Emergency Room For Fake Appendicitis


It Will Try And Kill You If Given Half A Chance. In Fairness, It Was Framed For This Job
There was a time I got to go to the emergency room for what ended up being what is known in the medical community as 'Fake Appendicitis'. As a child I had that trauma bug and had been to the emergency room lots of times for very real reasons so I thought I knew when a trip to the old Eee-Argh was justified. One night as I was sleeping I woke up with an immense pain in my guts region. My mom was asleep in her bedroom so I mustered the strength to crawl over and knocked on the door. She came out and almost stepped on me while I writhed and groaned on the floor at her feet. I had a fever and it hurt so bad that I could barely stand up or walk, I was in bad, bad shape. My sister had an emergency appendectomy two years earlier and  we were aware that may be the problem so I was rushed off to the hospital. When I got there they gave me a bed and pain killer and then took a blood sample to test and see if I was infected with something. My mom sat by me there in the middle of the night reading a news magazine to me. We were laughing about something in it that caused me a great deal of pain but was worth it because it was funny. The doctor came in and palpated my tum-tum and said he needed to see the results of the blood test but if it was my appendix I would need to get it out. I was kind of excited by this notion because it would make for a cool story and some real honest to goodness sympathy and attention. I hoped that this pain in my guts could net me some sweet, sweet, convalescence as well. All day watching movies, reading books, and playing video games, is a 13-year-old's Shangri-La. Unfortunately for me it was far worse news, the blood test came back negative and the X-ray of my guts seemed to show lots of poop was the actual cause of my pain. The doctor ordered up not a glorious and honorable appendectomy but the most shameful of all medical procedures – the enema. The long-suffering night nurse had to roll me on my side and gave my bottom some medicine, which had an almost instantaneous effect. I was up in a dash to the toilet. As far as bowel movements go this was quite voluminous and a quite expensive one. My parents would have probably preferred, all things being equal, for me to have defecated in our home facilities at a very low cost as opposed to the hospital's very pricey accommodations. It turns out that while my dad would have not been super happy about having to pay for an appendectomy but he would have because it would save my life. He was very cranky about paying 500 dollars for me to poop. My fake appendicitis was and still is a fun joke between my mother and I. In the end what price can you place on a memory? The obvious answer is $500.

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Shooting Arrows in the House.


One of the things I liked to do was impress my friends. Any chance I got I would try and take my friends to the borderlands of good sense and safety by pilfering some of my dad's 'hands off' type stuff and impress them. My dad had a few bows and arrows that were off-limits to me because I was not responsible in their use. I wanted to impress Nate and Ryan so I took them down from their hiding place but I was still concerned we would get caught if we shot them out in the open. I didn't want to get caught and so obviously we didn't shoot them outside where everybody could see us all out in our praise and glory. I decided instead to shoot them in the shop which is what we called that house in the front of our property that was full of parts. Nate, Ryan and I set up some targets on the far side of the bid room and we had a great time shooting. The only problem was the front room of the shop, where we had set up the targets, is where my dad stored all the new appliances that he was using for is storefront which was up by the hardware store on main. Our crime went wholly undiscovered until my dad took one of the dryers still in the box over to a lady's house for delivery and there was a perfectly round field tip arrow head hole right through the center of the panel. He apologized to her and said he could get her another on or take some money off of this one she opted for the latter and he came home looking for blood. I honestly had forgotten all about the arrow shooting by this time and when my dad was asking who punched a hole in the control panel of a dryer I was not lying when I said I didn't know. It was not until he described the hole and how it had gotten there that I knew that it was our target practice that was to blame. My dad's investigative abilities were quite good and he thought for sure That something that ridiculous had something to do with me, that was honestly very reasonable. When it was sorted out I had to work for free until I had paid back the damage cost which I did by organizing the shop. 

Faking a Major Injury and Getting Bored and Quitting


I got so little attention from having my head really bashed by a motor that I thought what I should do it again and cause a major injury to myself and try and get a lot of attention. The problem with that was to get some attention from getting a major injury I would need a major injury. I am not a huge fan of pain so I was trying to work out a compromise between lavish sorrow for my plight and minimal actual plight. I hit upon a plan, called faking, where I would be getting all of the sympathy and none of the pain. To set up myself up right I went out to that shop one day making extra certain that I told my mom that I was going out there working and that she better come check on me sometime your make sure I'm not hurt badly or anything. I went out and organize a little motor avalanche scene in the which it appeared that some motors and transmissions would've fallen, quite plausibly from a broken shelf I had arranged, down on me. I was going to play the part of the crushed and nearly killed victim and got into character by wedging myself back into the pile and then set dressing a few pieces on top of myself. It was completely authentic and I set them up like they just fallen over caught me unaware all I had to do now is wait for my unassuming and dutiful mother to come check on me and the pathetic trap of sympathy would be sprung. I laid down there in the midst of motors, transmissions and obvious distress waiting. Now it is important to know I am not overly patient and after twenty minutes of waiting to be discovered and saved I started to get bored. I gave it about five more minutes and was ready to call it quits. I had been gone an hour and my mom never come check on me so I was just there bored and in a mess of appliance detritus and getting no sympathy. I decided on a plan to so mournfully relate my fake injury and entrapment that I could get some real sympathy so I shuffled off the motors and went inside. I told my mom I had an accident up there in the shop and that I was trapped under some motors for some hours and she had never checked on me so maybe I would have died. She said that it was good I didn't die and that she was glad I was okay. She didn't even give me the time to check out my wounds. Stupid dang fake tragedy is stupid good for stupid nothing. 

Motor on the Brain


When we moved to the other side of Santaquin and away from the trailer park we bought an acre lot that had an old house still on it. When we first moved there all we did was bring our mobile home and park it in the middle of the lot and use the front house as storage for my dad's appliance business. He collected a lot of old remaindered appliance parts which he was going to use to rebuild some other appliances sometime. This actually never happened. We had stacks and stacks and shelves and shelves and piles and piles. All throughout the house was just full of motors, transmissions and different crap and miscellany. If we wanted to earn money or we were in trouble or for anything we had to go out and organize the shop. That was the mantra of our child hood 'organize the shop'. I don't really know what my dad thought that meant because it was never organized in the sense that there was a logical and systematic order to the items making them useful and valuable. There was far too many things to be organized in any sensible system and I was not sure what things went where so I would just take stuff and put it on shelves or into organized looking piles. Around our house friends were often press-ganged and so this day Nathan, Ryan and I were all out working and I was putting a motor up on a shelf. I had placed the motor up on a shelf about eight feet off the ground. We were listening to the radio as we toiled and when I finished putting the motor up high a quite popular number by the name of 'Can't Touch This' by Master of Ceremonies Hammer came on. I started doing a goofy 'Can't Touch This' dance to amuse my friends and somehow in my dance I flailed into the the shelf and caused the recently reposed motor to fall. It fell onto my head and as far as I could tell knocked me unconscious. I am not sure if it knocked me unconscious because I don't remember a small swath the time there before I was getting revived by my friends from what I can only assume is unconsciousness, but like I said I don't know, I wasn't aware of what was happening around me at the time. When they got me up I had a big bleedy gash on my forehead and was quite woozy. I now recognize these, after the years passing and the brain tissue healing sufficiently to think properly and remember stuff, as the signs of cudusioun or something that sounds very similar to that. When I told my dad that I'd been hit in the head with the motor he comforted and reassured me as was his caring and sweet way that I should not be and idiot stacking things in a stupid way and it was my own fault. If it was anyone's fault it was Mr. Hammer and his irresistible beats. 

Hanging out with Nate and Ryan


The summer after my first year in junior high I wanted to spend a lot of time with my new Payson friends because they were worldly and all kinds of cool. We had our budding relationship hamstringed by a lack of non-parental transportation. Living six miles away meant the play time had to be planned and scheduled and not a drop in kind of thing that kids need for friendship to thrive. Missing out on what I imagined was pretty much limitless fun and debauchery by my unfortunate mechanical separation was not a easy thing for my FOMO (fear of missing out) neurosis. In lieu of those friends I started hanging out with a couple of guys who were two years older than me. A couple of cousins named Nathan and Ryan who I mentioned in the story about Ryan getting stomped out. I was originally Ryan's little brothers friend but by this time I had not hung out with him in a few years and had made the transition up the the family tree. They were pretty cool kids and they thought I had lots of cool projects and opportunities for mischief available so they were along for the ride. Nathan was actually the older brother of the girl my sister tricked me into saying that I wanted to have sex with. That didn't seem to make him like me less and that was good. We spent most of our time riding bikes, fishing and trying to find some girls to talk to in person or on the phone. We had some really good times but they were in high school and I was in junior high so as the summer came to a close we parted amicability and except for a few camping trips with the scouts and getting in fights with some other kids at church basketball never really did much more together after that. Friendly yes, friends no. 

Phone Get's Stomped Out


 When I got into Junior High I started using the phone a lot and my sister was already using it more then that and we had one phone at our house and my dad was trying to use it for his business as well. He would beg and threaten and plead and fuss and cajole us to not use the phone from 8-6. You Know? Business hours. That was not going to be possible in most cases because School got out and the bus dropped me off sooner than that and those girls were not going to call themselves. So, day after day my dad would try and call in to get some help or information and there would be a nonstop busy signal. In those ancient days there was no reliable alternative to a land-line and we had neither call waiting nor voice mail. There was actually a machine with a tape in it that would record a callers voice. So after months of this probably loosing business and sanity my dad purchased us a second line known colloquially as the kid phone. That one we could use to our hearts content and leave his, and these are his words so please excuse the vulgarity, 'damn phone' alone. Well seems like that would have solved the problem right? Nope. Now we just had two lines to be on all the time and my sister and I didn't need to argue about who was using what at what time and whatnot. This, naturally, made my dad a little bit put out and he swore out death to the person who would dare use his business phone now that he had gone to the effort and expense of installing a kid's phone. One day there was a pressing emergency that I needed to attend to and my sister was on the kids phone so I decided to call a girlfriend from the business phone, because no one would ever know. It turned out to be a little bit of a last straw type situation because my dad had been calling in to talk to my mom so that she could rescue him after some car trouble and he had been getting a busy signal on both phones for two hours. He finally had to call a neighbor to come over and tell my mom to give him a call. When he got home I was still on the phone and he stormed in like a great big angry bear of hate and vengeance. He closed in on me in my room talking on the portable phone and yanked it out of my hand and slammed it down and while he jumped on it yelled at me in words timed and punctuated by his big two footed stomps on the phone. Stay (STOMP) Off (STOMP) Of (STOMP) The (STOMP) F{redacted} (STOMP) Phone (STOMP)(STOMP)! I was terrified because I thought I might get punched out next but he just stormed out and was yelling and ranting all night about it. That phone was little tiny sad little bits of gray plastic and wires beyond repair and almost beyond recognition. At the time I thought h was a massive jerk who over reacted, as an adult I think all in all it was a measured and qualified response. The lesson was learned and I didn't talk on my dad's business phone until late night or Saturdays from then on.   

Science Teacher Who is Unstable


 I really loved and still love the idea of science and learning and understanding the world as it really is. My formal education after my awesome teacher in middle school and before college did not help me expand on that desire in the least. I was excited to have a real science lab class that had Bunsen burners and chemicals and animals to dissect. Unfortunately, the lab tables were used in much the same way that regular tables were used throughout the school, to provide a reasonable ergonomically comfortable flat surface to elevate our books off of the ground. We got science books that were already dated and contained precious little that a young anarchist could use to build more effective bombs and weapons. I looked up explosives which had strangely been omitted from the book's index. Curious. I then looked up chemical reactions and explosives were mentioned in a frankly cursory and unfulfillingly vague manner. All it said was that explosives were a rapid reaction of oxygen producing heat and gas. Yes, yes I know that I want recipes. Damn the stupid education system and their everyone is included one size fits all science. The really great part of the class was the ersatz incredible hulk teacher we had. He was overly calm and collected talking in the softest of tones until he completely lost control of the class then he would all of the sudden raise his intensity level to just below your standard Macho Man Randy Savage calling on all comers at Wrestle Mania. The class would be shocked back into silent science and he would compose himself into a passable Bruce banner and continue the lesson for about ten minutes and then RAAAAGGGGEEEE. Everything he was teaching the Santaquin kids had already learned from our awesome science teacher in seventh grade so I was super bored and hanging out with the burnouts on the back row because at least they could tell me something I didn't already know. I learned that three dots on the web of the thumb was a Mexican gang tattoo that stood for 'My Crazy Life'. So the class was not a total waste.   

All Day in The Sun


 One day when my friend was over at my house he wanted to go to one of my cute neighbor's house. She was a year older than us and quite cute but I was too shy to just go over and talk to her as a girl even though I had been friends with her brother and had been in their house at least a hundred times. I don't know why going over to see her was so cripplingly nerve wracking but it was. For some reason when we walked over their we did it without our shoes on and it was a quite war spring day and our feet were getting burned on the pavement. We went up and knocked on the door all higgelty-piggelty like it was no big deal at all and then she came to the door and he talked to her. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal but it most definitely was I was vapor locked and barely able to breathe with the anxiety of the situation. She invited us in to meat her friend from gymnastics who was spending the night over and was also cute. Oh, great now there are two girls and two boys, like couples. I suggested we should go outside after we had talked for a bit and my friend had started dome playful tickle touching with my neighbor. We went out and I remembered that I didn't have shoes and was trying to figure out a way to get somewhere less intimate than a parent empty house when my friend suggested that the girls give us piggy back rides up to the park. They did. They carried my friend and I the two and a half blocks up the road to the park where we were less susceptible to foot burns. When we were done at the park they piggybacked us to another friends house where we hung out for a little bit and then we were piggy backed home. It was a most bizarre day. I am not by nature very comfortable with people serving me and getting a piggyback is way to much of a imposition in my opinion but the girls were willing and my friend was enthusiastic about it. I still felt guilty for making a girl I didn't know carry me for a mile on her back. As I write this I am embarrassed about asking a girl I didn't know to carry me on her back because I was too stupid to bring shoes. If I saw me doing that I would insult myself and tell myself to get some damn shoes and some damn dignity, damn it. I was not really thinking anything more would come of it at the time but on Sunday at church my neighbor told me that my piggyback slave had really liked me and wanted me to call her. I did call her a couple of times and we talked a bit but she lived in a town 9 miles away and to a car-less youth it might as well have been Bangladesh. I never saw her or was portaged by her again.  

Sexy is as Sexy Does


 My new friend that knew everything about everything knew about girls. Specifically, he knew what girls liked and how to get them to like him. He was always with girls, cute girls, ugly girls , popular girls, and every other type. He was just confident, charismatic and and easy going with girls and at 13 that seemed more like magic to me then if he would have been able to conjure fire out of thin air. I was always too self conscious at first with girls and then not self conscious enough and I would end up saying something cruel , or crude, or offensive or even hit the trifecta on occasion. Correction; more often than not. He always kept things easy and light and knew all about good hygiene and cologne and dressing cute for the ladies. At the time I thought that this was the coolest kid I had ever met and he had skills that I wanted to learn. I started dressing up more, but I assume still getting it wrong because my clothes budget still was in the discount rack and thrift store range. I bought some cologne that my sister recommended called gravity and I brushed my hair and teeth more regularly.
Hello, ladies – welcome to flavor country – I will be your guide to unfathomable sensual pleasures.
You know what? It worked. I was becoming more natural and easy going with the girls and they were more responsive me. I found that I had more girl friends than boys who were my friend. You thought I was going to write boyfriends back there didn't you? Not I, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get me to imply that I was a homosexual. I liked girls better than boys as friends because they were never trying to punch you to say hello, or goodbye, or I am bored. I was not a big guy and everyone liked to give me a friendly tussle and punch when they saw me and it drove me crazy. If a girl gave me a tussle, well. . .

A New Friend Who Knows About Cool Stuff


About this time I made another new friend who knew about cool stuff. He was a kid from Payson who I knew of because his mom had died in a tragic accident while she was pregnant. She was backing out of her driveway when a sheriff who was coming down the highway hit and killed her. He was in my English class where he and I sat by a girl I was madly in love with. Whenever we were talking about cool stuff he seemed to know all about it. Michael Jordan – he knew everything. Milli Vanilli – he knew all about them and had the tape. Claudia Shiffer – please – he had her picture in his binder. There was literally no defect in his pop culture knowledge and I admired that because I didn't know about latch key kids with access to MTV. Back in those days MTV had more then over dramatic Italians to look at they played music and had game shows. He didn't live that far from school so one day or another he invited me to come over and hang out. I did. I met his older sister and his baby brother and his widowed father, who by this twist of fate would become major elements in my families life. We hung out and listened to some music watched some MTV and then went over to his really cute neighbors house. It was possibly the perfect day. We started hanging out more and stayed friends on into the summer.

An Old Acquaintance and a New Friend


 There was a kid from Santaquin that I didn't like that much. He was friends with the coolest kid in school and was a jerk as far as I could tell. I knew him but we were not friends and if not for the neutral nature of the term acquaintance I would hesitate to use that word. When we went to Junior High somethings changed; first of all, anyone from your old school was more friendly based solely on the fact that we had been on the same team; secondly, we had not had any classes together in elementary school and none that I can recall in middle school but we happened to be alphabetically very close a G and an F ended up sitting close in every class. We would also ride the same bus and just by the sheer weight of all that proximity we started talking some. I didn't want to like him but he was actually really funny. So we started talking more and hanging out on purpose. We found that we actually had a very similar and very dark sense of humor and that we both liked lots of the same things. It is important to note that while we both had fairly mean senses of humor it was in the appreciation not in the commission of meanness that we got pleasure. For example we were once both running late to an assembly where the cheerleaders we rallying the school's pep. We were watching from the doorway when one of the girls was thrown high in the air and then allowed to plummet to the ground. The crowd was full of decent human beings and all gave out a concerned “Oh!”. My friend and I's response was a shamefully antisocial and simultaneously spontaneous gout of laughter that we tried to stifle as we ran out the door before anyone could see what a-holes we were. We did not wish that girl harm, she did break her ankle, and we didn't cause the accident but we were just really tickled at the absurdity of the situation. Another selling point for our friendship was that he was from a family that believed in keeping the fridge well stocked with Pepsi and that was appealing as we were not from that tribe. At some point we transitioned into being full blown friends and then we stayed that way for the rest of high school, college, single life, married life and who knows for sure, but maybe to the death.  

I Am Sorry That This Kid Knows My Sister


 As I hopefully made clear I had a very conflicted relationship with my sister. I really wanted her to love and like me or at least be nice to me and she was at best indifferent to my existence. If she thought I could benefit her in some way she would turn on the syrupy sweet and kind act and then turn on me or just ignore me when she got what she wanted. She was a year older and in the same school as me but I almost never saw her and we never hung out as she was ashamed of me. I was in a mixed grade art class and sat next to a kid who was named Chance and when were were shading a volley ball on a tin can he mentioned that he knew my sister. I said, in the way brothers sometimes will, 'I am sorry.' Well, I guess he more than knew her, he was one of her good friends and he ratted me out as soon as we were out of the class. My sister found me in the hall and grabbed an slapped me. She closed in close to me and was asking if I was sorry that everyone knew her or just Chance. I was embarrassed because she was assaulting me in the hall and lots of people were stopping to watch. I told her I was just kidding around when I told Chance that. She told me stuff like this was why she hated me. Noted. Now let me go so I can start trying to live down the shame of having my butt kicked by my sister in the hall of the school where I was just starting to get some social traction. She slapped me again and walked off with her fiends and I sheepishly gathered my stuff and headed to my class trying not to make eye contact with anyone. A couple of people asked were trying to ask me who that girl was and what happened but I just wanted for it to be over and get to class. I think I should have not been sorry that Chance knew my sister, I should have been sorry that I knew my sister.  

We Make Bridges


 I actually liked Mr. Breast-weight's class best of the three because we made stuff. Specifically stick bridges and a metal box for putting stuff in. The stick bridge was made of some short pre-cut square sticks that we were supposed to glue onto a template and then in the next class period after they were dry we would put them on a press and the teacher would smash them and see how much they could hold before they broke. It was awesome. I was really intent on building the best bridge in the class and obsessed over design and the build to make sure I would win the non existent contest. He had taught us that triangles would provide the best strength which would have been true if there were variations in the load a span or joint strength issues. I pointed out to him that in a strait oppositional span-less compressive load that a perfectly vertical column would be stronger. He disagreed with me even when I offered to diagram it on the board for him. The class couldn't have cared less they just wanted to glue their sticks to a template. I was frustrated that he didn't want to know the right answer. It still frustrates me when people do not want to know the right answer. I am constantly amazed that people just are not curious and don't care about vital issues like the best shape for a stick bridge and the theory behind it. I decided to prove him wrong so he would have to listen and then be sorry and change his ways. I glued four sticks in a square column and then glued four sticks for a base and four for a top and knew that my 12 stick solution was going to dominate the 24 stick triangle girder solutions in the non existent competition when they were all dry the next day. We were going alphabetically so I was about middle of the pack and I was getting nervous because some of the weak looking template replication bridges were holding 4-500 pounds before they would break. It came to my turn and I brought mine up and it looked insubstantial compared to every other bridge because it was more compact. Mr. Breast-weight popped it in and said something about how we were going to see if I was smarter then the people who design bridges. I would have been mad about that because the people who design bridges would have built something very similar to my idea because we were not bridging anything but I was to nervous about possibly failing to even get my feel-bads hurt. He put it in and loved the plate down and started cranking the jack as I watched the force gauge. 500 lbs , easy. 1000 lbs , c'mon just getting warm. At 1500 I think the teacher was starting to get nervous about the blow back that would take out an eye when this thing popped. 2000 lbs and the gauge ran out of numbers he asked me if we should keep trying until it broke or if I wanted to save my design. I was all for breaking it so see how much smarter then people who build bridges were. Well, at least smarter then what my teacher thought people who build bridges thought. He cranked the jack once more and we were off the scale. Once more and it was pegged once more and nothing changed. Once more and the 4000 lb jack stopped working because it was at its limit. I didn't try not to gloat when he let off the pressure and handed me back my slightly crumpled but basically no worse for the wear ersatz bridge. I wanted to brag but the teacher just said I cheated by not building it in a bridge shape like the template and none of the kids in class gave the slightest of craps that I won the imaginary competition that no one was having except for me. I started building another of the same design but in a line like the bridge template only more sturdy and set in by to dry to prove once and for all that I was right about the design. The problem was that when mine was dry the next class period Mr. Breast-weight wouldn't get the press set up again to let me have my own private go. I would have won the not-contest again anyway.    

Mr. Titplayer


 From my wall facing seat in the back, back, back of the class I got to see the world from a 'god of schools' eye view. I was separate and aloof not doing the assignments with the rest of the class because my teacher in an effort to keep me from causing problems had given me an old textbook and told me to read a chapter everyday and complete the assignments in the back. I did and it was actually a pretty cool book about different engineering problems that people had encountered and solved. When I finished my chapter and assignment I would start surveying the rest of the class goofing off and passing notes and not learning anything at all. My teacher, whom I got to know better then maybe most of the other students because I sat behind him as well, was really odd duck. After he had given a lecture and started the kids on a book work assignment he would come back to his desk and start reading his nerd hobby magazines and catalogs. The whole time he was doing that he would run his left hand up under his shirt elbow deep and start playing with his nipples. The first time I saw him do it I thought he was maybe scratching or adjusting a shirt of something but it went on way to long to have been that. He would be there for ten minutes hand up the shirt, reading about ham radios or something and pinching his own nipples and waiting for the class to finish up. It was really creepy but also very zen in a way.  I would watch him and the class all fidget away the hour until we were free to do it for another hour in another class and then go home and do it until bed time. After 2 weeks of sequestration with not so much as a peep out of me he must have had second thoughts about his prejudice and let me join the row with the stinky nerds. He maybe thought that I would not like sitting next to the stinky nerds while my friends were on the front row but I was a stinky nerd so I was in the brier patch so to speak. I did not have any reason to really mess with this teacher so we got along fine and before I left his class he actually apologized to me for being so rude when I first came to class. When he did that it made me feel a little guilty for calling him Mr. Breast-weight as a play on his name and telling everyone I could to watch him during quite time to see him play with his nipples. I went ahead and kept that to myself though so as to not ruin his newly found high opinion of me.  

My Suspended Reputation


 My punishment turned out to not be as bad as I thought. I was still allowed to hang out with friends on nights and weekends and as I mentioned I was burning up the phone lines lamenting my unjust treatment. When I came back to school there was a lot of rumor, exaggeration, and insinuation in the air and I tried to let it stay up there. Even though the behavior that led to my suspension had developed in a very organic, bottom-up desire to make people laugh the story sounded more like I was off the rails and just didn't care. One girl that sat next to me in history wanted to know why I got so mad that I broke a chair over a kids head and nearly killed him. Because, You know? That is how she had heard it. Well, I would say, sometimes you just have to unleash hell.
I had been in two fights at my new school both with Hispanic kids and both fights had looked rather violent but had mostly been me falling down. I am not sure what conclusions about me you can gather from that but I must include that my best friend at the time was, and I guess still is, Hispanic (I mean he is still Hispanic not still my best friend, we are still good friends but not best friends). So, it is not that I was a racist, if that is what you were thinking and I know it may have crossed your mind. It was not that I was particularly brave or violent, I am a fairly cowardly pacifist. All I can say is that I kind of liked my new bad boy reputation and I didn't correct any of the chair-breaking-over-head vs. me-falling-backwards-off-of-a-chair-that-broke-from-repeated-misuse misunderstandings. It would probably just confuse the issue. I started being welcome with the hard-A kids that sat a t the back and didn't give a damn. I always wanted to hang out with these kids because they were the coolest. A really pretty girl named Summer even invited me to a party at her house, and it was one of those mythical parties of Junior High lore, a non-chaperoned boy/girl party. I was really digging this new school. Some other boys and girls invited me to skip class and go hang out at there house a couple of blocks from the school. We just went and sat around talking but the thrill of just blowing off class was amazing. It was not all good though the teachers evidently talk in secret rooms just for teachers and my story was evidently well known because when I came back from suspension I got extra special treatment right off the bat in several of my new classes. In my carrers class which was the third installment of the TLC trifecta the teacher didn't even talk to me when I walked into the room he just pointed at me and said, ' Gause, to the back.' He then indicated a chair well away from all of the other students and behind his desk at the back of the room facing into the wall. I tried to turn the chair to face front and he yelled back to me that it was facing the wall on purpose and I was to leave it how it was. Cool. No, actually uncool. Some of my other teachers mentioned something to me or warned me about misbehavior and others said they had no idea why my punishment had been so harsh because they thought I was a great student.  

I Am In Big Trouble


 I was once again bodily towed from the classroom down the hall this time with two halves of a chair and a very, very angry teacher. She had been pushed to far this time and she was not going to stop until I was gone for good. She didn't even worry about picking up the other kid or cleaning up or calming the class she was just marching me strait to the principals office swearing forth oaths of eternal vengeance. She said I was getting suspend which scared me but then she said I would have to pay for the chair I had broken and she estimated that they cost about eighty dollars. Eighty dollars sounded to me like a life sentence of indentured servitude. I was terrified of what was about to go down. We got back to the principal's office in what was now my fifth trip in three months. I was sat down in the principals office while she told him what had gone on and then went to get her stack of disciplinary write-up papers. While she was gone the principal sat down and sighed and rubbed his face and asked me if I knew how many of his last ten discipline problems were kids from Santaquin. I thought I guessed high with five. The correct answer was all ten. He asked me what I thought made us all so crazy. I declined to offer a suggestion owing to the sudden and intense dryness of my mouth and the rapid beating of my heart. My parents were called and a meeting was arranged and I stayed at school for an hour after it let out to have our pow-wow. My mom was really upset about having to come back a third time and she seemed to be more sympathetic to the plight of the teacher and principal then my story of having to defend my hair from molestation. They told me I would be suspended for three days which was the rest of the week and I could come back on Monday. When I got home I avoided my dad and was faking asleep when he got back from a late meeting. The next morning when I would avoid him no longer he told me to come to his room and he asked me what this was all about and I tried to make it sound like I was a blameless victim and he knew I wasn't. He told me I would be pulled out of school for a month and I could come to work with him. I loved school, I loved my new friends, I loved going to class and to lunch and in the hall in between. I was devastated and I decided that because I had a little bit of a congestion in my throat already I would really played up a little hyperventilation fit to hopefully sway him into seeing how badly I would cope with this news, like it may cause me death or something. With the threat of my immanent demise hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles he told me to calm down and shut up; he was not impressed. I cried and flailed and wallowed in my misery and then was resigned to my fate. I got sympathy calls from all of my friends who agreed that what I was dealing with was total bull crap and that every adult in the authoritative chain of command was rude and very rude, and stupid and rude. I kind of liked my martyrdom and started playing that up. The chair ended up being $12.80 which I could cover so that was not the worst of it as I had originally feared.  

The Hair Defense Initiative


 I had really great hair. Longish, middle ear to shoulder at the time, and luxuriant it always seemed to get a lot of attention. Usually that attention was from young cowboys and Hispanic males who thought it made me look like a skater and/or a fag. I know they thought that because they would mention it to me as often as they could. Somehow in the cultural distillations of my Junior High skaters became the archenemy of anyone with a mind over-soaked in the chemicals and ideals of the machismo cultures that were still current in Payson at the time. The really sad irony of the whole deal was that I was neither gay nor a skater and I was taking flack for those jokers because I liked the look of my hair a little bowl-cutty. Anyway, the particular instance of follicle oversolicitude was in Ms. Clowns class where we sat not at desks but in pairs at trapezoidal tables. I was shuffled a couple different places to keep me from talking to my neighbors or disrupting in other was. Unfortunately for the teacher I was a persistent little cuss and would not let a little ignoring stop me from talking to the good kids she had tried to use to hem me in. My table mate was the girl who had ratted me out about my Miss Makeup skit and in front of me was a kid named Seven who I am not sure could talk. Behind there was a Hispanic kid who for some reason like to inform me of my sexual preference and pull my hair about twenty times a day.
“Hey.”, he would whisper.
“...”, I wouldn't answer.
“Why do you have long hair like a girl? Because you are a fag?”, he would ask, I assume rhetorically.
The irony is that in the next couple of years this kid would grow his hair out to show how tough he was. After he would whisper sweet nothings about me and my hair for a bit he would always pull it of mess with it or something crappy and I was growing increasingly unhappy with his behavior. A second fact needs to be put on the table here and that is that I had been a chronic chair tipper and leaner backer. The teacher had warned me lots of times that the plastic topped metal leg chairs were not designed for two leg use and if I did not stop leaning back in it I would break it and have to pay for it. This turned out to be exactly true at a bad time. I was leaning back in my chair and the hair kid was doing his thing I thought right now would be great time to teach him a lesson so when he leaned forward over his table to molest my hair again I spun on my chair and kicked his table as hard as I could, driving it into his solar plexus and knocking him to the ground. The force of my kick broke my chair into half plastic half metal and I was on the floor too. He recovered a little and crawled over to start fighting me on the linoleum of the HomeEC demonstration kitchen. We were both fairly out of it so it was not really much of a fight more just some sloppy flopping. The teacher came and broke us up and told me to pick up the pieces of my chair because I was in big trouble. She was correct in that as well.  

The Mankinni Receives Mixed Reviews.


Ms. Clown and I were far from done after the dickey jokes. Far from done. With the Dickeys we were either measuring or cutting or sewing every day for two weeks on a project that would take anyone without a legitimate medical brain disorder 20 minutes, tops. When I finished the project the first day and started finishing all the other kid's projects on the second by the third I was bored. Bored. Bored. I was ready for a change of pace but was more cautious after I had been threatened with sudden death if I disturbed class again. I started gathering scraps of cloth and began making a sexy little mankinni. I was quite and not raising hell so the teacher left me alone, assuming no news was good news. Anyone with children of their own know that a quite child, like the mighty Bengal tiger silently closing in on the Punjab caravan the stalking silence of naughtiness is the most dangerous. She had no children of her own yet so she was making this massive technical error based on her strictly academic knowledge of children. Book learning won't save you in the heart of darkness. I sewed at a Grinch-wrecking-Christmas pace to finish my joke costume so it would be ready for public display whenever the opportunity arose. Arise it did. Senorita Payasa absented herself for some critical business elsewhere and the game was afoot. I hastily pulled off my shirt and scrunched my shorts as high up on the virginal white of my legs as I could and popped on my homespun bra and pantries and mounted the teachers demonstration table at the front of class and began a sexy booty wag dance. The bit was absolutely murdering in the 12-13-year-old male and female homEC student demographic. I was doing so well I was imprudent in the length of my show and things went badly. The door flew open and Donna Pagliaccia closed the distance on my partly disrobed and provocatively undulating body and swept me off the table/stage and onto my butt and the floor. Talk about getting the hook. They say you can't please all the people all the time and they turned out to be really right in this case because she was one of the people and she was definitely not pleased, not pleased at all. I had thirty laughing kids and one rude critic had to ruin it for everyone. This is why we can't have nice things people. She held me with one hand while I struggled to free myself and get my shirt from off of the counter while she told someone to go and get the principal. I freed myself long enough to get the bra off and my shirt on and I had pulled my shorts back down to the dress code length by the time the principal had been summoned. I still had the over-panties on and I didn't see a graceful way to get them off before my ad hoc trial would commence so things looked pretty damning. Pretty damning indeed. The bell rang and all of the other kids filtered out as slowly as they could so they could see as much of the train wreck as possible without missing their buses and rides home. I was caught in one of those situations where there is no reasonable explanation for my behavior and so trying to rationalizes seemed out of the picture. I was, however, shocked at the blatant mis-truth and outright lies that I was hearing from the clown princess of home-economics. She was claiming that I had taken off all of my clothes (you know? Down to my nakies) put on the bra and panties and danced around the room. While the truth was only marginally better it turned out that having my ersatz panties over my shorts still helped me to clarify that while I did have my shirt off I had my shorts pulled up in a comical and not sexually explicit manner. The principal looked very tired and very unamused when he told me I would need to come with him and set up a private meeting with my mom and dad. 
Oh, no. Not dad. 
My dad had a very low opinion of shenanigans and was quick on the punishment trigger. Luckily, mom was the one who came and with my two baby siblings in tow and had to endure the shame of another private meeting with school administrators. She was not amused by my sexy dancing outfit or story but I was not punished much I think it was some kind of grounding which I could live with considering they were talking about expulsion based on the quasi-sexual nature of my performance. This was not the last time I would be in trouble for being naked at school, not even the second to last time actually.

Dickey Sounds Like a Naughty Word

For that classy suit coat with no shirt look. Only she knows. Well, only her and Jesus.

To the powers that be there was a desperate need for all eighth-graders in our Junior high to take Home EC which meant a class in sewing with the angry clown lady. She had chosen an essential piece of wardrobe for each of us to make during our time in her class – The Dickey. If you were not around in the fifties and sixties or you were not a massive nerd during those eras you may not know what a Dickey is, and good for you if you don't. A Dickey is a disembodied turtleneck collar that you could wear if for some reason you wanted to wear a sweater or jacket with no shirt under it but you wanted the classy look of a turtleneck. When you would want to do that is never. Regardless of the usefulness of such a accessory we were required to cut out and sew one to get a grade in the class so we all did. What I did was work out exactly as many double entendres as were possible to construct in the English language. The key with a really good double entendre is plausible deniability so you could play innocent if the need should arise. An example of a punishable double entendre would be to hold the Dickey at crotch level and say something like, 'look at my Dickey.' You see how it was too heavy handed? While good for the laugh it will get you yelled at and kicked out; steer clear of this amateurish technique. A better option would be something like this, “Teacher! Trent keeps touching my Dickey and it is making me uncomfortable.” Do you see how this is nonpunishable?  I protected myself by having some possibility that I was actually referring to the actual Dickey and not just using it as a joke word stand in. For some reason the teacher was getting increasingly frustrated with my constant stream of Dickey humor. She told me over and over to stop making Dickey jokes so I would just say something like;
'So you don't want me to talk about my Dickey anymore?'
She would say 'Yes.'
'But what if my Dickey looks funny and I am self conscious about it?'
She would say, 'Shut up or you are going to have to leave the class.'
'okay.'
I would really mean to not say one more thing but then a joke would occur to me and I would say, 'Teacher, make Danial take his dickey home and wash it, it smells funny.'
'Get out!'
okay.

Dressing Like a Clown and Hating Me


 Just after the first semester ended and I had not been to the principals office for a few weeks we rotated classes in the TLC group to the life class which was code for home-economics. The teacher was a great mound of a woman who was bossy and sassy and mean. She was one of those people who was probably picked on as a kid but she really wanted to pay everyone back by being in charge of her little kingdom and being condescending and rude every chance she got. Well, in the words of the incomparable Homie the Clown – 'Homie don't play that'. Every time she would say something in an inconsiderate way I would ask out loud to the class how she might say that in a more positive manner. She was not overly excited about a student correcting her manners. She started being extra picky about my behavior which did not need a lot of nit picking to find flaw with as it was. I was soon being written up and kicked out of her class at a regular pace. I spent many a seventh period out in the hall marking time until school got out and then sometimes she would ask me to stay after to talk about my behavior and twice I missed the bus and in the pre-cell phone wasteland of the early nineties my mom often could not be reached and I would walk the five miles home. The first time she asked for some administrative assistance with controlling me was when she came to school in an all denim one piece jumpsuit with a rainbow colored belt and brightly colored pompoms for buttons. In short, a clown costume. When she walked into class I immediately noticed the outfit and raised my hand until I was called on and I asked if she was ashamed of herself for stealing clothes from what appeared to have been a homeless clown. My joke got a decent laugh from the students but she turned red splotchy with rage and stormed over to me and picked me up by my hair and shirt and yanked me out into the hall. I thought I was going to get beat up by a Junior High HomeEC teacher and was actually fairly concerned. When we got into the hall she threw me against the wall and I cringed and curled preparing for a slap. None came but she asked my why I was always being such a little shit. I said she should not use that word because it made her sound uneducated. She grabbed my shirt again and dragged me around the corner and down the hall to the principal's office and threw me though the door telling the secretary I was to stay there until she got her class under control and then she would be back for a joint conference with the principal. The principal actually started with me before she got back and I told the principal the story in reverse order so I sounded less guilty and the teacher more so. When she got back the story was that I had been disruptive, she pulled my hair and called me a little shit and dragged me bodily down the hall to the principals office. Much of this story was roughly true and the principal was concerned over her language and physical assaults more so than the clever observation I had made about her clown suit looking outfit. I had left out the part about the clown suit in my version of events because I wanted to make sure the principal wasn't confused by what he would probably consider extraneous facts. She was so flustered and out of sorts that when he started questioning her about her behavior she forgot to mention the initial provocation either and she was looking like a very violent and unstable woman while I was putting on my best choirboy face. I was warned to be good in class and she had to stay for some extra talking. By this time school only had five minutes left so I just went and got my stuff from my locker and headed out to the bus stop.  

We Tussle


 Well, like I said, it was not a huge school and eventually old Mr. Dirt-Bag Bully and I were bound to cross paths in a relatively unregulated environment. Then like the cowardly date rapist, he was going to want things to get physical despite my protests. That day came when I was at lunch. I had eaten a healthy, well rounded meal of french fries and pizza from what was euphemistically called the 'snack lunch' line in the cafeteria so I was naturally well nourished and ready for anything. I had stayed close to some athletic and large friends of mine whenever possible to keep the high testosterone Troglodyte at bay. Were were all sitting in one of two Kivas that were in the common areas. These Kivas were a series of concentric squares that stepped down at 2' intervals to provided a depressed seating area that started out about 12' square and the bottom well was about 4' square. While I was sitting there explaining to a kid named Frank why my pants had patches on them that simulated that look of airmail stamps a chunk of rice crispy treat hit my arm and stuck. I looked up and there was my nemesis sneer laughing from about ten feet away. I picked the morsel off of my shirt and fired it right back at him trying to hit him in his stupid looking face. I missed but I hit his shirt dead in the center chest and he instantly switched from bully chuckle to bully rage and closed to distance to me in what seemed like preternatural time. I was still sitting and he pressed in close to me, face to face, him standing and me twisted at the waist. He asked me what in the heavily accented eff word I thought effing doing – and as an addendum to to question declared once again that I was a pussy. I told him that he had accidentally dropped some rice crispy and I had given it back to him, helpful soul that I was. He got madder and told me it was not an accident that he was trying to hit me with it. He told me I had better get it off of him or I was going to die. I straitened and stood up on the top of the Kiva, slowly as to not release the chemicals of alarm into his barely developed brain. I imagined that is acute stress reaction might just be fight-or-fight and I needed a second to get in good posture. When I was standing on the edge of the Kiva I was actually a few inches taller then my antagonist and in a burst of white hot nerd rage instead of brushing off the crumb and trying to avoid the fight I punched him as hard as I could on the collar bone. He was shocked and staggered for a tick as were most of the spectators then he bull rushed me which sent us both tumbling into the small square well at the bottom of the Kiva and may have saved my life. In that space we were both unable to mount a serious offense or defense and there was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing (I guess you know what that means about the narrator.). We were broken up, I was disheveled but basically unscathed and my opponent looked much the worse for wear as we were pressed by our shoulders into the principals office to have a chat. This was my third trip in six weeks so I knew my way. When the principal asked our story the bully said that I had just attacked him for no reason and showed him the bruise that was flowering between his shoulder and neck. I told him about the constant bullying and that he had thrown food on me and then attacked me tackling me into the bottom of the well. I was much more eloquent and forty pounds lighter then this kid so it was not hard to sell my victim story. It was mostly true with a little shading and with the parts about starting a joke about him being an exhibitionist left out. I was cautioned to avoid fights and the other kid was suspended for two days. Ha ha ha ha ha. I was smiling uncontrollably as I walked the empty halls back to class and when I walked into class I had trouble keeping the smile in check as everyone disregarded the teacher when someone asked what happened. I said I would tell whoever was interested later and class went on while I whispered the details of the fight and the suspension to my closest neighbors. Then the story was embellished and compounded until it was I who had initiated the fight and threw the much bigger bully down the Kiva steps before I broke his collar bone with a precision punch. I didn't disabuse these notions. The next Monday when his suspension had been served the bully was back in classes much subdued and as far as I remember never said anything to me ever again which suited me fine. He dropped out a few years later and I never saw him again.  

I Get in a Fight


 While constitutionally I am basically a coward I have a cognitive defect much like a mild form of Tourett's syndrome that makes it impossible to not say the joke that comes to mind. I can know it will not go over, I can know it will offend, I can know it will end in me taking a beating and still I press on. Rather; blurt on. The joke must go on. I had already taken a few beatings in my scout troupe, elementary school, middle school, home and at play by reason of my unbridled smartassery. Then there was Junior High. We were a school that mixed together about ten small cities and brought kids into close proximity for the first time who had very different cultures and pecking orders. That meant they all had to be re-evaluated and amalgamated or assimilated in a very short time. There was a Hispanic kid from Payson who decided early on in the year that I looked like and easy target for physical bullying because of how small I was. I was only about 60lbs and 4'8” when I started eight grade so not a real imposing physical specimen even by the shrimpy standards of Junior High but even by shrimpy standards this kid was a king prawn. He started to go out of his way to pull my shoulder length blonde hair and tell me to get an effing hair cut because I looked like a skater pussy. I appreciated his honest and forthright appraisal of my looks for what it was worth but declined to entertain the idea of a drastic reassessment of my personal style based on one review. I did, however, take great pains to avoid his physical and verbal assaults in the hall way but it was not a big school and at least once a week he was trying to antagonize me because he had little fear of retaliation. He didn't realize that he had engaged in a multi-front battle with one of the premier smartasses working in Payson and the surrounding environs at that time. I knew he could do nothing to me in the three classes we had together and he was no match for my wit so I started an unrelenting psychological campaign to bring him down a notch or ten. An example, in our English class I would walk in and then give an exaggerated stinky face and start waving the air and make a big to do about it smelling rancid. Then I would loudly ask who farted and ask for a confession and then all of the sudden I would make a show of realizing that this kid was in the room and call off the dogs. I would tell everyone not to worry about trying to find out who farted because he just smelled like that all the time. In gym class I would jog passed him and then yell out for everyone in class to hear, 'No! I don't want to look at your penis!” and then run off before he could hit me. This last one would cause a gym class chain reaction that would have lots of other boys also telling him they didn't want to inspect his member either. Then the joke migrated to the hall and several people were telling him in passing that they also would not be interested in seeing his boy-bits. If he was picking on me before out of boredom and unfocused aggression my campaign helped him to want to hurt me for more personal reasons. That is when the whole thing got to the boiling point and went pear-shaped and other mixed metaphors indicating a problem coming to a head including, but not limited to, straws and camels and fans and poop.  

Little Miss Makeup


 In Junior High we were required to take a three part class called TLC. Technology – Life -and Career. I did not have much success in these classes. All of the eighth graders were divided into three groups and You would spend a third of the year in each class and then switch. You know? Like circuit training for young minds. My group started out in the technology section which was supposed to teach us to use computers. They definitely succeeded in teaching me how to pick a computer furthest from the teacher and to play Oregon Trail for the whole class. I say the whole class but a good part of the class was spent goofing off and hanging out with the other disruptions and chatting. The teacher had been nicknamed 'Little Miss Makeup' in reference to her diminutive stature and her penchant for piling on the foundation, base, blush and eye shadow. Gobs of it. I did not make up the name 'Little Miss Makeup' but at that stage of my comedic development I was not above riffing on someone else's low hanging fruit. I worked out a little mime routine wherein I would show how 'Little Miss Makeup' might prepare herself for the day. When she was out of the room I would gather an audience and proceed to sit prissily on a chair. Next I would slide over a huge imaginary tub of base and scoop two big handfuls out and trowel it onto my face. I would give it a quick check and see that there was not enough imaginary makeup on my face and dip my whole face in the bucket for a wallow. The bit was always killing at this point. I would then grab another tub and make similarly exaggerated blush and eye shadow mimes and then pull out a grotesque pretend mascara wand and slather my eye shut with fantasy mascara and then comically pry my eyelids back open. Absolute comedy murder. Then she would come back into the room and we would have to play it cool. Except if I could get behind her and I would make a hand full of makeup maneuver and pretend to freshen up so the other kids could see and she could not. She was sweet and pleasant and she would always turn and ask me what I was doing to make the other kids laugh and I would say I didn't know. The joke would have tapered off and died with a whimper if I hadn't been ratted out by a little suck up tattle tale. I was unexpectedly called into the principles office for the second time in my first four weeks at my new school and there was the little miss obviously in post-cry dishevelment and the principal looking very unhappy. I knew what it was about but I decided for a little of the old play dumb. When the door was closed the principal took a slow measured look at me and tisked before he told me what the situation was. He told me that a student in my technology class had told my teacher that I had been mocking her by miming out a makeup routine. I was going to try for a 'What? Who me?' but I could tell by his tone is was telling not asking and I decided to keep quite and not make it worse. He asked if I would care to demonstrate what I had been showing the class. I told him I would not. I was so ashamed and sad that I had hurt my teacher's feeling that I felt like crying. The principal asked if I thought how my joke would make the teacher feel and I had to honestly tell him that I had in all the purest honesty of my heart never contemplated her feelings I was just enjoying the attention of my peers. This was when Little Miss Makeup decided to compound my shame by telling me she wore so much make up because she was embarrassed by the many deep acne scars she had on her face from when she was a teenager. She then asked how I would feel if someone made fun of my facial scar and I started to cry because I did know how it felt and now I was doing it to someone else. Luckily, breaking down made them ease up on the guilt trip and they just told me I needed to consider other people's feelings before I made a joke. They let me have enough time to finish bawling and saying sorry before I had to go back to class. I wish I could say that little intervention changed my life and I was always kind from that day forth, not so much. I left off making fun of anyone who was an obvious target and stuck to making fun of the popular kids and jocks from then on and I never made fun of someones face or what they did with it ever again.  

Spin Cycle


I forgot one significant instance of abuse when I was writing about all the things my older sister did to me for her amusement. Two facts are necessary to keep in mind for this story; first, I have a really sensitive dizzy-ness thing in my inner ear. Second, what a tire swing is. 
This can only be used for evil.
This is a tire swing of the model that we had hung from our front tree. This model has two sides that when twisted tighten the two rings together making escape impossible. So as she would do she tricked me into playing with her because she said she just wanted to hang out with me. I wanted to hang out and so I thought, 'how nice that my super aggressive sister would just like to hang out with no ulterior motives.' I did not think that in as many words but it was probably there in sub-text. She had me sit in the swing as I protested any sort of twisting on account of the hyper-sensitivity of the nerves in my semicircular canals. Once again that is not what I said but it was in the subtext of, 'Just push me, okay? Don't spin because I will get dizzy and puke'. She pushed regular for a few times to put me off my guard and then sprung the trap and spun me as fast as she could tightening the rope and cinching the tire shut into a cruel torture device. I fought to try and escape but the tire was so tight and she was winding up the swing so fast I couldn't work myself free. She didn't stop twisting until the rope's repeated twistings had so shortened it as to put it out of her reach. I was begging her not to let it go but I knew it was too late for gods or man to intervene. She turned it loose and I spun so fact the centrifugal force was pulling my head and feet straight out of the top and bottom of the swing. I was trying to create some counter pressure on the walls to keep the swing from re-twisting once it had hit bottom. But it was no use at the R's I was doing PM resistance was futile and the swing spun past the bottom point carried by momentum into a dreadful counter rotating re-twist. Then it did it a third time then stopped. I staggered out of the swing and puked and then laid on the ground with my eyes closed feeling the world spin and my sister's breathless laugh. I laid there for a long time because I was unable to walk and the lingering nausea lasted for days but I was not mad at my sister just sad that she didn't really want to hang out with me and that it had just been a trick. I have not sat in a tire swing since. 

Calling Girls


 Once I got my feet wet in the girlfriend game I took my new found confidence on the road. By the road I mean I looked up cute girl's phone numbers in the phone book and cold called them. Girls I knew, Girls I didn't know whichever struck my fancy. Just so long as they were cute. It actually went okay at times I would look up someone with a generic last name though and I would run into troubles. A Jones or a Johnson might require some calls to wrong numbers before pay dirt was found. But in these heady times of pre-callerID a missed call was no big deal just a quick request for the girl and then when they said I had the wrong number it was checked off the list. One could only hope that the girl they were searching for had an alphabetically precocious father. Sometimes I would hit and then begin an awkward conversation about who I was and why I was calling. It turned out that my plan extended only so far as a desire to talk to cute girls on the phone and I had a good plan for getting that result. When they would ask why I was calling I would usually not have an answer because I couldn't say my real purpose that is the first and cardinal rule of the girl game – never tell them what you really want. I would usually try and make up something about homework or projects from a class that we had in common and then try and segue to a regular conversation. It did not work very well or very often. Once when I actually had some friends over helping me call and talk a girl who was very cute but unaware of my existence became the target of our phone solicitations. She answered and I tried to chat her up with some furor because I had friends on the line in some need of being impressed by by skill with the fairer sex. She just kept asking who it was and why I was calling until she put her uncle on the line and he yelled at us about calling girls we didn't know and bother them and he ended up by threatening to kick our asses collectively. I hung up a little shell shocked and embarrassed that my friends had to hear me wuss out when a angry man yelled at me. In the frantic imagining of my twelve-year-old mind I thought that he may actually try and find out who I was and where I lived and try and find me and follow through on his treats. I gave up cold calling from that day forward. In a strange twist of fate the uncle of the girl ended up being my uncle-in-law by marriage. I have never told him that it was I who was calling girls and needed to get yelled at. He would probably not remember anyway.    

Crystal Pepsi


 There was a time when the big wigs over at Pepsi were thinking that they may be loosing market share because Pepsi was too brown. True story. When I was in junior high we had a closed circuit television system that played what was alleged to be knew but was more like a vehicle to advertize Pepsi to a captive audience. Selling caffeinated sugar water to pre-teens is not exactly hard but you need to make sure they buy your brand of sugar water and not the evil other brand. At one point they introduced a clear version of what was purported to taste like Pepsi. I drank my sugar water from cans a except for a little bit that got caught in the gutter I was unaware and unconcerned with the color. The started pushing it on every ad and they wheeled in special vending machines that sold Crystal Pepsi for 25 cents. That got my attention. 25 cents was the price point at which I would buy as many as my budget would allow. Which was many, many, many, cans of Crystal Pepsi. I didn't like it, it tasted horrid and I couldn't stop buying it because it was a quarter. If I didn't buy it I would be losing money and that is not reasonable. Eventually, they dropped the promotional pricing and I was unwilling to purchase and consume the horrid stuff at fifty cents a pop. I guess everyone else on earth also discovered it was foul and it was quickly no more. They say every man has his price and it seems like mine is twenty five cents.   

Breaking Up With my First Girlfriend


 I don't know if I made it clear enough but I was really sensitive to being 'whoo, whoo-ed' even when it was by mostly good natured teasers. I was also mortified by the idea that my girlfriend might want to hold hands at school where I could be teased, Finally, and this was a biggie, I had never kissed a girl on the mouth and just the idea of it would cause me to hyperventilate a little and start planning my exit like a man leaving a burning building. For all these reasons my relationship with my first girlfriend was getting off to a rocky start. Where we had developed some effortless and fun chemistry in our interactions before we were official I suddenly was very self conscious about talking to her and our conversations were really stiff. I also have a tendency to not look people in the eye when I get nervous or am unsure what to do in the social situation I am in and that is disconcerting to exactly everyone who is not autistic. So my days had become a over-thought maze of avoidance and carefully planned interactions that left no time for any PDA potential. When I did see her I would try and give her a quick wave and head on my way while she look at me confused about why I wouldn't come over the twenty feet to talk to her and share a laugh or two. When I got home though I was just fine I could be charming and funny and engaging on the phone because no one could see me and there was no chance that she would be able to try and cuddle up and kiss me. So every day when She or I would call she would always first want to know why I never talked to her at school anymore and my excuses were starting to get more and more ridiculous. On the second week of our 'going out' she had made some plans for us to get together Friday night at the movies. Oh, crap. There was no way that I was going to go into a dark secluded place with a potential kisser it was just not safe. It was Wednesday when she told me the plan and it sent me into a tailspin of anxiety. I told her that sounded awesome and that I would definitely get a ride over to the movie theater to meet her on Friday. I was lying, there was no way in hell I would be going but I didn't know how to get out of it. I thought I could frame up my mom and tell my girlfriend that I was grounded or something but then I thought it would only delay the inevitable. My life had been miserable as a committed man and I decided I needed out. It also did not help that I was getting a constant stream of mockery from the guys in gym class who inexplicably accused me of being a homosexual for having a girlfriend. An example, “Gause, are you really going out with Sarah? You are such a fag.' - and punch shoulder. I was not yet confident enough in my rhetorical skills to point out in a funny way that I was they guy with the girl while they were having a dude's night in on the weekend. I called my girlfriend up on Thursday and told her that we needed to break up, and here is where it gets classic, but I still wanted to be friends. I did really want to be friends but ones with no chance of being kissy face friends. She started to cry a little and asked me why and for some ridiculous reason and with a little bit of very tenuous logic I claimed that one of my good friend-girls, the one who was always trouble, from Santaquin said I should break up with her. As I write this I am ashamed of what a coward I was that I had to throw a friend under the bus in a misguided attempt to save face. I am not even sure what I was trying to get across with my weird excuse but that is why twelve-year-olds should not have girlfriends, because it is ridiculous. We stayed friends until she moved away a few years later in high school, we were never kissy face friends.  

A Real Girl


 There was a girl in my typing class who had just moved to Payson from Arizona and she was into me. I was really wary because no girl had ever flirted with me like she was. She would sit by me want to talk to me she gave me her number and told me to call her at home. I was worried because a girl this into me would probably want to 'go out' and that meant kissing and I did not know how to kiss a girl, you know, on the mouth. She was persistent though and pretty cute so I started to entertain the thought of maybe having my first girlfriend. I flirted back a little even started calling her on occasion to chat about what we had in common which was typing class and the people in typing class. I was building up the courage to ask her to 'go out with me' which at thirteen meant exactly no going out because we lived in different cities an I had no transportation. Then she surprised me by coming up to me at lunch in the midst of all of my friends and asking me to go out with her. I didn't answer I just told her I would call her later because I was too embarrassed by the 'whoo, whoos' all the other guys were giving me. I was blushing and walking with my head down to get my books and go to my next class and I chose a path I knew would not cross this girls path. The specific path I chose was to exit the building wait for the bell to ring walk around the long way around the outside of the building and come into class late. Discretion or cowardice? Hard to say, hard to say. I avoided the halls she would be in for the last three periods and made it onto the bus un attached and un-'whoo, whooed'. I was safe and riding home finally able to enjoy the feeling of flattery I had from being asked out by a girl, a real girl. When I got home I wanted to call her and tell her yes but I didn't want to seem over eager and amateurish so I went outside and played until I thought I had given it enough time to seem cool. I went in and called her and when her mom answered she asked right away who it was when I told her she seemed relived and got her daughter for me. When she got on the phone I could tell she had been crying as she was still short of breath in the halting manner of a post-cry breath catching. My heart sank because I knew she was sad because I had rejected her but I couldn't tell her it was just because I was a massive wuss and was too shy. I chatted to her like there was nothing particular I had called to talk about and then she asked me why I didn't want to go out with her. I said I did I just didn't want to tell her that in front of my friends. She took that to mean I was ashamed to be with her but I told her some cleaver and false excuse that didn't make me sound like a wussy. She asked pointedly to make certain that I was on board with going out and I said yes and had my first real girlfriend. I made an excuse to get off the phone and spent the rest of the night worried that she might want to hold hands at school or more unfathomably horrible, kiss. But like Big Daddy Kane warned - Pimpin' Ain't Easy. 

Tons of Weird Food


 My mom and dad were not into organized meals that were cooked and presented eaten and cleaned up in a modular fashion. My mom liked to cook huge batches of weird food that she would store on pans in plastic garbage bags and we could have some whenever we wanted. One of my favorites was a little dose of fresh baked goodness she called toads. It was a roll stuffed with ground beef and onions that she would bake up, wrap in the aforementioned garbage bags and refer us to when we asked what was for dinner for the next week or so. When the hunger was on you all one need do was fish one out pop it in the microwave and then dip it into the container of sour cream and enjoy. Then double dip into the container of sour cream and enjoy some more. My dad also would get in the baking mood and bake up a huge batch of over kneaded and under-risen hockey puck like bread and forbid the purchase of commercially produced, or 'good', bread until it was eaten. He would be suspicious of too fast consumption so we would feed it into the garbage a loaf at a time for a week or two until we could return to the sane world of purchased bread. The exception to throwing it out was our friend Moroni who inexplicably loved the stuff and would eat it on purpose and with great relish when he saw it was available. This means that there is no accounting for taste some people eat boogers, some people eat my dad's bread. What ever weird thing they were making they always made a huge batch and coasted for a couple of days.   

Doing Some Homework


 I never did homework at home except for big projects that required binding and/or collating. I would quickly dash off the work in class or not do it. The was once that I did a whole years worth of geometry over a weekend because a girl needed me to cheat for her. She had been a friend from Santaquin and we had a geometry class together. Math had always come effortlessly to me so I would almost always be goofing off in math class distracting those who were trying to learn. I even got kicked hard in the butt by the cranky old man teacher one time because I had the class rolling on a good joke I was working and I couldn't stop myself. So, he kicked me. I hopped around holding and rubbing my buttocks in a comical fashion and gave it a funny 'Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!' which did nothing to calm down the class. He had a policy that if you were able to pass the test with a perfect score you were not required to do home work but homework would make up as much as 50% of the class grade. I had already mastered geometry and therefore abstained from taking school work home with me. My friend though was in danger of failing and she had also not done any homework but she was also failing the tests. We hit upon a brilliant plan because I had not done any homework and had an unknown handwriting to the teacher I could do her homework. For a fee, of course. There were 35 worksheets that needed to be done and so I thought a buck a pop sounded like it would be about right she said that sounded awesome to her and our corporation of deceit was founded. I took all of the papers home and was able to knock out about one every five minutes and went through them in just a couple of hours with only one break for something to eat. I gave her the papers on Monday and collected my earnings. She turned them in and got an A. So, really an win-win minus the fact that she never learned any geometry. This was not the first or last time I did someone else's homework for money or as a favor, I just never did mine.     

Cheating in Typing Class


 You may have heard the adage about giving a lazy man a job and he will find the fastest and easiest way to do it. Well, that happens to be true, if he actually does it. In a world which requires the constant use of keyboards to interact with the world at large a good skill for me to have acquired would have been typing but I also had lots of friends in typing class and I wanted to hang out with them and talk instead of doing what we were assigned. I unfortunately for my life of typing struggles knew a little bit about keyboard shortcuts and knew how to copy and paste blocks of text. This skill was very useful because the way the class was taught was that we had a typing book that we would set on the side of our monitor and we would copy a paragraph and then recopy it. Or in my case I would copy and then paste and paste and paste it making it appear that I had amazingly fast word-per-minute speed. I would even do this for tests type, Control+C, Control+V. 120 wpm? Yeah, easy if you cheat. The problem was that I didn't know what was realistic and by the time we were six weeks into class and I had posted several WPM rates well above a hundred the teacher was starting to be really impressed even in a class of forty I was standing out. It is bad to stand out if you are a cheater. He was a quite practiced and skilled typist and his times were only at those at their peek and here was a kid, 12-years-old, blowing the doors off this keyboard game he wanted to tell everyone about his new phenom. He told the whole class that I was the fastest and most accurate typist he had ever worked with and he wanted everyone else to work hard like I was. Then he asked me to come up to his desk and show everybody my proper form and technique on the demonstration computer at the front of the class. I agreed and went up because I didn't think to defer out of pretended modesty. I got the the front and his computer had a box over the keys so the typist would only use the correct technique of looking up all the time. I myself didn't use that technique so much as I looked down all the time and typed out the sentence or paragraph and then copied it. I was in way too deep but I went up and tried to type as quickly and as accurately as I could without looking at my hands. I did about seven misspelled words in thirty seconds before the instructor told me to stop and come with him to the office. He didn't accuse me of anything because that would have been below both of our dignities at that point he just asked how I had been cheating. I also showed him enough respect to not try and lie and showed him how a clever student could game the system b using the cut and paste shortcuts. He was not unimpressed by my ingenuity and told me so but he did remind me that this was a typing class not a computer class and I should learn to type because I could use that skill my whole life. He told me to mark on his master record which tests I cheated on and I would get zeros but that is all the punishment I would receive. I came out of the office feeling relived that I only got in a little trouble. I learned my lesson and only cheated within reason for the rest of the semester.