School is Hell

F.G. Baker 6/15/15

I was a dead man, lying spread eagle on my back, face turned up toward the mid-morning gloom of another overcast Chicago day. My skinned knees told the story of how valiantly I fought against the insurmountable odds, like Lancelot fighting barehanded against the huge and overwhelming Dark Knight and his heavy, spiked Mace. Blood seemed to ooze from every pore of my knees and elbows, where they had been savagely ground into the gravel surface of the ground.

My face, pale and in repose, was a swollen mass of contusions from the beating I had received, blood everywhere, torn by mighty fists. I had fought bravely, desperately using my arms to block the heavy blows as best I could. It wasn’t even a fair fight, from the first sucker punch to the final ‘coup de gras’, I was outsmarted and outclassed.

The crowd of onlookers loved it though, the spectacle of some smuck, some everyman, putting up a fight against the world class talent and experience of the professional thug, Jimmy the Hammer. They silently routed for me, I’m sure, afraid to cheer me on lest Jimmy turn on them next. Even while the end played out, and I was on my back with Jimmy sitting on me, straddling my mid-section in true cage-fighter style, raining down the blows, I could see the faces of the gathered crowd in my final blurred peripheral vision. I know they were watching as I cleverly absorbed every blow, my strategy to wear Jimmy down, while I just lay there and took it, silently showing no outward emotion at my own humiliation and fatal demise.

Then the bell rang and Jimmy stopped. Saved by the bell! Jimmy delivered one more punch to my unsuspecting face and got up. He took time to stare down everyone in the audience, turning slowly as if to say ‘I know who you are and you’d better keep your yap shut if you know what’s good for ya.’ Then he trotted off to the door, leaving me for dead on the ground. The onlookers didn’t want to get in trouble, so they scampered off for the door too, leaving me to only a few loyal fans.

My spirit drifted upward in an out of body manner and I viewed my corpse from above, immobile, gritty, limbs askew, apparently lifeless. I looked down on the scene, the body on the ground, face up on the playground of life, a few odd boys lingering to see my final passing.

One of them asked the other, “Is he dead?” There was a pause, then I heard a voice from a distance address my corpse directly.
“Freddie, are you dead?”

Suddenly my soaring spirit collapsed back into my body and the moment was gone. I opened one eye and moaned.
The boys jumped back as the corpse came alive.
“No. I responded”

“Are you sure? You sure look dead.”

“Tommy, you numbskull. How could I answer you if I’m dead?” ‘Numbskull’ was a new favorite term I learned from the Three Stooges on TV.

That seemed to settle the question and I slowly got to my feet. Tommy, my only real buddy, helped dust me off as I tried to stand up. The other boys took off running to their classes, afraid to be late after the school bell announced the end of morning recess. I noticed that my sweetheart Patty had gone with them, not waiting to see if I was resurrected or not.

Boy! What a recess this had been.

I staggered across the crumbling and dismal playground toward the nearest entrance to the Waters Elementary Prison, the school where I spend many days each year. What kind of fiend thought to cover a playground with gravel? I wondered, as I plucked small angular stones from my knees and elbows, and even the back of my head, which Jimmy had concentrated on grinding into the ground.

I got to the door and saw my reflection in its wire-mesh reinforced safety glass. I looked like hell, hair disheveled, face bloody, dirt everywhere, knees and elbows raw, shirt hanging out. I pulled my cotton handkerchief out and wiped my face to little effect. I spat on my hand and wiped some blood and dust off my face, then applied the kerchief again and wiped my elbows. Mom would be mad about the blood and dirt: it was hard to get out of my clothes, a weekly pattern.

I tried to tuck in my shirt but realized too late that I had small gravel in the waistband of my short pants, so it all settled into my underwear as I tried to tuck the shirt in. Oh Brother! What’s next?

I realized that Tommy was still by my side and I told him he should go to avoid being late for class, or at least later for class. He scrambled in the door while I looked up at the windows on the second floor where I was sure Mrs. Nickerson had already noted my tardiness. The windows of that classroom were covered in iron bars and one-inch square steel mesh, like all the rest of the windows on this dark-brown, brick blockhouse of a building. All except the windows on the top floor where the school administrators had their offices and an unbarred view of the surrounding working-class neighborhood. That was where teachers had parent conferences so the parents wouldn’t see the prison-like, day-to-day plight of their children.

I took a deep breath and marched through the door, long after the second bell rang marking the beginning of classes and turning the hall of the school into a no-man’s-land, where I would get in trouble if spotted by the occasional roving employee. The second bell had already rung and that bell tolled for me.

I hurried to Mrs. Nickerson’s classroom and eased the door open a crack to see where she was. Luckily, she had her back turned to the door and I had a chance of sneaking to my desk unnoticed. I gently closed the door and tip-toed to my desk in the fourth tier of the second row, overjoyed that I had made it undetected. But it was not to be.

When I finally settled into my seat, rearranging chunks of gravel in my pants, and looked up, I realized that I had been discovered by Mrs. Nickerson. Her beady eyes and hawk-sharp nose were pointing right at me, her predatory gaze boring into my very being. I gulped and began to panic as she marched over to my desk and glowered over me, as I shrank into my desk, eyes averted, watching the thick ankles approach.

There was dead silence and I slowly raised my head to see what was about to happen. I looked at her too-tight, yet wrinkled face, with her over-sized, horn-rimmed glasses on a metal chain, capped by the gray-haired bun that was her trademark.

She stared down at the top of my head and prepared to speak. She crossed her arms and her throat issued the weird ‘cluck’ sound that it made just before she made some pronouncement of acute gravity.

“You are late to class again, Mr. Baker. And I see that you have been rough-housing with your friends. Really! You should show your classmates more respect and appear in class as neat and clean as they are. I will write a note for you to take home to your parents about your poor behavior.”

I turned beet red and all of the other kids laughed as she pulled my ear and led me to the door of the room. She sent me down the hall to the boy’s room to get cleaned up. I had to traverse no-man’s-land alone and in disgrace, humiliated beyond all recognition.

I was in the restroom washing my face, elbows and knees for a while. I brushed off my clothes and dropped my pants to get all the gravel out before tucking in my formerly white shirt. I plastered my hair down with water, having no comb, and scrubbed my hands and face until my hands rubbed clean on the white cloth towel of the dispenser.

When I got back to the classroom, I realized that it was Friday and all the other kids had already taken the weekly quiz. I would get a red zero by my name for the week for missing it. The deck was stacked against me, and it wasn’t even noon yet.

After a lackluster lunch during which I sat at a table in the cafeteria with Tommy and two other friends, eating my usual home-made sandwich of gristle and moldy cheese, washed down by souring milk, I returned to my classroom of despair, Mrs. Nickerson’s domain.

She marched back and forth in front of the room, lecturing us on some absurd grammatical rules of the English language, pausing to ask questions of select students, usually those simpering fools who sought her favor and recognition. She smiled at her favorites and glared at the bumblers who answered clumsily.

I was among those lucky few who rarely put up our hands for fear of ‘the look’ and of having our hands wacked by the trusty wooden ruler that Nickerson carried in her hand when she was in a bad mood, which seemed to be most of the time. She used it to single out kids, always boys, who she thought had not studied or who gave spectacularly wrong answers to her convoluted queries. It seemed she asked her favorites for the obvious answers and saved for her select targets the arcane contrivances that only Supreme Court Justices or linguistic scholars could hope to answer.

Nickerson used the ruler to get our attention, instill fear, and mete out punishment. She had apparently developed this means of torture at some previous job as a strict nun, prison guard, Inquisition interrogator, Nazi death camp commandant or some other position of unchallenged authority. I was becoming more and more certain that she had a Nazi past as I sat day-dreaming, between bouts of terror as she surveyed the room.

She called on Patty, who was in my class and the true love of my life at this early age. She was asked a simple questions and gave the correct answer as she always did, receiving a verbal pat on the head from Mrs. Nickerson in approval.

I didn’t begrudge Patty for this. I knew she was the smartest, prettiest and usually, the nicest girl in my first grade class. I was in love with her and she could do no wrong. She even laughed at most of my jokes.

She was an inch taller than me, had long, wavy brown hair, beautiful blue eyes and a pleasant smile. She was always dressed in a white blouse with some clever plaid skirt, tall socks and brown and white saddle shoes. I had once helped her up from the teeter-totter and my face brushed her shoulder. I was close enough to smell her warm neck and she smelled wonderful, just the way a girl should. I was captivated that instant and loved her ever since.

That morning, at the recess, I had simply gone over to talk to her and she had smiled her usual smile at me. I anticipated entertaining her with my new variation on the Bosco Chocolate commercial jungle, when Jimmy the Hammer cut me off from Patty. Only then, did I get the hint that Jimmy, the schoolyard bully, six inches taller than me and two years of muscle and fighting experience older than me, also had designs on my girl.

Jimmy pushed me aside as I still tried to speak to Patty, now aware that Jimmy had turned mean. The first punch caught me unaware on the right side of my face and sent me staggering. I ducked a second blow and then cleverly intercepted the rest of Jimmy’s fisticuffs with my face and forearms after that. I fell twice, too dumb to stay down, but afraid he would kick me while on the ground, one of Jimmy’s preferred techniques in the realm of schoolyard fair play.

Patty’s face was among those watching my drubbing and she hesitated, before fleeing into the school. Now she looked at me once in a while during class, embarrassed and, hopefully, sympathetic to my battered soul.

As I looked dreamily at her angelic face, her expression changed suddenly and some bulky presence inserted itself between me and the object of my reverie. I looked down and saw the thick ankles appear. Dread seized me as I raised my eyes to see Mrs. Nickerson standing next to my desk, ruler in hand, slapping it with one hand against the palm of the other, a malevolent grin of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune, on her visage.

“Present your hands!” She demanded.

Filled with dread at the coming pain, I held my hands out in front of me at shoulder level, palms up, waiting for the punishment, regardless of its fairness.

“Give me the backs of your hands, Mister.”

Oh, no! Not the backs! The backs of my hands were the only part of my body that didn’t already tingle with pain. The whacks of the ruler on the backs of the hands always hurt much more than the caning of the palms. But, of course, she would know that. Anyone who had been an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele, in the Nazi camps, would know the best ways to inflict pain.

I complied. She smacked my hands five times each as I tried to hold back tears of pain, aware that, if I gave in and cried, I would lose the respect of all my classmates at the hands of this disciplinary menace, her pleasure transparent for all to see.

“Go to the Principal’s office at once, boy!”

I fled the room, racing into the anonymous space of no-man’s-land. I ran to the boy’s room and ran cold water over my hands, all the while fighting the tiny stream of tears that left the corners of my eyes and dripped into the sink.

The cold water assuaged my hands and fear. I dried my hands and my face before the mirror, astonished at the color of my complexion which was a mottled blue and white with red-rash like highlights, puffy around the eyes and swelling on the sucker-punch side and on my nose. I felt dizzy.

The principal’s office has this massive oak door with a glazed window that was always intimidating. I had found on previous visits to this austere ward that I had to push hard against some unseen force to push it open and scuttle sideways out of its path before it slammed itself shut like some steel man-trap. Visits to the Warden of the school were never pleasant.

Luckily, the young, thin, dark-haired Miss Jones was there to receive me. Unlike the other drones that guarded the Warden’s inner sanctum, she was quite friendly and I hoped she was my friend. I came up to her desk and just looked at the top of her head as she finished scribbling something or other on a sheet of paper.

When Miss Jones looked up at me, at first she smiled, and then her jaw dropped in surprise. She rushed around the desk and knelt down in front of me and lifted my chin with a gentle hand.

“Oh my God!” she muttered. “You have been in a fight again, haven’t you? Was it that brute Jimmy again?”

I nodded my head and looked up at her. Then I couldn’t hold it in anymore and I cried.

Miss Jones enveloped me in her arms and held me close while I sobbed on her shoulder, releasing all the pain and unfairness I had absorbed that day.

“There, there.” She said and I blubbered on for some time, the two of us in the same stance all along. Finally, the pain and embarrassment reached a pause, my damaged soul having recovered somewhat, and I pulled away a little to look at her face.

“It will be alright.” She said and she gave me a light kiss on each tear-drenched cheek. I smiled at her. She was one of the few bright spots in this prison existence that I struggled through each day.

She took me down to the school nurse’s office where Miss Bunting fused over me while exchanging meaningful glances with Miss Jones. Bunting asked, “Is it that bully, Jimmy, again?” Jones nodded. They were both in on the dark secret at the school, the one that they dare not mention to the wrong people. All they could do is comfort me and others like me who suffered from unkind and unnamed devils at the school.

“You have done nothing wrong, Freddie. Remember that, no matter what Mrs. Nickerson tells you. You understand?” She left me in the care of Miss Bunting in the nurse’s office for the rest of the day and returned to her work.

Finally, at 3:30 pm, when the last bell rang, I found my brother waiting for me at the east gate of the iron bar fence that surrounded the school playground, a fence tall enough to keep the most dangerous convicts in. But this prison couldn’t hold me. My brother and I walked away, the eight blocks to our home at our usual pace.

My brother was two years older than me and I don’t know how he managed to survive three years of school, this dangerous phase of our lives. He didn’t say much but saw that someone had tried to rearrange my otherwise pleasant features. All he asked was, “What happened to you?”

What could I say? First grade is hell.