The Turd That Turned the Tide
Our story is set in the early 1970s, when I was in high school. A punk, about my age, had been dropping lit fireworks into post boxes to make them explode. We’ll call him Johnny Rotten. That’s not his name, I just don’t think I can tell the story right by saying [Bad boy].
Now, if this had happened in the modern day, there would have been words like ‘terrorism’ being thrown around. And if the punk had been of a darker complexion, the word “Felony” would have come up far more often.
Given the damage done by these illegally powerful recreational explosives, it was a miracle no one was hurt, but everyone around town was mostly chuckling about it and chuckling about boys and their antics.
The only people who were taking this rash of felonies remotely seriously were the post office.
Enter me. I was attempting to combine chores: Walking my dog and mailing out a letter to Grandma. Just a few feet away from the post box, Babe Ruth did what all dogs do sooner or later, and left an offering to the beetles on the sidewalk. Being a conscientious young woman, I crouched down to pick it up.
Here comes our own school’s local Johnny Rotten on his bike to the post-it box. Now, Johnny had a bad reputation with the girls around the school. He was handsy in a bad way and liked to make rude jokes at girls’ expense. Already low to the ground and performing the necessary abulitions, I darted behind a planter-box to hide from him.
I was half sure that if he found me, he’d flip my skirt over my head, or worse. He’d done something worse to Nancy last weekend when he found her alone, but she wasn’t willing to explain exactly what.
So I waited until I couldn’t hear him anymore, stood up, and walked over to the post box.
And then. I dropped the poop. Into. The box.
I didn’t realize it at first. I’d been shaken by my harrowing narrow miss with this delinquent and hadn’t really been thinking clearly. I only realized what I’d done when I got home and realized Grandma’s letter was still in my purse.
Well, I was an acquiescent young lady of proper breeding, so the next day, right after school, I marched over to the post office to apologize for dropping Babe’s waste into the mailbox.
Oh, it was a most flummoxing experience! I told them about the poo, and they dragged me away to another room to grill me with a bunch of questions. Did I see anyone else near the box? Just Johnny. Did I notice him doing anything unusual? Well, it smelled like he’d been smoking, but half the kids our age smoke already, so…
The Postmaster asked me to describe Johnny to him, so I obliged… leaving out the sorts of details that demure young women aren’t supposed to mention to strange men, like the rumors of his activities with other girls.
It turns out that Babe’s droppings had landed on and extinguished a lit firework, preventing a postbox explosion that could have severely injured me!
They were able to get a warrant to search Johnny’s house and found several other illegal fireworks of the variety that had been used for his little terrorism campaign. I was a witness at his trial, and he actually got felony charges! The principal was quite put out about the whole thing, kept blaming me for ruining a ‘perfectly fine young lad’s future’, but I enjoyed the excitement of the whole affair.
Several of the women teachers quietly thanked me for removing his disruptive influence from the classroom, and we girls threw a party as soon as we knew he wouldn’t be coming back.
I even got a finder’s fee! Eight hundred dollars, which was quite a lot of money for a young lady back then! I used most of it to buy myself a splendiferous prom dress, one that I used every excuse ever to wear until I could no longer fit into it. The remainder I used to buy everyone in my school ice cream… except the principal, who’d chewed me out for testifying against Johnny.
I tried to give my prom dress to my own daughter years later, but she said it was too kitschy for her, so I donated it to charity. I hope some other young lady got as much joy out of it as I did.
