The phone shrieked me awake, jarring me out of my dream of tropical paradise and into the reality of a frigid Adk January morn.

I looked at the clock — 0930.

What terrorist was invading my dreams and my wool-shrouded lair at this ungodly hour?

“Hello,” I mumbled into the receiver.

‘Hello,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.

I repeated my greeting; he repeated his.

“OK,” I said, tiring of this game. “Who is this?”

“Adam.”

Of course: Adam “Big Daddy” Harris, my favorite local entrepreneur and nemesis.

“Wuzzup?” I said.

“I need your info for our Winter Carnival poster.”

The info he wanted wasn’t personal. Instead, it was for a Carnival event I’m putatively in charge of. It’s called The Chucklehead Hoe-Down, a family-friendly jokefest to be held in the Garagery.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s gonna be Thursday the sixth, from six to eight,” I said.

“No it’s not,” he said.

“What?” I said, suddenly awake, as every cell in my bod flooded with adrenaline. “It’s the sixth. We already agreed on that. It’s in the Carnival schedule, I’ve got the posters printed, it’s –“

“No,” he said. “It’s the third. The sixth was already taken when we talked. I told you that.”

I said nothing because my mind was blank, punctuated by only a fleeting thought of doom, disaster and disgrace. I was positive we’d agreed on the Thursday date, especially since I’d requested others but they’d already been filled. I wrote the date in my calendar and told the Carnival chairpeople. I KNEW it was Thursday the sixth.

Or was it? I make lots of mistakes. Was this another one? Now I just couldn’t remember with certainty…

“Just kidding,” he said. “It’s the sixth.”

At that moment he was one lucky boychik, because we weren’t near each other and the sharpest weapon at my disposal was my wit. Cuz believe me if we’d been in the same room, I may have found my pic on the next day’s front page of the Enterprise, under the headline, “Death By Fountain Pen.” And under that the sub-head, in typical Aaron Marbone style, “An Inkling to Murder.”

Big Daddy had caught me unawares and had taken advantage of my kindly (and at that point, half-somnolent) nature. I probably should’ve expected it, given his snarky nature, but as I said, my guard was down. The Yiddish word for what Adam did was “shticklach,” which loosely translates as something that’s naughty but not harmful to someone. There are a bunch of other Yiddish words that also describe what he did, and him, but they’re unfit for a family newspaper — even one whose readers don’t know Yiddish.

–

The Pride of the Pranksters

–

To clarify: I have nothing against snarky humor. In fact, I’ve been known to indulge in it from time to time, myself. But I draw the line on pranks and practical jokes. Or more exactly, while I like practical jokes in the abstract, I don’t indulge in them.

Over the years I’ve thought of dozens of pranks to play on people — they delight my inner doppelganger to no end. But I’ve never actually committed one. What held me back? While practical jokes aren’t usually malicious, they always take advantage of someone. Maybe not for long and maybe not incurring any real damage, but for the time they do, however short, the victim feels fully what being a butt is — of either jokes, or in general. And while I can swap repartee with the best — and worst — of ’em, I cannot bring myself to making someone the victim of a jape.

But whenever I hear or think of a prank, I’m reminded of a guy I was in the Navy with, who as far as I’m concerned, was the Nicola Tesla of Practical Jokes.

His name was Davis, and he looked like a fresh-faced farm kid from The Heartland, which he was. But behind that innocent-looking visage was a world-class brain — at least when it came to ways of figuring out how to goof on people. And by dint of how many different goofs he came up with in the short time I knew him, it seemed his brain was in high gear, 24-7.

He was never malicious or mean-spirited, so no one ever got mad at him. Beyond that, he had brilliant timing, so he never pranked regularly or often, and then when he did, no one expected it, so we always fell out laughing when he did. For example, he made a “grass” skirt, bra, lei and headpiece out of colored paper and sashayed his way up and down the radio shack in his version of a hula. Another time he made a weird device out of discarded radio parts and rubber gaskets that became a mechanical whoopee cushion that he dubbed, The Flatuator. He also knew all sorts of bird whistles, and at the oddest times we might hear the call of a loon or the cawing of a crow.

For reasons known to him alone, he did his pranks only in the radio shack, when we were on duty. This bugged our Section Chief Tex Berry, but because they were infrequent and of short duration, there was nothing he could really do about it. And interestingly, Davis’s longest running prank was directed at Tex, bugged the snot out of him, and he never figured it out.

–

Pipe dreams of the worst kind

–

The radio shack was an old German air force pre-WWII building, so it had undergone all sorts of renovations over the decades. One remnant of those efforts, and one that seemed to make no sense whatsoever, was a big bunch of water intake pipes that weren’t hooked up to any water source. Instead, pipe straps held them to the ceiling, apparently neither going nor coming to or from anywhere. At least that’s how they looked to me. To Davis, they looked like The Grail of Pranks.

He had figured out that one of the pipes began outside the door to our section, near where he sat, and it ended directly over the Chief’s desk. Once he realized that, he was ready to raise, if not hell, then deviltry of a very spooky nature.

It was simple enough: He went in the hall and stood on a chair from which he could reach the pipe, then made soft spooky “oooo’s” and “wooo’s” and “weee’s” noises into it. And since that pipe ended above Tex’s desk, that’s who heard them. But this is where Davis’s timing shone. First, he did it only in the wee hours of mid-watches, like 0300 to 0400. Second, he did it so it was barely audible. And third, he did it for only a few seconds at a time, and maybe over the course of a minute, at most.

The effect was fabulous. At first, of course, Tex heard nothing. Or maybe he thought he heard something, but couldn’t be sure. Then, over the period of weeks, he realized he was hearing something. But he had no idea what it was. And this put him in a dilemma, because while he may not have believed in ghosts, they were as plausible an explanation as anything. Sometimes, rather than just making vague sounds, Davies would moan, “Helfe,” the German word for “help.”

When Tex was really bugged, he’d leave his desk and walk up and down the section, trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from. And of course when he did, it was too late, because Davies was already back at his receiver.

I sat directly in front of his desk, so one night he finally asked me if I heard those noises. Of course I was in on the prank and wasn’t about to either rat out Davies or lose a chance to get over on Tex.

“Noises?” I said. “What noises?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Kinda sound like a voice.”

“You hearing voices, Chief?”

“It ain’t funny, Seidenstein.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe it’s a dybbuk,” I said.

“The hell is that?” he said.

“Like a haint, a ghost,” I said.

He just shook his head and gave me a dismissive look of disgust.

Davis haunted Tex for the rest of his hitch there, without his ever figuring it out. But he also never gave up trying — much to his frustration…and to our delight.

Because we handled highly-classified material, all of us had Top Secret security clearances. We were dead serious about our jobs and communication security, and took great pride in never revealing any secrets.

But for me, and I’m sure the other guys in the know, the secret we were proudest to have kept was Davis the dybbuk.