A Growing Boy With A Growing Vocabulary

One morning in First Grade, when I was deeply engrossed in an intricate crayon drawing of an underground ant colony, my table-mate, Bryan, interrupted me.

“Hey, what are you doing?”  He asked, peering over my shoulder.

“I’m drawing an ant col-”

“Oh, that’s cool.  Hey, so do you want to hear a bad word?”  Clearly Bryan didn’t really care to find out what I was doing.  He had his own agenda.

“A bad word?  What, you mean like saying ‘their’ instead of ‘there’?”

“No, no.”  Bryan shook his head dismissively.  “Do you want to hear a bad word- like a word you aren’t supposed to say?”

“Not particularly.” 

“You sure?”

“Why would I want to know a word if I’m not allowed to use it?  That doesn’t make any sense.  I’d rather live a life of simple ignorance, thank you.”

I turned back to my project.  I was half-way through drawing the queen’s mandibles and I wanted to be sure to get them right. I had to focus because the only brown crayon I had been able to find was really dull now.  I should have waited to draw the trees until after I was done with the ants.  It was a stupid mistake, and now if I screwed up and made the queen’s mandibles too big, the anatomical correctness would be off and this whole drawing would be shot to hell.

“It’s a really bad one,” he whispered, moving his face inches from mine.

                                                                                                                                     

“MY GOD, BRYAN.  Yes, let’s hear this word.  I want to hear it so badly now.  Please tell me.”  I threw my crayon into the big bucket in the center of the table in exasperation.  Casey, who had been picking her nose all day reached in with her boogery hand and picked up my crayon.  Marvelous.  She noticed my frown and extended the promise:  “I’ll give it right back."  No thank you, Casey.  That can be yours forever now.

I turned to fully face Bryan, opening my eyes widely in sarcastic anticipation.

Bryan shifted in his seat.  “Well I don’t want to say it.  It’s a bad word.”

At first I stared blankly in disbelief.  A few moments later, he was still blushing at the prospect of saying this word.  I became inquisitive.  “Bryan, what was your game plan here?  Remember, you sought me out for this.  How did you envision this transaction occurring?”

Bryan looked crestfallen for a bit but then suddenly he perked up.  “I can spell it out for you!” he yelped excitedly.  He grabbed a purple crayon from the tub in the center of the table and flipped my drawing over.  Before I could stop him, he had scrawled the word “SHIT” in enormous letters across the back of my drawing. 

He pushed the paper toward me.  “There.  That’s the bad word,” he said, obviously very proud of himself. 

“Shit?”  I said, seeking some sort of affirmation.  I had never heard this word before and was curious to how it was pronounced.  I was also skeptical that it was “bad” since I had never heard it before.  If this was indeed a bad word, I’m sure someone would have told me by now.

Bryan’s expression immediately changed to one of horror and disgust.  He recoiled from me while muttering in a hushed tone “you said it…you said it.”

I was still unconvinced.  “Shit isn’t a bad word.  I’ve never heard of it before.”  I played with the word, trying different ways to say it.  “Shit.  Shit.  It sounds stupid.”

Bryan was covering his ears while looking at me with the widest-eyed terror that I have ever seen.  It was as if he thought that the word he had just taught me was an ancient incantation which was going to cause a sputtering volcano to sprout up in the middle of our tiny, windowless classroom.  If he was going to be so offended by me saying it, then he shouldn’t have taught it to me.  That’s like buying your kids a bunch of Nerf guns and then grounding them for shooting at the dog.

“I- I- I’m gonna tell on you!”  Bryan stammered.

“Shit’s not a bad word.  Go for it.”  I said.  I watched as Bryan ran over to our teacher and tugged on her sleeve.  He returned with her shortly.

“Bryan tells me you’ve been saying…bad words.”  My teacher trailed off as she looked down to see a big, purple “SHIT” gleaming up at her from the paper in front of me.

“Shit isn’t a bad word, is it?”  I asked.

“SEE, HE SAID IT AGAIN!”  Bryan exclaimed, pointing at me and jumping up and down.

My teacher dragged me out of the classroom, Bryan jeering behind us.  She took me straight to the principal to whom I tried to articulate the situation.  It didn’t go super well.  I was in his office for so long that I missed lunch, and when he finally allowed me to go back to my class, my ant drawing was gone from my desk.  My teacher had presumably collected it as a worthy addition to my disciplinary file to wave in front of my parents’ faces when they came in for conferences.

I’m not sure where my drawing ended up, but if I ever find it, I’m going to finish the queen ant and then frame it.  Shit side out.

Reejus Fillbun

My family moved from North Carolina to Virginia when I was half-way through 5^th grade.  On paper, it was a good decision because the secondary school system in Virginia was vastly superior and had activities to keep a curious adolescent amused other than petty-theft and teenage pregnancy.  The day-to-day reality of the situation was, however, that I was thrust in a school where social niches had been festering for six years.  This made it very difficult to fit in.  Well that and the fact that God had gifted me with an industrial-strength dose of social awkwardness.

I was even less popular than the girl who was born without sweat glands.  She couldn’t go outside because she would overheat if she was out in the elements for too long.  This gained her an understandable amount of sympathy, but her skin was weirdly shiny and inflexible like an exoskeleton.  It looked like someone had dressed a giant ant in Aeropostale.  I never really got to meet her, but I’m sure she had a terrific personality.  She must have, because she had about infinity times more friends than I did.  Infinity, of course, being the number you reach when you divide by zero.

I tried my hardest to act like everybody else in the hopes that one day people would forget how weird I was, but it seemed like at least once a week I would accidentally find a new and exciting way to not fit in.

One fateful day, when our class was lined up to go into the Cafegymatorium for lunch, I was listening to a group of guys talking- they didn’t mind if I stood nearby and listened as long as I didn’t say anything.  They were having a conversation about television which I was struggling to follow when one of the guys said some nonsense sound that made the rest of the guys laugh.  He had said something like “Regis Philbin,” which did not register as anything to me, but for some reason had been hilarious to the rest of the guys.  Was it a place?  Did Angelina Jolie go to Regis Philbin and eat some bad shellfish?  What was going on?

“What’s a ‘Reejus Fillbun’?”  I asked quietly.  All of the guys in the group suddenly stopped talking, their heads slowly pivoting to face me.

“What did you say?”

“Where is ‘Reeeejussss Fiilllllbunnnn’?”  I said trying to enunciate the syllables.  “Is that in Argentina?  I think I heard about a recall on tuna from there or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”  One kid said.  “Are you trying to say Regis Philbin?”

I shrugged.  “I guess…you guys were talking about it earlier.  What is it?”

“Wait.  You don’t know who Regis Philbin is?”  Another kid asked me, his face twisted into a mocking sneer.

“Oh, it’s a person?  What kind of a name is Regis Philbin?  Is that Turkish?”  I muttered.

“How is that possible?”  A third kid asked with disdain.  “Are you retarded?  Don’t you watch any television?”

“Well, not really.  I like cartoons, but most of the time I read books.”  I was speaking too quietly for anyone to hear.  All the guys had now turned away from me and were talking about how stupid someone must be to not know who Regis Philbin was.  Within 20 seconds, they had moved onto a new topic and we resumed our usual dynamic of me listening to snippets of their conversation as I stood quietly nearby.

For the rest of the day, I thought about this interaction.  Why DIDN’T I know who this Regis Philbin guy was?  Someone should have told me!  Why had no one in ten years ever told me who Regis Philbin was so that I could have avoided this embarrassment?  Who would do that to a child?

When my Mom picked me up from school, she got really confused really fast.

“WHY HAVE YOU NEVER TOLD ME WHO REGIS PHILBIN IS?”  I shrieked as I threw my backpack violently into the backseat of the car.  “WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU?!”

“Honey…what?  Regis Philbin?”

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE!  DON’T PLAY COY WITH ME!  I KNOW YOUR GAMES YOU CONNIVING HARPY!”  I jumped into the car after my backpack, sobbing loudly into my hands.  My Mom looked back at me as I kicked in my seat trying both to figure out where I had learned the word “harpy” and what part a TV talkshow host had to play in all of this.

I was inconsolable for most of the night.  I was convinced that my parents had intentionally kept the identity of Regis Philbin from me with malicious intent.  It wasn’t until the next day that I had settled down enough for my Mom to explain to me who Regis Philbin was.  Never before in the history of anything has there ever been a more anticlimactic moment than this one.

Basically it amounted to this: 

“Oh.”

And then I went back to reading “The Phantom Tollbooth.”

For Whom The Kettlebell Tolls

I received an Amazon.com gift card for Christmas. 

A couple weeks after the New Year, when I write thank you notes, I usually try to tell people how I’ve been enjoying the presents they gave me to ground my appreciation in something tangible.  So, instead of trying to convince my relatives that my gift card was accruing interest (a thing no gift card does), I decided to go on the hunt for an impulse buy.

I was sitting slumped in front of my computer, browsing through the bulk candy section when my stomach started itching.  I absent-mindedly scratched at it, salivating at the 10 pound bag of Twizzlers on my computer screen.  While scratching around my belt line, I felt something that was cause for alarm.  It was a pouch of flesh lolling droopily out over the drawstring of my sweatpants.  Surely this wasn’t…a muffin top.

WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?  I used to run every day in high school!  It seems like some people get better with time, but I’ve aged like an HP-laptop.  I once was full of energy and blazingly fast, but now it’s four years later and I can barely make it through a half a game of spider solitaire before I crash.

  

I spent the next few minutes frowning and kneading my extra stomach flaps disappointedly.

Suddenly imbued with the desire to no longer look like a baked good crammed indelicately into an undersized cupcake tray, I navigated away from the candy section and toward the free-weights.  After rooting around a bit, I stumbled upon something called a “kettlebell,” an object appearing to be the invention of someone so whacked out on cough syrup and amphetamines that they thought it would be a neat idea to add a handle to a cannonball.  The user-comments and product description lauded the kettlebell for its proficiency in “building a strong core and keeping tummies in check.” 

Tummy checking.  That’s what I needed.  I wished it sounded a little more masculine, but whatever.

I tried to narrow down the field of kettlebells by what I arbitrarily decided would be fair price.  The only thing wrong with this strategy was that the various models spanned a wide range of weights.  Also, most of them were measured in kilograms which meant that, because of Dwight “The Hipster” Eisenhower, I had no frame of reference for how much these things actually weighed.

Unsure of myself, I headed over to youtube and found a video of a guy in a blue headband talking about what size kettlebell would be appropriate for different people.  He was kneeling on the padded floor of a gym behind what seemed to be about forty kettlebells arranged from shortest to tallest in front of him.  The smallest one to his left looked like a handbag designed for an anemic mouse while the rightmost could have easily been the stunt double for an industrial water heater.  He went on to talk about how the lighter 90% of the weights were intended for women and children and stroke victims and how real men should use one of the three heaviest models.

I decided to go with the 18 kilogram kettlebell that he described as “for men who have really let themselves go.”  I thought this was a conservative middle-ground.

Two days later (because amazon is amazing), I drove home from work to find a package waiting at my doorstep.  After pulling into the garage and coming through the house, I opened the front door and leaned over to bring the package inside.  I grabbed the sides of the surprisingly small box and tried to lift.  It didn’t budge.  I tried again, but now using more of the “man strength” that I’d tricked myself in to believing that I possessed.  Again, nothing.

I took my jacket off and stepped out of the house to tackle this beast from the front.  I squatted low, wrapped my arms around the box firmly, and strained against the weight.  DID THE UPS GUY GLUE THE BOX TO THE PORCH?  I couldn’t get this stupid thing off the ground.  The best I could do was push against the side until it rolled onto a new face.  Apparently “18 kilograms” was the European equivalent of what we refer to as “a million fucking pounds.”

My ego bruised, I now had to resort to simple machines.  I went inside and looked for something I could use to make a ramp.  I needed something that wouldn’t buckle under the strain of this kettlebell that someone, for some reason, had designed to be the density of a dying sun. 

In the kitchen, my eyes settled on the wrought-iron stovetop griddle that I used to make grilled cheese sandwiches.  I grabbed it and walked back out to where my indignant new kettlebell waited to be broken like a wild mustang.

I set up the griddle in an angle between the porch and the stoop of my front door and rolled the kettlebell in a 5-point turn into place at the base of my impromptu ramp.  With great exertion, I was able to roll/scoot the box up the inclined plane into my house.

Dripping sweat and gasping for air, I was sprawled halfway in and halfway out of my house.  After a few minutes I gathered the remainder of my strength and climbed to my feet.  As I turned to close my front door, the UPS truck drove by as it was now leaving my neighborhood.  The tiny, Chinese woman driving the truck smiled and waved as she passed. 

I’m returning this damn kettlebell.

Man vs. Wild: Goldfish Edition

Throughout my elementary school years, my parents would sign me up for day camps at the local 4H center.  These were generally fun and sometimes even taught useful skills.  For instance I still, to this day, know how to make peanut butter from scratch; that art can be made from a hammer, a nail, and a foil pie-tin; and that a rainstick can be used to not only simulate the sound of a rainstorm, but also to bludgeon the booger-faced kid who made fun of your “gay” foil pie-tin drawing.

One day, my parents dropped me off at the 4H center to learn how to take care of pets.  They didn’t just drop me off hoping I’d figure it out, there was a program being led on the subject. 

Six hours later, when my Dad came back to pick me up, he walked into the building to see a ponytailed gentleman handing me a bewildered looking goldfish in a thin, plastic bag.  Upon seeing this, my Dad jogged up to the dude.

“Hey, hey- what is this?”

“Woah, easy man.”  The guy threw his hands in the air and took a step back.  “We’re giving them to all the kids.”

My Dad looked around to see every individual in the room below the age of ten toting around bagged goldfish in various stages of bewilderment.  Suddenly his tone shifted from suspicion to annoyance.

“Really?  A goldfish?”

“Don’t worry.  They only live like a week or so,” he reassured. 

I, of course, didn’t hear this.  I was too busy poking at my new bag o’ fish and saying sternly “look at me when I’m talking to you.”

It’s not that my Dad didn’t like fish- he was actually weirdly into them.  We had an aquarium at home that he built and stocked himself.  It had an expensive vacuum filter, aquarium rocks chemically designed to combat the formation of algae, and a model of a sunken ship submerged in the center to lend occasional shelter to the $40 dollar fish swimming around inside the tank.  He definitely liked fish.  But this goldfish, this “county fish” as he called it, was too pedestrian.

In his defense, it wasn’t a very pretty fish.  This thing looked like Steve Buscemi with flippers. 

My Dad dug out an old fishbowl from storage and we cleaned it out for little Steve.  Dad even used his fancy pH balancer on the water so that Steve could swim without… unbalanced pH I suppose.

The rest of that first day and about half way into the next, I sat by Steve’s bowl and played with him.  “Playing” isn’t really the best term for it, though.  There are really only so many games you can play with a goldfish, and after winning 35 rounds of checkers in a row, you start to wonder if it’s even trying.

Pretty soon, a week had gone by and much to my father’s dismay, Steve was still alive and still ugly.  By this time, it had been days since I had forgotten that Steve even existed.  My attention span rivaled the goldfish’s in brevity and soon Steve’s wellbeing became my father’s onus. 

Dad wasn’t too upset after the first week that Steve continued to exist.  But when week three rolled around and Steve was still doing little fishy laps in his tiny fish condoquarium, my Dad really started to get annoyed.

“That damn county fish won’t die!” my Dad growled to my mother.  They both stood in front of the fishbowl, arms crossed. 

“Well, Patrick loves it, so thank you for taking care of it,” my Mom said, giving my father a smooch on the cheek and walking out into the hall.  

               

“Maybe if I put it in the big tank with the other fish, they’ll kill that little bastard,” my Dad muttered, his mouth twisting into a grinchly smirk.

When I got back from school that day, Steve had been transplanted into the big aquarium with the rest of our fish.  I wasn’t sure why my Dad had integrated the schools, but I was happy that my goldfish was going to have more room to do his fish activities.  It took Steve a while to adjust, though, and for the first few days he continued to swim in tiny little circles in the corner of the big tank.  Steve may have been ugly and now verifiably dumb, but he was a hell of a survivor.

Shortly after introducing my goldfish to his aquarium, my Dad’s expensive fish started to die.  The first to go was the big, white and yellow angelfish that we found floating upside down, half cooked by the lamp.  Soon after that, we found one of the small neon fish that glowed in the dark bobbing on the surface of the water.  Sometimes two or three fish would die in a single day.  Not Steve though; ole’ Buscemi was still kicking.

My Dad was irate.  In his plan to off my fish, he had made a horrible miscalculation.  He had hoped that his exotic fish would see how ugly my goldfish was and put it out of its misery in a totally justifiable mercy killing.  He had not counted on the fact that my fish would be so exceedingly ugly that its mere presence would drive his flock to suicide.  Steve was clearly not aware of his effect on the other fish as he swam merrily around the tank, dodging carcasses as he went.

Pretty soon, my goldfish was the only fish left in my Dad’s tank.  He tried to introduce new fancy ones but none of them even lasted a week, which ironically is how long my “county fish” was intended to last.

A year and half later, my goldfish died, overstepping his seven day expiration date by 10400%.  I didn’t find my fish dead, I simply came home one day and he was gone.  My Dad said that he had died and that his body had been sacrificed to the mighty porcelain throne while I was at school.

I’m not convinced that Steve actually died.  Knowing Steve, he probably would have outlived us; I should have named him Methuselah.  What probably happened is that my Dad just finally snapped and flushed my fish.

I wasn’t too torn up because the only time I remembered that I even had a fish was when I was looking directly at it.

In retrospect, though, I’d like to think that Steve is still alive somewhere and that after Shawshanking his way through North Carolina’s sewer system he found his way to a beach in Mexico where people don’t care about how ugly he is.