Double Flee A

When I was 13, I was probably a terrible person, but I don't have any idea. I remember failing my Tennessee history class in eighth grade, a class taught by a Mrs. Upchurch, and because of this, having to go to military school. Passing was 70. I got a 69. I concluded that Mrs. Upchurch was a bitch.

All you kids out there, when your dad says he's going to send you to military school he's probably pulling your leg, but rest assured that some of the time people do have to go to them, and they might come from families like yours. To make matters worse for me, I was sent to summer school at military school, in the summer following my eighth grade year. Boy, did that suck. Once I saw that this whole military school thing wasn't an idle threat, that I was in fact going to have to go there again for the regular year if I didn't do as I was supposed to do, I decided to work hard in school. So I got "A"s for that term, and advanced to tenth grade classes in science, math, and english the following (ninth grade) year.

My logic was that if I got good enough grades, it would be clear that I was willing to do better in school, and maybe I could go to public school and live a life that approximated normality, that pipe dream, that paradise I saw depicted so orgiastically in Juicy Fruit commercials. One guess how my little academic superstar plan backfired. I was doing so well all of a sudden that it was like a miracle and I was back for the much more highly regimented regular school year. After that, in ninth and tenth grade, my grades were mostly hovering around 75. I do have to admit that that place had a great academic program.

I was a regular cadet after that, an "old boy". I knew where things were, how to cheat on shoe shining (it's called future floor wax), and how to stalk quietly through the woods to get to "wedgy's pizza" just off campus, behind the superintendent's mansion. I sometimes wonder if I could do it from memory. When I'm working on a lathe, watching spinning steel for hours at school, I think about the geography of places I was once familiar with. Riverside comes up pretty often.

Anyway, as a ninth grader I was pretty unhappy. I started smoking that year and got yelled at a lot. I guess everyone was getting yelled at all the time too, but I thought I was supposed to care.

Once I got into tenth grade things evened out. I got on a good hall in D company, which was less gangstery, and was a more mellow crowd of pot smokers, etc. I became friends with a bunch of guys on my hall and we had a pretty good time. This is the story of them, and when they all beat the shit out of my suite-mate, Kligman.

At the end of the hall next to the commandant's apartment lived Jason, Cal, Garcia, a latin guy, and the tall, lanky Atkins. Atkins always had cigarettes and you could get him to give you one. They were menthols. Cal was from a town near Gainesville. Garcia would say "beef" like "BIF", which we thought was funny. Jason was a black guy but he didn't hang out with black guys. He hung out with us. We had a pretty good time.

The hall was under the supervision of master sergeant (remembering all these names isn't easy, I'll have you know) Chris Beckman, who roommate was a popular egyptian guy named Aziz, a good soccer player. A short way of describing the supervisory abilities of Chris Beckman, is that he probably would have noticed if the whole hall was on fire. Beckman and I were pretty good buddies. Up until the time I was about 22 or 23, he would call my mom asking how I was doing every year or so. He was probably drunk. People usually are when they make those kinds of phone calls.

I lived in a room with a guy named Lancaster, who got kicked out of school for testing positive for weed. That was because a guy named Attaway gave a bunch of names to ass't commandant Bisso, who tested all of them, including me. Lancaster was the only one to get kicked out. Attaway left the school when he did that. If he had stayed, I honestly think they would have killed him. Due to the Lancaster drug episode, I eventually had the place to myself. In the suite with me (connected by a shower stall and a toilet) were Egizio, an amiable Italian kid whose uncle drove a cab in Atlanta, and Kligman, whose family owned Mustang cigarettes, Colombia's number one brand. He brought me a pack back once from a trip home. They were like sawdust, but I was polite and didn't say anything but thank you.

Kligman and Egizio weren't in the clique of Jason, Cal, Atkins, myself, a guy named Searls, and Garcia. They weren't big on socializing. It was no big mystery why. Those other guys were always hog-tying and throwing each other outside naked for all the passing cars to see. (I didn't have to undergo this because I was taped in a ball the week before.) I had a lot of fun with this group of guys. We would put our hats on sideways and tackle every single person who came down to D company after dinner. We called it "trucking", and it was a blast.

Anyway, we had these dress hats (click here for a picture) like ones the cops wear. They have an emblem on the front and that's held on with a screw in the back. If you lose that screw, the little eagle or whatever will fall off, and that's unacceptable. Kligman lost his screw at some point so he stole Garcia's screw. He got caught doing it.

I walked into the room as Kligman was hitting the floor. I really don't remember who was punching him at that point but he got picked up, beat down again, and kicked around. It was completely unfair. Kligman's eyes were both swollen shut, his arm or wrist was broken, and he walked with a gimp after that. And I'll wager he will never steal again. He did notice I was in the room even during his destruction. I would find this out later.

When Kligman decided to press charges against the guys who beat the shit out of him, he asked me for a statement. He was going to do me a favor because he liked me, and let me write the statement rather than be subpoenaed and testify. No one else enjoyed this luxury. All my friends down the hall had their story together, that only those who were under 18 had been beating up Kligman. They were thinking (probably rightly) that adults would get a harsher sentence. If I'm not mistaken, they went to court with their story straight. It must have sucked when they read mine.

Assistant Commandant Bisso was a fat, unhappy, mistrustful man who liked to know what was going on. His nickname was batman because he would just show up unnoticed. He'd been creeping around that campus since he was a cadet there as a young man, and was good at catching people doing things they weren't supposed to be doing. He also liked to be in the middle of whatever was taking place legally. Bisso found out about my and Kligman's arrangement and hounded me for that statement daily. Looking back on it, I would guess the school was also being sued.

I prepared my statement and gave it to Kligman, asking him to give it straight to his lawyer and not Bisso. Having more people than necessary in on my intrigue and duplicity could only be a bad thing.

The first day of court when all those other guys had to go to court and I very suspiciously didn't, was the day before graduation. Bisso let me leave a day early, because I'm guessing he communicated the gravity of my personal safety situation to my family. That day was the day before graduation, when everybody normally gets to leave school. While the bomb was getting dropped in some stuffy courthouse downtown, I was drinking a Yoo-hoo, with Riverside, finally once and for all, in the rearview mirror where it belonged. Best car ride ever.

There was no way I could go back there the next year or ever again. I would have been marked as a rat, lumped in with the likes of that punk Attaway, which I only deserve on a technicality. I wish they hadn't made me do what I did, but nobody deserves a beating like that. Kligman wasn't such a bad guy.

That marked the end of that leg of my five-year high school odyssey, which would take me to Virginia and to Idaho before it was over.

I occasionally dream I'm back at Riverside, and in my dream I know I'm almost thirty now, but it somehow makes sense that I have to do military school over and over again until I get it right. As far as I'm concerned, I got it right when I left that place, but my subconscious apparently can't let go at some level. Which is too bad.

The names and places are real.

posted by dale @ 1:17 AM