Spanking Shakespeare (6 page)

This does not bode well. It particularly does not bode well considering the final stanza of the poem I have just given her.

“This is really hard,” she says.

Can we not do this in public, please?

“I really like you, Shakespeare.”

No, you don’t, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“I think we should just be friends.”

Fine. Can I have my poem back?

“Are you okay?” she asks.

No. “I’m fine.”

“We can still be friends, right?” she asks.

No. “Of course.”

“I would still really love to read the poem.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. I take the poem and walk out of the room.

I’m late to math, and the only open seat is in the front row. Ms. Rigby gives me an annoyed look as I sit down. Normally, this would make me very uncomfortable. Today, I don’t care. It is impossible to pay attention, and without realizing what I am doing I pull out the poem and begin to read it.

“What have you got there?” Ms. Rigby says, standing over my desk. “Give it to me.”

My stomach lurches, and I feel history repeating itself. What is it about math class?

“I’ll put it away,” I say.

Ms. Rigby holds out her hand. “I said give it to me.”

I do not have the stomach to get into a power struggle with a woman who has been intimidating her students for over twenty years. I hand her the paper. What the hell, I think. It’s hard to imagine my day could get any worse.

She glances at it, then lays it on her desk and resumes teaching, her expression unchanged. After class, she tells me I am free to write whatever I want on my own time, but if I bring my smut into her room again she will contact my parents.

“That’s all,” she says when I do not leave right away.

“Can I have the poem back?” I ask.

She gives me a hard look. “I don’t think so,” she says, folding it up and putting it in her bag. “Have a nice vacation.”

THE TIME I GOT CAUGHT WITH A PORNOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE IN MATH CLASS

I have never really understood the social dynamics of the classroom, but it seems to operate along the same lines as a dog run. You have all the regular dogs who come to the dog run each day, and then, every once in a while, a new dog arrives on the scene. When this happens, all the regular dogs stop whatever they’re doing and rush to sniff the new dog’s butt.

So it was when Will Baker arrived on the first day of seventh grade. He was one of those small-limbed, sandy-haired, freckle-faced boys, who looks just innocent enough to make you nervous. All through the day, groups of girls would surround him with a million questions, then hurry off, giggling and whispering.

I didn’t actually hear what the girls were asking, but I felt pretty sure that they were trying to determine his answers to such thought-provoking questions as whether he had a girlfriend, whether he wanted a girlfriend, and who in the class he thought was cute. It was more than a little disconcerting, then, when Lisa Kravitz and Stacey McCaber turned around and stared at me, then rushed away, giggling like a pair of demented hyenas.

Will shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t have any idea what the girls were carrying on about, but I could barely concentrate for the rest of the day.

I caught up with him after school and introduced myself.

“That’s your real name?” he asked in disbelief.

“My parents are crazy,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s cool.”

“What were those girls giggling about in class?” I was most interested in finding out about Lisa Kravitz, a childhood friend I was secretly in love with.

He shrugged. Then, in a conspiratorial whisper: “Hey, you want to see something?”

“What?”

He unzipped his book bag and pulled out a magazine.

My eyes popped as I looked at the cover. “Jesus, where did you get that?”

He stuffed it back in his bag. “I got a lot of them.”

I looked around and lowered my voice. “Let me see that again.”

Will smiled. “You want it? I’ll sell it to you.”

“How much?”

He looked me up and down. “I’ll give you a good deal. Ten dollars.”

“Ten dollars? That’s too much.”

“You don’t want it? Fine with me.”

All night I thought about that picture on the cover of the magazine. Even though I had paintings of naked women in my room, they were nothing like what Will had shown me. It occurred to me that if I bought the magazine, my parents would probably find it, and I would have to escape to a cave in Tibet to live out my days in utter humiliation. It’s not that I would get in trouble. My parents didn’t really believe in punishment. No, what would happen would be far worse: They would want to talk about it.

“Where did you get this magazine?” they would ask. “Do you enjoy looking at these pictures? It’s normal, you know, for boys your age to think about these things. Do you have any questions you want to ask us?”

I bought the magazine the next day.

It turned out that Will had lots of magazines, and he soon established a profitable little business.

We quickly became friends out of mutual need. I needed someone who raised my cool quotient and improved my chances of impressing Lisa, and he needed someone who would follow him around like a lost puppy and do whatever he said.

“Where do you get all these?” I once asked him.

“Steal ’em,” he said.

“What? How? Where?”

“Stores, magazine stands. It’s no big deal.”

“Oh my God, I’m friends with a criminal.”

He gave me a dirty look. “You better not say anything.”

My voice took on an increased sense of urgency. “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught? They put kids in jail these days.”

“Chill out. I’m not gonna get caught.”

I realized that if Will ever got caught while I was with him, I would probably be named as an accomplice. Everyone in town would read about it in the paper, and for the rest of my life, wherever I moved I would have to register with the police as a convicted sex offender.

Meanwhile, I had plenty of other things to worry about, first and foremost making sure no one discovered the magazine I had bought. I had agonized for days over the best place to hide it. The problem was that no matter where I put it, I was able to come up with a perfectly plausible scenario in which someone would find it. I had stuck it between the box spring and the mattress of my bed the first night, but then I thought, What if my brother and his friends start jumping up and down on all the beds in the house and mine collapses? Then they try to put it back together, and…hello, what’s this? So I buried the magazine in my closet, then hid it behind a picture, then put it inside an old notebook on my shelf. But no matter where I put it I knew deep down that the only sensible course of action was to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Of course, this was totally out of the question. The women in the magazine had become more familiar to me than my own family. There was Marina, who had short blond hair and enjoyed going to the movie sand riding motorcycles. Then there was Angela, who liked to travel and go skinny-dipping in the ocean. Will had offered to sell me other magazines at a discount because we were friends, but I felt a fierce loyalty to the women I had come to know. Didn’t Patricia, on page eighty-seven, say that loyalty was one of the qualities she most looked for in a man?

One woman who could legitimately compete for my affections was Ms. Mitchell, who looked more like an Amazon warrior than a seventh-grade math teacher. She was young and tall and blond and strong and, miracle of miracles, not yet married. But more than anything, what made her so incredibly desirable was the fact that she liked me. I knew this because she always smiled at me and asked me to solve the hardest problems on the board, and because sometimes she would put her hand on my shoulder while she was walking around the room.

I had always been a good math student without really trying, but with Ms. Mitchell I applied myself as I never had before. In class I would find myself staring at her in rapt attention and wondering how it was that I never before had seen the beauty of a mathematical equation.

It was inconceivable, then, that I would jeopardize my relationship with Ms. Mitchell by bringing my pornographic magazine to her class, and not just bringing it in, but actually taking it out while she was teaching. Unfortunately, sometimes things happen in life that are simply beyond your control.

The night before the fateful incident, my mother announced that she had hired a cleaning service to come in the next day. The house was a mess, she said, and it needed professional attention. I couldn’t risk having the cleaners find my magazine, so I stuffed it in my book bag to bring to school. Then Will pulled me aside at school and said there was a rumor that the principal was going to inspect the lockers.

“I have my magazine. Where am I supposed to put it?” I whispered.

“Just keep it in your book bag. I’ve got, like, ten in mine.”

Every time I had to open my bag to take something out or put something away, there was the magazine staring me in the face. By the time I got to math class, I was a nervous wreck. In math the desks were pushed together for cooperative learning, and when I opened my bag to get my book, Rocco Mackey somehow saw inside.

“Dude, is that a porno?” he whispered. Rocco Mackey was repeating seventh grade and had the IQ of a doorknob.

“Shhh. We’re in class.”

“Let me see it.”

I had to do something fast, or Rocco might begin to salivate. “Just be quiet. I’ll show you after school.”

He nodded. “Where?”

I tried to ignore him, but he tugged on my shirt.

“Outside the school, now shut up.”

Ms. Mitchell looked ravishing that day, but I was such a basket case all I could do was pray for the end of class to come quickly. We were supposed to be working with our partners on a set of problems, which usually meant me doing them, Rocco drawing obscene pictures in his notebook, and then Rocco copying what I had written.

“Dude, she’s not looking,” Rocco whispered. “Let me see the magazine.”

“Not now, we’re supposed to be working.” I could feel the sweat pooling under my armpits.

Ms. Mitchell moved around the room. “Do I have a volunteer to put number one on the board?” She looked at me expectantly, and I felt myself blush.

“How about it, Shakespeare?”

Normally, I would have been delighted to do anything Ms. Mitchell asked of me, but I was terrified of leaving my bag unguarded for even a second.

“I don’t think I got that one right,” I muttered.

She looked at my paper. “That’s right,” she said. “Go ahead and put it up. Who wants to put up number two?”

I gave Rocco my most threatening look, walked to the front of the room, copied the problem as quickly as possible, and hurried back to my seat. My book bag was unzipped, and the magazine was gone.

I looked over at Rocco. He was slouched in his chair, staring at his lap with his eyes popped out and his tongue making circles around his lips, looking for all the world like a starving boy with a big juicy steak in front of him.

There was no question that something disastrous was going to happen. Any moment now, Ms. Mitchell would turn away from the board, see Rocco drooling on himself, and discover the magazine. It occurred to me that if I got expelled from school, at least I wouldn’t have to do the science project that was due next week.

“Give it back,” I whispered through gritted teeth.

“Shhh, don’t draw attention to me.”

In desperation, I grabbed for the magazine, Rocco grabbed my wrist, both our hands banged into the desk, and everyone in the class turned to stare at us.

Ms. Mitchell was there in two Amazonian strides. “Give me the magazine,” she said. When she saw what it was, she blushed deeply and seemed at a total loss for what to do.

“It’s not mine,” Rocco said. “You can ask him.”

Ms. Mitchell looked ready to explode. “Both of you need to come with me to the principal’s office right now!” She turned to the class. “Start on your homework. And if I hear a sound from this room, you’ll all have detention tomorrow.”

We didn’t get expelled. The principal listened to Ms. Mitchell, then asked us a bunch of questions, then gave us a long lecture, then called our parents to come pick us up. I told the principal exactly what had happened, the only lie being that I had found the magazine on the way to school that day.

We waited outside the office for our parents to show up, and Rocco started to cry. “I’m so dead,” he said. “My dad said if he caught me reading pornos again, he’d send me to military school.”

My father arrived first, and he looked more concerned than angry. He spoke to the principal for a few minutes, then told me we were going home.

“Are you okay?” he asked after we were in the car.

“I guess so.”

“That must have been really embarrassing in class.”

“I’m never setting foot in that school again.”

My father laughed. “Your principal showed me the magazine. I can see why math must seem pretty boring in comparison.”

I didn’t really want to talk about porno magazines with my father, because anything he said was bound to be disturbing.

“You know, I used to read magazines like that,” he said. “But then I met your mother and she—”

“Okay, Dad, I don’t need to hear that. Does Mom know what happened?”

“Your principal called her first, then Mom called me and told me I had to go to school because she was too embarrassed.”

My mother is one of those people who lives and dies by what people might think. It wouldn’t have been a big deal to her to find out that I was reading pornographic magazines, as long as nobody else knew. For her, the great tragedy was that I had been caught, and now people she knew would talk about what had happened.

“Why couldn’t you just look at your magazine inside the house?” she asked over and over at dinner that night.

“I can’t believe you never showed it tome,” my brother said.

Will called me later that night to find out what had happened. “You didn’t tell anyone where you got the magazine, did you?”

I assured him I had not.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll give you another one for free tomorrow.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to convince my parents to transfer me to another school.”

My parents made me go back to school the next day. Word had gotten around about what had happened, and for one day I actually experienced what it was like to be popular. I gave Ms. Mitchell an apology note at the beginning of math class, and she told me that writing the note was a very mature thing to do and that she was glad to have me back.

On my way out of school, I saw Will Baker and Lisa Kravitz kissing in the stairwell.