Kick Me (17 page)

Well, I knew one thing for sure: that “one of us” wouldn’t be me.

“Easy to revive a person, isn’t it?” said Sergeant Korn as he adjusted his belt and pants, his red face glowing like a shiny new fire truck.

Sure. Easy as pie, I thought. Can we leave before Mr. Wendell makes us play Killer again?

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure why Mr. Wendell was showing us this in the first place. I guarantee that if I was lying on the ground unconscious and in need of revival, not one of my classmates would turn me into their Resusci-Danny. “I’m not gonna kiss him,” I could hear them saying. “I ain’t a homo.”
Emergency
’s Gage and DeSoto these guys were not.

So, Sergeant Korn had shown us what he came to show us and I figured that was it. But it wasn’t. No, my friends, my nightmare was only beginning. Mr. Wendell stepped forward.

“All right, you guys. Line up. You’re all gonna take a turn.”

Huh? Excuse me? I’m sorry, I must not have heard you correctly. It sounded like you said that we were all going to take a turn giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to that doll that Sergeant Korn had just had his grown man’s mouth all over. That couldn’t be right. It would be completely unsanitary. That is, unless you have a bunch of freshly boiled and sterilized Resusci-Annies in the back, enough for each of us to have one of our own.

I looked over at Mr. Wendell and saw him produce a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a rag. He dumped some alcohol onto the rag and wiped Sergeant Korn’s spit off of Annie’s mouth. My stomach dropped into my Keds. A wave of panic overtook me. My natural instincts kicked in and I immediately started for the locker room.

“Feig! Where do you think you’re going?” yelled Mr. Wendell.

“I have to get something out of my locker.”

“It can wait. Get back here and line up.”

My eyes zoomed in on Annie’s mouth. White and cold and open and now dripping with an indeterminate mixture of Sergeant Korn’s spit and alcohol. My head started to spin.

“I said get in line, Feig.”

My mind raced. This couldn’t be happening. But it was. My fellow classmates were starting to line up in front of Annie. There had to be some way out of this. It just wasn’t possible that I was going to have to put my mouth on that thing. Especially after other guys in my class were about to do it, too. Something had to be done.

“Mr. Wendell, I think it’s against my religion to do stuff like this.”

“Feig, I don’t care if you’re the pope. You’re
doing
this, so get in line.”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. Visions of germs swimming en masse in a sea of spit sloshed through my brain. And as my panic rendered me stationary, my fellow classmates just kept lining up like lemmings. All my stalling was very quickly placing me at the back of the line. And yet I truly couldn’t move. I tried to engage in a logical discourse with myself. Maybe being at the back of the line would be a good thing, I thought, since class might end before I got up to Annie and I wouldn’t have to do it. But then I noticed that the line was moving at a pretty fast clip. Kids were reviving Annie one after another. Reality was starting to sink in.

There was no way around it. I was eventually going to have to give Annie the Kiss of Life.

I watched kid after kid kneel down in front of her. I saw her chest rise and fall a couple of times, then saw the kid walk away wiping his mouth and then saw more alcohol dumped on the rag that was now soaked with spit and disinfectant brought down to wipe off Annie’s face. I was really starting to feel sick. And this was before I realized that with all the air going in and out of Annie’s chest, there was a whole reservoir of lung germs inside my future Resusci-girlfriend just waiting to infect my body. I felt like a trapped animal, as I had so many times in this emotional gulag we called gym class. I had to get out of there but I knew I couldn’t. I was stuck, doomed, and now the last in line. More and more spit was being deposited on Annie by the second. Instead of having to revive her, I could accomplish the same effect by walking around the room and licking the inside of everyone’s mouth, including Sergeant Korn’s.

I was getting closer. And now I noticed that the kid directly in front of me was Doug Blaychek, our school’s most infamous mentally retarded kid. He was a nice enough guy if you met him in the hallway, but he had extremely large and droopy lips that constantly seemed to be soaked with saliva. I’d always been unsettled by the sight of his spit-covered mouth, but until this moment the odds had been nonexistent that I’d ever have direct contact with it. But that was all about to change.

Doug turned and gave me a big, wet smile. I forced one back at him. My life started to flash in front of my eyes.

Four more people to go. I thought about running out of the gym and making a dash for home, but for all I knew, Sergeant Korn would chase me down and make me
date
Resusci-Annie.

It was Doug’s turn. He kneeled down and bent over Annie. He took a loud, deep breath as if he were preparing to jump into the ocean to dive for pearls and put his mouth onto her face. I saw his back rise and fall several times as he tried to revive the lifeless rubber doll on the floor. However, it looked like Doug was actually trying to inflate her, and after a few moments, Sergeant Korn put his hand on Doug’s shoulder and said loudly, as if Doug were deaf, “Okay, that’s fine, young man. You saved her.”

Doug stood up and threw his arms in the air as if he had just won the hundred-yard dash at the Special Olympics. As he moved away, I looked down.

There she was. Annie. Her face was soaked. I didn’t know what part of that “soaked” was spit and what part was alcohol, and I didn’t care. It was a mess. And there was now officially
no way
I was going to do this. Mr. Wendell slapped the rag on Annie’s mouth and haphazardly pulled it across. Was that how he disinfected her every time? Annie’s face must now be a festering cesspool of disease and death.

“All right, Feig. You’re up.”

I just stood there, staring at Annie. Maybe if I throw up all over it, I won’t have to do it, I thought. No, I’m sure they’d just make me do it anyway.

“C’mon, Feig. What is it with you? Get moving!” barked Mr. Wendell.

“Yeah, c’mon, ya fag! Do it already!” yelled Norman. Sure, it was easy for him to say. Norman would probably wring out Mr. Wendell’s spit rag into a Dixie Riddle Cup and drink it for a quarter. My mind reeled. I had to do something and I had to do it immediately. But what? Think fast, I told myself.

Then it hit me.

Faint.

I coughed violently and fell over. There was immediate commotion. I hadn’t been sure if they would buy my sudden and convenient fainting spell or not, but I guess that the perception of me as someone who was prissy enough to faint at the thought of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was enough to convince them. As they all gathered around, I wasn’t sure if I should be insulted by this or not. But at that moment, all I cared about was how close I was to getting out of having to ingest a tidal wave of my peers’ saliva.

“I’LL SAVE HIM!”

It was Doug the retarded kid. New panic set in as I heard him stomp toward me to deliver his newly learned Kiss of Life. I was nanoseconds away from blowing my cover by screaming and running away when Mr. Wendell saved me by quickly grabbing Doug by the arm. “No, Blaychek,” said Mr. Wendell, “we don’t know if he needs mouth-to-mouth.”

I was starting to feel pretty good about myself. I had done it. I had substituted a brief moment of colossal disgust for a nice lay-down and a shot at becoming the center of attention. And not only was I going to get out of Annie duty, but I’d probably get to go home early. It was only second period, so I’d be able to watch
The Price Is Right
and eat lunch in the safety of my own living room. I could practically taste the SpaghettiOs.

“He coughed really loud before he fell down,” said Norman. Good, I thought, you were paying attention. Maybe now you’ll leave me alone when you realize this is probably just a delayed reaction to your drinking all my Squirt years ago.

Sergeant Korn stepped forward and looked me over. “You said he coughed?” he asked, sounding tense and official.

“Uh huh.”

“Then he must have choked. Everybody step back.”

And with that, Sergeant Korn stuck his fingers in my mouth, pinched my nose, and kissed me.

I was home sick for three days.

THE WORLD AND
MR. CHICKEN

I
was a huge chicken when I was a kid.

It’s hard to say why, exactly. I mean, most kids are scared of one thing or another, but I just seemed to be afraid of absolutely everything. And when you’re afraid of everything, you’re going to be afraid of some pretty embarrassing stuff.

Loud noises always scared me. Up until about the age of six, I always reacted to a thunderstorm in the same way: I’d clamp my hands over my ears and refuse to take them off until the thunder stopped, the storm clouds cleared, and the sun came back out. The loud rumbles and claps of thunder sounded to me as if the earth were exploding and about to fall apart, and I guess I figured that if I could keep the sound out of my head, I could somehow make myself exempt from the world’s destruction. My parents’ anecdote about the thunder being the by-product of bowling angels was of little comfort, making the sound even more off-putting because of the image their explanation conjured up— hundred-foot-tall giants in white robes with enormous, feather-covered wings growing out of their backs throwing balls the size of elephants down a lane made of roiling black clouds, knocking down pins that would crash on top of each other like the unsettling footage of falling trees I had seen on a
National Geographic
special about lumberjacks. My fear that these gigantic bowling pins might break through the clouds and fall on top of my house, killing us all, made me angry at these recreation-loving angels who were so self-absorbed that they had no idea how much they were traumatizing a kid who was forced to go to Sunday school every week just to learn about how wonderful they were supposed to be. If it was thundering during a meal and my parents wanted me to eat, one of them would have to feed me by hand because my palms would not leave my ears even if I was on the verge of starvation. I’d put my arms up and elbows out to the sides and clamp my hands so solidly onto the sides of my skull that the Jaws of Life couldn’t pry them off. I looked like a human loving cup, the living booby prize for my poor parents, who were quickly discovering that their only child was a neurotic mess.

My first experience in a movie theater went from fun to frightening when my mother took me to a double feature that saw a Winnie the Pooh cartoon inexplicably programmed on the same bill with the Rat Pack’s Roaring Twenties bootlegger musical
Robin and the 7 Hoods.
Sammy Davis Jr. sang, jumped up on a bar, danced a few steps, then pulled out a tommy gun and started firing wildly. As a trucker might say, I was “off like the bride’s panties” and cowering in the lobby before Sammy finished his first verse.

Circuses scared the hell out of me, both because performers always seemed to be shooting off giant cannons all the time and because the disturbing antics of the creepy clowns usually involved blowing something up or hitting each other with exploding sticks that would crack loudly like gunshots. As the kids around me were cheering and laughing at these allegedly comedic exploits, I would be fleeing for the parking lot like an extra in a Godzilla movie.

Those clowns also played into another of my major fears: I was afraid of anyone in a costume. A trip to see Santa might as well have been a trip to sit on Hitler’s lap for all the trauma it would cause me. Once, when I was four, my mother and I were in a Sears and someone wearing an enormous Easter Bunny costume headed my way to present me with a chocolate Easter egg. I was petrified by this nightmarish six-foot-tall bipedal pink fake-fur monster with human-sized arms and legs and a soulless, impassive face heading toward me. It waved halfheartedly as it held a piece of candy out in an evil attempt to lure me into its clutches. Fearing for my life, I pulled open the bottom drawer of a display case and stuck my head inside, the same way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. This caused much hilarity among the surrounding adults, and the chorus of grown-up laughter I heard echoing from within that drawer only added to the horror of the moment. Over the next several years, I would run away in terror from a guy in a gorilla suit whose job it was to wave customers into a car wash, a giant Uncle Sam on stilts, a midget dressed like a leprechaun, an astronaut, the Detroit Tigers mascot, Ronald McDonald, Big Bird, Bozo the Clown, and every Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Chip and Dale, Uncle Scrooge, and Goofy who walked the streets at Disneyland. Add to this an irrational fear of small dogs that saw me on more than one occasion fleeing in terror from our neighbor’s four-inch-high miniature dachshund as if I were being chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles and a chronic case of germ phobia, and it’s pretty apparent that I was—what some of the less politically correct among us might call—a first-class pussy.

Even though I tried to conquer my fears as I went through grade school and junior high, convincing myself that loud noises could be cool when they came in the form of firecrackers blowing up model cars and Led Zeppelin albums turned up full blast, and teaching myself that people in costumes are usually only present when an event is supposed to be “fun,” I would still succumb to a fear of anything unknown.

Especially if the unknown meant I was potentially going to get my ass kicked.

One of the biggest unknowns I feared was high school.

In the weeks before I became a freshman, I was terrified. But it wasn’t because of the theory that being afraid of high school is really a fear of starting at the bottom of the social ladder again. Granted, it’s true that by the end of junior high you’re one of the “big kids,” the upperclassmen/elder statesmen of middle school, and then once you arrive in high school, you’re back down in the depths of uncool again, a lowly freshman ready to be humiliated by the older students. But that wasn’t the cause of my fear. Depression, yes, but not fear. No, the fear came from something I prefer to label “High School Folklore.”

A lot of my more irrational fears as a kid came from the fact that my next-door neighbor Mary and her older sisters used to love to scare the crap out of me. They’d always tell me horror stories about things that would happen if I did something or other. They’re the ones who, when we were all at the beach, put the fear of God in me that I might spontaneously combust because “it happened to this kid over on Moravian Drive after he stayed out in the sun too long.” They made me paranoid for years about a mythical “sewing bee” that reportedly flew into kids’ bedrooms and sewed their mouths and nostrils shut in the middle of the night so that they’d smother to death. And to this day, I’m still afraid to put my cold hands in hot water because they told me if I did, my fingers would fall off. Looking back, I know that they were merely having fun with my perpetual fears and my chronic gullibility. And in the weeks before I was to enter high school, their minds reeled at the opportunity to ruin something I was actually starting to look forward to.

One summer evening, I was sitting with them in the ditch in their front yard talking about stuff our parents told us not to talk about. It was in that same ditch, when I was six, that they explicitly explained to me what sex was, resulting in a strange fever dream that night in which I was lying on the ground naked in a dark room as a life-size nude Barbie doll was slowly lowered down on top of me. But as we sat in the ditch that summer evening and listened to seventeen-year-old Becky, the eldest girl in their family, explain to us what hermaphrodites were, she suddenly looked at me and said, “So, Fig Newton, you’re starting high school next month, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said proudly.

“You better be careful. They don’t like freshmen very much.”

A hot flush immediately went up the back of my neck.

“They don’t?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully not to sound worried.

“Nope,” said Becky, giving me a very sober look. “You should see what they do to freshmen. Sometimes, if you’re walking down the hall, a bunch of seniors will grab you, drag you into the bathroom, and give you a swirly.”

I looked at Sharon and Mary, who were listening to Becky, wide-eyed.

“What’s a swirly?” I said, even
less
successful in my attempt not to sound terrified.

“It’s when they stick your head in the toilet and flush it. Last year, some kid drowned. The year before, another kid got sucked down. They found him in the sewer. Long and skinny and dead.”

I felt faint. “Really?”

“Yeah. But that’s nothing,” Becky continued, leaning forward toward me to heighten the impact of her warnings. “A lot of times, what they’ll do is grab a freshman, drag him into the bathroom, and make him eat drugs.”

I was now officially in a panic. My dad had just the other night given me the world’s most sobering talk about drugs after he and I came across a picture of a hippie shooting up heroin in an antidrug ad in
National Geographic.
My father had sighed a scary, disapproving sigh, pointed at the picture, looked me right in the eye, and said, “You see that kid? That kid is the stupidest kid you’ll ever see. And you know why he’s so stupid? Because what you see him doing, right there, is throwing his life away. Right down the toilet.” My father then launched into a one-hour lecture, telling me that if I took drugs, any drugs—if I decided it’d be fun to “get all
doped
up”—I’d turn into a vegetable. Immediately. And all of a sudden, there I was in the ditch hearing that a group of crazed seniors were going to put me in a coma the minute I entered the school on my first day.

I came home very upset.

“Mom! I’m not going to high school. No way!”

“Of course you are. What are you talking about?”

“I’m just not going. Forget it!”

“Why not?” my mother asked, concerned. Whenever I was upset, my mother would immediately become twice as upset, whether she knew what I was upset about or not.

“Because they’re gonna make me eat
drugs.
”

“Who is?”

“Seniors. They hate freshmen. This kid was walking down the hall last year and a bunch of seniors jumped him and stuck his head in the toilet and made him eat drugs!”

“Where did you hear this?”

“From some kids who go to the school.” I figured my fear would seem more valid if I didn’t tell her that Becky had been my source. After all, I was trying to get out of having to go to high school, not simply looking to be told that I was overreacting again.

“Oh, my goodness,” my mother said, extremely concerned. “I’ll call the school tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said, pouty. I knew things would be okay if my mom was going to “make a call.”

The next day, my mom told me that she had talked to Mr. Walker, the principal of the high school. Apparently, she tracked down the poor guy’s home phone number and bothered him during his summer vacation because of my paranoia.

“I spoke to the principal today,” she said, looking a bit embarrassed. Clearly he had convinced her that her son was crazy. “He said he wasn’t aware that any of this toilet and drug business was going on but that he’d look into it. He told me to tell you not to worry, though. He said it was probably just a story.”

Between my mother’s face and my reading between the lines of what the principal said, I immediately felt like the dumbest kid in the world. I started imagining the conversation that must have taken place between my mother and the principal.

“Mr. Walker, my son says that the older boys in your school force the younger ones to eat drugs.”

“Um . . .
who
is your son?”

“Paul Feig.”

“Feig? I don’t seem to recall the name.”

“Well, he’s not in high school yet. He starts next month.”

“Oh, well . . . I think he’s just been told some wild stories by some students having a little fun with him.”

“So, you don’t think it actually happens?”

“I sincerely doubt it, Mrs. Feig. If the kids have any drugs, I really doubt they’re going to waste them on your son.”

And then he probably hung up and mentally filed the name “Paul Feig” in the Whining Little Idiots folder.

That night, we had a very loud thunderstorm, and as I lay in bed and listened to the thunder claps rattle my bedroom window I started to hate myself for having spent my life up to that point being such a wuss.

When I got to high school the next month, still nervous and on guard, just in case Becky was right and I was going to be jumped, dunked, and turned into an addict, I found that high school wasn’t the jungle I was imagining it would be. More than anything, it just looked like junior high all over again, except that the girls were more mature and a lot of guys who were older than me had mustaches. And after a few days of being looked through like the Invisible Man by sophomores, juniors, and seniors, all of whom were having more fun than I was, I found myself with a new and actually legitimate fear—the fear of being completely ignored. I suddenly wished that even one of the older kids in my school would find me noticeable enough to merit a swirly or a forced meal of their stash.

Because, after all, if people are sticking your head in a toilet or shoving drugs down your throat, at least they’re paying attention to you.