good guys always win

good guys always win

chapter 10

(9.20.02)

It had been just two months since my family had moved back to New Jersey from Iowa. I was a posterboy for uncoolness: chubby, clad in hand-me-down clothing, prone to mispronouncing words (but at least not much of an accent), and untalented in every way except for knowing how to draw. The harmonious synthesis of these characteristics produced a most defining result: no friends.

Second grade: I went to the bathroom to take a piss. Two Jewish kids, who had been giving me disdainful looks in the classroom were also in the bathroom. As I finished up, the two kids called me over and pointed at a tile with two words etched into it.

"Hey Peter, can you read that for us?" one of them asked me. They had gambled on the prospect of me being ignorant of the word. Being friendless and constantly looking to improve that status, I obliged.

"It says 'fuck you'," I said, as I phonetically read the unfamiliar letter combination. I obviously had no clue what it meant.

The two Jewish kids were ecstatic that their plan had worked. They covered their mouths and jumped with joy. "Ooooh. You cursed! We're going to tell on you!" they said to me.

"Now Peter, you know that you're not supposed to swear. Don't do that again," my second-grade teacher told me with a stern look, shaking her head. It had only been a month, and I had already made a bad impression. Of course, when I was caught cheating on my spelling test, as I mentioned earlier, I became even more ostracized.

My parents tried to encourage me, telling me to develop my artistic skill and to show them off at school to make friends. "The kids don't think I draw well here," I told them. I had won first place for a safety poster I drew in Iowa, but nobody cared about that here. Tracing paper was a hot item and being able to perfectly trace Disney characters was considered artistic. "I'm just a regular boy," I said, not realizing my self-denigration was also hurtful to my parents. They didn't say anything and told me that I was right.

I didn't stay a loner forever, and I went on to make friends and build confidence. This role reversal never taught me that making fun of people was wrong; I took my share of disses and putdowns, but I learned to dole them out as well. I did, however, have a soft spot for kids who looked very lonely, especially the ones who had just started going to the same school. I liked taking the initiative to engulf a newcomer because I knew how lonely it felt to be ignored and to be sitting on the jungle gym alone, watching all the other boys play soccer during recess. I knew how it felt when nothing I said was funny to anyone, and I'd wish I had never said it. In a way, I developed a patronizing attitude of needing to "save" the loners. "Hey, wanna play touch football with us?" I would ask. I had done well in transforming personal pain into a philantrophic trait.

I didn't feel sorry for Benson when I heard the various reports of mistreatment: the cafeteria chants of "rat," locker slams, flipped bookbag, foot trips, and countless other tortures. Benson seemed to hold his own as he boldly retorted provocations with his firm belief in his "principles." It bothered me that we had failed to break him down. He felt that he had done the right thing.

We never really did anything terrible to Benson. In fact, the opposite occurred. Welton and I began to talk to him more casusally in gym class. Welton would talk about Star Wars with him, and I began to ask him for advice on video editing, of which he was an expert. In the back of my mind, I was still bitter that this rat had demolished a perfectly well-established on-line system that was well ahead of its time. The Hoching Education Network was supposed to last, but now destroyed. However, a few developments helped to reduce the animosity:

1) A few days after the now infamous classroom full of cheaters, Walker made a call to all the parents of the kids involved. Some parents were infuriated, but others, like mine, Warren's, and Welton's, responded in a manner that had Walker shaking his head. "Hello, I'm the history teacher of your son. I regret to inform you that your son has been found guilty of cheating on his homework." "So what?" Some of our parents even gave us wise advice: next time, don't get caught. Parental support always helps in critical situations.

2) Everyone received zeroes on their index card assignment, but the flipside was that Walker never assigned homework again for the rest of the year. Instead, we were bombarded with daily quizzes, which suited me and my friends perfectly because we generally performed well on them. It was, in fact, a counterproductive measure in terms of punishing the "dishonest": the kids who had meticulously done their homework in order to bolster their homework portion of the grade now saw such efforts totally nullified. The flow of quizzes only stimulated the cheating; we began to relay answers from the earlier classes to the later ones and inflated grades. Having to take a quiz everyday gave us opportunties to develop our creativity in sharing answers. Head and Warren would perfect the back tap-pencil flip communication system to compare answers. Wally and I would have great practice in learning to memorize our answers to share with others. Didn't Walker realize? The CIA trained Arabs to push back Communism only to see their project beget well-trained terrorists. Walker had tried his best to curb cheating by training us to study for quizzes. Little did he know that his system would beget highly specialized, well-trained cheaters.

3) The National Honors Society committee rejected all of us. By this point, I didn't care. The pool of available NHS candidates was thinned considerably, and eventually, it was cool not to be in NHS.

I ultimately believed that by moving away from our past differences, I would find greater peace with Benson. No, I wasn't trying to play the high-morality game; I felt that rash decisions would only result in unnecessary troubles. I would certainly get payback, but other issues loomed larger.

Chris, the class president, was the sorest of all who had been caught. He blamed me for "involving" him in a process he had never wanted to take part in. He grew anxious that his chances of getting into Harvard would be jeopardized by this incident. He was hardest hit when he failed to make it into NHS. I caught him bad-mouthing me once and that was the end of any semblence of friendship. He ceased to exist.

Weeks passed by, and soon the weather thawed and spring was here. Everyone in my biology class was required to take part in the science fair at school. I formed a group with Welton and Head. We bought a bunch of tadpoles and decided to monitor their growth in different types of water with different foods. The experiment failed miserably as all the tadpoles died. As Welton and I stood in his living room looking at the plastic containers holding all the dead tadpoles, we felt like counselors working at a camp for concentration.

"Let's make a video and fudge the data," I suggested.

"Yeah. Good idea. I'll order some more tadpoles so we can record them looking healthy," Wally said.

I convinced my dad to buy me an expensive camcorder that would help me to earn an "A" on a project. Welton and I had a vision of creating a beautiful documentary that would hide all the tadpole atrocities and impress the judges with soothing classical music, well-written narration, and the guise of a great experiment. Everything materialized; we took great shots of nature in my backyard, released some tadpoles into the stream to create a natural appearance, and had Head make a flashy poster. Welton even allowed his full-grown frog make a cameo to demonstrate our "successful" implentation of proper care. First prize and three $50 gift certificates later, we never had respect for science again; did humans really go to the moon?

Sophomore year came to an end, and we all finished with grades considerably lower than our freshman year. Ironically, the only "A" I received was in US History. Everything else was an "A-" or "B+". Warren suffered greatly in Algebra II, but he showed flashes of mathematic brilliance towards the end of the year, doing well on tests that he took straight up. After taking the last final, Warren, Nigi, and I took a train into New York City and reflected on our year. It was a tough one. Nigi fell the hardest as his poor grades would drop him from all his honors classes the next year. Warren and I talked about escaping with grades above C-level and looked forward to having easier teachers the next year. As we sat in Washington Square taking random pictures with the camera, I felt very comforted that my core of friends remained intact. They had waited for me, not worried about being late to class, but concerned about how I would handle three white men rebuking me. Seeing them negated what otherwise might have been a traumatic memory for me. How could we be defined simply as cheaters? We were friends, a bunch of nice kids; and we had much good works left to do.