My First Time
The first time I was suspended from high school, the official charge against me was downgraded from “verbal sexual assault” to “lewd conduct.”
In the first week of drama class in my senior year, we started with some trust building exercises, or more accurately, “inhibitions-shedding” exercises. I had been accepted into the advanced drama troupe, No Strings Attached (NSA). The idea was that a group of students who may not be friends outside the classroom would form bonds early by learning intimate details about each other’s lives. Fair enough.
Our teacher had taught at the school for 17 years, a brilliant, kind, and childless man who had dedicated his life to instructing young adults. And he was just a bit off: tantrums, frequent insulin shots, and rapid volume changes were all part of his operating policy. In short, he was a prima Donna.
On Thursday of that week, we all shared a fantasy that had yet to be realized. Obviously a bunch of high school students saw this as a platform to talk about sex. Troupe members were only limited by their own comfort level, and by the high likelihood that everything shared in that room would be spread around the 350 person private high school, Chamberton. “I want a girl to slap me during sex,” another said, “I want to do it in a hot air balloon,” there was a lot of crap like that. One girl kinda pushed the boundries by saying that she wanted to be choked out during sex. We all laughed and shot each other looks, “of course she does, Beth is as robot-goth as they get.”
My turn was near the end. The teacher was calm and clearly enjoying the insight he was gaining into his students’ minds. My best friend had just gone and told of his fantasy, which I knew to have actually happened the previous summer. He wanted to sleep with his next door neighbor who was a sophomore in college, while on his canoe in his neighborhood lake. The fucked up thing was that he took me on that canoe the day after the “bedding” to tell me the story. How sick?
So I began, “You know how you stand behind people on the escalator? Well, sometimes woman wear these awesome tight pants, and I really want to take my car keys and rip a hole in their pants and have sex with them from behind while on the escalator.”
A few people laughed. I kinda ended it there. I guess I expected people to ask some follow up questions like, “Well, most escalators aren’t long enough, how would you finish in time?” And then I’d tell them how when we got to the top I’d have the girl walk--with me inside her--to the down escalator and that we’d just repeat this routine until, you know, we were like done.
The next person went pretty quickly after me and we all just left the class afterwards. My best friend jetted to another class, so I went to my locker and then headed to Literature. After that class I was called into the principle’s office. I actually saw my principal loitering out in the hallway towards the end of class. The only thing I noted about his presence was that he was rubbing his cleft palette for the first time, which made me wonder if people with cleft lips habitually touch their faces when at home in front of the mirror, but make a point of not touching it in front of other people. Who knows. He just kept pacing, so I assumed that he had some budget crap to work on, since my literature teacher’s husband was the school’s accountant, well, his firm was anyway.
So Dr. Murphy asked me to follow him the second I stepped outside the room. Honestly, I thought I was getting another award. Not to be a dick, but I racked up an ass-load of awards the previous year: math, drama, a wrestling championship, a poetry award, ect. I thought that I landed an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, since I had submitted one about our school’s ambition policies concerning student-athletes. Not quite.
“Jake, do you want to talk about what happened in drama?” Not really, sir, it was all kinda intense in there. You know how Mr. Leavers treats the black-box, what happens in there, stays in there, ect., ect.
“Well, it didn’t. Some young women from that class have asked to drop it because of what you said. I want to hear in your own words what happened.” Uh, there’s no way I can say it. It’s extremely embarrassing. You’ve got to be joking. Everyone said crazy stuff: it was supposed to be your fantasy.
“The escalator fantasy? Jake, this is not a fantasy. This is a premeditated attack on women.” Oh my god. Are you kidding me? I’m sorry, I’m not being rude, but come on. How can a pair of keys even cut pants?
I guess I should note that our school had recently received $35,000 from the founder of the Great American Cookie Company to put an escalator in our new gymnasium. It was a weirdly big deal at the school. We had an assembly about it on the first day of school. I mean, the assembly was about a lot of things, but clearly the escalator announcement was the climax. All the teachers started applauding while the students kinda looked around confused, but we eventually started clapping when we realized that the donor was in the room. Uh, thanks bud, I guess the elevator in the gym was too slow. Well, it was too slow, but the gym was only two stories, so who gives a shit.
“As you know, we have a new piece of equipment in the gym. How do you think woman will feel knowing that you are behind them on the escalator? How you think they will feel?” Sir, I don’t know. Fine. Fine, I guess. Let me just add, that as a point of clarification, we don’t have a down escalator, so in reality, there is very little to worry about.
Well, that line of reasoning didn’t help. My original punishment was 4 days of out of school suspension, but this was a private school, which means parents can lobby pretty hard. My mom’s a lawyer, and my dad is, well, just a major dickhead, so between the two of them, they got it down to one day of in-school suspension, which doesn’t go on your record. My mom did a great job. She got everyone’s fantasy from the class down on paper and developed a matrix ranking the offensiveness of each person’s fantasy.
There were five categories: descriptiveness, legality, violence, practicability, and visibility. I guess some of these are self-explanatory. Under her ranking, I was the 4th worst offender. I scored highly in “descriptiveness” and “violence,” but I scored lowly in “practicability” and “visibility.” The more visible the fantasy the less danger involved since other people could intervene. Since mine would take place in public, I got a zero in that category, which saved me. I was through the roof in descriptiveness, which my mom admitted was the highest in the class. She also scored me second highest in visibility because a “piece of clothing is torn in an untraditional manner.” Another guy wanted to rip a girl’s buttoned shirt open, but she thought that was a reasonable use of clothing, so he was scored lowly.
So I placed 4th of 13th. The person who scored highest was a girl. She got three days out of school suspension, largely because of my mom’s lobbying. The 2nd placed person got 2 days and the 3rd ranked person got 1 day. Now, I didn’t sanction any of this. All I cared about was my college file, so as long as I didn’t get it on my record, I was ok. My mom thought that her system had to be consistently applied, and that she had to make a sentencing recommendation for each person.
The girl who was at the top of the list was this pretty cool Asian chick. We won a few competitions together in AP Physics the previous year, and while she wasn’t really good at problem sets, she kicked ass in mechanical design, so we did well in all the events where we had to build stuff.
I thought her fantasy was pretty legit. She wanted to take a guy to her family’s lake house, and fuck him while holding a gun to his head while he was underwater. Her scores were very high in all categories. It was violent, descriptive, practical, illegal, and not visible since her lake house was in the woods. I had argued that it wasn’t practical or violent since a) she didn’t say she wanted to shoot the person, b) she didn’t say whether the person wanted her to do it, and c) because a gun can’t fire underwater.
Anyway, no one cared what I had to say. So she got totally busted. The fucked up thing is that my mom charged the school $790 for her report containing the matrices. I mean, it was a totally well done report, but it’s not like the school asked for it. That didn’t matter apparently, because since they used her recommendations to a letter, it suggested that they liked and endorsed her work which means they had to pay her. That’s what she said. They didn’t want to pay at first but then she told them that she would sue, so they just fucking paid.
Anyway, I later got the role of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing and Edgar in King Lear. Edgar is a great roll.
The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'
King Lear (Edgar at IV, i)
Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. / Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.
King Lear (Edgar at III, vi)
In the first week of drama class in my senior year, we started with some trust building exercises, or more accurately, “inhibitions-shedding” exercises. I had been accepted into the advanced drama troupe, No Strings Attached (NSA). The idea was that a group of students who may not be friends outside the classroom would form bonds early by learning intimate details about each other’s lives. Fair enough.
Our teacher had taught at the school for 17 years, a brilliant, kind, and childless man who had dedicated his life to instructing young adults. And he was just a bit off: tantrums, frequent insulin shots, and rapid volume changes were all part of his operating policy. In short, he was a prima Donna.
On Thursday of that week, we all shared a fantasy that had yet to be realized. Obviously a bunch of high school students saw this as a platform to talk about sex. Troupe members were only limited by their own comfort level, and by the high likelihood that everything shared in that room would be spread around the 350 person private high school, Chamberton. “I want a girl to slap me during sex,” another said, “I want to do it in a hot air balloon,” there was a lot of crap like that. One girl kinda pushed the boundries by saying that she wanted to be choked out during sex. We all laughed and shot each other looks, “of course she does, Beth is as robot-goth as they get.”
My turn was near the end. The teacher was calm and clearly enjoying the insight he was gaining into his students’ minds. My best friend had just gone and told of his fantasy, which I knew to have actually happened the previous summer. He wanted to sleep with his next door neighbor who was a sophomore in college, while on his canoe in his neighborhood lake. The fucked up thing was that he took me on that canoe the day after the “bedding” to tell me the story. How sick?
So I began, “You know how you stand behind people on the escalator? Well, sometimes woman wear these awesome tight pants, and I really want to take my car keys and rip a hole in their pants and have sex with them from behind while on the escalator.”
A few people laughed. I kinda ended it there. I guess I expected people to ask some follow up questions like, “Well, most escalators aren’t long enough, how would you finish in time?” And then I’d tell them how when we got to the top I’d have the girl walk--with me inside her--to the down escalator and that we’d just repeat this routine until, you know, we were like done.
The next person went pretty quickly after me and we all just left the class afterwards. My best friend jetted to another class, so I went to my locker and then headed to Literature. After that class I was called into the principle’s office. I actually saw my principal loitering out in the hallway towards the end of class. The only thing I noted about his presence was that he was rubbing his cleft palette for the first time, which made me wonder if people with cleft lips habitually touch their faces when at home in front of the mirror, but make a point of not touching it in front of other people. Who knows. He just kept pacing, so I assumed that he had some budget crap to work on, since my literature teacher’s husband was the school’s accountant, well, his firm was anyway.
So Dr. Murphy asked me to follow him the second I stepped outside the room. Honestly, I thought I was getting another award. Not to be a dick, but I racked up an ass-load of awards the previous year: math, drama, a wrestling championship, a poetry award, ect. I thought that I landed an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, since I had submitted one about our school’s ambition policies concerning student-athletes. Not quite.
“Jake, do you want to talk about what happened in drama?” Not really, sir, it was all kinda intense in there. You know how Mr. Leavers treats the black-box, what happens in there, stays in there, ect., ect.
“Well, it didn’t. Some young women from that class have asked to drop it because of what you said. I want to hear in your own words what happened.” Uh, there’s no way I can say it. It’s extremely embarrassing. You’ve got to be joking. Everyone said crazy stuff: it was supposed to be your fantasy.
“The escalator fantasy? Jake, this is not a fantasy. This is a premeditated attack on women.” Oh my god. Are you kidding me? I’m sorry, I’m not being rude, but come on. How can a pair of keys even cut pants?
I guess I should note that our school had recently received $35,000 from the founder of the Great American Cookie Company to put an escalator in our new gymnasium. It was a weirdly big deal at the school. We had an assembly about it on the first day of school. I mean, the assembly was about a lot of things, but clearly the escalator announcement was the climax. All the teachers started applauding while the students kinda looked around confused, but we eventually started clapping when we realized that the donor was in the room. Uh, thanks bud, I guess the elevator in the gym was too slow. Well, it was too slow, but the gym was only two stories, so who gives a shit.
“As you know, we have a new piece of equipment in the gym. How do you think woman will feel knowing that you are behind them on the escalator? How you think they will feel?” Sir, I don’t know. Fine. Fine, I guess. Let me just add, that as a point of clarification, we don’t have a down escalator, so in reality, there is very little to worry about.
Well, that line of reasoning didn’t help. My original punishment was 4 days of out of school suspension, but this was a private school, which means parents can lobby pretty hard. My mom’s a lawyer, and my dad is, well, just a major dickhead, so between the two of them, they got it down to one day of in-school suspension, which doesn’t go on your record. My mom did a great job. She got everyone’s fantasy from the class down on paper and developed a matrix ranking the offensiveness of each person’s fantasy.
There were five categories: descriptiveness, legality, violence, practicability, and visibility. I guess some of these are self-explanatory. Under her ranking, I was the 4th worst offender. I scored highly in “descriptiveness” and “violence,” but I scored lowly in “practicability” and “visibility.” The more visible the fantasy the less danger involved since other people could intervene. Since mine would take place in public, I got a zero in that category, which saved me. I was through the roof in descriptiveness, which my mom admitted was the highest in the class. She also scored me second highest in visibility because a “piece of clothing is torn in an untraditional manner.” Another guy wanted to rip a girl’s buttoned shirt open, but she thought that was a reasonable use of clothing, so he was scored lowly.
So I placed 4th of 13th. The person who scored highest was a girl. She got three days out of school suspension, largely because of my mom’s lobbying. The 2nd placed person got 2 days and the 3rd ranked person got 1 day. Now, I didn’t sanction any of this. All I cared about was my college file, so as long as I didn’t get it on my record, I was ok. My mom thought that her system had to be consistently applied, and that she had to make a sentencing recommendation for each person.
The girl who was at the top of the list was this pretty cool Asian chick. We won a few competitions together in AP Physics the previous year, and while she wasn’t really good at problem sets, she kicked ass in mechanical design, so we did well in all the events where we had to build stuff.
I thought her fantasy was pretty legit. She wanted to take a guy to her family’s lake house, and fuck him while holding a gun to his head while he was underwater. Her scores were very high in all categories. It was violent, descriptive, practical, illegal, and not visible since her lake house was in the woods. I had argued that it wasn’t practical or violent since a) she didn’t say she wanted to shoot the person, b) she didn’t say whether the person wanted her to do it, and c) because a gun can’t fire underwater.
Anyway, no one cared what I had to say. So she got totally busted. The fucked up thing is that my mom charged the school $790 for her report containing the matrices. I mean, it was a totally well done report, but it’s not like the school asked for it. That didn’t matter apparently, because since they used her recommendations to a letter, it suggested that they liked and endorsed her work which means they had to pay her. That’s what she said. They didn’t want to pay at first but then she told them that she would sue, so they just fucking paid.
Anyway, I later got the role of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing and Edgar in King Lear. Edgar is a great roll.
The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'
King Lear (Edgar at IV, i)
Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. / Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.
King Lear (Edgar at III, vi)