Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Scott Mills and The End of Pranks

I want to take a quick moment to pimp out the genius that is Scott Mills. He’s going to be doing a short story for Western Tales of Terror (the art for it, wait till you see who’s WRITING it) and through our conversations I got directed to his EBay store. He has all these little illustrations he does and starts them at 5 bucks. I snagged a Fantastic Four and a Senor Muerte. I paid shipping on both of them and Scott was nice enough to throw in a free one of Senor Meurte kicking Captain America’s ass. So now I have three pieces of original Scott Mills art for the low, low price of 14 bucks. And believe me, I plan on getting more. I will go toe to toe with anyone for that Watchmen one he is currently selling. Anyway, check out Scott’s books, he’s a Top Shelf go-to guy and check out his EBay store. Buy everything except for the Watchmen one.

Ok, daily pimp is done. I need to keep up the appearance that this is a comic related blog, know what I mean?

I’m sort of college reminiscent this week, the past two stories being about Boston University. I want to drop another one on you guys, one that will probably make me look a lot nastier than the hooker hand story but is so funny, to me at least, that it just transcends being a low moment.

I was on an all male floor my freshman and sophomore year in college and we were epitome of dope-smoking, heavy drinking slackers. We never slept, we took hardly anything serious, and we just always found ways to piss everyone in our building off that didn’t live on our floor. We were the fourth floor, damn it.

At first our pranks were somewhat harmless. We switched around all the buttons in the elevator, for instance. If you press the second floor you go to the eleventh. If you press door open it actually closed. We would also spend an entire night first taping a sheet of newspaper to the outside of someone’s door (the doors swung inward) so they couldn’t see out and then stacked a couple of hundred cans from the recycling room in front of it. When they broke through the paper cans went every which way. When people caught onto to that we replaced the cans with giant metal garbage pails so they stubbed their toes while kicking through the paper. One of my favorite “innocent” pranks was when we took the clothes out of some girl’s washing machine and replaced it with about 40 cinnamon-raisin bagels we stole from the cafeteria. We left her clothes in a different washer and paid for the load, with a note saying “Sorry, too good to pass up”.

But then there was the prank war with the 6th floor. They had a poster of some chick on the wall of their communal area that we defaced with graffiti one night. Standard prank, but they couldn’t just leave it at that. The defaced our bulletin board, hung pictures of gay porn and tagged up all over it.

Up until that moment I don’t think we even noticed we had a bulletin board, but that was still a sign of war damn it.

So during peak class hours we put Vaseline on all of their doorknobs so they couldn’t open their doors when they got back. They tied our doorknobs together while we slept so we couldn’t leave our rooms (swing in, remember). We put cellophane on their toilet bowls so their piss splashed and they crap lingered on their ass cheeks.

It went back and forth for a couple of weeks. And then, one fateful day, we were pretty toked up and I decided to end this war once and for all. The prank we pulled the whole building in an uproar, but goddamn it was worth it.

We got one of those McDonalds plastic Halloween buckets, the ghost one to be exact. They give these out every year around Halloween time; kids are to use them for trick-or-treating. I took this bucket into the bathroom and dropped a hybrid piss/shit into it, wiped my ass and threw the toilet paper in the bucket for good measure. We then put the lid on the bucket, cut some air holes into it, put a note on it that said “Game Over” and left it in the desk they had in their common room.

Now, I wasn’t there for the big moment, but I heard about it. Apparently, the 6th floor started gradually smelling like shit and it got worse, a lot worse. We hid the pail behind some trash and books, I don’t know if they ever even thought to open the drawer but they really just didn’t localize the source for around 4 or 5 days.

Then, one afternoon, our RA called an emergency meeting. We all gathered in our common area, he explained to us that the pranks have gone too far. No one wants to know who did it, they don’t want to drag this out, but this better not ever happen again “or else”. Our RA was raging. He was so pissed. He called us “animals” and lectured us for an hour on the concepts of respect and hygiene. Afterwards, the resident director came and talked to us. Everyone’s face had this classic “What THE FUCK is wrong with you people” look to it. Our RA quit at the end of the semester, didn’t even finish the year.

Most of the guys from the 6th floor found it funny as hell. They admitted that we did win and the game was, indeed, over. They said that their RA warned them to no longer socialize with our floor; he was actually afraid of us, and we apparently have no sense of morality or decency and people like us are capable of horrible things.

Looking back at it now, all I did was shit in a bucket.

Labels: mitc

Scott Mills and The End of Pranks

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

7 Comments

Previous Posts