Today, while at a meeting to discuss the issues facing the "support staff", which I, as a graduate assistant am currently, I found myself teetering on the brink of manic laughter. I don't know why, but for a brief moment I remembered a "fun" kid's song that I used to sing whilst be-uniformed on the asphalt "playground" of the Knights of Columbus parking lot, filled as it was with cigarette butts and broken glass. To the tune of "Alouette":
Suffocation takes coordination!
Suffocation! A game we all can play!
First, you take a plastic bag
Then, you put it on your head
Go to bed
Wake up dead
Ohhhhh!
We'd sing this until one of the supervising "mothers" would come and beat us with a croquet mallet. Hahahaha, no, that's not true. It was a monkey-wrench soaked in horse urine. Thanks be that it wasn't a nun: they'd beat us unconscious, wake us up with smelling-salts and take us to confession, where we would be spiritually cleansed of our misdeeds and made to do our "penance", which often involved being fettered sin agua y sin cumida in a room beyond the dank passageway between the school and the church. The room always smelled vaguely of stale urine, skunked beer and tears; apparently, the local Alcoholics Anonymous met there weekly.
Truth be told, I can't remember much that was strange about having gone to Catholic school; this, surely, is because I have nothing to compare it to, since the first time I encountered the plebe was my first day of high school. As a "St.Mary's fairy" dressed in sweatpants and ill-fitting shoes, you can be sure that I spent many an afternoon enjoying the delights of wet-willies, toilet swirlies and the rapture of being randomly jumped by hoods with chains and piercings whilst walking that long mile home. Of course, that's because I haven't always looked the way I do now (ie, like a flannel-wearing Middle Eastern-cum-Mediterranean lumberjack). As a small bird-child, I was often the victim of overly-hormoned pubescent mutants, whose lack of mental faculties were more than made up for by their propensity to stomp people. My first year of high school I spent flitting in-beween "safe", well-lit classrooms trying desperately to avoid being noticed at all. I failed. I failed a lot. Being picked to answer something in class was always my death-sentence; punishment, apparently, for having previously gotten a very sound education. Two summers ago I went back to Hackettstown (home of M&M Mars, the only such plant in the Northern Hemisphere) with my best friend-turned Marine, Mary. In a bar that used to be a very old, beautiful hotel lobby, I met one of my tormentors.
Tormentor: Oh my God, it's you, isn't it?
Me: Yes. *bristles menacingly*
Tormentor: Wait a minute. How did I know you? Were you in my history class?
Me: No.
Tormentor: Math?
Me: Try again.
Tormentor: I give up. Damn, that was a long time ago.
Me: Let me set the scene for you. It's a Thursday afternoon, and I am taking the shortcut home because I'm not feeling well. Ordinarily, I would take the main roads out of abject fear. You and two of your chummies were waiting in a bush. The three of you step out of the bush, and I pretend that I haven't just soiled my undergarments. I try to get to the other side of the road but your friend lopes over and blocks me. You demand that I give you money for smokes, and I say that I don't have any. When I regained consciousness, you were just about to extinguish a Marlboro under my armpit.
Tormentor: Oh.
Me: Yes.
Tormentor: Dude, I am so sorry. God! What an ass I was then! I was so young and stupid!
Me: Here's $4.
Tormentor: What for?
Me: The smokes.
Tormentor: <muffled choking sound as he swallows the teeth I punched down his ugly cake-hole>
The night in jail did me some good. I learned how to crochet from a 6'7", 350lb man named Muffy who lost his man-parts in an unfortunate encounter with someone he called "The Armadillo." I guess I will never drink Wild Turkey straight out of the bottle again.
One of the things I do miss, however, is my class. There were only twenty of us, strong together as a family through the beatings and the endless weeping. Some days I will be walking down a street here in the corn and I will turn around and think, just for a moment, that I had seen one of them. I smile for a moment.
Then I think: What they be doin' on my turf? Man, I'll cut'choo. Cut'choo real bad.
Well, I have about three hours of work to do, and yay, it's 10 PM. As a matter of disclaimer, no, I was never touched in grade school, by nuns or otherwise. Leave that to public schools, eh?
Also: my bed currently rests, sans frame, on my floor in what I call "college ghetto dorm chic." So there aren't any clowns under there.
They live in my closet.
Good night.
Dom (Demir)
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