I started writing this months ago, and published two parts of it before the whole COVID 19 lockdown. But when that started I kind of lost the thread. Now I’ve finished it, and I did an audio version of it for my podcast, which you can find here. I even included audio clips from Marv Albert and John Andariese, But here’s the whole piece written out, pretty much, in it’s most recent version (with lots of stuff cut from the original part 1 and part 2, and some stuff added). It’s not a transcript because I added some stuff while I was doing it live, but it’s mostly there. I’m not sure when a thing is done. The weird thing about writing this stuff, versus writing stand-up, is that I get no feedback before it is put out into the world. So it may change again. Writing is re-writing. But if you’re not re-writing it right now it’s writing. So here’s some (writing):
It’s April, 1995.
I’m in my 6th year of teaching junior high school in New York City, my fifth year at IS 44. My boss (I call her my boss, in writing this and in conversation back then, but she’s really my supervisor- the junior high school equivalent of a department head/vice-principal?) tells me the choir teacher wants to speak to me. It still doesn’t thrill me when teachers want to see me to this day, and this goes all the way back to childhood: it’s never because things are going great. But sure, okay.
I go down to the choir room. The choir teacher (let’s call her Ms. Gregor) is a short, rotund, highly energized, charismatic woman- exactly the kind of person you would expect the choir teacher to be. Or maybe, exactly the kind of person you would expect to be a choir teacher. You could look at her, and picture her with her back to the audience, waving her arms in time to the music (conducting, I guess you’d call it) and mouthing along with the kids, having an absolute fucking blast. Unlike the junior high school bandleader I had who I remember at a concert we did at an elementary school in my home town conducing us, and because he was facing away from the audience he felt okay screaming, “You trumpets are shit! You come from the shit!” Now I was a saxophone, not a trumpet, so I did not feel personally attacked. I guess maybe they were late coming in, or off beat, or flat, or something... What I’m really saying is that by the time I was twelve I was a touring musician.
Ms. Gregor always wore beautiful kente cloth clothing with matching kente cloth caps, which nowadays obviously is controversial (TRUMP VOICE)(“thanks to the radical socialist antifa thug Democrat party”). She wore those plastic and wire frame glasses that remind me of FBI agents, like Willem Defoe in Mississippi Burning, or Andy McCabe, in the Deep State.
By the way Willem Defoe was 33 in that movie, the same age as Jesus was when he was crucified, which Defoe enacted in The Last Temptation of Christ, which came out the same year, when Defoe was 33. Doesn’t Defoe seem like he was 60 from the first time you saw him? In Platoon he was 31, in To Live and Die in LA he was 30- I’m at the age now in 2020 where I am fascinated by how old people were when they did certain things, and how old they were when I became aware of them. By the way, of course you’ve seen Platoon, but if you haven’t seen TO Live and Die in LA, you really should- I swear it has the greatest car chase ever caught on film , along with a score by Wang Chung!
As a junior high school choir teacher who deals with some difficult kids, Ms. Gregor has an advantage over me, a lowly science teacher. Everybody in the choir is there because they want to be there. I mean, they even get to miss other classes sometimes, like science, so they can go sing Wind Beneath My Wings or some shit. So if Ms. Gregor even starts to think about not letting them be in the choir anymore, they immediately behave perfectly for months at a time (I imagine, at least. I’m jealous, because if I threaten a kid with not being allowed to come to science class anymore, that’s... not a threat). TOUGH GUY VOICE: Hey, unless you get Liver Lips Louie the whole nut by Friday, we’re gonna have to take you down to the docks and give you a warm full body oil massage, and then we’ll drop you at Dave and Buster’s with a ten dollar roll of quarters. IS that really how you wanna play this?
She wants to know if I will chaperone a choir trip. The choir is going to participate in a competition at the Kings Dominion Amusement Park in Virginia. 110 students are going to get on three buses (not those chunky yellow school buses, that the kids used to call cheese busses, no no- the nice ones with velour seats that are supposed to tilt back but mostly don’t anymore. U know, the ones with bathrooms that you aren’t supposed to actually use because if you do you’ll activate the chemicals that will make the entire bus stink like Lysol’s butthole so PLEASE wait til we get to the rest stop). They’ll ride for eight or nine hours, sleep at a hotel, get up and perform, spend the day in the amusement park, go back to the hotel for another night (by which time if any of them stayed up all night the first night those darn kids will probably be so exhausted they won’t even be able to keep their eyes open), then board the buses again the next day for the eight or nine hour ride back UP the interstate to their homes in New York City.
There are a couple of reasons she wants me to come on this trip:
The school is divided into mini-schools (pretty catchy name, right?), smaller groupings within the school that divided the kids and the teachers, according to interest and/or ability. There are seven of them: The Art School (for kids who were into Art stuff- along with the three R’s they could take the 3 D’s Dance Drama, and Art), the Science School (for kids who were more into the world’s practical aspects, not pie in the sky dreamers like those Art school weirdoes), the Discovery Program (for kids with special needs- some of them had physical and/or mental disabilities, and others were classified as special needs because of behavioral problems, which without getting into a whole thing about it has always seemed dicey to me- like, one person’s behavioral problem could be somebody else’s difficult but charming wiseass- where do you draw the line? It was definitely stigmatizing, and it was also a way of dealing with kids that people just didn’t like or couldn’t handle- put ‘em in special ed), the Columbus Academy (which was for kids who thought they were smarter than everybody else- whose smart now, Columbus Academy?), the Computer School (which was for kids who actually were smarter than everybody else- like the kids who could do more with computers in 1995 than program 10 PRINT HELLO 20 GO TO 10 and break the screen), the Bilingual Program (for native Spanish speakers- and by the way, as for me, I’m tri- lingual- I’ll try any...), and then MY program, which is called the Environmental Studies Program.
The Environmental Studies Program is designed for students with a high degree of climate change awareness, a distaste for toxic pollutants and the corporations who manufacture them, a willingness to work closely with whistleblowers no matter what the personal cost, and the financial backing to purchase their own pH balance testing kits as well as floral and fauna field guides, with which they would monitor... just kidding. The people in charge named it The Environmental Studies Program after they got funding for it, but before they knew what it was. That was right before I was hired. No attempt was ever made to get the programming for the students to match the name of the mini-school, but cool name, right? ESP. Let’s hunt for ghosts or test predictions... nope It’s just four classes, about 120 students at any given time: a lot of kids who were asked to leave other programs for disciplinary reasons but haven’t been classified as special needs (yet), or kids who didn’t get into other programs, or kids who transferred into the school mid-year, or kids who don’t have particularly engaged parents to advocate for them, or kids who have just accidentally ended up there (I’m saying nobody WANTS to get into this program, nobody applied to be here). A lot of the kids are difficult, they aren’t always on their best behavior. And everybody knows they’re the kids who didn’t get to go anywhere else. Everybody else in the school referrs to the kids in the E.S.P. program as the Especially Stupid People, even some of the teachers. And the kids know it. But they most of all, they are sweet, kind 11 and 12 and 13 year olds trying to figure out how to get by. Like all of us, except for the age part.
Ms. Gregor tells me she’s gonna take some of my kids on the trip, but she’s nervous about it. She knows they can be difficult, and she can’t kick anybody out of the choir when they’re eight hours away from the school, and she wants somebody who knows them along. Most of this is of course unsaid, but I get the subtext.
She’s also bringing a hundred and ten kids total, like I said, and has three Moms and and a female teacher from the science school coming as chaperones, but no male chaperones. Just little old me.
She also lets me know there are a couple of other kids coming, kids I don’t know but who she sometimes finds particularly difficult to deal with. And when a teacher like Ms. Gregor says a kid is difficult, it means that kid has major behavioral problems. That’s how you say it without saying i.t Otherwise you have to say something like, they are fucking huge pain in the ass who never shuts the fuck up or sits the fuck down or does what the fuck they’re supposed to.
I would be assigned to pay close attention to those kids too, just in case, and one of them would have to share a room with me- that was the only way they would let him come on the trip. Like they couldn’t imagine that if this kid didn’t have somebody watching him ALL THE TIME, he wouldn’t burn down the hotel, or run away, or take a cube from the ice machine with his fingers, or something horrible.
But they were still letting him come. That was one of the things I always really liked about Ms. Gregor, in particular, but also lots of teachers. Sure, some of them are total clock-punchers, civil servants who come in every day talking about how much longer they have til their pensions kick in. There was one guy who would come by my room every year on the first day of school and go, “Well, only 187 days to go.” Which, fine, day one it’s mildly amusing. Day 62 when he comes by and says “Well, only 125 days to go,” and you know he’ll be there again tomorrow for day 63 slash 124 as he has been every day and will every day be, you just want to shake him say feel free to no longer force me to share in your shitty outlook. But their were also teachers who believed that every kid deserved a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, ad infinitum, and if you just kept giving them chances they might eventually get it. Compassion, mercy, forgiveness, optimism, hope... I honestly don’t think anybody has more of these qualities than good junior high school teachers.
I’m in, Ms. Gregor. Let the chips fall where they may. And Fall They Will. Abso fucking lutely.
NOW IT’S A FRIDAY, 8:36 AM, SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHERN NEW JERSEY (OR SOUTH JERSEY AS WE CALL IT IN THE NORTHEAST)
I’m on a bus with a bunch of junior high school kids. Probably Peter Pan Bus lines (I say that because that’s the one I remember, but there were others). I don’t remember for sure and I didn’t write it down, but I’m probably slightly overcaffeinated, a little sleepy, and deeply nervous. Not just because of the caffeine, but because I’m one of the “responsible adults” on this trip, and that feels like a lot.
Oh by the way it’s May 19, still 1995. I’m younger. More naive? Less aware of my shortcomings? I’m not sure. I do know that if somebody asked me to do something like this now in 2020 I would most likely decline immediately. Back then? Happy to!
Even though I’m well aware even then (now?) (TENSE) that things can instantly go sideways when you’re out in the world with a bunch of kids (your own kids, things will probably go sideways at some point- other people’s, they definitely will).
Like, there was the time I took some kids to see a play about Frederick Douglas, and the actor playing the horribly racist white overseer was so good (and, let’s be honest, the part he was playing was less than sympathetic to begin with) that when he came out for a curtain call, one of my students, sitting a number of rows back in the audience, hawked a lugie and spat on him. That’s a pretty awkward three-way post-show backstage apology conversation.
Or the time I took my students to Dorney Park (a combination amusement park and water park in Pennsylvania that the ESP program went to at the end of every school year, because what could be more fun and less nerve-wracking than making sure you’re simultaneously watching 100 kids in the wave pool? AND I say 100 because they didn’t all go in at once) and security came to get me because one of my kids had tried to walk out of the gift shop with a bunch of sweatshirts under her sweatshirt. She very convincingly and with a straight face explained to me she had no idea how they got there. And it puts you in this weird position where part of you is like “Stealing is wrong, and against the law,” and part of you is like, “This is my kid and she was just stealing sweatshirts from a combination amusement park and water park gift shop, let’s everybody just take a breath. I know her. She’s a good kid. ”
Or the time I told my boss that I was gonna go check out the brand new Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, across the Hudson River. I was a science teacher, and it looked like a cool place, so I wanted to go. She suggested I open the trip up to any kids who wanted to go with me during non-school time. I was like, sure, I mean, they won’t, but okay. That’s how I ended up on a Sunday (a goddam Sunday, for shit’s sake) taking the ferry over there with seven 8th grade girls who were nerdy enough to wanna do something like that on a Sunday, and we all had a great time wandering through the exhibits, learning about science and stuff, and getting lunch in the museum cafeteria, and then on the ferry ride home they were all giggling together and finally they couldn’t help confessing to me that one of the girls (the one who I would least have expected it from- the nerdiest, but of course that’s why she did it) had gotten her lunch tray together in the cafeteria and then walked out without paying for anything. And now we were on our way home and there wasn’t really a lot I could do. Turn the boat around? Swim back? I could scold her, and make her feel bad, which I did. And of course that’s very effective with a kid like that. Which is exactly what makes it unsatisfying.
Or the time I took a bunch of kids over to the park by the river, just a nice afternoon , why not, it’s New York City in the spring, let’s cut science class and go run around by the river, and as we were walking back to school a guy on a motorcycle rode by in the other direction, and then I heard the motorcycle get louder again and the guy skidded to a stop in front of me and ripped his helmet off and angrily demanded that action be taken against the kid who had, unbeknownst to me, picked up a chunk of asphalt and thrown it at the guy as he rode by. Didn’t hit him, thank goodness, so I was able to talk him down and promise repercussions. “I am so sorry, I promise you that when we get back to the school I will blah blah blah.” He started at me, put his helmet back on, and vroooom, he was gone. It was too long ago to do this, but I kinda wish I could have said, do you enjoy being a motor? Those are some weird commercials.
So I’m sitting on the bus and I’m probably thinking something like, I’m absolutely sure this trip is going to be great! Especially given the kids I’m responsible for. I mean, I’m responsible for all of them, that’s the nature of chaperone- cy?
But there are two in particular I’m supposed to keep my eye on (aside from my roommate, who I didn’t know and who was described to me as incredibly difficult, like you’ve never dealt wiht a kid like this, and first of all yes I have, and second the only difficulty I had with him was the amount of Brut by Faberge he would spray onto the white t-shirt he ironed to put on before dinner both nights because no matter what I said he knew for a fact that the more Brut by Faberge the more the girls, right Joe Namath?
One of the kids I’m supposed to keep an eye on is a kid named Jennifer who has been a student of mine for several years. Both in science class, and in my homeroom.
See by the time I started my fourth year of teaching, I kind of pretty much knew what I was doing, and how to handle a class (it took a while but I got there). I’d had various homerooms before this, but I was always new at being a teacher and they weren’t new at being students. So they were kind of in charge. But with these kids, they were mine from their first day of 6th grade. For homeroom, and for science. Had em for 6th grade. Had em for 7thgrade. So that’s almost two hours a day, and sometimes more if we have a lab, five days a week. After two full years together, we were like a family. So of course in their 8th grade year, my boss decided that they should no longer be my homeroom, probably primarily because they would complain about her to me and I would sometimes take their side, because sometimes their complaints were legitimate. Like when we went to the aforementioned Dorney Park toward the end of their 7th grade year, and my boss decided it would be okay to bring a few of her former students who were now like seniors in high school with us, because who knows why, I mean we’re on a school trip so why not add some unpredictable variables into the mix, and a couple of these 12th grade girls got into a fight on the bus on the way there with one of my 7th grade girls. My kid blamed it on them, they blamed it on her, and my boss’s solution was, my kid should just stay on the bus for the day when we got to the park. By herself. For the entire day. I had no idea how the fight started or what it was about, but no matter whose fault it was I knew there would not have been a fight if those 12th graders weren’t with us, so this punishment seemed to me unjust. I expressed this to my boss. She disagreed. So I told her that was fine, but if my kid had to stay on the bus, I would stay with her. Not the coolest, most responsible move you can make on a school trip when you’re the teacher, but there it is. YOU boss me? NO. I boss you. My boss let me know how she felt, got off the boss with all the other kids, stomped around for a few minutes, then came back on the bus and said, fine, she can come, just let’s go. We’ve gotta get to the Wave Pool. And the Buccanneer, I think that was a big ride at Dorney Park.
So she resented stuff like that, my relationship with them, and made sure in 8th grade I was no longer their home room teacher. Which upset me, and upset the kids. It caused a whole kerfuffle. Have you ever had a kerfuffle? They’re a New york thing. You can still get them at Katz’s on the Lower East Side. Take out only though, and wear a mask, please.
By the way, like I said these kids were in 8th grade in 1995, so they graduated, and moved on with their lives. In 2010 I was visiting New York at Christmastime. I was doing a show at the UCB theater in Chelsea, and I put it up on Facebook, and somehow these kids found out about it and 10 or 12 of them showed up. It was mindblowing. Would you go see your 8th grade science teacher do stand-up 15 years after you graduated 8th grade? Of course by then none of them were kids anymore, and most of them had kids. Except for two of them who reconnected that night and ended up getting married... this is all true by the way... I think...
Anyway, by May of her 8th grade year I had been dealing with Jennifer for almost three years. And our relationship was definitely up and down. Sometimes kids act out in school because of stuff that’s going on outside the school. At home, or in the streets. I won’t get into her personal business, which there was a lot of, but at some point in 8thgrade she was being so difficult every time we had science class that I finally made her change desks and move up so she sat right in front of me. Which of course was exactly what she wanted, but it made class 100 times easier. She was way calmer. Being a teacher is sometimes about manipulating students into thinking they are manipulating you. Every few weeks she would show up to class with an unopened bag of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies, which coincidentally are my favorite, and she and I would, over the course of 50 minutes, split the bag between the two of us. Yes, while I was teaching all the kids about sow bugs, or C 6 H 12 O 6, or Uranus is a gas giant, or whatever. And none of the other kids complained, and I really think it didn’t bother them- like I said, we had all been dealing with each other for years by then. We all knew what compromises had to be made to get through our days. Fortunately, mine was eating a sleeve and a half of bag of Chessmen. Upon reflection, yes, I’m not sure who was manipulating who into believing who was manipulating who was manipulating. But there were levels.
Having dealt with her for so long, and because, like I said, things were up and down, I had also come to know her mother fairly well. And her mother, knowing that Jennifer was going on this trip, and that I was also going, came to me and said, I want you to handle her money. I cannot trust her to have her own money, because she’ll spend it all right away on some bullshit and then have nothing for the rest of the trip. And I agreed. So while we were loading the busses, right out on 77th street between Columbus and Amsterdam, the mom handed me an envelope of cash, I don’t remember how much, probably, I don’t know 8 or 9 thousand dollars. It was, after all, a three-day trip. And she said, I want you to only give her five dollars at a time because she's going to keep coming to you, and keep coming and keep coming, and keep wanting to buy more and more stuff. And she just can't do that. So maybe sometimes you can talk her out of it. Sure. Maybe I can talk her out of it.
Another kid who I didn’t know and had never dealt with but was supposed to keep an eye on was an 8th grade boy named James. As best I could tell, the thing that made James difficult was that he was 12 or 13 years old and openly gay, and totally fine with it. Imagine Rupaul in 8th grade, but more comfortable with himself. In my limited experience, it’s unusual for a kid that age to be that out, to EVERYBODY—I didn’t even come out to my parents until I was in my late 30’s (and that was as straight). But as difficult as things probably were for him, everybody around him, his peers I mean, all seemed fine with it. I’d seen him around school, he was hard to miss-- loud, demonstrative, sometimes rude, always surrounded by a large group of girls who would defend him to the death. It may have upset some teachers that he had a lot of “attitude,” and it may also have upset some of them that he tended to favor muscle shirts and short shorts and spangly nail polish. It’s difficult to pull any of those off individually, but he made it all work. He was tall and skinny and a beautiful kid, but he definitely had a reputation as difficult.
So we load everybody on three buses, a hundred and ten students including James and Jennifer, who of course are best pals by the way, who could’ve seen that coming, and also four deeply deeply middle-aged women, almost elderly, certainly far more sagacious and infirm than I (who were probably 10 or 15 years younger then than I am now) (oh boy, here we go again), and another teacher named Lisa, who was very nice if a little fussy, and Ms. Gregor. So yeah, like I said, I’m on a Peter Pan Bus in South Jersey, somehwere in South Jersey. I said that, right? 8:36 AM?
I-95 is 1908 miles long. It starts in Miami, Florida, and ends in Maine at the border with New Brunswick Cnada. It is the longest of the North South Interstates, and the 6th longest of all the interstates. It passes through more states than any other interstate, 15, as well as the District of Columbia, which will be a state someday.
We’re in Jersey, South Jersey, did I say that? Then Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and finally Virginia.
That first day is all travelling. I know maybe a little of some of what the kids are probably feeling, since I took a similar trip when I was in 6th grade. My class and my brother’s class went to Washington DC for three days. Although there was nothing competitive about it, it was purely educational. We saw all the DC things- the Declaration of Independence, the Washington Monument, the White House, Lincoln’s Tomb...
I have very specific memories of being very dramatically upset at the Arlington National Cemetery, 12 years old, surrounded and overwhelmed by Death. We didn’t see the President while we were in DC, but that was okay because we had seen him earlier that year at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City when we went to see Aida, he was in the presidential box right in the middle of the first balcony and we waved to him from the bleachers, they call it the Family Circle at the Met but it’s the bleachers, and he waved back, which was thrilling of course but still didn’t help him get the hostages back from Iran.
And like the kids I’m chaperoning, we were staying four to a hotel room, you know, two queen beds with four kids in them. We stayed up all night talking, throwing food at each other- I specifically remember green grapes being mashed into a rug... but we did not dare leave those rooms, which will turn out not to be the case with the kids on this trip.
The big social activity when we went to DC was, both classes were gonna go see the movie Hair. A classic 70s flick, of course, in which there was a little nudity so it had a PG rating.
This meant they sent permission slips home with all the kids and my parents, out of the 50 or 60 parents or sets of parents between the two classes on the trip, were the only parents who wouldn’t sign the permission slip. PG was a bridge too far for them. Just too fast for my brother and myself. They’re a gateway- it goes PG movies, crack, armed robbery, prison break, standoff, we’re gonna start shooting hostages, etc. And my parents just didn’t wnat that for us.
So the night that everybody went to see Hair, my brother and I went with our friend David and his father, who was chaperoning that trip, to see The Champ. Rated G. Starring Ricky Schroeder, before Silver Spoons, before he became Rick, before Lonesome Dove, before NYPD Blue. And also Jon Voight. 6th grade. I wanted so bad to be just like everybody else, so going to see the Champ, instead of Hair with everybody else, was very stressful. I wonder now, if my parents had known what John Voigt’s politics have turned out to be, would maybe have rather we supported hippies dancing and protesting, despite their brief nudity, than a Fox News addled lunatic pretending to fight the Bounty Hunter from Raising Arizona til the Lady from Barfly tells Ricky to take him out behind the barn and put him out of all of their misery. Spoiler alert. By the way I just realized I still have never seen Hair. But I’ve also never shot hostages. My parents were right.
The thing I remember the most from that 6th grade trip is you’re just really excited the whole time. You're so excited to be away, and on your own, and stuff happens like you stop somewhere for food, not a rest stop but one step above, a cafeteria type place, and everybody gets their food and then a little cup of ice cream for dessert, you know those cups of ice cream that are half chocolate and half vanilla and you get a little wooden paddle to eat it with, not a spoon cuz treating wood so it holds a curve is too expensive, and there’s a girl in the class you like but you don’t exactly know how to deal with that so you steal her little cup of ice cream, and you’re throwing the little cup of ice cream back and forth with a friend, playing keep away from the girl, and you’re running around the cafeteria throwing this cup of ice cream, laughing, and you throw it to your friend but your aim is not great and it goes awry and you watch it sail across the room, and hit your teacher right in the coffee cup, spilling coffee all down her shirt. And this is the only teacher you’ve ever had where you already know for a fact that she despises you, because one day she just loses her shit at you in class for a reason you coulnd’t understand then and still don’t but probably had to do with you being silly, you’re sometimes a very silly kid, silly enough that later in life you’ll be a sometimes silly middle aged man who acts silly onstage in front of other people, so she stops everything that day in class and yells at you in front of everybody about how you need to stop showing off just because you have a crush on some girl in this class, and she knows who it is, and she could easily tell the girl you have a crush on that you have a crush on her... What a shitty thing for a teacher to do, to go out of her way to embarass a child in front of the rest of the class. Yeah, she despises you.
Or maybe she doesn’t and she was just having a bad day. One time I told one of my seventh grade students to suck my dick, to his face, but in my defense that was on the street, out on Broadway, not in school, so different rules apply. He was with a bunch of kids I didn’t know and they were all harassing me, I honestly don’t remember how, but he and I talked about it later in school and I apologized for my inappropriateness, and he apologized for his actions and we stayed close and it was fine and I never did anything like that again no matter what.
But she never apologizes, and now you spilled coffee all down her shirt, and it’s horrifying. The pit of your stomach drops out and you feel like you're falling even though you’re just standing there and you’re like oh my god what have I done? I'm the worst person. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I apologize. And she goes, what else would I expect from you?
So I know the kids are going to be hyped up. And we get to the hotel the first night, and I’m a little worried, but I also know that there are a number of other chaperones. I think lights out for the kids is at 10, but as soon as the sun goes down all the other chaperones are in bed, asleep. They’re like reverse vampires.
So it’s just me out there all night. From dusk til dawn. Roaming the hallways trying to usher kids back in their room. 110 kids, and about ten of them were mine and the rest I don’t really know. I don’t even know any of their names. And if you don’t know a kid’s name? They have all the power. I try, as I always do when I’m teaching, to listen carefully for names, and then I wield them like weapons: “Hey, guys, it’s 2 in the morning, and you have a competition tomorrow. Why don’t you put that picture back on the wall, just hang it up again, and go into your rooms and get some sleep?” “Don’t listen to that man! He doesn’t KNOW us!” “Oh really, I dont? Rumpelstiltskin?” “Oh shit.” “Alright, I’m going to bed.”
The next day the kids all got dressed up and sang in their competition.
I don't think they won, but they were great. The really made me feel like I was the wind beneath their wings, even though I could barely keep my eyes open. And it was still only day two.
Then, we went to the park.
There were lots of rides. I did not go on any, because I was too busy being worried. I was on high alert. You can’t be on high alert while you’re on the Intimidator 305...
By the way, I don’t even remember if the Intimidator 305 was there in 1995, I’m sure ride technology has improved a lot in the last 25 years, like so many other things, like economic inequality and racism.
The one ride ride I remember going on was the tram.
Which doesn’t even really count as a ride.
It was just an open air tram, and you get into a car and it would take you up and over the park and then down on the other side. So I’m on line, (and yes, I say on line, not in line, and at that time the difference between on line and in line would not have caused any confusion), and I’m waiting for the tram, and along come Jennifer and James, because Jennifer needs money. I gently try to argue her out of whatever she needs to buy, as her mother asked me too. I fail spectacularly, as I knew I would. Then, while we’re talking, Jennifer and James decide that it will be fun to go on the tram with me. Which is completely fine with me. Unfortunately it does not sit well with the two guys right behind me.
When I was a kid, if you were on line, you could give people frontsies and then they would give you frontsies, and there wasn’t really a lot the people behind you could do, adn it technically wasn’t cutting the line. That was just how it was. Not the case, at Kings Dominion. I hear one of the guys behind me say, “Look at fuckin’ Buddy Holly.” And I become aware he’s referring to me. And it kind of fits. I’m mid-twenties, clean shaven, lots of hair and large thick-rimmed spectacles. I know “Buddy Holly” is code for dorky near sighted white guy, and while not nearly as hurtful as it was intended to be, I get the message, which boils down to “Fuck you, nerd.” And let me paint a picture of these guys. Around my age, slightly older than Buddy Holly will always be, mid twenties, and by the way I just looked it up and Buddy Holly was born the exact same day as my Dad so if he hadn’t died at 22 he’d now be 83, so these guys are mid-twenties, beginner bellies, sleeveless flannel shirts, scraggly facial hair, mullets, toothless, baggie cutoff jean shorts, one of them crosseyed with a crossbow over his shoulder, the other holding a dead turkey and a bottle of Natty Light by their necks... ok I don’t remember what they look like, I only remember the things they say, but this picture is what my mind conjures up when I think of them, so it’s accurate, though not truthful. “Look at fuckin’ Buddy Holly.”
An easy insult to disregard, especailly when you are the adult responsible for 110 kids loose in the park. I also get it, a little. These kids did just cut the line, which isn’t totally legit. Still, ultimately who cares?
“Fuckin’ Buddy.” James and Jennifer hear it too, and know what’s going on. “Just lettin these fucking kids walk right up to the front of the line.”
Remember, this is a tram. For transportation only, not thrills. It’s going to save all of us about 7 minutes of walking, tops. A quarter mile? The guys are pissed, and I am ignoring them, which angers them more. They need to take it up a notch. “Fuckin’ Buddy. Lettin’ these kids in. Hey. I bet Buddy’s fuckin’ the girl. You fuckin’ the girl, Buddy?”
I’m still ignoring them. Jennifer and James are silent. It’s weird now, not just hostile. None of us know how to respond. Then this:
“Nah, I bet he’s fuckin’ the kid. Look at that kid. Buddy’s definitely fuckin that kid. Hey Buddy, you love fuckin’ that kid? Make ya feel good?”
The air is now drenched with homophobia, and racism, and pending violence. In fact, if this were real life, by now there would have been fisticuffs. Knockanolums. A donnybrook. I’ve been there before, numerous times. Not saying I’m good at it, in fact I mostly lose or tie. Lifetime I’m probably about 0-6-12. But we can do it, if you want. I’ll go. But of course in real life, I wouldn’t have been with two children. This is not real life. It’s a class trip. And, in defense of Hatfield and McCoy, they may not realize that I am teacher, with my students, here for a choir competition. They may well think I am an exceptionally brazen pedophile on a triple date. I have no idea how common seeing that was for them.
The tram car arrives. Jennifer, James and I board in silence. The car continues up and out across the park. The Army of Northern Virginia get on the car behind us, and they’re still chirping, louder now, because they’re angrier, but also because we’re farther apart, by nature of how a tram is structured. It’s like a chase where nobody gains, but nobody loses. They’re not yelling, but a librarian would be freaking out, and so would their minister, because they’re saying some incredibly uncharitable shit. Jennifer and James and I are silent, not sure what to say or do. I give Jennifer some money, and tell her to go have fun when we get off. All three of us are nervous. We get to the other side, and Jennifer and James head into the park. I walk down a hill, not sure where I am going, just trying to get away from whatever that was. That hideousness. I’msuddenly alone, behind a bunch of trailers, not sure why they were there, but no rides back here, and as I become fully aware of my aloneness that I hear footsteps behind me in the distance, quick, hurrying toward me. I am not alone. I realize the Pre-Boogaloo Boy Boogaloo Bois are about to jump me. Maybe this is about to be real life.
I brace myself to get into it with these guys. I steel my resolve. I turn and it's Jennifer and James running up like what the hell was the matter with those guys, Mr. Conroy? And suddenly we’re all laughing and mocking them and everything’s fine and we’re just back on a class trip, and Jennifer says don’t worry we got your back Mr. Conroy (ha as if I was worried) and they better step off or I will fuck them up, and we go get cotton candy and then they go off into the park and the rest of the day passes and that night is worse than the first because the chaperones are all exhausted and the kids aren’t and I roam the halls alone and harass Rumpelstiltskin and the other kids back into their rooms and by dawn the hotel is still standing and we get on the bus and head back up through Virginia up into Maryland and Delaware and Pennsylvania and I’m guessing we’re in South Jersey again and we stop at a rest stop and in the lobby of the rest stop, surrounded by the MacDOnald’s and the TCBY and the gift shop full of New Jersey State magnets and license plates with names on them and the entrance to the service station and whatever else was there, somebody has set up a boom box and is listening to the 7th game of the NBA Eastern Conference semi-finals, my beloved Knicks are playing the Pacers and the Pacers stole game one when Reggie Miller scored 8 points in 18 seconds to win the game but now it’s tied 3-3 and there’s almost no time left, and there’s a hundred people in the rest stop, listening, Michael Jordan was out of the league all year because he supposedly retired but we’ve all seen the Last Dance now he’s come back so he’ll be with the Bulls from the start of next season so the window is closing on this Knicks team but if they win this game they could get past the Magic and go up against the Rockets for the second year in a row in the NBA finals and we’re frozen, like statues, listening, to the radio announce. Harper inbounds to Ewing, the clock is running out, Ewing tries a finger roll, misses. Game over.
And we stand there, all of us, frozen. Season over. Hopes dashed.
Then I trudge dejectedly back on the bus, and we head back to New York. May 21st 1995.
A month later my junior high school teaching career ends. The Knicks get back to the Finals in 99, the strike season, and lose to the Spurs, and have been a punchline ever since. I don’t know where James is now, I hope he’s doing well. Jennifer and I aren’t in touch, but we are friends on Facebook. She is a nurse in New York City, and I know she’s been working hard recently. She doesn’t know it, but I’m proud of her. She’s a grandmother now. And you better step off, or she will fuck you up.
