Let's All Go Play Dodgeball

Recently, I was reminded of a high school incident that's never been explored at the Drawing Board. Today, I explore that space.

I was a good student in gym. So good, that when I needed an extra elective as a senior, I took a class called "More Gym" or something equally ridiculous. We played dodgeball a lot. I loved it.

One day, during a particularly epic dodgeball match, I lost the handle on a ball as I was attempting to strike another fellow with it. The thing took off, bounced off of a basketball goal and skied into a balcony of the gym that had never been used, at least not that anyone knew of.

So I climbed up there to retrieve the ball. The place was a graveyard for gym equipment. There were old sections of bleachers, entirely flattened balls, a shredded volleyball net. I vaguely wondered if my poorly-thrown dodgeball had suffered a similar fate upon arrival. Maybe I would meet my end here as well.

I rifled around, searching for the ball, but to no avail. The thing had disappeared altogether. The call came from below, "Find that ball, meathead!"

Perhaps it had rolled behind the wrestling mats. I went in for a peek, and what I saw was not a dodgeball. Instead, I laid my eyes upon a tremendous pile of human feces. Someone (or someones) had saved their defecations for a significant amount of time and laid them to rest here, arranged with a particular and specific design.

Put plainly, they had written "1997" in poop.

It was a tremendous senior prank that lay entirely uncredited in the annals of history. Until now.

One Time, Someone Set My School on Fire

This post may conclude my high school stories for a while. There's really no way to follow this. At least, until my therapist helps me to uncover all of the things I've almost certainly repressed.

When I was a senior in high school, there was a bit of an incident. My school always had a reputation of shady characters doing shady things, but this was the shadiest.

During first period band, a couple of guys sneaked into the band basement - easily the shadiest locale on campus. They hid there through the school day and into the night. All told, they spent more than 17 hours holed up in the basement, silent, killing time.

Then, when the time was right, they simply climbed into the band room and loaded up all of the gear they could get their hands on. Their plan was simple - they'd grab the stuff and, under cover of night, they'd leave. It was the perfect crime.

But there was one hitch. The school had security cameras. Oops.

So, the remedy to the problem was simple. The guys decided to start a small fire and sneak out through the smoke. The haze would make them impossible to identify. It was the perfect fix to the one problem inherent to the perfect crime.

They ended up burning down half the school.

Anyway, it was convenient for everyone. They were set to close the school in the spring anyway.

Down, Set, What?

My high school wasn't exactly known for excellence. We graduated students at a 33% clip. Our top twenty breakfast regularly featured students with GPAs in the high 2's. At our graduation ceremony, I sat next to a kid who was 20 - he was one of the lucky ones who did graduate. In six years.

I don't want to make the high school experience sound worse than it was. In fact, our high school did feature a few people who went on to do bigger and better things. For example, I write a blog.

But while stories of Turkish Professional Basketball players, gold medalists, and Daytona 500 winners might sound impressive, they're not good fodder for what I do over here at the Drawing Board.

--

Our high school football team won exactly one game in four years. One. Something like 24 of us rushed the field, but when we got down there, it was pretty muddy so we all went home. Here's what you need to know.

• The biggest guy on the team had a fake leg.
  
• The previously mentioned guy was also our kicker.
• To recap, the kicker was the biggest guy on our team. The kicker had a fake leg.
• We once gave up 64 points in the first half of a game, failing to record a tackle in that half.
• For two years straight, we were ranked as the worst team in the state.

Go Lions!

¿Como se dice?

I took four years of Spanish through high school. And in those four years, I learned exactly 51 words, including the dirty ones that we had to look up.

The class was fine; it just wasn't too hard to earn an 'A,' mostly because there was no urgency to learn or speak the Spanish language. We did often eat Mexican food, which our teacher interpreted quite broadly to include Frankie's Rib Shack.

We used to watch this show called Destinos, which was a poor attempt at educational television crossed with a poorer attempt at a soap opera. I can't even begin to recount the plot; not because it was in a language I didn't know, but because it was just bad. Wikipedia tells me that Destinos featured 52 episodes (!), although I've never seen anything beyond episode 12. And I've seen each of those episodes at least six times apiece.

In college, I was woefully unable to test out of as much Spanish as you might expect. Somehow, I passed right through the 100s into a Spanish 201 course. In that course, much of the curriculum centered around Destinos. When I read that in the syllabus, I yelped. During class. While the professor was talking.

I recall clearly that there was a tubby little boy named Jaime. Jaime had a rascal of a dog named Osito. One time, Osito got away; which led to the epic footage of a rotund child actor chasing a fuzzy little dog, all the while yelling, "Osito! Osito!" The kid made it about four steps into his run before doubling over and gasping - no wheezing! - for air.

I've seen the clip at least two dozen times through my educational career. That means I've spent about 2% of my life watching a fat kid chase a dog in a language I didn't know. That's probably all I'll need to say about my high school.

I Cussed at Dustin Diamond

In early 2001, I was a junior in high school. And one day, when I was in the hall during class for no good reason, I ran into Screech from Saved By the Bell.

I still have less than no idea what he was doing at my school, but after four or five successive double takes, I was sure it was him. He must have been used to the strange behavior I exhibited, because he stopped and introduced himself. What followed was not my most eloquent moment.

Screech: Hi, I'm Dustin Diamond.
Me: What the hell?

For what it's worth, this was about a year after Saved By the Bell: The New Class ended, and was well before he kicked the crap out of Horshack on Celebrity Boxing.

More Shakespeare Please!

Mr. Tutorow was my AP English teacher when I was a senior in high school. He stands out as being the best teacher I ever had, the most challenging teacher I ever had, and far-and-away the most eccentric teacher anyone has ever had.

He's also the person who really inspired me to write, so all of the word-vomit that is this blog is essentially his fault. The world thanks you, Mr. Tutorow.

Tutorow wore exquisite suits every day. He was very Italian and he flew to Italy as often as he could. He bought all of his shoes from Italy. Also, he bought all of his olive oil from Italy. He was a superior wine snob. (Actually, I'm just guessing there, but it fits.) He was a nut for opera, preferring Placido Domingo to Pavarotti. I remember that. Now would be a good time to mention that I went to a typical inner-city school.

I can't possibly call the roll of all the literature we read my senior year except to say that it was expansive. Our summer reading list spanned three pages. I didn't finish it. No one did. (I fully expect at least one alum to respond to this post and say, "I did.")

Mr. Tutorow had a wife in Cuba.

--

During my first winter break in college, Paul Klockow and I decided to go back and visit Mr. Tutorow. He was at a new high school - ours had closed due to an anemic 33% graduation rate.

The meeting was typical - we shared and reminisced. Then things went awry. Mr. Tutorow lost his keys. He stood up and shook a little bit. Sure enough, we could hear the keys, but when he reached in his pockets they were gone. This was a source of much consternation as our old teacher fidgeted and fished around in his pockets to find the keys. No dice.

Then, aha! He had torn a hole through the lining of his pocket. The keys fell through, but the chain had attached itself to some piece of fabric. Mr. Tutorow's hands were too big to get to the prize, and would Paul mind reaching into the pocket and fishing the keys out?

...

...

......................................................................

No. No, he would not. He would not do that thing.

And as far as we know, Mr. Tutorow is still sitting in the teacher's lounge of Washington High School, stranded there without his keys.

I Know What Biology Is and This Isn't It

There's one man who I remember more than most from my freshman year of high school. Mr. Bogucki taught Honors Biology. Also, he was kind of a weirdo.

Mr. Bogucki ate Taco Bell for lunch every single day, and he honestly believed that he was the pinnacle of human health because of it. On several occasions, he spoke of the virtues of the Taco Bell diet. Every 15-year-old in that room knew better.

That's not the only way he was eccentric. One time a kid asked to go to the bathroom. Mr. Bogucki allowed it, but only under the condition that the kid carry a fully stuffed and mounted moose head to the bathroom as his hall pass.

Fall asleep? Get slapped with a rolled-up magazine.

Protest that he shouldn't have hit you with the magazine? Get slapped again.

Take a swing at him because he just slapped you again with a magazine? He'd put you in a headlock and hold you until you stopped struggling.

(In fairness, that only happened once. But let's be honest, once is enough.)

Saved By the Bell

I was a fairly talented trumpet player during my high school days. That's not important, except to lead in to another crazy teacher story.

There was a guy named Mr. Gamble who taught me music from seventh through ninth grade. He was a decent trumpet player in his own right. He also had a truly fantastic temper. One time, he threw a music stand at a kid. He was never above yelling, and he often turned a bright shade of red. Imagine an early 90s Bob Knight directing a fairly poor middle school band, and there you are.

Not surprisingly, this fellow also had some issues with his blood pressure. He resigned as our band director after his doctor informed him that teaching music to poor musicians was going to kill him.

But my favorite Gamble story is this one. During the course of a very poor dress rehearsal in the school auditorium, something inside Mr. Gamble blew. The yelling was par for the course. The cursing was little more than average. His face reddened - again, that was normal. But there was more.

He began to stomp his feet, a strange way to emphasize count one of the measure. At some point during the stomping and carrying on, his foot landed precariously on the corner of the directors' platform. He fell backwards. He reached for a music stand - a music stand! - to hold himself up, but it was hopeless. He fell on his back and rolled a little bit. Then to our horror, and certainly his own - he fell six feet from the auditorium stage to the hard floor below.

It was like living in a Home Alone movie. He landed with a grunt, then all was silent. Some of us thought we'd just watched a man die. Our gaze turned toward the music stand that was falling in a sort of slow motion. It caught him right in the crotch. There was really nowhere else for it to go.

The ensuing, droning, utterly audible curse word assured us that this man was, in fact, still alive.

He clambered back onto the stage and addressed a collective of horrified teenagers, specifically the baritones, I believe:

"If you don't come in on count one, and that happens again - I'm not going to survive that twice."

Back to School

It's a shame I didn't keep a blog when I was in high school. I graduated from LaSalle High School in 2002, about two years before web logs became legitimate forms of communication. I met up with Mr. Paul Klockow last night and was quickly reminded of all of the stories from high school that need to be shared with the world. Namely, the story of Mr. Moyer.

Moyer was our government teacher, and he was a lame duck - he'd be retiring at year's end. One time a kid fell asleep in class at the end of the day, and Moyer wouldn't let anyone wake him. Poor kid finally woke up in an empty school three hours after the day had ended. That was Moyer.

We kept a running diary of virtually every session of class, and tracked how many consecutive days Moyer would say the word "jackass" during class. Every day for fourteen consecutive days. It was like being alive in DiMaggio's prime.

But the penultimate Moyer story is this one. During Christmas break of our freshman year of college, Paul and I decided to visit a few teachers. We went and saw Mr. Tutorow and Mr. Damien, but unfortunately, Mr. Moyer had retired. We decided to do some Christmas shopping, the whole time, lamenting that we couldn't see Moyer.

We walked into the University Park Mall, and who was the first person we saw? It was Mr. Moyer, sitting on a bench with his wife. He shook our hands with the intensity that makes your whole body shake until it's over. Then, this happened:

Moyer: Do you know what I do every morning now that I'm retired?
Me: No.
Moyer: I wake up, I drink my coffee, and then I sit on the porch, and give the finger to the school buses as they pass by.
Me: ...
Moyer's Wife: (Nodding sadly.)

And he was just one of the men who worked to shape my future.