SCHOOL

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 9^th 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.