Hail To The Chief

Originally posted on Yahoo 360 on Saturday August 18, 2007 - 05:39pm (CDT)

My down hill slide from honor roll student to acedemic failure had progressed to the point in 1967 that I found myself in the special education class. Quite a feat for someone who had just tested at115 on an IQ test. I was so unhappy where I was I just didn't care. While my classmates were struggling to master "readin writin an rithmatic" I was reading books I would hide In my text books...Meleville, Sandburg,Poe, and pulp fiction like westerns,ww2, and spy thrillers. My teacher knew I wasn't stupid She just had no way to penetrate the protective shell I had erected between myself, and the philistines. or so i thought.

We had spent...well they had spent the last two weeks memorizing the names of the u.s. presidents. I was called on to recite them , and managed to name a few, but it was obvious I hadn't been studying them. There were five or six clueless others, and after all that time teacher was not pleased with our progress. She anounced that anyone not able to get through the entire list by week's end would feel her new student made paddle. One lick for each president not named. What ever.

Now the special-ed class being the armpit of Monterey High school was located in the basement. what they did was wall off the back half of the girl's dressing room, and voila! we have a home for the losers. Can you imagine how much us poor male students were able to concentrate knowing what was on the other side of that wall? And it didn't even go all the way to the ceiling of the room. Just high enough to make sure there weren't any peekers.(rats!) But every hour all day long...we could hear them.

The week passed. I tried I really did, but it was just too many names in too little time.I came up six presidents short of a load. Doomed, and scared I watched the hands on the classroom clock race to my execution. Lunchtime. Everybody filed out some giggling, some learing at me, as they left. i was called to the front of the classroom. To my teacher's large wooden desk.

I was told to take everything out of my pockets, and lay them on her desk. My heart hammering in my chest i complied.I made eye contact with her my eyes glassey with tears. I was a failure in a class of failures. She told me she was sorry, but that she had to follow through with her threat. She tapped her desk telling me to bend over, and place my elbows on the top. She gripped the waist band of my cordaroy belbottoms pulling them up tight, and slapped my bottom hard! The foot long paddle with holes for extra sting, burned like fire!!

WHAP!! With the first swat the chatter of the third period girl's jim class ceased. Suddenly You could hear a pin drop! Oh god! Great. WHAP!! I gasped. I could'nt help it. I knew all those girls were listening to me get it. I knew it would be all over the school who it was too. I couldn't help it that paddle stung like fire!! WHAP!! I moaned. WHAP!! "Oh!" I was crying freely now. WHAP!! " OOH!!"

"Last one" She coached me. WHAP!! "Now I want those final six presidents by monday Terry , Is that understood?" I mumbled that it was listening to giggles of the girls on the other side of the wall as they returned to full babble. She ruffled my hair telling me I had taken my licks like a good boy, and to go ahead to lunch.

I didn't go to lunch. I climbed the concrete stairs turned left insteasd of right, and made my way out the back gate into the stacks of the lumber yard. i sat , and cried for awhile. Then leaving everything I'd brought to school behind I walked home. There was a white police car in front of my house. i didn't care.