Here's the story from one our favorite stalkers in all of it's glory...

Hi Dylan,

Thank you so much for sharing the story and bringing back so many funny memories. Man, we were crazy kids back then. The show ended as kind of a cliff hanger so in case any of your listeners want to know the details leading up to that night, they may be weird but true. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. Enjoy!



So back when I was in high school, I had this group of friends who considered toilet papering each other's houses to be an evening sport, you know.. just to pass the time. Yes, this was Santa Cruz County, and yes, we were weird, but there wasn't a lot of activities an under-aged person to do at night, so we had to be creative.

With the whole toilet papering thing, we were never destructive at all. We would tip toe around flowers, take care not to break anything but boy could we chuck a roll way up in a tree and over a branch like nobody's business! We'd make a big mess in the name of fun.

No one ever got upset about it either. Where were the parents in all of this? They actually got involved! I remember my friend Susie's mom would actually go into the yard, hunt down a foot print to try to deduct who had hit their house so she could drive everyone over to get that person back.

I had built a reputation as a legend in this special form of vandalism by hitting 12 houses in one night and setting a record for furthest traveled by drive 8 hours round trip to hit another friend's house (and used a whole case of TP on his yard… but that's a whole other story). Again.. it was all in good fun until one night.

There is only one time in the history of my adventures that I hit someone's house, out of spite. It was my senior year of high school and I had been assigned to a group economics project where all of the other team members had failed to show up to, leaving me alone with the one person who knew how to get on my last nerve. After our group work was done, he apparently annoyed my best friend, Julia, as well because she had also developed distaste for this individual. So for some reason, it only made sense to us that he was to be our next target. Yes, this was the first and only time we would use toilet paper for evil.

I think it was a Friday night when Julia and I found ourselves with nothing better to do so we took a bus to meet each other, dropped in on the Longs downtown and purchased enough TP to "decorate" my classmate's house. It was good and dark before we climbed over a hedge and into his yard.

We were less than 2 minutes into decorating when the lights came on. Normally I would run but with my reputation, being what it was, how could I leave a piece of my art unfinished like this? So Julia and I hid in the hedges hoping that everyone would go back to sleep… when the parents came out.

When his parents spoke, it was like a fricking episode of Leave it to Beaver had been flipped on.

Mom: "Gee honey, I wonder who would do this to us?"
Dad: "Gee darling, I have no idea."

Something about this conversation must have made something snap inside of Julia's head, because at that very moment she leapt up into plain sight, shouting, "We would!!"

The adrenaline started rushing as we found ourselves hurdling over a waist high hedge.

Down the street we ran towards Bookshop Santa Cruz where we came in through the rear entrance. As I approached the door of the glass storefront, my classmate passed right before my face along Pacific Avenue. His stride was firm and his expression was definitely angry, but he had not caught a glimpse of me in his peripheral vision.

"Where do we go now?" asked Julia.
"Back to the scene of the crime. They'll never look for us there." I said.

So back up the street we went towards the scene of the crime but by then we started to hear sirens which made us really paranoid. We cut over through the campus of Santa Cruz High School, hiding in the shadows but knew we couldn't go back to the bus station to head home because that is the most likely place that they would be looking for us. We had to think fast! Dylan's house was just down the street.

We ran… no, sprinted to his house, with adrenaline rushing through our veins. We took a big breath and a big gulp, knocked on the door and hoped that someone was home. The door swung open and Dylan shouted in a jovial tone, "Come on in, we're having a party." Julia and I looked at each other with relief as we both entered.

There was a huge bowl of blue cool-aid in the kitchen that someone quickly pointed out looked like smurf pee.. which brought us to the conversation discussing what color pee that smurfs have. But I digress. Later, a friend of Dylan's who worked in an ice cream shop, brought over one of those industrial sized containers of vanilla ice cream. I remember making smurf pee floats until near the time when we knew the last bus home was going to leave. We headed down to the bus station and made it home.. fugitives at large.

Dylan had saved both of us and we knew we had to repay him.. but how? We sat down and brain stormed but kept coming up blank. What did we know about Dylan? He is tall, creative, funny, loves art and he's skinny. Yes, very skinny. We both looked at each other and knew what we needed to do.

We had to create him a masterpiece that encapsulated the spirit of art and food all wrapped up in the best way that we knew how. So we snuck over one night and did the deed. The rest is history as Dylan described in his heart warming story.

So I don't know if we are the watermelon/spork stalkers or if this was a way of karma reaching out and saving Dylan the way he saved us but it makes for one wild story and an inscription at the back of my Santa Cruz High School 1989 yearbook that reads,

"It was BIG, HUGE, larger than life, there were watermelons and forks flying fast and furious. Now! What a rush!!!

Dillo "


The End