It wasn't that I was smarter or more advanced or anything like that. It was a time of the year thing. See, the people who decide such things have a cut off point - a date on the calendar - and if you're born after that day they bump you in with the next intake. The next year. I was born just in time to ride just above that line. I snuck in by a matter of days.
All of that which is only to let you know that I was eleven when I started 7th Grade. It is important to be accurate. Even when telling fiction...... especially when telling fiction.
I was brand new to this Secondary School, but I did have some history with the place. It was part of a small private school that ran all the classes from Kindergarden to 12th Grade out of one asphalt, tanbark and orange brick campus. So signing up for the Secondary School simply meant rocking up at the same damn address, with the same damn tanbark and same damn asphalt. The only changes were the new teachers and a new principal to answer to.
But I had more history than just that with the place itself , I also had history with said 'new principal' - a man we shall call 'The Baker's Son'.
That history had been foisted upon me. I hadn't asked for it. Nor did I even know it was available to be asked for. It wasn't a history that I had made or participated in or been present for. It was a history that my uncles had cultivated through years of arrogant and pointless struggle against the stubborn and petty force that was The Baker's Son. He then turned those collections of running battles into a grudge to be played out with and upon me. Their history was now my history and with all that hanging around, I started Secondary School..
Years later, as an older and far more distant fellow, I'd come to understand The Baker's Son better. His way. His method. Why he acted the way he did. It was not due to some misguided romantic vision of providing us with that which we needed to face the world. It wasn't because he had an idealised notion that what he was doing was for our best. It was because he was - and I'm sure, still is - a Pathological Narcissist. A man without reproach. Who felt no empathy and was filled with the zeal of a predator who wanted nothing more than to inflict pain. Or something.
But back then, as an eleven year old, I simply thought he was an arsehole. Though, to be fair, that too was certainly accurate.
Early on in that first year - I think it was still inside the first month of the school year - I was sent down to his office. I stood facing his broad, veneered desk, propped up against the row of cool, grey, iron filing cabinets stretching deep and far off the wall opposite. He leaned back on his high-back chair and smiled at me. I remember thinking that it was the smile of pleasure. I'm sure it was. And I'm sure he wanted me to see that pleasure.
His standard punishment - the 'entry-level' one - was a 500 word essay. The topics were varied and always inane. This wasn't the first one I'd been given. It was probably my third. Though, this time was different. This time I didn't deserve the punishment. I wasn't stitched up or sold down the river or tarred with the wrong brush or some other proverbial shit you could insert on your own in your own time. I had done 'something' - just not enough to warrant a trip to The Baker's Son's office. And certainly not enough to warrant a 500 word essay.
I have always been good judge of such things - knowing which crime fits which punishment - and as they say around these parts: "you gotta back yourself". And so I did. I backed my abilities to judge what was correct and fair and I straight-up just never did the essay. Not even a word. I went home that evening and went about my time as I wished - as if The Baker's Son had no authority to instruct any different.
The thing is, he had exactly that. He had exactly the authority. It was kinda central to the very definition of everything he was. But I was eleven - going on twelve - so that may have helped me miss all that.
The next morning, he called me into his office and asked me for the essay. I told him I hadn't done it. That was a medium sized error. When he asked why, I told him it was because I didn't believe I had done anything wrong and didn't deserve the punishment. That was a much larger error.
I know I said before that he was a evil man with a pointed drive to inflict pain upon me. This is true. However, this is not to say that I was never a little shit who provoked him. I certainly was that too. At times I was a smart-arse looking for a dispute. But for me, mentally brawling with him was not a priority, unlike for The Baker's Son, for whom tormenting me was an obsession. Personally, I had other things I was more concerned with - like cricket and telling stories and trying to string together three words to that Russian girl three doors down and trying to work out how to extricate myself from a consuming and surrounding world of religion that had me trapped inside of it.
Anyways, that exchange on that morning may have been one of the times where I pushed back at him. And he responded by doubling the punishment to 1000 words and suspending me from attending any classes until the punishment was done. So I wandered back out of his office and down the concrete stairs. I located my bike and rode home. There was a parent there - either the male one or the female one - and I informed them of what had just gone down. I was then forcefully led into the dining room and set down on one of the green and brown crushed velvet, dinner-chairs. I was given paper and a pen and told to get writing.
I didn't. I didn't write a word. I sat there all day - from 9am - and wrote not a goddamn word. I didn't deserve the original punishment, so it was simply impossible that I deserved this double-up. Zero times two equals zero and zero was exactly how many words I was determined to write. I didn't do anything in place of the writing. I simply sat there for hours doing absolutely nothing. Staring and daydreaming and doing nothing.
Around 5pm that table I was seated at had to be set for Sabbath Dinner and I was ordered to clear my unused stationary and lay down a white table cloth, pull out the Good-China and arrange it around. Setting tables was always one of my favourite things. My sisters and I even found a way to make it into a competition - who could come up with the most intricate ways to fold and arrange the paper napkins. This was before the days of Google and YouTube. I'm not sure how we came up with all the variations we did.
Two days later I was back at school. Every Sunday morning we had a 2 hour class that wasn't compulsory, but you had to attend. It was a bonus morning of learning every week, that no one - neither the teachers nor the students - seemed to think was a fine idea. At the end of that class, The Baker's Son called me once again into his office. I told him about my 'two times zero' theory. This too was a large error. He didn't take it well. I mean, it was a pure and precise theory, he just simply didn't agree with its premise.
When he got angry, his little head got quite red. He actually had a normal sized head, but his long beard - the colour of an old carrot pulled out of the ground two months too late - filled up so much of his face that it was hard to get the right perspective. All you had to work with were two, puffy cheeks - partly covered by square-lensed wire-framed glasses - which sat without the chin and the lips and the neckline that would've made it all seem fair and in proportion.
So, I'm standing in his office on a Sunday morning, watching two - seemingly - floating cheeks turn a dark shade of rage, when all I wanna do is go play cricket and ponder a key part of my religious extraction plan. He marches me back to the classroom. All my classmates have left by now and it is empty and quiet. He grabs the top of my right arm and drags me over to the front of the classroom where the teacher's desk sits facing the students' desks.
"Sit down! Here - at the teacher's desk."
I sit and he reaches into a draw, coming swiftly back out with a pen and several sheets of paper in one hand - as if he had prepared it all earlier, exactly for this moment.
"It is now 5000 words! I want a 5000 word essay on why you should've done the first essay for 500 words and why this will be the last time you won't do a punishment as and when it is given to you."
At this point, I feel that it is important to remind you that I am eleven years old - going on twelve.
I'm not the sort of narrator that fully understands everything about himself. I'm conscious of most of the paths I have taken and most often I know why - for better or worse - I have gone down them. But sometimes I have no idea. And if I'm gonna take the time to re-edit and re-edit a post at 3am, it is hardly worth the effort if I'm just gonna guess. So I never do. Guess, that is. I never guess at what I don't know about myself.
So, you should be comfortable that I am right when I tell you that the decision to write not even a single word of the 5000 - not a word - a decision made by the time he had turned back around and left the room in an energetic huff - had nothing to do with wanting to pick a fight or a lack of concern for consequence or a temper that was more in control of me than the other way around. It is entirely fair and correct to say that all those streaks of character lived inside that eleven year old, but they did not inform this particular decision.
This was simple mathematics.
Zero times two, times five equals zero. It's maths, baby. Mathematically, I owed zero words and that was what I was going to provide.
I stayed in that empty classroom for about an hour, going through the drawers in the teacher's desk and generally exploring the room itself. I was having a great time and then the door bursts open and a startled janitor appears in the doorway.
"What are you doing here?"
"Oh, I had some work leftover to do and The Baker's Son said I could stay back."
"Um, well are you nearly done here? Cause I need to clean and then lock it all up. Normally, by now, everybody is all done for the day. Everybody is gone."
"Yeah. Sure. I'm done. I can leave now."
I grab the papers and the pen off the desk and walk over to and across the concrete gang-plank that leads back to The Baker's Son's office. I was gonna give him a retelling of my updated mathematical equation and explain why I had not and would not write a single word of the essay. But the door was locked. The lights were off and the whole place was empty. As the janitor had just told me, everyone is gone for the day.
So, I just left . I tossed the papers and pen in a bin on my way out and rode off for an afternoon of cricket on a friend's backyard tennis court.
Monday morning rolled around and this story was now into its fifth day. A game of Test Match Cricket can go for up to five days. Once again, I found myself in that second-floor office. Looking back on it now, I'm sure The Baker's Son knew I hadn't done the punishment. At the time though, I wasn't so certain. I thought he was being genuine in his expectation of receiving a 5000 word essay from an eleven year old.
I once heard a story from a filmmaker who had escorted Bukowski on a trip somewhere. Bukowski got blind drunk on the plane ride and verbally abused all on-board - staff and fellow travelers alike. He was a mess and out of control and seemed to determined to communicate that in the most offensive manner possible. Later on, he wrote up the story of the trip and published it as part of weekly column he had in a local, Los Angeles paper. But he swapped things around. In the article, he was the polite and responsible one and the filmmaker was the drunken, shouting shambles. After he saw the article, this filmmaker called up Bukowski and yelled at him for tarring his name and demanded a retraction.
Bukowski replied with one of my most favourite sentences of all time:
"In my stories, I'm the hero."
With that in mind, I should write up the end of this story with this narrator once again standing up to The Baker's Son. Standing up firm in his position and defiant and proud of it all. The thing is, as I said earlier, it is important to be accurate when telling fiction. If I were real and this story really did happen, well, I'd be free to write whatever ending that makes me feel the best. But this is not how fiction works.
That fifth morning, I finally wilted. Sure, I was eleven years old and he was fifty, but, as the proverbial goes, I was the first to blink.
I launched into a fantastical story of being halfway through the 5000 words and how I had left the classroom to go to the toilet and that when I came back the door was locked. I told The Baker's Son that I'd looked for the janitor that had locked up, but I couldn't find him. I then attempted to climb in through the window - using my hands and legs - but it was locked. So, frustrated and unwilling to start again from scratch, I went home. I left the half-completed work sitting on the teacher's desk with the intention of picking it up the next day, But now, the morning after, the papers had disappeared and I had no idea where to.
I do not know where all that shit came from. I just lost my courage in the moment and that fucked-up, tall tale just spewed out of my mouth. There were so very, very many holes in it. I'm not gonna list them all here, but, my goodness, The Baker's Son did. He led me on a merry dance around the campus that morning, interviewing that janitor and the teacher that was first into that classroom that morning and some of my schoolmates and even a science teacher who it turns out was in his office all Sunday and had a view of most of the comings and goings. He took such glee in the embarrassing way in which he tore apart my ill conceived story.
And all of this, as an eleven year old - going on twelve.
Within the hour, I was sent home and suspended from school for two weeks. There was other elements to the punishment - from The Baker's Son, as well as that which my parent's piled on top. The details of all that is not important here.
What is important is how I fell to fear and cowardice and how quickly and suddenly everything unraveled as soon as I did. Even this post - this story - just kinda dribbles and falls apart once it gets to the part of me wilting.
What I learned was that it's more human - and more realistic - to start off scared and grow braver with time, rather than the other way around. It is all about flow. The way the flow of being here goes. It is the natural flow of things. And the way you seem to be getting less and less determined as time goes on, makes you seem less and less real to me.
