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!”

Grinning like an idiot in the chill winter air, my nose dripping like an open wound, I repeated the young man’s call of ownership and waited for the inevitable.

“I got dibs* on this one.”

* Dibs has almost religious meaning for young boys and calling dibs on something, anything, carries the weight of a Holy Decree carried down from the Mount. By calling dibs on something, a person has declared that they ‘own’ it. This is not to say that they actually own anything at all, but rather that everyone else must acknowledge that the dibs caller has specific rights to the item in question. Should someone else then try to acquire said object before the dibs caller, or before the dibs caller relinquishes his rights, then something unnamed and undefined yet suitably horrible would happen. Something like having to eat a booger picked fresh from the dibs caller’s nose or having to suffer the “Gas Chamber”. The Gas Chamber meant being sat upon, and farted on, by the biggest, fattest boy in the group. Hey, kids can be cruel.

I was a predator lying in wait for my next victim. I was a silent, invisible specter of doom in my bright orange jacket with brown, fake-fur lining around the hood. My blue, white and green mitten covered hands almost shaking in anticipation. The sheer thrill of the hunt filling me with more energy than any Kool-Aid and Pixie-Styx concoction ever could. Practically vibrating in place from excitement, I watched as my quarry came closer, seemingly unaware of the danger ahead.

I was holding The Most Perfect Snowball Ever™ and waiting for a bus.

Every kid growing up in the city knows about the almost symbiotic relationship between snow, kids and city buses. When snow falls in the city it’s the responsibility of the children to make like Thor and rain down fist-sized balls of powdery death upon every city bus that dares to enter their turf. And it is the duty, nay the honor, of the city-employed bus drivers to keep driving as if being pelted with thousands of soft, white, puffy meteorites were a normal part of their every day. It should be a badge of honor to them, something to brag about at the water cooler every evening.

“Hey Joe, I got hit about a thousand times on Avenue D and Flatbush. I bet there were oh… twenty, twenty-five kids out there today.”

“Ah Dan, that’s nothin’. Those kids near Ocean Ave and Kings Highway must have gotten a new leader or something cause they’re making plans. Can you believe they set up an ambush for me today?”

“No! They didn’t!”

“Yep, sure did. There musta been about a hundred kids and they all aimed for the front windshield.”

“Man, you are so lucky.”

“Don’t I know it.”

On this particular day I was with about seven or so other kids. We’d been throwing snowballs for the better part of an hour at our favorite spot, where you could see the bus coming from twenty blocks away. That left plenty of time to make snowballs and get into position before the bus got within striking distance. Everything was fine until I spotted something different about this bus, something out of place. Something so amazing, so astounding that it set my heart aflutter and my mind reeling.

The bus driver’s window was open!

I stood there for what felt like forever, staring in awe at what must have been every city boy’s winter wet dream. The perfect target for the perfect snowball. I distinctly remember thinking that whoever was driving must be new, or perhaps just stupid beyond all comprehension. An open window on a city bus when there was snow to be found?

Inconceivable!

Quickly, I set about creating The Most Perfect Snowball Ever™ and informing my compatriots that I had dibs on the next bus. This was key, because if I hadn’t called dibs, someone else might have seen the open window and called dibs first. That would have sucked and would probably have lead me down a different path on the road of life. One filled with trailer parks, lawn chairs, six-packs of cheap beer and a broken-down, gas-guzzling Ford.

Yeah, I would probably have wound up in Jersey.

I waited patiently for the bus to get close enough for the other people in the group to notice why this particular bus was so important, so special that it required a ‘Dibs Call’. It only took a few moments before they saw it too, and then everyone was in awe of my amazing luck. They all congratulated me on my find and acknowledged my right to go for the window first. Even the bigger, older kids could only look on in rabid fascination as the bus drew nearer, its open window beckoning like the high score on a Pac-Man machine, for someone brave enough to find a way to knock it down. At that moment I was like a tiny winter god to them, lording over my kingdom as I waited to pronounce a death sentence on a village idiot.

My nipples were hard.

The bus came and I took careful aim. Everything was riding on this throw; my reputation was on the line. If I missed the other kids would know that I had had greatness within my grasp and let it slip through my fingers. I would forever after be a snowball outcast, last picked during snowball fights and relegated to only making snowballs for others or being a living shield and ‘taking one for the team’.

Oh, the horror.

I couldn’t let that happen, I wouldn’t let that happen. I threw that snowball as hard as I could and it flew from my hand as if it were a hunk of steel with a laser guidance system and the bus driver was a giant magnet. It went right through the center of the open window and hit the driver square on the side of his head. Upon impact it exploded like a miniature nuclear explosion, white shards of ice and snow flying outward from the impact epicenter like a flower petal opening up in the morning sun. It hit so hard that I bet he spent the rest of the day picking snow and ice from the deep recesses of his ear canal.

My god, it was beautiful.

For the rest of the winter season I was ‘The Man’. All my friends wanted me on their snowball teams and even the older kids knew my name. I lived like a celebrity and loved every minute of it. I was famous and I owe it all to a nameless bus driver who committed the cardinal sin of driving a bus during the winter in the city and leaving his driver’s side window open. Thank you New York City bus driver, wherever you are, for being brave enough to do the unthinkable and bring joy to a young boy in Brooklyn.

Or, for being a truly stupid man and not realizing the danger you were in. Whatever.