Hell is the Boys’ Locker Room
If you don’t think that something like the Holocaust could ever happen again, spend some time in a boys’ side of a high school locker room. I say this with certainty because I’ve had my own real human head bashed into a locker for no reason other than some kid knew he could get away with it. And verily I tell you, it sounded worse than it felt.
I was a freshman in high school and because I’d only gotten a C in my Science class the year before, I wasn’t in Honors Physical Science with the well-fed geeks who’d been my constant companions since we’d been sorted into reading groups in the second grade. So that first day of school, as Algebra II (The Vengeance of Algebra) ended, and everyone else giggled off to their Honors class–where they’d wear lab coats and poke half-pencils behind their ears–I found the gym on the school map and began my lonely trek.
I’d traveled the entire length of the campus and was only yards from the gym when I saw some kid, probably another ninth grader, running at me. He was in his PE shorts, bright orange with white trim, a low-volume scream blaring from his slightly bloodied mouth. I stopped to watch him flail his bony arms as he zigzagged around me and through the crowd.
As his cries faded, I was grazed. Then bumped. Then shoved by the herd charging toward the gym. I couldn’t move.
I must’ve been waiting for someone to explain. But they just kept mowing through me, heads down, nothing to see.
I had no choice, so I just stumbled forward and joined the line to get a P.E. locker combination.
The old gym was as big as a city block and built to survive a Russian attack. Inside, the locker room was a world of cold gray murk. Abstract shadows cast across grids of exposed pipes lathered in a diseased filth, dripping a rust-colored mucus.
Every few minutes, some ancient machinery in the walls would rumble awake to crush something brittle and necessary. A brief silence would follow, interrupted by the throes of a gathering mob, possibly on horseback and chasing a small animal. Then a thud–flesh smacking against concrete.
Then screams muffled by hands or feet or worse.
I shut my locker and looked up and down the aisle to see who else noticed the madness around us.
Every head down, everyone lost in the task of getting shorts over shoes and out on the field as quickly as possible. I took the cue and joined the stream of identically dressed bodies filtering out to the yard. We gathered on a particular faded yellow line. The bell rang.
A coach with a Stalin mustache took four steps out of his office to grunt roll. Done, he’d throw us a few balls, blast his whistle twice and disappear. We’d all fall out to play whatever game we’d been assigned. But in the periphery, some poor kid lingered–everything about him in a limp.
The victim of the day.
He’d be forcing back tears and blood as he nursed an arm or his entire right side or clutched an ear as if it was about to fall off. And beneath the hurt and shock that kid didn’t seem any weaker or more defenseless than anyone else. Just hurt.
So I knew it–they were coming for us all.
We were just waiting our turn.
After less than a week, the mayhem bled out of the shadows. Beatings happened under bare light bulbs, in and outside of lockers, adjacent to urinals, into urinal cakes. The same madness every day, except before long the chasing and screaming stopped. Why bother? No one was coming to help. It was Lord of the Flies–sans the subtle erosion of morality.
I’d ask my nerdy friends about their P.E. class. They’d yawn one of those endless yawns that approximates unbearably sleepiness and sing, “Boring.” And they said it like boredom was a bad thing. In fifth period PE with most every other Calculus-bound kid on campus, the worst thing that ever happened was that a basketball game might end tied six to six.
But there was nothing boring about my P.E. class. When you’re fucked, boredom is paradise. And we were fucked.
Evil, real evil, had found us, and I realized that the sanitized, comic, Disneyfied notions of darkness at the edge of town or a Christian Hell with just one whimsical, well-dressed Devil were tropes designed to keep kids dumb or happy.
Here’s what real hell was like: Constant, soulless laughter; the drafty helplessness of standing barefoot on sticky concrete; my goods only shielded from harm by tighty whities; the more than occasional sight of penises–unfettered and dangling from beasts who would appear from nowhere, defying gravity, leaping from bench to bench, crushing rat shit and cinders under bare toes.
Everywhere a devil, and they seemed to freeze in midair while flinging themselves, their penises, their shit, their semen into eyes that never closed quickly enough.
Trashcans roved. A beast with hairy, pale, three bare legs dancing underneath–laughing, spinning, bouncing off walls, incapable of containing the hilarity of what was coming new. The can would pause and rise, as if caught in a gust of air. Then its stink would swallow some sad unsuspecting ninth grader’s entire being. Joy would thunder in from everywhere as the gears in the walls woke around us. The beasts were pleased.
And the worst part: Every humiliation, every beating was followed by the ritual of the fiends begging us to tell someone –anyone–what was going on.
“Then you’ll see what happens,” they laughed. “Then you’ll see, bitches. Everyone gets a turn,” they said, explaining exactly why being alive can be such a horrible thing.
When it was time for gym, an unfamiliar, unrelenting sort of fear–the feeling of my pelvis inhaling my testicles–consumed me. To function, I had to turn off who I thought I was and dig my chin into my neck. And every ninth grader in that locker room assumed the same pose. Slouched, head forward. No nods, no acknowledgment of each other of any kind.
Silence and shame were all we had to keep us human.
And I know: There were ten times more of us than them; we should have united and revolted. That’s as obvious in retrospect as it was impossible at the time. There was no one to lead, no ground to hold, no troops to rally.
Just tell the fish food to rise up against the fish.
And of course: There were people to tell, someone who could’ve helped. My mom might’ve cared, and she might’ve tried to do something drastic like alert the principal, I suppose.
But I wasn’t dumb. Anything she did would’ve led to more humiliations, more brutal poundings, a deeper more obvious sense of despair. All we could do was hope that life wouldn’t get any worse, knowing deep down that it would.
I survived those first few weeks–only bumped, rattled and slightly spat-on–by minimizing the time it took to dress. Without moving too quickly, I ducked in and then out in time to be on the field well before the second bell rang. I did whatever I could to avoid the fail that came from dressing less than ninety percent of the time. I knew if I could just make it till June, I’d join some team sport that was barely a sport– like tennis or golf–and never have to take regular P.E. again. There was a way out–if I could just survive.
But there had never been such a huge if in my stupid life.
In October, I began wearing my PE shorts underneath my jeans. But I gave that up when a girl in Algebra II asked me if my diaper was full. By November I was back to stripping down to my tighties. Then for months and months I slunk between the beatings and the smeared shit and the hocked loogis, spared anything worse than an occasional hangnail in an eye.
I survived until early spring when the belligerent ghouls decided for no reason that it was our row’s turn.
And we were getting ours–one-by-one.
Two lockers down, a brown-haired kid with a Big Dipper of moles on his back got dragged off to have his face buried in a used toilet. They held his head down in it for almost a minute before they, almost graciously, flushed.
The poor blond guy whose locker was right behind mine got peed on, twice, in the same day–once at the beginning of the period, then a longer more public spraying as he writhed on the floor near his locker less than an hour later. When it was done, he sobbed and wiped himself off with one leg of his jeans, I couldn’t even feel bad for him because I knew–I was next.
Verily I’d walk through into that bleak gray maze, that nest of vipers, as bravely as I could, knowing it to be the stomach of hate itself and I was but a piece of kibble. When I was dumb enough to look up, I’d see dozens of beasts licking lips, wagging cocks, all on the hunt for some bitch to devour.
Yet as soon as we were out of the locker room, they changed. They weren’t decent, but they were leashed. Their hands were always tucked in their pants, but their tight orange shorts nearly contained their junk. I might get elbowed in an ear if I was dumb enough to go up for a rebound, but they’d pretend to care. “I’d have someone look at that,” they’d say, almost cheery about it.
But in the locker room, the hunt was on. And when they found what they were after, they were righteous and dramatic, fuming with the affected torment of justified scorn.
“Why did you touch that fucking kid’s nuts?” this beast screeched at me, on the day I finally got mine.
From ten feet away, his spittle still sprayed into my eyes.
Half a dozen fellow ogres surrounded him, drooling encouragement. This beast was huge, and everything about his burnt skin, wild hair, gaunt frame was as jagged and sharp as broken bone. To steady myself, I focused on the odd holes in his sweat-beige PE shirt. His nipples dissolved cloth.
“Tell me, bitch. Why did you touch his nuts?”
The beast was pointing at the kid who had the locker under mine. He was skinny, short, pale kid with sad gray eyes. He was out most days, probably at a hospital being force-fed sugar water through a straw. Even the beasts knew that beating him would’ve have been worse than cruel–it would’ve been easy.
“Tell me! Why did you caress that fucking kid’s little white nuts and then stroke his tiny cock up and down?”
“I–” For reason that must relate to a subtle osmosis of religious hokum, I’ve always believed that being completely and irrationally honest in a crucial moment might save me or–in the worst-case scenario–my soul. But I’ve never found any evidence to prove this theory. “I–I wouldn’t do that. Ever.”
This beast was closing in, screaming, “You did bitch, admit that shit.”
Nipples in a beeline for my eye sockets–they’re bleeding. Or it’s blood from my own nipple-stabbed eyes.
The world spins. Fingers invade my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes. Why did I have so many useless orifices?
Rotting flesh inside my mouth. I could bite–but I can’t.
Then, that sound. The dull crunch of my real human head being bashed into a metal locker. Then? Relief.
Crumbled into a ball, wedged between the ground and the locker, expecting a downpour of piss, I held my breath.
But they were gone. I was OK.
My brain did the math–the locker was better than the floor. Better than the corner of the locker or the bench or–especially–the pale kid’s nuts.
My skin was entirely wet with sweat, but I was alive–only because weeks were left in the semester.
Next time would be worse. Next time there would be feces.
That night, for the first time in my stupid life, I wasn’t able to sleep. I love sleep. I was born asleep, crying but asleep. It was the only aspect of my life that never let me down. Even when my dad was at his worst, sleep found me as soon as my head and a pillow met.
But that night as I lay awake, sheets twisted across and around me in a dozen irrational ways, something terrible washed over me. As much as I wanted to be brave and important or good, there was a weakness inside me that only cared about being safe and comfortable. And this weakness didn’t believe in happy endings. And it didn’t care what or who or whom it had to sell-out to make my life easier. As the glum gray light of earliest morning seeped between my blinds, weakness took charge.
And though I had no idea who or what I believed in anymore, weakness knew exactly what it had to do.
When it was time for P.E. the next day, I made the long walk alone, but instead of feeding myself straight into the mouth of locker room, I made a hard right and kept walking along the length of the gym. The bell rang. I sped up as if I were being chased. All I saw were walls and fences so high that I couldn’t climb them without risking my life or my nuts. The urge to turn back and give myself up had nearly overtaken me when I noticed a pale blue door for a bathroom tucked into the building across from the gym. I sprinted to it. Before I did anything, I stopped to consider my options–I didn’t have any.
Weakness told me to push. The door opened.
I threw myself inside.
Though it was a barely bigger than my mom’s closet, it seemed to be empty. The walls were smeared with some strange filth. Rolls of what appeared to be used toilet paper were strewn across the floor. But the light was bright and yellow.
“Hello?” My voice cracked in several unlikely ways.
Nothing. No one. Of the three stalls, only the newer, handicapped one had a door and was large enough to hold a whole human being. Still I had to scrunch myself up as small as I possibly could so that my bare skin wouldn’t rub against anything. I sat down on the toilet. I kicked the stall door shut and pulled my legs into my stomach.
In that fetal pose, I waited for the bell to ring.
The next day, I went right back through the pale blue door. This time I had a day-old newspaper from my Algebra teacher’s trash to read and blot up odd puddles on the floor. I sat myself down. And when I was done with reading and blotting, I’d studied the cracks and the mold on the walls until the bell rang. After a minute or three of letting the blood seep back into my legs, I made my way back into the world to find my nerdy friends, nearly skipping. A new sort of lightness–I might even say a glee–tingled across my skin. And it lasted even as I watched my fellow ninth-graders hobbling out of the locker room, doused in shame and spit. I couldn’t care anymore.
Weakness had won.
For weeks I made my way in and out of that bathroom every day. Every day I felt a little safer.
As I became familiar with all the scars and dents on the pee-stained floors, I let my feet settle on the ground and taught myself how to doze off on the toilet. I was the master of my little world, and every day I thought less about what I was avoiding and more about how smart weakness was. And that’s how I should’ve known some terrible reckoning was on its way.
I had been dozing on the toilet for a half hour when I was awoken the sound of a grown man whistling the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (for My Love)” right outside my stall.
I was trapped. My shoes could be seen beneath the stall door. I tried to pull my legs up–they were both so heavy with sleep that even thinking about them sent a million pins and needles stabbing from my ankles to my thighs. Ignoring the pain, I grabbed one foot and forced a shin to rest across the plastic toilet seat. I took the other foot and tried to tangle my legs Indian Style. Together they were so lifeless and askew that it resembled a pile of scrap appendages. So I tried to forget that I had a body at all and concentrated on willing myself into invisibility –my superpower when I was a kid.
Through the crack between the stall and the door, I could discern that the whistler was wearing shorts. The giant muscles on his calves jutted out like a chin from his hairy legs.
Weakness told me that I’d survive if I didn’t breathe, move or speak. But weakness had no idea what the man would do next.
In a swift succession, he blasted three of crispest, wettest, longest farts I’d ever heard in my life.
Stink must travel at the speed of light because it hit me immediately. And since or before, I’ve never experienced anything close to the brutal horror of those atrocities.
I clenched my eyes, and dug my face into my shoulder, attempting to seal off the little air I had inside. That didn’t work. To keep myself from vomiting, I plugged my pointer fingers up my nostrils, knuckle-deep. If I could just wait him out and escape into the earth’s atmosphere, I might survive.
Tears wept through my eyelids. I tried to squeeze myself still, but the stink pervaded everything. I didn’t have much time, and knowing that I had to look to see if the man was still there. He hadn’t moved. He must’ve been surveying his environs, basking in his smell.
Then he turned and lunged at me.
Giant hands bulging with hairy, walnut-like knuckles grasped the top of the top of the stall and then a giant bulbous head with a giant Stalin mustache joined them.
My P.E. Coach and was staring down at me.
Unfazed by the sight of a pile of useless human flesh with fingers plugged up its nose, he shouted, “One!”
His head–but not his giant hands–dropped out of sight.
Less than a second later his head reappeared.
“Two,” he growled, adjusting his grip.
He considered me and said, “Thank God you weren’t yanking your worm, shitstain. I would’ve certainly crippled your ass.”
He dropped down to the ground and blew his whistle twice. Apparently there was a universal whistle language he assumed was recognized even in the shitter. I forced my feet on the ground and tried to stand, but my legs were still tingling with sleep. They buckled and I stumbled into the slime that coated the stall door. “What the fuck is going on in there?” the coach screamed, concerned I’d abruptly decided to start yanking my worm.
“Nothing, sir.” The smell entered my mouth. I fell back on the toilet. I leaned over myself to unlatch the stall door just so he could see my worm was nowhere in sight.
As soon as it was open, he began to push. “C’mon, shitstain. I don’t got time.”
I leaned back, spread my arms and stuck my palms into the ooze on either side of the stall to try and lift myself up.
He backed away, a bit spooked.
I fell forward and caught myself on the door. Somewhere deep in the stink I detected the taint of baked cauliflower, the worst smell on earth. I closed my eyes. A blue sky dawning, white doves fluttering in the distant, unbearable sunshine.
“Now, shitstain!”
I opened my eyes and forced my legs take shape as I contorted myself–like a cramped little old man–toward the coach. He backed up until he hit the sink. He put his hands up Judo-style, warning me not to get any closer.
I stopped and tried to unbend myself. My legs could barely hold me. I placed my hands on my knees and braced myself.
“Where are you supposed to be, shitstain?”
I thought he was just being wise and asking a question he knew the answer to. So I said, “I’m really sorry, sir,” trying not to allow in any smell in as I forced out what I’d taken in.
“I’m not square-dancing with you, shitstain. Where in the fuck are you supposed to be?” He was serious.
“Out on the field, sir–with our class.”
He huffed and puffed for a moment. “You’re in my class?”
The illusion that he had ever been wise was shattered.
Lying at that point would only confuse him and prolong the conversation, giving his smell the time it needed to smother my few remaining brain cells. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, you’re fucked. Wash your pussy and come with me.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said and fell to the floor.
In the PE office, two different soap operas were playing on two-oversized color TVs. Newspapers opened to the box scores were splayed everywhere. Three coaches, each holding a Styrofoam cup, and a few senior girls, each holding a can of diet soda, were all watching a groom tilt his blond head at his crying bride on the larger of the TVs. The coach walked me to his desk with one hand gripped tight around my flabby bicep so I couldn’t fall again. He told me to sit, stay.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I fell into the chair and it sank a several inches. I was still woozy–as close as I’d ever been to actual intoxication.
The coach watched the screen for a moment before the gauzy close-up faded to black and became a commercial for dish soap. “You dress tomorrow, shitstain,” he said, pointing at my head.
I preferred a life-sentence in jail, possibly the gas chamber. “Coach–” I said. I didn’t know how to properly say his last name, Ostropoloski, though I’d been in his class for months and it had been on several of my report cards. “I’ve missed twelve days–more than ten percent. I can’t pass.”
“Calm the fuck down, shitstain,” he screamed and turned toward me, one finger extended from his giant fist. “How do you know what you’ve missed?” He’d cracked the case.
“I kept track?”
He grunted, and nudged me out the chair. He pushed the chair over and out of the way so he could get his roll book from the top drawer of his desk. With his giant inflatable hands, he flipped through the little grade book as if his fingers were attempting Greco-Roman wrestling moves on the pages. His hands looked like four bulbous, hairy moles that shared one huge disjointed erection. Finally he pinned down my class. He counted for a second then abruptly turned the book toward me and told me to total the NDs for “Not Dressed” and the As for “Absence.” Once I figured out that his Ns were just as often Ms, it took me about twenty seconds to count all the days I’d spent luxuriating in that pale blue bathroom. And I was right; I’d missed for twelve classes, well over the acceptable 10% for the semester.
“Do everyone–the whole class.” He turned back to the TV.
That took maybe five minutes. I leaned over his desk and entered each student’s total in pencil next to his name.
The coach took the book back and stared at what I’d done until he began to rattle. His shaking got worse, nearing a seizure. I placed my arms over my head to prepare for the worst. Then a laugh began; he was just celebrating, as if he’d found a huge fold of twenty-dollar bills stuck up his own ass.
“Half these fat fucks can’t pass,” he said. “Wait here.”
He walked his roll book around the office and showed it to the other coaches. There was plenty of laughing and punching of each other’s shoulders and arms in a way that seemed more hostile than familiar. When that was done, the coach walked right up to me, poked my shoulder, possibly dislocating it, and said, “You got the job, shitstain. Take that and shove it.”
He paused, waiting for me to thank him so I did.
“You can show these ladybugs how to count up like that, too.” He pointed to the senior girls. “You’re welcomed.”
“Thanks,” I said again and took a moment to note the disgusted, repulsed frowns on the girls’ camera-ready faces as they inadvertently noticed me for the first time.
From then on, instead of going to the locker room or the pale blue bathroom, I walked straight into the coaches’ office and sat down at the coach’s desk. Two bells would ring and the coach would go out to the field, call roll and blast his whistle twice. When he got back, I’d adjust the absent kids’ totals. Then I’d sit still and be invisible. I tried to ignore everything, even the newspapers. I hadn’t looked at a box score since my dad had passed, and nearly every inch of newsprint was doused with coffee stains and the powder of sugar donuts.
So I just sat there. Every day a new kid sank into failure. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Or that’s what weakness told me.
Finally, it became June. It was over a hundred and ten degrees every day and the office was air-conditioned down to the mid fifties. The cold comfort made it easy to settle into my role as official snitch/bookkeeper. But I wasn’t welcome. The other coaches and the senior girls never did anything except actively shun me with thorough disdain–even after I’d taught them the secret of adding two-digit numbers without the assistance of fingers or toes.
Still I couldn’t shake from a sappy sort of gloom as I dwelt on the thought of it all ending. I’d never see them any of them again. Not my coach, not the bald coach whose body hair sprouted like weeds from the back of his shirt, not the scowling blond senior girl with giant breasts that grew larger and more spherical every day. That’s when I realized how screwed up it is to be alive–or me. Whatever’s ending–no matter how terrible it is–always seems better than what’s coming next.
On the last day of class, no one had to dress.
Everyone came straight out onto to the field. Basketballs were passed out and the students decided if they wanted to play or not. It was a cool, breezeless day and, for the first time, I heard what sounded like actual joy coming from the field.
The moment he saw me at his desk, the Coach said, “Been waiting for you, stains. Bubble all the grades, except yours.” He handed me a bubble-in sheet with flaps that had flaps.
“I’ll be back. Gotta drop off some shit at the pond.”
It took about five minutes to enter the grades. Only nineteen kids out of forty passed. The rest were damned.
As the coaches and their girls watched their soaps and giggled, I kept reminding myself that there was nothing I could do for the kids who’d failed.
I had to look out for myself–and I wasn’t safe yet.
Then, one-by-one each of the coaches grunted as they dropped their roll books and grade sheets in front of me. I went through, counting out and bubbling as quickly as I could while constantly checking the clock so I’d be done in time.
An hour passed in what felt like a minute.
There were two minutes left in the period when my Coach got back; he was sucking down the last drops from a carton of chocolate milk. From a pocket in his sweats he pulled out a plastic bag filled with cauliflower and dropped it on his desk.
My throat closed. I felt my legs begin to tingle.
I handed the last coach his grades back and sat back down at Coach Ostropoloski’s desk. “The sheet, shitstain,” he said.
I lost myself for a second and had no idea where it was. Then I realized it was right in front of me. I handed it to him. He nodded at me a couple of times, and then wiped his mouth with both shoulders, “OK, give yourself a pity C, clear?”
The bell rang. The office quickly emptied.
It was just us and two TVs blaring.
I took the sheet back and stared at my name.
It wasn’t right that I’d pass when so many hadn’t–that was pretty easy to figure out. But if I didn’t take the C, I’d have to repeat. And weakness wouldn’t let me consider that.
A D would’ve been more honest, but then I might have to explain myself to my mom. And if I did that, I might cry, and no one needed that.
So I bubbled in the C and told myself that that was it. Weakness could never win again.
The First Annual Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
The future begins now. Correction… Read more »
On Child Stardom
I’ve been a failure since the day I turned twelve years old—the day my mom put me in an acting class being held in a house across the cul-de-sac.
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My Treat
I’ve tried to write this story three different times but I still haven’t gotten it right, mostly because the story is not about me. It’s about my girlfriend, the girl I have been dating. It’s sort of a warning to the guys my age about younger women. But it’s also in praise of young girls and their virtues, all the things most guys spend their life trying to feel: the firmness, the newness, the sense that you are making an impression on something so beautiful and firm and new, the feeling that life isn’t all crap. This story is also about how all those things can be bought for at least a while. To me this is a story about confusion, desire and the mall. I hate when an interview in a magazine starts that way. Like, Chelsea Clinton spills the beans on growing up in the White House, Oxford, and vibrators. Then there’s one line about vibrators and it’s probably Chelsea laughing about something the interviewer says about a cell phone being like a vibrator. But this story is about confusion, desire and the mall. I promise. Read more »
Rekindling High School Romance
Being paranoid is really just the ability to read minds incorrectly. I got tired of people saying I’m paranoid (and being paranoid, I guess), so I’m glad I quit doing drugs. I have enough trouble reading my own mind; the best move was just to leave everyone else’s mind alone. Looking back, I probably should have quit way earlier. Read more »
GFE-Girlfriend Experience
REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914),
The Devil’s Dictionary
It didn’t make any sense. I just lost my head and let all my planning go to shit. I guess you call it an addict’s mind, the horses of desire dragging the sullen saint inside of me, etc. But in a few minutes I wasted the most fascinating research that I have ever conducted, and made a completely foolish decision. For weeks –whenever I shouldn’t be– I had been searching for the perfect escort. In minutes, I gave all that up and made a date with the first girl I could get to meet me. Read more »
Another Sunshiny Day in Obamaland
July 11, 2011
Rick Vasquez remembers how traffic used to be on the 110 Freeway. At one time it seemed like a sea of stalled cars puffing out gray smoke was a necessary torture he had to endure every morning to get from Norwalk to Downtown LA where he worked at Cal Trans.
He almost misses being stuck sometimes, especially since he’s learning Arabic on NPR 4 and his car—a plug-in Hybrid—uses as much energy as a boom box when it’s idling. But there’s no traffic at 2 PM when Rick and ten percent of Cal Trans commute in. There’s not even traffic at 8 AM when another ten percent of Cal Trans begins their workday.
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Watching Larry Caukly
“If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.”
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Former Secretary of Defense
A whole week Larry Caukly’s been plugging away without getting called into the Principal’s office. Now some punk in either his third or fourth period has stolen his role book on the day before grades are due.
“Give me four minutes, Cauk,” says Gino Horowitz the Union Rep when he comes to get Larry at the end of the school day. “Gotta drop the family off at the pool. OK?”
The union rep is a hard-assed shop teacher, the kind of educator that calls kids butt-ugly to their faces and sometimes even gives them Charlie Horses if a shithead breaks some equipment or makes a particularly demoralizing mom joke. He’s the kind of teacher that won’t exist much longer, he’ll tell anyone who listens. And because of his personally endangered status, he feels obligated to protect misfits like Larry Caukly from persecution by the PC patrol—the Liberal, ass-sanitizing-then-ass-kissing bullshit police represented at Jay High School by the school administration.
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Free Association
Something was wrong. Principal Schneider and Vice-Principal Berg had never been in our classroom for longer than a minute—except for a Holiday party. But now they were hanging around, hovering, whispering at each other and ruffling through things on Ms. Gold’s desk and pretending as if we weren’t watching everything they did.
The longer they stayed, the more it reminded us that that morning was already way better than a normal morning.
We’d missed at least the first half of math because we’d been left standing near the foursquare court in our boy/girl line. After fifteen minutes, Keith decided that we should play Telephone since it was something to you could do if you had nothing to do and a bunch of people. Ms. Gold gave Keith the nickname “Stubborn” the first day of class, so everyone knew it wasn’t worth trying to disagree with him, especially when he had a good idea like telephone. He started the game and the message went from ear to ear, sometimes whispered two or three times as we tried to get it right. By the end of the line, “Ms. Gold’s sub is late” became “Sucked thumbs taste great,” which made us all laugh—even Walter who was never laughed because his family lived in a bus and he probably owned just two or three pairs of underwear and socks. And we kept laughing until Mrs. Lowry, the other fifth-grade teacher, heard us and brought us inside.
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A Reassuring Monologue from the Creepy Guy On the Bus Delivered to a Girl Who Never Takes Her Ear Buds Off
God, I hate it when I’ve cough like this. It’s bad—I’m always coughing. My daughter said I’ve had a cold since the day I began to look fifty. But this thing is bad—it’s like broadcasting exactly where the mucus in my body has settled.
It’ll stop. I’m not contagious. We love that lie, don’t we. We love to say, ‘No, I’m fine,’ and then list everything that’s wrong.
We love to complain. Complain, complain, complain. Complain. COUGH, complain. Everybody does it. It’s like a little award speech we’re always giving—I never could have done it without everyone and everything who tormented me and made my life a little hell.
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