The Delinquent Summer of My Youth

By MAREK FUCHS
Published: May 20, 2001

LISTEN to songs and watch movies and you'll harbor no doubt: summer nights are filled
with nothing but panting teenage romance. When everyone is 16 and beguilingly
beautiful, a summer love affair blossoms on the day school ends, before snapping off,
tidy as a tack, at fall's first breeze.

What in the world, you ask, could be wrong with a picture like that?

Only one thing: I have zero idea what they're talking about. When I was a teenager, my
summer nights no more resembled ''Grease'' than they did ''Invaders From Mars.'' In
fact, I think it is safe to say that I was as far from John Travolta as was genetically
possible. And if there was an Olivia Newton-John out there for me -- well, let's just say
that I never quite found her.

At 16, my forehead full of acne, I spent summer nights in the constant company of the
same six guys. We had been best friends since elementary school and had always been
good kids, getting good grades and never causing much trouble.

This was the early to mid-1980's, which, in terms of youth culture, was hardly a
watershed period. No flower power here. This was the age of heavy metal bands and
acid-washed denim. But the absence of both romance and culture didn't sink us into a
teenage bog of inactivity. We were anything but aimless.

Instead, as our youth unspooled 10 times faster than any of us could have ever
imagined, the seven of us spent our summer waging an unrelenting campaign of low-
grade delinquency.

Before you skim ahead for a criminal confession, realize this: We were not the sort of
juveniles immortalized in popular culture, bouncing between reformatories or tumbling
out of a car as it drag-races toward a cliff. Come to think of it, we never even drag-raced,
because the seven of us would most often be driving around together in the same car.

The car seemed the size of a motor home, although looking back, we must have been
packed in pretty tightly. Air got scarce, because we liked to light up cigars we'd buy at
the Handy Stop.

On a typical night, we'd ''go signing,'' as we put it, always prowling for a trophy with a
name that held some significance. Bernard King, for example, was our favorite
basketball player so we stole King Street signs at least four times.
Stealing a sign isn't as easy as you might think.

First, you drive by to see if the coast is clear. If it is, you stop and tumble out of the car in
a puff of cigar smoke. One man goes about a hundred feet down the road one way, and
another man the other, each ready to bellow a warning that someone's coming. The
other four guys then set to work.

They jump up and hang off the sign and also ram into its post, sometimes even backing
the car into it, until, with a sudden lurch, it finally uproots. At this point, you exchange
high fives and hugs as if you'd completed an amazing feat of engineering. Then you pile
back into the car, which now is even more crowded because of the presence of the street
sign, the bottom of which is caked with dirt.

Hot, we'd head off to a swim club, ducking under privet hedges or climbing over chain
link fences. Once inside, we'd run around as if we'd breached a castle wall, before diving
into the pool and throwing a few deck chairs into the water for good measure. After that,
we'd break into the snack bar and grill up rows of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs
and cheese sandwiches, while drinking soda straight from the gun.

Once, we found a large salami in a snack bar, and back in the car, used it to club
mailboxes off their posts while leaning out of the passenger window.

Just what sort of strangeness had started? It wasn't drugs and, though we were
sometimes emboldened by alcohol we obviously could not handle, quite frequently we
were totally sober.

Even at 16, our shift in behavior seemed to bring up questions, and we'd talk about it,
though our answers were predictable: we were just biding our time in a suburban town
whose slow-moving nature was tamping down our lives. Someday we would break out
and do mightier things, but until then . . .

Recently, in thinking back on all this, I wanted to get beyond adolescent cant.

So I talked toDr. Russell A. Barkley, director of psychology and professor of psychiatry

and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the author of
''Taking Charge of ADHD'' (Guilford, 2000). I asked him if it were possible for people to
get temporary attention deficit disorder the way they might go temporarily insane. Dr.
Barkley said no way. The fact that this behavior didn't start until adolescence, was short
in duration and had little larger impact on our lives meant that there was nothing
diagnosable going on.

Dr. Alan Hilfer, director of psychology training at Maimonides Medical Center in

Brooklyn and a specialist in child and adolescent therapy, agreed. He even said that he
had always been so worried that his son was ''too straight'' that when he was caught
shimmying up a light pole to spray a small amount of graffiti, Dr. Hilfer was ''almost
relieved.''
Dr. Hilfer said that, in these cases, teenage boys were challenging authority,
experimenting with morality and making statements of independence and
unconventionality. Dr. Barkley added that when boys enter the age of sexuality, they set
out to create a hierarchy among their own sex, ranking themselves by who is the
strongest and biggest risk-taker. In this case, that boiled down to who could be the best
vandal.

Both felt that such a phase was appropriate for boys and that while they should be
punished if caught, parents of adolescent demi-vandals shouldn't be concerned that
their children are on the fast track to a life of crime.

Just look at us. We're poster boys for getting through it. My six friends and I went from
those pool raids to good colleges, jobs in steady fields, wives, children and now life back
in the suburbs, just like the one where we grew up.

With the perspective of time, we now even regret our crime wavelet. Sort of.

The seven of us recently got together at Chumley's in Greenwich Village and, as always
happens, these stories were retold with the same glow and dumb happiness that popular
culture uses to suggest every 16-year-old is off having a torrid summer love affair.

Don't you guys have any regrets, I asked? No one did. ''We didn't hurt anyone,'' they
said. ''They were pranks. People knew it was just kids.''

My friends weren't even embarrassed that we were working with a gilded small-town
safety net. If caught, at the worst, a police officer would have just given us a ride home.

''Don't you, at the very least, think that it was all a colossal waste of time?'' I asked.
''Shouldn't we have been trying to get girlfriends?''

''We had fun,'' they said, teasing me for my fussy and earnest attempts to get them to
admit guilt. There was none to be had.

Eventually it hit me. Today, we all have our own mailboxes, mortgages, children and
memberships at pool clubs. We're just too old to swing from signs anymore. If we get
caught, the downside would be too steep and definitely too embarrassing. From here on
in, remaining unapologetic is our one remaining pretense to that mightier life.