My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in eight years, and may never speak to me again, but I believe nonetheless that I’ve done better at parenting than any other job I’ve had. So at the beginning of March, as I observed the first anniversary of my most recent banishment from actual employment, I began to look into adoption.
Naturally, I’d have preferred a white child, preferably one with blue eyes, but the only blue-eyed white kids a single man can adopt nowadays are Romanians, and I remembered too well the nightmare my former semi-sister-in-law’s (hereinafter, my fossil) adoption of Romanian twin boys turned into. They seemed quite sweet at the airport, but she’d hardly gotten them home before they started trying to burn her house down and behead her in her sleep. The child psychologist to whom she took them didn’t speak Romanian, but speculated they might have anger issues owing to having been abandoned by their birth mother and raised by sadists.
The medications that were prescribed for them calmed them down considerably, but then the elder, Virgillu, reached adolescence, and the first thing he did was seduce my fossil’s female mail carrier. They eloped to Mexico together, my fossil’s mail wasn’t delivered for weeks, she fell behind on her mortgage payments, the bank foreclosed, and she and the twin left behind wound up living in her Honda Accord, for which she was unable to afford gas because the only place Alexandreu would eat was Red Lobster, which may seem cheap if you go there once in a blue moon for a special occasion, but which takes a real bite out of a high school teacher’s paycheck if she has to go there every night.
Heartened by the realization that some of our most noted entertainers — Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga — had all adopted children of African origin — and yes, yes, I know that if you go back far enough, we’re all of African origin — I was all set to fly over to see what Maui, from which Maddie had gotten hers, could offer in the way of orphans when Haiti, in the USA’s own watery back yard, was devastated by the January 12 earthquake, and my broker texted to urge me to get down to Port-au-Prince sharpish.
At first, I regretted my decision, as all the decent hotels left standing were full of journalists. But then I realized that for the money I’d been planning to spend adopting a Mauian kid, I could get five or six little Haitians. I went for it with hardly a moment’s hesitation, getting five boys. Fearing they might be ridiculed at school by children whose parents had voted against John Kerry because he speaks French, I gave them new American names — Jamaal, Rashid, Jamir, Rayshawn, and Kayshawn — on the plane home. Waiting for the airport bus at JFK, I realized that Rayshawn and Kayshawn sounded nearly identical enough to cause confusion and resentment, and decided that the former could retain his original name of Antoine, though now spelled Antawn.
Back home in Beacon, my friends and family greeted us with naked skepticism. How on earth, as an unemployable old person, did I suppose I was going to feed, clothe, and educate five young men, the youngest of whom wouldn’t reach 18 for 11 more years? I explained that I viewed the adoption as an investment. I would to enroll the boys in a basketball academy as soon as I got them squared away in elementary school; the chances of at least one of them making it either to the NBA, in which the minimum salary is now $25 million per season, or one of the better-paying European leagues struck me as pretty good. Failing that, I felt that the odds favored at least one of them becoming a major league middle infielder, as Haitians share a genetic gene pool with Dominicans, and can you name a single MBL team lacking a Dominican shortstop in 2010? Well, all right: Derek Jeter, but that’s only because of his endorsement deal with Ford, which I understand spends a great, great deal of money keeping him in the Yankees’ starting lineup.
As I write this, everything’s going much as I’d hoped. Jamaal, the second eldest of the boys, can already dunk at 13, and Jamir, who I’m not supposed to know encourages his little classmates to call him Jimmy, has been shown to have the highest IQ in the history of the Beacon School District. When we play Scrabble, the boys try implacably to sneak Kreyol words past me, and sometimes I let them, having found out the hard way how important it is to try to meet your kids halfway.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Showing posts with label sadism of PE teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sadism of PE teachers. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Correctional Officer of the Week
Recently, when I wrote about my experiences as an inmate of a New York correctional facility, I hoped that most readers would recognize my remarks as satirical. I have never committed a felony — at least one for which I have been successfully prosecuted, or, indeed, prosecuted at all — and have never spent a moment of my life behind bars. It was in front of them — as a correctional officer (that is, guard) in the criminal alien detention facility outside Stoughton, Wisconsin, that I spent seven months in 2007 and 2008.
One can’t really make ends meet on the starting salary offered by the Corrections Corporation of America — most criminal aliens are looked after by CCA and other private contractors hired by the Department of the Interior — so nearly all of us new “screws” had to supplement our income by dealing contraband to the inmates. In addition to such staples as heroin, methamphetamines, pornography, and Celine Dion CDs, a lot of my inmate customers wanted tapes of Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadien hockey games. While the vast majority of the criminal aliens incarcerated in America crossed the Mexican border illegally, you see, the facility at which I worked housed mostly Canadians, who’d sneaked across our northern border to escape their country’s health care system.
Standing Water, the leader of Cree Nation, composed of inmates descended from Canada’s largest indigenous group, had a much more specific request — for foundation that would complement his bitch Running Water’s skintone. A chiropodist in civilian life, the small, frail Running Water had apparently had no recourse but to impersonate Miley Cyrus in exchange for Standing’s protection. By candlelight, she actually looked very presentable, if nothing like La Cyrus.
There weren’t African-Canadian inmates, and thus not much call for an Aryan Brotherhood, but a couple of prolifically pockmarked diehards met every Thursday evening in the rec room to watch CMT and give one another really ugly tattoos. In exchange for a couple of bottles of cheap vodka distilled not from potatoes, but from asphalt, they would pretend to enjoy some of my own country-flavored songs, some of which appear on my indispensable new album Sorry We’re Open. Product placement!
Being a correctional officer is, of course, a dream job for a sadist such as myself. I loved being able to beat inmates capriciously, and to force the youngest and cutest to perform unnatural acts, either with me or with fellow inamtes. Perhaps most cruelly, I would stand outside the cell of an inmate I knew to be very proud of his country’s contributions to popular music and assert until he banged his head against the wall in frustration that whatever good music Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Shania Twain, and Rush may have made over the years isn’t enough to offset the first Alanis Morrisette album. That awful rancorous yodeling! Has anything — Kiss, Motley Crue, the Grateful Dead, all of hair metal, all of The Clash except “London Calling”, all of grunge, and all of gangsta rap aside — ever been worse?
Don’t imagine they didn’t try to retaliate. Don’t imagine they didn’t succeed; Canadians are capable of greater guile than we sometimes give them credit for. After I’d been in uniform a little over three months, the inmates voted me Correctional Officer of the Week, and suddenly I was shunned not only by my colleagues, but by people in the community at large. On at least two occasions shortly thereafter, fellow guards replaced the contents of my Thermos with urine. And one night when I went to Home Depot for a part for the upstairs toilet, none of the orange-vested brigade would deign to help me find it. The kids were harassed on the school bus, and someone put a plastic bagful of dog feces in our mailbox. At Walmart, the missus was Maced by a fellow shopper who bitterly recounted having died in an emergency room that was busy treating Canadians.
I saw little recourse but to abandon my career in corrections almost before it had begun, and to go back to graphic design.
[Just holler if you'd like to read the short story from which this was adapted. Facebookers: Read more zany essays just like this and subscribe here.[
One can’t really make ends meet on the starting salary offered by the Corrections Corporation of America — most criminal aliens are looked after by CCA and other private contractors hired by the Department of the Interior — so nearly all of us new “screws” had to supplement our income by dealing contraband to the inmates. In addition to such staples as heroin, methamphetamines, pornography, and Celine Dion CDs, a lot of my inmate customers wanted tapes of Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadien hockey games. While the vast majority of the criminal aliens incarcerated in America crossed the Mexican border illegally, you see, the facility at which I worked housed mostly Canadians, who’d sneaked across our northern border to escape their country’s health care system.
Standing Water, the leader of Cree Nation, composed of inmates descended from Canada’s largest indigenous group, had a much more specific request — for foundation that would complement his bitch Running Water’s skintone. A chiropodist in civilian life, the small, frail Running Water had apparently had no recourse but to impersonate Miley Cyrus in exchange for Standing’s protection. By candlelight, she actually looked very presentable, if nothing like La Cyrus.
There weren’t African-Canadian inmates, and thus not much call for an Aryan Brotherhood, but a couple of prolifically pockmarked diehards met every Thursday evening in the rec room to watch CMT and give one another really ugly tattoos. In exchange for a couple of bottles of cheap vodka distilled not from potatoes, but from asphalt, they would pretend to enjoy some of my own country-flavored songs, some of which appear on my indispensable new album Sorry We’re Open. Product placement!
Being a correctional officer is, of course, a dream job for a sadist such as myself. I loved being able to beat inmates capriciously, and to force the youngest and cutest to perform unnatural acts, either with me or with fellow inamtes. Perhaps most cruelly, I would stand outside the cell of an inmate I knew to be very proud of his country’s contributions to popular music and assert until he banged his head against the wall in frustration that whatever good music Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Shania Twain, and Rush may have made over the years isn’t enough to offset the first Alanis Morrisette album. That awful rancorous yodeling! Has anything — Kiss, Motley Crue, the Grateful Dead, all of hair metal, all of The Clash except “London Calling”, all of grunge, and all of gangsta rap aside — ever been worse?
Don’t imagine they didn’t try to retaliate. Don’t imagine they didn’t succeed; Canadians are capable of greater guile than we sometimes give them credit for. After I’d been in uniform a little over three months, the inmates voted me Correctional Officer of the Week, and suddenly I was shunned not only by my colleagues, but by people in the community at large. On at least two occasions shortly thereafter, fellow guards replaced the contents of my Thermos with urine. And one night when I went to Home Depot for a part for the upstairs toilet, none of the orange-vested brigade would deign to help me find it. The kids were harassed on the school bus, and someone put a plastic bagful of dog feces in our mailbox. At Walmart, the missus was Maced by a fellow shopper who bitterly recounted having died in an emergency room that was busy treating Canadians.
I saw little recourse but to abandon my career in corrections almost before it had begun, and to go back to graphic design.
[Just holler if you'd like to read the short story from which this was adapted. Facebookers: Read more zany essays just like this and subscribe here.[
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Gridiron Memories
Watching all these NFL playoff games has made me nostalgic about my own adventures on and off the old gridiron, none remotely illustrious, but several indelible.
I was a timid kid who longed for nothing more than to be like other boys, but seemed to lack all the usual masculine attributes. I was mechanically inept, and neither good at knots nor interested in becoming better. (Or maybe my complete lack of confidence in becoming better was what inspired me to feign disinterest.) I wasn’t a Boy or Cub Scout. I'd never went camping. Unlike my neighborhood's alpha boys, I didn’t like running over lizards on my bicycle, making all their internal organs squirt out.
But one day when I was 10, I played tackle football on the beach near where I lived, and sustained a very bloody nose — without crying! God, was I proud; I felt like a real boy! “I just had a little agreement with Kenny Woodruff,” I was able to explain laconically, shrugging, when Mom nearly fainted at the sight of me.
On day in PE when I was in the eighth grade, I somehow managed to talk my way into playing quarterback. On my first play from scrimmage, the other team put on a ferocious rush. Panicking, I just heaved the ball over their heads with all my might and hoped for the best. And got it; our team’s fastest player had somehow managed to run under the ball, and then into the end zone. A touchdown pass!
At 14, I was on the ninth grade all-star football team at Orville Wright Junior High School — not because I was any good, or even big (I was the third smallest boy in the whole ninth grade), but because inclusion was a reward for perfect attendance in after-school intramural sports. My presence was an outrage to the bona fide jocks on the team, but in practice one afternoon, the coach actually let me go out for a couple of passes, and damned if I didn’t make a remarkable diving catch of the second, inspiring my teammates to quit for at least five minutes trying to harass me into quitting.
I remained pint-sized in 10th grade, my prevailing gridiron memory from which is lining up in PE across from a black kid with biceps as big around as my head, and a Sonny Listen glower. I thought he might kill me, but he only swatted me aside like a papier mache sculpture on his way to the quarterback, whom he seemed to take great pleasure in knocking halfway down to the beach, “touch” be damned. Our instructor, a sadist, as all male PE teachers are, cackled delightedly before imparting that most time-honored of PE teacher suggestions to the moaning quarterback: Shake it off.
At college, noting my long (for the time) hair and (very slightly) outlandish attire, the football team called me a faggot. My girlfriend urged me to ignore them. She didn’t have to do a lot of urging. I wasn’t really a lover, rather than a fighter, but certainly much more the former than the latter. I was much more just about anything — a trapeze artist, a test pilot, a quantum physicist — than the latter.
My first major adult life partner and I used to enjoy watching televised football games. She enjoyed rooting against the Los Angeles Rams because star receiver Lance Rentzel had been busted for exposing himself to little girls. We both used to enjoy watching those little guys who stands on the sidelines holding a yardage marker drop them in terror when a player hurtled their way. We also used to enjoy seeing photographers and others knocked sprawling.
While researching my ultimately quashed biography of David Geffen 19 years ago, I carried a walking stick just in case the great man, known to be undelighted by my efforts, dispatched a team of goons to disappear me. When I explained that the stick was to do with an old football injury, one of the very few record biz types who'd agreed to an interview snickered, "Somehow you don't strike me as the football type." I nearly hit him with my purse.
Having had my shoulder replaced 14 years ago, I can no longer heave a football, or anything else, for that matter, except underhand. There have been lefthanded star quarterbacks in the NFL, but never an underhander. Yet another career choice now denied me!
[Exciting news: On Lala.com, where you can hear my new album Sorry We're Open, I am now ranked 80,573rd; next stop: stardom! Facebookers: Read more little essays and subscribe here.
I was a timid kid who longed for nothing more than to be like other boys, but seemed to lack all the usual masculine attributes. I was mechanically inept, and neither good at knots nor interested in becoming better. (Or maybe my complete lack of confidence in becoming better was what inspired me to feign disinterest.) I wasn’t a Boy or Cub Scout. I'd never went camping. Unlike my neighborhood's alpha boys, I didn’t like running over lizards on my bicycle, making all their internal organs squirt out.
But one day when I was 10, I played tackle football on the beach near where I lived, and sustained a very bloody nose — without crying! God, was I proud; I felt like a real boy! “I just had a little agreement with Kenny Woodruff,” I was able to explain laconically, shrugging, when Mom nearly fainted at the sight of me.
On day in PE when I was in the eighth grade, I somehow managed to talk my way into playing quarterback. On my first play from scrimmage, the other team put on a ferocious rush. Panicking, I just heaved the ball over their heads with all my might and hoped for the best. And got it; our team’s fastest player had somehow managed to run under the ball, and then into the end zone. A touchdown pass!
At 14, I was on the ninth grade all-star football team at Orville Wright Junior High School — not because I was any good, or even big (I was the third smallest boy in the whole ninth grade), but because inclusion was a reward for perfect attendance in after-school intramural sports. My presence was an outrage to the bona fide jocks on the team, but in practice one afternoon, the coach actually let me go out for a couple of passes, and damned if I didn’t make a remarkable diving catch of the second, inspiring my teammates to quit for at least five minutes trying to harass me into quitting.
I remained pint-sized in 10th grade, my prevailing gridiron memory from which is lining up in PE across from a black kid with biceps as big around as my head, and a Sonny Listen glower. I thought he might kill me, but he only swatted me aside like a papier mache sculpture on his way to the quarterback, whom he seemed to take great pleasure in knocking halfway down to the beach, “touch” be damned. Our instructor, a sadist, as all male PE teachers are, cackled delightedly before imparting that most time-honored of PE teacher suggestions to the moaning quarterback: Shake it off.
At college, noting my long (for the time) hair and (very slightly) outlandish attire, the football team called me a faggot. My girlfriend urged me to ignore them. She didn’t have to do a lot of urging. I wasn’t really a lover, rather than a fighter, but certainly much more the former than the latter. I was much more just about anything — a trapeze artist, a test pilot, a quantum physicist — than the latter.
My first major adult life partner and I used to enjoy watching televised football games. She enjoyed rooting against the Los Angeles Rams because star receiver Lance Rentzel had been busted for exposing himself to little girls. We both used to enjoy watching those little guys who stands on the sidelines holding a yardage marker drop them in terror when a player hurtled their way. We also used to enjoy seeing photographers and others knocked sprawling.
While researching my ultimately quashed biography of David Geffen 19 years ago, I carried a walking stick just in case the great man, known to be undelighted by my efforts, dispatched a team of goons to disappear me. When I explained that the stick was to do with an old football injury, one of the very few record biz types who'd agreed to an interview snickered, "Somehow you don't strike me as the football type." I nearly hit him with my purse.
Having had my shoulder replaced 14 years ago, I can no longer heave a football, or anything else, for that matter, except underhand. There have been lefthanded star quarterbacks in the NFL, but never an underhander. Yet another career choice now denied me!
[Exciting news: On Lala.com, where you can hear my new album Sorry We're Open, I am now ranked 80,573rd; next stop: stardom! Facebookers: Read more little essays and subscribe here.
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