The Reckoning

         As I’ve said previously, Bugs always had the laughter on his side—until that fateful day when he didn’t.

Remember: Bugs was my high school buddy, whose long-running series of practical jokes included, most infamously, peeing on classmates in the locker-room shower. By the spring of 1974, his victims—myself included—had decided we’d had enough. It was time for payback.

Bugs’ comeuppance followed one of his more vaudevillian stunts: planting a pie in the face of a senior all-star athlete. Compared with much of his oeuvre, this prank was relatively harmless. But his choice of  a target was a strategic misstep. The all-star was older, popular, and not someone to be trifled with.

It was, nonetheless, hilarious. I remember the incident in slow motion, watching from across the lunchroom table as Bugs sneaked up behind the all-star and quickly reached around to plant the banana cream pie. Bugs made a clean getaway—mostly because it took a while for the all-star to clear pie entrails from his eyes.

          But news travels fast in high school. It wasn’t long before the all-star confronted Bugs. Incredibly, Bugs—ever the bullshitter—somehow convinced him that he had been framed, and that the real culprit was another student, namely Rocco. Not surprisingly, the all-star secured his own retaliatory pie and nailed Rocco.

        The all-star wised up quickly after multiple eyewitnesses came forward to finger Bugs as the true culprit. Thus began the long-overdue reckoning. A coalition of Bugs’ victims formed and decided on a fitting punishment: a canal baptism. The all-star, along with a few football players, conspired to kidnap Bugs and toss him into the canal—a time-honored school tradition reserved for miscreants (and, occasionally, cute girls).

I was a passive member of the Dip Bugs Faction. Although I’d endured my fair share of razzing from Bugs over the years, by this time we had grown fairly close. In fact, I was one of the few people he confided in. I’d seen the “tears of a clown”—a vulnerability he hid from most.

I even interceded on his behalf with girls he was sweet on, though my matchmaking efforts were, at best, a wash. At first, I blamed my incompetence. Then I learned truth: The girls thought Bugs was a jerk. Two girls who went out with Bugs later compared notes and discovered Bugs had plied them with the same come-ons. He told each of them how special they were and that he felt overwhelmed because he’d never before “parked” with a girl before. Another told me she stopped seeing Bugs after he pressured her into labeling their relationship as “going steady.” It seemed Bugs was more interested in securing a prize than building a relationship.

So yes, Bugs and I were friends. Nonetheless, my participation in his kidnapping  felt less like betrayal and more like justice. It was time. His canal baptism was a symbolic end to his storied reign of pranksterism.

But oh, how he struggled! How he connived!

“OK, you got me,” he said when we grabbed him in the school parking lot. “Let me go and I’ll walk with you.”

Of course, the second we let him go, he bolted. We caught him again and this time he glowered at me.

“I swear I’ll get even,” he kept telling me

The irony was obvious, and I felt a little bad about it. The pie stunt was Bugs’ idea, but I had encouraged him. I might have been the one who overcame his reservations and convinced him to do it. Now here I was, helping to dunk him in the canal. Not a good look.

I rode in the all-star’s truck while two of his buddies held Bugs in the bed. Just as we pulled off the road near the canal, a cop appeared behind us.

“Officer! Officer!” Bugs screamed. “They’re gonna throw me in the canal!”

He thrashed around while the all-star’s buddies tried to hold him down. The rest of us approached the cop.

“He deserves it,” I told the officer.

“Yeah,” the all-star added. “He threw a pie in my face.”

“He’s been doing stuff all year,” said another. “This is our one chance to get even.”

The cop looked us over in silence, weighing the situation. Then he smiled and said, “Just let me get the hell out of here.”

We cheered as he drove away.

        The all-star and his crew dragged Bugs to the edge of the canal. At the last minute, Bugs, trying to save face, broke free and waded in himself. It might’ve worked. The water reached Bugs' mid-thigh and no one was going to go in after him. Problem was, the streambed was very uneven. Before long, Bugs lost his footing and plunged in up to his neck.

We offered him a ride back to school, but he refused. Later that day, at least one of our co-conspirators was baptized with an airborne pie.

Epilogue. After high school, I lost touch with Bugs. Our lives took very different paths. Bugs was a talented athlete who played in semi-pro leagues before coaching at the high school and junior college levels. I went to Utah State, studied journalism, and worked for several years at the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. Later, I went to law school and practiced law for three decades before retiring.

For most of that time, I heard little about Bugs—just the broad strokes of his career. Then the rumors began. Through the grapevine, we learned that Bugs’ high school piss play wasn’t a one-off. Apparently, he liked to pee on his wife, too. In the shower.

That revelation cast his high school hijinks in a very different light. His locker
room behavior now seemed less like simple mischief and more like a sexual preference or at least the foreshadowing of a later kink. Given the coercion involved in his teenage stunts, it’s worth wondering whether his wife also felt pressured to participate. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that she—now his ex-wife—was the one who disclosed the behavior.

The similarities between his teenage antics and his adult proclivities are undeniable. But I want to be careful here. I won’t claim that Bugs “got off” by peeing on classmates in high school. Nor will I assert that his marriage kink was identical to his locker-room stunts. But the throughline is hard to ignore. Both episodes suggest a desire to humiliate and degrade others.

I’ve portrayed myself as one of Bugs’ many victims, and that’s true. But writing this blog has made me reflect on my own behavior. I know that I also participated in his clownery—sometimes even when it was cruel or careless. While I don’t consider myself a bully, I do remember instances from my youth when I teased or harassed friends and acquaintances in ways that seemed harmless at the time, but in retrospect were probably hurtful. I’m more mindful now. I try to make sure my jabs never draw blood.

Finally, I have to admit: I’ve always been fascinated by tricksters. Bugs is one, but I also admire stand-up comics—even the defrocked Louis CK—especially those who expose hypocrisy. I also love transgressive musicians, mainly from the punk scene, like X, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and Johnny Rotten. My literary tastes also lean toward the confessional and the subversive: Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky. And I’m a big fan of Kierkegaard, whose words provide a fitting epitaph to this strange meditation:

Something marvelous has happened to me. I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favor of making a wish.

“What do you want?” asked Mercury. “Do you want youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful girl, or any one of the other glorious things we have in the treasure chest? Choose—but only one thing.”

For a moment I was bewildered; then I addressed the gods, saying: “My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing—that I may always have the laughter on my side.”

Not one of the gods said a word; instead, all of them began to laugh.

—Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or, Part I (Kierkegaard's Writings Book 3), Princeton University Press