In the late summer of 1996, I was a sadistic murderer. That isn’t something I’m proud of, but it’s true. In my defense, I could say that I was just a kid, and that kids in general are mean and dumb, but that’s not much of a defense.
Basically, I’d just moved to Springfield and was still trying to adjust to my new school. It was your basic elementary school, but it differed from those I’d attended in the past in one important respect: the playground was enormous. I mean, it was huge. It’s probably impossible to overstate its size.
(Though, come to think of it, maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing, and maybe my foggy memories are little more than terribly unreliable distortions. But let’s just assume that isn’t the case.)
Up near the school itself were all the typical trappings of a playground that you’d expect. There was a jungle gym, there were swing sets, there were monkey bars, and there was a four square court.
But the playground had no boundaries. Not really. The L shape of the school building boxed it in somewhat, but if you wanted to, you could wander out beyond the playground proper into a field of waist-high (for me at age eight, anyway) clumps of grass.
You could wander. You could wander as far as you wanted. A year later, they would pour asphalt and build a circular track out there, but until then, you could wander.
My friends and I didn’t wander. We killed grasshoppers instead.
I don’t know where the idea came from. I think it was something they had already been doing before my arrival in town, though that doesn’t excuse the fact that I seem to have enthusiastically joined in. Memory can be strange: I remember what I did, but don’t remember why.
It was kind of a friendly competition at first: a race to see who could capture the most grasshoppers in some arbitrary period of time. Catching hoppers (as we called them) required skill. First, you needed a good eye, because you had to be able to spot your quarry from far-off. Then, you needed a certain lightness of foot; you needed to be able to get in close. Lastly, you needed an effective pounce.
The best way to catch the little guys was by the legs. If you grabbed a hopper’s legs, it was powerless. It could do little more than twitch furiously and fruitlessly in your grasp.
This is all bizarre to remember. The me of 2009 is squeamish enough that I shudder to think of a grasshopper within twenty feet of me, let alone one in my hands. How could I have stomached that? What infernal engine drove me to do this stuff?
The friendly competition gave way to murder when Francis (not his real name) mentioned that he knew for a fact that instead of blood, grasshoppers actually bled Tabasco sauce, and that this was in fact where Tabasco sauce came from.
When some of us expressed profound doubt as to the veracity of this claim, Francis said he’d prove it. He killed one of his hoppers with a rock; as it died, hemolymph came oozing out. We were, of course, too young to know what “hemolymph” was, so yeah, I guess we thought it was Tabasco sauce.
We didn’t smash the hell out of any other grasshoppers, but we put some in jars. We swung others around and threw them out into the distance. We were a group of third graders who did a lot of sickening, sadistic shit, and I still don’t really know why. I didn’t play a huge part in what we were doing, yet it’d be disingenuous to claim that I was an innocent bystander. Even now, I still feel like I have hemolymph on my hands.
As kids, we had a pretty warped understanding of the way the world worked. What were grasshoppers to us? What was anything to us?
One recess, a friend of mine named David (not his real name) told us a dirty joke. He said he heard it at a party that he’d gone to with his brother. We were all pretty impressed by this; his brother was a sixth-grader.
“Okay, a guy and a girl are in bed, and they’re having sex,” David said. As he spoke, he gesticulated to show us what he meant. To him, the concept of “sex” was apparently best represented by two hands randomly swirling around and rubbing up against each other for several seconds.
“But then they realize the guy’s parents are coming home, so they’re like, oh shit! So then the girl goes and hides in the closet, and the guy takes the condom and throws it out the window.”
At this point we stopped him to ask just what the hell a “condom” was. His answer was vague and unsatisfying. “It’s a yellow thing,” he said.
“Anyway, so the parents come home and everything’s cool but the guy looks out the window and sees a little boy out by the driveway playing with the condom.”
“So he wants it back. He goes out there and he tells the kid, hey, kid, I’ll give you a dollar for that thing. And the kid says no. So he says, okay, ten dollars. And the kid says no. So he says, okay, a hundred dollars. And the kid says yes. So he gives the kid a hundred dollars and he gets the condom back and he throws it away.”
“Then the kid comes home to his mom and he’s like, ‘mommy, mommy, guess what? I sold a Twinkie to this guy for a hundred dollars! But he got gypped ’cause I already sucked out all the cream filling!’”
When the joke was over, nobody laughed. We all spent about ten minutes going back over segments of David’s tale and asking various questions. The main problem was that nobody really knew what “gypped” meant. The other main problem was that nobody (including David, it turned out) really understood why the joke was funny. Twelve years later, I still don’t understand.