Tag Archives: autobiography

November 25, 2015 · 9:28 pm

The Terrible Strip Poker Game That Sealed My Fate

SUN GAMES

Any time you try to play Russian roulette with girlfriends, especially two girlfriends at once, especially especially two girlfriends who don’t like each other, you have to expect at some time or other, a gun is going to go off.  This happened to me during a card game.  And it was fatal.

Now, I should warn you, the innuendo in this story is R to X rated.  But the truth is neither of these two young ladies became my wife (although my wife is actually more like Ysandra than she is like Abby… a fact I probably should not reveal because I promised never to write a post like this about her).  I never consummated anything with either young lady, though in the course of five years of this double-trouble relationship thing, I had way more opportunities than I am comfortable with.  And I really don’t know if Ysandra would be upset or happy to know that she was not the first young lady I ever saw naked.

The trouble began when I said yes to Abby’s plan to have a card party at my place.  It didn’t seem like such a terrible idea at the outset.  Card parties were a thing on autumn or winter nights in the Midwest, and both Abby and I had family experiences with card parties.  Abby diligently invited others to attend.  She offered a tepid, half-hearted invitation to Ysandra… out of a sense of duty, I suppose.  She also invited Mother Mendoza to play cards with us.  Now, Endira Mendoza was the older sister of the 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Evangeline Delgado, and she had been a Catholic nun before taking a job in Cotulla to teach 7th grade Science.  Everyone called her “Mother” or “Mama” because she loved all her students like they were her own children.  And she disciplined them that way too.  “I am fed up with this nonsense!” was the phrase that her students dreaded because the use of the paddle was not banned in Texas schools in those days.  What could go wrong with a party that included everyone’s “Mama”?

Well, I didn’t know everything about the situation before I committed to the party.  Mother Mendoza looked upon Abby as the wild and carefree little sister that she always wanted and never had.  And Abby could do no wrong in her eyes.  So, apparently, she was actually in on the plot.

Ysandra never actually said no to the card party.  She just didn’t show up.  She and I had talked about the possibility of buying a house together and living together.  But she insisted she had been married and divorced for the last time in her life.  She had no intention of going through that again whether she ultimately decided whether she loved me or not.  And, while I had done her bidding and gotten in contact with the American Naturist Association in Tampa, Florida, and discovered there was a club near San Antonio, I had never actually done the naked tent-camping thing that we had discussed.

So there were only three of us at the card party.  We had the requisite soft drinks and snacks.  We had a small table to use and plenty of chairs.  And I had a pack of playing cards that I had bought at the local grocery store.  But, oh no… My cards were not to be considered.  Abby had been to a novelty store in San Antonio, and she had purchased some very special cards.

“We have to use these,” she said.  “I bought them just for you and for this card party.  Endira was with me.”

I should have realized what was going on as she pulled things out of the brown paper bag she brought with her.  They were pornographic playing cards.  Each and every one had a picture on it that would turn me bright purplish-red.

“We are going to play strip poker!” Abby announced.

I immediately looked to Mother Mendoza for the expected, “I am fed up with…” but it never came.  Endira just sat there with an embarrassed grin on her Catholic nun face.  Remember, Abby could do no wrong in her eyes.  And besides, I later learned that Abby had won her over with the temptation of getting to see me at least partially naked.  Loneliness can work strange magic even on the most virtuous of maidens.

“Urm… ah… I can’t possibly do that…” I mumbled, unable to contain my shame, and my knees visibly shaking.  “Can’t we play gin rummy or trump or one of the other card games we talked about?  I may have some UNO cards.”

“No.  We have to use the playing cards I bought, and there will be prizes if I win the gin rummy game.”

“Well, okay… I guess…”

So we played a hand of the most embarrassing game of gin rummy of my life.  I could barely stand to hold my cards in my hand, let alone look at them long enough to plan a winning strategy.

“Rummy!” she cried eventually, laying down a run of 2, 3, 4, and 5 of hearts matched with three Jacks.

“Oh, uh… another hand then?” I timidly said trying to avoid… you know.

“Oh, now, wait a minute, Mike.  You promised me my prize.”

“Um, I may have some pie in the refrigerator.”

“No.  My choice.  I bought you something.  You are going to model it for us.”

I could not speak.  She reached in her brown paper bag and pulled out a male g-string.  I am not going to tell you what happened next because I may have fainted.  Suffice it to say that everything in this story is true… except I changed the names.   Any lies that are part of this story are lies of omission.  There are certain things I can’t tell you even thirty years later.

Ysandra forced me to reveal every little detail about the card party on a later date, and she got one of the best laughs of her life over it… at my expense.

12240330_1064707073548623_4595113678298695739_o

I eventually said goodbye to both of these young ladies.  Between the two of them, although I later realized that I didn’t love either one of them, they managed to ease up my self-imposed sexual repression to the point that I would be able to marry when the next real opportunity came along.  Abby moved on to a job in San Antonio where she became something of a hero-type teacher when she ran down and karate-chopped a purse snatcher trying to steal school-event money from her after an organized bake sale.  Her fiance was with her when she stopped by my apartment to tell me about moving to South Carolina.  He witnessed her giving me a hug and a kiss to say goodbye.  I understand the two of them had two beautiful little blond-haired daughters, and were both still teaching the last time I had word.  Ysandra decided she was never going to change me enough to suit her.  And we parted ways about a year after Abby left.  I actually bought a year’s membership in a nudist club, but I never had to use it before she left me.  I wanted to part as friends, but she emphasized that she wanted me to be happy, and she was sure if I ever found a wife, that she would not appreciate Ysandra as a close female friend.  The last I knew she was still single, still living in Cotulla, and still getting her way about everything there at the center of the universe.

Life is like that.  You juggle two girlfriends at once, you are bound to drop them both.  But it turns out for the better in the end.

1 Comment

Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

November 23, 2015 · 8:45 pm

Juggling Girlfriends (a horror story)

I do not know if you know this about me or not (I’m guessing you probably don’t because most people in the world couldn’t care less about my personal life) but I once had two girlfriends at the same time.

The Chase

It is the kind of thing that Tony Curtis can make look cool.  But Mickey can’t.  You see, the whole nasty, sordid matter happened completely by accident, and I did not do any of the terrible things I did… well, intentionally.

To understand how this all happened, you have to understand that I was about as awkward a hobbledehoy (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobbledehoy) as it is possible to find in a modern world no longer considered Victorian in nature.  I had been molested as a child, and had my share of issues.  I made the character of Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory look like Don Juan by comparison.

000

I truthfully did not understand why young women would be interested in befriending me.  I had a pronounced tendency to address my need for female companionship that was not of the sister-variety by chasing after women I knew for certainly would only respond by running away from me screaming bloody murder.  There are mutant women out there so mousey that you can’t even look at them without making them flee.  That was the type I set my sights on.  I needed to try… but I also needed not to succeed.

Ysandra was definitely not in that category when I first laid eyes upon her.  She was working at our school as an instructional aid, mostly helping translate Spanish into English and vice versa for the ESL students who didn’t understand more than ten or twelve words in the language I was hired to teach them.  For three years she was in and out of my classroom, translating and helping, and making my life generally easier, though she was in the other English teachers’ classrooms more than mine.  I don’t know why I automatically assumed that if I worked up the courage to actually ask her to go on a date with me, she would run away in terror.  But I could not have asked her that question without assuming it would be exactly like that.  I was not courageous in the face of success.  I had been on three dates before that point in my life, and they all proceeded from the fact the woman involved was afraid to commit to anything more than letting me pay for her movie ticket and sitting two seats away from me with an empty seat between in the movie theater.  I would not have been able to handle it otherwise.  But Ysandra, it turned out, was not like that.  She was an aggressive Hispanic woman with an agenda.  Divorced once already, and determined never to let a man make her do anything she didn’t want to do ever again.  But there were things she wanted to do that would make me nauseous and even faint.

12011239_1014039818638712_6639957078442547175_n

At the same time as Ysandra’s terrifying acceptance of me, I was busy mentoring the first-year Reading teacher across the hall.  Abigail MacNutly was a robust blond girl from Wisconsin who had gotten her first teaching job in deep South Texas, and was in for the same kind of slam-a-frying-pan-in-your-face sort of culture shock I had experienced three years before.  I discovered, to my chagrin, that this out-going, vivacious, and enthusiastic young lady not only had a lot in common with me and needed to rely on me to make her way in the world of teaching, but she also lived in the apartment next door to me.  And she had no compunction whatsoever about knocking on my door late at night and asking to borrow something for her apartment with no furniture in it, and then inviting herself to watch TV with me in my apartment.  You know what all the old ladies in the neighborhood that watched both of us constantly would say about that!  And when I tried to tell her that I was not comfortable with that arrangement, she would use her thousand watt smile on me and convince me that I was too nutty to be believed.  She even told me that her grandmother (whom I met when she moved into the apartment next door) had told her she needed to marry me so that she could settle down enough to make her life work out better than her mother’s had.

So, here is the set up for a horror story of monstrous proportions.  I was a child-man with serious issues about the concept of intimacy.  I suddenly, within the space of a week at the beginning of a new school year (1984-85) had acquired two girlfriends.  One I had thought I was chasing, and one who was obviously chasing me.  It has the makings of a long and totally unbelievable tale that I not only can’t complete in only one post, but can’t possible get away with not telling.  So be warned…

3 Comments

Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

November 4, 2015 · 2:55 pm

Naked Hearts II

20151104_shawn

Writing about girls who were my students and fell in love with me is not mere bragging.  Yes, I mean it.  I am not bragging.  I was a skinny, nerdish white guy surrounded by Hispanic people and white crackers who looked sideways at me for being from the north.  I was not a love god in any sense of the term.  Young girls fell in love with me because they lived in a world that did not pay attention to them and wasn’t particularly kind to them in any recognizable way.  And as a teacher, I was nice to them.  I listened to them and tried to understand them.  They were not afraid to talk to me.  I used humor a lot in the classroom, and I made them feel like I cared about them more than the other teachers they had.  I am still not bragging.  It was the methods and best practices that I worked hard on to create a safe and caring classroom with, not any natural charm that I possessed.  It was those things that made little girls love me even when I got older and fatter and less good looking.  Although maybe I had the advantage of “pretty eyes”.  At least that seemed to be what they said to me the most, that I had “pretty blue eyes”.

Part Two : “Dance with me, Mr. B”

The Cotulla Junior High (sandwiched into the high school campus in the 80’s and 90’s) tried a number of baby-sitting tactics  to make schedules work out and keep teachers teaching most of the time.  In the very early 90’s we called the 30-minute baby-sitting class “Advisory”.  It was used as a study hall by the few who actually studied.  It was used as a social half-hour by most, and as recess by the immature few.  In 1990 it gave me the unique opportunity to get to know one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s very energetic little “Bluebirds”.

There were two girls who were the very best of friends in my noon-time advisory class.  Olivia Angeles was in my English 8 class because, although she was super-smart and hard-working, she had a touch of Dyslexia.  Reading was tough for her.  But her very best friend, Shannon Moreno, was one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s star kiddos who got stuck with the “Buzzards” for advisory.  But she didn’t mind it because she got to be with her best friend Olivia… and she got to exercise her evil genius on me.  I didn’t know it from the start of the year, but Shannon would quiz Olivia every day about my class, what jokes I told, what activities we did, and she read every one of Olivia’s journal entries because I wrote back to students in their journals and sometimes drew things in their notebooks.  (Journals were as much about communicating with the teacher as they were about practicing writing skills.  And I learned from Olivia’s journal about how vigorously Shannon had been stalking me.  Olivia told me.  And Shannon had even added her own saucy comments to that journal entry.  Two laughing jack-o-lanterns and a smiling skull got drawn on that page… probably not the clearest response I ever gave a student.)

So, we began a tease-war, the three of us.  Shannon became known as “Bean-body” in advisory, while I was “Owl-eyes” and Olivia was “Miss Nevertalk”.  So much for decorum and respect.  Nasty things were said with a smile, and I truly loved that twinkle in Shannon’s big brown eyes when she told me I was the worst teacher she had ever seen.

Advisory was used for UIL practice.  University Interscholastic League is the Texas educational organization that administers not only all high school and junior high sports in Texas, but scholastic subject-based competitions as well.  I was a successful Ready Writing coach, a contest where student-contestants are given a topic that they haven’t seen before, and are asked to create a contest essay in a two-hour time limit.  Olivia entered that, not because she was better at writing than she was at other things (she actually placed in the Math contest), but because she liked me as a teacher and wanted to be in my event.  Shannon was a better talker than a writer, so she was in Mrs. Delgado’s Impromptu Speaking event where, given a topic and five minutes to gather your thoughts, the student had to deliver a fully supported position speech totally out of their head on a prompt they had never seen before the contest began.  Shannon practiced on me constantly.

“Here’s why teachers should never tell jokes in class,” was one practice speech she laid into me with.  “This is why teachers with pretty blue eyes are an unnecessary distraction for female students,” was another.  I laughed at all the right places and let her actually convince me.

“You are just too good at this,” I said to Shannon.  “You have convinced me to leave teaching.”

“Don’t you dare!” insisted Olivia, even though I’m pretty sure she knew we were joking.

And then came the Junior High Dance around the middle of November.  It was student council sponsored and both Mrs. Delgado and Mrs. Soulwhipple recruited me to be an adult chaperon at the dance.  Well, you know how junior high dances go.  They play the principal-and-parent-approved music way too loudly.  The girls bunch up on one side of the gym.  The boys bunch up on the opposite side.  Nobody dances.  They just shout over top of the music at each other in single-sex conversations.  But Shannon was on the student council and determined to have none of that nonsense.  A half hour into the single-sex shouting and loud music, Shannon walked up to me.

“Dance with me, Mr. B!” she shouted.

“I can’t dance.  I have arthritis in my knees,” I responded.  (It was basically true, but also convenient.)

“But no one is dancing!” she whined.  She was actually close to tears, though I suspect that was about 75% her incredible acting ability.  “They will start dancing if you and I show them how.”

I relented, silly goof that I am.  I wandered out onto the dance floor/ basketball court and started to do the best twisty-two-step-dancing wiggle I could manage.  She did her own very graceful watusi-sort of rock-and-roll dance opposite me with a grin that melted my heart.  Low and behold, everybody started dancing.  Mostly girls at first.  But when one of the more dangerous greasers tried to make fun of me for dancing, I called his own manhood into question and shamed him into getting out on the floor to bust his own moves with his sweetie-kins.  After that they were all more embarrassed NOT to be dancing.  My efforts that evening earned me a hug and a thank you from Shannon.  The real thing.  No jokes.

And not just one hug, either.  She hugged me again after winning a third place ribbon at the UIL Impromptu Speaking competition.  And the hug she gave me at the 8th grade graduation ceremony was complete with tears.  And Shannon cried too.  Teachers are only allowed to love a student with teacher-love.  But my teacher-love for Shannon ran about as deep as any river of emotion ever could.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 29, 2015 · 2:42 pm

Supergirl (Another Review from the Uncritical Critic)

20151029_124840I watched the new Supergirl TV show on CBS via the internet, and I have to say… Wow!  Now, I am not that big of a Supergirl fan.  The comic book from my overly-massive comic book collection from 40-plus years of being a juvenile reader at heart is the only example I can find to illustrate Supergirl.  And I only own that one because my eldest son wanted it at age 11 because of the bare-midriff dress in the cover illustration.  I have never been all that fixated on Kara Jor-El’s belly button myself.  But don’t get me started on a discussion of superhero babes with bare body parts in comics… well, because I will end up telling you things about myself I really don’t want you to know.  But I do know enough of the Superman mythos to appreciate what the TV show has done with this character.

10984483_1593574117575550_874118510410584037_n

Superman himself has been a part of my life ever since I can remember.  I remember him in black-and-white as George Reeves from the time I was first allowed to pick TV shows for myself.

So, I watched this Supergirl show last night in spite of the fact that critics I have read basically hated it.  I don’t actually understand their disdain.  It had everything I love about comic books.  The characters were simply drawn and two-dimensional, which is exactly what a comic book character should be.  Kara was given a back-story that matches the comic book mythos quite well, and yet, other characters like Jimmy Olsen and her adopted sister are clearly innovative and new.  The villain was life-and-death terrible in the way that comic book villains are supposed to be.  He even died at the end of the episode as comic book villains are supposed to do in order to surprise us when they come back to life as comic book villains always do sooner or later.  Everyone seems to love the CW’s newest version of The Flash on TV because it has that distinctive funny/violent comic book bravado about it.  So why didn’t they see the same thing in this new show?  I think, with time, this new show will prove them wrong.  I like the lost-little-girl-turned-superhero story presented in this first episode.  I went in expecting not to like it, and was bedazzled and befuddled and be-everythinged  that you want this kind of show to do to you.

20151029_133542

I will not try to tell you that you should watch the show.  If you are comic-book nutty like I am, you have probably already seen this show, and nothing I could say or do would have a ghost of a chance of keeping you away from it, if that was what I wanted to accomplish.  And I know that many people hate this kind of thing with a passion.  But, being honest here… something I am sure you are aware I rarely ever intentionally do… I want you to watch it so it will become popular and stay on the air.  After all, a TV show like this will generate more dolls and toys to collect.  Ta-ta-ta- TAAAH!!!

6 Comments

Filed under humor, Supergirl, TV review

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 25, 2015 · 5:06 pm

I Go Pogo!

I gave you fair warning.  Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now.  So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD!  You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.

20151023_100825

Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios.  If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist.  In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him.  He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics.  He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.

04-03pogo

ask.metafilter.com

ask.metafilter.com

Walt Kelly's Earth Day comic

Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic

Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own.  It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.

maxriffner.com

maxriffner.com

Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most.  He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.

b227c4eae078c85a27fc90a1f879019dPogoDaily8111971

And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.

4e6f409ce9cc60572a222854e621f0f62205_splashpanel_pogo_6002128_ver1.0_640_480

As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me.  If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies.  There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.

20151024_121836

So what more can I say about Walt Kelly?  I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words.  And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.

Pogo and Mamzelle

7 Comments

Filed under cartoon review, cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 23, 2015 · 2:25 pm

Potpourri

“Potpourri” is a word I learned in 5th grade from Mrs. Reitz, my 5th and 6th grade teacher in Rowan Elementary School.  It means a mixture of flower petals and spices put together in a cloth bag or in a bowl, placed in a room to make it smell better in a perfumed sort of way.  But on her yellow bulletin board in dark blue letters, she taught us that it meant a mixture of things put together to make things better.  And she told us that education was a kind of potpourri because it took many different things all put together to truly educate a child.

So, why am I writing about a goofy word like that?  Well, thanks to Mrs. Reitz with her 1960’s polka-dotted old-lady dresses, her black and very staid cat-eye glasses that magnified her eyes, and her sensible shoes… I know that potpourri is the real secret to good writing.  That is my excuse for why this blog is so full of a variety of excessively goofy and off-the-wall things.  But it is not easy to do this every day, cherry-picking excessively goofy stuff out of my library, or out of my memory, or out of my own teaching experience, or even my nightly nightmares to post as another interesting bug in my butterfly-collection-style blog.  Therefore today’s post will be one of those gawd-awful list posts that gives you fair warning about what my fevered old retired teacher brain is trying to cook up for the daily lesson.

chicago-cubs-logo-976879 10954518_10152963574585659_7920789639743315661_n

  1.  It is time to do the happy dance because my curse worked.  For the 107th straight year the Chicago Cubs will not win another World Series.  The Mets beat them in four straight games.  I did it by switching my allegiance temporarily from the Cardinals to the Cubs.  They have always been either my second or third favorite team in all of baseball.  Yet, every time I want them to win something, they lose.  Important regular season games, playoff games after the Cardinals are eliminated, or even happen-to-be-watching Saturday afternoon games between the Cubs and a team I hate like the San Francisco Giants, the Cubs always lose.  (I know it is not nice to hate anybody, but really, what is baseball good for without teams to hate like the Giants, the Yankees, and the Reds?  There have to be hated foes for the good guys to overcome.)  Me rooting for the Cubs to win is a much more effective curse than anything Bill Sianis’ stupid pet billy goat could ever conjure.
  2. I watched a PBS Frontline documentary about the struggle in Congress to create immigration reform and the unsuccessful Herculean efforts of Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago to build a consensus in the House of Representatives.
    Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois

    Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois

    Immigration is important to me because my wife is an immigrant.  So far, after 20 years of marriage she is still not a U.S. citizen.  And with Donald Trump preaching venom against anchor babies, we could end up having my wife and kids deported to the Philippines simply because all the mean old white guys in Congress (and possibly Ben Carson) hate foreigners on principle and only allow them as means to high profits.  This is an issue I care about because of my family and so many of my ESL students whom I love and treasure.  And this is an issue that can potentially be combatted by cartoon.  Trump and Congressman Trey Gowdy (with a football-shaped head) and basset-hound-looking Paul Ryan (and possibly Ben Carson) are all already cartoon characters who I would only have to draw realistically to make them into funny cartoons.  They are also key players in this ring-around-the-rosy-all-fall-down debate.

  3. I also need to tell you more stories about wonderful teachers like Mrs. Reitz and Mrs. Mennenga.  And about kids I have taught who lit my pants on fire (both figuratively and metaphorically), made my blood pressure rise, and touched my heart.  It goes without saying that those stories are probably the most valuable things I have hoarded over the course of my career as a teacher.  They will lose all their value if they go unshared before I die.
  4. I want to tell you about some of my cartoonist heroes.  I haven’t blogged anything yet about Walt Kelly, the wonderful Disney veteran who created Pogo and Albert Alligator.
    comicsalliance.com

    comicsalliance.com

    I plan to go on and on like this in bumblebee fashion, from flowering idea to blossoms of insight to posies of great beauty… flower, to flower, to flower… making potpourri.

11 Comments

Filed under humor, potpourri, writing

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 19, 2015 · 3:55 pm

The New Me

Catbird Me 2I was recently half-bullied and half-convinced that cleaning up and cutting hair and beard would make me feel better over all in spite of six incurable diseases and the ravages of old age.  Well, I fell for that line of reasoning in spite of my lovely reddish-purple psoriasis patches and flaking skin on my face and back of my neck.  And, the added push came from a possibly brief respite from facial and neck patches.  Things are mostly healed up in the parts you can see.  So, now, my wife says I look twenty years younger.  (Of course, she probably thought I looked about a hundred and thirty-five with the long hair and beard.)

20151019_131425111

So, see for yourself what I look like now.  It is scary to contemplate.  I look almost normal.  What kind of protection is that for society in general?  Now mothers can’s say to their children, “Let’s go over here, farther away from that creepy old fellow.”  There is danger that they might come close enough to hear me tell a joke.  Don’t believe me?  You should’ve seen the look on the face of that young mother from India who overheard me tell my kids at Walmart, “Milk prices have gone higher than gas prices here.  They must have changed to using gas-powered cows for milk.”  Really!  You’ve should have seen the expression on her face as she heard me say that.  It was like she had tasted some of the milk from gas-powered cows.  And it got even worse when she overheard my kids agree with me.  She was sure that I was an absolute danger to the educational health of her little happy brown children.

I am not certain that I can stay the way I am at the moment.  Being a spotty-faced old man again doesn’t have a lot of appeal.  But I am not sure I want to go back to Mr. Hairy again, either.  I liked the author’s beard and the Gandalf hair, but it had drawbacks of its own too.  I shall try this new me for now, and do the best I can to stay this way.  So be warned, keep your kids out of earshot.  You wouldn’t want to have any of them laugh themselves to death.

3 Comments

Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , ,

October 16, 2015 · 2:07 pm

Gilligan’s Island

Gilligans IslandI mentioned the other day the G-word from when I started teaching.  I mean, Fernando was guilty of starting it with his comment, but it caught on fast.  Before I knew what had hit me, every kid in Frank Newman Junior High School was calling me Gilligan.  I was, in fact, thin and somewhat gangling as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and I suppose I did have a goofy sort of smile, and a rather childish innocence (compared to the vato locos I was teaching at the time).  You can see for yourself.  ABCmemeThis is a high school graduation picture of me, but I didn’t change much in the seven years of schooling that passed before they dubbed me Gilligan.  Alright, the horn-rim glasses were mega-nerdy, I admit.  I only wore that style until they didn’t make them any more.

The reason the name bothered me was because they were trying to use it to gain power over me.  The more they irritated with it, the more they could make me mad, the more they could get away with calling me that and only making the principal laugh about it when I tried to report the misbehavior, then the more they could control whether we actually learned anything or not during class.  (The principal, at only four foot eight in height was dubbed “Papa Smurf”, and the History teacher, Mr. Stackwell was known as “El Pato” (Spanish for the duck) because of the way he walked and the fact that his face reminded even me of Donald Duck.)  But I did eventually observe that other teachers would ignore and even smile about it when they were called their own nicknames.  (Thank you, Mr. Stackwell, for giving me that example.)  I learned that I could accomplish more by owning it.  My classroom became “the Island” or “Gilligan’s Island”.   And we began feasting on cooked coconuts of learning.  I regularly pointed out that on his show, Gilligan often got the attention of the movie star, Ginger, and the farm girl Mary Ann.  There were benefits to being a single guy with two available girlfriends on a tropical island.  (I even tried the two-girlfriends-at-once thing in real life, but that’s a horror story for another day.)Hilda

El Loco Gongie often accused me of speaking Martian to the class because I used a lot of words that were, to his small mind, too big to be real words.  So I owned that too.  I would put groups of five big words on the chalkboard (or, at least, words they thought were big) and spent time each week expanding their vocabulary with “Martian words”.  I learned to fill dangerous down time when the class wasn’t doing anything else with “puzzlers”, trick questions or thinking games.  I asked them to answer difficult questions like; “You are in a room with four southern exposures.  Each wall has a window in the center of it.  A bear walks by one of the windows.  What color is the bear?”  (I promise not to tell you the bear was white… oh, uh, well, anyway, you can still figure out for yourself why that is.)   We began to have a lot of fun on Gilligan’s Island (Room 2 in the south hallway of Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas).  Diamantina even told Papa Smurf that I was “funny”.  Of course, Papa Smurf had a long talk with me later about why teachers shouldn’t be funny, at least before May of their first year.  But I learned that when she had told him that I was funny, she meant my class was enjoyable and she was happy to be there.  Funny equals learning.  That was the most important lesson Gilligan’s Island taught me.

4 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 13, 2015 · 2:52 pm

Fernando

newwkidI believe that I have mentioned before the fact that I was sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old child.  It is not a fact I was able to talk about publicly until the perpetrator died.  I have since forgiven him, and hopefully his family will always remain uninformed about the incident, for their sake more than mine.  And it is not a fact that did not have consequences.  I may have mentioned before that I did not get married until I was thirty-eight because of the discomfort the fact gave me in my acceptance of myself as a sexual being.  I was resigned to the idea that I would never be married or have children because of that fact.  The Paffooney I am using to illustrate this post is entitled “Long Ago It Might Have Been”.  I drew it after saying goodbye to girlfriend number two, a blond teacher-lady with a broad smile and sparkling eyes… A girlfriend I broke things off with when she began talking about marriage and having children.  The boy in the picture is my dream-child, blonde because of her, and modeled off an old black-and-white photograph of me at the age of about ten.  He has a Bart Simpson skateboard for a reason, and that reason was named Fernando.

(This particular aside, or parenthetic expression, is here to note that not all humor blogs are funny.  This one is meant to begin with a lump of wet sadness and mold it with the artist’s hand into something of the joy and sunshine that follows in the process of creating humor out of the suffering of an artist.)

I started my teaching career intending only to ever deal with high school students.  I was certified in Secondary English Education.  But the teacher job market was tight when I was starting.  I had a Master’s Degree with no experience, so I was one of those beginner teachers who was both unproven and expensive to hire.  Only Texas and Florida had job openings for teachers in the early 80’s.  And my Dad’s company had transferred him to Texas while I was still in college.  So, after applying about fifty times, I finally got a job offer.  But it was in deep South Texas.  And it was at a… oh, horrors! …junior high school.

My first problem student on my first day of my first teaching job acted out for the very first time in my… you guessed it… fourth period class.  You didn’t guess it?  Well, I had three periods of the first-day-quiet-sort-of-looking-and-listening-and-evaluating-of-weaknesses that new teachers normally get before the dam on the River of Middle School Chaos bursts and my illusions of competence were all drowned.  And Fernando was the boy who pulled the cork out of the hole in the middle of the crack in the dam.  Damn!  He was a skinny little hairball with long, uncut black hair and dark smiley eyes.  He was dressed that day in one of his two shirts and wore the only pair of blue jeans he owned.  He announced to the class, without permission to talk, that I looked like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island.  He made them laugh at me, and what followed was a long string of struggles to keep kids seated, to make them listen to anything I had to say.  He was a little ball of furious energy that could bounce around the room and hit you “splat!” on the neck in the back of your head with an over-sized spitball and not even give a hint that he had thrown it when you whirled on him to catch him in the act.  Of course, I knew it was him.  He was the only one behind me when it happened.  And besides, he later confessed to doing it.  It was the beginning of a truly awful first year as a teacher.  But the one bright spot was, believe it or not, Fernando.

This is actually a picture of Manuel, not Fernando... but it gives you the right impression.

This is actually a picture of Manuel, not Fernando… but it gives you the right impression.

You see, Fernando needed me more than any other student I had that year.  He came from a poor family.  He was exposed to a lot of drugs and alcohol and sex from his drug-dealer cousin, the one that went to prison for selling cocaine five years later.  His drug-dealer cousin was seventeen years old at the time and sitting in the back of that fourth period class.  The cousin turned out to be the reason Fernando acted out in class.  He was compelled to entertain his cousin and do his bidding.  I even believe from talking to Fernando that the cousin was sexually abusing him.  There are signs you pick up on when you’ve been through the experience yourself.  And he would never rat on his cousin, but he had a deep need to tell me things about himself.

He was the first student to discover where I lived.  He was also the first student to come knocking at my door on a day off in late September.  He wanted to talk and be around me.  I apparently made the mistake of making him feel comfortable talking to me in class, and just like when you feed a stray cat, you begin to be considered the property of that cat.

Now, I know you are probably thinking that it is not a good idea for a young single man to be spending time alone in the company of a young boy.  I was definitely thinking it, even if you weren’t.  I was aware of the literature suggesting that pederasts and child molesters were molested themselves when they were young.  (Never mind the fact that young boys like that are pretty repulsive in their habits and thinking, and not really what I would ever consider attractive… I would’ve died from the shock of being accused of anything like that.)  I made Fernando get permission from his parents to visit me.  I made sure the window curtains were open so anyone passing by could see nothing evil was going on.  I even got him to bring friends along when he visited, so that he was not coming alone.  And we started playing Dungeons and Dragons at my little apartment because it was fun to tell stories that way, and because it served as reason for them being there and for Fernando to be with me on weekdays after school and on Saturdays.  He turned out to be the first of many boys I befriended.  And although neither he nor I was really what you would call hug-able at that time in our lives, he was someone that I actually held in my arms, because he needed me to.  He was the first student I ever served as a second father to, but he was the first of many.  He was the first student I ever got to really know on a personal basis, but he was the first of many more.  And it was through the mentoring of young boys, talking to them and helping them to solve their problems, that I eventually reached a place of competence in my life where I could actually begin talking to and spending time with eligible young women.  Spending time with Fernando probably had something to do with my eventually being able to get married and have children of my own.  (Okay, maybe not.  Life is not that neatly tied up in a bow in the long run.  But it’s a pretty theory to work into this essay.)

15 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as , , , ,

October 11, 2015 · 3:02 pm

Cowboy Mickey

lil mickey cowboyI have written more than one “Understanding Mickey” post, and I feel I still haven’t given readers the tools to fully understand how to translate Mickeyism into English.  Part of the problem is that Mickey has changed over the years.  And Mickey never was the same thing as Michael Beyer.  That other self, the self-reflective Michael self, is the teacher, the thinker, the poet, the author.  Mickey is the cartoonist and story-teller.  And, most importantly, Mickey is a cowboy.

So, how did Mickey become a cowboy?  That isn’t such a hard thing to understand.  From childhood Mickey always had that sense of cowboy certitude.  You know, that feeling that no matter what problem rears its ugly head and threatens to stamp, and snort, and cause a stampede, there is a way to rope it, hog-tie it, and slap a brand on its rump.  The cowboy way is to never let anything stand in your way.  I always felt that there were extra reserves held deep down inside that I could call on to pull me out of the fire when troubles were at their worst.  No matter what, I would never be defeated unless I had my boots on and sixguns were a-blazing.

20151010_171316

I include this goofy cowboy-in-his-doll-collection-lined-studio selfie because the cowboy part of me is about to change again.  I am seriously thinking about shaving off my author’s beard and cutting short my Gandalf-hair.  Why?  Not because I am seriously considering stopping being a writer.  I could never do that till the day I die.  But, the cowboy part of me is gradually becoming less and less of an essential part of the plan going forward.  Besides, my wife doesn’t like the rough-old-cobb look that I have been cultivating since my retirement in the spring of 2014.

Mickey will always be a cowboy, but there is more to me than just Mickey.  In my selfie I am wearing my best cowboy hat, the one I bought at Goodwill that they apparently got from an estate sale.  It is from Hatter’s Inc. in Fort Worth, the place where LBJ bought a lot of his cowboy hats.  I feel like the spirit of some old dead Texan still lives in that hat.  I am also wearing my Naaman Forest Rangers teacher-shirt.  I spent twenty three years as a Cotulla Cowboy.  I spent one year as a Creek Valley Wildcat, and one year as a Garland Owl.  And then I ended my career with six years as a Naaman Forest Ranger.  So a lot of the cowboy in me is school-related.  And I am not going to throw away any of my cowboy hats any time soon.  I am never going to forget what it feels like to ride a horse.  I am never going to forget what it feels like to face an angry, out-of-control teenager and have to catch that bull by the horns.  I broke up more than thirty fights in my thirty-one year teaching career (and yes, I am counting the ones where no punches were thrown, and there was no kicking of teacher shins).  Those count too.  And in the long run, I will never be anything but a cattle-herding pedagogue who wields a mean wit and often shoots from the hip.

3 Comments

Filed under cowboys, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , ,