Kick Me Page 7

  Oh, well. At least he didn’t tell his mom that I was the one who’d told him how to do it.

  Brian stood up and started to walk away. After a few steps, he turned back and looked at me, a bit sheepishly. “And my mom said I’m not allowed to hang out with you anymore. And she says she wants your phone number so she can call your parents.”

  Hello, church camp.

  I WAS A POET AND, YES,

  I DID KNOW IT

  At some point in our lives we all want to be special. We all want to be that person who walks into a room and whom everyone immediately notices and says, “Hey, isn’t that so-and-so? I’m a huge fan of his.” And even though most of us know that the only real shot we have at achieving anything like this is through hard work and diligence, we all secretly dream that one day we’ll sit down at a piano and miraculously bang out “The Minute Waltz” or pick up a paintbrush and quickly lay down the sequel to the Mona Lisa. But it never happens that way. And that’s why most of our closets contain one abandoned saxophone or drawing kit or pair of tap dancing shoes. Because life’s just not that generous.

  At least, it’s not supposed to be. And that’s why I was so surprised when one morning, when I was in the third grade, the gods looked down from on high and for some unknown reason decided to make me a poet.

  It’s possibly the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. I awoke one day with a poem stuck in my head. But it wasn’t a poem I’d ever heard before. No, by some bizarre twist of neurological fate, the neurons and synapses in my brain had combined and interconnected during REM sleep and formed a fully written, ready-to-use poem that sat waiting for me in my frontal lobe. I woke up and there it was:

  I’m a knight in shining armor

  I’m the bravest man in town

  I fight off dragons from the queens

  I give kings back their crowns.

  The only thing that bothers me

  It gets me in the head

  By the time I get my armor on

  It’s time to go to bed.

  Just like that. A humorous poem, delivered sight unseen to my third-grade brain. I didn’t know where it came from. I hadn’t watched any medieval shows or read any Arthurian books lately. In fact, I didn’t even like that kind of stuff. I searched my memory, trying to figure out if maybe it was a poem I’d heard on TV or on the radio or read in a book. But I hadn’t. No, for some unknown reason, a fully formed Round Table verse had just popped into my head and now it was mine.

  I went to school that day bursting with pride over my poem from beyond. I wasn’t sure how best to share it with the world, but I knew that I wanted to impress Miss Patton with it. I’d always had the feeling that she thought I wasn’t very smart, especially since I consistently pulled up short during our times-tables races in her class. There was just something about the way she looked at me every day, a hint of annoyance on her face that said, “I wish you weren’t really here.” As a kid, you get used to people smiling at you and acting like they’re happy that you’re around. They’d always seem to go into overdrive when they spotted you standing with your parents, and their reactions could range from giving you a quarter to the antiquated gesture of pinching your cheeks. The latter didn’t happen often, but if you were ever brought before an old woman and heard the term “the Olde Country” used within a description of her, then the odds had it that you were in for a good ol’ fashioned, capillary-bursting cheek pinch. But not from Miss Patton. Even before I compared her to the fourth level of human evolution, she’d never seemed that impressed with me. But now I had a chance to change all that.

  And so, around midmorning, while the class was reading an assignment, I took out my binder, wrote the poem down on a piece of loose-leaf paper, and went up to her desk.

  “Miss Patton, I wrote a poem.”

  “A poem?” she said. Miss Patton gave me a perplexed look, since she had neither requested a poem from me, nor had we ever even talked about poetry during class. She looked at the notebook paper and read my verse. Then, to my surprise, she laughed.

  “Paul,” she said, looking at me with what I can only describe as utter amazement, “this is very good. When did you write this?”

  Not wanting to sound like I hadn’t put any effort into it, I immediately embellished. “I wrote it last night.” Not truly a lie but enough to make it seem as if I hadn’t just dreamed the poem up with no thought process whatsoever. Which I had.

  “Well, I am impressed.” And with this she stood up and got the class’s attention.

  “Everybody, stop reading for a second and look up here. Paul Feig has written a poem and I would like him to read it to you.”

  She handed me my notebook paper and gestured for me to step front and center. My heart raced. Much like a guest host heading to the spot marked with a star on the floor where Johnny Carson stood to deliver his monologues on The Tonight Show, I was being invited to stand in the spot where Miss Patton, the woman in charge of our third-grade education, stood daily. On top of this, Miss Patton was now smiling at me in the same way that fans smile at their favorite celebrities. Through eight simple metrical lines, hewn out of a night of random brain activity, I had accomplished what throughout the year I’d assumed to be impossible—I had turned Miss Patton into my groupie. I walked up to the spot of honor and faced the class.

  They were all staring at me, unsure. They knew me, since I’d been in the same class with most of them since kindergarten, and a few of them I could even call my friends, but at the same time, they’d never heard the words has written a poem spoken in the vicinity of my name. So it was clear no one had any idea what to expect. For all they knew, I was going to recite some flowery tribute to my cat or my grandma. I looked down at the piece of paper, took a breath, and started to read.

  “I’m a knight in shining armor / I’m the bravest man in town / I fight off dragons from the queens / I give kings back their crowns. . . .”

  When I read the final line of the poem, everybody laughed. It wasn’t an uproarious laugh, the kind you could always get by pressing the heels of your hands against your mouth and blowing to create a fart sound, but it was a good, solid response. Miss Patton then stepped forward and had the class applaud for me. I couldn’t believe it. It was mind-boggling. When I went to bed the previous night, I was just Paul Feig, the kid who was trying to figure out how to get girls to like him. But thanks to a random act of unconscious nocturnal wordsmithery, I was now getting a round of applause from my peers. Something in my brain snapped. Like getting your first shot of heroin, I was now immediately hooked on the forced adoration of my classmates. And I was overjoyed knowing that Miss Patton now viewed me as not just another third grader, but as an artist.

  I returned to my desk and Miss Patton started to talk to the class about poetry. She said that she had wanted to teach us some fundamentals but didn’t know if we were ready for it or not. But now that I, her eight-year-old poet laureate, had broken down the wall, she said that she was sure we could all handle it. And so she told the class that in the next two days, she wanted everyone else to write a poem, too.

  When we were all leaving for home, Miss Patton called me over and told me how proud she was of me for doing something on my own. To her, the previous night I had decided to throw off the shackles of mindless television viewing, pull out a quill and parchment, and spend the evening indulging and exploring what was clearly a prodigious talent. “I wish that more students were like you,” she said. “And I hope you’ll keep pursuing this gift you seem to have.”

  Now I had a gift! It was getting better and better. Miss Patton was putty in my hands. I had broken through into a whole new world, a world in which I was my teacher’s favorite student. I’d heard the term teacher’s pet bandied about derisively in the past and always thought it sounded like something a person should strive to avoid being. However, I was now starting to see the other side of it. Becoming the teacher’s pet could be a good thing. It could be the key to grade-school happiness. I
f I was her pet and she was going to start heaping praise upon me for the things I did, then my entire life would change for the better. I had to play this right. I had seen contests on the news where a kid would win the chance to push a shopping cart around a toy store for one minute and during that time anything the kid threw into the cart would be his or hers to keep. For free. I’d always been envious of the kids who got the chance to do that and was constantly outraged when they’d either dumbly fill their cart with a bunch of crappy cheap toys or else simply grab a Barbie’s Dreamhouse or boxed G.I. Joe Army Jeep and shove it into the cart, thus insuring they couldn’t fit anything else in there other than a few thin coloring books during their final fifty-five seconds of gratis shopping. I had always vowed that if I were to get that opportunity, I would figure out in advance the best toys to grab by making a preliminary trip to the store to calculate their weight, volume, and price. With a bit of planning, my shopping cart could be packed in such a way that the store would go out of business from lost profits. And this was how I knew I had to play my emotional shopping spree, courtesy of Miss Patton’s newfound respect. Maximum effort to ensure maximum returns.

  That night I stayed in my bedroom, working diligently, as my head slowly began to expand. Miss Patton had asked me to write out my poem on a large sheet of poster board to hang in our classroom, so that she could refer to it while she taught my fellow students how to analyze verse. I figured she wanted it up as a visual aid that she could use to show the other kids what I had done so right in my poem and what they were surely going to have done so wrong in theirs. As I drew light pencil lines on the poster board in order to keep my lettering straight, I imagined the poems that my classmates would bring in. Probably childish verses about trees or birds or their parents. Inferior works artistically equivalent to the “roses are red, violets are blue” school of greeting card poesy. All quite earnest and populist, true, but could anybody possibly hope to achieve the depth that my poem had? Could my fellow students transport their audience back through the ages, letting their words and images amaze and amuse the listener with tales of mythical knights in chivalrous times as I had? Would they be able to consider themselves junior Chaucers with their clumsy rhymes and Romper Room verse? Of course not, I mused as I carefully wrote out my masterpiece with a black Bic Banana marking pen. Poetry was for the Chosen. And you didn’t choose poetry—poetry chose you. The best my peers could hope to achieve was to imitate my style and possibly scribble out some veiled homage to my masterpiece. I pitied them as I breathed in a nontoxic whiff of my Bic Banana.

  The next day I arrived at school with my wall-sized poem. In addition to writing it out, I had also taken the time to draw pictures of a knight’s helmet, a horse, and the head of a damsel who looked a lot like a princess I’d seen in an old Bullwinkle cartoon. I’d had some trouble getting the poster board to school because it was an excessively breezy day and the large floppy piece of cardboard kept catching in the wind and flying away from me like a kite. I didn’t want it to bend and so I ended up pirouetting around the school yard with it in order to keep from creasing it against my body. I didn’t want any blemishes or imperfections on this placard to distract from my poem’s grandeur. When I got into class, Miss Patton smiled happily and took the poster board from me, pinning it up on the corkboard in the front of the class. It was the centerpiece of the board that was normally covered with flash cards and posters of the presidents, and I couldn’t have felt cooler.

  During the course of the day, Miss Patton taught us all about the different forms of poetry, about meter and rhymes and even dipped into iambic pentameter. As she lectured, my attention was much more on the other kids in the class than on what she was teaching. First of all, I already knew what she was talking about. I mean, I didn’t know the terms by name or by their official definitions but, as was quite clear, I was a prodigy. I knew that all this technical stuff she was talking about was for the benefit of those without the gift. If you had to be spoon-fed the basics of poetry, it was only because the gods had not chosen you to receive such an immense capacity for greatness. A prepackaged set of rules was your only hope for scaling the heights of creativity that just seemed to be preprogrammed in the small minority of we, the gatekeepers of art. I watched my peers’ faces as Miss Patton lectured and saw looks of confusion at the concepts she was laying out before them. Occasionally, Miss Patton would throw me a look that said, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, my talented ward?” Oh, yes, Miss Patton, I thought. I know what you’re talking about, but heaven help these other poor saps who are being forced to perform in my wake. I’m sure that they, too, will one day discover they have some small talent in another area, modest though it may be. But what’s the point of having prodigies if they are a dime a dozen? No, the burden of enormous talent is heavy, but it is borne for the sake of humanity. My suffering was worth the price.

  That night in my house, alone with my muse, I sat down to compose my next poem.

  There are times when our brains protect us from traumatic and embarrassing past memories, in order that we may continue to live our day-to-day lives unfettered by the pain of remembrance. In the years since third grade, time has erased from my memory and my records the words I composed that night. I remember sitting at our kitchen counter with a pile of notebook paper, waiting for the inspiration to hit me. Words started coming into my head and I wrote them as I heard them, secure in the growing genius of each. The words were forming some kind of verse about a parade going through a town. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow and so simply gave in to my unconscious. Unlike my previous metered effort, my emphasis wasn’t on trying to be funny or clever or even making sense this time. I simply knew that if I was channeling the same source that delivered the “Knight in Shining Armor” poem, then these words had to be good.

  Instead of giving me another a-b-a-b sequence of couplets, my otherworldly inspiration was now giving me an a-a-b-b little ditty. The only lines I can remember from the poem are the following:

  Oh, see what’s in my hand

  It’s a pin drop from the band

  What was a “pin drop”? I had no idea. And I didn’t care. The words were coming and I was writing. I knew this was what inspiration was all about. Just sit back, I thought, and be the stenographer to the artist within. Take the minutes of the I’m-a-Genius-Poet club meeting and reap the rewards. “Paul Feig Has Done It Again!” is what the headlines would read after Miss Patton got a load of this new batch of poesy the ghost of Shakespeare was sending my way. My pen scratched furiously as the last line of my latest masterpiece came through my hand and onto my lucky sheet of Smithsonian-bound paper.

  Spent, I set down my pen, sighed wearily, and thanked the Fates for another job well done.

  As I read over the poem I had written in forty-five seconds, I remember wondering if it was any good at all. But I quickly put such destructive thoughts out of my head. Of course it’s good. How could it not be? I wrote it. And once Miss Patton read it and saw that I had segued out of humorous verse and into abstraction, her admiration for me would grow exponentially.

  I walked into class the next day and saw my fellow students busily looking over their poems, making changes and handing them in to Miss Patton. I remember walking into the classroom thinking that my peers would fall silent, feeling the presence of the master among them and hoping that I would quickly read my latest creation aloud. But nobody seemed to notice me. I figured they were all too preoccupied with their quaint little verses and so took no offense. I walked right up to Miss Patton, who was busy stapling papers together, and said loudly, “Here’s my new poem, Miss Patton.”

  It was the strangest thing. For whatever reason, Miss Patton took the poem from me like I was just another one of her students. There was no look of excitement, no calling the class to attention. There wasn’t even a thank-you or a small conspiratorial smile. I was thrown at first but then quickly realized that she probably didn’t want to appear to be showing fa
voritism by fawning over my latest yet-unread work. She must treat my next masterpiece the same way she was treating all the other stanzas that were being handed to her, I thought. My poem would have to stand on its own.

  She had us all sit down and said she wanted each one of us to read our poems out loud.

  Aha! I was right. This was how she was going to laud me. Let me present the poem myself without any prevoiced bias. Then let the accolades roll in. You’re a clever one, Miss Patton. Clever like an art-appreciating fox.

  She went desk by desk so that our selection would be impartial. Other students got up and read their poems. As I suspected, most were about their families or about their pets or about the beauty of a tree or a summer day or any other standard verse subject suitable for a Carlton greeting card. There was nothing approaching the quality of a Hallmark-worthy set of metered lines, but their attempts were sincere, if not inspired. One kid even got a laugh with a poem about his dog stealing food off the dinner table. I chuckled supportively, glad that he had succeeded, happy that my poem wouldn’t have to be the only one worthy of praise. Of course, I knew my composition would be hands down the most successful work of the day, but that was like comparing apples to oranges. The depth of the lines I had written were beyond these childish verses. I looked up and started to resent my earlier success as I saw it pinned to the corkboard in front of me. To write about knights in shining armor is all well and good but to write an abstract poem about a parade was to break new ground. Once my new poem had succeeded, I figured that I would denounce my old work and take it down from the classroom wall, thus building my reputation as an artist who’s “hard on himself” and “a perfectionist.”