Tales from the Hood, or my Youth.
2nd Grade: I’m walking around the playground, lookin cool, lookin chubby. I’ve got a jean jacket with a red-and-white Nintendo (Intendo) patch on the back, and I’m imagining goombas and sasquatch and UFO reports and TWHOCK! SOCCOR BALL TO THE FACE!
4th Grade: We’re supposed to write one thing we like about our bodies and why. The real bitch, though, is that our little bits of narcissism will be hung on the wall in the classroom. All around me, the jocks are furiously scratching out their responses—one even writes “I love my bod”—and I can’t think of anything. I want to throw a pencil at Mrs. Lindaman, smack my gut, yell “I’m a fat kid, woman!” But instead I write: “I like my hair.”
6th Grade: An experiment in which we replicate the surface of the moon in a pie tin using sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, etc. for the layers of terrian. Then we drop or throw marbles into the pan to see how much dust is kicked up, how big the craters are—the marbles, you see, are asteroids.
Part of the experiment calls for a heavy asteroid hit—“use force,” Mr. Murphy says. I have to simulate a fast, heavy asteroid hit by using force. So I wind up and really sling that fucking marble into the pie tin moon, hurl it like a grenade, and it buries itself in the moon’s delicious surface. Baking cocoa soil and brown sugar dirt billow into the air—it’s a mushroom cloud—and stain Mr. Murphy’s shirt. His face is tight with surprise and anger. “That wasn’t force,” he says. “That was stupidity.”
…
I have a really terrible haircut. The wait at Great Clips was 45 minutes but I was desperate, was getting too shaggy in the back, was getting too many people telling me I look like the nerdy programmer on Office Space (Wes’s girlfriend, this haircut is your fault.
Here is your intermission from my story: while I waited, this tall jockish guy in all white workout gear and a white ballcap and floppyass sandals walked back from his cut to pay. He wasn’t looking at anyone, was grunting his responses in the most asinine “you mortals and your ‘books’ and ‘video games’ and ‘jobs’ can’t bother me.” And the whole time he pranced around, those shoes: flop flop flop.
His credit card was denied and for fifteen minutes he called people in vain. He flopped around in front of us, blathering into his cell phone, and finally finally, some other guy showed up.
“Thank God, man.”
“What’s going on?” the new guy said.
“Give me 15 bucks.”
“Dude, I don’t even have my wallet.”
“…Why? Why the fuck—“
“Couldn’t you have told me to bring it?”
I have no idea if he ever paid. Maybe he’s still there now, flop flopping around.
Back to the main story: my hair is hideously short, shorter than ever it’s been before. The Great Clips clipper I got didn’t speak English. “How long it been?” she asked. “Uh…two months?” “Okay.” Later, at the end, as I stare and try to be polite but secretly want to grab the clippers and go for my own throat: “Okay—“ patting my head “—Four month haircut!”
I’ve been gored by fate. The cruel bull of fate. And now he’s parading me around his bull stomping grounds, shaking my limp corpse to attract the ladies.
…
Fuck, one more tale. When I was in 6th grade social studies I got my first D. Prior to this I’d never scored below a B and my parents were freaked out. Every other class that semester or quarter or whatever we had back then gave me an A or a B. But Ms. Chapman scored me a D. Why? Why?!
I was transferred after much parental complaining, and went back to my A/B routine. I always thought maybe I just didn’t understand her teaching style, or wrote essays in a way she didn’t like, but yesterday, standing at the sink here at IVRS and washing my hands, I remembered something else:
About three weeks before grades had to be turned in, Ms. Chapman halted our lesson to search the classroom. She was looking for a little green plastic container that held “her entire life.” She asked us: had we seen it? It had our grades on it. It had all our score records.
We didn’t find it that day. I always assumed she found it eventually—how could she not find it? But what if she didn’t, and she had to make the grades up on the fly?
Maybe I’m just looking for an explanation for my D.
4th Grade: We’re supposed to write one thing we like about our bodies and why. The real bitch, though, is that our little bits of narcissism will be hung on the wall in the classroom. All around me, the jocks are furiously scratching out their responses—one even writes “I love my bod”—and I can’t think of anything. I want to throw a pencil at Mrs. Lindaman, smack my gut, yell “I’m a fat kid, woman!” But instead I write: “I like my hair.”
6th Grade: An experiment in which we replicate the surface of the moon in a pie tin using sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, etc. for the layers of terrian. Then we drop or throw marbles into the pan to see how much dust is kicked up, how big the craters are—the marbles, you see, are asteroids.
Part of the experiment calls for a heavy asteroid hit—“use force,” Mr. Murphy says. I have to simulate a fast, heavy asteroid hit by using force. So I wind up and really sling that fucking marble into the pie tin moon, hurl it like a grenade, and it buries itself in the moon’s delicious surface. Baking cocoa soil and brown sugar dirt billow into the air—it’s a mushroom cloud—and stain Mr. Murphy’s shirt. His face is tight with surprise and anger. “That wasn’t force,” he says. “That was stupidity.”
…
I have a really terrible haircut. The wait at Great Clips was 45 minutes but I was desperate, was getting too shaggy in the back, was getting too many people telling me I look like the nerdy programmer on Office Space (Wes’s girlfriend, this haircut is your fault.
Here is your intermission from my story: while I waited, this tall jockish guy in all white workout gear and a white ballcap and floppyass sandals walked back from his cut to pay. He wasn’t looking at anyone, was grunting his responses in the most asinine “you mortals and your ‘books’ and ‘video games’ and ‘jobs’ can’t bother me.” And the whole time he pranced around, those shoes: flop flop flop.
His credit card was denied and for fifteen minutes he called people in vain. He flopped around in front of us, blathering into his cell phone, and finally finally, some other guy showed up.
“Thank God, man.”
“What’s going on?” the new guy said.
“Give me 15 bucks.”
“Dude, I don’t even have my wallet.”
“…Why? Why the fuck—“
“Couldn’t you have told me to bring it?”
I have no idea if he ever paid. Maybe he’s still there now, flop flopping around.
Back to the main story: my hair is hideously short, shorter than ever it’s been before. The Great Clips clipper I got didn’t speak English. “How long it been?” she asked. “Uh…two months?” “Okay.” Later, at the end, as I stare and try to be polite but secretly want to grab the clippers and go for my own throat: “Okay—“ patting my head “—Four month haircut!”
I’ve been gored by fate. The cruel bull of fate. And now he’s parading me around his bull stomping grounds, shaking my limp corpse to attract the ladies.
…
Fuck, one more tale. When I was in 6th grade social studies I got my first D. Prior to this I’d never scored below a B and my parents were freaked out. Every other class that semester or quarter or whatever we had back then gave me an A or a B. But Ms. Chapman scored me a D. Why? Why?!
I was transferred after much parental complaining, and went back to my A/B routine. I always thought maybe I just didn’t understand her teaching style, or wrote essays in a way she didn’t like, but yesterday, standing at the sink here at IVRS and washing my hands, I remembered something else:
About three weeks before grades had to be turned in, Ms. Chapman halted our lesson to search the classroom. She was looking for a little green plastic container that held “her entire life.” She asked us: had we seen it? It had our grades on it. It had all our score records.
We didn’t find it that day. I always assumed she found it eventually—how could she not find it? But what if she didn’t, and she had to make the grades up on the fly?
Maybe I’m just looking for an explanation for my D.
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