Kick Me Page 3

  But, after all, ’twas the season.

  The pageant was a blur to me. There are unsettling home movies from the event my father dutifully took that show me reciting my skeptical-elf routine so loudly that you can almost hear my voice coming through the soundless eight-millimeter film. Behind me in a sloppy line are my fellow elves, fidgeting and shifting their weight and picking their noses and engaging in general unprofessional stagecraft. I, on the other hand, despite my nontraditional garb, was the very picture of professionalism. I had overcome the handicap of my costume, the mockery of my peers and schoolmates, the stifled laughter of every teacher and parent in the audience, and I discovered the true meaning of Christmas. They had all laughed at the skeptical elf and made fun of his clothes, but the skeptical elf had learned that it was about more than just clothes and presents and decorations. He had learned what this holiday was all about, and he hadn’t done it for them, not for himself, and, no, not even for Santa.

  No, the skeptical surplus elf had done it all for one thing and one thing only . . .

  The United States Army.

  GROWING UP THROWING UP

  When I was in grade school, it seemed like everyone was always throwing up. Every time I turned around, I’d hear a splat and see some queasy-looking kid standing over a puddle of puke. And then, seconds later, I’d get a whiff of that unmistakable throw-up smell. This always announced the imminent arrival of a janitor, who would enter carrying a large broom and a dustpan full of red sawdust to dump on top of the offending pool of barf, which was then swept back into the dustpan and spirited away by our unlucky custodian.

  What a gig.

  I’ve never been able to forget that red sawdust. I always knew when it was around because of its own distinct odor, something akin to an extremely cheap bottle of Grandma perfume, a sort of subdued peppermint smell with just a hint of mothballs thrown in. Throw-up smells terrible and, because of that, the red sawdust always smelled pretty good when it arrived. It wasn’t something you’d want to smell every day, but when the air is ripe with the aroma of what was formerly inside of a kid, red sawdust was about as welcome a smell as fresh home-baked cookies on a rainy day. That is, until it was dumped on top of the vomit, where the two opposing fragrances would battle for superiority and produce a tangy, sour bouquet, like a pungent French cheese gone horribly wrong in the back of a hot car.

  As a kid, I never knew why janitors always used that red sawdust or where it came from. Years later, when I was working in the warehouse at my father’s store, I learned that it was actually a manufactured product called sweeping compound, and was made to both soak up spills and keep dust from going into the air as you swept a dirty floor. Not knowing this back then, I figured that the red sawdust was just something the janitor had found lying around in the wood shop and decided was as good a substance as any to camouflage a puddle of throw-up. Because he had to do something so that we kids didn’t have to look at it. All school professionals know that if one kid sees another kid’s throw-up, that kid will then also throw up. And then another and another. Throwing up is contagious. One kid with a nervous stomach can set off a chain reaction in a crowded classroom that could seriously deplete the world’s supply of sweeping compound.

  I never understood how my peers could throw up so easily. To me, throwing up is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. The stomach-twisting retches. The complete lack of control of one’s body. The hellish sounds of air being forced through the upwardly traveling bile. To this day, I think I’d rather die of food poisoning than have to throw the tainted food back up. I think I’ve only thrown up about three times in my life. But never in school. Things were bad enough without adding regurgitation to my list of problems.

  My most vivid experience with throw-up happened in the second grade. It was show-and-tell day, and I had brought in a brandnew Hot Wheels fire truck that I was dying to show off and tell about. That truck, which I had wanted for months, was everything I had dreamed it would be and more. Bright red and so new that all four wheels were still straight. They hadn’t had a chance to bend inward yet like Hot Wheels cars always did after a few play sessions, so that when the car was rolled, it would simply go into a spin and tip over. No, this Hot Wheels fire truck was pristine. It even had a little ladder that you could move up and extend out. I’d been trying to get my mother to buy it for me for what seemed like a million years and had finally guilted her into it. The day before, she had accidentally thrown my favorite troll doll in with the laundry and had turned his bright red hair pink, and I played her like a royal flush. My tears could only be stopped by a trip to the toy store and, lo and behold, the fire truck was mine. And now I couldn’t wait to impress my peers with it.

  The teacher, Miss Drulk, had gone out of the room for a minute, and I was busy making the truck race to the scene of a fire on my desktop, complete with screeching tires sound. I was good at sound effects and was convinced that no one could do the sound of a car getting into an accident and blowing up better than I could. True, I couldn’t do a machine gun as well as my friend Gary, and when it came to helicopters, Stephen Crowley was the king. But when it came to automobiles, the rest of the class could simply step aside. I was the master.

  As I sat there, lost in my own noisy world, making the truck go into a catastrophic slide that saw it heading for a fall off the side of my desk—where it would then burst into flames in super-slow motion—Chris Davis, a perpetually dirty kid who sat behind me, tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Hey, Paul, that’s a neat truck. Can I use it for show-and-tell?”

  What? I thought. No way. This was mine. I’d been waiting all day to show this baby off. “No. My mother just bought it for me.”

  “Aw, c’mon. I don’t have anything to show. My family can’t buy me anything. We’re poor.”

  For a kid who was poor, he sure said it a lot. I’d always heard that poor people were proud, but the only thing Chris was proud of was telling you how poor he was. He was always talking about how his family lived in a shack, how they didn’t have any clothes, and how they had to eat birds in order to keep from starving. I never knew if I believed him or not. I couldn’t imagine anyone’s family sitting around naked eating robins and sparrows. But my mother had always drilled into my head that I had to be nice to people who were less fortunate than we were because we, too, might be poor someday. Did she know something I didn’t? I would wonder. Were we on the verge of bankruptcy? Because I was terrified of the thought of having to walk around in front of my parents naked.

  I stared at Chris for a few seconds, deliberating. He stared back at me with a pathetic look on his face. I stared at his hands. They were filthy. His clothes had food stains down the front. His hair was dirty and looked like it hadn’t been combed in days. I wasn’t sure if this meant that he was poor or if it was simply proof that the guy was a slob. However, my Sunday school teacher’s voice rang out in my head: “Do unto others as . . .” Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. I get it. Stupid Bible.

  “Well . . . okay. Here. But be careful with it.”

  Fortunately, I had brought along one of my less cool Hot Wheels cars and I figured I could show it instead. I don’t know why I didn’t give Chris the less cool car, but I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t good at thinking on my feet when I was seven.

  Miss Drulk came back into the room. I had a huge crush on Miss Drulk. She was beautiful. She always wore short dresses and her hair was done up in that 1960s straight-down-to-the-shoulders-then-flipped-up-at-the-ends style that I thought was just the most feminine thing imaginable back then. Simply put, she had blond That Girl hair. And she was always extra nice to me, too. Miss Drulk knew that the other kids picked on me and she always seemed to be coming to my defense. Once, when some third graders made a dog pile on top of me at recess, Miss Drulk came running over and made everyone get off. I was crying, as usual, and so she took me into the teacher’s lounge and gave me carrot sticks out of her lunch. I really fell in love with her that d
ay. Even now, when I eat carrot sticks, I occasionally think about Miss Drulk. Her or Carl Slanowski, who used to secretly shove carrot sticks up his nose, then give them out to teachers.

  Anyway, Miss Drulk came into the room and announced that it was time for show-and tell. When she said it I felt a twinge of excitement. But then I quickly remembered that it was going to be the poverty-stricken Chris Davis, and not myself who would be showing off the brand-new Hot Wheels fire truck. I immediately felt mad at the guy for guilting me out of my first moment ever of potential coolness.

  And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard it.

  SPLAT.

  Oh, no, I thought. It couldn’t be.

  I turned around to see Chris Davis sitting behind his desk, which was now covered with throw-up. COVERED. For a poor kid, he sure had a lot in his stomach. And what was buried under the lake of vomit?

  My fire truck.

  Chris had barf running down his chin and was about to start crying. Kids always cried after they threw up. Probably because throwing up was so disgusting, there was nothing else to do but cry. And if you cried, the odds were you didn’t have to clean it up yourself. But when I saw Chris about to start bawling, I just wanted to slug him. I mean, if anyone had the right to cry, it was me. Couldn’t he have pushed my fire truck out of the way when he felt the vomit coming? I mean, throw-up gives you a couple seconds of warning before it arrives. It doesn’t just appear. You’ve got at least a few solid moments of nausea and tingling in the back of your throat that lets you know you have time to push a brand-new three-inch-long Hot Wheels fire truck that doesn’t belong to you out of the goddamn way. And didn’t the kid even know he was sick? He must have at least felt queasy when he was talking to me. A person just can’t feel great one minute and the lose the entire contents of his stomach the next. I guess he’d had a bad bird for breakfast.

  Chris started crying. Miss Drulk came over and pulled him away from his desk. The massive amount of vomit was starting to migrate down his desktop and spill over the edge onto his seat. It was truly disgusting, but the worst part of it was seeing that faint outline of a fire truck–shaped lump underneath it all. Miss Drulk hustled Chris off to the bathroom. I heard him crying all the way down the hall and even heard his sobs echoing out of the boys’ room. Mr. Carowski, our mysterious janitor, a mountain of a man from some unknown country who spoke to us in an unintelligible mixture of garbled English and rumbling bass tones, came in with the famous red sawdust and dumped it on top of Chris Davis’s desk. All my classmates were over at the window trying to get some fresh air, since the room was now filled with the unmistakable odor of stomach stew. Mr. Carowski then took a hand broom, swept the whole vomity mess into a bucket, and sprayed the desk with disinfectant. The disinfectant smelled even sweeter than the red sawdust, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Mr. Carowski took his bucket, mumbled a few indecipherable words that I think were supposed to convey the warning “Don’t touch his desk until it dries,” and departed. I looked down at where my fire truck had once sat. Nothing was left but the memory.

  I never asked Mr. Carowski about my fire truck, and I never saw it again.

  And I never got over my anger at Chris Davis. Especially when I found out that he lived in a house twice as big and way nicer than mine.

  I AM BETRAYED BY A GIRL

  Childhood is built on bad decision making. In fact, if it weren’t for all the bad decisions we were constantly carrying out as kids, there’s a good chance that none of us would have figured out all the things we weren’t going to do when we became adults.

  A few of the more obvious lessons I learned as a kid were:

  * Don’t ride a bike with no brakes down a very steep street that dead-ends into a feculent, stagnant river.

  * Don’t hold a lit firecracker in your hand to see if it’ll hurt when it explodes.

  * Don’t save your urine in a flowerpot for more than a week in a hot garage if you don’t want your parents to find it.

  All obvious conclusions. All painfully learned.

  The good thing about those epiphanies was that they stuck with me. Once I’d done them and realized how stupid I’d been to do them in the first place, I never did them again.

  Unfortunately, this was not the case with all of my bad decision making. Because there was one area where I just kept making the same mistakes over and over again:

  Girls.

  I know that most people have ill-fated stories concerning their interactions with the opposite sex. But they usually don’t begin to appear until their junior-high or high-school years. For me, my stupidity with girls started as soon as I walked out of my preschool.

  As a kid, I was somewhere around the mean average when it came to emotional maturity and intellect. I wasn’t the dopiest kid in the class but I wasn’t the most advanced, either. The kids who you could tell were going to “go places” were already starting to show the beginnings of leadership qualities even at an early age. While it didn’t manifest itself in anything as overt as some future class president’s jumping up on his third-grade desk and leading us in a revolt against our teacher’s unfair demand that we hang up our coats or organizing a sit-in next to the teeter-totters in order to protest the shortness of our recess periods, you could just see that some kids were the types that other kids followed.

  That wasn’t me.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t a member of the paste-eaters either, the underachievers I would routinely observe digging their fingers deep into the inner reaches of their noses to extract something green that would immediately be snuck into their mouths as a sort of chewing tobacco for the younger set. These were the kids who routinely fell off the monkey bars and peed their pants and threw off the rhythm of the teacher’s lessons by raising their hands and uttering such pithy phrases as “What?” and “Huh?”

  No, I was not one of them either. I was a youngster who clearly fell in the middle of the social bell curve. Except for the fact that I liked girls.

  I’d always liked girls, ever since I was five. Maybe it was because I grew up next door to a house with eight kids, five of whom were girls. Of them, my best friend Mary and I started playing together when we were babies. And so I was quickly broken of the “euw, cooties” instinct before it ever had a chance to take effect. This set me apart from my male classmates, many of whom were still begging one another well into the sixth grade to “spray” them after they had been brushed against by a girl. (For those of you who didn’t grow up in my neighborhood, “spraying,” was the act of holding an imaginary aerosol can about six inches away from your friend’s cooties-infected area and making a psssssht sound while moving the imaginary can back and forth over the offending patch of skin, thus decontaminating the victim from whatever disease was believed to result from contact with a female.) No, I was a much more worldly five-year-old who had watched too many sappy romances with my mother on the Afternoon Million-Dollar Movie and had thus been transformed into a pint-size Lord Byron who decided that girls were to be sought out and wooed, not sprayed against and run from.

  And it was because of this that, when I was six years old, I had a girlfriend.

  True, it was in the most patronizing sense of the word, usually uttered by my parents at bridge games to their friends in the form of “You know, Paul has a little girlfriend now.” Their fellow bridge players, upon hearing these words, would look over at me as I sat there watching TV and give me one of those annoying “isn’t he cute in his ignorant six-year-old way?” smiles that I now find myself giving to little kids no matter how hard I try not to. But whether they or anybody else chose to believe it, Patty Collins was my girlfriend.

  At least for half a day.

  It was a warm, sunny morning in the summer between kindergarten and first grade, and I had walked the four blocks over to Patty’s house to play. When I arrived, the day started out like all the others we had spent together. We played a few games of Candyland and the ironically titled CootieBug and were having a nice t
ime. It was then that our play date took an unexpected turn.

  “Do you want to set up a tent?” she asked me.

  “A tent?” I asked, uncertain. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “We could play inside it.”

  It seemed like an innocent enough idea to me. After all, when you’re a kid you always seem to be desperate to hide inside things. Whether it’s a plastic cube at the top of the playground slide or an appliance box or a makeshift fort made by taking your mom’s wooden fold-out drying rack and covering it with a blanket, we as kids always seemed to enjoy sequestering ourselves away from the rest of the world. I think when you’re that age that it’s the only time you seem to have any control over your life. Hiding places were safe havens where we couldn’t be forced to eat brussels sprouts and could cough without covering our mouths and could make goofy faces without fear of being told our faces were going to “freeze that way.” Inside our boxes and forts and treehouses, we were kings and queens. We were our parents, and we had ultimate authority. Or at least we did until somebody yelled at us to get out of there.