The benefits of a planet full of cars are plenty.
In addition to the obvious — oval and straight racing, demolition derbies and landing zones for bikini models — cars have also served as ground zero for practical and not-so-practical jokes.
As you may know, my younger brother Bruce and I grew up in a street rod/muscle car environment. He spent much of his younger years in his hardly-stock forest green 1969 Camaro and later Firebird. Elsewhere in our driveway my 1968 Dodge Charger and later 1969 Mach 1 Mustang were on the receiving end of endless repairs and upgrades.
Bruce followed his natural passion and became a GM master technician for about three decades. And I started and maintained the Whip’s Wheels newspaper, full of vehicles these past three-plus decades.
While a solid education can lead to a lucrative career in automotive technology, it more importantly prepares young men and women like Bruce for a lifetime of pranking your buddies’ cars.
Back in the early 1980s Vinnie, a year younger than me, became an unofficial but significant member of our family. My mom still considers him her third son as we consider Vin the normal brother.
But acceptance into the family in those early days came with an occasional bout of lighthearted hazing from the brothers Whipple.
One night Vin was at our Methuen home probably watching the Bruins with us. My job was to keep Vin occupied while Bruce pretended to have another fit of diarrhea or some ailment that kept him out of sight for several minutes.
Fortunately for all, diarrhea was absent that day. In reality, Bruce had quietly slipped outside. Which is convenient because that’s where Vin parked his Buick Skylark.
On this particular night Bruce masterfully ran a single jumper wire from the electric fan on the Buick’s radiator to the horn. Then he returned to the Bruins game swearing to never ever again eat a McDonald’s hamburger. The game ended, Vin said his goodbyes and headed home in his Skylark.
Around the halfway mark, the Buick’s engine reached about 200 degrees and the electric fan started up. And as you’d imagine, all that current had a nice wire to travel across. When the juice arrived at the horn, the expected results arrived in a very loud, steady fashion.
Vin was not the only motorist on the highway that night.
Though he soon wished he were.
Vin smashed the horn repeatedly to stop its blaring at the cars in front of him. But as long as that electric fan was spinning, current was transforming Vin’s horn into a siren. It was a long drive home.
He called us with a LOT of questions when he got home. Initially, we played dumb but after hearing about the reactions from a highway full of motorists getting honked at, we started giggling and admitted we may have been complicit.
The prank worked well enough that a few weeks later Bruce modified the procedure so the horn tripped every time Vin used the directional signals. His choice was to either make turns with zero signaling or use the turn signal and let the world know with a shrieking horn.
This time he didn’t need to ask how that could have happened.
Not all pranks require electricity. The now-closed Pips joke shop sold aluminum tailpipe whistles that slid a few inches into the tailpipe. A small hole in the closed end allowed enough exhaust to pass through during acceleration to make any victim automobile sound like an approaching train.
No prankster’s toolbox is complete without a tailpipe whistle.
One Friday afternoon, I stuffed the whistle into the exhaust pipe of my boss Larry’s Corolla and bid him happy weekend. And off he drove, whistling all the way.
On Monday morning, Larry came to work hot as a pepper. I listened to him rant for several minutes about how a mystery shriek from his engine had baffled him most of the weekend.
Every time he stepped on the gas, the pipe howled. Every time he backed off the gas, the sound vanished. After some investigating, the mechanic located the whistle and removed it.
Larry waved the whistle in my face.
“Any idea how that got in my pipe?!” Larry demanded.
My reply said no, but honestly, there were no other viable suspects in New England that day. I ‘fessed up and suggested that one day we’d all have a good laugh. That day hasn’t arrived yet.
Some pranks are more work than they’re worth.
On this occasion, I recruited Vinnie to help me find a dead skunk. Not just any dead skunk would do. Nope, we’d need one that reeked even worse than your standard varmint.
Vinnie and I drove all over southern New Hampshire till we discovered a perfect road-kill specimen in Hampstead, I believe. I slid my best skunk-grabbing hand into a glove, scooped up the late Pepe and dropped his gag-worthy carcass into a Glad bag.
We tossed the mess into the trunk of whatever jalopy I was driving at the time, then headed for the Pleasant Valley Street Market Basket where a different Larry was working. Admittedly, the stank inside our car from the trunk-skunk was horrid and we questioned the wisdom of tying a rotting skunk under someone’s car simply to have something to write about 40 years later.
I grabbed some rope and the skunk and wriggled under the trunk of Larry’s ‘73 Dodge Charger. While holding my nose with one hand, I somehow tied a slip knot around the beast’s tail, then wrapped it around the rear axle and gingerly placed said skunk atop the rear differential. I should have used more rope.
Like all good vandals, we rapidly departed the crime scene as quickly as we arrived. We headed to a safe house and waited for the irate phone call we surely would receive. When we hadn’t heard from Larry or the local HazMat agent, we decided to call Larry and ask how life was going for him.
“If you’re calling about the skunk you tied to my car, I spotted it and cut the rope,” Larry said to the two dejected pranksters. “It was hanging from the diff.”
Any hopes of Larry unknowingly dragging a reeking varmint home disappeared when he saw the skunk dangling from the axle. I rode in that car and I’m fairly certain a dead skunk would only have increased its value.
Oh, there were other pranks but I’ve run out of time. And any time my unattended truck is within five miles of Bruce’s house, I get nervous.
