Mayhem in My Heart and Egg on My Face

Once upon a time--I think it was 1972, or maybe ‘73--three more or less typical teenage boys went out to raise a little suburban hell. We’ll call them Alan, Brad and Scott. The first two are pseudonyms.

Alan and Brad dropped by Scott’s house, wearing devilish grins.

“Wanna go egging?”

Now, Scott had toilet-papered a few houses in his time. He’d broken some windows at an abandoned, quake-damaged school. He’d lit more than a few firecrackers and bottle rockets. He’d drunk his share of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and done a few other things that won’t be detailed here. But egging was something he’d never done.

Alan and Brad were angry at some guy, so they hit his house first. Soon the targets were random. One egg, neatly cracked with yolk intact, was left on the hood of a stranger’s car, no doubt ruining the paint job. A few minutes later, they were laughing and cruising near their high school. Sitting in the back, giddy with the badness of it all, Scott saw a car coming the other way. Without warning his cohorts, he lobbed an egg out the window. Bull’s-eye. This would prove to be a mistake.

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There weren’t any paint-ball guns in the early ‘70s, thank goodness. And hand-held video cameras weren’t readily available either, or else there might be a record of that night’s low-grade meanness and high-grade stupidity.

But that was then. Now, four teenage boys from the San Fernando Valley are facing prison terms ranging from two to four years after making national news by videotaping themselves on a cruel, three-night rampage. They attacked people and vandalized cars with baseball bats and guns made for war games that are capable of shooting paint pellets up to 210 miles per hour.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen some of the video and heard the way the boys, ages 17 and 18 at the time of the attacks, laugh and joke as they do their paint-ball drive-bys. One boy cackles something about “human head baseball” after leaning out the car window and hitting somebody with a bat. (It was small comfort to learn he actually struck his victim in the rib cage, not the head.)

The first reaction is to be appalled, shocked, disgusted--to view the perpetrators with utter scorn. Later come the memories that inspire a measure of pity. After all, these young men have never been described as hard-core gangbangers.

“These were mainstream kids,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen, after negotiating the plea-bargains reached last Friday. “They were doing OK in school. But I can’t believe this is what most kids are doing.”

Yes, there’s no question these young men’s actions were beyond the pale, graduating far beyond malicious mischief to mayhem. I called Cohen the other day and asked if he ever got into trouble as a teenager. He told me about the time, at age 16, he was caught drinking a can of beer while working on a friend’s car. And one night he and some buddies coated the school’s doorknobs with Vaseline.

If he had ever gone egging, he didn’t admit it.

No, Cohen agreed, we didn’t have paint-ball guns back then. But, he pointed out, we did have BB guns and baseball bats. These boys were getting kicks by hurting people.

Cohen finds himself unimpressed with the media campaigns that the perpetrators and their attorneys have waged in hope that the judge reduces the sentences. Some have been on Oprah and other talk shows with their victims. As Cohen understands it, one victim accepted an apology and another didn’t.

Nor is the prosecutor impressed by one young man’s video of repentance, in which he is shot with paint pellets himself and gets moral education at the Museum of Tolerance. If he really wanted to feel the victim’s pain, Cohen suggested, he would have had to have been shot unexpectedly on the street at night--and in the face, not the arm.

Cohen said he hopes the young men emerge from prison as better persons. “I feel terrible for their families,” he added. “But you just can’t turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.”

I asked the prosecutor to compare the four-year sentence to plea-bargains for other crimes. Cohen said it was hard to generalize, but four years would be comparable to some plea-bargains for some armed robbers and drug dealers.

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The phrase “drive-by shooting” wasn’t common in the early ‘70s, and there was no music romanticizing “gangsta” life. There was no TV show like “Cops,” demonstrating the power of raw video. There was nobody like Dennis Rodman, whose head-butting, bad-boy persona now has such All-American firms as McDonalds and Carl’s Jr. competing for his endorsements.

When the egg splattered the other car’s window, Alan was startled, then stepped on the gas and made a few quick turns. They were safe.

Thirty minutes later, they found themselves back near the high school, parked and cleaning up the last egg, one that had broken inside the car. A familiar vehicle pulled alongside, blocking a getaway.

Two men got out--older, larger men with anger in their eyes. The culprits, trying to hide their terror, feigned innocence. The men said they knew the egg came from the back seat. One reached inside the open window and slapped Scott’s face. Thinking fast, Alan showed them remains of the broken egg and explained how his car had just been hit too. The bad guys went thataway.

“Look, I know you did this,” the car’s owner said. “The only reason I’m not going to the cops is that I can’t prove it.” Scott, for one, was more concerned about the prospect of a serious butt-kicking. The men let the boys go. Scott, for one, never went egging again.

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.