By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
(This is Part II of a two-part column. Part I, “Raiding in Reading,” ran in The Advance last Sunday, and you can read it HERE.)
In the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, there is a scene in which Gibson’s character asks that his son, played by Heath Ledger, be assigned to Mel’s command because the son knows “every deer path and swamp trail” in the area. That is how we would have thought of ourselves when we went out raiding in our Pennside neighborhood at Halloween—savvy patriots able to outwit the brilliant General Cornwallis—had the film come out in 1982 instead of 2000.
We knew which backyards to cut through, which houses had motions sensors, and where the muskrat holes were when we had to jump across the creek that meandered behind our backyards and glowed in the October moonlight.
We were confident we could outrun every adult and hide in bushes and spaces that the police would never find. And we all solemnly agreed that if you felt that your capture was imminent, and you did not have a box of Pop Rocks and a Pepsi to blow up your stomach, then you ditched the evidence—soap bars, toilet paper, and corn chucked down sewer openings or into hedgerows.
In this youthful arrogance, some of us inevitably became sloppy.
But when we were just like our country—young, scrappy, and hungry—we were good. Craig Carpenter and I could wrap a car in less than 30 seconds, so long as it didn’t have a roof rack and wasn’t parked too close to the curb. Craig would stand on the driver’s side, I’d be on the passenger’s side, and we’d roll and toss the toilet paper back and forth as we carefully walked down the sides of the car until it was fully wrapped in Charmin.
Soaping a car’s window took even less time and was far less risky. A lot of the kids I raided with went to Catholic school, so they liked to draw crosses on the car windows, spreading God’s word in soap streaks. And if you parked your car beyond the crescent of light thrown by the streetlamps, you might wake up the next morning to find every inch of every window covered in a thin layer of Irish Spring that would require the help of a garden hose to get it off before you could drive to work.
As we grew older and some of our friends got their licenses, our neighborhood became a popular meeting place for raiding parties, and on some nights our ranks grew to as many as 15 people which we knew was brazen and reckless. Homeowners weren’t as likely to nab one in a party of four, but just like the Wild Kingdom nature show on TV, any time you’re running in a herd, there’s always going to be a zebra that takes a bad step or runs into a backyard surrounded by fencing and finds itself alone, with nowhere to escape, as the lion comes in for the kill.
Also, our out-of-Pennside friends didn’t know the “deer paths and swamp trails” like we did. I remember sprinting through a darkened backyard one night. leading the escape with my friend Caleb running a few steps behind me, when I saw a clothesline stretched across the yard. I yelled “Clothesline!”, ducked under it, and continued to run. Unfortunately, Caleb didn’t hear me, and the clothesline caught him at neck level, throwing him backward off his feet and knocking all the air out of him. I saw Caleb at a wedding a few years ago, and he said he still had painful memories of that night and the trouble he had speaking for weeks afterward.
Another Halloween, we converged on the house of an older couple who exulted in commandeering any of the Wiffleballs we hit into their backyard. Our friend Tom lived next door and decided he wasn’t going to hit their house with us because it would be too obvious and they would know it was him, so he sat in his living room and watched TV while the rest of us snuck out and threw handfuls of corn at the couple’s bay window. The old man did his own sneaking out, and the next thing we knew he was on our tail.
Most of us scrambled to distant corners of the neighborhood—except for Greg Laibe. Greg wasn’t familiar with the neighborhood and only knew that Tom’s house was next door so he ran there. The neighbor, though elderly, wasn’t blind, and followed Greg into Tom’s living room where a shouting match ensued with Tom telling his neighbor to get the hell out of his house and the neighbor pointing at a poorly hidden Greg behind a chair and yelling that he was going to call the cops.
Threats were made back and forth, but things eventually calmed down and the neighbor left. Tom was annoyed that Greg had been so stupid and banned him from his house.
The dumbest moment in the Halloween Tales of Pennside belonged to my friend Robbie Miller. Robbie was a few years behind me and formed his own raiding party with my brother Tommy and a couple of other guys. I was not there on that fateful night, but I heard plenty about it later.
Robbie and my brother were two of the most athletic kids in our neighborhood, and on this night, Robbie wanted to show off his vertical jumping ability by leaping onto the hood of a parked car—an unmarked cop car, as he only discovered after the fact—and then running across it. One person who was not impressed was the police officer sitting behind the wheel.
For reasons I still don’t understand, none of the four boys took off when confronted by the pissed-off cop. Not only that, but they willingly gave up their real names and addresses. Fortunately, Robbie’s ill-advised scamper didn’t cause any damage so no charges were filed. Robbie’s parents did exercise their right to ground their youngest child when the officer showed up at their door later that evening, and the raiding careers of Robbie and my brother both ended then and there.
I, forever the earnest student, learned a valuable lesson in that moment.
A few years later, I was in my brother’s dorm room at the University of Maryland drinking beers with my girlfriend and some of my brother’s friends. Though my girlfriend and I were of age, the overzealous RA who stormed in and busted the party didn’t seem to care because drinking in the dorm as forbidden no matter who was doing it. The RA took his job seriously, and methodically went around the room with a clipboard, demanding everyone’s name and address.
When he got to me I answered without hesitation: “Robbie Miller, 212 Mayer Street, Pennside, Pennsylvania, 19606.”
“Learn from the mistakes of others,” that great philosopher Groucho Marx once said. “You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
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FXBG Advance columnist Drew Gallagher’s book Funny for Nothing was released on July 28 by Long River Press. It’s available for sale in the Fredericksburg area at Novel Bookstore (212 William Street), Liberty Town Arts (916 Liberty Street), The Card Cellar (915 Caroline Street), Wren & Sparrow (807 Caroline Street), and Laudenbach Brewing in Stafford (45 Centreport Parkway, Unit 101). You can also buy it on Amazon.
