MY LIFE AS A PUNK

Someday I will have children, and they will be as sweet and wonderful as can be. They will be studious, and kind, and thoughtful, and I will think to myself how fortunate I am to have such perfect children. Then, they will turn 12 and try to set me on fire. I know this because karma is real, and I have it coming.

I don’t remember the first time I tried to be bad. I know that as a child, I was bad--played too rough with my sisters, didn’t eat all my dinner but still wanted dessert, talked back to my parents. But I wasn’t trying to be bad. Being bad was what I became in the process of doing something or trying to attain something that I wanted. But sometime, around the age of 12, what I wanted was to be bad. That’s the difference.

I think it would be easy to blame it on bad influences, and Jesse, my best friend at the time, certainly fit the bill, since he wore a jean jacket vest sometimes with Guns N’ Roses pins on it. And having him around certainly made it easier to do bad things, because he either wanted to too or he didn’t need much in the way of excuse to misbehave. But it wasn’t his influence on me, or my influence on him. We were adolescents, all raging hormones and high pitched voices that cracked low without notice. We were full of that kind of weird sexual energy that has no realistic outlet except to create mischief. We weren’t malicious. It was just high spirits.

I don’t think I had it in me to use my mischief against those weaker than me, so I never was a bully. I might have helped that there weren’t a whole lot of people who were weaker than me, but I think there was a part of me that knew, somewhere unconscious, that I was only pretending to be bad. So I directed my malfeasance at those in power above me. My favorite was my 7th and 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Teahan. I tormented this woman on a daily basis for two years. I don’t know if I’ve ever showed such singular commitment again, to anything.

There are dozens of stories, all too similar and boring to really recount, but they all had a theme: she was stupid, and I was smart. And I reveled in any opportunity to demonstrate this to her and to my classmates.

An example: she once lost one of my three paragraph essays, claming that I had never turned it in. She told me that I could pass it in the next day but I would lose a whole letter grade for being late. I used to type everything on my typewriter back then, so that night I went home and typed the paper in triplicate, put different dates on each and hid two of them in different places on her desk, passing the third in to her. A few days later, she passed us back our composition folders, and inside were four of my essays, with an apologetic post-it note (well, series of post it notes--I remember mocking her decision to,once realizing that her thoughts wouldn’t fit on one or even three post-it notes, continue to write them on there anyway.)

My other foil was our 8th grade Social Studies teacher, Ms. Sullivan. Ms. Sullivan was in no way stupid--at least not to the extent that Mrs. Teahan was.) But her disadvantage was mobility: she was an extremely large and old woman, who rarely if ever got up from her desk during class. The only time, in fact, that she was not seated at her desk is during lunch. That it took us much less time to get back from the Cafetorium each day than it did for her to get back from the Teacher’s room (despite the fact that the teacher’s room was a great deal closer) allowed us to engage in much mischief. I don’t know when I first started turning things on her desk upside down--her stapler, her coffee mug, her desk calendar--but I do know that rarely a day went by when I didn’t find something to leave flipped upside down on her desk. Until one day, I had run out of things, and decided just to turn the whole desk upside down.

I had help. We cleared everything off the desk, to make sure that nothing got damaged, and then turned the entire desk upside down and took our seats. I won’t mention my accomplices by name, except Jesse, who has already been dragged into this, and Brad, who disappeared into private Catholic school the next year. Whether or not this descent into crime had anything to do with it, I am unsure.

Ms. Sullivan was an older teacher who looked like she had been teaching since the days of corporal punishment, and her face would get really tight and red when she was angry. She didn’t say anything, and asked some of the students in the front to turn her desk rightside up again. Nobody sold us out, but they really didn’t have to. Our reputation preceded us.

The next morning we came in to the classroom and our desks were turned upside down. Looking back now, I admire her pluck, but that day we weren’t going to be defeated, so we each sat on the desks upside, crouching on top of the wire book rack that hung under the seat. She ordered us to get off, and we eventually did, but we thought she’d learned her lesson. Don’t mess with us. She retired at the end of the year.

Probably my proudest moment as a punk was in Mrs. Teahan’s eighth grade class. As a class we walked down to the Elementary School and were paired up with a third grader, and the assignment was to write and illustrate a children’s book for them. Again, from the vantage point of adulthood, I can admire the civics lesson, the community service aspect inherent in this assignment. But as we left the Elementary School to walk the half mile back to the Middle School, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking that I wanted a Devil Dog. So instead of walking directly back to the school, I walked the opposite way to the center of town and in the local Lil’Peach, I bought a Suzy Q (there were no Devil Dogs on offer) and then walked back to the Middle School. Jesse came with me, at least part of the way, but I remember him being a little gun shy about actually going to the Lil’ Peach. No Suzy Q for him, then.

We were fortunate that Mrs.Teahan had gotten back to the school later, and was late for a grade wide assembly, so she marched the whole class into the Cafetorium, and as such we were able to sneak in undetected and nobody knew we had been missing. It was a dangerous gamble, and I don’t think I even knew about the assembly, or if I did, even imagined the possibility that I would be able to use it to cover for my tardiness. I didn’t have a plan to cover for my absence. Getting caught was probably the point.

The next day, however, the Elementary School principal called the Middle School to inform them that two eighth grade students loitered about before going back to the school. Jesse and I were hauled out into the hallway by Mrs. Teahan and read the riot act. I was a precocious child, and for some reason a big viewer of the daily repeats of LA Law on A&E, and made a lawyerly defense argument. How do you know it was us? Did the Elementary School principal mention us by name, or offer a description? Or did he say two boys and you automatically assumed it was us?

It was an impassioned plea, a well-argued defense, but I was careful to never actually say directly it wasn’t us. Instead I focused on the unfairness of being assumed guilty without evidence. Of being condemned by prior bad acts. And I could see it on her face. Mrs. Teahan realized the error of her ways. It was unfair to accuse us without proof. So she apologized. Said that she shouldn’t be so quick to rush to judgment and that she was sorry.

Jesse gave me a sideways look of relief. We had gotten away with it. We had escaped punishment for our silly little act of defiance, thanks to my deft skills of debate.

“It was us,” I said. I couldn’t resist letting her know that I had fooled her again. Even if it meant rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory. I couldn’t bear for her not to know that I had outsmarted her again. “You shouldn’t have assumed it was us, but it was.”

She retired a few years later and became our Massachusetts State Representative. I’d like to think maybe I’d taught her a few things that would come in handy during her political career.

I left 8th grade and when I got to the high school, I was the small fish in the big pond. There was little patience for my punkdom and nobody really found it funny anymore. The girls from my grade were all snatched up by upperclassmen boys and with nobody left to impress, my life as a punk was over, more or less.

Our final prank at the Middle School involved the Basketball scoreboard. It had been taken down for repairs, and was leaning outside Ms. Sullivan’s classroom, right next to the gym entrance. At the end of the day one day in late May or early June, Jesse and I picked the thing up and ran it down the long straight hallway, where the entire 7th & 8th grade classrooms were. Our plan, probably, was to get it outside and leave on the lawn. But when we got it to the lobby, we found it was too tall to make it through the doorway. Realizing we were seconds away from being caught, we rested it up against the wall there, and then left through the front lobby doors, to go cause our mischief somewhere out in the sunny spring air. There’s probably a metaphor somewhere in there, but damned if I could find it.