Saturday, February 25, 2006

Childhood Story #69 The Amateur Garage Axe Murderer Scare

Ahh, I stumbled upon some old emails I sent my buddy Geoff like, 10 years ago when I found him on the net. More childhood stories.. This is one of my favourites!

In the start of the summer of 85 Mike D moved a little ways away to a new house on Keystone in back of Blackburn Public. For awhile his parents had two houses, the one in front of my parent's house, and the new one on Keystone. When they first took possession, his parents let us kids sleep over there on our own recognisance in the living room with sleeping bags, a TV, and a VCR. We watched Friday the 13th part 3D that Wednesday summer night. Among the crowd was Alan(What do you mean Jason's not real?)Ewing, and Mike's lovely older sister who we were all probably in love with at one time or another. We were 15 and had beer hidden in the toilet tanks for after Mike's sister left. After the movie Al was scared shitless and opted not to stay the night and offered to walk Mike's sister home(he had his bicycle). We had told him before the movie that a lunatic had escaped from the regional Detention center on Innes road and he liked to wear hockey masks and cut up people with chainsaws (damn but it was handy having a real-live almost-jail type thing up the road!). When they had been gone for about five minutes I got a wicked idea. When Alan usually went home, he had this habit of hiking open his garage door at the top of his driveway and firing his bike inside the pitch black darkness before slamming it and going into his house. Wouldn't it be funny as hell after his having seen Friday the 13th for me to sneak into his garage and scare the living shit out of him when he yanked the door open(just as long as I got out of the way of the incoming bike)? Everyone agreed it was, It was 11:00pm and if I ran, I'd beat him to his house and have time to hide in the garage while he walked Mike's sister to her parents house.
Five minutes later I was over his backyard fence and in the pitch dark of his unlocked garage. Giggling my ass off at the heart attack he was going to have, I got down on my stomach and lifted the garage door an inch off the concrete so would be able to see his bike riding up the driveway. This was going to be good. Five minutes later I got up off the concrete. He was a bit late, probably talking it up with Mike's sister, amazed at the prospect of being alone with a girl that he wasn't related to. The eyeballs were getting a bit better in the dark after being in there for awhile and I could make out an axe leaning against the garage wall. A prop! Excellent! I'll probably get an earth-curdling scream out of him now. Ten more minutes went by. Alan wasn't being punctual tonight. Maybe a real axe murderer got him(I was just an amateur). The night vision was back and I could see that the garage was packed full of great things you could scare a guy with. I was busy trying to decide between hedge clippers and the axe when I heard a car coming up the driveway.

I hadn't noticed that Al's parents car wasn't in the driveway before. It's missed details like that that make the best of plans fail. Al's dad was coming up the driveway in his big car probably with every intention of putting it in his garage. I'll bet though, that he wasn't expecting to find an amateur axe murderer in there! What the crap was I gonna do? Then he did something weird. He left the car running and got out of it. On the other side of teh garage door I could hear him fiddling with a briefcase or something on the hood of his car, then he started to hike the garage door open. Giving Alan a heart attack would have been funny, he was young and would probably recover. Explaining to his dad why I was hiding in his garage with an axe, was a different story. That inch crack that I left at the bottom between the garage door and the concrete was letting mucho headlight in and I could see really good now. I had already ditched the axe on the floor and moonwalked to the rear of the garage when I first heard his dad get out of the still running car. In Al's garage there was a door to go in the house on the right, and a door to outside freedom on the left, and I could see a couple of garbage cans at the back. Big smelly green plastic garbage cans with lids that I could probably fit inside (if it came to that).

The reason they were smelly turned out to be because they were full, so I ducked behind them and put my blue Kayway hood up and on(this has saved many a young offender in the 80's). Might as well hide the most recognizable part of the anatomy in case I had to flee. The garage door was open all the way now and I was crouched behind these smelly chocked full 'o chicken guts garbage cans with bright headlights cutting around them thinking to myself that I was going to dodge this bullet. Nobody would have to know about this, nosiree bob.. And how lucky I was to have these great green garbage cans to hide behind in Al's garage on this fine summery Wednesday night. The word garbage and garage even sound alike. And when Al's dad opened the garage door all the way is just about the time that I realized that it was garbage day tomorrow(Thursday), and Al's dad was just about to take out the garbage. He was going to march over to where I was hiding and lift up one of these here garbage cans and take them to the curb!

Which one was it going to be? SCREW IT!! TIME TO FLEE!!!! I let out a big yelp, and crashed all the garbage cans over, and took off out the left hand side doorway to the outside before I even heard his dad say "What are doing in...! Get out of there!". And I was over the gate and in the backyard before I heard the car tires squeal and peel out of the driveway. He was going to try a pursuit! he was probably going to try to get me crossing Innes road or something. I fell over his back fence, ran across Innes, got a soaker in the ditch and crashed through somebody's cedar hedge, bumped into a garden shack, slipped through somebody's Petunia garden or whatever, narrowly missed falling in an in-ground pool, and headed into the best place to lose anybody chasing you - the Kemp road corn field.... I got back to Mike's house, bruised, battered, wet and bleeding. My temples were cut from the corn leaves nicking me as I plowed through the furrows, and the first thing I saw when I came in the back door was Alan hoisting a beer to his lips! He had just walked Mike's sister home because she was beautiful, and had every intention of coming back afterwards. When he arrived ten minutes after I left they said, "Did Dave get you?" and when he didn't know what they were talking about, they filled him in. That was funnier than the first plan.


I saw his father the next day and he still to this day doesn't know it was me. He told all the neighbours about the prowler that night and advised them to lock their doors at night...

I got Al back though... The next day....


--------Epilogue--------------
Al's dad died a number of years ago. Still didn't know it was me.

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