The Mortal Kombat, Hockey and Mailbox Story
This story is about me and my friend Kevin and an incident that happened one day while bored at his house. It involves hockey tape, a mail box, inspiration from Mortal Kombat and some rocks. This happened a long time ago, probably about 1994. Kevin and I were about 14. I assure you that we were at least teenagers when this happened. As embarrassing as that is to admit.
Kevin and I had been outside playing hockey. At that time If we weren't inside watching TV we were outside playing hockey, which surprisingly enough was pretty often. Our hockey consisted of a 10 cubic ft chest freezer in the garage as the goal, a broken goalie stick taped together with a splint, a plastic baseball glove, a tennis ball, and Kevin's right handed hockey stick. With these supplies our games consisted of Kevin hitting the tennis ball at me as the goalie. I am left handed and couldn't use the only legitimate stick that we had so I was stuck to goalie.
Not sure what led to it but some how during our playing a roll of crappy hockey tape came out. It was crappy because it was double sided. Hockey tape is usually just very textured on one side to provide grip, but for some reason this tape was sticky on both sides. Since we didn't have hockey gloves at the time it was pretty annoying to get sticky hands after playing so this roll of tape was useless to us.
Anyway I guess out of frustration Kevin takes the roll of tape and starts swinging it around over his head like a helicopter. Like a black person from the south might swing his shirt over his head. With each swing the tape would unravel more and more until he was swinging what had to have been at least 10 ft of tape. So he was making a good 20ft diameter circle with this tape. I guess this was Kevin's way of proving he was the master of the roll of tape. I don't remember exactly what I was doing but I might have been cheering him on like he was doing a keg stand at a frat party.
Now it's at this point that he thinks he's Scorpion from the Mortal Kombat series of fighting video games (and who wouldn't) and takes the tape and wraps it around the mail box in front of his house. The mail box looked a lot like the picture at the beginning of this story. Pretty neat how the tape perfectly wrapped around the mail box like a Batman grappling hook. And without missing a beat Kevin yells, "get over here" just like Scorpion and proceeds to rip the mail box out of the ground!
Picture this as best you can, a 14 year old wrecks his parents mail box by pretending he's an imaginary ninja fighter from a video game. Imagine explaining that one to your parents. I'd rather say the silly rabbit did it trying to steal my Trix.
My initial thoughts were amazement. He actually ripped the mail box out of the ground! Maybe he is Scorpion? Kevin was not so amazed. I assume he was put into instant shock about what his dad might do when he sees this. By the way his dad isn't the new age Dr. Phil type of dad. He's an ex-navy submariner from the 60's, chain smokes and drinks beer all day. He's more Chuck Norris than Dr. Phil.
So needless to say Kevin and I panicked a little. We tried to stick the mailbox back in it's hole, but this had quickly back filled with dirt and gravel. We dug it out as best we could (with our hands) and stuck the mailbox post back in there but it wasn't staying up. We get the idea, "hey lets just put some big rocks around it. That'll hold it up". Surprisingly this didn't work. The 4 or 5 softball sized rocks did hold up the mailbox as long as you didn't try and open the box. As soon as you pulled on that handle it came toppling over. For a brief second, we thought, as all kids in a panic think, "maybe they won't notice" or " maybe tomorrow when the mail man tries to open it we can blame it on him".
Soon his dad comes out. And being that it really wasn't that big of a deal, he just told us to dig a new hole... with shovels... and remount the mailbox. The funniest part while we were trying to fix this with out getting caught was his parents were most likely watching us the whole time. The mailbox is right outside the large window in the front of the house. We were in plain view of this window. They were probably just having a ball watching us "fix" this mailbox. For some reason I don't ever recall thinking of the window. This is probably one of my funniest moron stories from being a kid. It makes me laugh every time I think about it.