With Sincere and Abject Apologies to Pedro Neavis Gonzales, Esquire

The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. And also because I'm not sure about the statute of limitations on stuff like this...

Way back in the heady years of the early 70's, 1972 to be precise, Nixon was soon to be threatened with impeachment, we were all scared as can be we would be sent off to Viet Nam in a few years, M.A.S.H was a brand new T.V. show nobody thought was funny at first, (you see, before reruns it didn't have a laugh track), The Godfather was the smash hit at the movies, T-Rex was everybodies favorite band, and Derek and the Dominoes were having a big hit with Layla, and because of that very song, I wanted so bad to become a rock star, that I decided that  year, 1972, I was going to Hollywood someday, and was going to make my name shine bright in those tinseltown lights as a musician. Kids...

I was going to school in Fort Worth, Texas at Springstone Middle School. No cell phones, no iPods, this was before CD's and even cassettes, hell, we only had records and a few crummy stretchy 8-tracks for music, for cryin' out loud. No video games, or computers, we all played sports, and that meant football, basketball, and baseball, (except the freaks, and we chased them around the playground enough for them to all get track medals).

The War on Drugs was just in it's first year, barely getting started, so we did manage to find all kinds of mischief to get into...

Just like today, I rode to school, and home again, in fact I rode just about everywhere, on a beat up old brown and green ten speed Dawes english racer bicycle, I thought I was cool because I had purchased a Brooks leather racing saddle for $20.00 new and installed. That hard leather saddle busted my ass for the entire 8th grade year, but it finally got broke in about the time I gave up riding to high school the next year as a freshman, because that was just not cool.

Anyway, it was spring, and back then, there were no air conditioners in the classes. Seriously,  it was always hotter than the blazes in that building that late in the year, and nobody really tried to do too much in the way of serious instruction. The building was an old monolithic three story brute of a place, built back when imposing structures were the style. I remember it always smelled of sweat, piss, and fear, like jails and old schools always do, but with a rich overtone of old concrete funk and wet mildew for a finishing touch. The class I was attending was what we refferred to as "cincher" , that meant easy, because it was being taught by a wonderful old teacher named Mr. Gorge.

Mr. Gorge was an retired Navy man, and he was mostly prone to two things. Falling asleep in class, or rambling for the whole hour about just about anything that came to his mind. And let me tell you, that man had traveled the world in the Navy. He told us stories of faraway places, life on a Navy ship, ports of call he had visited, and really deliciously creepy and gruesome things as well. He had been a WWII sailor, and had served at Midway, I think.

"War is Hell", he told us often.

He had a thick latino brogue, but was as literate and well read as anyone I ever met. He introduced us to Joyce, Twain, and even Coleridge, which I'm pretty sure would get your ass in deep dutch these days, exposing young impressionable 8th grade minds to such literary scoundels as these men. We didn't have lockdowns, metal detectors, piss tests, or cops in the hallways, man, those were different times.

We had pretty much decided sex was gonna be really cool, but only a few of us had even been lucky enough to have experimented with it. We had also discovered pot, boones farm, and ripple, and could usually find some wino down on Vickery Blvd. to get us a bottle, if we bought one for him, too. And somebody or other's big brother usually had a matchbox of what I would barely call pot today, that we could buy for the massive price of $10.00.

But we were good kids. See, the hippies, the coming revolution, womens lib,  and the Viet Nam War dominated the news, and we just did what the society, through the news, our teachers, coaches, and Vice-Principals, told us constantly NOT to do.

Nostalgia was unheard of, we all loved the Beatles, and we all knew they were gonna get back together any day now. Bell bottoms on our pants were stylishly huge, and were only cool if they were  so big that you could not see your four inch platform shoes underneath them, and life was about as good as it gets.

The aformentioned hippies congregated at the local duck pond park, and did hippie things, but none of us had dared to grow our hair that long, and most of the local establishment either looked like Mr Burns from the Simpsons, or just like old country western singers do today, with greasy slicked back hair, long sideburns, cowboy boots, and a pack of lucky strikes or winstons rolled up in their short sleeve button down shirts.

Anyway, this particular day, the class was being especially unruly, and Mr. Gorge had had to call out two or three boys for a few minor disiplinary cautions. Yeah, I admit I was one of them, being the class cut-up and having a close friendship with one of the most wicked boys I ever knew, Bart B. didn't help.

I had a reputation among the teachers as a bright, but hard to manage, and easily bored pupil. Bart and I were semi-famous for dirty tricks and such, but we just wanted to have some fun, you know?

Well, just as we were being asked to stand up and take our fair share of the shame and embarrassment of Mr. Gorge's derisions for talking in class, the old crackly Intercom system speaker up on the wall called out..."Mr. Gorge, come to the Principals office, please".

He looked at that speaker on the wall with the consternation fitting for a king deprived of his chance to behead a peasant, but before he left the room, he turned back, pointed a massive fat and knarled finger at us, and said..."Stay in your seats, children, I don't want to hear a peep out of anyone till I return." Yeah. like that was gonna happen.

As soon as his massive and heavy steps stopped echoing from the hall, the whole class exploded in righteous and anarchic mischief. Spitwads flew across the room, girl's pigtail's were pulled by brutish little fingers, and Bart and I looked on with a certain sense of pleasure and satisfaction from so recently escaping the teachers wrath, just by the skin of our teeth, and due to nothing more than pure luck and timing.

Now, here I have to say looking back, that this was one of those days that changes a kid. Forever. Not me, or Bart, maybe, or the thirty odd students now running back and forth and up and down between the desks, but for two boys in particular, fate, in the dark and sinister form of Bart B. and myself, would soon lay it's cold, clammy hands upon them, and change their lives forever.

As I luxuriated in my crummy graffiti covered wooden desk, as only a gangly 8th grader can, I looked over at Bart. He had a particular demonic smile I recognized that meant as much as, "well how do you do, boys, let us bring some wickedness to the surroundings", on his face.

In his hand he held a tack, a single carpet tack, a tiny thing really, a small half inch type of carpet tack in reality, but in my long held tortured memories of that day, a mean and malevolent looking thing as I have ever seen.

Now Bart's specialty was incriminating other kids, and getting them in scads of trouble. He was the perfect angel to his parents, and to teachers and principals alike, and to most people who know him today, they would be aghast if they knew the real Bart as a young man. He was evil incarnate at times, and I felt awfully proud to be his accomplice in most of his shady games. He could throw a goofy face at a kid from ten paces, and you could place a good sized bet in Vegas that that same kid would get called out for laughing in study hall, while Bart remained stony faced like a professional poker player betting the moon. He was money, he was just magic that way.

But on this particular day, he had his eyes on a particular victim, more than that, two victim's, a double play if you will, and he showed that carpet tack he grasped so knowingly, to a poor lost soul of a kid named Chuck, that wanted desperately to be as cool as we constantly told him we were. Chuck would always be the patsy or fall guy for our games, he was a little heavier, a little slower, a little less sharp to see the dark side, the potential harsh consequences, of our sometimes evil childish pranks.

Bart leaned over like a practised card sharp, almost silently whispering something in Chuck's ear, and grinned maniacally, as he pointed out the intended recipient of this sticky gift.

Poor, poor, Pedro. If only he had been sick that day, if only he had stayed in homeroom a little longer, his life might have been different. He was one of the good kids. He studied hard, he wasn't a stuck up jock like us, in fact he was too slight to even play sports. So, why he was chosen I will never know. Fate, I think, just wanted to rip on him, and I tell myself we were just the messengers of that awful sharp pointed telegram of destiny.

And, most importantly, he was not sitting in his desk, and was occupied talking to somebody else, and looking away as the weapon of ass destruction was delivered to the sweating little hand of Chuck.

Chuck had a snickering kind of laugh, kind of raspy, and could barely contain his noisy glee to be included in such a horrible stunt. With the skill and timing of hitmen, both Bart and I raised a single finger to our lips for stealth and silence, then pointed at the exact spot where the carpet tack would have maximum effectiveness and total penetration, if Chuck would only contain himself, and stick that pointy sucker down in Pedro's desk seat. As we leaned back in our desks, and waited, little did we know we were changing two boy's lives for better, or most likely worse, on that hot May day.

We watched as the room became more and more animated. Would Pedro see the sneaky present we had had specially delivered to him? Would he brush it away before sitting down? Not on this day he wouldn't.

Silent like the lambs we weren't, we watched as Pedro sat down, right in his seat. He didn't just sit down, he landed. Many kids had a way of sliding into a desk, and if he had chosen that approach, that day, well, no one can say what might of been. Instead, he landed HARD.

He dropped into that desk seat like a heavily laden helicopter transporting a full load of something just a bit too heavy for an elegant landing.

POW! That sucker stuck in his butt, and it stuck good and hard. Chuck had made the placement exactly correct for a perfect, dead center career killing punch of the right cheek of Pedro's posterior.

At first, it was like those scenes in war movies where everything becomes focused on a single thing, and pulls the focus in tight, and sound is an afterthought. Three young hoodlums watched in first glee, then blending to a bit of anxiety, and finally heading into full scale alarm as we realized the awful and total effectiveness of this hateful trick, just lately played on unsuspecting Pedro, by our soon to be severely chastised playmate, Chuck.

The sound of Pedro's agonized yelping seemed to be coming down a long hall, a train tunnel almost, as the young scholar realized that something terrible had punctured his derriere. It was actually simply  the doppler effect as his throat was being turned around and around  by his head, as he reeled about to try to see just what was happening, you know, back there.

Pedro shot out that desk like, well, I saw a man shot out of a cannon once at the circus when I was 10, and Pedro was much quicker, with significantly more velocity, and simply tons more acceleration. As he danced like he had a miillion or more bees stinging his bum repeatedly about the room, gradually most of the kids in the class dropped their mouths open and stared disbelievingly at what was transpiring right in front of them.

Bart and I had already sat upright in our chairs and folded our hands on our desks in anticipation of what surely must come next. As the sound of poor suffering Pedro got louder, the class became icy still, and unearthly quiet. Try as he might, no amount of pulling, clawing, screaming or cursing, in equal parts Spanish and English, seemed to have the slightest effect on that carpet tack's tenacious grip on, or in, the thickest part of the muscle of his gluteous maximus.

He circled around and around the front of the room, grabbing like a crazed madman at his ass, shouting things I only thought I knew how to say at that tender age, as Bart and I exchanged the glance of warriors fully expecting a terrible onslaught of withering enemy return fire.

And poor Chuck just...sat there, almost unaware of his hideous, and rapidly approaching fate, for his hand in this awful fiasco.

Now I have heard, or read somewhere, that the bull elephant, and also the water buffalo, of Africa, are both said to "bellow" when angered. This I cannot confirm or deny. But the sound made by our sweet old retired Navy history teacher, as he walked into that classroom, and saw the one mexican boy in his class, screaming and cursing to beat the band, as the child grasped desperately at his own now twitching and spasming backside, to try and relieve the agonizing pain he was experiencing, could well and truly only be called bellowing.

How he knew what had transpired, I can't say. But he knew...

Mr. Gorge LOUDLY, with the full authority and tone of a man who was used to military discipline, bellowed at the top of his lungs in the direction of the class..."WHO? I repeat, WHO put the tack in Pedro Neavis Gonzales' seat?"

I will never forget that moment as long as I live. As tiny beads of guilt ridden sweat rolled down my forehead, I could barely move. No one made a sound, not one child chirped, not one student sounded off. But with the awesome skill and perfect precision of a Chinese Olympic drill team, the whole class, every single long since forgotten child, every single one, turned their heads, as if attached to only one body, and stared right at....Chuck.

My heart raced incessantly as I realized NO ONE knew of mine and Bart's very slight but still sinister complicity in the whole sordid affair. Not one student in the whole classroom had seen us chide and tempt Chuck with the task he was being set up to completely take the rap for. But two things led to his total undoing.

First, someone HAD seen Chuck place the tack right before Pedro's posterial arrival, and as Pedro danced the dance of the tortured all over that hot steamy Texas classroom, word had spread quickly, as only children can spread it, that Chuck had in fact, done the dirty deed.

And secondly, Chuck just had a guilty face.

The look of disgust, mixed with rage, tempered by outrageous and protective anger for a boy of his own heritage, on the face of my history teacher, will haunt me till three days after I am dead.

Chuck quickly realized the fix was in, and that he had been absolutely fingered by every single kid in that classroom. Including me and Bart. We couldn't help it, it was instinctive. We were just staring at Chuck in disbelief at our double lightning strike of luck, and his imminent downfall, all occuring in the short space of a few minutes.

The scene in my mind nows shifts to a slow motion sort of Sam Peckinpah finale reel, as the enraged teacher tries to both comfort and relieve the suffering of the afflicted Pedro, as well as bodily lift Chuck out of his seat by the closest earlobe Chuck possesed. This was a man used to the horrors of war, the strangeness of anything the far east had to offer, but he was LIVID at the shameful transgression he was seeing acted out in his classroom. As he put his arm around Pedro's shoulder, Pedro was drug closer and closer to the desk Chuck would only occupy for an instant more. Then Mr. Gorge reached over and uplifted the now terrified Chuck completely out of his desk, by his earlobe, I swear, and as Chuck just hung there suspended in midair for a moment, I couldn't help but think of a little squealing piglet, hung up on the butcher's sharp and merciless meathook, and I truly shuddered for him to the depths of my soul.

I shot one furtive look at the ringleader of this whole grimy mess, but Bart was perfectly and astonishingly composed. That dude was bad.

Then the words rumbled, no, more like exploded. from the incensed history teachers mouth..."YOU..Chuck...are in quite some trouble, my friend", and he let Chuck slip from his grasp momentarily, only to grab him by a more substantial portion of Chuck's now quaking frame, and drug both boys, both now kicking and screaming, out the door of the classroom, and down the hallway.

Even now, the aftermath of that moment is terrible and wretched to my memory. I felt awful, just awful, for the plight of the two obvious victims, Pedro and Chuck, but there was also such a surreal and bizarre air in the room at this time, after what our young eyes had just witnessed, that it was only just a matter of seconds befor the whole class erupted in almost frenzied and side splitting laughter.

Appparently the school nurse had been able to quickly assess the entire situation concerning the interloper in Pedro's bottom, and relieved him in as just as quick a fashion. His voice died down, just as the plaintive cries of Chuck could be heard coming from the echoing halls, emanating from deep inside the Vice Principal's office, as louder and louder Chuck proclaimed his complete and total innocence of any wrong doing.

These hearfelt but futile sounds were quickly drowned out by the singular and still hard to remember sound of at least 5,000 hard blows with a paddle being dispensed with true relish by the now also enraged Vice Principal.

Then the bell rang, and reality reigned once more in the classroom I was occupying. All the kids looked about at each other, and then scurried out of the door like rats off a burning, sinking ship. The hallways were instantly filled with that high pitched drone of sound that is normal between classes in any school, and I sped away from that classroom, as fast as my shoes would allow on the hard, slick, cement floor.

Perhaps, Pedro was not really as badly injured as I might have feared, but I never once spoke to him again, fearing he might know somewhere in his heart of my small part in that horrid practical joke gone horribly wrong. Bart and I remained good friends till college, but my heart was never in another scheme he concocted the same as that day, and then wouldn't you know it, he was the one who made it to Hollywood, years later, not me. I wish him the best, and hope I never get on his bad side, for he could be murderously deviant in his quest for practical jokes, at least back in the day.

I wish him well.

Poor Chuck was never the same. God willing, he will learn to live a more normal life someday, but I fear we put him on a path in life he was only marginally willing at first to tread. And me, I am just a wisened old man, sitting in front of a computer tapping out my confession to one of the most amazing, hilarious, and embarrassing events of my life.

Peace.