Inside Doug's Head

As the fictional man of steel, Superman swore to protect the weak and the innocent. If I were Superman, I would swear at the weak, the innocent, and anyone else who happened to get in my way. My days would be spent walking around town, taunting and laughing at people, mocking them for how they couldn’t do anything to stop me from tormenting them. “Hey, I’m Superman. Why don’t you just come over here and make me?” is what I would say, and then I would crush them with a building, or a really big boat that I pulled out of the ocean. They would cry and I would laugh at them in my loud Superman voice. “Ouch, Superman, your laughing is hurting my ears and making my suffering worse. Please stop!” But, I wouldn’t stop. I would just keep right on laughing and giving them cancer with my x-ray vision. Yes, the universe certainly knew what it was doing when it decided to prevent me from being Superman.

When I was a kid, I never wanted to grow up. The adults that I knew had nothing but responsibilities and never did anything fun. I didn’t see them driving bikes, or playing in the mud, and they never just hung out with friends at the playground. Nope, growing up was not going to be for me and I was going to resist the process as much as I possibly could. Then one day, being able to drive a car, vote, and drink liquor all seemed like things that were worth growing up for. I can’t exactly recall how the idea of driving drunk to the polling station changed my life, but it just did.

So, I then began to imagine myself as a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis or that swan-goose thing of H. C. Andersen, transforming into some sort of tower of intellect and bulwark of quiet dignified repose. In my head, I constructed a picture of myself as future-me, stroking my beard and clucking my tongue while I engaged thoughtfully in contemplative conversations on Math, Science, and the nature of the deliciousness of three cheese ranch salad dressing.

Yeah, I’m still waiting for all that to happen. It turns out that the mess you are when you’re six is the mess you’ll be when you’re sixty. Still, I’d rather have my motorcycle now than the bicycle I had when I was eight. Life is wasted on the living.

Every summer, my parents, probably out of some sense of responsibility for enriching our lives, would drag my slightly older sister and me on the proverbial family vacation that often induced thoughts and plans of suicide. We had to suffer through hours in the back of a million-degree station wagon, all the while fighting over whose turn it was to rest their foot on the big humpy thing that ran down the middle of the vehicle. We had no such luxuries as air conditioning or seat belts. To keep from suffocating, the windows would have to be fully cranked down, and the wind flapped and howled like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. For safety, we were told that we should hang on to something in the event of a car accident.

Along the way to our undisclosed location, we would stay at every craptacular, no-frills campground, and only occasionally at the most deeply discounted of discount motels. Of course, plan-ahead was a concept my parents never fully embraced. Reservations? We don’t need no stinkin’ reservations! They also didn’t believe in maps, or directions, or travel arrangements of any kind. I wonder if my parents were actually hoping to abandon us somewhere, but always chickened-out at the last moment.

Once we got to the point where we were too tired, hungry, and hot to even breathe anymore, well, an hour or so past that, the parents would start thinking about stopping for the night. By this time there was never any rooms at the inns. We always ended up in the cheapest and dirtiest of the rat infested, flea-bag motels. Either that, or tenting on the side of the road next to a drainage ditch. At least that’s the way I remember it. Usually one or all of us would get sick from eating at less than clean restaurants, where, based on the aroma, the meat tasted an awful lot like I imagined a decaying skunk would taste. To this day, right now even, when I think of taking a family vacation, I instinctively want to eat a gun.

We drove for a hundred and some hours one time to get to Santa’s Village to see the reindeer. In July. Yes, of course they were closed. Who goes to see Santa in July? My parents thought the tickets would be cheaper in the off-season. The gates were locked with thick chains and the reindeer had been made into mincemeat pies many months earlier. After all that driving to get there, we just turned around and went home. What else was there to do? Mmmm—I bet those reindeer tasted some good, though.

We spent one summer on a road-trip to Boston. My mother found us a hotel with a fancy sounding name, so she was expecting pretty high things. It was something like The Royal Crap Hole, or The Regency Tower of Despair. We only stayed a night or two, so the room itself was tolerable for the short time we were there, and the mice were very polite. For me, the tough part was that I had to sleep in the same bed as my father. Even at $18 a night my parents were too cheap to get two rooms. My sister slept with my mother, and I slept with my father.

Now, I loved my father and everything, but sleeping with him was, well, awkward. As far as I was concerned, my father smelled funny, and I was certain he had body lice or some contagious disease that I didn’t want to catch. I know, it was irrational, but I was twelve and really afraid he might accidentally spoon me in the middle of the night. I think this is the reason why I still don’t sleep well even in the nicest of hotels. Is there a name for that, a deep rooted psychological fear of paternal spooning?

While in Boston, we rode on a subway for the first time in our lives. My parents had no idea how the route numbering and schedule worked, so they went right up to the first person they saw and asked them for instructions. For context, I grew up in a small town that was so white that when it snowed you couldn’t see the people anymore, so he was the first actual black person I had ever seen. Conversely, I think we were the first white people who had ever directly spoken to him without accusing him of committing a crime, as he seemed a bit startled to have us approach him. My parents never had an inclination towards racism, and he could tell we were from out of town.

Well, the guy was genuinely polite and he patiently explained the hub-and-spoke arrangement of the transit lines, what the train colors meant, the difference between the inbound and outbound designations, and he showed us how to get all around town. We had a pretty good time exploring the city after that. How does the saying go? Show a guy a fish and he’ll want one. Give a guy a fish and he’ll ask for a glass of milk. Teach a guy how to fish and he’ll expect government subsidies.

Hold on there, you with 911 on speed dial, I’m just being dramatic, not confessing to a major crime. My eighth-grade year was an eventful one, for it was that same year that I poisoned my English teacher.

It was a dark, dreary, overcast morning and, for English class that day, we were going to be watching a film reel on an old play written by some Shakespeare guy. My teacher (technically, he wasn’t really mine because I think he belonged to the school board since they had acquired him as an orphan in the 1930s) would waltz into our classroom (again, it wasn’t really ours, as the District owned the school and we just visited the place on the weekdays, but this is going to be a long story if you keep making me clarify these little points) every morning with his cup of coffee in hand, however this one day he realized he had forgotten something after getting to class. Upon leaving to retrieve that which he was missing, he left his cup full of coffee unattended on the big desk at the front of the room. Sadly for him, it was within reaching distance of me, and that was a big mistake. Correction, two big mistakes. Well, possibly, one big mistake and one lesser mistake with the potential for significant repercussions.

Now, either coincidentally or by a twist of fate, a nearby classmate of mine had recently started using a fountain pen for writing his school work. Not one of the fruity fountain pens made out of a huge gay feather from an endangered species of smelly bird, but one with the fat ink cartridge on the inside. Seizing the opportunity for unobserved mischief, I snatched the pen from his hand, held it over the steaming cup of coffee, and gave it a short, abrupt, downward stab into the air.

Ever do something evil and then realize that it worked better than you wanted it to? Well, oh my, this stream of ink came squirting out of the nib of the pen and only partially hit the coffee surface. The bulk of it landed on the inside, outside, rim, and handle of the cup, and it splashed all over the desk, the desk pad, and every single sheet of paper in between.  You know that hollow, yawing, tingling feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when reality yanks your chain and you prepare yourself for the hurt you know will soon follow? Me, too. Right then, I felt all of that and a whole lot more.

You see, the English teacher wasn’t one of those frilly little poetry-reading turds living in constant peril of being carried away by a strong breeze. No, this guy was pretty rugged, and he carried himself with the stature and disposition of a prison guard. He was also the vice principle of the school, and there were rumors he had previously killed a student over a troubling matter of a late assignment. I knew I would be next, exactly one second after he returned and discovered the layer of inky goo all over his cup and desk. In a panic driven by terror, I grabbed a wad of paper towel from a nearby roll and started quickly cleaning up.

The lights were off in the room, in preparation to watch the film thingy, and it was difficult to see exactly where all the dark blue splatter had settled. Ink doesn’t come out of paper and wood very well by frantically rubbing it with more paper. Then there was the cup. My initial instinct was to toss it out the window and pretend like he had forgotten to bring it to class. I quickly practiced my best, What cup? look and found it somewhat less than convincing. So, I engaged Plan B: flip the pen over, stick it in the coffee and stir with great vigor. One, two, three stirs in, and I hear, “What the hell are you doing to my coffee?” in a loud booming voice emanating from a silhouetted figure in the doorway.

Busted. There was no way to make it look like anything innocent, accidental, or even remotely understandable. Without attempting to respond, I immediately backed away like a cat with wet feet standing on a hot electric griddle. The lights were off in the room and the teacher couldn’t really see me all that well, not from the door and not with the contrast of the light in the hallway. I coolly sat down in my chair and said nothing. He marched brusquely to the front of the room, lifted and examined his cup, and momentarily sent me a scowling suspicious look that punched a hole through the darkness. After a heart stopping few seconds, he dropped the sinister stare and we proceeded to watch the film.  He sat off to the side of the room, quietly drinking his cup of ‘coffee.’

At the end of the class, the lights came back on. The teacher stood and said a few words about the nature of the timeless genius of Shakespeare, and returned his presently empty cup to the desk. Now, for sure, I was fully expecting he was going to die soon from ink poisoning. Maybe that’s the part that makes it a felony—the expectation of someone dying as a result of something you have done. Or, perhaps it is the watching in silence and doing nothing to warn your potential victim. Either way, the lights came back on and the ink that was clearly everywhere became so much more visible. I knew he saw it and recognized it for what it was, for he was neither blind nor stupid. In addition to the broad scatter pattern across the wooden desk surface, the ink was all over the inside bottom and outside of his cup, smeared upon his lips and tongue, and when he spoke I could even see it on his front teeth. All I could do was wonder if he would die before or after he killed me.

Much to my surprise and relief, he never said a word to me about the incident. At the end of the class, he just picked everything up (not, like, the whole room everything, just the stuff that he came in with—don’t be stupid) and walked out. Then I felt really, really horrible. On the inside. The ink had somehow stained my soul and I experienced a confluence of guilt and shame very deeply; but, then it went away.

Of course, I realize now the ink was non-toxic and he was never in any real danger of dying from it. I imagine he’s dead now, though, because it has been nearly 30 years since that day and he wasn’t a young man back then. Still, I never tried to poison anyone after that. I had learned my lesson: Even though it may seem like it would be a laugh and a lark to poison someone, it really isn’t a nice thing to do. It might just make them angry.

I had several friends growing up, in retrospect I realize so many of them were total jackasses, but one in particular stands out. He was always going on about how his father was the manager of the local Sears department store, as if that entitled him to the privileges of social royalty. They didn’t have a name for people like that back then, but in these more modern times, we call them douchebags. His younger brother was a big-fat-boy—I imagine they’re both either 800 pounds or dead, by now—who would shove people to the ground, sit on them, and fart grotesquely in their faces. By the age of nine, my friend had figured out how to do multiplication by repetitively counting his fingers and toes, so that made him some sort of math genius in the eyes of his teachers. I always felt put down and somehow inferior when I was around him, and these feelings formed the basis of our imbalanced friendship. He moved away at the end of grade six, and I didn’t miss him much, so we never kept in touch.

You know how in the movies and TV shows the dorky little kid gets viciously picked on by the bigger kids? They mercilessly do cruel things to him, make him do their homework and menial chores, and then he spends the rest of his time trying to figure out an elaborate way of getting back at them. Well, that was never me. I realized pretty quickly that evolution provides two paths for survival in the wild—either be big, or be smart. The big people were surviving the only way they knew how, and I was fully prepared to take advantage of them for that. I didn’t wait for any bullying to happen, I established trade relations right up front. I’d do the big-guy’s homework as long as he’d punch that guy over there in the groin for me, should it ever become necessary. It was win-win, except for the guy curled up in a ball on the ground holding his groin and writhing in agony. Had humans and dinosaurs traveled together on the evolutionary trail, saddle-up, I would have been the one riding the T-Rex. Thanks to my penchant for the symbiotic relationship, I was never picked on, at least not for very long.

When I was in the eighth-grade, I went a bit too far with this strategy, though. There was this guy, he must have been in his early twenties, who was assigned to our class mid-year after being released from prison. The other kids in the class started crying and pooping their pants the instant this danger-to-society walked into the room. He was huge and hard looking, with threatening tattoos, jagged scars, and arms as thick as a fat chick’s thigh. He took a seat in front of me. Boldly and without fear, I politely introduced myself, asked him if he needed anything, and offered to help him get caught up in the Math assignment during the lunch break. In spite of all his outward appearances, he was actually a pretty decent guy with a crass sense of humor, and we got along quite well.

Then, one ordinary day, a dipshit who was sitting in the desk behind me decided to start mouthing-off to me in class, making rude comments, questioning my mother’s marital fidelity, and kicking the back of my chair. Just the regular annoying thirteen year-old kind of stuff. I was fully prepared to ignore him until he got bored and moved on to someone else. My new friend had other ideas. Without warning or provocation to do so, he calmly stood up, walked over and hit the guy squarely in the center of the forehead with his fist so hard I could hear brain rattling around skull. Thwunk! Coup contrecoup, and back again. The vulgar sound it made still haunts me to this day.

My former annoyer, now turned victim, immediately melted to the floor, completely unconscious; he even wet himself a little. That was bad enough, but my ‘friend’ then proceeded to try stuffing the limp body out through an open window, like an unwanted rag doll, or a dead hooker in your hotel room when there’s been a knock on the door. The police eventually came and dragged him away. When we first met, I should have thought to ask him why he had been in jail, because it must have had something to do with a frothy mix of rage and anger issues.

I never saw my would-be protector again after that incident. I feel somehow responsible for his re-incarceration, and the presumed forced acts of sodomy we so often hear about occurring in those places. Truly I had learned a big lesson: With great power comes a great power bill.