Freshman Year – Glastonbury High School
In August of 2003, I had finally arrived at Glastonbury High School; the beginning of the end of my lengthy career in public school. GHS is your average high school; chock full of puberty, insecurity, depravity, and most importantly, assholes (literally, and figuratively). The school itself houses more than 2,000 students, a gym, a pool, an elevator for the handicapped kids, and a vending machine that never works. On the whole, GHS is your average New England High School.
I had always thought (and still kinda do) that ‘maturity’ was just a term older people made up to make themselves seem superior to younger people in their own minds. Now, while this still rings true when the elders throw around the insult “You’re acting Immature!” – Like when you ride a go-kart around the neighborhood in your underwear, or when you fall asleep during a funeral - the term ‘maturity’ takes upon a new meaning when you actually do mature. The word “Immaturity” has been linked to the words “stupid” and “reckless”, but those assertions are false, at least in my mind. “Maturity”, to me, means “responsibility”, and not in the sense of wearing a seatbelt when you drive 90mph down the highway (naked), but in the sense of responsibility for your legacy. The question, “When I die, what do I want people to remember about me?” comes to mind. 9th Grade was the year I started to mature.
Anyway, halfway through the year, something happened so inane and trivial that it could only change the course of Alex Traynor’s life forever:
Somebody took a dump in the urinal.
On Tuesday, March 3rd, 2004 (I’m probably making that up), my life changed forever. Throughout the day, I started over-hearing strange whispers about something in the urinal. So, I inevitably went there to check it out, and there it was: dookie, in the urinal. Instantly, thousands of questions sprung to my mind, among them:
1. Who did it?
2. Why?
3. Did a confused girl wander into the boy’s bathroom?
4. Why was it smeared against the back of the urinal?
5. Does that mean that somebody had to poop in their hand first and then transfer it to the urinal?
6. What did the perpetrator have to gain by this action?
7. Seriously, who would do this?
8. Are the Russians behind this somehow?
9. Why do I care so much?
10. Will I ever forget this?
The only one of those questions I’ve been able to get an answer to is #10. And the answer is a resounding no. I will be telling my grandchildren this story. Chances are, I’ll be telling this story on my deathbed, whether or not anyone wants to hear it.
It was just something about the sudden sighting of human feces in the wrong receptacle that shocked my fragile 9th Grade mind to the core so much that I could never possibly forget it. It opened my mind to new ways of thinking, and instilled a sense of abstract appreciation that exists to this day.
I stood staring at the shit for about a minute until someone else walked into the bathroom. Not wanting to look like some weird, feces-obsessed perv, I ran back to my table as fast as I could, and sat in remote silence, pondering my legacy, through mostly existential questions:
- Will anyone remember anything I do?
- Could I potentially be happy without any influence?
- Do I even care what I’m remembered for as long as I’m remembered?
- If I fell down in a forest, would anybody hear me?
- I told people I wanted to die with a “rocket up my ass,” because it would, quote: “get me in the papers.”
- I told people that on the last class of the last day of high school, I would pull down my pants, poop, get up, leave, and never come back.
- I once jumped over the Grand Canyon on a Razor™ Scooter.
- I lied about the last bullet-point.
- Occasionally, I drive on the wrong side of the road and talk in an English accent to freak people out.
- I speak mostly in sentence fragments.
- Like this.
- I once jokingly said, “9/11 was the most hilarious thing to happen since the holocaust!”
- I took this photo.
Sophomore Year – “Hell”
Everybody has a year when all of the lessons they’ve learned in previous years go completely and utterly ignored. Sophomore year was that year for me. The year where I, in many ways, regressed intellectually and as a person.
Now, while the vast majority of my grade school career was spent suckling off the taxpayers’ teat in public school, there was one notable exception: In 10th Grade I spent one month at boarding School. Now why was I in boarding school, you ask? For four main reasons:
1. Just like in 8th grade, I hardly ever attended school. So they told me to leave.
2. When I did actually go to school, all I did was sleep and pretend to have better things to do.
3. I was incredibly reclusive during this point in time, and my parents wanted to get me out of the house.
4. I was too sexy that most teachers claimed I was a distraction to all the girls in the class(not true, but for the sake of my ego, let’s just pretend it is)
And with that brief explanation, begins Alex Traynor’s one month adventure in: Boarding School!
Now, while I still remember the name of the boarding school, for the purposes of this article, we’re just going to refer to it as, “Hell.”
My miserable time in Hell is best divided into three main chapters:
1. Social Alienation:
Social acceptance is really a crapshoot wherever you go. There’s no telling if you’re going to be surrounded by friends, or by people who hate your guts. And in Hell, most of the people hated my guts:
David Safdie – Me and David started out as buddies, but our relationship quickly deteriorated when I realized he was an Orthodox Jew. Now I was fine with David being Jewish, but seeing that I learned all of my racial tact from ‘South Park’, it really didn’t come off that way. Apparently, he didn’t see the humor in my awesome Hitler impression.
Josh Levin – To this day, I can count Josh Levin as easily, the most incompetent person I have ever met. Now, I can go on and on for days about just how frighteningly incompetent Josh is, I’ll leave it at the example that rings foremost in my mind:
Josh liked to sleep in the nude. And I slept in the bunk above him. One morning, I woke up as usual and jumped off my top bunk, only to land on a very naked Josh Levin who had apparently rolled off the bed the night before. So, I hit his body at full force and fall flat on my face, while he’s screaming bloody murder. Then he gets up, still completely naked, and starts yelling at me, accusing me of jumping on his naked body on purpose. Now, while I was on the floor, ignoring the yelling, and writhing in pain from the impact, Josh decides to kick me in the ribs to get my attention. Once I regained the ability to speak, I was able to shout out, “Put on pants!” The following response from a very naked Josh will forever be embedded in my brain, “What are you talking about?! Pants have nothing to do with this! This is about you jumping on top of me; don’t try to change the subject you little shit!” Eventually, my other roommates woke up and were finally able to break it to Josh that he was naked, and yelling and kicking me for no apparent reason. A week later, this was Josh’s apology: “Sorry for peeing in your hamper last week, I was really mad after you jumped on me...” Prior to that apology, I had no idea he peed in my hamper.
Andrew Something – Self-described as “Avril Lavigne’s Biggest Fan”, need I say more?
Mike Kaplan – Quite possibly one of the most disgusting people I have ever met. Mike Kaplan is what you get when “the-kid-on-the-playground-who-will-eat-anything-for-a-dollar” grows up.
Richard Cooch – I didn’t actually speak to Richard Rodney Cooch much, but I remember him not liking me after I discovered that the shortened version of his name was “Dick Rod Cooch”
2. My first and last foray into giving a shit about politics:
I’ve never actually been an overly political person (well, despite running for president), but this was especially true in my earlier years (where I had actually thought Dick Cheney was the announcer on The Price Is Right until 2002.) In Hell, my longheld policy of political inaction changed rather suddenly with the announcement of Two Words: Free Pizza.
Pizza is my favorite food, as it has always been. Not even my genetic urge to consume more and more potatoes and Lucky Charms could help me overcome my infatuation with pizza. Pizza is the greatest food on earth. Some say that it was invented by the Italians. I say that is false. Pizza is so perfect that I could only have been invented by Scarlett Johansson’s left nipple. I enjoy all types of pizza, with many different toppings, and in all of its different forms (regular, bagel, Hot Pocket, and calzone.) My love for pizza knows no bounds, as this paragraph has been proof.
I supported John Kerry in the 2004 election. Not because of his position on the Iraq war, not because he opposed privatizing Social Security, and not because he supported increasing the minimum wage. I supported John Kerry because his campaign gave out a lot of free pizza. And most of the time, it was really good.
On my third day in Hell, an advisor urged me to join a few extracurricular activities, and looking through the list, only one caught my eye:
Ultimate Frisbee Club Enjoy some fun with a Frisbee!
Chess Club The game of champions!
Bird Watching Club Come look at Birds!
The Young Democrats Club FREE PIZZA!
So, obviously, I showed up at the first Young Democrats meeting of the year.
There were three people there: myself, the aforementioned Mike Kaplan, and some fat chick. We all ate the pizza in relative silence, assuming that the Young Democrats would disband after the pizza was gone, until the optimistic teacher who set up the meeting told us that we were all invited to a John Kerry rally the following day. When asked, “Will there be pizza?” the teacher responded, “Of course, there’s always pizza.” I was sold.
At the next meeting I was elected president of The Young Democrats (basically because no-one else gave a shit), and I worked out a plan that had the three of us going to a different John Kerry party/fundraiser/get-together every night until the election. Me and the others ate delicious free pizza courtesy of the Democratic party every night of the week, and all we had to do was pretend to give a shit about politics and say “George Bush really sucks” when asked any question.
And after two weeks, when it seemed my scam was at the top of its game, I did something stupid enough to fuck it all up:
I became President of The Young Republicans.
At the time I equated: Young Republicans + Young Democrats = Pizza^2, and for a time, it worked that way. I was eating free pizza two meals of every day, and it was awesome. Until, someone realized what I was doing.
Turns out, you can’t be president of two rivaling organizations without someone noticing. The members of both organizations argued that this was “a conflict of interest” and that I “was only in it for the pizza”. My counterargument was, “How can it be a conflict of interest, since, when has this not been about the free pizza?”
Ultimately, both groups impeached me because they were jealous of my pizza-getting savvy, and there was nothing I could do to appeal, I was out.
On the rebound, I started The Young Green Party Club, but quit after a week since I was the only member (no-one else was willing to stoop low enough to go to the Green Party parties), and the parties mostly offered shitty vegetarian pizza.
Depressed at the new lack of pizza in my life I was considering drawing up plans to rob a Pizza Hut, that is, until something much worse took place.
3. The Minivan “Incident”:
One would assume that the time when I was 5 and “air-fucked” an audience of 500 dressed as Elvis would be the low point of my life. But, that coveted spot would later go to what I affectionately refer to as “The Minivan Incident.”
Desperation is what makes the world go round, and it’s the driving force between such products as station wagons, Old English malt liquor, and rubber vaginas. My time in Hell was fueled by a rampant desperation to go home. And that desperation was bad, comparable to the levels of desperation where crack whores start to look appealing
From my third day in Hell on, I started scheming for a way to get out. And after about a month of being unsuccessful, I had had enough.
As you learned from the ‘Social Alienation’ chapter, I didn’t get along much with my dorm-mates. We fought constantly and had very little in common. Well, except for one thing: A game we had made up (or just conveniently stolen, I don’t remember) called “Extreme Pillowfighting.”
Extreme Pillowfighting is remarkably similar to pillowfighting, with the main notable difference being that we were actually beating the shit out of each other, unlike 14 year old girls at slumber parties. We put on heavy metal music with a strobe-light, got our pillows, and started whacking each other with them until we bled. Half of the time we played without the pillows, and most of the time, someone was seriously injured. The reason we even bothered to call the game “Extreme Pillowfighting” after we had ditched the pillows was to fool our ignorant dorm adviser (who thought any game with the word “Pillowfighting” in it was inherently gay, and the worst thing that could happen was one of us would get AIDs)
Well, one night Extreme Pillowfighting got kinda out of hand, and I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but about 25 minutes into the game I was kicking Josh Levin in the throat and screaming, “this is for my hamper!” Eventually other people got involved (before I had the opportunity to murder Josh) and broke up the game(fight.) But, no-one was able to calm me down.
I had had enough of Hell, and had decided to escape. So I did what any reasonable 15 year old would do: I tried to steal a car.
I didn’t start out with that decision though, and for a half an hour, I started running towards home (actually, I only ran for about thirty seconds and then walked the rest of the time because I’m perpetually out of shape.) I made it about a mile before they realized I was running away, and as soon as they did, they chased after me, in one of the School’s minivan’s.
They pulled the minivan past me about 100 feet, got out, and tried to convince me to come back to the school. I responded with something along the lines of “Fuck You.” We argued for a little bit, until I saw my break: They left the car running. Upon this realization, I broke out into a mad dash past the administrators and into the seat of the neon Ford WindStar.
At that point in my life I hadn’t learned how to drive a car, so I did what they did in the movies: Shifted it into drive and put the petal to the metal. That was not a good idea, mainly because before I knew it I was going 80mph head first into a tree and I had no idea where the brake was. Eventually I turned to avoid the tree and took the petal off the metal until I coasted to a stop. And while I was stopped after nearly killing myself, a sudden realization came to my head:
I WAS STEALING A MINIVAN!
Not only did I realize that this was a crime, but I realized that this was probably the lamest crime ever. In the eyes of the law it was the same exact thing as stealing a Ferrari, except, I wasn’t stealing a Ferrari, I was stealing a neon Ford Windstar with a dented hood. Just as felonious, twice as lame.
I started to cry. And not just because I had nearly beaten to death a kid for peeing in my hamper. And not just because I desperately wanted to go home. But, mostly, because I was going to go to jail for stealing a minivan. From then on I would be a laughingstock; I would be “the mini-van guy.” I’d be derided daily in all the local newspapers. Women would laugh at me, and men would spit on me. My parents would disown me. And I would probably die a virgin. Well, except for all the anal rape that was sure to come my way in prison. Right before they put me in the electric chair.
Faced with that frightening future looming in the horizon, I realized I had to right the situation. I left the car and walked back with tears in my eyes to where the administrators still stood, and had this conversation
“Where’s the car?” they asked.
Which prompted me to bawl uncontrollably, “It’s sooo shitty”
“Is it alright?” they had asked.
“No! It’s a fucking Neon minivan, It’ll never be alright” I managed to utter.
“Did you crash it?” they replied.
“No, but I wish I had” I said.
The day after the incident, I had figured the police would come and take me away for my little joyride, but the administration never pressed charges (probably because pressing charges would only bring attention to the fact that they all drove minivans), they just kicked me out.
So, in the end, the incident did actually get me out of Hell, but at what cost? I ALMOST STOLE A MINIVAN!
After Hell, I went back to my sweet sweet life of poor attendance at Glastonbury High School, where I would finish my adventures in public education.
To be continued…
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