If you got the dreaded second checkmark, you were on your way to visit the principal, who waited with his paddle to administer corporal punishment. My understanding is that he went easier on the girls or the younger kids, but if you were a fourth grade boy, he beat your ass without mercy. And the parents were totally fine with it. To the best of my knowledge, there was no form they could fill out to say “I withhold permission for you to beat my child’s ass during school hours.” If you came home crying...well, you should have behaved in class.
Nobody knew what would happen if you got a third checkmark. I assume that Mrs. Starkling would just club you in the back of the head with a sledgehammer and drag you off to the slaughterhouse. Every Friday before school let out, she’d erase the names, and announce to those of us who’d been naughty that we would start with a clean slate on Monday.
Now, I was not a bad kid. I studied hard, got decent grades, and tried to pay attention as much as possible. But I couldn’t keep out of my own head, which caused me to come up with fascinating observations that had to be shared with the kids around me, immediately. This was, of course, “talking in class.” I got a hell of a lot of checkmarks for talking in class.
Worse, I’d conjure up mental images of such side-splitting hilarity that even if I bit down on the sides of my mouth hard enough to draw blood, I couldn’t keep from laughing. I’d imagine that Mrs. Starkling, while walking down my row, let loose with a thundering, extended trumpet solo of flatulence. “Oh, dear,” she’d say. The “Oh, dear,” is the part that always got me.
To be clear: there was no actual incident of flatulence. But thinking about the possibility of this happening (“Oh, dear!”) was so uproariously hysterically screamingly funny that I could not keep silent. Mrs. Starkling would ask if I wanted to explain to the class what was so amusing. I would answer that, no, I did not wish to explain this. And my name would go up on the chalkboard, if it wasn’t there already.
The truth was, I didn’t fear a visit to the principal. I’d been there twice, and though it was not an experience that I cherished, the pain went away after I was no longer required to remain seated. What really hurt was the thought of missing out on Movie Day.
One fine Monday we were told that Friday would be Movie Day. We would do the usual learning until lunch, and then after lunch the lights would go out and we’d get to watch a non-educational motion picture! Oh my God! There’d even be—brace yourself—popcorn! But because Mrs. Starkling was allowed to change the rules at any time, there was a plot twist: if you got a checkmark, just one, you would not be part of the glory of Movie Day. You’d be sitting in a different classroom with the other wicked children, doing an assignment specifically crafted to be as boring as possible. Presumably somebody would walk up and down the rows with a bowl of popcorn, taunting you with its buttery scent.
I vowed that I would not miss Movie Day.
But…”Oh, dear!”
That was Monday. I got my name written on the board on Tuesday, but I made it through to Friday morning without a checkmark. Then I forgot myself and right in the middle of a math lesson I asked the kid next to me if he’d seen Sanford & Son that week.
Mrs. Starkling spun around. “Who was talking?” she demanded, looking straight at me. She knew perfectly well who’d been talking, but she was going to wring a confession out of me anyway.
I froze. What had I done? Oh, God, what had I done?
“It was me, I’m sorry,” said Todd Lester.
Todd never got in trouble. Ever. He wasn’t some smarmy little suck-up who sat in the front row and raised his hand first for every single question, but his behavior record was spotless. I knew him only as a fellow student in Mrs. Starkling’s fourth grade class; we didn’t play together at recess, and I didn’t even know which bus he took home. There was absolutely no reason for him to take the rap for me, except to be a nice guy and keep a screwup like me from missing Movie Day.
He sat two rows away. He obviously wasn’t the one who’d been talking. Mrs. Starkling looked at him, looked back at me, sighed, and then wrote Todd’s name on the chalkboard. She returned to the lesson without further scolding.
I couldn’t believe he’d done that for me.
Todd was a far more fascinating human being than I’d ever imagined.
Before lunch, I had an uncontrollable fit of giggles (“Oh, dear!”) and forfeited my right to Movie Day, so he’d sacrificed his flawless reputation for nothing. But as I sat in the mostly empty classroom doing the bullshit assignment, I vowed that I’d pay him back for his act of kindness.
After school let out, I hurried over to Todd as he walked toward his bus. “How was the movie?” I asked. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m sure it was great. Thanks for saving me.”
He stopped walking. “Were you dropped on your head as a baby?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Should you ask your mom and dad about it?”
I explained why I couldn’t stop giggling in class. He stared at me, not quite comprehending why imaginary flatulence would have such an impact on me. Real flatulence, sure, of course, everybody can enjoy that, but cracking up over fictional flatulence was very odd to him.
“But I wanted to thank you anyway,” I said. “I owe you a Twinkie or something.”
“Fine. I’d love a Twinkie. Hand it over.”
“I don’t have one with me. But we’ve got a box of them at home. I thought maybe you might want to come over.”
“I can’t ride your bus without a permission slip.”
“We could walk.”
“How far?’
“It’s too far to walk. I don’t know why I said that.”
Todd stared at me like I was a complete idiot. He was right to do so.
I wasn’t sure he was going to resume the conversation, so I continued it for us. “Sorry. I’m stupid. This is probably why we’re not friends.”
“We can walk to my house,” he said. “It’s not that far.”
“Will your parents get worried if you’re late?”
“They won’t be home.”
“Sure, I’d like to come over. Can I call my mom from your house?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go!”
Todd and I walked to his house. As it turned out, we had very different definitions of “not that far.” It would’ve been faster to walk to my house. I’d been starting to put on some weight, so walking more than an hour left me short of breath and requesting occasional rest breaks. One of those rest breaks was at a payphone, where I went further into Todd’s debt by borrowing a dime so I could call home. I’d thought “not that far” meant twenty minutes, maximum.
Our conversation during the walk was not that of kids who felt like they’d been friends their entire lives. We talked about superficial fourth grader stuff. When we got to his house, I was extremely impressed by his comic book collection, so after a lecture on how to properly care for them—I was a “fold the front cover around the back for ease of reading” kind of guy—we read and had a detailed discussion about some exciting superhero adventures.
(In case you were horrified by that last sentence, I’d like to break from the narrative to explain that for much of human history the comic book was seen primarily as disposable reading material, rather than collecting material. So I wasn’t some raging comic book-destroying psychopath; it was, in fact, standard operating procedure to fold the front cover around to the back. Cultures evolve and in contemporary society I would be shunned and perhaps put to death for such disrespectful treatment of a graphic novel, but back then, Todd was the weird one, not me.)