24 May 2014
1839 hrs
Good day, Patient Reader;
I thought I would present
the Heidi story once more, this time in a linear fashion. Over the next week or so there will be subsequent parts posted daily, or nearly so. Heidi needs her story told, and I need to tell it. So shall I begin? Splendid!
Here goes:
The first words I ever said to Heidi
1839 hrs
Good day, Patient Reader;
I thought I would present
the Heidi story once more, this time in a linear fashion. Over the next week or so there will be subsequent parts posted daily, or nearly so. Heidi needs her story told, and I need to tell it. So shall I begin? Splendid!
Here goes:
Heidi and the Cunning Fennec Fox
(c) Properfessor
The first words I ever said to Heidi
were, “I love you . . .”
Three simple words that, as
words tend to do (and these three
in
particular), forever changed our lives.
Ms. Moss' sophomore World History class,
as typical as any High School world history class save one important fact: Out
of all those classes all over the world, Heidi was in this one.
Ms. Moss assured us that her
class was going to be different; going to be better
than any other history class we'd ever participated (or not) in. We
would, she said, discuss violence and sex, but “not necessarily violent sex.” True to her word, we spent the entire third
term, the very last half-semester I'd ever spend in High School, discussing
King Henry VIII of England. Yes, his tales from a hale and hearty youth,
fighting and conquering his opponents on the battlefield; in the Games of
Tilting; in the bedrooms with his conquests of another type.
We loved how Ms. Moss pointed out
the textbooks gathering dust on the back table of her classroom . . . my second
period classroom full of High School promise and bewitching tales of lust,
betrayal, third nipples, witchcraft and beheadings . . . Divorced Beheaded Died,
Divorced Beheaded Survived . . . the six ways to remember the six wives and
their fates. A Neurotic Mnemonic.
The texts gathered dust solely for the reason that they went
unused. She did not even bother to issue them to her students. She
felt that rote memorization of dates (1066) and names (William the Conqueror,
Harold, The Battle of Hastings) was simply a poor way to get kids interested in
the way the world was. Plus, it was as boring as watching shit
dry.
Ms. Moss was as cool a teacher as any I
had ever had, and I had Miss Hatton in the 5th grade. But
Celia Hatton is another story altogether.
Ms. Moss was so cool in fact, that I
thought it might be worthwhile to push the envelope and see just what, exactly,
it was that I could get away with in her class.
High School in the Granite School District meant that 9th grade was the final grade of Junior High School, rather than the Freshman Grade of HS that is the 9th grade in so many other places.
This was High School, man.
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(c) Properfessor
As it was for over 90% of the populace, HS
for me sucked. There was no popularity in my future, there. I was the
drug-taking nerd, the smoke- smoking jock surrounded by Mormon jocks who looked
at me as if I was some sort of unnecessary gristle on the Porterhouse Steak
that was their lives . . . 'If only that fucking bear wasn't shitting
in OUR woods,' they'd look at me and think.
'Fuck
Yourself!' I'd look at them and think right back.
This
was the school where kids could obtain excused absences so they could go skiing
with their folks, who in turn got their excused absences from their jobs as
doctors and lawyers and bankers. But if someone from say, MY upper middle
income bracket were to miss three days out of a school week to recover from an
ear infection or the flu, well . . . we practically needed a letter of
Hat-In-Hand-Begging from our Congressional Representative before we were
forgiven.
But Heidi's story is not about the class warfare that plagued
this House of Horrors that was my HS. A place where the very Chastest Of
All were the popular ones. Just look at my sister. Pimply-faced
dudes were lining up at our door, taking turns beating it down just to NOT have
sex with her. She and all her girl-mates were squeaky clean, and that
generation loved it.
HS for
me sucked so hard that I found relief in the solitude with which I surrounded
myself. I was no hypocrite and was so proud of that. There were
other stoners there, sure. It was HS fa Chrissakes, right? Surely I was
no rebel there. But I do believe that I was one of only two sophomores
that attended that school that dropped acid.
My homeroom was Phys. Ed. My school had
an Olympic-sized lap pool, and an Olympic-sized diving pool. Only the swim team
were allowed to dive, but the rest of us P.E.ers got to use the pool that whole
semester.
I was in that pool the very first time I
“fried.” I had dosed the previous night, around 2200 hrs, taking some blotter
acid called Black Pyramid, which was the best blotter around at the time.
I had no other experiences prior to that by which to gauge this claim, but I do
know that I was higher than a Japanese kite.
I was high the whole night.
High through my preparations for the school day; high through my brother in
law's morning ritual of picking me up and driving me to school on his way to
work; high as I clutched the water polo ball, floating like a plasticine porter
with looking glass tie in the deep deep diving pool . . . High through Ms.
Moss' 2nd period world history class-
high as I sat across from Heidi,
hyperbolically speaking, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen up to that
point in my life.
The pencil, a number 2 Dixon
Ticonderoga- named after the famous fort
that Ethan Allen and his group of Green Mountain Boys captured in the War of
America's Revolution? Who the
fuck knows- rolled in its quiet thunder across my desk, seemingly of its
own free will, with gravity and slope of surface having nothing to do with it
at all, and falling to the floor with an echoing crash and BOOM.
Ms. Moss was already looking at me funny (or
was it paranoia?) because of what happened when she instructed the class to
extract from our folders a single sheet of lined paper.
I, genius that I am, flipped through my folder
one lined sheet at a time through all 250 of them, only to close my folder at
the end of this rite, put my folder beneath my seat from whence it originated,
and then laid my fevered brow against the cool surface of the wood-grain veneer
that was my desktop. I even sat in the front row where she could not
miss my psychoactive display.
This last act is, in retrospect (I believe),
what jarred the pencil loose and caused it to overcome inertia. That
writing utensil body-at-rest became the rolling thunder body-in-motion because
I was too high to take out a piece of paper.
The thunder awakened me from my reverie,
and I was able to watch as the pencil continued its inability to defy gravity
and hit the floor with its tiny nuclear explosion. whoom.
As
I stared at it lying broken and dead on the floor (for surely nothing could
survive a fall like that), I saw a delicate hand, replete with a glove made of
black and tatted lace, appear at the pencil and raise it, seemingly, from the
dead. I definitely did not hear Jesus say, “Dixon Ticonderoga, come forth . . .”
I took it from Heidi's proffering paw.
Her fingertips in the palm of my hand were bolts of lightning, and a
lesser man would have been smitten. Good thing I was too high to know how
lesser I was.
'Thank you' is the customary etiquette in
situations such as that. 'Thank you' is truly what I had intended to
say. The words were forming in Wernicke's area, the part of my brain that
constructs the grammar and syntax that we use in language, that chooses the
words and the order in which we will present them. I felt those words
slip briefly through the visual cortex just in front of the occiput of my
skull; felt them move to Broca's area, the part of my cortex responsible for
laryngeal flexion, for the movement of my tongue and vocal folds and the mechanics
of speech, responsible for making my mouth bite the streaming consciousness of
the gibberish of my mind into easily digestible words that I can then vomit
forth. I swear to god that 'Thank you' was on the very tip of my
tongue . . .
So
why the fuck did “I love you” come out?
I was
horrified. And she, not missing a beat, replied, “Jesus . . . s'just a pencil .
. .”
