School Violence
I did not want to talk to the skinny, stringy-haired kid in the patched jeans, hiking boots, and Screamin’ Creamin Claude T-shirt who dropped clamorously into the desk in front of mine. He should have known why. He was Mark Tipton, my erstwhile chum from the previous year’s Chemistry class, who on several occasions had accused my Karen of being an obese, syphilitic, nose-picking infanticide, among other things. He greeted me buoyantly.
“Hiya, Pete. How’s thing’s goin’?”
“Oh—perfect.”
It was the first class of the first day of another year at school, my senior year, to be exact. I had hoped that my last term would proceed quickly and smoothly, but as fate and the school district computers would have it, I could already tell things weren’t going to go any better than the year before. Neither did I find it encouraging that, even though I had secluded myself away in the rear of the room and that there were plenty of other desks available, Mark deliberately sought out one adjacent to mine. And it had been a long day for me already—my new paper route was getting me up at four o’clock.
“Get fucked up a lot over the summer?” he asked.
“Always.”
He nodded his approval just as the teacher, a short, portly man with a crew cut that looked like a gray wheat field, entered the room. His oversized three-piece suit and shuffling gait added to the comical impact he seemed to have instantly made on the class, as a few stifled giggles permeated the air. Mark was quietly snickering in front of me. After roll was taken our droll instructor announced himself as a Mr. Weckworth, inducing more giggles, and progressed to his introduction for the course, which was to cover the history of the world from the advent of civilization. I remember him saying in his Oklahoma twang that a great deal of the events that shaped the world could be reduced to one common denominator: the struggle over and control of the the planet’s unevenly distributed resources. The first of these was, as he called it, “dihydrogen oxide, known in these parts as water.” Following humankind’s domestication of the plants and animals that made up its food supply, arable land came a close second. Several times in his discourse on the invention of farming, the teacher used the term horticulture as a synonym for the science of cultivation, or agriculture. This caught the attention of Mark, and inspired a pun which he whispered back to me. “You can lead a horse to water,” he said, “but you can’t lead a hor-ti-culture!”
I winced. He and Jeff would often exchange quips of this sort in Chemistry, and while it was in fashion, use them to refer to Karen, the woman who now bore my child. It appeared history was about to repeat itself.
“And you ought to know,” he finally added.
Mark found himself dragged out of his seat and thrown against the wall before he could even register his complete surprise. When he realized this lightweight he had so often ridiculed with impunity now meant business, he grabbed an eraser from the chalkboard railing and hurled it in my direction. The shot struck my shoulder, exploding with a cloud of chalk dust that I could taste and leaving a ghostly striped epaulet on my blue shirt. The attention of the entire class was riveted on us, of course. Never mind book-reading humanity’s endless conflicts or hearing it in lectures—here it was before their very eyes.
“Boys,” the teacher implored uselessly. “Boys, please!”
Mark placed an empty desk between us, attempted to attack my knees with it. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mr. Weckworth advancing on us. He had shed his coat, looked ready to get his hands dirty if necessary, in order to stay this battle. Mark saw him, too, knew the fight would be over in a matter of seconds, so he decided to strike the last, devastating blow.
“Karen Martin’s a whore! Karen Martin’s a whore!” he chanted defiantly.
With the teacher now not more than three steps away, I kicked the desk aside and thrust my fist into Mark’s leering grin. He stumbled backward and fell, banging his head sharply on the chalkboard railing as he went down.
The chair in the vice-principal’s office was certainly an antique—a slat-backed wooden armchair, showing its age by the layers of varnish that had been applied to it over the years. Those layers had flaked off at certain points—the elbows, the armrests, the seat—by its variously suffering occupants, until it less resembled obsolete furniture as an oft-used torture device. I fancied the chair might have been made by the same carpenter who fashioned the first stocks, or the first electric chair. But to compare it to an instrument of atrocity is not to say that I expected to be treated cruelly. On the contrary, I anticipated the entire mess resolving favorably. Never mind that the vice principal himself had been summoned to personally escort me to his office, as though I couldn’t be trusted to undertake such a journey alone. Never mind that I threw the first and only punch. As I studied the framed portrait of the vice principal’s darling wife and twin daughters on his credenza, I realized that we could easily find a lot of common ground. He was a family man, and would easily understand the motive for my actions. I was deliberately provoked, by nothing less than the callous villification of the one I cared for most.
The only nagging worry I had concerned how Mark was going to come out of this. When the vice principal came to lead me away he was still out for the count and then some. In the interim the teacher attended to him. He placed his coat in a bundle under Mark’s head. He took his pulse, after which he looked me up and down and commented, “He’s still alive. How much I can’t say.”
I thought he must be kidding. One good look at my physique would tell him I couldn’t have hit Mark that hard, and besides, he heard what Mark had been calling my Karen. I searched the faces of those around me, saw the mingled dread and accusation as they turned their eyes from me to the body on the floor and back again. As always, action spoke deafeningly louder than words.
I assumed a pose of rigid dignity before my peers, reminding myself and anyone capable of telepathic reception that I had done nothing wrong. Once the vice principal had deposited me in the decrepit chair and bade me wait, I again became stiffly dignified, even though no one could see. I held my posture for a half hour or more. It wasn’t until the bell signaling the end of first period sounded that he finally made it back. “Yeah, they should be here any minute now,” I heard him say to someone out in the hall. He poked his head inside to make sure I was still there, turned and said, “Page me,” re-entered and shut the door.
“Well well well!” he said beamingly, sliding into the seat behind his desk. Vice principal Feldon was the bouncy, gray-haired grandfather type who might have been just as comfortable selling cars. He certainly made me feel like I had come to the right man for a good deal. “So I understand you were involved in a little tussle.”
“You could call it that.”
“Okay, I will then,” he answered with a brief smile. “And would you mind describing how this...tussle...came about?”
“Mark insulted my girlfriend. My fiancée.”
Mr. Feldon formed his mouth into an O, although the actual sound took a few more seconds to follow. “Fiancée? Was she in the class with you at the time?”
“No, sir. She graduated last year.” I began to relax a bit. This was where I would bridge any gap of understanding between us—making him realize that he would have reacted the same way under the circumstances. “We’re planning to get married around Thanksgiving.” This wasn’t exactly true. Karen and I had made no definite plans. I just thought it would be a nice touch.
“Ah,” he said, as if affected by some pleasurable sensation. “Have a picture handy?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, my congratulations to you both.” He smiled pontifically.
“Thank you.”
Now that my guard was down he let me have it. He asked if I thought harmless namecalling was sufficient cause for giving someone possibly permanent brain damage. I found such news almost as indigestible as chewing gum and said nothing. He stared at me a long time and then invited me to display my knowledge of anatomy. He turned in his chair, pointed to the base of his skull. “Do you know what’s here? Hm?” He turned back before I could answer. “It’s where the brain joins the spinal column,” he said with some irritation, as though correcting my error. “And there, so the paramedics have just informed me, is where you struck Mark. His neck is all but broken.”
He stood and gave me his gray-suited back for the space of a minute, giving me the opportunity to raise my feeble defense. “Sir, I only—” but he raised his hand and waved me off. He parted the slats of his blinds and took in the beautiful morning.
“What’s your fiancée’s name?”
I told him, feeling no shame.
“Karen. A lovely name. I suppose this Karen must be quite a gal. It does her proud, I’m sure, that the boy she is about to wed goes around punching people out for her. Is she that special, or is it just some sort of kinky ritual you’ve decided to try?” He swiveled on his heels. He eyed me belligerently, something I would not have thought him capable of a minute before. “Just in case your memory needs refreshing, young man, we had a student murdered in this district only three months ago. It’s the first time anything like that has ever happened at any of the schools in this city. You can certainly understand that everyone in charge of education will do everything in their power to assure that it will be the last time. We were planning to make it a widely-known and clearly stated policy this year, that any student caught inflicting any undue injury to any other student will be adequately and appropriately punished, but you’ve managed to, if I may coin a phrase, beat us to the punch.” He offered me a sour smile, which may have been an invitation to laugh. I didn’t accept. I had already heard enough bad jokes for one day.
The phone on the vice principal’s desk buzzed. He picked up the receiver, cooed an affectionate ye-es? into the mouthpiece. “They are? Oh, good. Okay, thanks.” He returned the receiver to its cradle, gingerly stepped from behind his desk and opened the door. With a crook of a finger he indicated that I was to follow.
Out in the lobby waited not only two police officers but a television photographer and reporter. Before anyone noticed us I managed to find my voice and ask what all this was about.
“You are a celebrity, my friend,” Mr. Feldon replied cheerily, clapping a heavy arm across my shoulder. “You will be the first person charged with felony assault under the El Vado school district’s tough new policy against violence. The media is naturally quite interested in your fate.” He smiled for the camera as the photographer panned the caged hungry eye on his shoulder toward me. The officers, who had plainly been left waiting for some time, suddenly stood at attention as I was delivered into their custody. The female reporter, a blonde in a houndstooth jacket and skirt that produced iridescent swirls on our TV’s color raster, commanded the photographer to zoom in as the cops slapped on the cuffs, and I performed the obligatory contortions in order to hide my face.
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