Jón Gnarr - The Indian

When Gummi got back from Mallorca he gave me a saltcellar and a little pirate pistol with caps. You can only shoot one shot at a time. But it shoots brilliantly.

Gummi is my friend. He’s always kind to me. He never fights with me and doesn’t make fun of me when I do weird things. His mom and dad are always nice to me, too.

I always invite Gummi to my birthdays and he usually invites me to his. It was his birthday the first time I ever went to his house. He’d just moved into the neighborhood. I didn’t have anyone to play with that day. I knew a boy had recently moved in to that house so I went and asked for him. His mother answered the door.

— Is there a boy here?

She let me in. There was a birthday party going on. I got cookies and soda. After that, we were friends.

I sometimes pull pranks. I like to tease annoying people. I tease this one guy who lives in the street next to Gummi. He’s always annoying us kids. If our ball goes into his garden, he always takes it, and we can’t get our ball back. So many balls disappear. So I peed in a punctured ball. Then I went and kicked another ball several times at the wall of his house. I knew it would get on his nerves a lot.

After I’d been kicking the ball against his house a while, I took the pee-ball and threw it in his garden.

He came right out.

— Can I have my ball?

— No, you’re never getting it back.

— You’re annoying and you stink!

When he picked up the ball, it sprayed pee all over him. I started laughing and ran off. A few times, I’ve thrown stink bombs into his garden.

I also like to tease Posh Friðjón. He lives in our street, too. He’s not annoying. He’s always friendly to kids. All he ever does is sweep and tidy the outside of his house. Sometimes he sweeps the sidewalk in the street. He’s even swept the road once or twice. He wants everything to be neat. That’s why it’s so much fun to tease him. Like I’ve thrown sand on the pavement next to him. I’ve thrown mud at his door. Once Gummi and I stole some eggs from Mom and threw them at his windows and front door.

I also sometimes ring and run, or pack snowballs into exhaust pipes. It’s perfectly harmless; all boys do it.

But some of the things I do are a total surprise. They’re things I wasn’t planning to do. I don’t know why I do them. They happen inadvertently. Once, for example, I was playing with my Matchbox cars in the basement. There was a large windowpane standing against the wall; Dad was going to put it in the living room. One of my cars accidentally went behind the window and I couldn’t get to it. So I took an empty bottle and broke the window so I could fetch the car. I didn’t mean to ruin it. It wasn’t planned. Dad went crazy and spanked me.

People often get angry at me. Sometimes I know why; usually I don’t. They often don’t realize that what I did wasn’t intentional.

Every New Year’s Eve we visit my aunt and uncle. They live in an apartment building in Breiðholt. We eat a meal with them, watch the Billy Smart Circus, and set off fireworks.

They have a lot of kids and know how to make real fries. Mom just makes artificial ones. When we have chicken for dinner, we have fries from a can. They’re thin and hard.

Once, when we were going home, I was a little way in front of Mom and Dad. My cousins were up on the balcony with sparklers. I was waving goodbye to them. So they could see me better, I climbed up on the roof of a car. The old man who owned the car came running. He was totally furious. He shook me all over and yelled at me. I was so scared I started crying.

Mom was upset, not at me but at the guy. That was nice of her. It was quite a surprise. I hadn’t spoiled anything, just waved goodbye.

When I do something inadvertently I often feel bad afterwards because I don’t know why I did it in the first place. Maybe I’m just evil. Maybe there is one Jón who is good and another Jón who is evil who makes the good Jón get up to all sorts of mischief. Maybe Satan’s gotten inside me.

I often play in construction sites. I know it’s forbidden but it’s so much fun. It’s like being in a fort. You’ve got to be careful not to step on a board full of nails, though. That mega sucks. I’ve stepped on a nail stick several times. Once, Gummi and I were playing, and Gummi trod so hard on a nail that the nail went right through his foot: the tip came up out of his instep. Gummi started bawling and had to go to the emergency room.

Once, I climbed up on the roof of a ranch house that was being built. There was scaffolding around the whole thing. When I was up on the roof, I realized that there were people working on the house: I saw their heads peeping up from the roof’s edge. They’d left their tools up on the roof.

It was a game of cowboys and Indians. I was an Indian out stalking. They were the cowboys. I crawled along the roof and took a hammer. The men hadn’t spotted me. I hit one of them on the head with a hammer. It wasn’t hard, there was no blood or anything, but he was still really, really mad. I was so scared that I ran away and jumped off the roof.

I don’t know why I do these random things. I just suddenly start doing them. My dad asks me why. I don’t know what to say.

— Why did you do it? he asks.

He’s angry.

— I don’t know, I mumble. It’s all I can say.

— Exactly: you never know anything!

It’s true. I hardly know a thing. I don’t want to learn or to have friends. I don’t behave myself. That’s why I can never go fishing with my dad or on his trips when he goes out west. You can’t take me anywhere.

— Want to play a game? asks Gummi.

— What game?

Gummi has lots of games. He’s so grown-up and calm and knows so much. He’s got everything ordered and tidy in his room and keeps it all that way. My room’s just piles of junk.

Gummi has a gift for making models and painting them. He has a lot of cars and planes that he built himself. I thought it would be shit easy so I bought a model plane at The Play House. I never managed to get it together. The result was ugly, nothing like the picture on the box. I had glue all over my hands and there were also large blobs of glue all over the model. It was a Spitfire. I stuffed it with cotton and gasoline, set light to it and threw it off the roof.

— Memory?

That’s no fun. You have to remember images. I can’t remember anything and I always confuse the images. It’s annoying, like Mastermind. That’s the most annoying game I know.

— Let’s play Monopoly.

— Okay.

Monopoly is a great game. I like playing board games with dice and money. I love saving money and having a lot of it. Though Risk is my absolute favorite. It takes a really long time to play. I play it by myself. I’ve made my own maps using big drawing sheets I got from school. They’re half the size of the board that comes with the game. I drew new countries and colored them with markers. I created new rules and new cards. In my Risk, there’s money. I use money from the Fisheries game. You get a certain amount of money for each country you control. And you can also sell troops. With the money, you can buy cannons that can go over land, or else ships. They can only be used once and are more expensive if you are sailing a long way. If you’ve got a whole ton of money, you can even buy a nuclear bomb. Those kill an entire country including everyone inside it.

I like to build a large army. When I have a much larger army than all the others, I take them on all of a sudden and kill them in a flash offensive, sailing with all my ships and bombing the biggest countries with my nuclear bomb.