Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [91]
“Try it again,” he shouted.
I gave the key a turn to the right and instantly the motor came on. Finally, something started tonight.
“That’s it,” he said, looking now through the windshield for the first time, all clear and easy to see through. “Need to get that battery checked out.”
I thanked him and said good-bye to Sharon.
“See you Monday,” I said, trying to cover the sound of the end of my high school dating career.
“See you Monday,” she said.
Twenty Names
“MOORE, YOUR SHIRTTAIL is out!”
It was the voice of Mr. Ryan, the assistant principal for discipline at my high school, and he was right on my back. Not figuratively. He was literally on it.
“Turn around!”
I did as I was told.
“You know the rules. Shirts are to be tucked in.”
I tucked it in.
“Bend over.”
He was carrying “The Paddle,” a shortened version of a cricket bat, but with holes drilled in it to get maximum velocity.
“C’mon, this is not right,” I protested. “It’s a shirt!”
“Bend over. Don’t make me tell you again.”
I did as I was told. And as I was bending over, I marked the date on my mental calendar as being the last time I would ever do what I was told to do again.
WHACK!
I felt that intensely. The flat board of hard wood smacking against my rear end, and the two-second delay before the pain set in.
WHACK!
He did it again. Now it really hurt. I could already feel the heat of my skin through my pants, and I wanted to take that paddle and bash him over the head.
WHACK!
Now the greatest pain became the humiliation I was experiencing thanks to the growing crowd and the eyes of everyone in the cafeteria who was standing to get a look at what was happening in the hallway.
“That’ll do,” the sadist said. “Don’t let me see you with your shirt out again.”
And with that he walked away. He had no idea how profoundly he had just changed my life—and his. He had, in that one act of corporal punishment, created his own demise. How many times had this man struck a child in his career? A thousand? Ten thousand? Whatever the number, this would be his last.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how one minute you’re just walking down the hall with your shirttail out, you’re thinking about girls or a ball game or how you’re on your last stick of Beaman’s—and then the next hour you make a decision that will affect all the decisions you make for the rest of your life. So random, so unplanned. In fact, it puts the whole idea of making plans for your life to shame, and you realize you really are wasting your time if you’re trying to come up with a college major, or how many kids to have, or where you want to be in ten years. One day I’m thinking about law school, and the next week I’ve committed all my meager teenage resources and energy to stripping an adult of whatever power he thinks he wields with that big paddle.
I straightened upward, red-faced for all to see in the cafeteria. There were plenty of snickers and guffaws, but mostly there was that look people have when they’ve just seen something they’ve never seen before. I was known as a good student. I was known as someone who had never been given the paddle. No one ever expected to watch me being beaten by the assistant principal. I was not the type of student you would see being told to “bend over.” And that was what was so entertaining about this particular beating to the gathering crowd.
It’s not like Assistant Principal for Discipline Dennis Ryan hadn’t been gunning for me in the past, or that I hadn’t done anything to deserve his wrath. I had done plenty. By the time I was halfway through my senior year, I had organized my own miniprotests against just about every edict that Ryan and the principal, Mr. Scofield, had laid down. The latest of these revolts involved convincing nine of the eighteen students in the senior Shakespeare class to walk out and quit the class.
The teacher had just handed back to me my twenty-page paper on Hamlet with a giant red “0” on top of it. That was my grade: Nothing. Zip. I stood up.
“You cannot treat me this way,” I said to him politely. “And I am officially dropping