We stood together staring out over an entire city covered in a white blanket of newly fallen snow. As we stood there on the roof, six stories above the rest of humanity, I happened to look down at the snow-covered street and had a wonderfully evil idea.
“I’ll bet we could cause a great accident by hitting a car with a snowball as it passes by!”
“True.” Said my friend with all the authority a boy one year my senior could muster, “But cars are small game. A bus on the other hand would cause a much bigger crash!”
Well, the thought of a huge crash was too much for our young, hoodlum minds to pass up, so we immediately set about creating an arsenal of snowballs and iceballs with which to bombard the next bus to be so unfortunate as to pass by our building. Then, we hunkered down behind the rooftop ledge and waited for a victim to show itself.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
It did not occur to us until after about twenty minutes of freezing our buts off that perhaps the buses weren’t running that day do to the massive amount of snow on the street. Although you would think the lack of any traffic whatsoever would have given us a clue.
Hey, we were hoodlums not physicists.
Out of boredom more than anything else, I threw one of my snowballs off the roof at a snow-covered parked car just to hear it hit something. When it hit it made a satisfying ‘thwap’ and cleared off a small patch of snow from the roof of the car. A few moments and another snowball later, a slightly larger patch of car was visible. I looked over at my friend, who happened to be watching my progress with clinical interest, and gave him the raised-eyebrows-and-nod-of-the-head, or REANOTH* sign.
*The REANOTH sign is an almost universally understood signal for mischief among both the young and the old. Most young people use this signal to silently inform another individual about, or invite another individual to participate in, a potentially dangerous/crazy/fun idea or action. As humans age, this signal usually evolves into a silent message from one adult to another of a sexual advance. This is then usually accompanied by a slap and/or a furrowed-brow frown and headshake from the female. Most males in the general area will then respond by covering their mouths and laughing at the sorry fate of their friend’s love life. Males should always use REANOTH with caution.
My friend understood my thinking immediately and we tackled our new mission with gusto. We would free that parked car from its snow-cocoon by slamming snowball after snowball onto its hard and unyielding roof. After about 10 minutes we managed to clear almost all the snow off the car and we made an important discovery in the process. The larger the snowball, the more satisfying the sound and the more snow we could remove in one shot. This is vital people, so write it down.
Bigger snowball equals more snow removed.
Got it? Good, because we had a lot more snow and there were a lot more parked cars waiting to be liberated from their frozen-water oppressors. We decided that the next car should get the royal treatment and we went about creating a super-huge snowball. A snowball to end all snowballs, the big daddy of snowballs and when it was done we christened it ‘Mr. Clean’. Mr. Clean was maybe three feet across, two feet wide, too thick for us to wrap our arms around and packed solid with snow.
Mr. Clean was the world’s first nuclear bomb in snow form.
Somehow, don’t ask me how cause I couldn’t tell you, we managed to get that monstrosity up and onto the edge of the roof. We picked out our victim, made a few aiming adjustments and pushed Mr. Clean over the edge. For those of you who do not have degrees in physics let me paint the picture for you. Two young mischievous little hoodlums have just thrown a 35-pound snow bomb off of a six-story building onto a parked automobile’s roof.
Yeah, yeah I can see you wincing. But like I said, we were hoodlums not physicists.
Now, to be fair our plan worked like a charm. To say we cleared the roof of snow would be a massive disservice to Mr. Clean. His impact on that car had the same displacement effect as a giant meteorite slamming into the center of a small lake. Snow went flying off that car like butter off a hot skillet. It was like all those videos of nuclear blasts where you see the sound wave blow out the nearby buildings in an ever-widening circle of death. Mr. Clean performed just as his name implied he would, he cleaned all the snow off that car, but good.
There was just one teensy, tiny little problem.
Like I’ve stated before we were hoodlums not physicists, and we had failed to take into consideration the effect such a heavy object dropped from so great a height would have on the relatively flimsy material of a car roof. Not only had Mr. Clean cleared the car of snow, he had also smashed the roof down into the car’s backseat and blown out all the car windows. Glass and snow was all over the pavement just like the innards of a bug after being squished underfoot.
It looked like a giant had stepped on a big, metal roach.
My friend and I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, but could only have been one or two seconds, staring down at the damage we had done. Two seconds of utter silence, with only our heavy breathing to fill the void. Two seconds was just long enough for the beauty of seeing the snow fly off the car to be replaced by horror at the damage we had done.
Two seconds was also exactly how long it took for the car alarm to go off.
When the alarm went off, my friend and I broke out of our spell of horrified inactivity and ran like hell. By the time we got back to my apartment we were laughing like mad monkeys and re-enacting the snow-explosion with evermore exaggerated details. We promised each other that we’d go down the next day and check out our handiwork up close and personal. Perhaps with some other friends so they could confirm our dirty deed for the entire school and thereby make us famous. However, the next day the car was gone and with it our evidence. No one in the neighborhood ever mentioned it and we never found out what happened to the car, but my friend and I still laugh about the Mr. Clean incident to this day. All it takes to set us off is a car alarm on a cold winter day and we’ll look at each other and say:
“Bamph!” Pause. “Weep, weep, weep, weep, weep, weep!”