Hot teacher + boredom = painful 3rd period erection... MATH!The 17th century Scottish general Hugh Mackay once said that there is nothing more tedious than a perfect person. If this is true, than I am quite possibly the most exciting man in the world. I am sure that in some cultures more advanced than ours, stunted fingers and absent jawlines are symbols of masculinity, yet physical defects aside, I have a number of emotional and social blemishes that have hindered most of my adult life. For instance, I am not exactly sure how to play Monopoly, nor do I understand what a monopoly actually is. Sometimes I make up my own racial slurs and yell them at black people ("Go back to Africa you goddam googapet!"). I originally mistook the Penn State grand jury report as a letter to the Penthouse Forum. And I once danced with my mother to Marvin Gaye's classic "Let's Get It On." So where do my imperfections come from. I can blame my physical flaws on that unfair bitch Hereditary. But what about my emotional and social shortcomings? Why is my brother outgoing and charming, and I have a personality that my grandmother described as "Gollum-like?" It would be easy to blame any mental imbalance on my upbringing, such as the way my father used to make me perform Jodie Foster's scenes from Taxi Driver when I was little. But I believe there is a much more sinister entity at play, a dark and secretive place built upon exclusion, paranoia and subtle threats. I am talking, of course, about skool. For everything that has gone wrong in my life, I can trace its roots back to my years in skool. All of my cynicism, self-doubt, neurosis, and chalk addiction can be directly linked to the gloomy period of my life known as my skool-years. I'm not talking about pre-skool and kindergarten, that shit was easy. Nap time, milk breaks, recess, The Hungry Caterpillar...I rode that shit hard and put it away wet. I'm talking about elementary skool, junior high, high skool, even college. Those formative years when a boy starts to learn what to do with an erection, and why red-headed kids make shitty math partners. The sixteen years I spent in skool were painful experiments in social interaction and broad human conditioning. To this day I can't pick up a calculator without having violent Vietnam-like flashbacks where my Geometry teacher is screaming, "Use the Pythagorean theorem to tell me how much of a whore you are!" Elementary skool was probably the worst for me. Based on my looks and physical abilities, if I had lived fifty years earlier and in Poland, I would have been final solutioned in a heartbeat. Plus, kids have absolutely no sense of decency or moral etiquette. If you were fat, the kids in your class would let you know. My elementary skool was a small Dickensian building set in the middle of town. The Lower Pod contained grades one through three, and the Upper Pod contained grades four through six. I hated skool right from the start. For one, seven hours a day was way too long when it came to a six-year-old. At that age I had no sense of time, so seven hours may as well have been twelve hours. To this day I still have trouble judging the passage of time. What I think lasts a solid eight minutes, is actually about forty-three seconds, according to my fiance. In my first grade class we had our own bathroom right in the room. No need to go down the hall, just take a shit right here, three feet away from the desks. I hated that, as bathroom breaks and visits to the nurse were the perfect time-wasters. But with a bathroom right there in the classroom, not only did it not waste time, it also provided nonstop opportunities for utter humiliation. As I said, the toilet was literally three feet from the nearest desk, so if a kid went in there and unleashed that day's bowl of chili, the smell would waft through the entire room. That's some serious Oliver Twist shit. Yet, bathroom privileges were short-lived. One day a kid went into the bathroom and took a dump. He then proceeded to smear his own feces (shit) all over the walls and floor. That is true. A little kid with deep scatological issues, smeared poop all over the bathroom. It happened during a recess break, so no one actually knew who did it, but we all blamed a member of the poor section of kids. In skool I was a solid B student. If I really applied myself, I could get As, but rarely did I apply myself. Because I hated skool. I hated that these teachers could make me do things. I hated that I had to be in my desk for seven hours. I hated that most of the kids in my class were complete jag-offs. I was terrible at sports, terrible at math and science, and got shoved into fences by older kids at recess. I did have a crush on my second grade teacher but she yelled at me after I got caught trying to look up her dress. She scolded me in front of the whole class, I called her a "brainy dyke" and it turned into the whole ordeal. Somewhere around fifth or sixth grade I had to be put into a special reading class because I was not comprehending the work as well as the other students. This is the closest I ever came to being retarded, other than that time I injected myself with the human papillomavirus. By the time I was twelve and finishing up sixth grade, I was of average intelligence, socially awkward, prone to random erections several times a day, and eating my feelings. In the fall of 1997 I started seventh grade. What made junior high so terrifying is that grades seven through twelve were in the same building. So even though I was being placed in close proximity to rapidly developing girls, the chances of being picked on increased greatly. Another thing that started in seventh grade was football. I had never played organized football before, so I was equal parts excited and pants-shittingly nervous. I was made an offensive and defensive lineman. I thought that this were perfect, because I thought on offense all I had to do was stand in front of the quarterback and make sure he didn't get hit, and on defense, just try to get to the quarterback. I had no idea that for each play I had a specific duty and that just closing my eyes and wildly flailing my arms about would not be sufficient. There was also the whole thing about showering with my teammates after practice. I had never showered in front of anyone before, other than my scout master, who said it would earn me my Soup Bubbles merit badge. Of course, when a group of seventh grade boys shower together it's an unhealthy mix of homoeroticism and acts of pure disgust. We all stared at each others' dicks, how much pubes we had, one kid wasn't circumcised so everyone said he had alien dick. We threw soap on each other, pissed on each other, towel-snapped each other. Overall, it was super, super gay. In seventh grade I was at the bottom of the food chain, so I made an artform out of keeping my head down, not looking anyone older than me in the eye, and remaining completely anonymous. The one shining glory I had in junior high came during the Homecoming dance when I was still in seventh grade. I went to the dance with my best friend Matt...I mean, I didn't go-go to the dance with him, we weren't a couple. It was strictly platonic. Anyway, that night, as I peered out over the crowd, trying to take in as much cleavage as I could, Molly, the senior-fucking-prom-queen asked me to dance. No shit. I'm sure for her it was just a moment of wouldn't-it-be-funny-if-I-danced-with-the-biggest-dipshit-here, but for me it was transcendent. It was like reaching nirvana, or finding the nudity code on N64's Conker's Bad Fur Day. Molly was wearing a sleek black dress that fit tightly against her body. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, gorgeous blue eyes, and a nose that would have landed her on any endangered species list for birds...seriously, she had a huge nose. But more importantly, she was a senior and she had breasts and she was popular and she was asking me to dance with her. My height put me exactly at level with her chest, and I stared at them bewbs every chance I got, memorizing every bump of gooseflesh, every freckle. My hands just barely touched her hips, and they trembled with the ferocity of Michael J. Fox being electrocuted. The dance was brisk, and afterwards I never had any other contact with an older girl, but to this day, Molly remains a special part of my spank bank. By the end of junior high I had cut out a fairly secure niche for myself. I wasn't popular, but I was well-liked, I had friends, and was altogether average. But high skool shook everything up. The pressures of junior high were nothing compared to the pressures of high skool. Everything took on a much more serious and foreboding tone. I half-expected to see wrought-iron gates with the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI formed into them at the skool entrance. If elementary skool can be compared to a depressing Charles Dickens novel (i.e. every Charles Dickens novel), and junior high can be compared to a coming-of-age J.D. Salinger novel, than high skool can effectively be compared to the dystopian novels of George Orwell and Ayn Rand (if I don't make as many literary references as possible than I begin to feel that my English degree was a waste of time and money...Mark Twain, Moby Dick, Hemingway's simplistic prose...there). High skool definitely had the feel of a military dictatorship. The most popular seniors obviously held sway over the student body. These were the handsome and developed athletes and the girls that had transformed from being cute to honest-to-goodness jailbait. These young men and women answered only to Big Brother, the class made up of teachers, councilors and the Principal. As a freshman I was a nobody. At football practice, under the guise of being told I was now a part of something special, I was basically just tackle-fodder, a chubby piece of meat used in hitting drills. I was also subjected to the grueling high skool version of the Bataan Death March known as wrestling practice. Again, my lack of athletic prowess made me an excellent meatbag to practice moves on. During the wrestling season my freshman year, I went from 172 lbs. to 150 lbs. and racked up an impressive 0-6 record. I only wrestled in one J.V. tournament, where I lost all my matches, and I wrestled for the varsity team once. It was a dual against a hated rival, and through a series of circumstances I had to wrestle in the 162 lb. weight class. Now, I hated sports and did not take wrestling seriously, because I knew that I would never have to wrestle in a real match. There were two other kids on the team in my weight class. They were older than me, loved the sport, and where I was 150 lbs. of pure atrophied muscle and lingering baby fat, these two guys were chiseled outta marble. But on this one occasion, one of the wrestlers missed weigh-in and the other moved up a weight class, so I was selected as the team's 162 lb. wrestler. The dual worked itself out where, had I won my match, the team would have won the dual. As my match approached, my brother Dale and the other wrestlers were giving me advice, practicing moves, and building my confidence. By the time I stepped out onto the mat, I felt like I could actually win. Then I saw the guy I had to face. The dude looked like fucking Batman! Muscles, whiskers, and because singlets left nothing to the imagination, I could see his dick was way bigger than mine. The referee blew the whistle and I was on my back faster than a ten-year-old in a Penn State locker room. I decided one year of wrestling was enough, telling my parents that I would excel at football if that was my sole extracurricular focus. Football lasted only two years, after I finally came to the realization that my love of torturing animals was the only thing I had in common with Michael Vick. My skool work fared slightly better than my athletic attempts, but as with the rest of my skool career, I remained a solid B to B- student. Abject boredom was the most stimulating emotion skoolwork could arouse. Every once in a while a girl's nipples would poke through her shirt, or a fight would break out, or someone would cuss out a teacher, but really skool became nothing more than a monotonous necessity built around conformity and ridicule. Those that did rebel did so usually through sex or partying. My high skool sex life consisted of jerking off to late night airings of Silk Stalkings. I went to prom twice in high skool, and both times with girls that can accurately be described as meh...I also began to refine my taste in alcohol, preferring Hawkeye vodka and warm Natty Light as the fastest means of getting shithammered. By the time I became a senior I had already met the requirements to get into my college of choice, and so I took the bare minimum of classes that I could take and still be considered a functioning student. These classes consisted of an English course, three Home Ec. classes and two study halls. In the book Nineteen Eighty-four, Winston Smith had his little alcove where Big Brother's cameras could not see him. And I had my backrow seat in Stinkfinger's study hall. Stinkfinger was without a doubt the hottest teacher in skool. She was fortyish, divorced, and going through a post-marriage whore phase. She got her lower back pierced, and one day during English my friend uncovered an email from Stinkfinger on the teacher's computer in which Stinkfinger stated plainly that all she wants is a man with a huge dick. This, of course, sent our young minds, insane with teenage hormones, into a fucking tailspin. But the closest any of us got to hooking up with Stinkfinger came one day in study hall in which she repeatedly tongued her inside cheek. I said she probably had a canker sore on the side of her mouth, but allusions to dick-suckery were too much for us. That moment became the highlight of my senior year. I graduated from high skool in 2003 and eventually went on to a completely uneventful and regretful college career in which I strove for nothing and attained nothing. In most dystopian novels the hero usually dies, succumbing to the death knell of mass conformity and repression. But I didn't die. Skool did not kill me. I lived to fight another day...fight another day of crushing student loan debt to pay for a degree that makes me virtually unemployable...Viva la revolucion!
The Moore You Know: A few weeks ago I went to a Halloween Party (topical!) I dressed in my shabby black suit, my gray vest, my derby hat and a thin, frail walking stick. A little mustache under my nose. After about the tenth person commented on what a great Charlie Chaplin costume I had on I finally had to shout, "I'm not Charlie Chaplin goddamit! I'm business-casual Hitler!"
© Eric Moore - 2011
