Martin was from one of those frozen European countries.
Finland?
Denmark?
Sweden?
Fuck if I can remember. I was nine. It was a long time ago.
What I do remember was that the teachers encouraged us to expose him to culture and that kind of crap.
So, we took him bowling.
“Knock down the pins with the ball,” I said to Martin.
He grinned, ran down the lane, and swung the ball like a wrecking ball.
“I go on strike!” he shouted, and went to the next lane… and the next one…
We got thrown out.
Martin kept the shoes.
Tag: childhood
Pageant
When I was in school, a teacher thought it would look cool to have crepe paper ribbons tied to our wrists for the Thanksgiving Pageant.
As we moved our arms for the song, the ribbons crinkled and waved.
Some kids tripped over them. Others got behind other kids and tried to strangle them.
Because they were crepe paper, they’d snap, so no kids got hurt when they tripped, and no kids ended up strangled.
The teacher, on the other hand, was found hanging from their belt in the bathroom.
For Christmas Pageant, the substitute just had us sing Jingle Bells.
Horse
Growing up, I didn’t have a basketball hoop and backboard over the garage.
It wouldn’t have made sense. The driveway was at a 15 degree angle.
Instead, several of our neighbors had them, including one on a pole in the cul-de-sac our driveway connected to.
It didn’t matter, though. I sucked at basketball.
Even without the dribbling, I lost enough times at Horse to provide mounts for all of Genghis and Kublai Khan’s armies.
So, how did I get that varsity letter in basketball?
It’s for women’s basketball. My high school girlfriend.
She left it to me in her will.
What’s the deal with the Cookie Monster?
Sometimes, I wonder about the Cookie Monster.
Why does he talk that way?
And why is he obsessed with cookies?
I did a little research, and found out that he was a foreign exchange student, but the file didn’t say where he was from.
Only that he’d never left.
He keeps saying C is for Cookie, but his permanent record says he got caught sleeping with the home economics teacher in an attempt to get that upped to an A minus.
As for his English grades, there’s no amount of fur that blue furball could shag to keep from flunking.
Imaginary Friend
Most kids have imaginary friends.
I had an imaginary theater critic.
He’d go on and on about Broadway flops and the Tony Awards, or the latest Sondheim production.
I’d yell at him to shut the hell up.
We lived in Iowa. We never went to Broadway.
We didn’t go to the movies or watch plays on television, either.
I never tried out for plays in school because I was homeschooled.
I thought about trading with my friends for their imaginary friends, but I didn’t have any.
Because I was homeschooled, and my only friend was Bert, raving about South Pacific.
War Is Fun
Other kids set up their toy soldiers in battles, arranging men and tanks and plastic barbed wire on their basement floors.
Ralphie’s different. He stages courts-martial, using a television court drama’s action playset to bring the war criminals of his toy chest to justice.
He also turned a hospital set into a VA hospital in which to treat the wounded members of his plastic green army.
Then there’s the brothel…
His sister stomps into the basement, demands her Barbies back, and kicks the courtroom and hospital over before returning to her room.
The door slams.
Ralphie blinks, and shouts: “TORNADO!”
Brain
If I suffer some horrific tragic accident that reduces me to becoming just a brain in a jar, I want that jar to be a cookie jar.
Because, let’s face it: the kids these days are fat.
And there’s nothing that puts a kid off of between-meal snacks like reaching for a Chips Ahoy and coming up with a handful of grey matter.
But then again, kids don’t wash their hands, either. Disgusting, nasty creatures!
Pawing around my lobes, their booger-covered fingers scrambling my neurons… ewwwwww!
They’d reduce me to a drooling, blithering idiot.
(Unlike how I am now, right?)
Knowing
Whenever GI Joe used to say “Knowing is half the battle,” I wondered what the other half of the battle was.
My friends didn’t know.
“But knowing is half the battle!” I said.
“Yes, the other half,” said Ricky, the kid who ate paste. “Perhaps the other half is not knowing?”
“Just like that Socrates guy!” said Sue. “He knew that he didn’t know, so not knowing is… knowing you don’t know!”
“Maybe we just need to buy lots of their toys?” I asked.
We agreed, and played GI Joes in the sandbox.
Except for Sue; she played with matches.
Big Moe
Big Moe checks his watch, struggles to get up from the sidewalk, and says he needs to go to the gym.
Everybody laughs.
Big Moe’s wider than he is tall, and I swear he takes up an elevator all by himself.
“I gotta go get my little brother,” he says. “He goes down to the gym every day to work out.”
Ricky: “What does he do? Lift you over his head?”
Everybody laughs again.
Big Moe snorts, rumbles down the sidewalk.
Strange. Moe doesn’t look as big as he usually does.
Walking to the gym every day’s a start, right?
Tis Of Thee
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
They used to make an effort hiding the cameras in schools.
A toy on a shelf
One of the presidents on the wall
An air vent
“For safety” said the government, installing more cameras to the crumbling, mold-infested buildings named after heroes, famous writers, and the elected officials who budgeted for the schools, but not their maintenance or the teachers in them.
Alarm!
Fifth Grade!
Third period!
English!
Play it back:
“Govern… the government governs by the will of the governed.”
Flag them.
Flag the teacher.
Bring them in.