Never Living It Down

I was making small talk with a student, a male student, the other evening as I flipped through an enormous stack of papers searching for his exam.

Me: "So, what's your major?"

Him: "Business. Eventually I'm going to study to be a mortician and take over the family business."

Me: "So, you want to go back and live in your hometown? How do you like it there?"

Him: "I like it a lot, but sometimes the politics of living in a small town can get old. And everybody knows all your business, you know?"

Me: "[Laugh] Oh yeah. There was a kid on my bus..."

Well, now I've started a story that I have to decide how I'm going to finish. The moral of the story was simply going to be about how some things haunt you when you grow up in a small town. Again, I flipped through the rolodex and came up with a story, but maybe not the right story. This one is about a kid named Jason who lived on Tope Hill.

Strangely, Tope Hill had a large concentration of pot heads. In a recent entry in Jane Espensen's blog about writing scripts (she writes for Battlestar Galactica), she said you should name your characters something that vaguely remind you what the character is like without being too obvious. Claire in the Breakfast Club would be a good example. Rich, snooty, smart. Whereas Bender sounds like he enjoys binge drinking and fucking things up. Wouldn't Tope Hill sound vaguely like a place where people like to smoke reefer? And it just happens to be a real place. I also remember hearing that when Scott, a Tope Hill denizen, didn't have pot, he enjoyed a huff or two of gasoline.

At any rate, I remember hearing on the bus that a kid named Jason was caught somehow, by somebody, in a comprimising position involving a drumstick. To be specific, a witness deduced that he had inserted it in his ass. Everybody on the bus had learned the news the next morning before our bus lurched down the back road, off of Tope Hill (picture a Guatemalan bus teetering down a mountain).

As I piece the story back together now, parts of it sound likely. But then drumsticks tend to have lots of splinters and rough patches. Maybe with a lot of sanding and several coats of polyurethane, it could provide a harmless thrill.

Nevertheless, it's been more than twenty years, and I remember the kid's name and that one story. I imagine that among his closest friends, he probably became known for other things: probably pot-related exploits. For a much larger percentage of the population, he was known for the drumstick thing. It's odd to think that a twelve year old indulged in a moment of sexual experimentation, probably in a darkened corner of his house more than twenty years ago, and that moment--if it ever actually happened--lives in infamy.

I saw a documentary on pbs about kids tormenting each other on the internet, and how once something goes up on the internet there's no taking it back. They made the point that this was a frightening new world of being exposed to the world, etc. Well back in my day, we didn't need the internet. We had what anthropoligists call a rich oral tradition...which reminds me of this girl who rode the bus. But that's a story for another time. Actually, that sort of thing didn't happen when I was a kid. That was an advance of subsequent generations.

So, how to finish the borderline inappropriate story I started telling my pupil. I said, "...well, a kid on my bus masturbated with a drumstick, and nobody ever forgot. Looks like I lost your test."