Kick Me (3 page)

I started to take heart. Maybe my costume wasn’t so bad. True, I looked a little more combat-ready than any elf I’d ever seen but that was just about color. The cotton ball on my hat looked fairly pixieish, and I liked that my foam-filled socks gave the impression that my actual foot was big and not just merely a normal foot encased in an oversize curly shoe. And in my faux lederhosen, I almost looked like one of the kids from
The Sound of Music.
Well, except that I had freakishly large feet.

No, I thought, maybe I was going to be okay.

After lunch, our teacher, Miss Connor, informed us it was time to change into our costumes and get ready for the pageant. She shepherded the girls off to another room to change, and we boys went about the business of transforming ourselves into Santa’s army.

What I saw next worried me.

Out of every bag, my peers produced gaily colored costumes. Bright reds and greens and crisp clean whites made the room glow. The infusion of hues seemed to have an almost magical effect on our otherwise colorless classroom. My friends all started donning their vibrant costumes, shorts with white fake fur around the waist and matching suspenders that actually crossed in the back. Some of the kids even had green or red tights. And everyone had shoes that looked like they came from a Hollywood studio costume department. These were the most realistic-looking elf costumes I had ever seen, better than the ones worn by the teenagers who worked at the mall and dragged you over to Santa to have your picture taken. And it was in this atmosphere that I pulled out my United States military elf attire.

“What color is
that?
” asked Brian in the same tone of voice he would have used if I had pulled a turd out of the bag.

“It’s O.D. green,” I said defensively.

“What’s
odie
green?”

“
O.D.
stands for
olive drab,
” I said disdainfully, hoping to make Brian realize how uneducated he was in the vernacular of our country’s military.

“Elves aren’t that color,” piped in Mike. “You’re gonna look like a booger.”

This got a round of laughter, as any reference to bodily functions or emissions always did back then, and it was quite clear I had a long afternoon ahead of me.

I put on my outfit and became the focal point of the room.

“What’s wrong with your feet?” another kid said incredulously.

“They’re elf feet. They’re
sup-posed
to be big.”

“Elves’ feet aren’t big,” said Brian. “Their
shoes
are big.”

“No they’re not,” I countered. “It’s their
feet.
They’re big and curly. My mom said so.”

“Well, your mom is wrong.”

Miss Connor came back into the room and looked us all over.

“Very nice. You all look wonderful,” she said with a smile that showed she was overcome with the cuteness of the scene. Then she saw me. “Oh . . . my” was all she could muster as she stared at me with a furrowed brow that seemed to say, “Maybe I should call Child Services.”

“He doesn’t look like an elf, does he, Miss
Con-nor?
” Mike said, throwing a mocking glance my way. He always had an annoying habit of using Miss Connor’s name like a weapon to prove my stupidity.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Connor. “I think he looks exactly like the kind of elf who would have doubts about Christmas.”

Touché. I had spent the last several months unsure whether I should have a crush on Miss Connor or not, and now I found the scales tipping in her favor. It had been a toss-up between Miss Connor and Amy Lepnick, the blond-haired girl who sat at the front of my row. But since Miss Connor had just given me a great defense for my costume and Amy had just that morning informed me, “Your ears are too big,” Miss Connor was now the love of my life.

“That’s right, Miss Connor. That’s why my parents made me dress like this,” I said, giving Miss Connor my most sincere teacher’s pet smile. Mike rolled his eyes.

Miss Connor brought us out into the hallway, where the girls were waiting. They, like my fellow male elves, all looked like they had been professionally outfitted by the costumer of the Ice Capades. Each girl was wearing a red or green short dress with white fur on the hem and on the ends of her sleeves. They had on matching stockings and shoes that all seemed to have just the right amount of curl. Their shoes also made their feet look actual size. I guess even in Christmas Town, obscenely big feet are a no-go for the upwardly mobile female elf.

When the girls spotted me, they stared in disbelief. I saw a few of them stifle laughter. Amanda, despite her Coke bottle glasses, blinked at me and said, “You look weird.”

“I’m an elf who doesn’t know the meaning of Christmas. I’m
sup-posed
to look this way,” I said in a haughty tone.

“You look like a booger that doesn’t know the meaning of Christmas,” piped in Michelle. It got a huge laugh from both the girls and the guys, even though Mike had already gotten a laugh with the same lowbrow reference earlier. One thing’s for certain in grade school—a booger joke will
always
land well with your audience.

We all headed down the hall to the gym, where the pageant would be taking place. I straggled at the back of the group, trying to avoid my classmates’ stares and comments. “You look like an elf who lives in a garbage dump” and “They should call you Stinky the Retarded Elf” were just a few of the zingers my fellow North Pole inhabitants got off at my expense. In addition to the slings and arrows my peers were hurling my way, I was having a lot of trouble walking, since my socks had no soles to provide traction and had thus reduced every step I took to that of walking across an ice skating rink in new leather-soled shoes. The effect was more of an elf with a drinking problem than a kid whose parents had sent him off to school with improper footwear. After a few minutes, however, I discovered that slippery socks could be fun and started skidding back and forth down the hall like a big-footed hockey player, well in my own world.

Just then, Miss Connor stopped. “Oh, shoot. I was supposed to tell Mr. Kavich’s class to come down to the gym in five minutes.” With this comment, she looked back at us and noticed that I was at the rear of the group. “Oh, Paul, run down to their room and tell them, would you?”

My heart sank. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Mr. Kavich’s class was sixth grade. Even though I knew they were soon to see me in the pageant festooned in my government-surplus elf gear, there was something about their seeing me out of context that I knew spelled trouble.

“But . . .”

“Hurry up. If we forget, we won’t have any upperclassmen in the audience. Now go on,” Miss Connor said, giving me a smile that to her said “Be a good boy and make me proud” but that to me said “I’m in love with you, Paul Feig. Do this for me and I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to you.”

Having crushes on teachers is the surest way of relinquishing any and all power over your dignity when you’re a kid.

I smiled at her and ran off to deliver my message. I glanced back and watched the rest of my class head off to the other end of the hallway and disappear around the corner. As they marched away from me, I was struck by how authentic they all looked in their elf costumes. It made our hallway look like one of those cheesy movies about Hollywood studios, where the street outside the movie sound stage is always filled with extras dressed like centurions and astronauts and Vegas showgirls. Seeing my classmates looking so elfinly accurate and not being in front of a mirror to see myself made my own costume start to morph into something magical inside my head. The noncommittal olive drab that dominated my army/navy outfit started to turn a Santa-approved kelly green as I ran and skidded down the hallway. My boxer shorts suddenly sprouted fur trim and my night watchman’s cap with the cotton ball on top became much more like a hat that Robin Hood would be proud to wear, complete with a razor-sharp pheasant’s feather as a plume. On top of that, there was no greater pleasure than to be out of class and in an empty hallway when you knew that behind all those closed doors you were passing were students wishing they were in your shoes. Or foam-filled socks, as the case may be. No, I was one light ’n’ lively elf, roaming the countryside delivering good cheer to the poor unfortunates, ready to transform their holiday season from simple commercialism into Yuletide magic.

I slid up in front of Mr. Kavich’s classroom door. I could hear him lecturing behind it. The weirdest thing about being in a hallway when classes were in session was hearing all those teachers lecturing to all those students and knowing that each lecture was about things you didn’t know yet. From behind Mr. Kavich’s door I could hear him talking about the roots of grammar and to me at the time it sounded as erudite as if I had been standing outside a quantum physics lecture in a hallway at MIT. Feeling very cool to be seconds away from entering a sixth-grade classroom as a lowly first grader, I confidently knocked on the door.

“Come in,” said Mr. Kavich.

I opened the door and stepped inside. “Mr. Kavich, Miss—”

That was as far as I got.

I’ve always heard that Sammy Davis Jr. kissing Archie Bunker on the cheek was the longest laugh from an audience in television history. If that’s true, then I must officially nominate the response I got from this class of sixth graders as the longest laugh a first grader ever got from a room full of upperclassmen in the history of the Macomb County school system. As I stood there, watching both the students and Mr. Kavich become helpless with laughter, I pondered whether this was the kind of joy and goodwill I, as an elf, was supposed to be bringing to the world. I had certainly put them in a holly-jolly mood. Anybody could cheer another person up by giving him or her a present, but to be able to fill people with happiness just by entering a room . . . well, I figured, that took talent. Granted, this wasn’t so much happiness as it was ridicule, but in the world of the elf, the theory had to be “Whatever it takes.” And I was definitely taking one for Santa’s team.

But, after all, ’twas the season.

The pageant was a blur to me. There are unsettling home movies from the event my father dutifully took that show me reciting my skeptical-elf routine so loudly that you can almost hear my voice coming through the soundless eight-millimeter film. Behind me in a sloppy line are my fellow elves, fidgeting and shifting their weight and picking their noses and engaging in general unprofessional stagecraft. I, on the other hand, despite my nontraditional garb, was the very picture of professionalism. I had overcome the handicap of my costume, the mockery of my peers and schoolmates, the stifled laughter of every teacher and parent in the audience, and I discovered the true meaning of Christmas. They had all laughed at the skeptical elf and made fun of his clothes, but the skeptical elf had learned that it was about more than just clothes and presents and decorations. He had learned what this holiday was all about, and he hadn’t done it for them, not for himself, and, no, not even for Santa.

No, the skeptical surplus elf had done it all for one thing and one thing only . . .

The United States Army.

GROWING UP THROWING UP

W
hen I was in grade school, it seemed like everyone was always throwing up. Every time I turned around, I’d hear a splat and see some queasy-looking kid standing over a puddle of puke. And then, seconds later, I’d get a whiff of that unmistakable throw-up smell. This always announced the imminent arrival of a janitor, who would enter carrying a large broom and a dustpan full of red sawdust to dump on top of the offending pool of barf, which was then swept back into the dustpan and spirited away by our unlucky custodian.

What a gig.

I’ve never been able to forget that red sawdust. I always knew when it was around because of its own distinct odor, something akin to an extremely cheap bottle of Grandma perfume, a sort of subdued peppermint smell with just a hint of mothballs thrown in. Throw-up smells terrible and, because of that, the red sawdust always smelled pretty good when it arrived. It wasn’t something you’d want to smell every day, but when the air is ripe with the aroma of what was formerly inside of a kid, red sawdust was about as welcome a smell as fresh home-baked cookies on a rainy day. That is, until it was dumped on top of the vomit, where the two opposing fragrances would battle for superiority and produce a tangy, sour bouquet, like a pungent French cheese gone horribly wrong in the back of a hot car.

As a kid, I never knew why janitors always used that red sawdust or where it came from. Years later, when I was working in the warehouse at my father’s store, I learned that it was actually a manufactured product called sweeping compound, and was made to both soak up spills and keep dust from going into the air as you swept a dirty floor. Not knowing this back then, I figured that the red sawdust was just something the janitor had found lying around in the wood shop and decided was as good a substance as any to camouflage a puddle of throw-up. Because he had to do something so that we kids didn’t have to look at it. All school professionals know that if one kid sees another kid’s throw-up, that kid will then also throw up. And then another and another. Throwing up is contagious. One kid with a nervous stomach can set off a chain reaction in a crowded classroom that could seriously deplete the world’s supply of sweeping compound.

I never understood how my peers could throw up so easily. To me, throwing up is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. The stomach-twisting retches. The complete lack of control of one’s body. The hellish sounds of air being forced through the upwardly traveling bile. To this day, I think I’d rather die of food poisoning than have to throw the tainted food back up. I think I’ve only thrown up about three times in my life. But never in school. Things were bad enough without adding regurgitation to my list of problems.

My most vivid experience with throw-up happened in the second grade. It was show-and-tell day, and I had brought in a brandnew Hot Wheels fire truck that I was dying to show off and tell about. That truck, which I had wanted for months, was everything I had dreamed it would be and more. Bright red and so new that all four wheels were still straight. They hadn’t had a chance to bend inward yet like Hot Wheels cars always did after a few play sessions, so that when the car was rolled, it would simply go into a spin and tip over. No, this Hot Wheels fire truck was pristine. It even had a little ladder that you could move up and extend out. I’d been trying to get my mother to buy it for me for what seemed like a million years and had finally guilted her into it. The day before, she had accidentally thrown my favorite troll doll in with the laundry and had turned his bright red hair pink, and I played her like a royal flush. My tears could only be stopped by a trip to the toy store and, lo and behold, the fire truck was mine. And now I couldn’t wait to impress my peers with it.

The teacher, Miss Drulk, had gone out of the room for a minute, and I was busy making the truck race to the scene of a fire on my desktop, complete with screeching tires sound. I was good at sound effects and was convinced that no one could do the sound of a car getting into an accident and blowing up better than I could. True, I couldn’t do a machine gun as well as my friend Gary, and when it came to helicopters, Stephen Crowley was the king. But when it came to automobiles, the rest of the class could simply step aside. I was the master.

As I sat there, lost in my own noisy world, making the truck go into a catastrophic slide that saw it heading for a fall off the side of my desk—where it would then burst into flames in super-slow motion—Chris Davis, a perpetually dirty kid who sat behind me, tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, Paul, that’s a neat truck. Can I use it for show-and-tell?”

What? I thought. No way. This was mine. I’d been waiting all day to show this baby off. “No. My mother just bought it for me.”

“Aw, c’mon. I don’t have anything to show. My family can’t buy me anything. We’re poor.”

For a kid who was poor, he sure said it a lot. I’d always heard that poor people were proud, but the only thing Chris was proud of was telling you how poor he was. He was always talking about how his family lived in a shack, how they didn’t have any clothes, and how they had to eat birds in order to keep from starving. I never knew if I believed him or not. I couldn’t imagine anyone’s family sitting around naked eating robins and sparrows. But my mother had always drilled into my head that I had to be nice to people who were less fortunate than we were because we, too, might be poor someday. Did she know something I didn’t? I would wonder. Were we on the verge of bankruptcy? Because I was terrified of the thought of having to walk around in front of my parents naked.

I stared at Chris for a few seconds, deliberating. He stared back at me with a pathetic look on his face. I stared at his hands. They were filthy. His clothes had food stains down the front. His hair was dirty and looked like it hadn’t been combed in days. I wasn’t sure if this meant that he was poor or if it was simply proof that the guy was a slob. However, my Sunday school teacher’s voice rang out in my head: “Do unto others as . . .” Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. I get it. Stupid Bible.

“Well . . . okay. Here. But be
careful
with it.”

Fortunately, I had brought along one of my less cool Hot Wheels cars and I figured I could show it instead. I don’t know why I didn’t give Chris the less cool car, but I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t good at thinking on my feet when I was seven.

Miss Drulk came back into the room. I had a huge crush on Miss Drulk. She was beautiful. She always wore short dresses and her hair was done up in that 1960s straight-down-to-the-shoulders-then-flipped-up-at-the-ends style that I thought was just the most feminine thing imaginable back then. Simply put, she had blond
That Girl
hair. And she was always extra nice to me, too. Miss Drulk knew that the other kids picked on me and she always seemed to be coming to my defense. Once, when some third graders made a dog pile on top of me at recess, Miss Drulk came running over and made everyone get off. I was crying, as usual, and so she took me into the teacher’s lounge and gave me carrot sticks out of her lunch. I really fell in love with her that day. Even now, when I eat carrot sticks, I occasionally think about Miss Drulk. Her or Carl Slanowski, who used to secretly shove carrot sticks up his nose, then give them out to teachers.

Anyway, Miss Drulk came into the room and announced that it was time for show-and tell. When she said it I felt a twinge of excitement. But then I quickly remembered that it was going to be the poverty-stricken Chris Davis, and not myself who would be showing off the brand-new Hot Wheels fire truck. I immediately felt mad at the guy for guilting me out of my first moment ever of potential coolness.

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard it.

SPLAT.

Oh, no, I thought. It couldn’t be.

I turned around to see Chris Davis sitting behind his desk, which was now covered with throw-up. COVERED. For a poor kid, he sure had a lot in his stomach. And what was buried under the lake of vomit?

My fire truck.

Chris had barf running down his chin and was about to start crying. Kids always cried after they threw up. Probably because throwing up was so disgusting, there was nothing else to do
but
cry. And if you cried, the odds were you didn’t have to clean it up yourself. But when I saw Chris about to start bawling, I just wanted to slug him. I mean, if anyone had the right to cry, it was me. Couldn’t he have pushed my fire truck out of the way when he felt the vomit coming? I mean, throw-up gives you a couple seconds of warning before it arrives. It doesn’t just appear. You’ve got at least a few solid moments of nausea and tingling in the back of your throat that lets you know you have time to push a brand-new three-inch-long Hot Wheels fire truck that doesn’t belong to you out of the goddamn way. And didn’t the kid even know he was sick? He must have at least felt queasy when he was talking to me. A person just can’t feel great one minute and the lose the entire contents of his stomach the next. I guess he’d had a bad bird for breakfast.

Chris started crying. Miss Drulk came over and pulled him away from his desk. The massive amount of vomit was starting to migrate down his desktop and spill over the edge onto his seat. It was truly disgusting, but the worst part of it was seeing that faint outline of a fire truck–shaped lump underneath it all. Miss Drulk hustled Chris off to the bathroom. I heard him crying all the way down the hall and even heard his sobs echoing out of the boys’ room. Mr. Carowski, our mysterious janitor, a mountain of a man from some unknown country who spoke to us in an unintelligible mixture of garbled English and rumbling bass tones, came in with the famous red sawdust and dumped it on top of Chris Davis’s desk. All my classmates were over at the window trying to get some fresh air, since the room was now filled with the unmistakable odor of stomach stew. Mr. Carowski then took a hand broom, swept the whole vomity mess into a bucket, and sprayed the desk with disinfectant. The disinfectant smelled even sweeter than the red sawdust, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Mr. Carowski took his bucket, mumbled a few indecipherable words that I think were supposed to convey the warning “Don’t touch his desk until it dries,” and departed. I looked down at where my fire truck had once sat. Nothing was left but the memory.

I never asked Mr. Carowski about my fire truck, and I never saw it again.

And I never got over my anger at Chris Davis. Especially when I found out that he lived in a house twice as big and way nicer than mine.