained the original plan to my father and offered to extract the bucket from his backyard. He declined on the basis of it being too dangerous because of the possibility of severing underground cables. Now that I think about it, he might have just been worried about temporarily losing cable TV and having to deal with a repairman.

  To this day, the bucket sits underground exactly where my sisters and I buried it. I’ve offered to exhume it on numerous occasions, but my father never has any interest in getting his yard dug up again. After almost a decade, I can’t help but imagine what the bucket’s contents look like. It was a mess of goo, pasta, and dirt back then and I’d love to see what the years and an assortment of underground creatures have done to it.

  As it stands, it’s an unmarked grave commemorating many years of annoying my family. By that point in my life, I had found a more fruitful and varied assortment of people to mess with who were in no way related to me. Surrounded by like-minded idiots of the same age, it was time to narrowly avoid getting my ass kicked in the college dorms.

  Hashinger

  After a very comfortable and private adolescence consisting of playing video games, watching wrestling, and copiously masturbating—rarely at the same time—in the comfort of my childhood home, moving into the college dorms was exactly what I needed. I had just turned 18, and I was destined to live a very boring life if I didn’t find some kind of kick in the ass that would force me to coexist with others my own age.

  Knowing that college would be a dramatic change of pace, my mother recommended that I enroll in something called the Freshman Summer Institute at the University of Kansas. This involved living on campus for a month and attending classes, but its primary purpose for me was purely social. I couldn’t stand most of my peers in high school, and that was back when they were forced to pretend to be civil human beings under the watchful eyes of their parents. I was dreading what they’d be like once they were let loose for the first time in their lives.

  A four-person suite would be my living quarters for the month, featuring two rooms containing bunk beds, and a common living room area and bathroom in between them. Bryce was my roommate, and I wasn’t particularly concerned about him. We weren’t close friends—he tended to hang out with the jock crowd—but we had gone to school together since sixth grade and there had never been any problems between us.

  One of our suitemates was a kid named Lucky who was the son of a literal oil tycoon. Even for our one-month stay, he brought enough electronic equipment to launch a space shuttle. He fancied himself a DJ, and the small common area between our two bedrooms didn’t exactly muffle the day-long electronic music that he’d be playing or attempting to make. These were the days when I militantly rejected any music that wasn’t classic rock from the era between Chuck Berry and the end of Led Zeppelin.

  I had heard next to no hip-hop in my life, and I dreaded waking up every morning to Bryce’s alarm clock, which blared Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad.” This period actually led to me becoming more open-minded about rap and hip-hop. As the weeks went by, the constant Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, and Jay-Z that Bryce played in our room started to grow on me. While I got used to his musical preferences—and certainly preferred it to Lucky’s techno/electronica/ house/whatever it was—I could never quite get used to the girls that he’d bring to the room. I’d leave while they were messing around, obviously, but I had to overhear some truly mind-numbing conversations as Bryce tried to woo these future sorority recruits.

  Most of these exchanges have been successfully scrubbed from my mind. I’ll never forget Alyson, though. Like Lucky, Alyson had come from a very rich family about two hours away in rural Kansas. Her father had bought her several cars, but had neglected to teach her how to fill them with gasoline. Back in their hometown, he would drive her car to the station and fill up its tank whenever it was empty. Within days of Alyson arriving at the dorm, she broke into a crying fit about how selfish her father was for not wanting to drive two hours to put gas in her car. One pouty phone call later, her dad was on the highway to save the day as he always had. This continued for the entire month.

  Bryce’s frequent trysts served as a reminder of my lifelong lack of activity in this arena. Still a virgin who had never kissed a girl, I viewed college as my chance to wash away my reputation as an odd, awkward kid. Never mind the fact that the University of Kansas was about a half hour away from where I grew up and that the “odd, awkward” reputation came as a result of my actually odd and awkward personality at the time. This was college! Things would be totally different, and I’d seen enough movies to know that I’d be getting laid left and right as soon as I stepped into the dorms.

  Under wildly different circumstances, I’d actually had a chance to lose my virginity a couple of years before this. At the time, my mother’s boss was a former NFL player named Geoff. This was back when I believed I could become a pro wrestler if I just got into good enough shape. Geoff heard about this through my mother and offered to help me with my workout regimen since his enormous house featured a personal gym.

  A few times a week, I’d head over to Geoff’s to perform sloppy bench presses and almost pop blood vessels in my head while trying to do a single pull-up. To this day, I’ve never successfully performed a pull-up, and I’m convinced that any you’ve ever seen has been an optical illusion. This gigantic dude would do his best to give me tips here and there, then inevitably get frustrated and go back to doing curls with barbells that outweighed me.

  Geoff’s NFL days left him with more money than he knew what to do with. This led to him becoming a highly valued customer of an armada of Kansas City strippers. Whenever I’d go to his house, it wasn’t unusual to see one or more strippers lounging around his living room. I guess I can’t prove that they were all strippers, but they certainly fit the profile. If someone put Geoff’s girls in a police line-up and asked you “Which one is the stripper?” you’d point to all of them.

  Sometimes he’d bring one of the girls along as he gave me a ride home to my mom’s. The stripper would usually sit in the back, looking bored and smacking gum. On one occasion, a busty blonde sat in the passenger seat while I sat in the back. Geoff pulled up to my mother’s driveway and before I could say thanks and get out of the car, he stopped me.

  “Hey Dan,” Geoff said.

  I glanced at the front seat to see him slowly running his hand up the blonde’s thigh, sliding under her short skirt. As he darted his eyes back and forth from me to the girl’s crotch, he was clearly trying to draw my attention to what was happening down there.

  “This is my girl, Dan. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said, understanding exactly zero of what he was trying to imply. During this, the girl was staring blankly at me.

  “You get that? This is my girl. What do you think of that?”

  “Uh, that’s cool! Welp—thanks, Geoff!” I blurted out as I scampered from the car and ran into the house.

  To this day, I’m still not sure what he was going for with
that. Did he think that I was checking her out and he had to assert that she was “his” or something? Was he bragging in a “hey, check out this stripper that I get to have sex with!” kind of way?

  Based on what he asked my mother the next day, I think he was probably gauging how comfortable I was around women. Geoff asked her if I had ever had sex, and I’d have to assume that my mother responded with at least ten solid minutes of laughter.

  Armed with the knowledge that I was a virgin, Geoff offered a proposal to my mother. He owned several businesses in the area, one of which included a limousine service. His plan was to combine his access to limousines with his network of strippers to create the most fucked-up Make-A-Wish loss of virginity story imaginable.

  “I’ll get one of our biggest limos and fill it with the wildest girls I know,” Geoff told my mother. “I’ll tell them that Dan’s got cancer and he’s only got a few months left. They’ll fuck his brains out all night.”

  My mother isn’t a maniac, so she rightfully responded with something along the lines of “What the fuck is the matter with you? I’m not letting you put my 16-year-old son in a limousine with a bunch of your coked-up stripper friends.”

  I was crushed when she relayed this story to me. For an incredibly sexually frustrated teenager, the laws of logic and safety took a major backseat to “I would like to touch a vagina as soon as humanly possible.” Why wouldn’t my mother just loosen up and let her underage son partake in a drug-fueled limousine orgy that came with an almost certain risk of contracting several STDs? What a prude.

  Since I didn’t lose my virginity to a bevy of strippers while speeding down a rural Kansas highway—and I’m really glad I didn’t—I’d have to figure out how to make it happen the old-fashioned way: quietly existing in a college dorm and hoping that some girl would have pity sex with me. For a week or two during my summer program, it seemed like it might actually happen. Most of the participants were strangers to each other, so there was a revolving door of people coming in and out of almost every dorm suite in an effort to socialize.