GPOYW—Throwback edition
This is a picture of me and a few cohorts chillin’ in our high school parking lot. It was us just before we went on a harrowing adventure to Arlington, MA, where we coned the school librarian.
Now, for the uninformed, here are the facts:
1. All librarians are bitches
2. The librarians at LHS were even greater bitches. Whether it be the perpetually pregnant slutty one, the one who would yell at you from behind her desk, or the kind-of-nice-but-still-pretty-mean lady who checked out all your books and made you leave your various fruit juices (since they didn’t sell soda at LHS) on the counter before you went in.
3. The head librarian, known as Ms. Lum, was the biggest bitch of all. She once deleted an entire Spanish paper I had been doing because I didn’t know my login password and used a guest account. Despite the fact that she could see from her admin panel that all I had open was Microsoft Word, she gave me no warning and shut my machine off. When I went to complain, she solved the problem by yelling me my password loud enough for half the library to hear, and offered no apology for deleting my entire paper, which was due in about an hour to another unforgiving bitch of a teacher named Ms. Desloges.
4. Coning is the act of gathering a ton of traffic cones, and strategically placing them all over someone’s lawn, porch, or any other reachable place on their property (perhaps their roof if you’re feeling vindictive).
5. Coning became a huge fad senior year of high school, mostly due to the entire town’s gas pipelines being re-done at once after a house fucking exploded.
6. One of my enterprising friends found Ms. Lum’s home address, and proposed a journey into the slums of Arlington, MA to cone this bitch back to the stone age. (Or at least the CONE AGE, AMIRITE?!?!) (I’m not.)
Now, the story.
We met in the LHS parking lot, bringing with us as many cones, barrels, sawhorses and rolls of fencing as we could find. My van was used as the primary courier for all the materials, as the back of my van had no seats in it because I pulled landscaping duty at my house and used the bed of my van to haul mulch and woodchips from our recycling center back to my house.
My van (as I’ve clarified in earlier posts) was a piece of crap. One of its greatest flaws was its malfunctioning gas gauge, which showed that the car was empty 100% of the time. I used a triptometer to try to keep track of how long it had been since I’d filled up, but it was a delicate business, full of many close calls and pushes to the gas station.
That night, as we rolled into Arlington, the car felt a bit funny, but I shook it off as a byproduct of hauling close to 50 cones in the car. We hopped off of Route 2 and hit Arlington Heights, a Boston suburb full of ridiculously high hills.
As we rolled up the final street, my car completely lost the will to drive, and stopped briefly in the middle of a steep hill, before starting to roll backwards at nearly 40 mph. I pumped the brakes to no avail, before throwing on the E-brake and doing a slow release-catch of the brake as I backed into a random driveway.
At this point we were a bit deflated, but $60 of gas (plus the price of the canister) later, we were back on track thanks to a gas station about a quarter of a mile away.
We approached the house with all the caution and stealthiness of stampeding bull elephants, barely suppressing our audible giggles as we covered her house in cones. Suddenly, after placing about 20 or so, a door slammed. Frozen in our tracks, we pivoted on the spot, looking for the source.
“What the hell are you doing?” came a raspy voice, not from Ms. Lum’s house, but from her next-door neighbor.
“Um..” stuttered one of our posse (perhaps Brian Sewell) “We’re just…”
“I think you have the wrong house!” the neighbor said, standing angrily (and a bit confusedly) on the porch.
At that point, one of us finally summoned the power to move and yelled “Ditch!”, the universal coner’s code for “get the fuck outta here”. As we bolted the neighbor retreated back into the house, for what we weren’t entirely sure.
As we left, my friend Taky decided it was absolutely necessary to get some pictures of the house, and halted our fleeing caravan to snap a few shots. After a few flashes of his camera, I suddenly realized that the flashes were coming not only from his car, but from the neighbor’s house as well. The son of a bitch was taking pictures of our car! At that point we floored it, but not before the neighbor took a couple of nice photos of possibly the only rusted red 1995 Dodge Caravan with nothing but a tarp and cones in the back in the greater Boston area.
At home, we celebrated our victory with unease. Would Ms. Lum see the photos and attempt to use the administration to check our plates and numbers? A lot of us parked in the student lot in those days, and so it wasn’t out of the question. Instead, nothing became of it, leaving only this photo as an enduring memory of the lesser-known of three senior pranks levied against the bitches known as the LHS Librarians.
