Two Stories

Our football coach was a big guy who pretended to be nice but who got a kick out of picking on kids.  He was big, but he was soft, and I think he was just a bully.  One day, he decided to charge the football team with cleaning up some of the social deviance on campus.  He wanted them to put a stop to the smoking in the bathrooms.  

The bathrooms were shit holes.  It was bad enough to pee there.  The stalls had no doors and the toilets were filthy.  You would rather soil yourself than go in there.  But they were a place to smoke, and smoke we did.  The bathrooms stunk like old bars, layers of nicotine covering the walls.  Between classes, someone would post outside the bathroom to keep lookout.  If a teacher was seen coming that way, he would step in and let everybody know, and cigarettes would go into the toilets, a foot would kick the handle, and everyone would leave.  

Bob was the football team's star fullback.  Star may have been a misnomer since we didn't win a game for three years, but he started.  He was big and thick and pretty dumb, it seemed to me, but he was full of the piss and vinegar coach had poured into his ear.  One day, he came into the bathroom where everyone was smoking, and he walked up to a little guy I barely knew since he had gone to a different junior high than I and was one of those quiet, sullen boys that came from an even poorer part of town.  None of them pretended to have social skills.  They all seemed to me to be related somehow, all being thin and in some strange way old.  

When Bob told him to put out the cigarette, he just looked at Bob expressionless like an Eastern European who hadn't learned English but didn't want anyone to know.  Then he took a drag off his cigarette and slowly blew the smoke into Bob's nostrils.  Drawing himself up into a controlled rage, Bob took the cigarette from the boy's hand and threw it in the toilet.  And then the little fellow, without expression or effort, swung his bony fist and caught Bob right on the nose.  Bob didn't understand what had happened at first, his hand reaching up to staunch the flow of blood, his eyes circling around every which way.  Then, almost crying, he shouted, "You broke my nose," and reached for some non-existent toilet paper.  Finding neither that nor any sympathy or help, he quickly made for the door.  

And, as if nothing had happened, our boy lit up another cigarette.  It was nothing to him, you could tell.  Worse things than that probably happened to him every day.  

After that, the vigilante thing was over.  

The biology teacher was a little guy with a big dome of a head that was afflicted with male-patterned baldness.  He had bucked teeth which he tried to disguise by wearing a thick, oversized mustache.  The result was that he looked like a chipmunk.  

He had no luck with students who thought of him as a caricature more than person, so when he talked, nobody troubled themselves with listening.  His class was a lesson in futility.  When he tried to lecture, the room was noisy, everyone talking at once, occasionally someone putting up a hand to ask something ridiculous. "Mr. Bagger, do flowers have penises?"  And so he would quickly give up and assign some reading and a list of questions we were supposed to answer.  And  then, sitting above us at his teacher's station, he would bury his nose in a book and try to ignore the anarchy around him.  

One day, someone had constructed a paper airplane.  It was an awful airplane that would not fly at all.  If you threw it left, it went right.  If you threw it up, it went down.  Eventually, it landed on my desk.  Now it was my turn, and being a show off, I made a great act of straightening the nose and creasing the wings as if all of that would make it more aerodynamic.  And then I made a few practice feints in the direction of Old Bagger's bald dome.  And suddenly everyone was encouraging me.  "Do it, do it," they whispered with bright glee.  Knowing that the plane could never cover the distance between Bagger and me, I thought what the hell, and so drawing my hand back, I brought it forth with great vigor.  

The moment it left my hand, I knew I was in terrible trouble.  It felt as if it had jets attached to the wings.  I could hear it cutting the air as it picked up velocity.  Nothing in my experience had ever gone faster, truer, straighter.  From the moment it left my fingertips to the moment it smacked his head with an audible thud was no more than a microsecond.  It took even less time for the entire class to shout out in glee.  Everyone howled with the thrill of it, to see such a thing, but just as quickly, as Bagger looked up, his face a mask of confusion and rage, they went silent.  It was as if someone had pulled the plug on the laugh machine.  

Bagger stared out across the space that separated him from us now, authority growing on him as quickly as the lump that was swelling on the top of his head.  You couldn't believe the thing as it grew before your eyes, a swelling white mass with a bright red center on top.  It was like watching a cartoon.  

"Who threw that airplane?" he queried in a low, gravelly voice.  Nobody said anything.  But slowly, all eyes turned slowly to me.  No one was going to tell, but nobody was going to take the fall for this, either.  

"Did you throw this airplane?" he asked me.  

Scared, I couldn't speak.  I simply nodded my head.  And with that, he walked me to the principal's office.  

There is little point in telling the rest of it.  I got into trouble, but only a little.  I had to apologize to Bagger in front of the class, and that was that.  I know he was dissatisfied, but I had a feeling that the principal had no more use for him than the rest of us did.  

I've often wondered why these two stories are conjoined in my memory.  Why should I remember them together?  In truth, I don't know, but that is how they always come, one following the other.  Perhaps they are paired to draw some distinction between me and the other kids, all of them.  Or perhaps it is to remind myself that I was like them.  I have never figured it out.  

Nor can I today.  I have no profound conclusion.  It is just that.