Kick Me (23 page)

While Mrs. Black was our most famous victim, she was not the most intriguing. In junior high there was one driver with whom I had real interaction. More than that, I was partly responsible for her demise.

Her name was Sally. Sally was strange to us because she wasn’t an old lady. She was fairly young, probably in her late twenties. Back then it was always hard to tell how old an adult was simply because everyone was older than we were, and, for us, people tended to fall into two categories—kids and adults. Sally was an adult, but she wasn’t a member of the beehive-hairdo set. Sally looked more like a young Billie Jean King, and I have to admit that, for a few moments when I first met her, I had a bit of a crush on her. The crush, however, proved to be very short-lived.

Sally was a strange person. None of us could figure her out. I think the first day we had Sally, the burnout girls thought they were going to like her because she was young and had a former-freak-girl quality about her, which I’m sure scared them. A cool bus driver who understood them meant no bus driver to torment on the way to school. And that scared
me.
Because if those girls couldn’t torment the bus driver, they’d torment other riders they didn’t like. And for some reason, they didn’t like me. I don’t know
why
they didn’t like me, but they didn’t. I think it was because they
could
pick on me, since I was harmless both in looks and in nature. And pick on me they did. I could never wear a knit cap to school because they’d always steal it. I’d be sitting in my seat in the morning and one of them would always pull my hat off my head as she passed by. This would make my thin hair stick straight up, because the combination of cold weather, knit caps, and getting-your-hat-pulled-off-your-head friction always turned my hair into an electromagnetic nightmare. Then, playing keep-away, they’d throw my hat all over the bus, and it’d usually end up flying out the window where it would spend the rest of its life being run over by cars and frozen into the slushy road, waiting to be found months later, black and crusty, in the spring thaw. So, for the sake of my hats and my sanity, I really hoped some tension would build between the girls and Sally.

My prayers were answered. A couple of days into Sally’s tour of duty, she yelled at the girls in the back of the bus to “put out those stinkin’ cigarettes.” Someone threw a snowball that had been smuggled onto the bus and it smacked Sally in the back of the head and the feud was on.

I never could figure Sally out. One day, she’d give you the biggest, friendliest smile as you got on the bus because she knew that you weren’t one of the troublemakers. Then the very next day she’d stare at you with death in her eyes as if you were one of her worst enemies. You never knew day to day how you were going to be greeted, and it became very unsettling to me. On the days Sally decided she liked me, she’d tell me to sit in the front row so that we could talk. Our conversations usually ended after she’d ask me, “What kind of crap do they make you guys study these days, anyway?” and I’d launch into a description of my classes that lost her interest in about five seconds. She’d always respond with a distant “huh” and that would be that. But at least she was on my side.

That is, until one day, when Sally smashed my lunch.

I was sitting in the front row of the bus, right behind the door. Between the front seat and the steps that led off the bus, there was a three-foot-high metal partition that I always assumed was there to stop you from tripping kids who were getting on and off the bus. Also, the doors folded up and swung into the partition whenever they were opened, so I guess it was supposed to protect any front-row riders from getting their knees and feet whacked at each bus stop.

Well, that morning, the girls were giving Sally a pretty hard time. She had to pull the bus over twice and scream at the top of her lungs, and this was making her grow quite agitated. She started complaining to me.

“What the hell, you know? I mean, what the
hell?
” she kept saying over and over.

Always willing to lend a sympathetic ear, I sat forward and leaned on the partition to listen to her. Chin on my arms, I hung my lunch sack over the little metal wall.

“My dad would have kicked my ass if I had acted like that,” she said, shaking her head. “He kicked my ass for a lot of things that weren’t half that bad.”

Sally’s words soon turned into mumbling. I tried to understand what she was saying but couldn’t really hear her, between the noise of the bus engine and the yelling of the girls in the back. I kept nodding, however, worried that if I didn’t seem like I was listening, she might go off the deep end. Well, as soon as we pulled into the school parking lot, Sally glanced at me as I was leaning forward, then quickly reached over, grabbed the lever that opened the door and angrily yanked the doors open before the bus had even stopped. Before I could react, the doors flew toward me and smashed my lunch flat between them and the partition. I pulled my face back just in time to avoid getting my nose broken. I looked over at her and she was staring straight out the front windshield, tapping the wheel with the smallest hint of a smile on her face and acting like she had no idea she had both destroyed the lunch that my mom had packed for me and almost altered my face. Too stunned to say anything to her, I extracted my pancake-thin lunch and got off the bus. That day in the cafeteria, I sadly ate my flattened ham sandwich and exploded Twinkie and tried to figure out why Sally had chosen me to be her scapegoat that morning.

However, I soon found out that my new role as her whipping boy, upon whom she could alleviate all the frustrations of her job, was officially my new full-time career. During the next week, she’d knock her elbow into the back of my head while returning from a cigarette-gathering mission in the back of the bus, make me miss the bus several times by pulling away when I was about ten feet from the door, and on numerous occasions lurch the bus forward when I was walking down the aisle looking for a seat, making me fall flat on my face. I had become Sally’s punching bag and had no idea what I had done to deserve it. And I had no idea what to do.

It all came to a head one day as we drove home from school. The bus was unusually calm. That day in the general assembly, they showed us a VD film and I think we were all deeply disturbed by it. The pictures of large open sores and lesions had stunned even the freak girls, who could occasionally be heard muttering, “God, that was so
gross.
” And the result of all this was that no one was hassling Sally. And I don’t think she knew what to make of it. She seemed really nervous, as if she thought we might be formulating a plan to pounce on her or for some time bomb we planted under her seat to go off. I guess, like a professional soldier, she had just gotten so used to fighting with us that her mind didn’t know what to think in times of tranquillity. I watched as Sally became a twitching, fidgeting mess. Her eyes kept darting up to the mirror to look at us, then her head would snap around, as if she thought she was going to catch us doing something below the mirror’s view. But there was no such intrigue afoot. Visions of giant syphilitic sores were still too fresh in our minds for any of us to do anything more than think about what a life of celibacy would be like.

As we started arriving at the bus stops, Sally seemed to grow more and more impatient for everyone to get off. She started telling departing students to “hurry up” as they headed down the aisle for the exit. She’d pull up to a bus stop, slam on the brakes, and say “c’mon, c’mon” as people got off. This made the girls in the back start to wake up.

“God, have a cow, why don’t you?!”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Sally started to look more panicky. God only knew what kind of scenario she was unraveling in her head. Next stop. Screech! “C’mon, c’mon, hurry up!” She was making all of us nervous wrecks. I couldn’t wait to get off that bus but was now filled with a feeling of dread that I, Sally’s scapegoat, was not going to get off unscathed.

Finally, we arrived at my stop. Everyone from my street got up and filed out. As my friend George, who was walking in front of me, stepped onto the doorway steps, he dropped his notebook. Papers fell all over the street. He stepped off the bus and bent down in front of the door to pick everything up, blocking my exit.

Well, that was apparently more than Sally could take because all of a sudden, I felt her hand grab my back and push me hard. I flew over the top of George and landed headfirst on the pavement. I saw a flash of white, then a few seconds of black, as if I’d just received an uppercut from the world heavyweight champion. As my eyes came back into focus, I saw the last kid jump off the bus as Sally yelled “Jesus Christ, get OUT!” The bus screeched away from the corner as we stared after it, some of George’s notebook papers getting sucked into the air by the bus’s sudden departure. As the papers fluttered to the street, I touched my forehead and felt a small rock that had embedded itself into my skin.

When I got home, I told my mom what had happened and she proceeded to call the school and report Sally. The next day, Sally was gone. We found out a week later that Sally had been stoned the entire last week she was driving our bus and had lost her driver’s license because of it. That was a major notch for the freak girls. Because not only had they gotten rid of another bus driver, they had completely wrecked her life, too.

And then, finally, there was Steve. Steve was a hippie. I always imagined that when he went in for the job interview, he told the bus company, “Hey, man, being that I’m a young guy and into rock and roll and have long hair and stuff, the kids’ll really be able to relate to me.” After hearing the stories about our dreaded bus, he probably figured that he would be the guy who was going to perform a miracle and crack the unruly crowd on the Wendell route and possibly have a TV movie made about the experience.

One afternoon, after the freak girls had gotten rid of Mrs. Black for yet another year, Steve climbed onto the bus. He was wearing dirty elephant-bell jeans with big flowery patches on the knees, a peace sign T-shirt, sandals, and love beads. His hair was down past his shoulders and he wore a headband. Everyone fell silent when he stood up in front of us and gave us a big smile.

“Hi, everyone. Peace. My name is Steve and I’m your new bus driver. I know you guys have had trouble before with bus drivers and I can relate to that. I have a hard time with the Establishment, too. Adults can be a real drag.” He laughed. “I just want you to know that since we’re all almost the same age, I’m here to help you guys. If you ever have any problems with anything—school, your parents, your boyfriend or girlfriend—just come on up front here and when I’m done driving you home safely, we’ll rap and see if we can’t straighten your head out. Okay? That sound groovy?”

He gave us a sincere smile.

We stared at him in silence. Then . . .

“TAKE A BATH, YOU FUCKIN’ HIPPIE FAGGOT!” screamed Sue Clark. Then all the freak girls burst into gales of derisive laughter.

Steve’s face went blank, then he looked like he was going to cry. He slid silently behind the seat, started the bus, and drove us home. And for the next few weeks, Steve descended into Hippie Hell. The freak girls systematically destroyed everything Steve stood for, shouting insults ranging from “You were probably too much of a pussy to go to war” to “Get a haircut, you homo.” After two weeks, Steve was gone. To this day, I still feel depressed when I think about what happened to Steve. Looking back, he was probably the best bus driver we could have had. He probably could have even been our friend.

But I guess people don’t really know a savior when they see one.

But then again, saviors shouldn’t be driving school buses.

AND NOW A WORD FROM THE BOOTH . . .

O
ne day, when I was in the eleventh grade, I found out the football team was looking for a new announcer. And I was very excited.

Ever since I was little, I’d always fancied that I had a great announcer’s voice. When I was seven, my dad gave me an old reel-to-reel tape recorder that quickly became my favorite possession. I’d spend afternoons talking into the mike, making up compelling in-the-field news dramas full of excitement and a testing of the human spirit.

“This is Paul Feig out in the battlefield where things look relatively calm after a . . . wait. What’s that?”

Like all seven-year-old boys, I was very good at making the sound of (a) a bomb whistling down out of the sky, (b) that bomb exploding, (c) machine-gun fire, (d) single-shot handgun fire, (e) the rumbling of a squadron of airplanes coming into range, (f) those same airplanes dive-bombing, and (g) any other mechanical sounds that involved war, death, and destruction. At this moment that I was recording my out-in-the-battlefield drama, I was performing a combination of sounds (a) and (e).

“Oh, my God. It’s a bomb. Run for your—” Sound (b).

“Oh, my God, they hit the tank! We’ve gotta get outta here!” Sounds (f), (a), and (c).

“We’re trapped! Quick. We’ve gotta get to that foxhole.” Sounds (b) and (c), with a few (d)’s thrown in for added mayhem.

“Argh, they got Charlie! My leg! They got my leg!” Riff on (g).

End ominously by simply turning off the tape, simulating the destruction of the tape recorder. Let your audience ruminate on the horrors of war.

Repeat. Endlessly.

My dad’s old reel-to-reel eventually led to my teenage purchase of a high-end cassette recorder and microphone, upon which I would perform my scripted radio shows in the sad privacy of my Steve Martin poster–covered bedroom. By this time, as I was making my way through the wilds of high school, I had left the art of war to the professionals and was dabbling in two areas of sound pastiche—the detective show and Ed Sullivan impersonations. Granted, Ed Sullivan had been off the air for many years by the time I started imitating him, but since I’d heard John Byner do a funny impression of Ed on the local Canadian TV station we received in Detroit, I was convinced that I could do it, too. What I planned on doing with it was a mystery, but at that time, I somehow assumed the media were clamoring for a sixteen-year-old doing imitations of a guy my peers had no memory of.

“Right here on our show, how about a big hand for President Jimmy Carter!” I’d yell enthusiastically into the microphone, as I hunched my shoulders up in a Sullivan-esque fashion. I would then continue talking like Ed Sullivan as I moved the mike away from my mouth, saying things like “All right, Mr. Carter, right this way,” creating the impression that Ed was walking away. When the mike was as far as possible from my mouth, I would go into my half-baked Jimmy Carter impression, which was simply a low-grade imitation of Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation from
Saturday Night Live.
I’d talk in a Jimmy Carter–like manner, thanking Ed Sullivan as I moved the mike slowly back to my mouth, simulating the approach of our thirty-ninth president. “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. My fellow Americans, today I’d like to talk to you about . . . peanuts.” Neither my impressions nor my material were very good but my mike technique was outstanding. And so was my growing resolve that I belonged on the radio.

So, in my junior year, when the opportunity to be the announcer for the football team arose, I jumped at it with a gusto unseen in our school regarding anything except trying to get out the front door after the last-period bell. I marched down to the office of our vice principal, Mr. Randell, to offer up my services. Mr. Randell was a nice guy who’d received a very bad rap at our school. Not only did he have the misfortune to be our vice principal, a thankless job that invites all the abuse that students are too afraid to aim at the actual principal, but he was also cursed with the misfortune of looking vaguely froglike. In retrospect, he really didn’t look like anything other than an overweight guy with small features, a large fleshy face, and an underbite. But in the hands of our perennially cruel student body, whose main goal was striking out at any and all authority figures, Mr. Randell’s features all added up to the poor guy being assigned the nickname “Toad.”

I sat down in Mr. Randell’s office and informed him of the great fortune that was about to befall both him and the football team.

“Mr. Randell, I want to be the football announcer.”

“Oh, really? Excellent. I’ve always thought you had a good voice, ever since I saw you perform ‘The Parrot Sketch’ at assembly last year. I’m quite a Monty Python fan, too, you know.” No, I didn’t know, but I have to say that the Monty Python comedy troupe’s cool quotient took a near-fatal hit with that revelation.

“Oh, really?” I said, not wanting to let any negative energy get in the way of my being offered the announcing job. “They’re the greatest.”

“They certainly are,” he said, chuckling to himself, his mind taking a brief trip through their repertoire. Had he been my age, I could have easily launched us into a one-hour marathon of reciting sketches word for word but, since befriending the vice principal would only result in even more torment from my peers, I simply chuckled, too, and stuck to the matter at hand.

“So . . . is anybody else up for the job?” I asked.

“No, surprisingly. I thought we’d have a few more students interested in it,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “Do you know a lot about football?”

Without missing a beat, I looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”

I knew nothing about football. I mean, I knew that announcers always said stuff like “he’s at the twenty, he’s at the ten, he’s at the five, TOUCHDOWN!” I could do that quite well, having loudly practiced it over and over the previous evening in my room until my father came in to tell me that he and my mother couldn’t hear the television. To me, being able to describe what I was seeing on the field would be a nonstop performance of making jokes, doing funny voices, and keeping the audience rapt as I called out the action of an extra-point kick. “There’s the snap. The kicker runs up and . . . OOOOHHH! IT’S GOOOOOOOOOOD!” What more did you need to know about football than that? Nothing. At least not in my book.

“Have you ever been an announcer at a football game before?” Mr. Randell asked.

“Whenever my father and I watch football, I do the play-by-play commentary along with the TV.” It was scaring me how effortlessly the lies were coming out of my mouth. My father and I never watched football together, and on the few occasions that I would turn on a game, my “announcing” the play-by-play consisted of my simply repeating any of the announcer’s phrases that seemed fun to say. Phrases like “Ooo, that’s
gotta
hurt” and “Oh, brother, can you believe
that?
” were the extent to which I had ever announced a football game. But in my head, at this moment, that qualified me for a great career in the announcer’s booth.

This was not a new way of thinking for me. Unfortunately.

See, ever since I was a kid, I was always convinced that if the pressure was really on, I could do anything. I always imagined a scenario in which I was being held captive by some enemy soldiers who’d have a gun at my head. One of them would say, “If you can play Mozart on this piano, right now, we won’t kill you. If you can’t, you’re dead.” And then, because it was a life-or-death situation, even though I had no idea how to play the piano, somehow I’d magically be able to play Mozart. I don’t know why I thought this. Probably because there had been a lot of stories on
That’s Incredible!
lately about mothers who, when their children were pinned under cars, suddenly developed superhuman strength and were able to lift the autos with one hand. So, I guess I figured that if a housewife can lift a car, I could play a sonata. And at the very least, I had to be able to announce a stupid football game.

Mr. Randell gave me the job and told me my first gig was that Friday night. I left his office very excited. I foresaw great things in my future. From the Chippewa Valley Big Reds football games, it would be a straight shot to taking over for George Kell and announcing the Detroit Tigers baseball games. From there, it was a quick stroll to
Wide World of Sports,
where I would be standing in the field with Jim McKay, announcing downhill skiing as I wore my supercool yellow announcer’s sportcoat with the regal WWOS patch on the breast pocket. I knew I could say “and the agony of defeat” as well as anyone else out there. Big things were on the horizon and I owed it all to a guy named Toad.

I spent the next few days practicing in my room and in my car. I didn’t bother to read any books about football because I had convinced myself that I’d have a sidekick who would take care of all the details of the game. Every sportscaster has a color commentator, and I knew they weren’t just going to stick me in the booth alone. Even Mr. Randell had said there’d be people up there to help me. So what was the point of trying to fill my head with a bunch of mundane rules? Leave that stuff to the support team, I thought. I was there to entertain and enthrall.

My father was quite surprised when I told him about my new job.

“
You’re
going to be a football announcer?” he asked in the same supportive tone he’d used the time I told him I wanted to ask my school’s head cheerleader to the prom.

“Yeah, they gave me the job.”

“But you don’t know anything about football.”

“Sure, I do,” I said, indignant.

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t learn it from me. I can’t stand the game.”

It was true. My whole family had a strange aversion to sports. Except for my grandmother, who was fanatical about the Tigers. She always referred to them as “my Tigers” and would sooner give up her Social Security checks than miss watching a game on TV. According to her, she was always “suffering” along with her Tigers whenever they had a bad season. I’ve always wondered if it was my grandmother who made professional sports so unattractive to the rest of us. It’s like being around alcoholics. The more they get into the booze, the less cool booze seems. Being around sports enthusiasts makes me want to push an amendment through Congress banning all professional sports from our culture. The sight of people either celebrating a victory of their local sports team or getting really upset because their team didn’t win has always depressed the hell out of me. I don’t begrudge anybody for getting excited about the fortunes of the team they’ve decided to follow. It’s just when it really seems to affect their happiness and satisfaction with their lives that it makes me nervous. I’ve become enthused over certain play-off series and championships whenever my old Detroit teams were involved, but it was because I no longer lived in Detroit and was homesick for the Midwest. By living in Los Angeles and still rooting for Detroit, I was somehow reconnecting with my past, cheering not for the men on my team but for the place in which I grew up. And if my home team lost, especially to a Los Angeles team, it was as if my place of birth had failed, thus causing me to be a dud, a second-rate citizen put in his place by the bigger, hipper town in which he was now living. In these moments, sports were simply a conduit through which my self-worth passed. And so, for displaced people in this country, I can understand the allure of following your favorite sports team.

But if you’re living in the town that your team’s in and you’re going nuts all the time, then something’s gotta be missing from your life.

The night of the football game arrived. I got in my car and nervously headed over to the football field. I had spent the week imagining what my debut was going to be like. I had never been to one of my school’s football games, except in my sophomore year when I spent the homecoming game standing by the fence pining over Tina Jenkins, a pretty cheerleader whom I was planning to ask to the homecoming dance on the very day
of
the homecoming dance. And on that day, the announcer’s booth had been a faraway and mystical place to me, a small wooden house up at the top of the bleachers. I tried to remember what the announcer for the team had sounded like but couldn’t recall ever hearing one. I remember hearing the occasional announcement of a player’s name and the score, but beyond that my memory had failed me. I kept telling myself that, despite what the past announcers had done with their jobs, I was going to bring a whole new level of entertainment to the proceedings. I envisioned the people in the stands laughing uproariously at my humorous side comments. I couldn’t really think of what any of these humorous side comments might be, but I was sure that in the heat of the moment, I’d be playing that crowd the same way I’d be bashing out Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
if a gun were pointed at my head.

I pulled into the school parking lot, which was crowded with cars and families heading over to the field. Seeing them, I started to get a little nervous, but quickly made myself feel better with the realization that these people were all in for quite a treat. They didn’t notice me now, but after the game they’d be mobbing me, shaking my hand and saying “Funny, funny stuff” and “I never enjoyed football until tonight. Thank you.” The night air was cold and I hadn’t worn a warm enough jacket. However, I knew that once I got up into that booth, everything would be great. I had seen the inside of an announcer’s booth on an episode of
The Odd Couple,
when Oscar was doing play-by-play with Howard Cosell. The clean white room with the bank of recording and sound equipment against the back wall. The microphones mounted on stands, sitting in front of you on a white counter. The window that revealed your sound engineer, to whom you would confidently nod as you were coming to the end of a commentary so that he could deftly hit the music button just as your story reached its crescendo. I couldn’t wait for the game to start and my career to be launched.

I got to the bleachers and looked up at the announcer’s booth. I wasn’t quite sure how to get up there. I scanned around and saw that there was a rickety wooden staircase leading up to it behind the bleachers. I took a look back at the crowds who were heading to their seats. Moms and dads and little brothers and grandfathers were all decked out in red and white with the politically incorrect logo of our school’s screaming Big Red Indian emblazoned on their sweatshirts and jackets. These were the football regulars, people who came out every weekend night to watch their sons and neighbors clash on the gridiron. The world of high school sports and its supporters was as foreign to me as the backstage politics of the drama club was to these people who were now packing into the stands. Would they accept me and my new take on their world? Or would my vocal antics prove too revolutionary for them? Did they want their football straight up and sober, or had they been longing for an unorthodox messiah who would challenge the very way they enjoyed their sport? Unsure, I turned and headed up the stairs to the announcer’s booth, the butterflies in my stomach doubling with each creaky wooden step I trod. Whether they were ready or not, this crowd was just minutes away from the new world order, and I was going to be standing at the helm.