It’s true… 24 years of my life was spent in the Jungles of Junior High fighting for my life against predatory seventh graders, monkey people, lizard people, and general craziness. If my pictures are loony, and my stories are insane, it is because I have endured where no sane man should ever venture. The pink raptor, by the way… one of my best students.
No, I never actually got caught naked on Main Street wearing only a teddy bear in front of the Ben Franklin Dime Store. Thank goodness for that. But believe me, today was almost as bad as that. (Really, I just made up this picture to illustrate a bad day. It didn’t actually ever happen. I know it sounds like I am protesting too much, but… oh, well. Some of my friends know the truth.)
Today started with a near fatal accident on my morning commute. I have been having trouble on the drive in the mornings, passing out at stop lights on occasion and having to be awakened by angry car horns. I am a diabetic and I did discuss it with my doctor and my mother the forty-year RN nurse. I have been eating extra protein for breakfast to keep my blood sugar high enough. Still, I had a sudden rude awakening. I was going forty miles an hour as I was awakened by the car rumbling down the median on a divided portion of the highway. I got control of the car and veered back into my lane before I reached the light pole or the up-coming intersection. Believe me, I am going to take super serious steps to prevent that looming fatal accident. If I don’t, I will either end up dead or having to work with severely soiled underwear. No way can I afford another sick day.
So, after the good news about still not being dead, I was called into the vice principal’s office.
“Did they tell you that you were going to be having a new writing class?” he said out of the blue beyond.
“No.”
“You can teach a writing class, can’t you?”
Well, of course I can. I have done it a million times before. It is just that I never had to do it suddenly in the middle of a grading period before. So what is going on here? “Um, yes, I can,” I answered with the utter stupidity of the totally blind-sided.
“Good. We will be replacing your third period class today.”
Oh, good. Thank you so much. Why am I being singled out for this kind of treatment? Well, I am eligible to retire. They want me to retire. And my department is not only made up of gray-haired old fogies like me, but is being blamed for low test scores. (Of course, no one seems to notice that the scores I am routinely blamed for are second language speakers of English who have been mainstreamed in regular English classes. Why am I to blame for failures of kids who are not directly in my classes? Oh, that’s right… ESL teachers take the blame for ESL students whether we’re allowed to teach them or not.) Okay, bring it on! No way I’m gonna let kids fail, even if they are heaping it on to drive me out.
My blood sugar went too low again before the end of the day. All three of my own personal kids are failing at least one class. I am getting older by the minute. When I stop and think about it, it would be better to be a kid again, caught naked in front of the Five and Ten. (You might want to check out my previous post “Because Naked is Funny” to find out why.) It would be, all-in-all, a much better time. (And it didn’t really happen. Well… not like the Paffooney, anyway!
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Okay, I know it’s creepy. I know it is only a little bit funny. But I like to think it’s good colored pencil work, and it does seem to stand up well over time even though it was created back in 1980. I wrote this hoping to break into the cartoonist world in the 1980’s. I only managed to get rejection letters and form letters back then. Big dreams and no real breaks. But if you are goofy long enough and cartoon up a storm with enough lightning and hailstones in it, somebody will invent the internet (Thanks, AL Gore) and digital photography and WordPress Blogging so I can share it all with you.
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When I was 12, my favorite novel was Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book. I loved it. From page one to the last sentence of the story about the White Seal. I owned a paperback copy that I still have 45 years later. I bought it from the school book order form, Scholastic, I think. I used my allowance money, earned at a nickel a week. Along with the chapter books I had read previously, The Swiss Family Robinson, the White Stag, and Treasure Island, it guided my view of life. Every grove and forest in Iowa became the jungle in the summer of 1968. The windswept fields of corn and soy beans easily transformed into tropical seas. I imagined pirates, natives, and buried treasures everywhere. When I found a piece of a brass candlestick with the necessary curved part, which became the cursed Ahnk from The Jungle Book. Midnight, Grandma Aldrich’s blue-eyed black cat, became my Bagheera. I traveled with an invisible Baloo. You know, it was only a year or so before that when I saw the Disney movie. So, of course, dancing and singing was a part of being a jungle boy.
In the book, unlike the movie, Mowgli was naked in the jungle. He didn’t wear clothes until the first time he submitted himself to the man village. He took them off again when he escaped. I had to try that too. I went to the BinghamPark woods down by the Iowa River. I found a tree where I could put my clothes, and I took everything off. I figured roaming the woods like Mowgli would be great. Boy, I was a stupid child. Problem number one struck with my first naked step in the forest. Dang! There must not be any twigs or nettles in Mowgli’s jungle. I tried hopping from place to place, but in minutes I was wearing at least my socks and shoes. Hanging branches and brambles were a problem, too. They clutched at me, striping me with welts and scrapes. Certain parts you just don’t want pricked by a bramble bush. It was like God suddenly planted those pointed things everywhere. Okay, shoes and socks and shorts. Well, then I began to get cold. Iowa is never very warm even in the height of summer. I had already defeated the whole naked in the forest thing when I put my shorts back on, so, what the heck! It just didn’t work like I thought.
I still believed that the ways of the jungle were an essential part of my young life. I read and reread what the Jungle Book says about the “Law of the Jungle”. I tried to make sense of it as a credo to live by. Of course, at twelve we are always among the wisest and all-knowing of God’s creatures. We can make sense of the world in our own weird little way, and no one will ever be able to sway us from the philosophy we live by, no matter how silly it is. I still think about my “Jungle Book Period” as an important part of my young life. There are things about young Mowgli and Jim Hawkins and the Robinsons that formed a significant part of my character. I would one day make use of those determined and resourceful qualities to stay alive in the classroom jungles of South Texas. I tried to make others see it. I shared Kipling and Stevenson with kids and hoped that I could make them learn, as I did, how to be that little boy facing and succeeding against the dangerous jungle around him.
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This is cartoon that I actually got published in a comic book from Ben Dunn’s Ninja High School comic book series. You could look it up. Nobody paid me anything, but maybe it will be a collector’s item some day.
I have been married to a beautiful Filipina for nineteen years now. We have two handsome sons and a beautiful little girl. I am going so far in learning a new culture that I have chosen to learn how to speak that gawd-awful language Tagalog. Salamat. If you gave a chicken monkey-lips and set him to caterwauling, you’d have some idea how Tagalog sounds to a jaded old English ear like mine. I love it. “Flowers” would be “mga blklk” in Tagalog. How beautiful is that? I don’t have to worry about having a sense of humor. They will laugh at me just for my pronunciation.
I am quickly learning also to take part in the most important ritual in Filipino culture. Karaoke. It’s a uniquely oriental thing. Friends and family gather around the TV and start passing around the “magic microphone”, “Magic Mike” for short. Dang! That’ll be my name from now on. Just call me “Magic Mike”! The words appear on the screen in front of rotating still pictures that vary from the aerial view of Mad Ludwig’s German Castle to a beach in Hawaii. The words themselves have been placed there by some Japanese or Korean guy who barely knows how to speak English. He apparently sits in his Tokyo apartment all day listening to American CD’s and trying to write the words down exactly as his Samurai brain slowly processes them. The grammar is always twisted and goofy, many of the words are wrong. The mistakes on the screen can throw me way off singing one of my favorite songs when it gets to the part about “birds is flying over the rainbow, so why won’t I?” Ah! The total comic artistry! And get this, the machine scores the performance. You can hit the most cat-strangling, nails on blackboards sort of notes, and if you hit the beat right, it gives you a 94 and calls you a star singer. Sinatra is turning over in his grave. Barbara Streisand will be turning over in her grave too as soon as my singing kills her.
Don’t get me wrong. As silly a thing as karaoke is, I love it. It makes me feel good to belt out a round of “I did it my way”. I sing better than some of our friends. But, we have some real singing talent join us on occasion. James is smoother and more polished singing a Beatles tune than the Beatles themselves. Ernie sings “Beautiful Sunday” so well it brings a tear to my eye. And of course, there’s nothing that tickles me more than hearing a Filipino tenor putting his all into “My Wild Irish Rose”.
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I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.
First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in my chin, very little hair left on my ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.
Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed high schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in my ears and my squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on my face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I have taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.
Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.
So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!
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(pictures borrowed from; http://www.whenmoviesweremovies.com/RedSkeltonimages.html, http://godcelebs.com/22413-red-skelton.html, http://vint-rad.blogspot.com/2013_03_01_archive.html)
How do you spell comedy? R-E-D-S-K-E-L-T-O-N! For real, that’s how I spelled it during a third grade spelling bee in 1965. Pretty dang dumb, wasn’t I? But it got a laugh from the prettiest girl in class. I truly couldn’t get enough of Red Skelton on Wednesday nights. It was on past my bedtime, but Dad always let me watch, because… well, I think it was his favorite show too. George Appleby always trying to get something past his wife who would always catch him and punish him soundly for something that truthfully wasn’t his fault. That con man tricked him into drinking that stuff that made him act like an insane lady’s man. San Fernando Red pulling a gag on the man with the silver six-gun and hoofing it out of town before the townsfolk caught on to him with the tar and feathers. He never truly got what he had coming, or what he wanted, either. Someone else got it instead. Freddy the Freeloader making even poverty and homelessness funny. He never passed up a cigar butt in the street and found a dime on every sidewalk.
I always thought that if it was going to be funny, it had to be done Red’s way. Let’s face it, there were two kinds of humor back then and only one my parents truly approved of. They were Eisenhower Republicans living in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest. Red’s gentle humor, with its hidden ribald parts, could profoundly make you laugh, and once in a while bring a tear into your eye. It was never mean-spirited or cruel. It never made a political or religious point. It always assumed that all people were good deep down, and even the bad guys could be reformed with the right joke or prank to make them see the error of their ways. That was comedy.
The other kind, the scary kind was Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. They would say bad words, even though you couldn’t say Carlin’s famous seven words on TV back then. They made jokes about dark and desperate things. Democratic political conventions in Chicago, the Viet Nam War, racial tension, the Black Panthers, these were all fair game for satire and black humor. Their jokes assumed that all people were basically bad and greedy and ignorant… full of malice towards all. Not even the comedian himself was assumed to be the exception to the rule.
And seriously un-funny things were happening. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Another Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both killed in 1968. Patty Hearst was first kidnapped by and then somehow forced to be a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Chaos took the world we knew and turned it upside down. You had to learn to laugh at dark things, because laughing was somehow better than crying and hurting inside. The pictures of the My Lai Massacre in Life Magazine made me sick to my stomach for weeks. I did everything I could in class to make that pretty girl laugh, and when I couldn’t… I had to shut up for a while. I had to think.
I decided early on that I needed humor to live. I had to have the funny parts in my life in order to ward off the darkness. I whistled walking home from choir practice at the Methodist church on dark November nights. I told jokes to the rustling leaves and invisible hoot owls. I got by.
So, what is the lesson learned? If you read this far without gagging, then you know I mix a little funny with a little sad… and try to make a serious point in my writing. Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I truly believe that Red had it right. People are basically good. You can reform a bad guy with a good joke. You can get by in the dark times.
If dark times are truly here again, then maybe that is why I have to tell my stories, make a few jokes, and make people think. I know I may be killing you with boredom by now, but that’s what I do. I’m a professional English teacher. I bore people to death. And if you read this far, and you’re still alive, maybe I can make you a little bit smarter too.
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At school today the principal asked us to come up with one word that we wanted to apply to our own lives as teachers. You know how the teaching game is. You start a new semester; you have to be subjected to eight hours of blah-blah-blah. It is required blah-blah-blah mandated by Texas education laws. My magic word was wisdom.
So, what does wisdom imply? Well, I am old. I should have some of that thing in one pocket or another. So I search my pockets. As a kid I vowed to become a wizard. What is a wizard if not a wise man? A wise guy. How, then, do you acquire wisdom?
In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller tells us that mystical wisdom from the wise guy mystical sage is only saying a thing is its opposite. Thus true wisdom comes from learning how foolish you really are. It’s a good joke, but it’s also true. You can’t be wise unless you realize how little you actually know out of all the things that there are.
Why would I want to be wise? Well, I have the fool thing down pretty well already. As fools go, I’m a humble fool who trades in foolishness and calls it humor and young adult novels. So it follows, by logic, an advanced form of foolishness, that I must be wise.
Okay, wise guy, time to say something wise in the conclusion… Doh!
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Here’s an older post I am quite proud of. (If course only idiots are too proud of things, which probably gives something away.)
I have the privilege of being a public school teacher. Or maybe I should use the word “cursed”. It is no easy thing to be a teacher in the modern world. Regressive State governments like Texas mandate that teachers do more with less. We have to have bigger classes. We have to show higher gains on State tests. We have to do more for special populations based on race, disability, language-learner status, and socio-economic status. Of course, we give money to private schools to be “fair” to all, so a majority of the well-funded and advantaged students are removed from the public school system, even though studies show that their presence in classes benefits everyone. When the majority of students are low-income in a single classroom, even the gifted minority perform less well. When higher-income students are at least fifty per-cent of the class, then even the low-income and…
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As a child I was like most boys of the 60’s. I loved monsters and monster movies. I drew skeletons and Frankenstein’s monsters. I made comic book stories about space aliens, vampires, and wolfmen. I filled my fantasy world with dangerous creatures of the darkness.
It was only natural, then, that I create a story of monsters in Iowa. I set this story in my little home town. I created a story of a boy who was born funny (not ha-ha funny) and had to be kept out of sight in a secret attic room because he was thought a monster. In reality, Torry had a rare hereditary condition called hypertrichosis where you grow hair all over your face and body. Torry’s parents would mistake it for a monstrousness that they felt was the family curse, lycanthropy, werewolf disease. And the story would have to have a hero, Todd Niland, who accidentally makes contact with and befriends Torry.
For a villain, I would draft Torry’s young and well-to-do uncle Macey. He would be the keeper of family secrets and the real monster of the story. What he would do to his own family and his allies would be a crime that would eventually become murder.
So there it is. (Shudder!) A novel idea I will call for now The Baby Werewolf. Deliciously dark and dangerous. A monster masterpiece of macabre manufacture. Of course I will obviously approach the project with my usual total seriousness. Not one joke. You have my solemn promise… with all my fingers and toes crossed.
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Catch a Falling Star 