NoHo Smashers
by Anthony Alba

Idle hands are the play things of the devil

Everyday at 9:55am at North Hollywood High, nutrition breaks out. Throughout the school, there isn't really much to do except eat, talk, and walk around, leaving idle time for everyone. Many people will fill their time by listening to walkman radios, cassette players, and compact disk players, or holding hands or making out, or defying the rules.

Over by a classroom stairway, a group of unified outcasts group together and have somehow found something new that amounts to so much more. So much more destruction. Laying around in this area are the school junk left overs, including a couple heavy blocks of cement, play signs, old steel fences, mint condition zip lock bags, and bottles. To shade them, they have a wonderful tree, where people have marked their entry into this territory by leaving their chewed gum on the tree. A basic everyday performance for each of them is to place something on the concrete pavement, take a left-over concrete rock, and drop it to smash the object. This is what they do to remove their boredom, to keep them occupied, to get a good laugh, to create abstract art, and it's what they do for fun.

Sometimes they will add on and buy soda bottles and such items just to smash them while they’re still new. At various times, it is almost like a game - how many people can you splash from here? They do not only use this area to smash objects. There are "have-to-be-there" moments where they will take unopened soda cans and throw them against the high walls. From here, the soda will rickashay off with holes and sputter around, shooting out the soda, almost as if it was spazzing out.

At this point some may wonder who cleans up all this mess. Well, no janitor would dare step near this mess, but every day, when everyone shows up again, the mess has disappeared. The last constructed opinion was that it was the pigeons. Evidence concluded this to be a fact, as careful observation has it, this is all very true. Pigeons are either releasing their milky colored droppings or taking in food to create them. For the latter, food is always being dumped on the ground by careless teenagers eating their school lunch and leaving their garbage that holds priceless crumbs for the pigeons. The janitors are getting paid for the work they rarely even have to worry about because the pigeons come around. Well, this is the just one of the versions of teenage carelessness throughout High Schools everyday, and the pigeons are forced to clean up after them.