ohhhhhh yeahhhhhhh
Its
strange looking back and thinking about how I used to be when I was young. I am
so different now, so many events in my life have shaped the person that I’ve
become.
The first day of my freshman year
of high school was one of the most frightening days of my life. It reigns as
number three on a list that includes defending myself with a shotgun and my ex-
girlfriend telling me she might be pregnant. I was 14 years old and up until I
turned 18 I had always been a late bloomer. I didn’t develop like the other
kids in public school did. I went to a middle-school with about 15 kids total
in the sixth through eighth grades. The reason was because I have a severe learning
disability. I’m retarded when it comes to mathematics. Even today when I go out
to restaurants I have to count out the waitress’s tip on my fingers like a
child, and if I get frustrated I just leave her a $10 bill and call it a day.
Fortunately I was gifted when it came to writing, music, art and just about
anything else associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. I spent a lot
of my time making paper mache sculptures of birds I liked or reading about the
various civil war battles. I didn’t have any friends, I still played with
action figures and I listened to a CD of Kiss’s Destroyer that I checked out from the library every week so I could
blare the songs religiously into my head via my Walkman. That’s right, my
Walkman. I didn’t know how to talk to people, I didn’t know that it wasn’t cool
to be excited about the assigned books in your English class and I honestly had
no clue that other children were going to be cruel to me because of it. On top of all this I was about a hundred
pounds overweight, wore thick glasses, played the tuba and was terrified of
going places without adult supervision.
The
biggest hell of freshman year was gym class. It was a class involving sports.
I’ve always been terrible at pretty much everything sports related and most
people could tell that immediately having took one glance at me. I was and
still am the kind of guy who drops a lightly tossed pass right in front of his
feet and gets murdered by an incoming linebacker. Naturally I spent my entire
freshman year without any close friends. Alienation was an understatement, I
wasn’t an alien, I was an extra-dimensional creature. The other children gawked
at me like I had descended from a spacecraft in a Paul Stanley tee shirt and
jean shorts and now desired nothing more than to learn the ways of human
beings. During gym most of the other boys talked about pussy and football, two
things that I had no interest in and couldn’t begin to understand. The other
kids could tell I wasn’t part of the group, they would make fun of my clothes
or spray axe body spray into my eyes. Maybe to an average freshman this
wouldn’t have been a big deal but to a guy who had skipped the social
development stages his peers had been through it was incredibly tough. I spent
a lot of my time crying after school and lying to my mother about how I had a
great day full of smiles and rainbows.
I still cry, very rarely, but I still do. Anyone who is too cool
to feel emotion can meet me in the parking lot of your local Wal-Mart, I’ll be
happy to beat you until you feel something. At this point as a reader you might
feel a little bad about the experiences your young narrator has been through.
Personally I don’t regret a thing, so save your hugs and sympathy. People are
violent animals when it comes down to the dirt of it. I don’t care how many
degrees you hold, how many dinner parties you throw, or how many times a day
you pray to your god. If you believe humanity has evolved past violence then
you are a fool.
The positive note about gym was that every day
the coach would take pity on me and let me sit with him in his office and eat
half of my lunch. I loved lunch. Everyday my dad would pack me treats in a big
purple plastic lunchbox with stickers covering the sides. Sometimes he would
make me a sandwich or pack fried chicken from the previous night’s dinner.
Every day he would make it a surprise and I would sit in the small office with the
old coach and eat. It was the first time I had begun to really appreciate my
father for the kind and generous person he is and although I could have really used
to lose some weight, a Kit-Kat bar in my lunch was the most fun I had in an otherwise
terrible day.
I spent
the entire year playing half of a basketball game and eating half of my lunch.
Once class was over I would change back into my school clothes, everyone would
make fun of me for being fat or wearing Looney Tunes underwear and I would go
about the rest of my day. This was a lot on me, especially at a time when I was
going through puberty. What could be worse to a young boy than having hormone
induced mood swings on top of the stress of the other kids poking fun? I felt
trapped and between the constant humiliations of having my pants pulled around
my ankles or being sucker punched in the middle of class I thought that high school
was probably the worst idea mankind had ever thought up.
Though
like everything in life the year passed before I knew it. It was the last few
weeks of school before summer break. Standardized testing was going on which
meant that students spent most of the day in one class, unfortunately for me
that class was gym. It was an entire week of the longest chain of pranks I had
ever endured. Every day of that week I walked into the gym in the morning,
changed into my gym clothes and listened to my KISS CD until one of the other boys would harrass me for a few
hours, then I woud eat my lunch and listen to the entire album again until a
different boy would pick up where the other left off.
The last day of that week is a day
I will never forget for as long as I live. I carried my big purple lunchbox
into the gym in the morning, walked into the cold concrete locker room and
placed it into my locker. I can still smell the stench of the boy’s locker
room. It is like a gang of sweaty Sumo wrestlers tried to cover up the smell of
an elephant turd with the cheapest cologne they could find on sale at the
Dollar General. I assumed my spot next to the bleachers until it was time for
lunch, but the coach wasn’t in his office that day. I walked around for a few
minutes, but couldn’t find him. I walked to my locker, took out my big purple
lunchbox and carried it into his office. I opened it up to find some turkey, a
banana, a package of raisins and an ice-cream sandwich! Fuck yeah! I love ice
cream sandwiches! I immediately went for the ice cream and opened half of it
up, it had already began to melt a little but that didn’t ruin anything for me.
I was an ice cream eatin’ machine. I was just about to plunge my face into the
wrapper when I heard a voice behind me. “What the hell is that?” It was Chuck
Brodman. Chuck was a blonde hair, blue eyed, athletic, rich kid. He looked like
a perfect Aryan specimen, I’m sure his grandfather pimped slapped Jews during
the Holocaust. He was an incredible athlete who would constantly remind the
other boys how he had fingered his girlfriend Jessica Nelson in the girl’s
locker room. At the time I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what “fingered”
meant but it seemed like a big deal. Regardless I was still transfixed on my
treat and I didn’t understand right away that he wasn’t actually interested in
learning what I had in my hands. “My dad packed me an ice cream sandwich!” I
turned around to face Chuck to tell him about my good luck. Upon looking at
Chuck’s face I realized two things, one was that he had actually sarcastically
asked the question and two was that even if he hadn’t no one was going to be
excited about my ice cream except for me.
What happened next would shape my thoughts and
actions for the rest of my life. Chuck slowly walked up to me, he towered above
my head as he became uncomfortably close. He snatched the ice cream sandwich
from my hand, turned around and walked into the boys locker room with it.
Although I knew nothing good would come of it, I followed him in hopes that he
wouldn’t flush it down a toilet or something. When I entered the boy’s locker
room Chuck was standing on a concrete bench next to the lockers, my heart was
beating faster than when I was forced to actually exercise. He had crushed my
ice cream in his hand in front of the entire 9th grade gym class, he
jumped off of the bench and dropped what was left of it on my tennis shoes.
Everyone laughed at me. I couldn’t help myself, I began to cry. I had never
cried in front of people before, even when my parents came home and I had been
crying I always made myself stop. I felt my chin become weak and my stomach
felt light as tears poured down my eyes. I balled like a baby. “What a faggot.” I’ll never forget the cool
tone of his voice, the sound can only be related to how a dentist’s drill feels
when it hits a nerve in your tooth. He stomped the ice cream sandwich into my
orthopedic sneakers.
I thought about how bad the entire
year had been, I thought about how much my dad loved me and how he had woken up
early and put extra ice into the lunch box to make sure the ice cream hadn’t
melted before lunchtime, I thought about killing myself by jumping off of the
gym roof and finally as I clenched my fat little fist I thought about murdering
Chuck Brodman. I grabbed his neck with my left hand in some sort of strange
death grip, I remember holding so hard that I could almost wrap my fingers
entirely around his trachea. I wound back with my right hand and punched him. I
had never punched anyone before in my life but I had seen Harrison Ford do it
enough times in Indiana Jones to loosely grasp the concept. Luckily for Chuck I
had forgotten the move where you rip your opponent’s heart out of his chest and
drop it into a pit of lava while Indian men scream praise to their devil-god,
because I would have done that shit. I yelled wildly as I held tighter with my
left hand, Charles began to turn red. I punched him again and again till his
body collapsed. His skull hit the floor so hard the echo of bone against
concrete bounced off of the metal lockers and through the tile shower room. I
got on top of him and punched him again. It was the first time I had ever lost
control of myself. The floor of the boy’s locker room was covered in blood. The
other boys had at first chanted “fight, fight, fight” in classic high school
form but the sight of the beating I had just inflicted on Chuck had been so
shocking that they eventually stood in silence at the raw display of animal
aggression they had just witnessed. I went to my locker, took my change of
clothes and ran to the library. My head was pounding and I was covered in blood.
I changed clothes in the library bathroom and placed my gym clothes in my
backpack.
I don’t know why I chose to go to
the library. Maybe because I just wanted somewhere really quiet to process what
had just occurred. I walked up to the first shelf of books I saw, picked a
large photography book about elephants off of the shelf, opened it to a close
up of a baby elephant, laid my face flat on it and cried. I cried because I was
afraid of what would happen to me, I cried because I had never seen so much
blood, I cried because my hand was big and swollen but mostly I cried because I
felt bad about hurting Chuck Brodman. I sat there crying into the book until
the coach, the principle, the vice principle and a police officer came to bring
me to the office.
For the
next four years of my life I had to see a therapist about my anger management
problems. Ironically gym class did end up helping me find the sport I am best
at; boxing.
