Near Vana- Heidi, Part I and the Cunning Fennec Fox

 

The Bearing of Bears: Care and Feeding

      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, and 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 5^th 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 9^th grade was the final grade of Junior High School, rather than the Freshman Grade of HS that is the 9^th grade in so many other places.  This was High School, man.

     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' 2^nd 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 un-levelness 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 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, 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 continue its inability to defy gravity and hit the floor with its tiny nuclear 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 . . .”

 . . .  to be continued . . .