Reading a recently posted anecdote by RJack-45 made me suddenlly recollect a little teenage prank I pulled on a very bad man.

My mother was engaged to this guy for like 4 years. It was one of those relationships where the man thinks he is making the woman happy by saying they are 'engaged' but never plans on actually picking a date, let alone marrying her. I was a rather obnoxious teen at the time and supposedly hated my mom but really hated him. At first it was for all those cliched reasons like: he wasn't my dad, he was in my house, he was another grown-up and I found him mildly annoying. In time I started to realize that my dislike for him went from those calculated teenage responses to something really sincere, and warranted, because he treated my mother like crap.

One time I wanted to punish him but couldn't give him a piece of my mind verbally because I was supposed to be at odds with my mother and openly standing up for her would add some weakness or vulnerability to that fact. Teenage girl/mother relations are fucked up, what can I say.

Instead, I did something anonymously; I poured half of the contents of my bottle of Nair (yes, this was the late-80's) into his bottle of Neutrogena T-gel shampoo. I was filled with devilish glee picturing him going nuts trying to figure out why his hair was systematically falling out.

Unfortunately that never happened. A few days later, I noticed that he had replaced his shampoo with a new bottle. This may have been because the thick pink Nair mixed with the translucent brown syrupy T-gel crap had produced a substance with a color and consistency he had immediately recognized as abnormal. Crafty, slick bastard. I hadn't given him that much credit. Nothing was ever said about the incident.

A year later, she had somehow guilted him into actually agreeing on a wedding date and he went through the motions of the whole thing pretty convincingly. When they booked a location and the invitations were mailed out even I started to believe it was going to happen. But low and behold, exactly four days before the chosen date (my out of town relatives already had their hotel rooms reserved for christ's sake) he backed out of the deal and left.

Yes, I put Nair in his shampoo. Jerk.