213: Devil on My Shoulder
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From WBC Chicago it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm out of class. One day when I was 14, coming home from junior high school, I saw my across the street neighbor Mark Nastor and he was writing his 10th speed down this big hill near our school. I was near the bottom of the hill and I had one of those, you know, there's like three ring binders that you use when you're in school, those loose leaf binders. I had one of those with all my school papers in it. And as Mark Nastor sped down the sidewalk of this very steep hill, I got this idea and to explain this I need you to picture for a second what a loose leaf binder looks like when you lay it on the ground. It looks like a little ramp, right, with the highest point of the ramp being the fatter side, the side with the rings. I thought I could throw my loose leaf notebook in front of Mark's moving bicycle, positioning it perfectly so his wheels would roll up the ramp and it would serve as a ramp he would fly in the air like evil, can evil. Now I want to say what about speed, this idea popped into my head and then like in a second, too fast to actually think this through. If there were time to think about this, I don't think I would have done it. The idea pops into my head and then there is Mark Nastor moving fast down this hill and I threw the binder in front of him. Now in case you're wondering what the actual aerodynamics are when a moving bicycle meets a junior high school binder and how high the bike flies and how far it goes, I can tell you because I was there, I saw this. What happens to a bicycle in this situation is it flips on its side at a very high speed, throwing the bicyclist off and bruising the bicyclist. The bicyclist then gets up, curses at you and asks this question, "Why did you do that?" It's a good question. It's a really good question and I had no answer at the time. I do now because I heard some things lately that shed some light. I was seven years old when this happened. All of my life, my family, would go to this campground for the whole summer. This is Wendy. In this campground, all of my sister was a teenager at the time, she was 17 at the time. All the teenagers at this campground on Friday nights, before they would go out, they would go up to this place, this barn that had video games and there was a little place where you could buy a penny candy. One night, one of these Friday nights, I went with my sister up to the barn and she had this one friend and I don't remember her name, but I remember what she looked like. I remember she had this blonde feathered hair and she was really pretty and she had eyeshadow and makeup on and that was kind of fascinating to me. She was wearing this orange jumpsuit and it had the zipper down the front and it was really, it just sort of stood out to me and at some point, I went over and I was talking to her and I don't know why I did it, but I had this impulse and I said, I just said to her, close your eyes and she did and when she closed her eyes, I reached out and I grabbed the zipper and I unzipped her jumpsuit all the way down to the belly button and when I did that, her, her breasts popped out of the jumpsuit and I didn't, I don't know what I was expecting, but I didn't expect them to pop out and like they did. She wasn't wearing a bra or anything and she screamed and she was completely freaked out and I just ran away, I just ran, like I ran back to the camper. Her sister was furious, her parents were furious and they kept asking her over and over, one
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