The Lords of Mischief

Art by the Amazing Lance White @lancewhite_cit

“I remember Halloween.”

Our first Halloween in ’96 started out harmless enough. Mike, Mat and I were barely a band—we didn’t even have a name or a real drum set yet, just a single snare that Mat hammered at high speeds. We were supposed to meet at Mike’s friend Chris Furin’s house and a bunch of Chris’s surfer buddies were gonna be there, though to them I hardly had a name; everybody back then just called me “Dobbs” because that’s what the 9^th Grade gym teacher, Coach Jackinoffski, would scream at me—before I stopped dressing-out for his class, that was. From then on, I was banished to the Driver’s Ed bleachers at Lake Howell, where all the delinquents met to skip class, smoke and listen to music. That’s where I met Mike for the first time and started hanging out with him, which awarded an infinite value to the endless columns of zeros that Jackinoffski had scrawled next to my name in his grade book.

Our recipe for trouble was simple: one part eggs and two parts toilet paper, plus a hefty dose of teenage angst. We planned to shake up this highly volatile and virginal cocktail on the streets near Eastbrook Elementary and then rip the fucking lid off.

What could go wrong?

Mat and I met at Mike’s house first where we scoured for last-minute costumes. We discovered a few flannel shirts and beanies in Mike’s hallway closet, and then viola!, we became instant mervishaws—our slang-term for Alternative/Grunge Rockers—which was funny, because I still had seven Nirvana shirts tucked away in my own closet back at home, even though we were cool Punks now… Super tough.

After joining up at Chris’s, Mike, Mat and I walked to Winn Dixie (referred to as “Winn Dick-Me” in those days) for our evening’s ingredients with Dave Gunderson, one of the surfer-dudes who was also in my Spanish class. Somehow, we weren’t questioned or denied when we arrived at the check-out line with nothing to purchase except for four cartons of eggs and eight packs of toilet paper…

Above, the Lords of Mischief were smiling.

We got back to Chris’s street and went to work. Since we didn’t have any idea for a house to target, we decided we were going to egg random people instead. Makes sense, right? Gunderson sat poised behind a tree as our first victims came into view—it was a guy and his son all dressed up for trick-or-treating.

Gunderson hid behind a tree and waited for the pair to approach. He took his shot—and MISSED! Then, as if by some kind of Halloween miracle, the egg stayed INTACT. Gunderson’s would-be target picked up the misspent ammo and returned fire—it was a DIRECT HIT!

“Goddamn it!” Gunderson shouted as he wiped vainly at his goo-blasted chest.

“Little assholes!” the guy called out before leading his child away in triumph. This wasn’t going so well, at all.

“You guys really shouldn’t do this so close to my house,” Chris, who was not an aspiring psychopath and had way more sense than any of us, said. He was content to just hang out with his friends in the garage and didn’t share in our tendency towards embracing demonic possession.

“You’re right!” Gunderson said. “We should split up!”

I grabbed a few eggs from a carton and stashed them in my beanie, which had grown too hot to wear. Mike, Mat, Gunderson and I walked down the street and in no time our next targets appeared: three little girls, dressed as princesses or fairies or some shit like that, all about ten or eleven. Easy pickens, for sure.

“Bombs away!” we shouted as we launched our eggs from afar, but Gunderson, not to be slighted again, charged up for a close-range attack and for some reason, like a fool, I followed. I tossed one egg, which overshot, but Gunderson continued to close-in. He was at ten feet… five feet…  He stopped at point-blank range and pelted an egg directly into one of the girl’s faces.

Gunderson, you lunatic—what the fuck are you thinking!?!?!?!

My brain couldn’t process what happened next: a bellowing scream emanated from one of the pre-teens that sounded nothing like the cry of any little girl I’d ever heard. I couldn’t compute. How was this possible?

Then my sociopathic and underdeveloped brain put it together… this was no little girl—it was their MOM! And this wasn’t just any mom, this was the mother of the devil, himself, hidden here on earth, disguised in human form, posing as a child on All Hallows Eve, all the fires of hell at her command. And Gunderson had just brought this ancient and unholy beast out of hiding.

“YOU GODDAMN BASTARD MOTHERFUCKERS! I’M GOING TO FUCKING! KILL! ALL OF YOU! YOU ASSHOLE SONS OF—”

Clearly, she had never known the divine grace of God like her son, Lucifer.

Gunderson and I bolted back towards Mike and Mat, who were already in retreat. Gunderson inched past me as this Satanic mamma bear bore down and got right on my tail, cursing and clutching. One of her stubby claws reached out and snagged a piece of my mervishaw’s flannel.  

I was dead meat.

“PIECE OF SHIT!!!” she responded as I barely wriggled from her grip. “ASSHOLE!” I picked up the pace and her footfalls pounded louder, seeming to stomp the breath out of my own chest. She was closing in again. This whole thing might have been almost funny for the first thirty yards or so, but how much farther could I run? And for how long? I was no fucking athlete—I’d abandoned my long-distance track abilities back in the 9^th Grade when I stopped dressing out for Coach Jackinoffski’s class.

“GODDAMN—” We’d gone about a hundred yards and Mother Suspiriorum wasn’t letting up. “—LITTLE FAGGOTS!” I used up every last ounce of my energy to sprint forward and at last her roid-raged banshee voice began to fade. Somehow, beneath the sound of blood pulsing in my ears, I heard a crack from down near my hip. I looked and saw the eggs I’d stashed inside my mervishaw-cap had all broken. I flung the beanie down in a random yard without another thought and then dared to look back—

The age-ed battleaxe had reached her limit; she huffed and puffed in the distance, content to spit curses at us from afar. I ran on to catch up with Mike, Mat and Gunderson, who’d hid up against the side of a house. “I’m gonna go and get my bike,” Gunderson told us. “I’ll meet back up with you guys later!” Gunderson ran off and disappeared.

“How long should we wait here, you think?” I wondered aloud in honest-to-God fear of that witch who obviously had Satan on speed-dial. Now that our number had dwindled by one, there was no way we’d stand a chance. “You guys think the coast is clear?”

Mike looked at me suddenly. “Hey—where’s that hat?”

“The what?” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“The beanie! The one you were wearing!”

“Oh!” I remembered at last.  “I had to ditch the mervishaw cap. The eggs busted inside while I was running—”

“THAT WAS MY MOM’S HAT!” Mike screamed into the night and shoved me into a chain-link fence.

“I had to!” I shouted in disbelief as I throttled back. No longer did I care if our hiding spot was revealed; our own eggshell reality had cracked and all those rows of Jackinoffski’s careless ovals were beginning to feel as empty as the value he’d ascribed to them. Big fat fucking voids, no longer spheres of possibility.

“Hey! Come on!” Mat yelled as he wedged himself between us before the situation could escalate, saving our embryonic band and friendship in the process. He was our hero. “It was just a fuckin’ beanie for Chrissakes—what the fuck!?”

That brought us back to our senses, along with the light which flicked on inside the house we’d sheltered against. A set of eyes peered out from a nearby window. “Shit! Let’s go!” We took off once again and barreled down Betty Street, which led out onto the main road, Tangerine.

Safe at last, we decided it was time to switch gears—maybe a little less trick and a little more treat? I don’t think I’d even had a single piece of candy yet. No more terrorism, I promised myself. It was gonna be good clean fun from here on out. The Lords of Mischief could go fuck themselves.

We knocked on our first door and an old lady answered. “Trick or treat!”

“What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“Oh—we’re mervishaws, ma’am.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know—grunge-rocker types. Ever heard of Pearl Jam? Soundgarden? There’s Stone Temple Pilots, too, but they’re kind of poseurs, don’t you think?”

“Uh-huh. Aren’t you a little old for this?”

“I guess so…” But really, who’s ever too old for free candy? Dumbass. She handed us just enough chocolatey crap to make us go away, then we tried another house or two with diminishing results. We snacked a little bit, chasing a sugar-coated dragon, but it didn’t take the education required of a Hershey Corporation chemist to realize that our hydrogenated oil-based high wasn’t going to cut it anymore—we were one-hundred-percent trouble addicts now. Mischief was the only thing that was gonna do it for us. So, of course, we got bored and decided it was probably okay to go back to Chris’s, even though it had only been about 30 or 40 minutes since our near-death experience. We returned to Ardmore, Chris’s street, and figured—hey, why not trick-or-treat our way down to his house? This multi-tasking seemed like a practical idea, but as we hit up the first couple houses on his street, an unsettling feeling began to tug at our nerve endings…

We were being watched.

There was a man lurking in the shadows across the street. I don’t know how long he’d been there, or how we hadn’t noticed him sooner. When he first caught my eye, I figured he was the parent of one of the trick-or-treaters skipping from house-to-house, but as all the kids vanished into the night, this man lingered behind. He imposed a foreboding gravity which grew heavier and more menacing as he mimicked our every movement on the opposite side of Ardmore.

This guy couldn’t be here for us—this is just a coincidence, right? After forty-five minutes, things must have settled down… Forget about the fact that our frontal lobes weren’t developed; these were the thoughts of three morons.

“You see that dude?” Mat whispered. Of course we had, but nobody answered.

Then, at last the man spoke and I could see the picture from a mile away of where this was headed. Straight back to hell.

“Nice night out, huh, boys?”

“Uh…. sure….”

“Any of you guys get the bright idea to throw some eggs tonight?”

We all froze. None of us said a word. Chris’s house was all the way at the end of the street, and there was no outlet in that direction. Nerves rattling, we discovered that we possessed a mental link, a group telepathy, one which might come in super-handy—should we be able to survive the night. Somewhere, deep in the yolk of this newly unified unconscious, our collective flight instinct beckoned us back the way from which we’d come… Slowly.

“What do you say, boys?”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mike ventured.

“Which one of you is Dave? Which one of you is Dobb?”

My blood turned cold.

My identity had been compromised.

One of the guys back at Chris’s must have talked. Not only did this man, who had to be the husband of Medusa, know my name—well, part of it, at least—he also knew two other things: one, that I was not really a mervishaw, like my flannel purported, and two, that since fucking Gunderson wasn’t with us, we might as well have been the fuckers responsible for fast-balling the godless abortion of a chicken fetus right into his wife’s face.

We were so dead. The husband was about to finish the job his wife had started, all before we’d even gotten a goddamn drum set.

“I should kick every one of your fucking asses…” He started to cross the street towards us and we began to walk a little faster, but only by a bit; in the circumference of our fledgling mass mind we’d gained the knowledge that breaking out into a full-on run would only expedite our demise.

The demon’s slave got just a couple paces behind us. I could feel hell on my heels as he tried to talk himself out of killing us. “Yeah, I should kick every one of your asses, but the cops are on their way right now. You pieces of shit fucked with the wrong people!”

As he continued to stalk us to the end of the street, I begged the Lords of Mischief to deliver us from this chaos. Please… please… They must have heard me, because once we made it out of the subdivision for the second time—

I looked back and the bastard was gone.

Holy shit! My prayers had been answered! I don’t know how, but we escaped! That was it for me, no more fucking around. I was done making trouble. Perhaps the Lords wouldn’t be too happy about this decision, but we’d already won their favor, bent them to our will, so fuck ‘em once again. We decided to be good little mervishaws and call it a night.

Mike, Mat and I made it to the home stretch, almost to the turn that led to Mike’s house, when we saw a car approaching. Its headlights were blinding, burning. I held up my hands and squinted through outstretched fingers to try and ID the vehicle, hoping upon hope that it wasn’t what it looked like—

But it was.

It was the squad car en route to Chris’s house. The demon’s bitch of a husband had not been lying. Now there was no need for the cops to go over to Chris’s, because they’d found us right here, out in the open with no sanctuary from the law. No wonder the demon fucker had stopped following us—he’d driven us right into the cops’ grasp.

The cruiser dropped speed as the driver spotted us. Time slowed down as my heart beat faster and faster. I was weak in the knees, my whole body shaking. We’d crossed the Lords of Mischief and now they demanded satisfaction. We were about to face time in juvie, fines, not to mention the fact I would never be allowed to hang out with Mike or Mat again.

Our burgeoning band and the bond we’d formed were done for.

The cruiser’s brakes squealed to a halt as I braced for arrest, both cardiac and legal. It came to a dead stop right alongside us at arm’s reach. We listened to its engine hum on the otherwise silent street but the sound I heard the most was an echo from the not-so-distant future of the judge’s gavel pounding three times—once for each of our condemned adolescent souls.

If this moment only lasted a millisecond, it was an eternity. We just stood, frozen, waiting for the sleepy red and blue lights to awaken and announce, We’ve got you, you little shits, in their tired, dizzy cliché. Incarceration was upon us and we never even stood a chance. We’d been so stupid.

My body rattled from beanie-less head to Airwalks. Fear and insanity had breached my every membrane. But then, just as complete madness was about to hatch, the cop took his foot off the brake pedal and the cruiser inched forward again—

And he fucking drove off. 

“What the HELL?”

We turned to watch the cop car crawl away from us, that’s when we looked up to see that directly behind us was a familiar octagonal shape:

A fucking STOP SIGN.

This flag-saluting fuck was just following the rules of the road (I know, unusual for those in law enforcement) and had actually stopped for a stop sign. “No. FUCKING. Way…” I’d never had a drink before, but I sure could have used one then. Leave it to the Lords of Mischief to have the last laugh. You gotta hand it to ‘em; they’d delivered us from one realm of chaos, alright, and placed us right into another.

We walked back to Mike’s house, our souls beaten and basted. I can’t begin to express the amount of relief I felt once we’d said our hellos to Mike’s mom and quietly closed the door to his room behind us. Safe at last, but for real this time…

We sat in silence, catching our breaths and fortifying our nervous systems, but then—

The phone rang.

All of our hearts stopped.

Somebody at Chris’s house had not only given the vengeful lunatic and the cops my name, they’d obviously given up Mike’s name and phone number, as well. We were toast, after all…

Mike yanked up the receiver to intercept the call before anybody else in the house could get it. “Hello?”

Is it the cops? I wished to ask, but couldn’t pry my jaw off the floor.

“Oh, hey, man—” Mike said into the phone.

It was Chris. Thank God. I was able to relax. They exchanged a few words, then Mike hung up.

“What happened?!”

Mike gave us the details: the lady Gunderson pelted in the face had brought her husband by Chris’s house after she saw the cartons of eggs we’d left in his front yard (Smart!), so Chris and the crew were forced to fess up to something. She didn’t recognize any of those guys as her assailants, so Chris and the crew admitted the kids who threw the eggs maybe went to their school? They didn’t really know any of them, per say, but one’s name was Dave, and the other was, like, Dobber, or Dobbler, or maybe Doppeler, or something like that…

I felt a wave of relief that the guys hadn’t actually ratted me out, but I was also beyond-thankful that Coach Jackinoffski had never called me by my full name in 9^th Grade. Luckily, our juvenile psychosis wore off long enough for Mat, the hero of this story, to convince his dad to buy him a real drum set. Mat’s reasoning to his pops was that playing music would help keep him from running amok on the streets of Eastbrook, even though RunnAmuckS is exactly what we named our band. And you know what? It all seemed to actually work for a time, though the Lords of Mischief weren’t done with us yet…