Punks and Quizes and Smiles - Teddy Nutmeg

This is another "oldie but goodie." I'm putting it up early in the day so you have a long time to read it. -KV

Punks and Quizzes and Smiles…
Teddy Nutmeg

Last night dreamland was good ole’ Atwater High School, where I was in a student-like capacity of some sort, but the kids there were just that: kids, and I mean young, like 12 or 13 years old. I know, I know, kids that young don’t go to high school. I am aware of that fact. IT WAS A DREAM. Stay with me.

When I say I was in a student-like capacity, I mean that although I was there, and even attending classes, I know I wasn’t a student; I’m always ME in my dreams, although I am in bizarre situations doing random things, my current identity stays relatively intact.

So, the first thing I can remember is going into the third-world-style bathroom, except dirtier and far more foul smelling, to attend to my urinary needs. On my way through the graffiti covered door, one of the aforementioned 12 year olds runs right into me and gives my stomach a healthy shove (he couldn’t reach my chest).

I look down into his snarling mask of a face and from the crack in his sneer, he spits more vulgarities at me in 5 seconds than I use in a month (and I’m 25 and not afraid of a little fucking shit here and there) before strutting by.

I say a few parting pleasantries to his back and let my bladder take me inside the bathroom, where it finds a deliciously free stall in which it can empty itself in privacy. I’m unzipping, trying to ignore the turd-encrusted toilet, when I overhear some prepubescent voices saying things no prepubescent voice should ever say. I’m a bit blurry on details, but here’s what I can recall:

Voice one, tough-sounding and squeakily high pitched: Nah, muthafucka, I got the shit right here. Pay up.

Voice two, slightly deeper but somewhat less tough: Man, fuck that!! You owe me from last time, shorting my ass like that, you owe me!

Squeaker: Mother fucker. The shit is right here [he drops something down onto the back of the toilet, next to where the pipe fits into the wall; its a small ziploc bag rolled into a 1-inch cylinder, the tint of green visible beneath the layers of rolled plastic). You want it?

Deeper: Yeah, I’ll take it, punk ass, but you still owe me. [green bills drop down on the white ceramic, on top of and perpendicular to the faintly glimmering green plastic bag of weed]

Squeaker: Whatever. [a too small hand scoops up the bills, too small feet make almost no noise as they patter out, and the stall and bathroom doors slam in succession]

Deeper: Motherfucker. [another small hand snatches the bag and he scoots out discreetly. neither one washed their hands on the way out, I notice]

I stand spread-eagled over the toilet, frozen in shock -- unable to pee for trying to reconcile the fresh images and sounds with my previous experience with 12 year olds who just want to have water fights and spill kool-aid everywhere. A rusty bell clangs somewhere in the distance, scaring the piss out of me, and I realize I’m late for class.

I’m standing outside, looking in the window of a darkened classroom which must be mine. Through a crack in the cheap nylon drapes I can see they’re watching a movie. I get the distinct feeling that this is the same classroom in which I had social studies back in 9th grade. I walk in just as the reel-to-reel projector clackity-clacks its way through the end of the reel. Strangely, I know what they just watched (maybe I caught part of it while standing outside), and as the teacher hands out a pop quiz, I’m both nervous and confident that I’ll do fine if I can only remember that one detail just out of reach, just on the periphery of consciousness.

Empty-handed, backpackless (sin mochila, for you Spanish speakers) and sweaty, I borrow a torn half-page of ruled binder paper and a chewed pencil and I stare at the scrawled quiz question, delineated in severe chalk slashes against the dusty dark green of the chalkboard. The letters were written in a hand so heavy that the chalk left thick white clumps on the edges of the straight lines; the fat horizontal top line of the capital “T” is a powdery trench deeper in the middle and ridged on the edges.

I sit, struggle, and sweat. I know I know the answer. If I can only remember. Remember. Remember. Remember. I think on in frustration.

As I simmer in furiously forced cognition, memories pound into my head like angry surf on the rocks at Big Sur – opening a hundred lockers, going to a hundred football games an spirit rallies, sitting in a thousand classrooms, glancing into a thousand sets of sparkling flirtatious eyes, feeling my heart beat quicker as a thousand cute lips curl up at the edges and a thousand eyelids bat coquettishly.

I didn’t remember the answer to that quiz, in my dream last night, but through all my years of schooling, for all the pop quizzes I aced, what I remember most are not the answers, not a) Benedict Arnold, b) The Raven, c) Prague, or even d) the Teapot Dome Scandal; what I remember most are the shining eyes and smiling faces of all the beautiful girls I ever had the privilege of sitting next to, and all the sweet secret moments we saved from the dullness of the average school day.

And here, now, in my cubicle in the third story, making $X0,000 dollars a year, all I want is to be back in one of those classrooms, staring into those eyes and feeling my heart beat faster as those lips smile, just for me.

-tn (2003)