Beached at Strawberries…
So umm yeah, when I was young Dot Rat I was troublemaker. I know, you’re all sitting there like “aaahaaa I knew it”….to which I say GFY…..the majority of us were troublemakers in one form or another. Some of the funniest and most heartwarming stories in any Dot Rat’s barroom convo arsenal include those from our youth….and the dumb shit we used to do. For instance my buddy Ricky liked to sit on the mailbox in Adams Corner on hot summer days wearing nothing more than shades and a pair of Adidas while giving cars the thumbs up….and no not that thumb. Then after he was bored with that he walk over to McDonald’s on Gallivan, stand in line and order Big Macs…..I mean utterly brilliant stuff here.
Who could forget the legendary Duchaney that did the Dorchester 500 buck naked on a moped…
Well my story is not as naked as those but you get the idea.
Myself, my big brother and my buddy Chris liked to take the shit show on the road. We were a tight knit group of maggots that loved screwing with people for a laugh. It wasn’t that we didn’t come from good homes or that we didn’t know right from wrong…..in retrospect the adrenaline involved was the allure. It started off small with tossing snowballs at cars and buses driving down the street….eventually we graduated to eggs. Put a small piece of granite on a trolley track….boom…awesomeness. A wrist rocket and a bag of M80’s was an entire weekend of fun. Smoke bombs on the trolley bus during the political rallies at Adams Corner….epic! An electrified pen left on a table where people fill out lottery tickets is pure magic too. Chris and I had a love of technical tricks so we started the clicker game. Cablevision of Boston used to have these remote controls designed to work with any cable box much like the Comcast ones today. Arm yourself with one of these bad Larry’s and get yourself within eyesight of someones TV….and you got a party on your hands.
Our chase for adrenaline led us to petty theft. Not something I’m particularly proud of to be perfectly honest. We didn’t go around pick pocketing innocent people or breaking into people’s homes, we did have some ethics even if it’s hard to decipher when talking along these lines. We liked to go into a department store and gank a video game or an RC car for our own enjoyment. As you can imagine, this hobby of mine was very nerve racking. If my father ever caught me…well dotrat.com may not exist today. Ma wouldn’t have been too pleased either…. and this lady was Bruce Lee with a shoe let me tell ya.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVV0okFUbo
Anyway, we are trolling around Downtown Crossing one afternoon when my buddy Chris decides to check out Strawberries Records. We walk in and immediately start casing the joint, the manager is giving us all the evil eye, he knew we were up to no good. Not like it mattered, we were all cocky at that point. What I never accounted for that day was a new technology called a security tag. You see in 1987, this little invention was taking the theft prevention industry by storm but, someone forgot to give this f*cking guy the memo and I did not know there would be ONE STRATEGICALLY PLACED ON THE CD I WAS ABOUT TO STUFF IN MY DRAWERS!!!! I’m sorry but this sh*t still angers me to this day, my “blood brothers” knew to tear their tags off but didn’t share the insight. So I prance toward the exit not even conceiving that these giant partitions would light up and set off an alarm that sounded like the goal horn at the garden.
Yeah, I started singing too….OH NOOOO OH NOOOOO. So Urkel the manager comes over and starts frisking me like I’m going to Concord MCI for a 10 year bid. He stops short of asking me to bend over and spread em before I finally give up the EPMD CD thinking he would have mercy on me. He tells me that he wants me to go back to the office so he can call the police. I freak out…there is no way I can let my parents find out I’m heisting CD’s…all I can picture is my father walking into the police station like Mike Tyson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTTAB4V3-Zw
I had to hatch a plan quick….so I used simple mathematics, my weight versus Urkel’s weight. Easily a 50 to 60 pound difference here so I sat on the floor. He comes over and asks what I was doing. I told him straight up…. “there’s no way I’m going back there, my parents will kill me if I get arrested”. He tries grabbing the hood of my jacket and attempts to drag me to the back of the store. I can see my crew outside the front door losing their f*cking minds laughing….literally fogging up the windows on the front of the store. Urkel’s head is turning purple because he can’t budge me. This is probably the only time in my life I truly felt blessed to be a girthy dude. Finally after five minutes…he gives up and tells me to screw. I jump right up and belt out a “see ya!” …I couldn’t contain my relief. I ran outside of Strawberries and declared from that day forward I would never steal again. My brother still laughs about it till this day….I still can’t believe it actually worked.
I guess the moral of the story is it doesn’t pay to steal, and if you are still going to do it, be prepared for consequences. Just be a good person, or start eating and get really good at beaching yourself……