Bubba's Tale - The Path To College

I eventually found out that school was a place that little children grow to be bigger children and to complain about how awful the sandwiches moms pack in lunch boxes turn when left in a hot locker for 3 or 4 hours before it comes time to eat them. I was once offered the delightful treat of a whole tuna salad sandwich by a boy that told his compatriots that some substance called mayonnaise had magically turned into rat-piss slime jelly. The interval between exiting the bus with the flashing red lights and eating lunch was filled with short stays in several different rooms, the first of them named, rather oddly, "Homeroom".

I often sat while in "Homeroom", wondering why this place that was definitely not my room at home was called what it was. The only thing of note that took place while I stayed here was the bored recitation of announcements of no apparent interest to anyone, the standing ritual called pledging allegiance to a flag for which it stands, and the calling of the roll. Calling of the roll was in itself an arcane activity, for in order to call the roll, the teacher stood and read a list of names and when a child heard one he liked, he would shout out the word "here". In the 12 years I attended grade school the calling of the roll never did actually generate either an appearance or any other response from a roll, even though I would sometimes prod the roll I brought from home with a stick to see if it would react somehow.

It was during roll calling that I became know officially as Bubba although my parents would stoutly declare that they never named me, and the children that went from room to room with me never called me anything but derivations of either the word "mutant" or words of scatological origin. My brother Steve was in my first "Homeroom", which for some reason in the years after the first one, would every year be a different room. I was sitting quietly through my first calling of the roll when the teacher who was finishing the calling got a marked reddening of the face and turned to me and ask me what my name was, if I had one, since it wasn't on the list. I must have looked as lost as I was, because Steve chimed in immediately saying that I was "Bah-ba". The teacher must of thought that Steve was trying to say Bubba because that is what I saw the man write down at the bottom of the list of names he had while mumbling to himself that he had to tell the registrar he had an unfortunate addition. I liked having a name, for it made me an equal with the other children, who it seems, were all given names. I also like being given something, even if I couldn't eat it or sleep on it.

The rooms that followed the "Homeroom" were called things like Art, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Jim. Jim was the most interesting of all these since it was a really big drafty, wooden floored room, and just before we entered it, we went into another room and changed our clothes with the ones that stayed seemingly permanently in small metal closets. My change of clothes were a pair of shorts so stiff that I couldn't bend them and I knew they were mine even the day the lights didn't work due to a failure by somebody named Power, because I could smell them from at least forty feet. The part I remember best about the Jim room is that we would have another calling of the roll but this time instead of just shouting the word "here" when we liked the name that was called, we dropped our shorts to show the teacher our "Jock Straps and Cups". It took me many years to figure out that "jock straps" was not the thing that grows from time to time amongst the hair, and that the cup was the plastic thing that always clanked when the teacher had me stand in front of the children and hit it with a ruler saying to us that a cup protected us from injury. I guess it did, but it hurt sometimes when he got worked up into such a frenzy that he was spitting half way across the room apparently mad that one of the children forgot to wear his that day saying that an example had to be made. If he ever made one, I never saw it so I guess the example must of been made on the other side of the teacher.

I was told by a old lady after attending school for several years, that I didn't need career counseling since no employer in his right mind would ever want to hire something as distasteful as me and that I should go to college. I didn't want to argue with the old lady but I bit off a finger and found that I wasn't all that distasteful, and in fact, tasted far better than a tuna salad sandwich with rat-piss slime jelly and I told her so. She turned a very interesting shade of white-gray and proceeded to vomit all over the table and the application papers she said she filled out for me. When she regained her composure, which she said she lost, she told me I would go to college and the sooner the better. I asked Steve what college was and Steve told me that it was like schall but harder, I was only more puzzled but determined to find out what was harder than the flakes that come off of a dead fish.

The old lady said she would do what she could do get me into a good college and that I was to continue going from room to room like I had been for years. One day, she called me into her room and told me she had great news for me and that she had got me into a college and I was to start in July and that I was to start to think about what I wanted out of life so that I could make the best of my wonderful opportunity.

Little did I know the worst years of my life were soon to come and that I would some day look back on the experiences I had while going to school with a sense of loss and sadness. But before July came, I experienced the pomp and circumstance of graduation, and drinking some stuff called vodka at a party in which the guys invited me to so that they could imitate the teacher that called the roll in the room called "Jim". I never felt so loved in my entire life, and when the party was over, I felt so let down that I had this terrible headache and the thing that grow from time to time in the hair in my shorts hurt like nothing I've ever felt before except maybe the time when a classmate said he wanted to heat some meat with a Bunsen burner and I wasn't to move until he did it. My pain and headache were only just fading when July came around and off I went to college.