Tom and the Sex-crazed High School Teachers

Special Sex Ed

Ms. Groo was a chubby special education teacher in her thirties when Tom was in high school. Most of the 2000 pupils on campus knew her simply because she taught the “retards,” as the crasser kids called them. Tom befriended a couple of these lower IQed students. He would see them walking home from school alone and would pull up along side them on his bicycle and walk and talk for a while. Some of those kids had interesting views of the world and some came from very strange families.

Anyway, back to Ms. Groo. Tom knew very little about her, but admired a teacher that would spend her day trying to drill life skills into students who required extreme patience. That is until one day--she wasn't at the school anymore. Tom soon learned that she had been fired from the school district for allegedly having sex with one of her special students.

Arrogant Charisma

The high school had a couple of theater teachers while Tom attended. One of them was Mr. Showmaker, a thirty-year old, clean cut, well-built man who had acted in some television prior to becoming a schoolteacher. He was handsome and several of the girls giggled when they gossiped about him.

Mr. Showmaker took charge of an after school martial arts club for students to work out and train with him. Tom decided to join. The club was supposed to be a place where martial arts students of different disciplines could show each other moves. Mr. Showmaker quickly changed that and made it more into a showcase for his abilities. One day, Mr. Showmaker, decked out in his karate gi, told the club members that he was very annoyed that a woman he knew who was a black belt had let her boyfriend beat her because she did not have the will to fight.

“Having a belt will do you no good if you do not know how to face a combative situation,” he said, “So, I’m going to have each of you spar with me, and you’ll learn. I don’t want anyone that I train with to be like that black belt woman.”

Tom did not like this. He came to martial arts club because he thought that the Oriental art was fascinating, not because he wanted to fight with a teacher. Tom and one of his friends often sparred for sport in his friend's back yard on a mat made out of carpets. Tom had also fought plenty of bullies throughout his public school days and it seemed to him that Showmaker was just trying to show off. Tom knew it was supposed to be only a sparring match, but he knew that he would very likely injure Showmaker in the process, and perhaps Showmaker, who was much stronger and more skilled, would then thrash him. Showmaker had the air of someone you did not mess with. An assault on his ego could result in physical harm. Tom regretted joining the club and this would be the last day he would go. He even considered leaving then and there.

Tom had never had Showmaker as a teacher, but his parents had run into him once while at the school for an Orchestra concert that Tom had performed in on the theater stage. Showmaker talked to Tom’s prim and proper mother about something, and almost said the word “sh*t,” but caught himself at the last minute. Tom had been standing nearby and his mother later commented on this.

“Mr. Showmaker almost said a bad word,” she said, “I could tell.”

Now, as Tom sat awaiting his turn to spar with the man, he recalled this conversation. It seemed to 16-year-old Tom that Showmaker had a hard time controlling himself. He recalled another time when Mr. Showmaker and Tom’s Orchestra teacher, Mr. Wirrin, started yelling at each other during class. Mr. Showmaker went into the room where the Orchestra was rehearsing and started complaining that Mr. Wirrin had left chairs and stands on Showmaker's stage after a rehearsal. He was very rude to Mr. Wirrin in front of Mr. Wirrin’s students. When he left the classroom, Mr. Wirrin turned to his Orchestra students and shook his head, “What a jerk,” he mumbled.

So, Tom sparred, or rather he blocked everything that Showmaker threw and decided to be defensive rather than aggressive. Often when he fought bullies, Tom liked to wear them down by defending. Many bullies had more powerful muscles that could seriously injure Tom if fists landed on his face, but Tom had endurance on his side and could literally be the last one able to stand. Unlike many bullies, Tom had extensive martial arts training both from classes and from drill instruction from his ex marine father. Over and over again, bullies would throw all of their conviction into the first few moments but rarely had the stamina or patience to beat someone who cooly defended and stuck only when opportunity presented. Mr. Showmaker criticized Tom for not now engaging him.

“You can’t be afraid to hit me. Don’t be like that woman and just stand there and take it.”

Tom replied, “That friend of yours, she survived, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I intend to survive too. I may not have struck you, but none of your strikes are getting me.” Tom knew that Showmaker was just waiting for Tom to throw a punch that would end him in an arm bar on the ground, a move that would have made the other’s awe at Showmaker’s prowess. Tom had just watched Showmaker throw one of the other club members to the ground moments before.

When Showmaker realized that sparring scrawny Tom was not going to end in his glory, he told Tom to take a seat so he could then demonstrate some moves.

Tom did not go back to the club. He believed that the teacher had a streak of narcissism in him that was difficult to respect. Several months later, he went to see the student stage production that Showmaker had worked on with his students. The main star, a sixteen-year-old, did not perform that evening. An ambulance came to the school and she was taken away. With that distraction, the play was awful. Tom learned the next day that she had had a nervous breakdown because Showmaker had allegedly been having sex with her, and that, coupled with her pending debut in front of her parents and classmates, had been too much for her to handle that night. Showmaker was forced to resign in disgrace shortly thereafter.

Spelling Bee Given by Illiterate Screwel Employee

It was lunch period at Von Toilet Bowl Tommy’s nickname for his favorite school in the seventh grade. A small group of thugs encircled him on the playground. One of the bullies shoved him and yelled, “Wanna fight $#!+head?”

Tommy’s backpack fell off his shoulder from the push. His marine father would not have taken this treatment from anyone. An adult playground monitor stood nearby, vigilantly monitoring, but doing nothing to help.

“You’re going to die,” the bully shouted as he shoved again. “I’ll shove that violin you play up your @$!”

The other thugs chuckled at Tommy’s torment.

Tommy punched the bully in the left eye hard enough to knock him to the ground.

The monitor sprang to the rescue, while calling bravely on his walkie-talkie for backup. He and his brave backup dragged Tommy and the bully to the Dean’s office.

Tommy had thought his fighting days were over after moving to Von Toilet Bowl Junior High from the sixth grade center in the bad neighborhood the year before.

Not so.

Tommy sat in the dean’s reception area facing a wall that was one big window looking out into the hall. The bully stood in the hall taunting him with his middle finger and making evil faces. Why was Tommy in the dean’s office and the troublemaker apparently free out in the hall? The injustice made Tommy tear up.

The secretary noticed Tommy’s tears, “Need a hanky honey?”

“Why is he free out there while I’m still in here?” asked Tommy, sounding somewhat meeker than he had intended.

“Oh, he’s not out there. He’s in the other room.”

“I saw him through the glass out there. He just flipped me off and threatened me. I could read his lips.”

The secretary rolled her eyes and dialed Tommy’s parents for the inevitable meeting – the meeting that would precipitate punishment for violating the zero-tolerance fighting rule.

Tommy would later learn that the bully had an identical twin, which explained why the bully in the window did not have a black eye. For the following two weeks, the identical twins were not so identical.

The Dean could have suspended Tommy, as he did with the bully. Instead, he punished Tommy with “in-house” suspension for three days, so Tommy wouldn’t miss school and his grades would not suffer. Tommy spent his suspension in a room with bad kids, isolated from everyone. He even had to eat lunch there.

Tommy’s sense of justice was shattered. He cried in front of his parents and the dean. The school did not care whether he lived or died. Kids could knife him while the monitor watched and did nothing, but the moment he defended himself, he was in trouble.

The Dean seemed genuinely concerned, “May I give your son something to read?”

It was the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It was the Dean’s way to show that he disagreed with the school district’s draconian policy. The poem would comfort Tommy when faced with injustice in the years to come.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

The rest of the year, no bully bothered Tommy. The mark of courage he punched into the bully’s eye lasted long enough to get the point across that Tommy should be left alone.

During in-house suspension, the school hosted a school-wide spelling bee for students in honors English classes. The winners would compete with the winners of other schools in the county, and eventually the State. Tommy knew he was by no means the best speller in the school.

The in-house suspension monitor called him to her desk to administer the test for the spelling bee. None of the other suspended students there were honors students, so only Tommy would take the test. The monitor was to read a word, and then Tommy would write it down correctly. Then the monitor would take Tommy’s list to his teacher.

Frequently, she did not know how to pronounce the word she was to read, and showed the word to Tommy before he wrote it down.

“I not sure how this word sounds. What you think?”

Tommy looked at the word, “Oh, that’s mnemonic (nuh-mon-ik).”

“Ok, what about this word?”

Tommy looked at the list again, glancing up and down it quickly before stating, “Oh, that’s pneumonia (nuh-moan-e-uh).”

After completing the list of twenty words, Tommy went back to his carrel desk and smiled. He could have written them all correctly, but he purposefully misspelled a few. He did not want to be the spelling bee champion of the school only to lose against another school.

In spite of his efforts, it was a three-way tie. The three top scorers went to the principal’s office for another bee to select the final representative. The other two students were eighth-graders, a year older than Tommy. Tommy did not win. He remembers one of the words that the principal told him sounded like “lawn-jer-ay,” a word Tommy had never heard before, spelled l-i-n-g-e-r-i-e. Tommy could not believe it. Later, he found the word in a dictionary and learned it was French for women’s undergarments.

“I thought it was supposed to be an English spelling bee,” he later told his English teacher. She was surprised he had scored so high the first time but came in last the second.

“Besides,” he added, “I don’t know much about women’s underwear!”