So, first things first. I will not be playing any April Fools Jokes.

I haven’t done any since, a few years ago, I pulled one and sent my little brother, Dominic, to the hospital.

We’d always had a tradition of doing them, but they really started to escalate when we got into our 30’s. In April of…I think 2000, maybe 2001, they started getting really mean. Stuff like storming into his workplace (the Ford car plant, at the time) and, in front of all his co-workers, pretending I was his lover and we were having a big spat about why he wouldn’t leave his wife. Then when I got home that day I found that he’d ordered 30 pizzas to my house – all of them Mushroom pizza. Everyone in my family is deathly allergic to mushrooms.

So the next year things got worse, and they kept getting worse. My little sister Gina tried to get in on the game, but hasn’t been seen since the “Let’s get an army of albino dwarves to tie her up and put her in the cabinet under the sink” April Fools Joke of ’03. Still, Dominic and I kept at it, and eventually we were doing things like setting fire to each others cars, and hiring people to burst in and kidnap each other in front of our kids.

Well, the last one was me hiring a landscape team to destroy his lawn.

I’d hired them under the premise that we were “Re-landscaping” with all rock, and we needed them to use their big bulldozer to strip away every bit of lawn from the yard. When the machinery arrived early that morning and started destroying their lawn, he went running out to stop them, but the driver of the bulldozer didn’t see him, and clipped him with the plow on the front of the machine. As he was diving away to not get completely crushed, he slipped and fell into the street, where he was almost hit by a huge ice-cream delivery truck. The delivery truck swerved to avoid him and flipped over, pouring out about 2 tons of ice cream -Mocha Fudge- directly on top of my brother.

The construction guys, still not realizing that Dominic was even in the yard, ran to the truck and started to help the driver, who was unharmed but hanging upside down in his truck. Dominic, buried under an avalance of Mocha Fudge in Family Size containers, could barely move, and realized that no one was hearing his screams. Knowing that he’d never be able to move the giant mound of ice cream on top of him, and that his oxygen was quickly being used up, he knew that he only had one chance.

He began to eat his way out as quickly as possible, devouring Mocha Fudge as fast as he could swallow it.

And that’s how my brother went to the hospital: with the biggest brain-freeze headache ever recorded. He spent 3 days in intensive care. Well, actually, he spent most of that time in the labor/delivery ward due to a weird clerical mixup. From there, because of his yelling about not wanting to be there, they admitted him to the psych ward for about a day and 1/2 until it was all straightened out. And then his insurance wouldn’t cover “pre-frontal-lobe hypothermia due to frozen dairy overload”, and so he took them to court. They’re still waiting for a court date.

Out of guilt, and shame, I’ve never done an April Fools Joke since.

Honestly.