An Ernest Asshole

what makes me so hard to get along with

At sixteen, I went to war with my headmaster. That sounds like a power dynamic in which I was very unlikely to win, and it was. At issue was the fact that, when auditioning for the job, he told us in the student government that “he understood our school had an unredeemable problem with drugs.” Having never lived here before, I asked him why he thought we had a worse issue with drugs and alcohol than any other school in Mississippi. His response was, “It’s what I’ve heard.” I didn’t accept that as authoritative, so we went to war.

I showed up for football practice the next summer to discover that several of us had been expelled for using drugs and alcohol. I can’t truthfully posit that these were friends of mine, but they had similar positions on the football team. I also felt like their habituation with regard to drugs and alcohol wasn’t particularly worse than other boys who would be returning—but didn’t play football.

Realizing I was trying to fight uphill, I knew I had a problem. Everyone knows that not having the high ground is what turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. On a sheet of college-ruled paper, I made a list of boys who had been expelled and what their fathers did for a living. Then, I made a list of boys that I knew had comparable patterns of drug and alcohol use but weren’t expelled and what their fathers did for a living.

Without openly accusing him of it, I was arguing that the headmaster selected boys to be expelled based on the social position and financial standing of their parents, not on their actual experience with drugs and alcohol. I realized I needed to couch my argument in terms that made it seem like I believed he did this inadvertently, which was actually a lie. I believed he didn’t care if he did it intentionally or not.

My argument fell on deaf ears. At sixteen, I knew it was unlikely that I would win. Knowing I wouldn’t win and deciding whether or not to try were never conditions related to me.

Suddenly realizing I made a fatal error, I returned to the headmaster’s office. He wasn’t there. Bea Donnelly asked why I was so frantic. I told her I desperately needed the paper I had given the headmaster back. “Why?” She asked. “Because I’m not a goddamn snitch!” I answered. Realizing I had given my opposition a list of students who used drugs and alcohol made me feel horrible, but I can report that every name on the list would graduate from that school, even though I would not.

The irony of the situation is that, of the names of sons and fathers that I had given to the headmaster to prove that his decisions were classist, three of the fathers would grow to become among my closest friends and advisors. They would call on me when my father died, and I would call on them when their wives died. One, I would visit as he spent his last days in a nursing home. I always felt like in my haste to win an argument with this headmaster, I had become a snitch, but no harm was to come of it, although my connection with the man who ran my school was irreparably severed.

I announced that I no longer felt welcome at my school. The headmaster said that was a good thing because, in fact, I was no longer welcome there.

The next year, I enrolled at a school I had been avoiding because I knew the man who founded it. I knew why he was no longer associated with it. I knew why it existed, and I knew why control of the school had been taken from the man who created it. Now that I’m old, people tell me I should forget these things. Water under the bridge, they say. There’s nothing to be gained from exposing old wounds. Maybe they’re right.

My new headmaster knew that I had a reputation for being rebellious, proud, defiant, undisciplined, and big, really, really big and strong. My new football coach held up t-shirts with the words “Three Hundred Pound Club” printed boldly on them. “If you work really hard and keep at it, you can earn one of these shirts when you benchpress three hundred pounds.” He said.

I asked my friends to load the forty-five-pound bar with six forty-five-pound plates for a total of three hundred and fifteen pounds, which I bench-pressed ten times. “Where’s my shirt?” I asked. I was fully aware that I was being an asshole about it, but there was something about that guy’s smile that I didn’t trust. His assistant coach was a guy I would, even today, trust with my very life, but he, himself, I always had suspicions of.

The new headmaster had been in the Navy. He figured he had a plan to handle me. One morning, I was sent to his office because, in the library, I asked a boy, “What the hell kind of shoes are you wearing?” The new school had a rule about swearing.

I was to be spanked in front of the other students because I said the word “hell.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

When asked why I had the audacity to refuse the punishment, which everybody knew came with swearing, I said it was because I had heard him say much worse, and then I gave examples of when he had.

In those days, at the start of the day, a student would get on the school’s public address system, say a short prayer, and lead all of us, good potential American citizens, in the pledge of allegiance to the flag. There was one layer of sheetrock between myself, this new headmaster, and the hapless student trying to lead the entire school in prayer.

Pressing the button on the microphone to say the prayer she had chosen, this girl could not be heard. All the entire school could hear was the new headmaster using very colorful language to describe what sort of person I must be to challenge him like this and how wrong I was to do it. They still talk about it.

At that point, I only had a few more credits to earn before I could legally graduate in the state of Mississippi. I finished those at the Education Center, and graduated a full year before scheduled to.

When I was thirteen, I was a member of the Boy Scouts of America. From this, I learned how to bandage wounds, build a fire, build a suspension bridge, how a radio works, and how to light my own farts.

I had an idea to make leaf prints of the trees in my neighborhood, pair them with botanical pen-and-ink drawings of the tree and its bark, and a brief description of the tree with its proper genus and species name. A leaf print is made by rolling ink or paint onto the underside of the leaf, pressing it into paper, and pulling it away, leaving a printed impression of the leaf’s structure.

After gathering nearly thirty specimens, I collected my drawings and prints into a book and presented them in hopes of earning the Botany Merit Badge. I kept the book for many years but can’t find it now.

My scoutmaster said what I had done was impressive, but I hadn’t followed the merit badge instructions. He couldn’t give me credit for my work, even though it was considerably more work than what was required. That moment marked the beginning of the end of my career in the Boy Scouts of America. Soon, cars and girls would be more interesting, and they, it seemed, had no interest in my improvisation or inventiveness.

For thirteen-year-old boys, throwing things at each other was a considerable interest. For Boy Scouts, it was soybean pods under the watchful leadership of Po Lutkin, our general. At school, it was pinecones, with no particular leadership at all. Boys are naturally competitive. Beaning each other with botanical specimens seemed an adequate way of determining the pecking order.

Doing what I was told and doing what I thought best were never the same thing.

In college, my theater master taught me to do play analysis and write cards for each play we read. He insisted that I should read at least one play a week. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize that’s fifty-two plays a year for four years. It does actually work.

As per his instructions, a theater card listed the elements of the play, a brief synopsis, and your production notes. They should not actually be presented on cards; they should be between one and one and one-half pages long.

I had been using the internet for five or six years by then. This was before Mozilla even. It was all very primitive. I had a computer at home. Searching for “Bertol Brecht” returned three text files and two .gif files. I printed them out with my theater card, turning in six or seven pages instead of the required one to one and a half pages.

Brent asked why I was turning in so much more work than required but not keeping current with the plays I was supposed to read. In those days, I didn’t tell anyone I had dyslexia. Not my teachers, not my friends, not my bartenders.

“Oscar Brocket was an asshole." was my answer. Brocket wrote “The History of the Theater,” a book that is required, even today, by students wishing to become theatre majors. He is notoriously thorough. Making it through Brocket usually determined who left with a theater major and those who left with a theatre minor.

When I moved downtown, I had three copies of Brocket. They sell for about $200 each now. I donated my textbooks and nearly four hundred plays and movie scripts to the high school I left when my relationship with the headmaster became untenable. They’d never gone very far from my heart.

I’m pretty much unable to follow instructions, but I can follow my heart. I often can’t do the work required, but I can do more work than anyone would think to ask of me. I’m disjointed and unsynchronized, but I try to be earnest.