I grew up in the teenage wasteland of suburban Ohio. There wasn't much to do and out of boredom I often got into trouble. This is the story of the two times I was arrested in high school. Since I was underage both of these arrests have been expunged from my record.

In 1988 I was 13 and pretty into computers. My mother could only afford a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 as opposed to a Commodore 64 that everybody else had.

I loved the movie War Games and tried to emulate everything that David Lightman did, from the clothes he wore to the trouble that he made.

One afternoon my friend Paul and I were skateboarding behind a sporting goods store and we decided it would be a good idea to go through store's dumpster. The dumpster was full of all sorts of junk but mostly credit card carbons.

Remember, this was back in the day before ATM's or debit cards. To process a credit card, it had to be manually swiped on one of those clunky credit card machines. You got a copy, the store got a copy and the black carbon was just tossed into the trash even though it contained your credit card number and all your personal information.

I gathered up an armload of carbons and hatched a brilliant plan to order a bunch of stuff from The Home Shopping Club. My scheme was simple: I would call HSC, claim to be the person whose name was on the carbon, give an address down the street from my house and see what happened.

My plan worked better than expected. I called HSC and they happily gave me an account number. From then on I was allowed to order from their automated system, without having to talk to the operator. I could simply order things by entering the stolen credit card numbers on my touch-tone phone.

Paul and I started to stay up all night drinking Cokes and ordering the stupidest stuff possible: flimsy train sets, crummy jewelry, trinkets, shitty toys, kitchen items - anything that seemed remotely funny to us at 3 A.M.

Strongsville, Ohio was a wealthy and trusting place, and if someone wasn't home the postal carrier usually left their packages on their doorstep. This made it easy for Paul and I to cruise the neighborhood and collect our boxes before people got home from work.

Things were going great, then I got reckless - I ordered a personal photocopier. I had no idea how big it was and wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I waited excitedly for it's arrival at the bogus address down the street.

A week later Paul drove me to the house where the copier was delivered. He stayed in the car and I walked up to the porch but the package wasn't there. I decided to press my luck and ring the doorbell.

A father and son came to the door.
'Can I help you?' said the father.

'Uh, I think something I ordered accidentally got delivered to your house by mistake.' I lied.

'Oh yeah, that came last week! It's in the basement, we'll go get it
.' said the father in an unfriendly tone.

At this point two other members of the family came to the door, a mother and a younger sister. They scowled at me.

The father and son disappeared to look for the package. A few minutes later they came back and told me they couldn't find it in the basement but it might be in the garage. The younger sister was dispatched to look for it and returned 5 minutes later, empty handed.

'It might be somewhere else in the house. Let me think for a sec.' said the father, obviously stalling.

'Maybe I'll just come back for it later. Thanks anyway.' I replied stepping off the porch, in retreat.

'You aren't going anywhere!' yelled the father grabbing my wrist. Holy Shit!

I twisted free from his grasp and ran onto the lawn yelling at Paul to GO! He peeled out and I kept running, cutting a zig-zag pattern through backyards all the way home.

I arrived out of breath and found my Step-Dad outside of our house absolutely fuming. The cops had pulled Paul over and gotten my address out of him. We were totally busted.

Paul and I were taken to the Police station. The cops were surprised at how young we were and seemed sort of amused by the whole situation. I exonerated Paul right away, in part because the scam was my idea, and in part, because I didn't want to split any of the stolen loot with him. There was no way I was going halvsies.

A big cop sat me down in a chair next to his desk. I was petrified – there seemed like no way out to the situation. Then I noticed that he was having a hard time entering my report into his computer - a TRS-80! My speciality!

I convinced him to let me look at it and after a few minutes I spotted the problem: a loose RS-232 cable. I refastened the cable and - VOILA! - problem solved. I had bought myself some good will.

Amazingly enough I only got 3 months of low-risk probation FOR CREDIT CARD FRAUD. The police persuaded HSC to take back the copier at no charge and my previous thefts went unreported. I was sentenced to one day of community service, cleaning up a VERY BIG public park on the 5th of July, which was totally gross.

My mother grounded me for a year but that was quickly reduced to a week. She soon forgot all about it and went back to drinking her way out of her terrible marriage.

I didn't realize it, but at the time she was having an affair with a scrap metal mogul. She would crawl out of her bedroom window at night while my Step Dad was sleeping to meet him at a sports bar down the street appropriately named Sneakers.

About a year later Paul called me on the telephone excitedly. 'You have to call this guy's answering machine, IT'S GREAT!' he exclaimed.

My telephone number was 238-1769 and Paul had mistakenly dialed 234-1769. I called it and what I heard blew my mind...

The message began with the energetic opening notes of Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor. DUNT-DUNT-DUNNNNNNNT. A few seconds later the most feeble voice I ever heard spoke over the music, 'Hey, this is Dennis!' It sounded like a teenaged girl. 'I'm out looking for the eye of the tiger,' he continued. 'I'll call you back when my journey is through!'

HOLY SHIT!!!!!! It was the funniest thing we had ever heard. We called the number ALOT, way too many times and Dennis never picked up. Not once.

I knew that most answering machines had a simple two digit code, that allowed you to listen to your messages from any phone. I figured out Dennis's code and Paul and I started listening to the messages people left him. They were pretty boring so I decided to stir things up a bit. Using the two digit code I discovered how to change Dennis's OUTGOING message.

We started to change Dennis's outgoing message all the time. We called from everywhere, morning, noon and night. The terrible thing was that we didn't leave funny, goofy messages. We left horribly mean fucked up messages, like the one written above.

Here is another example....

How about this one?

There was no limit to what we would say. Kids from school started calling the number just to hear the fucked up shit we would leave. It became a thing to do, people would beg us to say their names on the messages.

This went on for a few weeks, then one morning before school I called Dennis's machine and heard this....

Busted again.

The Middleburg Heights Police Department couldn't understand why I was harassing this guy and I couldn't really explain it myself. Why did I say all of those terrible things? They put me in an interrogation room and played me a tape recording of all the messages.

The messages were so totally out-of-control that after listening to a dozen of them I couldn't take it anymore. I started to nervously giggle then burst into hysterical laughter. Pissed off, a giant cop grabbed me and literally dragged me to a jail cell.

A few hours later my mom took me home. I'm told I have to meet Dennis the next day at Bob's Big Boy. It turned out that Dennis was a school teacher at a Cleveland Public School and was convinced that somebody had been breaking into his house to change the message. He got an alarm system and a doberman pinscher(!).

The next day I met Dennis, expecting the worst. He turned out to be a totally nice guy who seemed generally concerned with a troubled youth. He had a copy of the police report that I had written, and was impressed that I used the word sequential when explaining how I figured out his code. He dropped all of the charges and bought me a hamburger! I think he went out on a date with my mother too, but I think that was supposed to be a secret. When I went to college a few years later, Dennis wrote me a letter of recommendation.