The Big Moment
His hesitation was understandable. In his own mind, there had been no event in his life thus far that would measure up to the moment he was about to endure. Endure may have been a bad word to use, actually. To "endure" meant, or at least implied, that it would be a negative experience, a painful struggle; he didn't know if this would be negative or positive yet. He only knew that it was, perhaps, one of the only moments in his life where he just might, as that puppet dog said on television all the time - poop on something, himself being the most logical candidate.
Oh sure, he had rehearsed plenty. He tried to memorize what he was going to say, like when he used to try to study for science tests during freshman year in high school. He thought of those high school science tests. Oh, how he fucking hated those. He used to be quite frightened by them, in fact. There was nothing more painful than having to lay on his bed the night before a test with the most uninteresting science book in the whole wide world and try to memorize, section by section, over and over again, scientific equations. Or to try and remember that fissionable nucleii are so unstable that they will fall apart if struck by a neutron. Memorization was such a funny thing. He couldn't remember any of the elements of the periodic table, but he remembered the shit about the fissionable nucleii? He laughed to himself.
He thought about the one time in science class when he had faked a severe headache and was convincing enough that the sceince teacher, the miserable (and clearly gullible) Miss Veracruz, appeared so concerned for his well-being that she had excused him from class to go to the nurse! That trip to the nurse would be memorable for another reason - his affliction of singing out loud and not knowing it. On the way to the nurse's office that day, Led Zeppelin's "Rock & Roll" just happened to be cruising through his brain and there was nothing that was going to stop it. He was in mid-verse, strutting down the hall, walking right by Mr. Temple's math class, audibly yelping the "lonely lonely lonely lonely time" part of the song and not realizing he was singing out loud.
The twenty or so teenage heads in Temple's class all turned at once in near-perfect synchronicity, looked out into the hall and broke into spontaneous, cackling laughter, as if someone had held up the "laugh" cue card on a TV set. He could still hear the laughter fading as he approached the bright red, swinging double-doors twenty-five feet down the hall from Temple's class. He always wondered why they didn't just get some new goddamn doors instead of painting over them every August? He spotted a small, peeling piece of red hanging off the door, stopped and inquisitively pulled off a half-inch of the soft paint, revealing the slightly different colored red from last year underneath. History, he thought. Now that's an amazing topic, promising himself to never, ever fake a headache in history class.
History was a large, overpowering black bear. Not history class, but the idea of history. When it approached, a person should just calmly lay down and play dead against it because there's no chance in hell of overpowering it. Standing now at the double doors, he held the piece of red paint in his hands, up at eye-level. He could bend it back and forth or pull both ends outward but it would just return slowly to its original shape. He crumbled it up into as small a paint-ball as possible, held it between his index and finger and thumb as hard as he could for ten seconds, then let go. It slowly unfolded, much like that thing on TV where they speed up the camera and watch as a flower blooms. The paint sprouted right back to its original shape, as if he had just pulled it off the door.
Looking closer at the doors now, he could spot different colors, scattered, where paint had started to chip off. Tilting his head up and squinting a little, he could spot a touch of green at the top left corner where a couple of generations of paint had worn off.. There at the bottom - some blue showing on the right-hand door where, undoubtedly, many a foot had pushed the doors open this school year. He didn't need to look on the opposite side to know that the very same shade of blue would be showing in almost the exact same place.
He had some time and he knew it. He should have been taking advantage of this time to do something like go to the nurse to continue the charade. Surely Veracruz would be calling down there to make sure he made it okay. He knew it was making no sense to be utterly fascinated by a pair of swinging double doors that he and hundreds of others ignored every single day, but his mind suddenly couldn't get away from the black bear. What year was it when these doors were green? The 1970s? He imagined some messy-haired '70s guy pushing through these doors, humming Sweet's "Love Is Like Oxygen."
You get too much, you get too high.
Not enough and you're gonna die
Love gets you high...
He pulled out his science book, threw open the cover and looked to the left. Located there was the list of previous students who had used the book and the year they possessed it. This was always a treat. Every year when students got their books, most often the very first thing they would do is open it to see who had it before. It was a fascinating sociological experiment that should be studied. He would always wish that the book he had would have the names of pretty girls one or two grades above him, so he could show them. An icebreaker!
He got a hot girl's book once. Marcia Immergluck. Terrible last name, but she was so pretty and seemingly nice. He talked to her a couple times in seventh grade. It began after soccer practice one day. The girls and the boys both finished up at the same time and were heading in and somehow he ended up walking about two feet behind her. She sensed someone and whirled around, her brown-blond hair jumping as she turned. For an instant, just a fleeting second, he caught her disappointment that it wasn't someone else and it hurt like a punch to the gut. But she smiled and said "you goin' to the Fair tonight?"
Looking down at his science book, though, he recognized a few names but it was mostly people he didn't know.
Harold Stedman: 87-88
Josh Ribalski: 86-87
Jody Awari: 85-86
Michelle Lilly: 84-85
Yu-Min Taraka: 83-84
Simon Harmon: 82-83
Nancy Gendron: 81-82
Robert Schmidt: 80-81
Christopher Strong: 79-80
Kathleen Carr: 78-79
Kathleen Carr. 1978. No idea who she was. He was tempted, with his time granted courtesy of Miss Veracruz, to go to the Media Center (why was the school library always called the "media center," he wondered?) and look up Kathleen Carr in the stack of old yearbooks. He curtly dismissed the idea. His hand touched the door again and he gave it a small push, just enough so that it swung out about six inches and swung back in, emitting that all too familiar sound of the doors, the slight squeak of the hinge, the wood barely scraping the wood of the other door. The sound he had heard and ignored for four years now.
Certainly Kathleen Carr has put her hands to this very door every day in 1978. What was going through her mind? Did she care about science? Was she pissed that she was the first one to get this book and had no list of previous students who had used it? That must have been disappointing. Were the doors green? Was she hot?
His mind snapped back to the present, remembering what he was about to do......
His hesitation was understandable. In his own mind, there had been no event in his life thus far that would measure up to the moment he was about to endure. Endure may have been a bad word to use, actually. To "endure" meant, or at least implied, that it would be a negative experience, a painful struggle; he didn't know if this would be negative or positive yet. He only knew that it was, perhaps, one of the only moments in his life where he just might, as that puppet dog said on television all the time - poop on something, himself being the most logical candidate.
Oh sure, he had rehearsed plenty. He tried to memorize what he was going to say, like when he used to try to study for science tests during freshman year in high school. He thought of those high school science tests. Oh, how he fucking hated those. He used to be quite frightened by them, in fact. There was nothing more painful than having to lay on his bed the night before a test with the most uninteresting science book in the whole wide world and try to memorize, section by section, over and over again, scientific equations. Or to try and remember that fissionable nucleii are so unstable that they will fall apart if struck by a neutron. Memorization was such a funny thing. He couldn't remember any of the elements of the periodic table, but he remembered the shit about the fissionable nucleii? He laughed to himself.
He thought about the one time in science class when he had faked a severe headache and was convincing enough that the sceince teacher, the miserable (and clearly gullible) Miss Veracruz, appeared so concerned for his well-being that she had excused him from class to go to the nurse! That trip to the nurse would be memorable for another reason - his affliction of singing out loud and not knowing it. On the way to the nurse's office that day, Led Zeppelin's "Rock & Roll" just happened to be cruising through his brain and there was nothing that was going to stop it. He was in mid-verse, strutting down the hall, walking right by Mr. Temple's math class, audibly yelping the "lonely lonely lonely lonely time" part of the song and not realizing he was singing out loud.
The twenty or so teenage heads in Temple's class all turned at once in near-perfect synchronicity, looked out into the hall and broke into spontaneous, cackling laughter, as if someone had held up the "laugh" cue card on a TV set. He could still hear the laughter fading as he approached the bright red, swinging double-doors twenty-five feet down the hall from Temple's class. He always wondered why they didn't just get some new goddamn doors instead of painting over them every August? He spotted a small, peeling piece of red hanging off the door, stopped and inquisitively pulled off a half-inch of the soft paint, revealing the slightly different colored red from last year underneath. History, he thought. Now that's an amazing topic, promising himself to never, ever fake a headache in history class.
History was a large, overpowering black bear. Not history class, but the idea of history. When it approached, a person should just calmly lay down and play dead against it because there's no chance in hell of overpowering it. Standing now at the double doors, he held the piece of red paint in his hands, up at eye-level. He could bend it back and forth or pull both ends outward but it would just return slowly to its original shape. He crumbled it up into as small a paint-ball as possible, held it between his index and finger and thumb as hard as he could for ten seconds, then let go. It slowly unfolded, much like that thing on TV where they speed up the camera and watch as a flower blooms. The paint sprouted right back to its original shape, as if he had just pulled it off the door.
Looking closer at the doors now, he could spot different colors, scattered, where paint had started to chip off. Tilting his head up and squinting a little, he could spot a touch of green at the top left corner where a couple of generations of paint had worn off.. There at the bottom - some blue showing on the right-hand door where, undoubtedly, many a foot had pushed the doors open this school year. He didn't need to look on the opposite side to know that the very same shade of blue would be showing in almost the exact same place.
He had some time and he knew it. He should have been taking advantage of this time to do something like go to the nurse to continue the charade. Surely Veracruz would be calling down there to make sure he made it okay. He knew it was making no sense to be utterly fascinated by a pair of swinging double doors that he and hundreds of others ignored every single day, but his mind suddenly couldn't get away from the black bear. What year was it when these doors were green? The 1970s? He imagined some messy-haired '70s guy pushing through these doors, humming Sweet's "Love Is Like Oxygen."
You get too much, you get too high.
Not enough and you're gonna die
Love gets you high...
He pulled out his science book, threw open the cover and looked to the left. Located there was the list of previous students who had used the book and the year they possessed it. This was always a treat. Every year when students got their books, most often the very first thing they would do is open it to see who had it before. It was a fascinating sociological experiment that should be studied. He would always wish that the book he had would have the names of pretty girls one or two grades above him, so he could show them. An icebreaker!
He got a hot girl's book once. Marcia Immergluck. Terrible last name, but she was so pretty and seemingly nice. He talked to her a couple times in seventh grade. It began after soccer practice one day. The girls and the boys both finished up at the same time and were heading in and somehow he ended up walking about two feet behind her. She sensed someone and whirled around, her brown-blond hair jumping as she turned. For an instant, just a fleeting second, he caught her disappointment that it wasn't someone else and it hurt like a punch to the gut. But she smiled and said "you goin' to the Fair tonight?"
Looking down at his science book, though, he recognized a few names but it was mostly people he didn't know.
Harold Stedman: 87-88
Josh Ribalski: 86-87
Jody Awari: 85-86
Michelle Lilly: 84-85
Yu-Min Taraka: 83-84
Simon Harmon: 82-83
Nancy Gendron: 81-82
Robert Schmidt: 80-81
Christopher Strong: 79-80
Kathleen Carr: 78-79
Kathleen Carr. 1978. No idea who she was. He was tempted, with his time granted courtesy of Miss Veracruz, to go to the Media Center (why was the school library always called the "media center," he wondered?) and look up Kathleen Carr in the stack of old yearbooks. He curtly dismissed the idea. His hand touched the door again and he gave it a small push, just enough so that it swung out about six inches and swung back in, emitting that all too familiar sound of the doors, the slight squeak of the hinge, the wood barely scraping the wood of the other door. The sound he had heard and ignored for four years now.
Certainly Kathleen Carr has put her hands to this very door every day in 1978. What was going through her mind? Did she care about science? Was she pissed that she was the first one to get this book and had no list of previous students who had used it? That must have been disappointing. Were the doors green? Was she hot?
His mind snapped back to the present, remembering what he was about to do......
