In Fort Collins, a bike-friendly town of 120,000 or so that Money magazine, Reader's Digest and my sister all have called a swell place to live, "bicycle boxing" is three teen-age terrorists in an SUV, roaring up behind cyclists and slugging them with a baseball bat.

  These punks — ages 16, 16 and 17 — hail from nearby Windsor, a much smaller burg with at least three families whose parenting skills clearly fail to meet your fundamental "Ozzie and Harriet" standard.

  As regards the kids, who face a variety of charges well short of attempted murder, the most you can say is that they were bright enough to take their batting practice out of Dodge. Word travels fast in a small town, and the guy you whack with a bat today may turn up on your doorstep with a tire iron tomorrow.

  Young And Dumb. There is something about a teen-age boy that highlights the flaws in Darwin's theories regarding evolution and the Biblical doctrine that God created man in His own image.

  At that age, I was possessed by a swarm of lesser devils, most of which wished they'd snagged someone with a driver's license. It was hard to cause much mischief on a Schwinn Varsity, though I did my best.

  Eventually, I fell in with a couple of like-minded ne'er-do-wells with a '60 Chevy Apache panel truck. And we set out to prove, as our fathers and their fathers did before us, that the only thing worse than a teen-age boy is three of them.

  Amateur herbalists all, we thought it great sport to put the Apache in neutral and try to coast all the way from a popular park-and-puff spot at Gold Camp Road and High Drive down through North Cheyenne Caņon and along West Cheyenne Road to Nevada Avenue.

  One rainy day, there was a pedestrian, and a puddle, and we swapped a little momentum for a moment, showering him with a wall of murky water that arced overhead like the Banzai Pipeline. It was the seed of an idea that reached full flower when we swiped a hand-pumped fire extinguisher from school, emptied and cleaned it, then refilled it with water for late-night ambushes of any white hats brave enough to approach an idling Apache in response to a giggled request for directions.

  Special Delivery. We eventually moved on to harder stuff, like coasting up to a mailbox with lights off, slipping an M-80 with lit fuse inside, then punching it down the block to enjoy the detonation from a distance.

  One night, we decided to take out an oversized mailbox with two M-80s linked by a single fuse. For some reason, I had to step out of the truck to place the charge, and as I touched a lit Marlboro to the center of the single fuse — whose burn time was half that of a single M-80, a detail I had failed to consider — the truck rolled backward slightly, making it impossible to open the passenger-side door and leap in.

  So the truck tore off down the street, and so did I, the mailbox vaporized with a thunderclap, and a jagged piece of what used to be its door rocketed past my head like shrapnel. And it finally dawned on me that someone could get hurt dicking around like this. Probably me.