Here Comes Trouble (29 page)

Now the greatest pain became the humiliation I was experiencing thanks to the growing crowd and the eyes of everyone in the cafeteria who was standing to get a look at what was happening in the hallway.

“That’ll do,” the sadist said. “Don’t let me see you with your shirt out again.”

And with that he walked away. He had no idea how profoundly he had just changed my life—and his. He had, in that one act of corporal punishment, created his own demise. How many times had this man struck a child in his career? A thousand? Ten thousand? Whatever the number, this would be his last.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how one minute you’re just walking down the hall with your shirttail out, you’re thinking about girls or a ball game or how you’re on your last stick of Beaman’s—and then the next hour you make a decision that will affect all the decisions you make for the rest of your life. So random, so unplanned. In fact, it puts the whole idea of making plans for your life to shame, and you realize you really are wasting your time if you’re trying to come up with a college major, or how many kids to have, or where you want to be in ten years. One day I’m thinking about law school, and the next week I’ve committed all my meager teenage resources and energy to stripping an adult of whatever power he thinks he wields with that big paddle.

I straightened upward, red-faced for all to see in the cafeteria. There were plenty of snickers and guffaws, but mostly there was that look people have when they’ve just seen something they’ve never seen before. I was known as a
good
student. I was known as someone who had never been given the paddle. No one ever expected to watch me being beaten by the assistant principal. I was not the type of student you would see being told to “bend over.” And that was what was so entertaining about this particular beating to the gathering crowd.

It’s not like Assistant Principal for Discipline Dennis Ryan hadn’t been gunning for me in the past, or that I hadn’t done anything to deserve his wrath. I had done plenty. By the time I was halfway through my senior year, I had organized my own miniprotests against just about every edict that Ryan and the principal, Mr. Scofield, had laid down. The latest of these revolts involved convincing nine of the eighteen students in the senior Shakespeare class to walk out and quit the class.

The teacher had just handed back to me my twenty-page paper on
Hamlet
with a giant red “0” on top of it. That was my grade: Nothing. Zip. I stood up.

“You cannot treat me this way,” I said to him politely. “And I am officially dropping out of this class.” I turned to the students.

“Anybody want to join me?”

Half of them did.

The zero grade would lower my GPA to a 3.3 by the end of the year. I couldn’t have cared less.

This was not my first run-in with a teacher. The teacher who ran the student council class also flunked me. I never missed a day of that class. I made more motions and participated in more debates than perhaps anyone else in there. And that’s what bothered the teacher who was the student council advisor.

“How can you flunk me?” I confronted him.

“I’m flunking you because you create too much trouble in here,” he answered smugly. “I like a nice quiet, peaceful student council. You have made this year too difficult for me.”

All of this weighed on my mind on the walk home that day of my public paddling by the assistant principal. How would I exact my revenge? I had to look no further that night than the evening newspaper.

A copy of the local
Flint Journal
lined the box of trash I was cleaning out in our garage. I looked down and between stains of Miracle Whip and Faygo Redpop I noticed a story that reminded me about how the voting age in America had recently been lowered to eighteen.
Hmmm,
I thought,
I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks.

I went back inside the house and, an hour later, I picked up the town weekly, the
Davison Index.
There, on the front page, taunting me, daring me, my future calling me:
Hello, Mike. Read this!
The headline?

S
CHOOL
B
OARD
E
LECTION
J
UNE
12, T
WO
S
EATS
O
PEN.

Huh. I’ll be able to vote for school board in a few months. Cool.

Wait.

Wait a minute!
If I can vote…
can I run?
Can I run for a seat on the Board of Education? Would this not make me one of the
bosses
of the principal and vice principal? Yes? Yes? Whoa.

The next day, I called the county clerk’s office, the people in charge of elections.

“Um, yeah,” I stammered into the phone, not quite believing I was making this call. “Um, I was wondering that, now that eighteen-year-olds can vote, can we also run for office?”

“No. Not all offices. Which office would you like to run for?”

“School board.”

“Hang on, lemme check.” Within a minute he was back on the phone.

“Yes. The required age for school board candidates is eighteen.”

WOW! I couldn’t believe it. But then panic set in. How could I afford such a thing? They must charge you a lot of money to put your name on the ballot.

“How much does it cost to get on the ballot?” I asked the man.

“Cost? Nothing. It’s free.”

Free?
This just kept getting better. Until he added the following:

“Of course you do have to get the required number of signatures on a petition in order to have your name placed on the ballot.”

Damn. I knew there was a catch. There were twenty thousand residents in the Davison School District, comprising the town of Davison and the townships of Davison and Richfield. Going all over the school district to collect God knows how many signatures was going to be next to impossible. I mean, I still had lots of algebra homework to do.

“How many names do I need on these petitions?” I asked with resignation.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty??”

“Twenty.”

“Did you say
twenty?
”

“Yes. Twenty. You need twenty signatures on a petition that you can pick up at the board of education offices.”

I could not believe that I only needed twenty names on a petition—and then, suddenly, I would be an official candidate! I mean, twenty names was nothing! I knew at least twenty stoners who would sign anything I put in front of them.

I thanked the man, and the next day I went to the superintendent’s office to pick up the petition. The secretary asked if I was picking up the petition for one of my parents.

“No,” I replied. And instead of adding “Would you like to see the welts on my butt or would you rather I call Child Protective Services?” I simply said, “It’s for me.”

She picked up the phone and made a call.

“Yes, I have a young man here who says he wants to run for school board. What is the age requirement these days? Uh-huh. I see. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone and bit her lip.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen,” I replied.

“Oh, well, then, you can’t run. You have to be eighteen.”

“But I’ll be eighteen by the day of the election,” I blurted out.

“One minute,” she said, picking up the phone again.

“Can a seventeen-year-old run if he will be eighteen on election day? Uh-huh. I see. Yes. Thank you.”

“Apparently you may run,” she said, as she reached into the file cabinet and pulled out the petition. “Make sure that
every
signature is that of a
registered
voter who lives
within the boundaries
of the school district. If you don’t have
twenty
valid names, you will
not
be placed on the ballot.”

I had the names within the hour. When the twenty signers asked me why I was running, I just said, “To fire the principal and assistant principal.” That was my entire platform on Day One, and it seemed to play well, at least to twenty citizens.

“What about college?” my mother asked, perplexed when I told her I had decided to run for school board. “How can you serve on the school board and go to the University of Detroit?”

“I guess if I win, I’ll go to U of M in Flint.” She liked the sound of that. If I won, I would not be leaving home. My parents were not the type to kick you out at eighteen (though that is when my sisters would leave). They did not like to see us go.

I returned the next day to the school board office and turned in my petition. Word soon spread through town that “a hippie” had qualified to be on the June ballot. I set a goal of knocking on every door in the school district. I handed voters a flyer that I had written up outlining my feelings about education and about the Davison schools specifically. I told people the administrators in the high school had to go. I’m guessing this frightened most parents.

But there were some in town who were delighted with the idea of a young person on the school board. OK, they were all under twenty-five.

And then there was the majority, the ones who noticed I had long hair. The week I began to campaign, the racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, won the Michigan Democratic Presidential primary. Not a good sign for me and my chances. (This was also my very first time voting. I cast my first vote ever as a citizen for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for president.)

The Chamber of Commerce types in town were appalled at the thought of me, a kid, winning, as were many of the Protestant pastors, the local rednecks, and the pro-war crowd (which was made up of all of the above).

The problem was, the town pooh-bahs had a really bad strategy to stop me. Six of them went down to the school board office and took out their own petitions to run against me. Six of them against me. Clearly they missed a few days of civics class when they were young. You don’t win by running the most candidates – you’ll split the vote and your opponent will win with a plurality. It was to my good fortune that they did not know the word
plurality
and I did. I taunted them and challenged more Republicans to go get their own petitions to see if they could beat me!

And that was when I got a taste of my own medicine. In addition to the six older, conservative adults who would oppose me, an eighteen-year-old decided to also run against me—and thus split the already very small youth/liberal vote I was going to get. The other eighteen-year-old candidate was none other than the vice president of the student council, Sharon Johnson—the girl who was one of my only two dates in high school.

“Why are you running?” I asked her, a bit peeved that she was stealing my thunder.

“I don’t know, I thought it would be neat. We could both be on the school board!” (Two seats were open on the board, and her idea was that we could both win and serve together.)

Why was she still tormenting me? First student council, then the bra, then the steamed-up windows, and now she’s going to split the youth vote and sink any slight chance I might have had to get elected.

A week before the election, I received my first anonymous hate mail. It was addressed to the two eighteen-year-olds running. It read:

Sharon Johnson
Michael F. Moore

What lame-brained fool ever talked you two brats into running for the school Board?

Moore, you talk about your vast knowledge about all affairs. Where and when did you acquire this? Why you haven’t even got brains enough to get a haircut.

You are asking the citizens of Davison to vote you into the school board, actually insulting their intelligence by so doing.

My advice to you both is this? Have your good Mother take your diapers off; get a job or go to school, acquire some of this wisdom only acquired through experience and hard knocks and then come around and run for offices. Why you haven’t even started to live as yet.

Sharon—at least you are a beautiful young lady and you deserve a better fate than to be elected to a school board which is really a thankless job.

One who knows what he is talking about.

Yes, Sharon, you are a beautiful young lady, unlike that long-haired lug. As hate mail goes, this was one of the nicer ones I would ever receive.

On the morning of election day I got up, ate my Cocoa Krispies, and went to school. There were still five days left before graduation, and I had finals to take. The yearbooks were handed out and they contained the results of another election: the senior class had voted me “Class Comic.”

When school recessed at 1:30 p.m., I went and voted for me. I had focused my entire campaign on getting every eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old out to vote. There were nearly two hundred eligible voters just in my senior class. I had spent less than a hundred dollars on the campaign. We had spray-painted yard signs with stencils in my parents’ basement. There were no ads, only the one-page flyer I handed out going door to door.

There was a big turnout at the polls, and when they closed at 8:00 p.m., the counting of the paper ballots began. Less than two hours later, the results were announced.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the district’s assistant superintendent announced, “we have the results. In first place… Michael Moore.”

I was shocked. The group of hippie students who had gathered to watch the votes being counted went crazy with delight. A reporter from a local station asked me how I felt about beating seven “adults.”