When I was a kid my cousin Jenny was one of my most-favorite cousins [apologies to my other cousins for a youth’s favoritism], whatever she liked was cool. She wanted to grow up and be a hair dresser and so I would let her do my hair up all ‘cool’ so I could look like whatever the cool guy’s name was (I don’t even remember the actor’s name). Jenny really liked MacGyver. If you don’t know what MacGyver is (there are readers of this blog who are younger than Mr. Swiss Army Knife) he was a guy who could get himself into tough situations where evil people were going to kill him and he’d always use science or ingenuity to get out of the bind. In one particular episode MacGyver opened a car door with his knife (or so I thought). This little bit of influence leads me to my story…
I, a six or seven year old boy, wanting to be like MacGyver got into my dad’s toolchest and got out his rather large buck knife and opened it up. I knew I couldn’t whittle anything with it because my whittling skills were pretty poor (mostly because I wasn’t allowed to have knives). I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have the knife, but I was a big boy in my mind so my parents needn’t know about the knife until I could prove to them how good I was with it. Well, after thinking a bit I thought about opening up my neighbor’s son’s car door. He was home for the weekend from college. Ms. W. (his mom) gave me my first drum set because her son Brian didn’t use it anymore. I really respected her as a single mom and as a large black woman who probably could have killed me with a look.
So I inconspicuously walked over to the driver’s side door and tried to fit the giant tip of the buck knife into the lock slot. It didn’t fit well, but MacGyver’s knife took a while to unlock the door, almost up to the time he would have been caught. My luck ran out sooner than his did because Brian came out and said, “Hey, what are you doing to my brother’s car?” I told him of my plan to use the knife to get into the car and he said, “I’m going to go tell my mom!” I argued that he shouldn’t but he didn’t listen.
I ran (note to self: don’t run with sharp objects) with the open knife to the garage, and threw it into the drawer because there was no way I was going to undo the lock that held the blade open. I hid behind the trash can and breathed so slowly that I almost passed out. If there was one thing I had learned from the episodes of G. I. Joe it was that when the enemy was near you needed to stop breathing and keep yourself quietly hidden away. I heard Ms. W. open her door and listened to her spout statements like, “What sort of boy tries to break into their neighbor’s car?” I also admire her for not swearing when she probably would have been at least moderately justified for calling me several creative names my parents had not picked. Ms. W. arrived at our front door where my mom was equally shocked to find out what I had attempted. She looked and looked for me.
My mom never found me until I turned myself in. She then marched me over to Ms. W.’s house where I appologized with great tears in my eyes. She forgave me and I learned an important lesson: Buck knives don’t fit in car locks. I also learned that if I was going to be a ‘smooth criminal’ I was going to have to take lessons. They didn’t offer those at the local rec center. So much for my life of crime.
Is that all??
When I was 8, my family went to some boring event; boring in that 8-year-old me got bored and wandered back to the car. The car was locked, but I was sure I could get in. I tried to “pick the lock” on the rear hatch of the station wagon with a stick. Of course, most of the sticks in the area were far to big to fit. I tried progressively smaller and smaller sticks until I was down to toothpick sized twigs. What do you know it when right in… and broke off. I didn’t tell anyone. A couple days later, my mom found out that she couldn’t unlock the rear hatch. She gave me that mom-look, knowing that locks don’t usually break themselves when there’s an 8-year-old boy around. I gushed my confession in a flood of tears. She had to take the car to a locksmith to get it fixed.
However, while I was at Amarillo College, it was commonly believed that I was “half-Mexican” (Please forgive my bigoted Texan friends.) because I could break into anything without damaging it, including most locked cars, classrooms, and the Baptist Student Union building. I only used my powers for good, of course.