I Was a Spanish Speaking Pigeon

First published on May 14, 2013

I was passed over again this week for Teacher of the Month- in our school it's better known as "Dragon of the Month." That makes eleven straight years— ninety-nine straight months —that I have not been chosen Teacher of the Month . . . the Week . . . The Day . . . or even the goddamn Minute. Nothing. Nada. Zero.

And for the longest time I was befuddled as to how this could be. I mean, after all, don't I say, "yes" to every piddling, ridiculous, lazy little favor that's asked of me? Don't I say, "Good morning" to everyone I pass in the halls and hold doors open for people whose hands are free and who are still thirty yards away? Don't I make myself and my resources available for others without ever asking for a payback?

But at long last, I think I have discovered the reason why I am the educational version of the Invisible Man:

You see, I didn’t feel I had much going for me when I was a kid, but one thing I did have was a sense of humor. By seventh grade I had established myself as a regular in the class clown rotation, with frequent appearances in both the principal’s and guidance counselor’s offices.

Our principal Mr. Kreitzberger used to drum his fingers on his desk with a combination irked/confounded look on his face and ask me, at least once a week, “Just what are your intentions here at Hillside Junior High School, Mr. Johnson?” To which, on one occasion, I leaned forward in my chair and said, “You know, sir, I’ve been wondering that same thing. A question like that requires a deep and thoughtful answer. And after a great deal of time spent giving this matter my undivided attention, since my parents had me chained to the wall in the basement, I think I’ve come up with an answer.”

Mr. Kreitzberger brightened and sat up taller in his leather swivel chair. “Which is?”

“Well, sir, it’s like this. I’ve decided that this lovely little school of yours is a crashing bore. The teachers are clueless, my classmates are idiots, and quite frankly, the only thing that’s going to keep me from blowing my brains out in the next two years is some form of entertainment. I figure it’s my civic duty to supply that entertainment.”

Mr. Kreitzberger sank back in his chair and let out a long, exasperated sigh. “You’re a real smartass, aren’t you, Johnson? You think you’ve got it all figured out.”

I fell back in my chair as well, feeling smug. “Well, no. Not all of it. Just this county lockup for morons.”

***

I returned to school after three days of suspension at home, and was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office before we’d even said the morning pledge. With a disingenuous smile, Mrs. Fleishman invited me to sit down on the white naugahyde couch across from her desk, her weighty perfume making it hard to breathe. On the wall above and behind me hung a cheap painting of a gondolier navigating the murky canals of Venice. I assumed it was either a thinly veiled metaphor for junior high school, or her fantasy of the life she would rather have been living. She opened a file and, dabbing the tip of her thumb on her tongue every now and then, flipped through a stack of official-looking documents.

“What’s all that?” I asked her.

“Your file,” she said, without looking up.

“Anything interesting?”

“All of it,” she said with a smirk.

***

The third week of September was a special time for the seventh graders at Hillside, because that was when the teachers and counselors all huddled together and decided which kids were going to be placed in which level classes. Until then we’d all been assigned to classes more less by our last names and ages, and by our SRA standings at the end of sixth grade. We were really nothing more than junior high school recruits at boot camp: learning the rules, learning the basics, figuring out which teachers we should legitimately fear and which ones were young and gullible, or so close to retirement that they just didn’t care anymore. But after three weeks of mutual reconnaissance, it was time for the brass to make their selections.

We had a three-tiered system at Hillside: There were the eagles— they were the brainyacks, the “A-getters,” the kids that no one liked because they seemed so much smarter than everybody else and weren’t friendly to the rest of us; the bluebirds— the kids who were definitely bright, maybe as bright as the eagles but who weren’t snobs or nerds; and the pigeons— everybody else. Along with being dubbed a certain specie of bird, a second layer of honor or humiliation was heaped upon every kid in the form of a foreign language. We were all required to take a second language, maybe the only thing Hillside Junior High School, and presumably the state of New Jersey, got right. The eagles were placed in the French class, the bluebirds were assigned German, and the pigeons were dumped into the Spanish hopper.

Which room did I wind up in? Let me put it this way:

Me llamo Paco.

Yep, I was a Spanish speaking pigeon.

I wish I could say that being placed in the same holding tank with the likes of Bruno Kowalski, Jeb Phelps, Nadia Innes, and the other intellectual lightweights who occupied the Top 40 slots on the popularity chart didn’t bother me, but it did. In fact, it didn’t just bother me, it incited me to new heights of rebellion.

First of all, I had gotten straight As and Bs until I hit the seventh grade. There were many reasons for my sudden fall from academic grace, and again, I suppose I could point the finger at my pre-algebra teacher Mrs. Fromm, a humorless raisin of a woman if ever there was one, or Mr. Kreitzberger— whom I suspected was behind my demotion anyway —but the truth is, it was my brain’s fault.

You see, in those days, nobody knew anything about Attention Deficit Disorder or any of those other handy labels teachers and doctors stick on kids who know that school is really nothing more than a weekly reminder that there’s something worse than church. Back then, the assumption was that if you couldn’t sit still in your seat it meant you had a bladder problem; if you couldn’t shut up while the teacher was talking it meant you were an incorrigible, rude show off with insecurity issues and were a poor reflection on your family. Worst of all, if you screwed up on tests or couldn’t stay with a book because your mind filled up with so many exciting pictures and ideas that you couldn’t decide which one to concentrate on, you were pegged as a dim bulb, or a fugitive from daycare. The thing was, I did all of that stuff: I had great kidneys, yet squirmed like a worm on a hook; I upstaged my teachers at every opportunity, yet I wasn’t insecure at all— if anything, I was overconfident; and the only thing I ever quit was the Boy Scouts, because I felt like a dork wearing a khaki uniform and struggling with that silly three-finger salute. Besides, none of my friends were in the local troop.

Eventually, I figured out why I had been kicked down the stairs of academia to swim with the bottom feeders: it was the team captain phenomenon again. The same way it didn’t matter how many home runs I hit in baseball, or tackles I made on the football field, or how many times I ran the hundred yard dash faster than anybody in the school except for Kenny Wirt, I always got picked last. It was the same thing in the classroom: it didn’t matter how many “A”s I got on my essays, or how well I did on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, or how many times I embarrassed that old bat Mrs. Lineal when she got her facts wrong in Social Studies. The team captains had chosen me last again.

A pigeon.

A flying rat.

Ése era yo.