The Lowest Point on the Magical Misery Tour

Author's Note:  Remember, some parts  are apocryphal and some parts are not. 

Don't play practical jokes.  They are almost never practical.  Sometimes, they are tragic.

My last practical joke victim was Michael Horowitz a rotund fellow from the Bronx section of New York City.   We were sophomores in college together.  Michael had worn a tie once in his life and that had been to his grandmother's funeral.  He was proud of this and, for me, that pride labeled him a buffoon.  In 1962, Michael was barely in school clinging to his student deferment from the draft with a 2.0 grade point average.  In his way, Michael was trying to be accepted by trading on his superior strength which was bolstered by his superior size.  Michael would burst into our dormitory's student lounge dressed in his gym shorts and tank top, muscles bulging and announce, "Betch youse I can....."

All one had to do was fill in the blank with some challenge like, scale the outside of the building, break a cafeteria tray over your head or the ever popular put your fist through one of the plaster board walls in the stairwell.  (He was Bluto before John Belushi was Bluto.)The stairwell area from the first to the fifth floor was pock marked with Michael's willingness to accept any task that would show off his incredible strength.  I watched this behemoth perform his nightly rituals of power silently.  I never had any words to fill in Michael's random challenges although I secretly wanted to voice something that would make the giant look foolish.  One night, I stepped up to the hulk and said, "Betcha if we wrap you up in athletic adhesive tape you can't get out of it."

"Betcha I can," came the standard reply.

Within minutes, I had gathered all of the strong unrelenting tape available and, along with three other boys, wrapped Michael as tightly as possible from head to toe.

I yelled, "OK!" to the trussed up Michael and sat back to watch the struggle.  After thirty seconds a ripping sound was heard and Michael had pulled his arms straight away from his sides where seconds before they had been mummified by the tape.  Once he got his arms free, he ripped off the remaining tape and the challenge had been met.

The three other perpetrators clapped Michael on the back and laughed at me, their former leader.

I was infuriated and retreated to my room to conceive the greatest challenge of all time.  Late that night, it came to me.

The next day, I boarded the bus for Germantown, PA and my almost alma mater the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.  (I was only there for one year.  It was during that year that I discovered the existence of a group of people who are waiting for slavery to be reestablished.  But that is another story)  It didn't take me long to find Marvin Goldbloom and even less time to talk Marvin into ordering a bag to be knitted in his father's textile mill in North Carolina.  The bag had a tensile strength of ten thousand pounds per square inch.  Within two weeks, the bag was in my possession.

The next night, with two football linemen in tow, I waited for Michael Horowitz to return from dinner.  As Michael entered the lounge to issue his challenge for the evening, the bag was dropped over his head, pulled down to his feet and he was wrapped head to toe in athletic adhesive tape.  This time there was no ripping sound.  The only sound was the thumping of Michael's body against the wall, the furniture, the doors and finally the floor where he fell exhausted.  He was our prisoner.

When we had shown everyone the "captured" Michael and stopped laughing and pouring beer on the iron like nylon bag, someone asked a very important question.

"Who is going to let him out?"

I had anticipated the question, and was ready with an answer.

"We'll roll him down the stairs and out onto the lawn and the campus police or somebody will find him and let him out."

And we did.

The campus police did come across the enormous bundle within a few minutes of its arrival on the front lawn of the dormitory.  It took them about fifteen minutes to free Michael Horowitz who was so enraged he was unable to thank them.  Instead he ran into the dormitory, up the stairs to the fifth floor and began battering every animate and inanimate object in sight.  The city police were called and it took two of them with night sticks to subdue the crazed Michael Horowitz.  My friends and I had fled the building after depositing our package on the lawn and did not return until after curfew and Michael had been taken away.  The dormitory supervisors conducted a thorough investigation, but no one would confess to the prank.  The only one punished was Michael Horowitz who was expelled thereby losing his student deferment.   He was drafted into the Army within six weeks.  Six months later, a North Vietnamese sniper hurled a 7.62 millimeter challenge at Michael Horowitz from a Kalashnikov AK-47that he could not overcome nor did he survive.