We went to another school as a group, supposedly for professional development. We observed some teachers in their classrooms.
I brought a label maker and showed some way to make fancy, gold-leaf labels using some expensive tape for the labeler. They liked it so much that one teacher stole it. Made her own nonsense labels and wasted hundreds of dollars of gold leaf tape on gibberish.
Pissed was the name for it. I was pissed. We went in the gym and sat on bleachers waiting for the principals to come in and wrap things up. I got up and showed the ruined label sheets and called out the teacher. They were hostile and put me down.
We got in our principal’s car to go back to our school. We went a little was south on a decent asphalt road and came to an intersection with a couple of houses. A dirt road ran diagonally from the intersection to the southeast and it had a sign:
“Caution: 17-Foot Hole Ahead! If using this road, take it slow and avoid falling into the abyss!”
My principal grinned and said, “We’ve got time left. Let’s see this 17-foot hole.”
He gunned it and we went flying down the dirt road. Suddenly, he hit the breaks and we hit a big bump and fell … about 17 inches. The hole was 17 inches deep, not 17 feet.
The farmer who dreamed up the scheme was there. His field was tunneled by something, probably gophers, and this little depression had sunk 17 inches. He was enticing people to come see the hole, then charging them for getting a wrecker to winch them out, because, even though it wasn’t deep, there was usually a flat tire or broken axle or something.
Standing with the farmer was some guys from the state Geological Survey taking some measurements and looking at the hole.
We caught our breath and then laughed. But there was another sign on the far edge: “Caution! Sinkhole activity in progress! Up to five feet variance being recorded today.”
The others got out of the car and went over to the farmer. I stayed where I was, still pissed that my fellow teachers didn’t have my back over the label thing. Also, I thought it was fuckin’ hilarious that the principal had done a dumbass thing and now his car probably had a broken axle. So I just sat there.
But suddenly, the car sank. It went down three feet. So I bailed. I climbed up the sides and then we watched as the hole began to slowly swallow the principal’s car. In the trunk were a bunch of the other teachers’ stuff, like book bags and projects. They were all disappearing. And they weren’t amused when I laughed at them. Whatever they lost would be a far cry from the expense of what I lost when my gold leaf stuff was stolen and they thought it was nothing.
Revenge. It’s sweet.
We walked back up the road to the intersection and knocked on the door of one of the houses. Lo and behold; it was answered by the very teacher who stole my shit. Oh, goody. She looked at me and smirked. “How’s your gold leaf shit?” she asked. “Still looks a thousand times better than your house. What do you call this decor, early American shit hole?”
She was not amused.
We all went into the living room to wait on the district to send a school bus for us. Things were tense. Especially when I saw the thief’s scissors on a desk and sat on the floor and began cutting strands of her super-ugly, super-skanky 1970s gold shag carpeting.
They didn’t notice at first, so I cut a nicely rendered “Fuck You!” in the carpet. There were some kids’ toys lying around, so I took those and began to dismantle them and pile the pieces in the floor in front of the fireplace, which had a roaring fire in it. Pieces nearest the fire began to melt and smell a little. She truly lost her shit then.
“My god, what the fuck are you doing?! That’s my kids’ toys! You’ve ruined them!!!” she screamed.
“The tape you ruined cost over $1,100, bitch. Where’s my money?” I replied.
She ran over and gather up the pieces of her kids Super Woman or whatever playset. Then saw the “Fuck You!” I’d cut into her shag. Which hadn’t been vacuumed since born-again Jimmy Carter fought off the rabbit while canoeing with the help of almighty god.
I thought she was going to have a stroke.
Our teachers left the house; cowards to the end. The offender’s husband was out in the fields, but her father-in-law, Gramps, was sitting in his recliner. He was 90 years old and having a chaw of tobaccy. And giggling his old ass off. He’d wanted his daughter-in-law to get fucked up ever since his son had introduced her as his fiancee back all those years ago. He was cackling.
She ran out of the house. I went back to cutting the carpet. It was so offensive a carpet, so offensively filthy, that it begged to be cut. So I did.
Suddenly the front door banged open and three Neanderthals walked in. I was actually pretty attracted to one. He was a bear cub just slightly shorter than me, old enough to know what he was doing. He and his brothers came over and tried to be scary.
“We don’t like what you’re doing to Cousin Karen’s carpet. Not one bit,” he said.
“No, I don’t suppose anyone would,” I replied. “This is just a little payback boys; Cousin Karen destroyed $1,100 of my teaching materials and doesn’t want to make it good. So, I’m taking it out of the carpet.”
“She did that? Well, that’s not nice of her. ‘Course, she don’t have $1,100. I doubt she has $11. But she shouldn’t a done that. And you shouldn’t be cuttin’ her antique shag either,” he said.
“Have you looked carefully at her antique shag,” I asked. “Filthy. There are critters down there.”
He looked. “Well, so there are. Nasty. But anyway, we’re supposed to bust you up a little and get you out of here,” he said.
“Bryan,” I decided to call him Bryan on a whim, “Bryan, until I get restitution, ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere.”
He stood up. So did I. I was a head taller than he was. He was also pretty much jelly, not rock-hard muscles. He decided not to chance it, especially since I was staring down on his head and had a sharp pair of scissors in my hand. He decided to gross me out.
He took out an old nasty jockstrap. It was his cum rag. It was crusty and gross. He shoved it in my face. I laughed.
“Son, I’m a gay boy. Shoving a cum-encrusted jock in a gay boy’s face and expecting him to run away is like shoving a fifth of bourbon in a drunk’s face and expecting him to dump it in the sink. Thanks for the present. I predict many happy hours of strokin’ my meat to this and adding my own DNA to it. May I keep it?” I said.
They gave me a look of disgust and walked out of the house.
Then the other principal came in with his skanky wife. She had a fleecy blanket you get from Kohl’s thrown over her shoulder like it was a mink. She was arguing with him. He tried to argue with me, saying the State Cops were coming for my ass.
“Great! It’ll be a triple arrest for your teacher’s grand theft of expensive goods (a state felony), for your refusal to act on a report of a crime in your building (a state felony), and for me cutting some carpet (a misdemeanor with a $10 fine), so bring ‘em on, the quicker the better.” I said.
He rolled his eyes and became conciliatory. “Now simmer down, let’s see if we can’t settle this thing amicably,” he said.
“Amicable is $1,100 in my pocket within an hour and the thief being put on unpaid leave until the start of the next school year. That’s reasonable and equitable,” I replied.
He just looked at me.
His wife was getting hot and pissed. She took off her blanket and threw it at me. It landed instead on the fireplace heart. An end of it fell in the embers and caught fire.
She didn’t notice. I didn’t move. The principal cackled on. His wife smoked a Virginia Slims; where she found any, I don’t know.
He finally realized her blanket was on fire. He jumped up and yelled and pulled the blanket right out of the fire onto the shag carpet. That shit was made by every flammable, carcinogenic, artificial fiber known to 1970s man. It started melting and burning immediately.
The principal and his wife fled. I helped Grandpa out of his chair and he took me into the kitchen.
“That was the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Been waiting for this for donkey’s years. Here, son, what you do is go out the back kitchen door, disappear into them corn stalks,” he said.
We began to hear the sirens of coming fire trucks. The house was putting forth an impressive column of smoke.
“When you get to the next section line road, cross it and follow the soybean lines, keep heading west. You’ll come to the highway. I’ll have a friend of mine pick you up. He’ll be in a red 1968 Chevy pickup. You can trust him. Now scoot! And thanks!” he said.
I took off through the cornfield and the soybean field. The truck was waiting where Grandpa said it would and I hoped in. Zeke (of course) was his name and he congratulated me like I had killed the wicked witch of the west.
He drove me all the way home, cackling under his pipe. He drove away with a laugh and a wave and I went in to change out of my sooty clothes and freshen up.
It was just the start of interesting.
