It's hard to know why a man turns to a life of crime. A broken family? Grinding poverty? Hanging out with the wrong crowd? Or maybe he's just a rotten seed, destined from birth to be a blight on humanity.
I have no excuse. My family was stable and loving, we were solidly middle class, and my friends were harmless dorks. The biggest hardship of my youth was hay fever. The mean streets of Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Murder Incorporated were a world away from my idyllic New England home. So I must have been born bad; nothing else can explain the reign of terror I visited on my second grade class.
It started innocently enough. In the spring of 1957, my class set up a beautiful miniature farm. It had a farmhouse, barn, and silo made from construction paper, and a large population of plastic poultry and livestock. Within a few days, that population started to dwindle.
Why cattle rustling? Because like most fledgling criminals, I was burdened with a first-class set of model trains. My layout included a farm which was not nearly as well stocked as the one at school. I figured that I would borrow a couple of cows and return them the next day. Even though I forgot to bring them back, nobody seemed to notice. That afternoon, I lifted three chickens and a goat. I just lingered a while before heading out to recess, and when the classroom was empty, I stuffed them in my pocket. As before, there were no repercussions. Even my parents seemed oblivious to my farm's sudden productivity and my remarkable success at animal husbandry.
I grew headier with each heist. I soon left the farm behind and started moving small school supplies - rulers, scissors, and the like. But even the thrill of unlimited paste wasn't enough. I got greedy.
As part of a science unit on weather, our teacher, Mrs. Pierce, constructed a milk carton anemometer. We took it outside one windy day, and she timed the blade rotations with a gleaming silver stopwatch. It was love at first sight. I had to have it.
I spent that night in feverish preparation, devising a scheme so diabolical that Sherlock Holmes himself would be baffled. At exactly 2:55 the next afternoon, as school was letting out, I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could see the watch. When she left the room for a moment, I bolted.
Ingenious, no?
For the next few hours, I went into a timing frenzy. How far could I run in a minute? How long could I hold my breath? What I should have been timing was how long before the jig was up, because soon after, I dropped the watch on the sidewalk and broke the crystal. I could no longer tell Mrs. Pierce that I simply forgot to give her back the watch before I left school - the linchpin of my scam. Despite this setback, I was determined not to crack, to play it cool as long as I could.
Which turned out to be not that long. When my father came home from work, he found me banging my head against the side of our porch. He asked what I was doing, and I said, "Trying to kill myself." Keen observer of human nature that he was, he got suspicious.
After a call from the school, he had the facts but decided to sweat it out of me anyway. When my father got seriously angry, he would speak softly and slowly, but with menacing intensity and volatile sarcasm. He also possessed an extremely potent version of the hairy eyeball which could extract a confession faster than the Spanish Inquisition.
"I understand you got a stopwatch at school today."
Deny everything.
"A stopwatch? What stopwatch?"
"How about the broken one we found in your jacket."
Oops.
"Where did you get it?"
"My teacher gave it to me."
That was true.
"Why did she give it to you?"
Uh oh.
"She gave it to me for being a good student."
Even at seven, I knew I was in it deep.
"Really?"
"Yeah."
Deeper and deeper.
"Well, we'll just have to call her up and thank her for giving you such a wonderful gift."
He reached for the phone. I folded like an origami crane.
"Wait a minute! Let's talk."
Game. Set. Match.
Justice followed swiftly. I received a thorough spanking, lost a few month's allowance to pay for the watch, and was forced to apologize to Mrs. Pierce. I'm convinced that only part of the punishment was for the theft; the rest was for the dimwitted way I'd committed it. My father, who'd led a fairly wild youth on the streets of Paterson, NJ, was likely more embarrassed by my ineptitude than my criminality.
And so with chastened heart and sore behind, my career as an evil mastermind came to an end.
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