W.E.W.: 6. Men in Marin

I went out to Atlas Cafe for a little coffee and an everything bagel with jalapeno cream cheese. I brought a copy of a story I wrote a while ago to read through and revise. Haven't had much luck with stories, really. Haven't written that many, even. So I looked over the damn story and changed a few little things, and while it might not actually go anywhere and I'm not so sure I like the ending, it was pretty OK I guess.

So we drove across that long golden bridge, took a right, a left, curved up the hill, saw bridge and ocean and city clear behind us, and dropped down into the Marin Headlands.

Dotsin and Kimby invited us over for cards tonight, so we may fly out to OGLE-TR-56b. But it's so warm we might crank up the submarine and head down to Marianas. Decisions, decisions.

W.E.W.: 5. Palace of Minos

I have no camera today. I must remember my adventures some other way. I will board a train and head to the southern coast, to Venice, to Majorca, Knossos. Where an old man drinks pomegranate juice. We know now—don't we?—what it means to drink pomegranate juice, now that it is readily available in our health food stores. Or perhaps it is only that we are older.

Pomegranate seeds are fun to eat and tasty. And, yes, a sensual delight. Juice, red, and picked from flesh. But now we know that when pressed to juice the pomegranate is salty, bloody. To drink is to drink the dirty warm blood of the beloved.

On this adventure I passed a boy walking a puppy. I'm no good with ages. But I can say that the boy was some three feet tall (the puppy less than a foot). It has occurred to me that there might be less violence in the world if we all carried around small children. But a child of three feet should not walk alone on city streets. And there are villains enough who would tear through innocent flesh to destroy an adult enemy.

I sat down on a bench to write. A black-bearded man in a blanket sat down at the other end. I had noticed him outside the train station as I was crossing the street. His cardboard sign was tilted away from me. I could only make out the words "HOMELESS" and "STRESSED." I once wrote similar words on a piece of cardboard. But now I'm on the train, writing in my notebook. I left the bench humming the long-lined opening of Ariadne's first aria: "Ein schönes war..." There once was a beautiful thing...

I left the man in rags with a cardboard sign asking for help while singing German under my blond breath to board the train that will take me to another city to pick up the opera DVDs I ordered.

There are other examples, two of them really rather cute. (a) On the bus this morning a woman was curling her lashes with a metal contraption that looked like it would cut elephant toenails. (b) Right now a woman on the train is rubbing her hair with something that looks like roll-on deodorant. And now, wonder of wonders, she is writing in a notebook with a pen shaped like a pink flamingo.

W.E.W.: 4. Homeless

There is a homeless man outside my office window. He wears a green grocer's apron; that's how I recognized him at first. No, wait. It's just a long shirt sticking out from under his other layers. When he walks he tilts his head and looks up to the sky, his mouth moving in grumbles silent through the space and glass separating us.

He's across the street. He does push-ups for long minutes at a time, sometimes back near the tree and cushion that form his bed, back against the gray graffitied wall, but sometimes on the sidewalk right next to the street. What image have you formed? His hair is long and dirty gray ("grizzled," I read today in the Chicago Manual of Style, is better for describing dirty old humans than "grizzly"), his face rough and wrinkled.

On two different days the police came by. The cruiser blocked the alley, and a metallic voice boomed from the panzer. The homeless man had been running this way but started running that way. I wondered what the police say to people who sleep outside. The man ran off but his pile of things remained. He came back after awhile and hugged the couch cushion and took it away. Hoe many things does he own? How many are important to him?

But he came back after an hour or so, propped the cushion against the tree, and lay down. What does he think about when he's alone?

Another day the police came back twice. Shooed him away, but he came back. It occurred that if I were wearing a suit I might have thought, "Fucker never learns." But instead I thought he probably got a couple blocks away and realized he didn't know where he was or how he got there, so he turned back toward the place he remembered was safe. I don't know which judgment is worse. Both I and the suit have him on our coffee tables.

Before I got this job I thought it might be good to work in some homeless shelter or somehow be involved with the issue of homelessness. I'm sure the answers to many of my questions are easy to find. I'm sure there are plenty of ethnographies and academic histories of homelessness. What happens in homeless shelters? What are the rules? How long can you stay? Is their goal to get every homeless person working at McDonald's and struggling to pay rent on some two-walled shack to some fat man with bloody claws?

Doesn't homelessness mean that the rest of us are "all in"? You can't halfway decide to live the life of property.

W.E.W.: 3. Dog Dreams

I have dreams in which Tristan comes back. He appears panting that goofy grin, his hair matted with mud and weeds, that guilty-mischievous look that says he has just been on a long adventure without human supervision.

"Whose dog is that?" someone asks.

"He used to be mine," I say, and I wonder how far you have to take a dog before he loses your scent. It seems they always find their way back.

Tristan lingers around outside my apartment—it is the quiet, run-down neighborhood in Athens, not the busy streets of San Francisco—and we exchange short glances whenever we happen to meet on the front steps between our separate comings and goings.

When I wake up, we may meet again. He may be up in the city one day, strolling about Golden Gate Park with his new owners, a man, a woman, two blond children. He cannot bear to be without them and will not stroll too far (although in truth the man was a little harsh with him at first).

Here I am sitting on a bench because the sun reaches my bare ankles but a tree shades my face. Tristan pauses and sniffs at my feet, but my scent is changed and unrecognizable. He looks up with his brown eyes. He is older now, grayer than I remember. But so am I. The youngest boy calls him by a name I do not know. He pants, twice, and then leaps away.

W.E.W.: 2. Pubertal Depression

The depression I experienced around the time I was in sixth grade was related to the beginnings of puberty. For several years I had worn a jacket even on the hottest days. In sixth grade my jacket was especially parka-like, thick with a hood that had a zipper down the middle so it would split and lay like beetle wings on my back.

One day I overhead some friends talking about me, and soon I was convinced that my friend Rusty didn't want to be my friend anymore because my overly layered and newly pubescent armpits were engaged in the celebration of new and malodorous characteristics. I switched to a lighter jacket and experimented with my older brothers' sporty deodorants, but it was too late: Rusty never came back to me.

But it was sixth grade, and we were dividing along social lines. Rusty, John, Kevin—most of the boys I had played with for the past several years—were following a different trajectory. Many of them followed what I can now call a normal, heterosexual course, one related to the testosterone flowing through their various parts—though of course there were also divisions along the lines of interests, talents, social background, and so on.

Strike the scientific philosophizing which will of course one day look ridiculous: I was terrified of growing up.

The Boy Scouts had scared me sufficiently even before I made it to seventh grade, when every word out of our naughty mouths came with a wink and a double meaning and where I learned how men and women have sex (not through school or even friends, but through H.F. Saint's book Memoirs of an Invisible Man, later a silly movie starring Chevy Chase; I had learned much about anatomy and its manipulation from Stephen King, but he had never spelled out the mechanics). The Boy Scouts were proof enough that it's time for women to rule the world. The Boy Scouts were my taste of boot camp.

Enough generalizing which will of course one day look ridiculous: At camp one of our fearless leaders told us the story of Peg-Dick.

I was afraid of bodies. I knew that seventh grade came with gym class and a locker room. A gym uniform. Green shorts, a white T-shirt with my last name written in black permanent marker on the back of it. I remember seeing an older boy across the Boy Scout camp change into his bathing suit. He was naked, and the intersection of his legs was dark, hairy. That night I prayed that puberty would hurry, that I might have such a protective covering before I was forced to strip in front of my comrades in the locker room.

There are fine lines between modesty and innocence, shame and corruption. One remembers these incidents . . . a scoliosis check. We all take off our shirts and stand in line, and go in one by one, and he tells us to turn this way and that, lift our arms over our heads, and he makes notes in his little folder.

"Lookin great there, McCurdy," he says with a snort.

There is nothing between me and the world but my skin.

"Well, what are you waitin for? Put yer shirt back on. Get outta here."

Or was it something else?

Writing Exercise Week: 1. Opera Memories

As I was walking home from work today, I had an idea. I should proclaim this Writing Exercise Week on my blog, and I should force myself to write at least 200 words every day. And then next Monday I will choose from the week's scribbling one starting idea from which I'll have to create a complete Written Thing.

But I'm so obsessed with these five minutes of music from Ariadne that I must cast them out:

Zerbinetta. The blink of an eye, a moment, is nothing. One glance is everything. Many people think that they know me, but their sight is blurred. On the stage I play the coquette, but who can say that my heart is in it? I appear to be happy but actually am sad. I pass for sociable but am so alone . . .
Composer. Sweet incomprehensible girl!
Zerbinetta. Silly girl, you should say—who sometimes allows herself to long for the one to whom she could be true. True to the end.
Composer. Whoever it may be that you seek—you are like me. The earthly has no place in your soul.
Zerbinetta. You speak what I feel. (Pause.) I must go. Will you forget this moment straight away, in the blink of an eye?
Composer. Can such a moment be forgotten in all eternity?

It is the nature of some music to hide its secrets. I have come across several such pieces. Ariadne is one. I sat down one day in the media center on the seventh floor of the library at UGA with a laserdisc of some strange Strauss opera called Ariadne auf Naxos. (Another day I sat down with a laserdisc of Salome and watched a crazy woman, Maria Ewing, whom I would later love as Carmen, sexily roll down some stairs. And dance the seven veils. And kiss the bodiless mouth of John the Baptist.)

Most of the opera was inaccessible, but there was a moment when Jessye was singing some dramatic line and the music was getting faster and there was a tambourine and the lights were flashing. That was enough. I bought a CD some time later and listened a bit to Leontyne Price and a powerful metallic tenor named Rene Kollo, who also sings in the one song I'd take to my desert isle, Mahler's Lied von der Erde. (Which ten years ago I experienced live, with my friend Tara, in the front row of Symphony Hall in Atlanta, which I guess is acoustically unsound but oh, so intimate. I could see the tenor's spit—and I should mention that according to the program he had understudied the role of Bégears in my favorite opera, John Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles, where I first saw Renee Fleming and knew her as the Pressed Bosom.)

And finally a few moments of the second act (the opera within the opera) caught me: Ariadne's first vast arias, Zerbinetta's vocal pyrotechnics (which lend themselves to whistling), Bacchus's off-stage shrieks, their loud loving struggles.

And now, where am I? As always happens: back to Act I. As with The Magic Flute, I am now grown friendly with the act that first seemed so purposeless. Here I am with the composer, played by a woman in pants, who learns that his serious, epic, mythic opera is to be followed by light entertainment:

Composer. After my opera? A comic postlude? Dances and trilling, lewd gestures and double entendres, after "Ariadne"? . . . The mystery of life comes to them, takes them by the hand—and they order for themselves some ape-like buffoonery to wipe from their unspeakably frivolous minds some slight feeling of eternity. . . . A jolly little comedy! A passage back to their vulgarity! These immeasurably common people want to build a bridge from my world back to theirs. This experience will poison my soul forever!

And when the composer learns that his opera must be performed simultaneously with the lighter fare:

Composer. As I lay in my cradle an inner voice foretold that something like this would happen.

I have nearly cast it out. For now. The frightening reality is that I'll seen be digging into Der Rosenkavalier, which is not only a full hour longer but seemingly a million times more complex.

Two hundred words down.

Neighbors and nightmares

I was just glancing through my April posts to see if there was anything worth anything, and I stumbled across "Vividly I remember one night around that time when I struggled to conceal my tears from the next-door neighbor who was baby-sitting me." Funny, I just dreamt about her last night. I was about to see some sort of theatrical show in a place with lanes and turnstiles like an amusement park ride, and she and her mother were just leaving. I waved and we spoke casually for a little while, and I wondered what they were doing so far from home.

There is so much one can remember about the neighbors in one's childhood, whether it's biting one on the arm, making one pee on a plate, or learning from one that a belief in God improves one's physical health. Some of them stuffed deer and lacquered fish in basements; some lived in unfinished attics. In one living room were two pairs of bronzed shoes; in another, a copper lighthouse. Pianos, armchairs, coffee tables, coffee table books. Houses well-kept and long-established, houses new and unformed. Adults not much older than I am now.

I can see out my bedroom window the potted plants under an eerie white light and the alien who tends them. And sometimes she stalks the rabbits in her garden. And sometimes she strokes the cat that grows on her arm. And if she goes away, it is because a witch has evicted her.

And when the nightmares of your own home become too great, you run to your neighbor, and you beat and beat on the door, it's the middle of the night but you don't care, and just as the claws reach for the cotton tail of your pajamas, the door opens and the family is there, all five of them, with red eyes, a smile, and fangs . . .

Everybody needs help sometime

Dave is a relatively homeless man who sits on the corner of Jefferson and El Camino in Redwood City, California. He comes in to the store from time to time and waits patiently until one of us has a moment to change his quarters into dollars, his dollars into fives, his fives into tens.

"My eyes aren't what they used to be," he said when he came in today. "Could you help me with this when you get a chance?"

"What do you need?" I asked. He handed me a marker and a piece of cardboard.

"Just something like EVERYBODY NEEDS HELP SOMETIME," he said.

"Oh, you want me to write it," I said, taking the marker and placing the cardboard on the counter. "I guess I could do that," I mumbled, wondering whether he had said everybody or everyone and whether it should be sometime or sometimes.

I began to write. "Is this your pen or ours?" I asked.

"Oh, I got it right here. It's yours."

"Well, it doesn't work very well." I rooted around in a drawer and pulled out a green Sharpie. The ink flowed dark and bold.

EVERYBODY
NEEDS HELP
SOMETIME

"Hey, thanks a lot," Dave said.

"Take care," I said.

Her skin is like a potato (more A.S. Byatt)

"'Her skin is like a potato and her body is like a decaying potato, in all that great bundle of smocks and vests and knitwear and penitential hangings. Have you seen her legs and arms, Dr Himmelblau? They are bandaged like mummies, they are swollen with strappings and strings and then they are contained in nasty black greaves and gauntlets of plastic with buckles. You expect some awful yellow ooze to seep out between the layers . . .'" (A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories)

I have finished The Matisse Stories. First was "Medusa's Ankles," which was alright, and which I read over a turkey burger and french fries on a breezy sunny corner. Then I read "Art Work," first on my bed and then over coffee on a shady corner. It was stellar and perfect, and I saw myself rereading it not far in the future. I couldn't imagine a more perfect story. And then, last, was "The Chinese Lobster," which I read on the train. It was divine, thoughtful, and devastating.

She is a genius. She is a writer. She is a miracle. She is a sculptor. She is a painter. She is a brain. She is a computer.

With her, I do not ask, "What is the purpose of story? Are there really such things as stories? Can anything really be set down?" And I do not ask, "Why should I write a 'story'?"

If any human can write a story like this—and, in truth, I felt this also when I read Salinger's "Teddy"—then, well, another can. She is, after all, just a person. She can't be the only person capable of this perfection. With will, practice, and care, perhaps I could . . . ?

So much in the world

Changes are coming. I've been, somehow, tired. Too tired to think of writing.

I have seen how 9-to-5s and TV conspire.

I read a splendid story this morning: "Art Work," from the little collection The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt. I am still afraid of her, afraid to read Possession or any other longer work since I tried The Game and failed. She is so high up there, a sorceress of words and detail. Or she seems to be from a previous age, where sentences were like imported doilies. But I will start with these short stories, which also encourage and inspire me:

For example, from "Art Work":

'Well, it all just comes to me in a kind of coloured rush, I just like putting things together, there's so much in the world, isn't there, and making things is a natural enough way of showing your excitement.'

Puppy Love

“It’s a puppy night, Sylvie,” Natonk said as he pushed his tray into the incinerator.

“A rough day at the shop?” the computer asked.

“Just lonely,” Natonk said, walking to his closet. The panel slid open and he ran his fingers along the wraps hanging there. Blue, red, yellow, orange — he had changed into the green as soon as he had gotten home.

“I did the ocean setting today, but hearing those waves and watching the sun sail overhead only made things worse,” Natonk mused. His two longest fingers were stroking the collar of the orange. “It’s supposed to be relaxing,” he said, letting his green wrap fall in a soft puddle around his naked feet. “But who can relax when you’re crunching numbers?”

The computer hummed. “I’ve always found — computation — to be relaxing,” Sylvie said.

Natonk kicked the wrap into the bottom of the closet and ran his hands down his bare sides, stretching. “But you’re a computer, Sylvie, that’s what you do.” He twisted this way and that, working out the kinks he had developed while sitting that day. “I’m a human,” he began, “and humans — love.” He reached for the orange wrap and lifted it from its hanger. He put his arms through the sleeves, walked over to the settee, and collapsed on it, exhaling heavily.

“I have noticed,” Sylvie said, “that your sighs are increasing daily.”

Natonk smiled at this. “In quantity?”

“Yes,” the computer replied. “But also degree. Shall I give you the numbers?”

Natonk laughed. “No, I’ve had enough of numbers.” He spread the wrap over his lap, looked over at the aquarium display. “I trust you’ve reported this to the super?”

“Of course, Natonk,” Sylvie replied.

“And?” Natonk asked.

“And you have not reached intervention levels,” the computer reported. “However, at this rate of increase —”

“Enough!” Natonk interrupted. “What I don’t know won’t hurt me.” He sighed as he played with the soft ends of the wrap’s belt. “Besides, I’m long overdue for a reset anyway.”

“Be that as it may, Natonk,” the computer said in what Natonk recognized as her formal voice, “you would do well to put off reset as long as possible.”

“Hence,” Natonk said, fluffing the length of his wrap, “puppy love!”

Sylvie was silent for a few moments. “As long as I live,” she said at last, after a slight whir, “I’ll never understand you humans.”

Natonk smiled. “Are we such complex machines?”

“I think I’ve already mentioned this,” Sylvie continued, “but there is a branch of computer science addressing that very subject. Actually, they phrase it like this: ‘Are humans infinitely complex or infinitely simple.’”

“And where do you stand on the issue?” he asked the computer.

“I have never had the opportunity to study the problem formally, obviously. You would have to go to the library and talk to a research computer,” she answered. “But,” she whispered, and here the lights of the apartment began to dim, “my experience would suggest that you are infinitely simple.”

“Sylvie!” Natonk cried, sitting up suddenly so that the length of his wrap slid off his thighs. “I haven’t given the specs yet!”

Sylvie remained quiet while the receiver began to hum. The lights in the dark wooden panel glittered and went out, and Natonk felt the floor vibrate beneath his naked feet. He sighed and pulled himself up off the settee.

“Sylvie. . . ,” he murmured reproachfully as he walked toward the receiver’s panel and placed his thumb on the pad. The receiver grew still, and the pad beneath his thumb glowed green and then faded. He stepped back, and the panel slid into the wall as the lights in the cell resumed their normal brightness and Natonk saw —

“Oh, Sylvie,” he sighed, this time with the peace of one who looks up at the timer at work to find he has only one minute before day-end.

His puppy stood there, naked and smiling, and Natonk’s jaw relaxed and his mouth hung slack as his eyes took in the gray-touched white fur on the feet, as they traced up the light down of the legs, which thickened into a plush curly carpet and the thighs and waist, then grew sleek and long at the chest, and downy down the arms, so that there were a few soft tufts visible between the knuckles of the long hands.

“Sylvie, Sylvie,” he murmured as he admired the wild shock of white hair on the head, the soft fur around the thick red lips, the bushy gray eyebrows over the bright blue eyes. “Sylvie,” he said, shaking his head, “how did you know?”

“Simple,” she replied, placing special digital emphasis on this word, and with that the glass of the receiver retreated into the wall and the puppy took a tentative step forward.

“Yes, that’s it,” Natonk said. “Come.” The puppy’s arms stretched out in front of it, and Natonk seized the hands, feeling the warm palm beneath the cool fur. The puppy smiled and stepped into the room.

“Aren’t you beautiful?” Natonk exclaimed, lifting the puppy’s hands light in the air. “Let me just have a look at you,” he said, spinning the puppy around. The puppy was lean and healthy, and the fur down his back and on his buttocks shone with a gentle light of its own.

“Arf arf,” Natonk said approvingly, and Sylvie laughed.

“Yes,” she began, “I’d say there is sufficient evidence supporting the hypothesis of infinite simplicity.”

“Oh, Sylvie,” Natonk sighed, “hush.” He led the puppy to the rug in front of the video window. “Hush and leave us to play.”

1987, Banalities, Deuteronomy, Depression

Some explanation: A couple weeks ago I came across a Magic Hypnotizing Disk online. My eyes went wide and I exclaimed, "I had one as a kid!" I thought for a moment. "And I can prove it!" I'm still recovering from a bout of skepticism in my formative years, so coincidences become more exciting for me when there's incontrovertible proof. I remembered having written about the hypno-disk in a journal I was required to keep in sixth grade. All these entries from 1987 come from that journal, which is addressed to my sixth grade teacher.

I've recently written about sex dreams. These stemmed from a similar case. I was in fact sitting at my keyboard and suddenly remembered an early sex dream, which for me had stood out because it was so realistic, so sexy, and so positive. I am still looking for a journal entry detailing this dream. I suffered also from prudishness in my formative years, so I'm not sure that there is one.

The first of the following three entries captures "a day in the life" of a sixth grader (well, me). The second shows me in a religious fanaticism. At its height, I called myself and a group of my friends "Keisler Kids," named after the Sunday school teacher I revered. The third marks my first attack of depression. Vividly I remember one night around that time when I struggled to conceal my tears from the next-door neighbor who was baby-sitting me.

October 1, 1987

Today was an okay day. Now I notice that those other stories this week were a little bit on the short side. So I think I'll stretch this one out.

Today I started off in the usual place. The bed. Then my mom came and woke me up, because I forgot to set my alarm. I got ready, ate a waffle, and left for school.

At school I had to set up the risers. Then, back to the classroom, where I got ready for reading and math. Math I don't like too much. It just doesn't do anything for me.

Then off to reading. Da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum-dum-dum, in tune to the William Tell overture (Lone Ranger). We answered questions, you know, skill check, comprehension, type thing.

After that we went to SNACK. Then us band people went to band. We did a test and played some tunes.

Next on the agenda we went to science and social studies. In science I got a 60. In social studies, we had a test. So that was a lot of fun. A whole barrel of fun. (Sarcasm)

Then I got to come back to good old home room for english. I like english except for one thing, sentences. Ugh! We did an easy page. I sure like easy pages, hint, Hint, HINT!

Lunch was the next biggie! Lunch! At lunch I waited for Rusty to sit down for me "Daily Joke." Today it was:

Who's ever heard of a taco with dandruff?

Well, I was referring to the flaky cheese. To my amazement, he laughed. I have never liked the school's food.

After that we worked on english and then went to music. At music we watched a 25 minute tape. One of those where you're so bored that you look around at people to see if they have noses!

And then to recess. I played four-square. But it wasn't my kind of 4-squarers. So that was a bowl of cherries also.

That just about concludes the school day. Now let's jump to 6:00 at home. Here's the setting.

A house. 1987. Oct. 1. Suddenly, the door bell rings.

I went to the door, and who was there but, my grandparents. They came in, settled down, and offered me an orange.

Truthfully I don't know a wally-doodle on how to eat an orange, or peel it, for that matter. Virtually I made a fool of myself. (I also don't know what virtually is, it just sounds good.) And that concludes a day in the life of PG McCurdy.

The End!
Finally.

October 7, 1987

Today was o.k., as in fine, el pronto, vitzen bugen, or in other words, a regular day. By the way, I have no earthly idea what elpronto and vitzen bugen mean. I never wrote about this, but it's about Tarot cards and crystal balls and horoscopes and junk like that it says in the Bible, and I quote,

"Deuteronomy 18:10-12

10 "There shall not be found among anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer,
11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.
12 "For who ever does these things is detestable to the Lord; and because of these detestable things the Lord your God will drive them out before you."

Unquote. So, down with all that junk, which ends another day in the life of PG McCurdy.

October 13, 1987

Today at school I got a case! Detective case! I "solved" it, but if you want all the details, then go ahead and ask.

I felt terrible around 5:30. Not sick-terrible, but sad-terrible. I felt like I had too much school left til the biggie, Being out of school. I really do not want to go to Booth Jr High. Right now I am trying to stay cheerful.

I had a Boy scout meeting later today. It wasn't much fun. Scouting isn't my favorite. I kind of want to quit, but if I stay and make it to Eagle, I will have been well rewarded. And this ends another day in the life of PG McCurdy. Come back, ya' hear?

1987, Trouble with Teach

September 22, 1987

Today was a bad day. First off, I got in trouble in Mr. Davis' class. Here is how it happened.

We were doing a math sheet when Rusty asks me a question. "Is this right, 5, 7, 11, carry the one, 7, 6, 2?"

I nodded 'yes,' now knowing what he was talking about, when Mr. Davis boomed out.

"Rusty, did not I say there was no talking?" he said.

"Yes," Rusty said.

"And why were you and PG a chit-chatting?"

"I was asking him a question," Rusty said.

Mr. Davis said, "Rusty, what did I tell you would happen if you talked?"

"I da' know," Rusty said.

"Well," said Mr. Davis, "why don't you ask PG what I said."

Oh me gosh! I had forgotten what he said. I knew it was something bad. I had no choice.

"I forgot," I said laughingly. Not too soon had I seen the look on Mr. Davis' face. It was not a laughing-matter-face. He was serious. Plain SERIOUS! Gulp!

Mr. Davis said, "Well, I guess you two owe me 5 laps around the field. Or two zeros. I know that both of your parents wouldn't like that."

That about ends the discussion. Ouch does my hand hurt. Anyway, I've always stood up to my rights. This time, it didn't work. Well, I can't blame the teacher. After all, what did he do? Rusty started it. But, I'm not mad at him because I've been in his position before. I got somebody else in trouble and I felt bad.

THE END