Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [66]
“That’s not how you hold ’em,” he shouted at me. “You’re holdin’ ’em like a girl.”
I picked up the three or four books and looked around to see if anyone had stopped to laugh at the boy who carried his books like a girl. The coast seemed clear.
“How’m I supposed to carry ’em?” I asked.
Boone took the books from me and held them in the cup of his hand with his arm fully extended toward the floor, letting the books hang by his side.
“Like this,” he said while walking a manly walk down the hallway.
“How was I holding ’em?” I asked.
“Like this,” he barked as he mocked me, holding my books up to the center of his chest like he was caressing breasts.
“That’s how girls do it?” I asked, mortified that for the first half of my first day in public school, everyone had seen me walking around like a pansy.
“Yes. Don’t do it again. You’ll never survive here.”
Check. So, half a day impersonating a girl. What else had I done to deserve Boys State?
Well, there was that time a few months later on the band bus. Boone had fallen asleep with his socks and shoes off. Honestly I can’t say he had socks. But there he was, barefoot, his leg propped up on the armrest of the seat in front of him. Larry Kopasz had his cigarettes with him and it was decided that in order to solve the riddle “How long does a cigarette take to burn all the way down if being smoked by a foot?” he lit one and placed it between Boone’s toes to find out. (Answer: seven and a half minutes.) Boone let out quite a yell when the hot cinder of the Lucky Strike reached his toes, and he didn’t miss a beat from dreamland to wrestling Kopasz to the floor of the bus, which caught the attention of the driver. (In those days, as most adults and bus drivers smoked all the time, student smoking often went undetected because their smoke simply went into the same smoky air we were all breathing.) Somehow I got implicated in this brawl, as Boone held us all collectively responsible. (On that same overnight band trip, we snuck into Boone’s room to run another science experiment: “Does placing one’s hand while asleep in a warm bowl of water make one piss himself?” Answer: yes. And this time we took a Polaroid so we’d have proof to hold against him should Boone, the bedwetting tuba player, turn us in.)
But that was it. Seriously. I got good grades, was on the debate team, never skipped school and other than a skit I wrote for Comedy Week about the principal living a secret life as Pickles the Clown, I had not a smirch on my record.
As it turned out, Boys State was not a summer reformatory school for hoodlums and malcontents. It was a special honor to be selected to attend. Each June, after school ended, every high school in the state sent two to four boys to the state capital to “play government” for a week. You were chosen if you had shown leadership and good citizenship. I had shown the ability to come up with some very funny pranks to play on Boone.
Michigan’s Boys State was held three miles from the Capitol Building on the campus of Michigan State University (the girls held a similar event called Girls State on the other side of the campus). Two thousand boys were assembled to elect our own pretend governor of Michigan, a fake state legislature, and a made-up state supreme court. The idea was for us boys to break down into parties and run for various offices in order to learn the beauties of campaigning and governing. If you were already one of those kids who ran for class office and loved being on student council, this place was your crack house.
But after campaigning for “Nixon-the-peace-candidate” as a freshman, I had developed an early allergy to politicians, and the last thing I wanted was to be one. I arrived at the Michigan State dormitories, was assigned my room and, after one “governmental meeting,” where a boy named Ralston talked my ear off about why he should be state treasurer, I decided that my best course