The GOOD, The Bad, and The Behemoth

 Wine and women is all I crave
A big legged woman is gonna carry me to my grave
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all

--“Born Under A Bad Sign,” Albert King (1967)

“Today, I’m going to be GOOD.”

I drawled the last word out for emphasis, staring earnestly at myself in the mirror. I was unsmiling, deadly serious. You’ve never seen such a serious seven-year-old, I promise you. This day was going to be the day that I finally got it all together and was GOOD in school. Nothing could stop me; my determination welled up within my little chest and I felt the confidence of steely resolve settling in my spine.

In fact, I wasn’t just going to be GOOD—I was going to be CHERYL NICHOLSON GOOD. Now I smiled, my belief in my own abilities settled fact in my mind.

Cheryl Nicholson lived one block over from us; she was tall for a girl, with shoulder-length black hair the color of beautiful night. She was quiet, a little introverted—the perfect complement to my gregarious personality. Her skin was pale but unblemished; her hands delicate, like rare china. Of course I knew that we would be married one day.

Cheryl Nicholson never spoke up in class. She turned her assignments in on time and with a penmanship that was simply beyond my capacity to achieve. Her handwriting was neat, scripted, beautiful—like Cheryl Nicholson herself. There were no stray pen marks on the page, no ink blots, no random pictures of fart clouds blowing over civilization. Her pristine notebook paper was the direct opposite of mine. She sat near the teacher and did everything she was told. She was never absent, never loud, never spoke out of turn, and was passive and obedient. Naturally, she viewed me as the bearer of some distasteful plague. She was unaware of our ultimate destiny together, and tossed her shimmering dark hair contemptuously at me when I spoke to her. She moved in different circles than I: she was GOOD, after all. Cheryl Nicholson had never been to the principal’s office.

The principal’s office was my second classroom, of course. From the earliest days of Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick’s first-grade class, Mr. Stephenson and I had become quite close acquaintances. We had first been introduced when I had erupted in a song-and-dance routine that initiated a raucous disruption in the classroom. The sound of the other students laughing had been quite addictive; I naturally continued my unseemly gyrations in a desperate attempt to recreate the magical moment, and the class had fallen into pandemonium. I could hear Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick pleading with me to sit down, but I just couldn’t—kids were laughing, and they were laughing because of my work. As I sat in Mr. Stephenson’s office that first time, he called me over to his desk, picked me up and sat me down on the top of it. His graying black hair was slicked back, and he smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and Brut cologne. He fiddled with the buttons on my shirt as he explained to me in a patient voice that I was a very special young man and that he was expecting great things from me. He had pointed to his paddle leaning against the wall, and had warned me in a very regretful voice that he really didn’t want to use it on me. It would be far better, he had explained, if I could just learn to be GOOD. I had been eternally grateful to Mr. Stephenson for his mercy, and he who has been forgiven much loves much. Mr. Stephenson and I were tight.

Or, at least, we became that way over the course of the next couple of years.

There was the time, later that year, when Jonathan Connor and I had been caught drawing pictures of fart clouds in class. Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick grabbed poor Jonathan by the arm and jerked him upwards, scolding him for his crass humor in mixed company. She shot a disappointed glare my way, and I slunk down in my chair, chided and ashamed. Jonathan and I had both gone to Mr. Stephenson’s office that day, and we both had felt the familiar lead ball in the pits of our stomachs as we awaited what was certain to be an awful paddling.

But none had come. Mr. Stephenson had visited with us one at a time—and I honestly don’t know what he said to Jonathan. He gently assured me again of his unswerving belief that I had GOOD in me, and could demonstrate it in Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick’s class. I had once again left his office, un-paddled and relieved, and quietly determined to live up to his hallowed expectations.

Then of course there was the Jet Fighter Incident. Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick had been trying to teach us the benefits of writing in cursive, and I had decided that my desk was a P-51 Mustang fighter jet. While she stood in the front of the class and demonstrated perfect cursive writing, I was busily fighting the Nazis from my desk—complete with whining engine sounds, Browning 50-caliber machine gun blasts, and screaming wreckage. Even when asked to stop, I had simply gone covert—the fighter jet was still working, but on a lower volume level. Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick had eventually commanded me to move my desk (jet) out in the hall until I could learn to behave. Boy, was that a mistake.

I moved my desk into the hall and proceeded to blast away at those German fiends at top volume: each teacher and student that dared walk past my line of fire received withering fire from my machine guns. Finally, Mr. Stephenson had wandered up to me and asked me what I was doing. Once again, I had found myself sitting atop his desk, listening to his calming voice explaining that I mustn’t test Poor Mrs. Kilpatrick’s patience so much.

Yeah, I guess you could say I had serious trouble being GOOD. Cheryl Nicholson didn’t, though: not only did she never misbehave or talk out of turn, she was completely unfazed by any of my shenanigans. She seemed to float ethereally above me in status: I could never match her essential GOODness, no matter how much I tried.

And try I did, gentle readers. I resolved myself on numerous occasions that there would be no further incidents, but generally by 10:00 in the morning I would be knee-deep in incident. Even when I was earnestly trying to follow directions, I still managed to fail at being GOOD—like the time my second grade teacher Mrs. Holland had asked us to bring our favorite records from home to play in class for everyone. Mrs. Holland was a woman of great girth; clothed in polyester pantsuits, she waddled onerously throughout the room, constantly out of breath, watching diligently to ensure that no terrible incidents occurred on her watch. Her rotundity was a natural deterrent to my normal tomfoolery; I was a little frightened of her sheer size. She ran that second-grade classroom like a platoon, giving orders sharply, then sitting down to catch her breath, then edging her behemoth build through the tiny rows of desks to keep an eye on us. On Record Day, Cheryl Nicholson had brought Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love” and Mrs. Holland had happily played it on the record player. Each of the other students had also brought equally noxious pop records from home, many of them the soundtrack for Grease, or Tony Orlando and Dawn, or some such. Then Mrs. Holland had asked me what record I had brought, and I had happily handed over Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland.  You can imagine the horror on her face as the speakers began to blare Hendrix’s supersonic feedback. Being GOOD was just an impossible task for me.

But on this day, as I looked intently at myself in the mirror, I was determined that it would be different. Somehow, in some way, by some herculean effort, I was going to be GOOD—all day long. And for the first couple of hours, the day went exactly as I had planned. There were math lessons, which I could have done without—but on which I concentrated on with unusual energy. There was more handwriting practice, which I would have barely preferred to being set on fire—but to which I applied myself with unlikely vigor. Somewhere around 9:30 A.M., I stole a glance at Cheryl Nicholson, sitting smugly and effortlessly in her silence near Mrs. Holland’s desk—over in the GOOD Zone. I could tell she was impressed with my behavior, and I knew I was taking the first steps on the long road to our eventual wedded bliss. In fact, if it hadn’t been for my cousin Gina Gayle Hyde, I most certainly would have succeeded in my Sisyphean task of being GOOD.

Gina Gayle Hyde’s grandmother was my grandmother’s sister. Their farm sat adjacent to my grandfather’s farm just outside of Gainesville—but my Papa’s farm was just a hobby of his, and the Hydes actually lived on theirs.  Gina Gayle was another GOOD girl, and she was constantly being embarrassed by my persistent reminders to her that we were cousins. It apparently pained her to know that we were kin, and on this particular day in history she removed the price tag from her Big Chief writing tablet and stuck it onto her forehead.

“What are you doing?” I took the bait.

“Selling myself away from you,” she taunted back at me.

I sat, stunned at her frontal assault on my pride. I could feel my cheeks flush with embarrassment, and I stared at her, gape-mouthed, eyes wide—unable to answer her shot across my bow. Gina Gayle burst into laughter, and I slunk down in my chair. Her laughter wasn’t the subdued giggle of a GOOD girl, either: it was a full-on guffaw, and it reverberated through the classroom. Heads turned, and soon the whole class was in on the joke. As the laughter built to a dangerous crescendo, I saw Mrs. Holland struggle to stand up from her seat behind her desk. Her eyes had narrowed to a pair of intolerant slits, almost buried beneath folds of jiggling skin. She rounded the corner of her desk and thundered her way across the classroom toward me.

“Mr. _____!” she bellowed in a prophet’s voice of proclamatory doom. “That is the last straw!” Anything that took place in the world of grownups, of course, was always the last straw.

Now I turned my unblinking stare toward Mrs. Holland. The injustice of the situation stung me, and I couldn’t even manage a response. I wanted desperately to explain to her that I hadn’t done anything—that I was completely innocent of wrongdoing—that, for once, I had been GOOD. But Mrs. Holland had already sized up the situation and noted that this incident involved one GOOD student and the future Wheels-Off Theologian—and had drawn the statistically viable conclusion that anyone might have fairly drawn. Gina Gayle drew back instinctively from me, scooting her desk back a foot or two. I was isolated and alone, and Mrs. Holland reached down and grabbed my skinny little bicep with one meaty hand. Her death-vice grip caused me to whimper in pain, and I felt even more embarrassed by that whimper.

I was vaguely aware that something was happening in me—deep inside, far beneath my conscious but perpetually distracted mind. My skin was hot with shame, and the first drops of tears had already raced down my face. I felt alone in that classroom—the students who had faithfully laughed at my antics had abandoned me, and now served on a brutal jury that had pronounced a terrible verdict: I was BAD. Just plain BAD. I was only aware of this in a tangential sense, and momentarily: I could feel something welling up inside me, and I was unsure whether I would burst into even more embarrassing tears or yell in anger. In one unconscious, fluid movement, I wrested my tiny arm from Leviathan’s grip and dove instinctively for the nearest desk. I scurried under it, and could see the little legs of its occupant back away. The desks were in a neat row, and I had an escape tunnel. Of course, the tunnel ended about ten feet away—even closer to Mrs. Holland’s desk—but I was living in the moment, and began to scoot up that tunnel as fast as my little knees would crawl.

And then a most remarkable thing happened.

For reasons that, to this day, have still not presented themselves for logical defense, Mrs. Holland inexplicably, strangely, unpredictably, got down on her hands and knees and proceeded to crawl up that tunnel after me.

I didn’t know whether to be horrified or entertained. As Mrs. Holland squeezed her ample frame into that tunnel of desks, she proceeded to crawl forward, muttering threats under her breath. Each foot she traversed on those polyester-clad Knees of Plenty caused the desks to lift up from the floor and ride on her humped back. Students leaped to their feet, chairs crashed backward, desks flipped in the air as she gained velocity and gained on me. I had only a moment to glimpse her face, purple with rage, as she edged closer to me—then I turned and bolted out of the other side of the tunnel. When I reached the other side, I stood up to run, knowing that this would be a BAD action but feeling as though it were the only one left to me. Mrs. Holland didn’t make it all the way through the desk tunnel; she stood up, and desks cascaded off her back like Japs off of Godzilla.  For a split second, as she crashed her way toward me on foot, I was frozen in terror—until I heard it.

There was no mistaking it. It was a sound that erased my shame and lifted me to triumph, no matter what depths I had managed to sink myself into. It was the sound that would define the rest of my childhood, for better or worse, and draw the sharp and un-erasable lines of my destiny. It was a sound that had bathed me in warmth from my earliest days at the Presbyterian kindergarten. It was a sound I never heard at home, but could count on at school.

The entire class was roaring with laughter.

I surveyed the class, my eyes resting with satisfaction on the carnage in view. Children were doubled over with laughter, tears were streaming down their cheeks. Jonathan Connor was howling and slapping his desk, a chimpanzee grin plastered on his face. I could feel my own face breaking into a grin, and I made no further evasive action as Mrs. Holland advanced on me. She reached out and gripped my arm, but this time I could feel no pain.

They were laughing.

She marched me past the overturned desks and the other children and toward the door. I stole one last glance at Cheryl Nicholson.

She wasn’t laughing, of course. She was GOOD, after all.

Even in the hall, I could still hear the children laughing uproariously, a glorious, triumphant cacophony of validation that underscored the status of my coup—which would ultimately become legendary in the halls of Edison Elementary.

 I spent the rest of the day sitting in the office, reading the stack of books that they had on the waiting table near the secretary. That was my punishment. Mr. Stephenson would occasionally open his door and look over at me, sadly shaking his head, a somber expression on his face. I managed my best aw-shucks slink, my eyes dropping to the floor in faux shame. At the end of the day, I went home, and the next day—back to class. Nothing was ever mentioned of the incident, and Mrs. Holland acted as though the previous day’s adventures had never taken place. In a way, I got a clean slate that next morning—a new opportunity to be GOOD. But deep down inside, a certainty had begun to dawn on me—a certainty about which I wasn’t quite conscious yet, but which had already begun to settle in as a personal conviction.  I knew already that Cheryl Nicholson and I could never be: she would find a GOOD man and marry him. She would have her fairy tale life with another. 

I would content myself with the laughter.