Practical Joke, by Phillip Hoyle

Recalling clearly my eldest sister’s evaluation of the girls in her dorm five years before, [“They’re all so immature,” she said,] I wondered what I’d find in the boys dorm at the same small church-related college in north central Kansas five years later. Would there be a lot of horseplay, silliness, competition? Would the talk be rough, derisive, pious? I was pretty excited by the prospect of living around so many other guys because I had no brothers. Would I find a brother there? If so, would I like it? Who would I room with? Questions. What would be the answers? I already knew a little about the small burdens in that dorm, of needing to keep the room clean in order to pass periodic inspections, to fulfill duties of dust mopping hallways, straightening lounges, or cleaning shower rooms. Would I enjoy bull sessions?

I trudged up the steps of the rather new dorm toting my bags and boxes, depositing them in my room. Then in came my roommate—Roy his name—from a small southwest Kansas town out in the Great Plains where one can drive for a hundred miles without seeing trees or hills, where the wind blew without stop, where he attended a school with one hundred students including elementary and high school. I was lucky for, like me, Roy was studious, a seriously mature student. That helped both of us to get in good shape academically. And he was nice this slender, strong, black haired boy with a resonant voice and good manners. And he was clean.

I came to school with a stereo, a small LP collection, artwork to hang on the dorm room wall, and a two-drawer file cabinet. He came with some books, a basketball, running shoes, and a car. I came with years of musical experience; he with years of playing high school sports. We had both worked regular jobs. We shared our room, shared respect, and shared some classes for we were both ministerial students. We got along well.

Roy was athletic. He’d been the all-around great student in his graduating class: going out for all the sports, singing in the choir, dating the girls, even entering the state speech and debate tournament where he presented an interpretation of T. S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men” for which he was awarded recognition. My eighteen-year-old mind didn’t grasp that serious poem; I wonder if his did. Some nights when Roy and I were studying in the dorm, he at his desk beneath the window, I in the middle of the room, I’d notice the floor vibrating. The first time I looked up for an explanation, I found Roy unconsciously bouncing his legs, setting the room shaking. This nervous habit may have been related to his fast speech, his hand movements when making some point, his fast metabolism that kept him slender.

There were some shenanigans in the dorm; what else would one expect from a group of undergraduates thrown together in close proximity with dorm hours that gathered us in at 10:00 pm. There was the din that finally quieted around 11:30. There were wrestling matches organized at odd hours. In general, we lived surrounded by other guys about our age, nice guys at that.

I noticed that most afternoons at the same hour Roy would return to the room following one of his classes. That particular afternoon I was reading at my desk when I got the idea, surely inspired by a current scary movie or simply by remembering life at home where one of us kids would scare another. I wondered if I’d really pull the practical joke becoming as immature as some of my dorm mates. When Roy was due to return, I turned off the light, crawled under his bed, and waited. It seemed a long wait, but finally the door opened. Roy walked over to put his books on his desk, then opened his closet door. All I could see were his feet. I was trying to figure out how most effectively to scare him: scream, grab, jump? Waiting I decided simply to reach out and clasp his ankles. Finally he took a step toward the bed and turned around into the perfect position with his back turned. I reached out, clasped his ankles and said nothing.

He said something, probably not anything he’d say from the pulpit, and screaming jumped. I suppressed my laughter and crawled from my hiding place. That was it. Fortunately Roy didn’t faint, and the practical joke did not end our friendship. It probably didn’t strengthen it though. We lived together two years more before the summer we both married our girlfriends. In fact, I gave my girlfriend an engagement ring in the backseat of his car while we were on a double date. My best guess? He forgave me.

© Denver, 2014

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

Practical but Cruel Jokes, by Ricky

I joined the Mormon Church in December of 1968.  Soon thereafter, I became friendly with the missionaries whom had taught me the pre-baptism lessons I needed for the introduction to Mormonism.  As a result, I was privy to some of their stories of missionary experiences.  I will relate two of them below.

Practical Joke #1

Mormon missionaries always come in pairs and are referred to as “companions”.  Such pairs share a modest apartment and are placed together for varying amounts of time before being split up and paired with a different companion.  Under these circumstances companions get to experience each other’s idiosyncrasies.

One such pair had the following habits.  One insisted on being the first one in the shower each morning.  The other had a pet gold fish and would always be the first to drink from the cold water jug upon returning to the apartment each day after being outside in the hot Southern sun.

One day, as a practical joke, the first companion secretly placed the other’s gold fish in the cold water jug before leaving the apartment.  As expected, the other missionary arrived home and grabbed the water jug and began to drink from it before he noticed the now dead gold fish inside.  Internally, he was seething with anger but did not show any outward signs other to acknowledge the “joke”.  But he was already plotting his revenge.

The night before an important gathering of all the missionaries in the district, when he finished his shower, he set up his practical joke.  During the week, he had purchased a pack of blue Rit Dye gelatin capsules.  That night he removed the shower head and put several capsules in the pipe.  Replacing the head, he then went to bed.  Getting up a little early the next morning, he informed his companion the he was going to walk to the chapel where the meeting was to be held and was leaving early.  Thus, he left his companion alone and departed.

During his walk, the gelatin capsules eventually dissolved.  When the companions met at the meeting about one hour later, the one companion said to the other after looking at him for a moment, “Are you feeling a little blue today, Elder?”  As you may expect, his companion’s exposed skin (head, neck, hands) was bright blue.

Practical Joke #2

This next story takes place in the panhandle of northwestern Florida.  A newly assigned missionary, called “Greenie”, was assigned to a companionship for a short time until he could be paired with his own companion.  The greenie arrived about two days prior to another missionary meeting which was to take place in the morning in Panama City.  It was necessary for the missionaries to leave early in the morning in order to arrive in time for the 7:30 AM meeting.

There were two companionships and the greenie sharing a car for the trip, 5 missionaries in all.  After about an hour of travel, the driver pulls the car over next to a field of watermelons and suggests that they go pick up a few for all the missionaries to eat after the meeting.  Everyone gets out of the car and the greenie says something like, “Isn’t this stealing?”  He is told it is okay, that it has been done before, and not to worry.  The greenie agrees to help.

Just as the greenie picks up his water melon and removes it from the vine, a young black man appears and demands to know what they are doing in his water melon field.  One of the missionaries pulls out a pistol and shoots the black man who falls down mortally wounded to all appearances.  The missionaries tell the greenie to get back to the car and start walking away down the road towards their destination while they stay behind to hide the body.

After hiding the body, the missionaries get back in the car and drive up to the walking greenie and pick him up.  They explain that this type of thing does happen occasionally, but no one cares because it was a black man, so don’t worry.  Of course the greenie is in total mental turmoil.

After arriving at the meeting and unloading the melons the missionaries attend their appointed sessions.  The greenie is then informed that they will be staying for regular church services.  Just before the services are to begin, a black family arrives and the greenie is startled to see the young black man who was shot and buried walk into the chapel.  The four missionaries with whom he rode then introduced the family and privately explained that they had set him up as an initiation prank.

Practical jokes may be fairly common, but most are cruel and not very funny.  I do not condone them because they usually result in escalating rounds of revenge jokes and can easily result in violence.

© 28 July 2014 

About the Author   

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach.  Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is, TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

There is a Frog in My Beer by Gillian

Generally, I think I have a good sense of humor, but it is definitely not of the practical joke variety! Hardly surprising. If you go by Wikipedia's definition, practical jokes are everything I abhor:  " A mischievous trick or joke played on someone, typically causing the victim to experience embarrassment, perplexity, confusion, or discomfort."

And why would I want to do that??

Need I say that I have never taken advantage of April Fool's Day, though I always tried to stay aware of the date as I proceeded cautiously through the day.

Researching this topic a little on the Web, I was surprised to find that the terms "hoax" and "practical joke" seem to be used interchangeably. I have always tended to think of a practical joke being perpetrated on an individual, for the amusement of those creating the situation, secretly watching from some hide-y-hole close by: a sign pinned to someone's back, or the back of an office chair, or cars parked within an inch on either side of the victim's car, so there is no way he or she can get into it. I have observed this one in the days before cellphones when of course the car owner was forced to go back into the building to phone, or simply wait, at which time the jokesters hastily remove their cars. Why is that funny? I simply do not get it.

And now I think more about it, I guess a hoax really is very much the same thing. Fake artifacts or photographs, false media announcements, causing people to be elated or fearful depending on the content, and later let down or relieved when they realize it was untrue. Sorry, this is as unamusing to me as that rubber spider in the bed, or fake vomit in the car; which should, as I see it, cease to be funny about the time one goes to kindergarden.

And I'm sorry to make it into a Battle of the Sexes thing, but I really believe, based on personal experience and documented examples, pranks and hoaxes are much more favored by males than females. Maybe it's some kind of power thing. Not so much over women but men over other men. When I worked in manufacturing, back when we had such a thing in the good old U.S.A., practical jokes were a permanent part of the culture.

Sometimes women were targeted, but not often. I think the fact that most women simply tut-tutted and shook their heads sadly as they washed their hands in trick soap which blackened the skin, or discovered that the sandwich in their lunchbox suddenly contained plastic cheese, rather disappointed the onlookers and so took them out of the game. With the men it became a competitive one-upmanship. Ok you got me good, but you wait. Mine'll be better. That kind of practical joking, not involving the unwilling or unsuspecting, doesn't bother me. All's fair between consulting adults - in this case using the term adult rather loosely.

In fact, bemused.  All this silliness, and I see it more as unkindness, to say the least, is apparently nothing new. There are documented examples from the Middle Ages on, and, I'm sure, many many unrecorded pranks before and since. The latest version would, I suppose, be computer viruses, which I doubt most of us find very amusing.

I do have, however, my own evince of past pranks. The house my grandparents lived in had at one time in the 1800s been a pub. Digging in the garden, my father unearthed an old earthenware tankard, remarkably undamaged. Inside it, emerging up the side, is a big brown frog. Apparently, the publican would pick the right stage of inebriation of one of his customers, and serve his next pint of ale in this mug. The poor guy probably thought he was suffering from DT's when the frog started to surface from his beer.

 

I have to wonder if it was the wisest stunt to pull on an obviously good customer, but then, some people will pay quite a price to get a good laugh at someone else's expense.

     

At one time I managed the graveyard shift of a plastics production shop. There were about 30 plastic presses and 35 to 40 miscellaneous employees. More than half the workers were temporary, "ninety-day wonders" as they were sometimes referred to by permanent employees, disparagingly but not meaning any harm. This was in the early 'seventies and at that time this country had floods of refugees from Vietnam looking four work. Many of our temporary vacancies were filled by these quiet, hard-working people who never caused trouble and were, in fact, dream employees. New to this country, speaking very little English, and heads filled with who knows what horrific memories, they were, understandably, a bit jumpy. I had always turned a blind eye to a few little pranks, as long as they was not too disruptive. It's hard to stay awake all night doing repetitive, boring, tasks, and if a few practical jokes gave them a little added adrenaline then so much the better. But then it spread to pranks pulled on the Vietnamese; nothing serious or really mean, but these poor people were completely confused by it, a little scared, and above all, I think, completely bemused. Why were these things happening to them? Why was someone doing such things? I was forced to put an immediate halt to  it all, and if, occasionally I saw it happening again, I once again managed not to see it unless it involved any of the poor bemused Vietnamese.

© 15 Aug 2014

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Practical Joke by Carlos

There are some things that a man who has carried a weapon into battle never shares with others, keeping it confined perhaps out of fear that to unlock it from his soul will unleash a tragic truth about himself.

When I was a about ten, my uncle, a veteran who had lost his innocence in World War II and later in the Korean War, took me to see Pork Chop Hill, an enactment of a battle fought during the Korean conflict. I hated the savagery, the brutal, bestial violence. I emerged from the theater angry at my uncle for exposing me to such a film, one that I later realized had a potential to leave psychologically scars. It wasn’t until I learned to think like an adult that I realized that my uncle, who never ever spoke of the carnage and butchery he, no doubt, had experienced, had attempted to share with me his painful past, a secret he could never  entrust to an adult. In retrospect, I understood why over time he chose to drink himself to death. As for my biological father, who also fought in the Pacific front during the Second World War, he too never ever spoke of his experiences as a sailor out at sea. When he returned from action on the frontline, he floundered aimlessly, angrily. Years later, he married my pregnant mother a day shy of my birth, no doubt in a guilt-ridden attempt to legitimize me, and maybe himself. When my mother died, at her request, he summarily relinquished me to his parents. I can only imagine what goes on in a woman’s mind when she cannot trust her child to his father. Though I would meet with him on occasion when I was growing up, I hated those awkward, silent moments, punctuated with heated rants. He was so temperamental, so unrefined, that I subconsciously decided to slough off any residual part of him, endeavoring to be everything he never was. Again, it wasn’t until later that I learned compassion, recognizing that the ghosts of his past haunted him every moment of his life. I haven’t heard of him in years. When I last saw him, he was a frail, disappointed man; who knows, perhaps he has finally found peace in death. Interestingly, I learned only a couple of years ago, quite by accident that I was named Carlos after my uncle; as for my middle name, Manuel, I also learned it is my father’s middle name. Thus, as a symbol of new beginnings and hopes, I bore the names of two men who shared a common core, a source I too would someday encounter. As for the parents who raised me, being that they were undocumented Americans, they felt more comfortable cocooned in the Spanish-speaking barrios of west Texas. Nevertheless, believing in the American dream and realizing that their two sons had had little choice of a future, all their dreams were placed upon me becoming an educated man, a man who could pick from the sweetest fruit on the tree. They never attempted to dissuade me from what in retrospect were obvious gay inclinations, my poetic nature, my love of gardening and cooking, my relative lack of male-centered interests. I was never cautioned to be anything but myself, the antithesis of what my uncle and father had been, products of a war-burdened society.  No doubt, they must have been devastated when I was drafted during the conflagration of another war. I considered only briefly the thought of dodging the draft by declaring my homosexuality, that aberration that was still viewed with disgust but which would have provided me with a different hand with which to play. Instead, I answered the call to duty, mostly out of a misguided belief that to fail to answer was inconceivable to the men in my family. Thus, once again, my parents managed to bestow a blessing to another son whose destiny was thwarted by a different war where young men were sacrificed for old, rich men’s egos. My parents’ only solace was that God would be merciful and that their prayers to the saint-of-the-month would be answered as they had been answered before. However, the practical joke was on them since each son returned transformed by the cesspools in which he had trudged. To this day, I am very selective of sharing the details of the endless nights holding onto the earth out of fear that if I didn’t, she would gather me in an intimate embrace. Suffice to say, that I proved myself as an American, perhaps more so than some, regardless of whether I wash my face or not.

During basic training at Fort Ord on the Monterey Peninsula in California, I learned to meditate, to embrace my surroundings even as I was transformed into a hesitant warrior. By encasing myself into my poetic chrysalis, I sought to keep my keel intact, ensuring that I would not lose myself as my uncle and father had a generation before. I followed the rules of the game, practicing at playing soldier while nurturing a yet indefinable core within me. We were frightened young men, a microcosm of an America of the time seething with rage due to inequities of race and class. Most of us suspected, though we never admitted, we were fodder cast into the fire pit, expendable. Some, a few courageous souls I prefer to believe, chose to swallow spit and reject the attempt to mold them into combatants. Of course, I’ll never know whether they were self-actualized men who chose to act on their convictions or defeated boys who weren’t up to the task. Regardless, they were summarily dishonorably discharged. For days before their departure, however, they were made to sit in front of the barracks facing the platoon in formation before them as though they were on trial for crimes against humanity; it was part of the psychological charade to which they, and we, were subjected. It was an attempt to portray them as pathetic, emasculated boys unworthy of another’s compassion. Nevertheless, I would look at them with respect, acknowledging that every path has a puddle. When we were compelled to run with full gear, to the point that I felt my chest heaving with pain, but didn’t want to be singled out as the runt of the litter, I would look at the thick carpet of invading ice plant thriving on the sand dunes and find solace in the tenacity of their being, and I would keep running. When instructed on how to use the M-16, I would cast glances across the bay and its icy waters and remind myself that someday I would have to wade into the ocean to be restored. And when I was compelled to listen to marching chants pregnant with vile racist words in an attempt to dehumanize the VC, I prayed we’d all be forgiven.

Years later, upon completion of my tour of duty, I returned back home to Texas. On the bus home, ironically I was asked for my identity papers by an immigration inspector in New Mexico in spite of my being in full dress military uniform. I guess, my face was still a little dirty. Later, my fellow veterans and I were stigmatized by some of our countrymen as rapists, My Lai baby killers, addicts, and pawns of the establishment. Thus, I chose to silence my voice and deny my past. I managed not only to survive but to thrive in spite of those moments and the moments that followed. Because I was gay, a poet, a former soldier, I learned from fallen warriors before me. Unlike my uncle, I’ve never been self-destructive; unlike my father, although I have my moments of melancholy, I am essentially whole. And unlike my parents, I don’t hold my hands in my lap and ask the saints to intervene when a force larger than myself confronts me. I discovered it is easier to control the amount of salt that goes into a dish than to try to scoop it out when the dish is oversalted. I’ve learned that though there are some things a man who has carried a weapon into battle never shares with another, he must find the resolve which can only come from within himself to approach those time bombs and diffuse them, thus turning the tables on the practical joke of fate.

© November, 2015, Denver 

About the Author 

Cervantes wrote, “I know who I am and who I may choose to be.”  In spite of my constant quest to live up to this proposition, I often falter.  I am a man who has been defined as sensitive, intuitive, and altruistic, but I have also been defined as being too shy, too retrospective, too pragmatic.  Something I know to be true. I am a survivor, a contradictory balance of a realist and a dreamer, and on occasions, quite charming.  Nevertheless, I often ask Spirit to keep His arms around my shoulder and His hand over my mouth.  My heroes range from Henry David Thoreau to Sheldon Cooper, and I always have time to watch Big Bang Theory or Under the Tuscan Sun.  I am a pragmatic romantic and a consummate lover of ideas and words, nature and time.  My beloved husband and our three rambunctious cocker spaniels are the souls that populate my heart. I could spend the rest of my life restoring our Victorian home, planting tomatoes, and lying under coconut palms on tropical sands.  I believe in Spirit, and have zero tolerance for irresponsibility, victim’s mentalities, political and religious orthodoxy, and intentional cruelty.  I am always on the look-out for friends, people who find that life just doesn’t get any better than breaking bread together and finding humor in the world around us.