Train Tracks (14 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Happy and Sad Cuff Links

N
o question, if I was a kid in school today—let's say, in the sixth grade—they'd put me on every mind-controlling drug imaginable. The mean-faced, clipped-haired women would say, “That little Savage, he has shining eyes and he talks too much. Put him on Ritalin. Put him on Prozac. Put him in a straitjacket. He shows all the classic signs of maleness. We must kill it. Kill it! Crush it!”

I believe most mothers don't even know what their poor boys go through in school. When I was a young boy, my mother bought me a pair of cuff links. They were a set of the thespian masks—you know, one was a sad face and one was a happy face. I loved those cuff links. I'd look at them when I was bored in class. On my right cuff I had the happy face; on the left sleeve I had the sad face. Some days I'd switch them around and put the happy face on the left sleeve and the sad face on the right sleeve.

Many days I was so bored I didn't know what to do. I'd look at these cuff links for hours in the classroom while the teacher was going on and on about George Washington and the Delaware River. I was so bored, I spaced out. I learned that George crossed the Delaware, he saved the country in Trenton, he overthrew the British—I got that the first week of kindergarten! They're still teaching it to me in the fourth grade. In the fifth grade, I learned what a peninsula is. In the sixth grade, it took them a year to teach me what an island is. I couldn't take it!

So, I stared at the cuff links: the happy face, the sad face.

When I got bored with the cuff links, I'd start pulling hair out of the skin on my arms. Today, they would have put me on Ritalin or put me in a nuthouse. They'd call my lack of attention a disease. It wasn't. It was called boredom! I'd inflict pain on myself rather than listen to the teacher bore me one more second.

Rather than improve the curriculum or place bright kids in special classes, teachers today might say, “Oh, your son has something wrong with him, Mrs. Savage. We found out that he looks at cuff links instead of listening to the teacher talk about how evil America is and why white males need to be put in the pillory. He's pulling hair out of his arm, and we suggest you put him on a moderate dose—just a moderate dose—of Ritalin on the first day.” That's for starters. Soon, the teacher might say, “Let's put him on Prozac.”

Now, I'd be the first to admit that teaching is a tough profession: Keeping the lesson engaging day after day takes everything out of you. As long as I live, I'll never forget the day I first walked into a classroom to teach. Maybe I'll write a book about it one day. You know, something for the students. I could call it
The Savage Guide to Surviving Teaching.

Anyway, back then I didn't look much older than the students. I had graduated high school at sixteen, which means I in turn graduated college very young. Frankly, I decided to grow a goatee to look older than the junior high school kids in my class. I remember when I raised my foot to walk over the curb the first day, to step into that junior high school, and my foot froze up—I actually stopped midstride. The students were racing past me to get to class and I was standing there as stiff as a statue!

I had no idea I had a fear of teaching, but I did. If you think teaching is an easy job, try it someday. It is probably one of the toughest jobs on earth if you do it right. So, when I'm critical about the teaching profession and the teachers union, don't get me wrong, I fully recognize it's a tough drill. At the same time, there's no excuse for boring students to death. If an uneducated man like Woodchuck Bill could teach me about life, then surely I should be able to do the same with my college degree—at least that was my view as a beginning teacher.

TWENTY-TWO

Woodchuck Bill

A
s a kid I loved the summer—what kid didn't?—because in those days if you came from a modest-income home, you didn't go to a camp to advance your mathematical knowledge, another to advance your sports knowledge, another to lose your tubby waist. You went and had fun for the whole summer. Without the ball and chain of school holding us back, we were liberated. We'd come alive. Those were such wonderful days: those eight hot weeks when the sun didn't set until nine
P.M
. At the first change of the seasons, somewhere around mid-August, I remember feeling the impending return of slavery. The first hint of fall was announced by the thunderstorms, and I'd feel the shackles of school coming back. I knew I would soon be returning to my horrible, mean school, in corduroy pants, armed only with a meatloaf sandwich. I'd have to face the teachers and chalk dust and bullies in the bathroom. It was awful.

When September rolled around, I was doomed.

Let's not make any mistake about it: Personally, I hated school. I detested the testing. What do you think?—that because I went all the way through the system and got two masters and a PhD that I somehow loved it? I never did! Learning is supposed to be a discipline, not “fun.”

We were kind of poor, so what we did during summer was, to get out of the hot inner city, the family rented a small cottage with all the other families from the neighborhood and relatives up in the cool Catskill Mountains. We stayed in what were known as bungalow colonies because you basically got one room—kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, all in one room—and your whole family was in there. Then the whole “colony” was filled with your friends and their parents, so it became a little village. Naturally, it was paradise because every other parent was your parent and you reverted back to another time in history: We'd play Indians out in the woods and carve trees and make canoes out of birch bark.

In one of these bungalow colonies, there was a guy who was a caretaker who lived in an old abandoned barn with his wife. That was Woodchuck Bill, to us kids—it was a Tom Sawyer experience. We loved Woodchuck Bill. Bill was unlike any teacher I ever had at school. Man, could he tell stories!

Now remember, he was not a bum. See, today they're a bum; they're homeless. He was what was known as a “hobo” in those days, and there were people who were hobos, who were sort of respectable in their own way. That was his job category: He'd put it on the IRS, like the “what do you do” job category. “Hobo.” I don't know what he made—next to nothing. Probably just the barn in exchange for his work.

Woodchuck Bill would regale us kids with his stories. He was a big guy with a big stomach on him. I remember him saying, “All right, kids, come over here.” Today he'd probably get arrested just for even telling us a story. “All right, I want all of you to punch me in the stomach.” Now, right away that's child abuse today. So, we'd all go up with our skinny little arms—we were nine, eight, seven—and we'd punch him in the stomach, and nothing would happen. So, naturally, we thought he was Superman. He must have been pretty strong, when you think about it.

Anyway, so we all hit him one after the other. We realized we were nothing compared to Woodchuck Bill. Then we'd sit at his feet and he'd tell us stories. He'd say, “Well, I've seen hurricanes and I've seen tornadoes.” We sat spellbound, like out of a book from the nineteenth century. What I liked most about Woodchuck Bill was that he lived in this barn with his lady friend with almost no possessions. They had a few pots and pans, which hung from hooks. We'd say, “What do you eat?” And he'd say, “We eat woodchucks.” Who knows if he was telling the truth—I don't know if you can eat a woodchuck.

Hanging around Woodchuck Bill is the perfect example of the education I got outside of school that was just as important to me, if not more so, than what I'd get in a stuffy classroom. As “odd” as Bill was, he had such insight into living and enjoying life and being an independent thinker. He possessed a pioneer spirit that made us think we could tackle the world with our bare hands. Woodchuck Bill is long gone now. I only wish kids today could experience the education I got from a man with his kind of streak of independence! Unfortunately, students are rarely introduced to men and women of courage, honor, inspiration, or other traditional principles. Instead, thanks to the Left-leaning teachers' associations, the schoolhouse has become a hothouse of radical ideology. Instead of stimulating students' minds, they're taught to stimulate other parts of their bodies, from kindergarten to graduation.

TWENTY-THREE

Fat Pat & Tippy the Dog

W
hen I was a boy, my parents moved us from our Bronx apartment to live in a small row house in Queens, New York. At that time, we got a dog named Tippy. Tippy the dog was a ferocious part-Chow who, when I was eleven, ripped my foot open. I'm not talking a scratch here—he treated my foot like a lamb shank! I actually had to be hospitalized and get stitched up! I still loved Tippy the dog, even though the doctor told us to take him to the pound to be gassed.

Tippy was a male, which might explain his crazy temperament. The truth is I happen to prefer owning a male dog. Why? I don't know how to do this in a delicate manner—you know, every once in a while a female dog has a thing happen to her and it's a mess. And, no, I don't believe in having your dog “fixed.” I didn't buy a pet just to spend all my time and money at a vet!

Now, aside from taking a bite out of me, the worst thing that Tippy ever did when he was little was to mess the house. Dog owners know that's what happens until they're trained—you get used to that. However, when a dog grows up and knows how to do its business outside, another problem surfaces. Once or twice a year, Tippy would go into heat. I remember how he'd jump on my father's friends' legs. Whoever came into our house, Tippy would try to mate.

This was a real problem because people were always coming to our house. They all knew my mom loved to cook, so day and night they'd drop in on us. True, it was a different day and age: People could just stop by for conversation. It wasn't like today, where you make an appointment a month in advance.

For us, just about every night someone would knock on the door. My mother would serve cake and coffee and they'd sit in the living room and talk for hours.

But when Tippy the dog was in heat, watch out.

One guy in particular drove Tippy insane. I don't know why Tippy focused on Fat Pat, but he did. Fat Pat must be dead thirty years now. This guy was like a character out of
The Sopranos.
You know, he had a size 25 neck. Rumor had it he was a bookie—Fat Pat always seemed to have something shady going on the side, if you know what I mean.

Still, we kids loved him. He was just a lovable, giant sort of guy, always laughing, always good for a joke. Don't ask me why, but Tippy especially loved him, too. When Tippy went into heat, if Fat Pat was sitting in the living room, the dog would jump on Fat Pat's leg and grab it with his huge paws. The two of them would go crazy in the living room! Tippy would start rockin' and rollin' on Pat's leg; Pat would laugh and laugh, rolling his head back on the soft couch.

Picture a fat guy rolling back, laughing as the dog's humping his foot: The women are screaming. I'm busting up. My mother gets a broom and starts hitting the dog. She chases Tippy with that broom like a samurai warrior. She'd yell, “Get out of here! What are you, an animal?” We'd lock Tippy up in the basement. He'd be barking and making noises like he was King Kong down there. Everyone else would go back to the coffee and cake.

There's a lesson here: Unlike humans, my dog went into heat twice a year or whatever. But human males, especially those in college, think they're in heat every night. They've been brainwashed since kindergarten into thinking they're supposed to be in heat 24/7, and then they wonder why they're impotent half the time!

But, going back to Fat Pat. He worked in a seedy hotel as a “night clerk” but he was really a pimp. Now, you immediately think he's a bad guy, right? Listen to this before you jump to conclusions. He and his wife could not have children. One day Pat brought home a little girl from his “hotel.” A little girl who was the product of one night's lust with one of the girls from the hotel. He and his wife raised that little girl as though she was their own! But wait, it gets better.

Years later Fat Pat brought home another child, this time an infant boy, from Hotel Lust. His wife's sister raised that child as if he was her own! Years later, after Pat died, that adopted girl took care of her “mother” right up until her last day. Do you think today's soul-deprived world would see a pimp bringing home a love-child to raise until the end of his days? Whether the two children were from anonymous “johns” or were, in fact, Pat's with one of the working girls, remains an unknown fact to this day.

TWENTY-FOUR

Tippy the Dog Would Let People In, Not Out: How Our Immigration Policy Should Be

N
ow, about Tippy the half-Chow dog: He would always let people in our little house in Queens, but he would never let them out. You could come in, he wouldn't bark at all. He smiled, his half-purple tongue hung out, but if you tried to leave, he'd attack you. He went crazy! You had to constrain him with an iron chain and then put him in the basement. You'd hear brooms and mops falling down the basement steps. He was like a nutcase dog. So, I had a dog that let people in the house but would never let them out.

I think that's what we should do with the immigrants in America. “No Middle Eastern immigrants can leave America without a thorough examination by the FBI.” You come in, and we don't say a word. You're not getting out, though. That's all. You want to leave? Go to the FBI—we'll let you out in a few years. You can't go out! What are you leaving for all of a sudden? What, the SSI didn't go down? There's religious tolerance here—What are you leaving for, sir? Ah, you're going back to Pakistan to visit your mother? Tell you what: We're going to investigate you until the year 2020. We want to ask you a few questions . . .