I don’t know how it ever started. I suppose the same way anything like this does, slow at first and escalating until things are completely out of control. At least that’s how it seems. Everything was fine one day and crazy the next.
But it isn’t that I’m not to blame. I can’t say that I was the chief instigator, but I probably was. If I wasn’t, I’m pretty sure my tenth-grade English teacher thought I was. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of suspects. Somehow there were only three boys in a class of thirty, and all three of us sat in the back. She had a one-in-three chance of getting it right. And more times than not, all three of us were involved in the shenanigans. But as I recall, I’m the only one she ever tried to get even with, and she did a pretty good job of it.
She was a lot of fun, as I recall, and that’s probably why things got so far out of control. I can picture here yet today, even though that was thirty years ago, standing up front in the class upon the raised platform, almost a stage, lecturing on whatever book it was we were reading at the time. I remember And Then There Were None by Agatha Christi. I might be able to recall others if tried, but they’re not germane to the story.
And it was up on this raised platform where most of the mischief occurred. I’m not sure which happened first, but I think it was what we did to her desk. It was one of those big battleship-gray office desks. It sat right up on the edge of the platform and had a piece of steel in the front so we couldn’t look up her skirt when she was sitting there.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but before class one day, we turned it around so the drawers faced the class. Then we changed everything on the top so it looked perfectly normally. She came into the class and sat down in her chair and tried to roll it up under the desk, but she couldn’t because she rammed her knees into that metal back. The class was completely silent except for the three guys in the back laughing our asses off.
She was a good sport about it and we didn’t get in trouble or anything. She just made us put it back the way it was. I’m sure the fact that we got away with it only spurred us on to greater feats of mischief.
I don’t remember how long it was since the desk incident, but the next thing we did was to put a thumbtack on her chair, point up. Looking back, I realize it was a pretty dumb stunt, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
As before, she came into the classroom and sat down in the chair behind her desk. You would have thought that she would’ve learned her lesson, but she didn’t. I think it was because she took attendance at the beginning of class, though I don’t remember precisely.
I waited in breathless anticipation. And there, after she sat down and pulled her chair under her desk, I saw her eyes go wide. She later told us that she didn’t exactly sit on the thumbtack, but rather rolled back onto it as she got comfortable in her chair. Looking back that’s probably all that saved me from suspension, or perhaps even expulsion.
As it was, she just seemed to let the whole thing go. We had a couple of laughs about it, and it was over. Or so I thought. She was a vindictive one, that tenth-grade English teacher. She let me think that she’d forgotten all about it, but she hadn’t. She was just biding her time.
I don’t precisely know how long it was before she struck back. It may have been a day, or it may have been a month. If memory serves, it was about a week, but memory is such a fickly thing, never acting the way you want it to.
In any case, I came into class one day and she was there, which was unusual, but not unheard of. I put my books down and sat down at my desk; and onto a tack that she had placed there for me. Unlike hers, where she rolled back onto it, I struck mine directly. Luckily I had the reflexes of a sixteen year old in good shape. I came up off of that tack almost before it penetrated skin; almost.
As I assessed the situation, both in my chair, and around the classroom, I discovered the tack and more than my English teacher laughing. I don’t know how many of the students were in on it, but obviously a fair number. I picked the tack out of my hind side, which was stuck more in my denim jeans than it was in me, checked my seat for siblings and sat down. My pride was only slightly worse for the wear and I learned a lot about life that day.
Even though my English teacher was a person of responsibility and authority, I learned that life doesn’t always have to be so serious. Sometimes it’s all in fun, and it isn’t truly funny until someone has a tack sticking out of their butt.
Boys and Fireworks…and Regrets
Like any other boy, I loved shooting off fireworks when I was a kid. But it was illegal to buy, sell, or own fireworks in the small Iowa town where I grew up. But they weren’t illegal in Missouri. I can remember that about a week before the Fourth of July, people would load up in cars and make road trips south to buy fireworks.
I remember one year in particular. I was probably nine or ten years old and my older sister worked at the local grocery store. One of her co-worker, a boy of about her age, was going to Missouri on a fireworks run. I don’t remember his name, which is probably just as well. That way I can’t incriminate him.
What I can say is that my sister came home from work one day and told us he was going to Missouri. He’d offered to pick up fireworks for my brother and me if we had the money. We jumped at the opportunity. We pooled our funds and sent our money with her to give to her friend.
A few days later my sister told us he was back and arrangements were made for us to go pick up the goods. My brother and I were both too young to drive, and we lived outside of town. So we went with mom on a day when she was grocery shopping.
Being young at the time, not to mention naive, I didn’t know how much it resembled a drug deal. We met in the parking lot of the store to make the exchange. We’d already given him the money so all he had to do was to give us the fireworks.
We followed him to his car where he opened up the trunk. We saw two paper bags filled with packages of fireworks wrapped with thin, colored tissue paper. Both bags were ours. I don’t know about my brother, but I was thrilled to see how far our money had gone.
“Now, you’re not going to be shooting these off in town, are you?” my sister’s friend asked. Considering that fireworks were illegal in Iowa and that he could get in a lot trouble if we got caught, it was a legitimate question. If we were caught with fireworks, then he could get into trouble.
“Yeah, we’re going to shoot them off right in front of the cop-shop,” I replied in the typical smart-aleck fashion of a nine or ten year old.
I don’t remember him saying anything more. Maybe he told us to be careful with them. Maybe my brother, who was three years older, jumped in to say we were going to shoot them off out in the country. What I do remember, to this day, are the words I said to him; Yeah, we’re going to shoot them off right in front of the cop-shop.
Those words have haunted me since I can remember.
It wasn’t like he knew me and he was doing me a favor. He only knew my sister. He was just doing it for me because of her. And I repaid his favor by being a jerk to him.
Looking back on my life, if there was ever just one thing I could do over, I would take back those words. It may seem inconsequential, just a smart-aleck response from a smart-aleck snot-nosed kid, but for some reason, those words have really bothered me.
If I could find him and ask, he probably wouldn’t even remember it. I’ve asked my brother. He doesn’t remember. It might be that I’m the only one in the world who remembers what I said to him. But it still matters to me.
Yes, there were worse things that I’ve done since then. We don’t need to go into the gory details now. I’ll leave that for later episodes. Let’s just say I wasn’t a perfect kid. I wasn’t that bad, but I wasn’t perfect.
So why would I choose this one, seemingly inconsequential to take back if I only had one thing in my life I could change? That’s easy.
The rest of the things I did all add up to make me who I am today. When I get up in the morning, I look into the mirror. And I have to admit that I like the person looking back. If I were to go back and fix one of those things, one of those worse things, I might not be the same person I am today. I’m not willing to risk that. I consider them life lessons that I needed to learn to become the person I am.
I know that this incident also helped to shape who I am, especially considering the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it. So maybe I don’t want a do over on this either. After all, it was an important lesson I learned. Maybe it’s okay to just say I regret what happened. And if you happen to be reading this and you’re the man who used to work with my sister, and you remember a snot-nosed kid being a smart-aleck to you when you were just doing his sister a favor, then I would like to say, “I’m sorry.”
~Doug