Kick Me Read online

  “Why’d you let us keep using it?” I asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know—it just worked really well” was his disturbing answer. And that was my dad in a nutshell.

  I also never encountered a real piece of toilet paper until I went away to college, because my father would stock our bathrooms with the industrial toilet tissue that he bought at a discount from his government wholesalers. It had all the softness and absorbency of typing paper and acted more like a frosting spreader than a piece of toilet tissue. Once, while on a sleep-over at a friend’s house, I went in his bathroom and for the first time in my life used a piece of quilted toilet paper and had a religious experience. It was around this time that I started to curse the day my dad ever owned an army-surplus store.

  However, as a first grader who was simply trying to get an elf costume for the Christmas pageant, I knew exactly where that costume was going to be pieced together.

  “All right,” said my father with a sigh. “I’ll take him down to the store this weekend and we’ll figure something out.”

  A few days later, we went into Ark Surplus and started scouring the aisles for anything that was vaguely elflike.

  “This looks like a hat that an elf would wear,” said my mother, picking up an olive drab green watch cap, similar to the one worn by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees.

  “What kind of pants do elves wear?” my father asked as he poked through a shelf filled with hunting clothes.

  “I think they wear shorts,” offered my mother.

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “They wear shorts with suspenders.”

  “Well, I don’t have any shorts here. At least, none that’ll fit him,” my father said, frustration rising in his voice. It was Sunday, the only day my father closed his store and the vision of himself passed out in his chair with the Sunday paper lying uselessly on his stomach was obviously dancing in his head as he tried to unlock the fashion mysteries of the North Pole workforce.

  I don’t know why my parents didn’t try to find a book that had a picture of an elf in it that they could have used for reference. Maybe it was pride, or maybe it was the fact that my parents had no real use for the accoutrements of Christmas. My father always bought our tree at the local YMCA but that was about as far as Christmas decorating went in our house. The same red spray-painted foam balls with macaroni glued to them that I had made in preschool adorned our trees until I left for college. My mother had no patience for decorating, so one rather moth-eaten-looking Santa doll she had won in a Kiwani-Queens bingo game became the sole representative of holiday cheer in our house. My father spent most of my childhood telling everybody at Christmastime, “Christmas is a holiday for kids. Anyone over eighteen who expects to get Christmas presents should have his head examined.” This Scrooge-like theory stopped at his store’s cash register, however, since he still made lots of money off Christmas surplus shoppers, scary people who liked to buy old army helmets, bayonets, and dummy hand grenades as presents for their loved ones. But whatever their true feelings about Christmas were, my parents felt they could pull an elf costume out of all this former soldier gear. And I had no choice but to trust them.

  We came home that afternoon with a bag full of army issued goods. The search for elf shorts resulted in my father’s grabbing a pair of olive drab (or “O.D.,” as surplus hipsters called it) green U.S. government boxer shorts and two black nylon straps. These straps were usually used to lash down an ammunition box but were now going to serve as my merry suspenders. The question of footwear had stumped all three of us, and so a long pair of O.D. green socks and a lengthy piece of foam rubber had been harvested in the hopes of approximating an elf shoe.

  “Okay,” said my father with determination, “let’s get to work.”

  He and my mother went about constructing my elf outfit. I put on a white button-up shirt from my closet and stepped into the army boxers, which my mother then hoisted up, practically lifting me off the ground and giving me an army-issue wedgie. My father took the black nylon straps and taped the ends inside the front and back of the boxers, creating a suspender-like effect.

  “What the hell do elves’ feet look like anyway?” my father asked, staring at the long army socks.

  “They have shoes that curl up,” I offered.

  “I think it’s their feet that curl up,” my mother said, as if the idea that only their shoes curled up was an absurd notion.

  My father thought for a second, then grabbed a knife and went to work on the piece of foam rubber from his store. He cut two large banana-shaped curls that were almost a foot long and then stuffed one inside the toe of each sock.

  “Here, put these on,” he said, handing them to me with a look that said he was convinced he was almost finished with his costuming task.

  I pulled the socks on and stood up. My feet now looked like two dark green pontoons. Instead of curling upward, they gently rose at about a fifteen-degree angle. In addition, my feet were now each about twenty-four inches long. My father looked at my “shoes” for a couple of seconds, then nodded his approval.

  “Those look like elf feet to me,” he said, satisfied with his creative skills.

  My mother pulled the watch cap down onto my head and then she and my father stepped back to inspect me. Their stares made it quite clear they had no idea whether I looked like an elf or not.

  “It feels like there’s something missing,” my mother said, hand on chin, thinking.

  “He looks like an elf to me,” said my dad with a sigh that alerted the world he now had about five more seconds of elf duty left in him.

  “I know what’s missing,” said my mom excitedly and sprinted off to the bathroom.

  As I stood there with my dad staring at me with a perplexed look on his face, I didn’t know how I felt. I liked being in a costume, and since I wasn’t able to see myself, I imagined that I looked every inch an elf.

  “Why are you playing an elf anyway?” my father asked in a tone that sounded like he was insulted by the very thought of his son portraying a mere peon in Santa’s organization.

  “I don’t know,” I said, surprised at my father’s question. “I guess they think I look like one.”

  “You don’t look like an elf to me. Well, except for the costume.”

  Before my father’s disapproval could scar me for life, my mother ran back in with some cotton balls and a bottle of Elmer’s glue.

  “This is what was missing,” she said and proceeded to put glue on three cotton balls. She took two of them and put one on the toe of each sock. Then she took the third cotton ball and stuck it on top of my hat.

  She stepped back and looked at me proudly. “Now he looks like an elf.”

  My parents stared at me. Several seconds passed.

  All of a sudden, my mother burst into laughter. After a few seconds, my father caught the fever, too, and soon my parents were sitting on the floor, helpless with hysterics.

  I knew tomorrow would not be a good day.

  I headed off to school the next morning with my costume in a paper grocery bag. The pageant was scheduled for the end of the day and was to be attended by the entire school. Older kids were going to play the bigger roles in the show like Santa and his reindeer, while it had been left to my class to be the army of elves, mainly because we were all the correct height. Since I had been blessed with a loud voice and good speaking skills, I was to portray the skeptical elf, for whom the pageant was being held. In an act of Charlie Brown plagiarism, my character apparently had problems deciphering what the true spirit of Christmas was and it was up to everyone else in the show to convince me that Christmas wasn’t just about presents and food. Which was ironic because to every single one of us in that elementary school, presents and food were exactly what Christmas was all about. But, like the celebrity who endorses a product he’d never use in a million years, we in the pageant were going to try to sell this altruistic bill of goods to our fellow students.

  I had a queasy feeling in my stomach
all morning. While I was looking forward to being the star of the Christmas pageant, I was having great angst over my elf costume. The sight of my parents helpless with laughter had shattered whatever confidence I had at six years old and so I was quite worried about the reaction I was going to get from my peers.

  “What’s your elf costume look like?” I asked my friend Brian.

  “I don’t know,” Brian said with a shrug. “It’s pretty stupid.”

  I started polling the other kids in the class. They all seemed to think that their costumes were not really very elflike.

  “My mom made mine, but I don’t know if she really knew what she was doing,” offered up Amanda, the girl who sat across from me.

  “Yeah, my dad made me wear the same crappy elf costume that my brother wore a couple of years ago,” said Mike, a kid who always had some form of bright green visible around the vicinity of his nostrils.

  I started to take heart. Maybe my costume wasn’t so bad. True, I looked a little more combat-ready than any elf I’d ever seen but that was just about color. The cotton ball on my hat looked fairly pixieish, and I liked that my foam-filled socks gave the impression that my actual foot was big and not just merely a normal foot encased in an oversize curly shoe. And in my faux lederhosen, I almost looked like one of the kids from The Sound of Music. Well, except that I had freakishly large feet.

  No, I thought, maybe I was going to be okay.

  After lunch, our teacher, Miss Connor, informed us it was time to change into our costumes and get ready for the pageant. She shepherded the girls off to another room to change, and we boys went about the business of transforming ourselves into Santa’s army.

  What I saw next worried me.

  Out of every bag, my peers produced gaily colored costumes. Bright reds and greens and crisp clean whites made the room glow. The infusion of hues seemed to have an almost magical effect on our otherwise colorless classroom. My friends all started donning their vibrant costumes, shorts with white fake fur around the waist and matching suspenders that actually crossed in the back. Some of the kids even had green or red tights. And everyone had shoes that looked like they came from a Hollywood studio costume department. These were the most realistic-looking elf costumes I had ever seen, better than the ones worn by the teenagers who worked at the mall and dragged you over to Santa to have your picture taken. And it was in this atmosphere that I pulled out my United States military elf attire.

  “What color is that?” asked Brian in the same tone of voice he would have used if I had pulled a turd out of the bag.

  “It’s O.D. green,” I said defensively.

  “What’s odie green?”

  “O.D. stands for olive drab,” I said disdainfully, hoping to make Brian realize how uneducated he was in the vernacular of our country’s military.

  “Elves aren’t that color,” piped in Mike. “You’re gonna look like a booger.”

  This got a round of laughter, as any reference to bodily functions or emissions always did back then, and it was quite clear I had a long afternoon ahead of me.

  I put on my outfit and became the focal point of the room.

  “What’s wrong with your feet?” another kid said incredulously.

  “They’re elf feet. They’re sup-posed to be big.”

  “Elves’ feet aren’t big,” said Brian. “Their shoes are big.”

  “No they’re not,” I countered. “It’s their feet. They’re big and curly. My mom said so.”

  “Well, your mom is wrong.”

  Miss Connor came back into the room and looked us all over.

  “Very nice. You all look wonderful,” she said with a smile that showed she was overcome with the cuteness of the scene. Then she saw me. “Oh . . . my” was all she could muster as she stared at me with a furrowed brow that seemed to say, “Maybe I should call Child Services.”

  “He doesn’t look like an elf, does he, Miss Con-nor?” Mike said, throwing a mocking glance my way. He always had an annoying habit of using Miss Connor’s name like a weapon to prove my stupidity.

  “I don’t know,” said Miss Connor. “I think he looks exactly like the kind of elf who would have doubts about Christmas.”

  Touché. I had spent the last several months unsure whether I should have a crush on Miss Connor or not, and now I found the scales tipping in her favor. It had been a toss-up between Miss Connor and Amy Lepnick, the blond-haired girl who sat at the front of my row. But since Miss Connor had just given me a great defense for my costume and Amy had just that morning informed me, “Your ears are too big,” Miss Connor was now the love of my life.

  “That’s right, Miss Connor. That’s why my parents made me dress like this,” I said, giving Miss Connor my most sincere teacher’s pet smile. Mike rolled his eyes.

  Miss Connor brought us out into the hallway, where the girls were waiting. They, like my fellow male elves, all looked like they had been professionally outfitted by the costumer of the Ice Capades. Each girl was wearing a red or green short dress with white fur on the hem and on the ends of her sleeves. They had on matching stockings and shoes that all seemed to have just the right amount of curl. Their shoes also made their feet look actual size. I guess even in Christmas Town, obscenely big feet are a no-go for the upwardly mobile female elf.

  When the girls spotted me, they stared in disbelief. I saw a few of them stifle laughter. Amanda, despite her Coke bottle glasses, blinked at me and said, “You look weird.”

  “I’m an elf who doesn’t know the meaning of Christmas. I’m sup-posed to look this way,” I said in a haughty tone.

  “You look like a booger that doesn’t know the meaning of Christmas,” piped in Michelle. It got a huge laugh from both the girls and the guys, even though Mike had already gotten a laugh with the same lowbrow reference earlier. One thing’s for certain in grade school—a booger joke will always land well with your audience.

  We all headed down the hall to the gym, where the pageant would be taking place. I straggled at the back of the group, trying to avoid my classmates’ stares and comments. “You look like an elf who lives in a garbage dump” and “They should call you Stinky the Retarded Elf” were just a few of the zingers my fellow North Pole inhabitants got off at my expense. In addition to the slings and arrows my peers were hurling my way, I was having a lot of trouble walking, since my socks had no soles to provide traction and had thus reduced every step I took to that of walking across an ice skating rink in new leather-soled shoes. The effect was more of an elf with a drinking problem than a kid whose parents had sent him off to school with improper footwear. After a few minutes, however, I discovered that slippery socks could be fun and started skidding back and forth down the hall like a big-footed hockey player, well in my own world.

  Just then, Miss Connor stopped. “Oh, shoot. I was supposed to tell Mr. Kavich’s class to come down to the gym in five minutes.” With this comment, she looked back at us and noticed that I was at the rear of the group. “Oh, Paul, run down to their room and tell them, would you?”

  My heart sank. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Mr. Kavich’s class was sixth grade. Even though I knew they were soon to see me in the pageant festooned in my government-surplus elf gear, there was something about their seeing me out of context that I knew spelled trouble.

  “But . . .”

  “Hurry up. If we forget, we won’t have any upperclassmen in the audience. Now go on,” Miss Connor said, giving me a smile that to her said “Be a good boy and make me proud” but that to me said “I’m in love with you, Paul Feig. Do this for me and I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to you.”

  Having crushes on teachers is the surest way of relinquishing any and all power over your dignity when you’re a kid.

  I smiled at her and ran off to deliver my message. I glanced back and watched the rest of my class head off to the other end of the hallway and disappear around the corner. As they marched away from me, I was struck by how authentic they all looked in their el
f costumes. It made our hallway look like one of those cheesy movies about Hollywood studios, where the street outside the movie sound stage is always filled with extras dressed like centurions and astronauts and Vegas showgirls. Seeing my classmates looking so elfinly accurate and not being in front of a mirror to see myself made my own costume start to morph into something magical inside my head. The noncommittal olive drab that dominated my army/navy outfit started to turn a Santa-approved kelly green as I ran and skidded down the hallway. My boxer shorts suddenly sprouted fur trim and my night watchman’s cap with the cotton ball on top became much more like a hat that Robin Hood would be proud to wear, complete with a razor-sharp pheasant’s feather as a plume. On top of that, there was no greater pleasure than to be out of class and in an empty hallway when you knew that behind all those closed doors you were passing were students wishing they were in your shoes. Or foam-filled socks, as the case may be. No, I was one light ’n’ lively elf, roaming the countryside delivering good cheer to the poor unfortunates, ready to transform their holiday season from simple commercialism into Yuletide magic.

  I slid up in front of Mr. Kavich’s classroom door. I could hear him lecturing behind it. The weirdest thing about being in a hallway when classes were in session was hearing all those teachers lecturing to all those students and knowing that each lecture was about things you didn’t know yet. From behind Mr. Kavich’s door I could hear him talking about the roots of grammar and to me at the time it sounded as erudite as if I had been standing outside a quantum physics lecture in a hallway at MIT. Feeling very cool to be seconds away from entering a sixth-grade classroom as a lowly first grader, I confidently knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” said Mr. Kavich.

  I opened the door and stepped inside. “Mr. Kavich, Miss—”

  That was as far as I got.

  I’ve always heard that Sammy Davis Jr. kissing Archie Bunker on the cheek was the longest laugh from an audience in television history. If that’s true, then I must officially nominate the response I got from this class of sixth graders as the longest laugh a first grader ever got from a room full of upperclassmen in the history of the Macomb County school system. As I stood there, watching both the students and Mr. Kavich become helpless with laughter, I pondered whether this was the kind of joy and goodwill I, as an elf, was supposed to be bringing to the world. I had certainly put them in a holly-jolly mood. Anybody could cheer another person up by giving him or her a present, but to be able to fill people with happiness just by entering a room . . . well, I figured, that took talent. Granted, this wasn’t so much happiness as it was ridicule, but in the world of the elf, the theory had to be “Whatever it takes.” And I was definitely taking one for Santa’s team.