When I was in college, I was a clown. The kind of genially dorky footballjerk who could always be counted on to make farting noises under an armduring a particularly slow Biology course on intestinal parasites. Thekind of geek who always got drunk at parties, put on a lampshade and dancedon your best furniture.
One April Fool's day party, my thinking muddled by Jack Daniels and beer,I announced to the entire party that they were a bunch of boring jerks andthat their potential future leadership meant the United States was in aserious moral and intellectual decline.
Declaring that their rampant stupidity made my life no longer worth living,I stepped out onto the window sill of the hotel's third floor and jumped.
You could hear the shrieks and yelling for miles as the crowd of people dashedto the window sill, hoping no doubt, to catch a glimpse of my bleeding, smashedbody on the pavement below.
Imagine their surprise, when they got to the window sill and found me lyingon the ledge just below the sill, having a quiet conversation with the pigeons.
"April FOOLS!" I cried.
Imagine my surprise, when the equally drunk "Beef" Beefheart, the school's starquarterback, cried "April Fools yourself, you goddamn jerk!" and pushed me offthe ledge.
To say my life passed before my eyes would have been a lie. I was too busyscreaming and wetting my pants.
I went over the edge, onto an awning below the ledge (miraculously I wasdirectly over the front of the hotel, otherwise I wouldn't be telling youthis story now). Unfortunately, I was going so fast, I ripped right throughthe awning, trying the whole time to grasp and hold onto something to keep mefrom crashing onto the cement below.
Beneath the awning was another, which I also tore through, and yet another,last awning which I bounced on twice, before I flipped over it and hurtledto my death.
I landed on my feet, screaming. Not from the pain, even though I snapped myankle in the fall, but because I didn't have time to realize that my descenthad stopped.
Beef and I shared the expensive repair bill from the hotel. Neither one of us,to my knowledge, played another practical joke after that.
Any wonder I don't drink any more?
T.T.F.N.!
H
