The Funniest Days of My Life - Part 1

Alarm Bells

May 1994: My neighbour's house had been empty for about two months. When you're fifteen, on your term break and bored out of your skull, there isn't much that you won't do to keep yourself entertained. Things like conscience, responsibility and "laws" exist beyond your moral comprehension. Or awareness. If you could call it that.

Thankfully, I was in with the right crowd.

We'd been stealing stuff from the new bookshop for the past few days and now we were bored again. Hardback novels, paperback novels, music CDs, stationery sets, Rolling Stone magazines, anything that we could sell to geeks and losers at school when it opened. We were like the Krays, we were unstoppable.

(At the height of our delinquency, my good buddies stole a motorcycle, drove it around till it ran out of gas and launched it into a pool, somewhere near the Dam)

So it happened that one day we were hanging around outside my house when it occured to me that no one was probably going to move in to the neighbour's house for at least a few more months, and that we could bust into the place and 'liven' it up a little. Armed with nothing more than the invincibility of youth, we climbed over the wall, and I headed straight for a side door that was miraculously left unprotected; there was no grill to hide it, no heavy padlock to dissuade stupid teenagers from breaking into the house and pissing on the walls.

There was, however, a small blue box just above the door that had the letters "C-H-U-B-B" written on it, in bold. As I grasped the rusty doorknob, it hadn't at that point occured to me yet that people could leave the alarm system on even if they'd moved to a swanky new apartment somewhere else. Why they hell would they?

"Guys, let's go upstairs and moon people from the window!"

The moment I yanked the door open, the siren pierced my eardrums and the whole world went into slo-mo. I could see the bare insides of the house, the walls had been whitewashed and there was nothing inside - no furniture, no stacks of discarded porn magazines. I turned around, my hand still on the doorknob, and looked at the guys, whose faces also looked a little whitewashed, and said "Fuck, the alarm's still on!"

Naturally, all hell broke loose. As one, we hauled ourselves over the wall, laughing and screaming in surprise, and the guys jumped on their bicyles and rode off as fast as a pair of apeshit robbers could.

I ran into my own house (where else was there to go?) and hid in my bedroom. I pulled the blanket over my head and pretended I was asleep. With the siren going off like it was a bombing raid.

For the next 30 minutes of my life, I promised myself to never steal or try break into another house again, as I agonized over whether or not the cops would discover my fingerprints when they dusted the doorknob.

Thankfully, the cops never came.