We weren’t bad kids in my youth, but we were inescapably identified by the adages that most people in middle-20th-century Las Vegas led their lives by: birds of a feather and guilt by association.

     As kids, we went trick-or-treating only once. We scored beautifully on candy, fruits and nuts, and we even managed to repeat a trick-or-treat at a place called Dean’s Pharmacy, cater-corner to the old City Hall, where most of us tasted soft-serve ice cream for the first time — twice
     On our way home we came across two older boys, not from our circle. They’d never paid much attention to us, but sometimes circumstances throw people together unexpectedly.
     One of the older boys, Dickie, had a bad reputation, having been arrested for siphoning gas, not to burn it but to sniff it.
     They invited my friends, two Freds, Leroy and Alfred, and me, to join them for what they called urban renewal, or slum clearance.
     We all walked to a house on Commerce Street, to pick up still another friend. He wasn’t in. His mother said he was visiting his girlfriend down the street. When we got no answer at the girlfriend’s house, Dickie, the leader of the group, ripped the screen door off its hinges and put his shoulder to the front door and burst it open. Apparently, Dickie had watched a lot of movies in his day. The friend, who apparently had been amorously occupied, ran to the door.
     There the slumbering Romeo confronted his “friend,” accusing him of wrecking the place. And here I must insert that even as a 12-year-old, I was impressed by how people perform permutations on language and syntax depending on their degree of incredulity, anger, defensiveness and arrogance. So, rather than an exchange like, “What the ___ are you doing?” and “I didn’t do nuthin’.” we get a much more formal tone: “What right have you to break my girlfriend’s door?” And the reply, employing an obvious subjunctive, was, “Believe you me, far be it from me to break the door. It broke by itself.”
     Well, Romeo was bent out of shape and chose not to join us for the rest of the slum clearance Halloweentics. Still revved up, Dickie wanted all of us to knock over an outdoor facility — they were plentiful in those days, there being one in the girlfriend’s back yard. It was a bit flimsy to begin with but still able to withstand Las Vegas-type gusts.
     Dickie instructed my friends and me to push while the older boys, he and Sammy, pulled. Naturally, we youngsters, mesmerized by the thrill of hanging out with older boys, wanted to impress our role models but didn’t want to cause any damage either. Knowing what conceivably awaited us in the vasty depths, we younger boys grunted and groaned while exerting absolutely no effort.
     Sammy came over to our side with an “I’ll show you how to push” attitude. He backed up some 20 feet, got a running start and rammed his right shoulder into the outhouse, with enough momentum to have knocked over six of them. But as it started to tip, he must have realized such buildings don’t come with easy-to-grip handles, and amid some choice curse words, he went airborne.
     We lightweights on his side of the structure tried to push it away from us to allow Sammy to balance and jump to the other side. But Dickie, on the other side, negated our efforts as he too pushed, uprighting the structure. None of us had ever seen anyone reach so quickly for whatever was available to avoid taking a trip south. A weathered 1×2 piece of lumber, held by a couple of nails helped save Sammy.
     I emphasize that Sammy’s fate could have been much worse. The most traumatized part of his person was a shoe. Remember, in those days, in that neighborhood, few people had a spare pair of shoes. That fact gave Sammy a certain air of distinktion at school the next morning.
     The fault of my friends and me was in abetting the older boys. We didn’t actually bust down any doors or cause the outhouse to topple, but it was our privyledge to have been in the company of older, more adventurous boys.
     The grapevine must have been out of service that night, as Mom and Dad never let on that they knew anything about our Halloween atrocities. Except for our shenanigans that Halloween — which we still wonder how they escaped her notice — Mom never let a deed go unpunished. And sometimes, even without solid information, Mom would sometimes open with, “I heard some boys were throwing rocks . . . “ And with that kind of intimation, we often hanged ourselves.
     We were blessed by being routinely upbraided bilingually. She never gave us a choice, but if she had, we would have opted for a lambasting in English.
     It was much shorter that way.