After I posted my combination April Fool's Day/LieQuest 2022 joke yesterday, I saw "pocket full of spiders" in the Random Node nodelet and it reminded me of this funny event. This was back in the early 1970's when I was in the seventh grade in the Far Rockaway, New York vicinity.
A few doors down from where I lived was my friend Archie's house. He was a really funny dude and we hung out all of the time. I was 12-ish years old, as was Archie. Unfortunately for me, Archie had a gorgeous sister who was thirteen and had hit puberty. Monique had a large afro (as was the style in the seventies) and she had sprouted voluptuous curves that made me all weird and tingly whenever I saw her.
The day prior I had gone to play Skee-Ball (kinda like bowling into a giant dart board) and, since I had excellent hand-eye coordination, I won a gigantic pile of tickets to trade in for the cheap imported crap they had as prizes. I spent all of the tickets on about 40 small plastic black widow spiders. I wanted to meet up with Archie and play some pranks, but I had to wait until he got back from a dentist appointment. As I was passing his house I saw Monique sitting on their picnic table and reading a book. Some other part of my anatomy decided I should go and wait for Archie at the same picnic table. I'm sure Monique never would have thought to be my girlfriend because I was the same age as her annoying brother. I still had to give it a go.
Usually, Monica tolerated my presence because I liked to read even more than she did. She looked up from her tattered library copy of "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton and muttered, "He's at the dentist."
"I know. I thought I'd wait here, if it's okay with you," I said. "Besides, I want to know what you think of that book."
Yeah, studmeister me knew what to say to get a hot smart girl interested in talking to a scrawny Italian boy.
She launched into a conversation, mostly one-sided, about all the books she had read in the last few months. Lucky for me, I had read them all and tossed in a few comments to show I was familiar with her favorite parts. She got down from sitting on the table and sat on the same bench as me as we went through novel after novel. She had on a purple tube top and she bounced as she waved her arms around. I swear, she must have had some Italian blood with the way she used her hands to talk. I was so happy that I wore my biggest, baggiest bell-bottom jeans that day (remember, this was the 1970's and we had no fashion sense) because it hid some embarrassing developments.
Well, that was when Smith hopped over her fence and barged over. Smith was the neighborhood bully, and nobody even knew his first name. Just Smith. He always stole whatever money I had on me, and apparently he decided to perform this mugging in front of Monique to show how awesome he was.
"Gimme your money." Smith wasn't very loquacious or creative, but he was efficient.
I was, of course, heartbroken that I was going to be robbed like a loser in front of a girl I was falling in love with ever since I sat down at that picnic table. "Fine," I said, and I reached into my right pocket and started to pull out whatever I had. It was a couple of quarters and about half of the spiders.
Here's where some local garden deity decided to smile some fortune upon me. I slapped the coins and spiders on top of a june bug that had just landed unnoticed on the table top. "There you go," I said in a dejected voice.
Smith looked at the plastic spiders with the little red hourglasses painted on them and laughed. "What's that shit? Fake spiders?"
At that point the june bug decided to start trying to crawl out of the pile of plastic legs. Smith watched in horror as the pile began moving on its own. Then he let out a blood-curdling scream three octaves higher than his speaking voice and ran as fast as he could to escape the yard. Turns out he was terrified of spiders, or at least real ones.
The june bug emerged and flew off. Monique and I just stared at each other for a minute, and then we began laughing so hard we were crying.
Smith never tried to mug me again.
Monique didn't want to be my girlfriend, but she did want to practice something called French kissing. We did that. Often. Until almost a year later when her father caught us playing tonsil hockey.
Archie never did find out what his sister and I would do almost daily, but I did give him half of the spiders I had. I gave Monique five of mine and she sometimes wore one on a chain.