One day they dragged me over to gifted and talented. I was nine or eight. Left the regular classroom went to the one with the seagreen concrete blocks. They had chess in there and some other little kid was playing Mozart on the Casio. The teacher was a woman with Sally Jesse Rafael glasses and a brown clownwig. I took a seat with some other kids and they were doing math problems for fun and I just sat there. The teacher asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do anything. But then one of the kids said I was the one who had drawn the cat playing the tuba. And the polar bear on stand up bass. So then I was given some paper and markers and colored pencils and the teacher loomed over me. I drew a dog trying to pluck a harp. This went on for a couple weeks. Every Wednesday over there with the kids who were teaching themselves French and who were trying to solve the Freudian square root of their father’s unhappiness. I used to draw a lot of monsters drinking coffee. One day the teacher pulled me aside and told me I wasn’t gifted or talented and they’d made a mistake. So in the middle of the day she kicked me out and sent me back to general population. Which I really appreciated.
I recall the day limes finally came to town.
I recall when we got almonds.
I had to take one of those standardized tests and my mom had heard something new. Scientists had discovered that almonds were brain food. So she got me some almonds. A little pouch of them. And she got me these tiny blueberry muffins and an apple juice. Now look at me today.
Sixth grade we went on a trip into the woods. It was one of those camps like in Friday the 13th. Up in the northwest corner of New Jersey in a state park. Spent a couple nights there. It was fine. I already lived in a campground with its back against a sand pit and the pine barrens beyond. But here I was away from home with my school friends in another campground. We slept in log cabins. The teachers made a big deal about how the guys all had to communally shower. But when it came time most kids just took a shower with their clothes on. Washing their armpits under their shirts and washing their butts and everything else under their underwear. There’s ways around each and every kind of shame.
They had us all square dance together too in a larger log cabin. We’d been trained in all kinds of serious square dance procedures for years. The teachers before these teachers had feared jazz. The new teacher were afraid of hip hop. Gym class had been volleyball, kickball, presidential fitness test, and the rest of it square dancing.
The day of the big square dancing dance I was in a boat with another kid and he had the idea that we could crash our boat into the teacher’s and capsize it. So we tried to do that paddling fiercely and doing some kind of war cry but wound up just flipping ourselves and my glasses sunk to the bottom of the lake and I swam to shore in my shoes and tan jeans and the other guy said it was my fault we flipped. But we’d been in the boat together. That’s how it always is. I couldn’t see for the last day. I couldn’t see anybody during the big square dance. I had really terrible peepers. I still do. I made many mistakes.
Years later I worked with a mutant from Louisiana named Grover. He would put an entire pouch of chewing tobacco in his mouth at one time. His cheek was stretched out nasty. He would take the chew out and set it on the table and then eat his chips and drink his Pepsi and his cheek would sag down like he was melted. We worked at an oil refinery on the side of the turnpike. The place had a giant neon sign going up the side of one of the units hundreds of feet into the sky. Hess. It’s out of business now. But this place used to make the gas that was sold at those Hess stations, of course. Those stations were where they sold those toy Hess trucks, of course. Every Christmas you would get another one. My father collected these Hess trucks, my grandfather collected these Hess trucks. When my grandfather died, my father inherited all of his Hess trucks. Woohoo. Grover was twelve hundred miles from home. Every day he commuted three hours round trip to work because he had a tow behind trailer that he lived in in that same state forest I was just telling you about. He had no friends or family up there. It was just some woods where he had arbitrarily parked his tow behind trailer. He drove one hundred and forty miles every day. Seven hundred miles a week. Thirty six thousand miles a year, in a big old diesel dually pickup truck that got fifteen miles per gallon at let’s say three dollars a gallon for fuel. So, about seven thousand three hundred dollars in fuel. Every year. For ten years by the time I had met him. So seventy thousand dollars. And over three hundred thousand miles he’d put on the truck. And about eight thousand hours of commute that he had invented for himself while already being halfway across the country from his real home down south where his wife and children were without him. When I finally asked him, “Why do you stay up there? There’s a campground twenty miles west of here and it’s nicer.” He just shook his head and dumped the crumbs from his potato chip bag back onto the pile of chew and stuffed all that back into his face.
There was a teacher I had in middle school who assigned us to write a one page essay each week on some current event in the newspaper. I’d always look for something where some kids would do something crazy or get in trouble for drunk driving or something. I’d lie about the current event and make it cooler and write it up like a spoof of those after school specials where the kid takes one puff of a joint and becomes a kill crazy maniac and murders a bunch of nuns and then gets chased by all the police in the state until he drives the car off a cliff and the car hits the bottom of the canyon and explodes into a fireball. They didn’t have canyons where I was from so I always liked when cars could go off the side of one and explode in a fireball. Whenever a teacher would assign something I would try and not do what they wanted with the assignment, but would do what I wanted, and try to do it in a way that could maybe get me a C, which was fine, and which would make it so I wasn’t bored as shit for the hour that I had to write the assignment. I was always bored as shit. But this was when I discovered that you could entertain yourself and you didn’t have to be bored if you could just make yourself laugh at something ridiculous you’d made. Well the teacher didn’t give me a C, he gave me and A and so I kept writing this ridiculous things each week and I made them more and more ridiculous. One day I was walking down the hallway between classes and someone came up to me and told me that the teacher had read my current event essay to his other class. Then he’d read it to his other other class. So every week I had these kids who were like looking forward to my stupid fucking current event essay. Okay. I had fans. I wasn’t trying to be a writer I was just trying to do what the teacher didn’t want and then it turned out to accidentally be what everybody wanted. Or what some people wanted. I guess that’s where I found my voice as a writer. So then I figured, okay, I might as well go over to the school newspaper and see about writing for that. The teacher who ran that was cool but she said I had to pitch her story ideas and I had to tell the truth. The truth? I owed it to everybody to have ethics and integrity and if I was going to be a good journalist I had to operate by a set of codes. So I didn’t even attempt to do that. I would have no idea how. Or why.
I knew this kid who’s father owned a McDonald’s franchise and he used to brag about how he had already been accepted into college and was going to Hamburger University. My parents were getting divorced and I didn’t want to be home at the time, so when the kid who had a future at Hamburger University asked me if I wanted to do winter cross country with him, I did that just because I didn’t want to look like I wasn’t tough enough to run hundreds of miles in the snow or something. It was terrible. But I found out that when you run really far in the cold, your brain stops sounding like it’s full of hornets.
There’s a park by my house with a mile and a quarter loop around the outside of basketball courts and tennis courts and soccer and baseball fields. Really lovely. The ducks bob in the lake. I hadn’t gone running in a maybe three years and I went out there and fired up the run tracker app I have there on the phone and I jogged an eleven and a half minute mile. Pathetic. I went to work the next day and told all my coworkers about it and they all talked shit and said they could probably run six minute miles blackout drunk. Then four days later I went and ran the loop again and tried a little harder and ran it in ten and a half minutes. I went to work and told everybody about it. How I’d shredded a whole minute off my mile in just four days and how if I kept it up at this pace I would be running a three minute mile in a month’s time. So then they all challenged me to a foot race in the gravel lot outside. But I said I wanted to train for a while so I didn’t embarrass myself in front of the woman who worked in the guard shack checking IDs. Two days ago I went to the loop and ran it in 8:45. So maybe by easter I actually will shatter the world record for the mile. Which would be sweet. It’s three minutes and forty three seconds so all I have to do is do it in three minutes and forty two seconds.
I had this gym teacher that would say when you run you are supposed to hold your fingers delicately as if they were holding potato chips and as you pump your legs you just gently bring these potato chips up to your lips.
When I was in school we didn’t have school shooters yet. Their advent was years off. But people would call in bomb threats constantly and we would stand out in the parking lot behind the school and wait until the local police just said, “No bomb.” There was a girl, the most beautiful girl in school, whose mother had passed away. One of the teachers used to leave twenty dollar bills tucked under her windshield wipers. It was a secret thing he would do. Like a secret guardian angel thing. I never took any of these twenty dollar bills. The teacher watched the car from his classroom. He was waiting for somebody else to take the money so he could have some kind of vengeance. Everybody has to have a midlife crisis and this was his. Of course he must have loved this girl. Everybody did. But he must have loved her the most. I went by my old school the other day and it is surrounded by a farm of solar panels. I could not see the school anymore beyond the solar panel farm. The old path I would have taken up to get to the school was blocked off with serious as a heart attack fencing with a warning I didn’t bother to read.
There was the teacher who was in Playboy in the mid-sixties.
There was the teacher who would get drunk and tell us about fighting in Vietnam and he would sometimes hit the carpet suddenly and cower in combat flashback.
There was the teacher who had a psychotic break one day in class saying she could see the ghost of the boy she had killed on the autobahn, decapitating him in the wreck. He was sitting right there in the last row. Did we see him?
I’m a teacher now, I think. I teach creative writing classes on my computer. People send stories and I say things about them and the other people in the class say things about the stories. It could be that we are learning things and are improving the work or it could be that all that is impossible and it’s just nice to have deadlines and it’s nice to have something to do on a Tuesday night at 7:30pm. I wanted to be a teacher when I was younger but I wanted to teach history class. History class seemed like the best thing to teach, you just got to make fun of everything that ever happened. The other day my friend in New Orleans asked if I would like to teach with her at a place that has a creative writing program for incarcerated individuals down there near the bayou. Of course I said I wanted to do that. The people I’ve known in my life who have had the best stories are the ones who have gone to jail. I work with this one guy named Rob who went to prison for four years for shooting somebody in the head. It was self-defense but he still did four years. He has the best stories I’ve ever heard. I could care less how true any of them are. Anyway he started calling me Professor on the job site there as a kind of attempted cruel nickname. But I like it. They used to call me Poet because they found out I had published poetry online and had books of poems for sale. But I liked that too.
We were talking about acid the other day at work. I was saying I haven’t wanted to trip out since the world shut down for the virus but my coworker said this last year had been the best year of his life for dropping LSD. I was telling him about when I was twenty and not going to community college like I was supposed to. My girlfriend had said she was going to break up with me if I didn’t do sometime with my life or at least go re-enroll in the 13th grade. Which I had already done and dropped out of after attending English 101 a few meetups. The adjunct had been an unconfident sweaty man and everybody in the class seemed like random people from the DMV. So I dropped out but that was easy. You didn’t even have to tell anybody. One night around that same time, I took some acid with my friend Justin and some other guys and we just started driving around the town in Justin’s pink car. He drove all night long just in random directions. Through the marshlands. Down Main Street. Up and over and back around behind and through it all. And then sometime in the pre-dawn we found ourselves on the college campus just doing loops of the parking lot and the roads that weave around different buildings and fields. There were four of us in the car and none of us had ever gotten a college credit. We just kept looping this college campus for hours it seemed until finally I blinked and was sitting at a booth in an IHOP and through the plate glass window was a sign for the mattress store, still aglow as the sun was coming up. Justin kept asking, in reference to the sign, “Is it working?” “No.” “How about now.” The store was called Sleepy’s. The sign, try as it may, could not lull us to sleep.
One of the guys in the car I haven’t thought about in years. He was dating this great girl who had terrible teeth. One day she started letting a dentist take nude photos of her and probably more and the dentist fixed her teeth. The guy wasn’t mad at his girlfriend or this situation she’d stumbled in involving dentist intercourse because teeth are really expensive and if his girlfriend wanted to fuck a dentist who was he to judge. It wasn’t like he had done anything great with his life and he suspected he never would and so what. Life was the gift, I guess. But he was a really hard worker. I got him a job one time repairing someone else I know’s roof. But when the job was done the other guy refused to pay my friend. I kept expecting him to show up in the middle of the night and just rip the roof off but he never did that. They were all docile people. Most everybody I ever knew was.
Just Learning Now
Love this so much, so poignant and side-splittingly hilarious. I read this line over and over and over and still cannot stop laughing: "those after school specials were the kid takes one puff of a joint and becomes a kill crazy maniac and murders a bunch of nuns and then gets chased by all the police in the state until he drives the car off a cliff and the car hits the bottom of the canyon and explodes into a fireball."