I’m 33 years old, very close in fact to 34.  I have a wife, two sons, and a dog named Bingo.  We have an SUV with two child seats and a plastic insert in our luggage area to protect our upholstery.  We are planning on adding a second car, smaller, sensible, fuel-efficient.  We don’t drink.  We don’t smoke.  We don’t go out after 8pm unless we’re on a mission for diapers or formula.  We have a mortgage, a growing collection of Wiggles DVDs, and a Winnie the Pooh growth chart.  When we watch the nightly news, we grumble about the teen drivers and global warming.  In every way, I would seem to be a normal, well adjusted person.  But … beneath this facade of suburban utopianism I have a little secret.  Back in the day …

I was a hellion.  A week smoking, beer guzzling, fist fighting, stealing, shoplifting, vandalizing, self-destructive hellion.  And I was in 5th grade.

The Back Story

The summer after 4th grade, my mom found a job as a sociology professor at McMurry College down in Abilene, TX.  It was part of her mid-life feminine assertion.  Just like Murphy Brown or something.  At least that’s how I understood it.  We had survived the marriage and separation with my dad, i.e. Odie the Wonder Dummy.  All the years of struggle were about to pay off.  Now that she had a job, it was going to be happy times for the rest of our lives.

It was no longer frowns and sad clowns.  No, it was a quest … a quest for fun.  I’m gonna have fun and you’re gonna have fun.  We’re all gonna have so much fucking fun we’ll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles.  You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of your assholes!  I gotta be crazy! I’m on a pilgrimage to see a moose.  Praise Marty Moose! Holy Shit!

Sorta.

Texas

We packed up all of our things, grabbed half a dozen of my grandma’s credit cards, and moved south, out of Oklahoma.  It was my mom’s first (and only) attempt to fly as a solo parent.  No dad, no grandma.  The oldest, Trishie, stayed in Oklahoma.  I don’t blame her.  So it was my brother, my sister, and little me.

With no father or father figure in sight, my brother who was four years older than me, was testing the bounds of behavior even before we left Stillwater.  And I was his little disciple.  Sneaking out at night to explore rain sewers, staying up late, back talking, watching scary TV, and hiding nudie mags under the mattress.   It was my grandma that put us in line.  Until her dying day, that woman bragged about the time she put my brother and I in headlocks and wrestled us down to the ground … at the same time.  I think she was 75.

When we moved into our 2 bedrooms at Barcelona Apartments, my brother and I quickly discovered that instead of Abilene, we’d apparently moved into the Wild West.  There were no laws.  There was no sheriff, no punishment, no repercussions.  My mom seemed mainly disinterested in our behavior … even when we’d destroy the apartment.  Nothing.  No reaction whatsoever.  Our antics were only worsened by the appearance of a redneck, troublesome neighbor, named David Farmer.

You know what happens when you don’t give children structure?  They go further and further and further towards Jerry Springer. In no time at all, we’d be bashing Piggy with rocks as we wrestled the Conch of out his fat lobster claw hands.  Need proof?  Well then …

• I decided to paint my room, got bored after one wall, and then kept the paint bucket to use as  a toilet so I wouldn’t have to leave my room.
• My brother and I created swords from broomstick handles and played smashout with all of the windows in one of the bedrooms.
• We started a puppy mill and literally had 14 dogs rampaging in our backyard.

Those are just a few examples right off the top of my head.  In each instance, there was no correction, scolding, beatings.  Nothing.  So … we grew our hair out, started wearing ripped up jeans, heavy metal T-shirts, and stayed up late on Saturday nights to religiously watch Headbangers Ball.  We became Stoners.

Now, queue up the 5th grade.

Mr. Wilson

I went to Jackson Elementary School.  Not to brag, but I was a smart little kid.  I’m not sure what gave me such insight into things … it certainly has not been leveraged to fame and fortune in my adult years.  But going to a school named after Stonewall Jackson soured me immediately.  I had a moral objection to attending a school honoring a Confederate General.  So maybe when I was placed in my 5th grade class with a first-time teacher, Mr. Wilson never really had a chance.

For starters, he looked just like this guy:

And I mean exactly.  The other kids in the class were normal … or at least normalish.  I was the budding sociopath in the back row.  Rebel without a cause.  Not to fluff my own feathers too much … but as I said above I was also a … genius.  A genius, I tell you!  Like Wiley Coyote.  Case in point, I scored in the 97th centile in every standardized test I ever attempted.  A mix of bad attitude with evil cunning …

I hated school.  And I’m not sure where this intense hatred of school came from, because I had enjoyed it back in Oklahoma.  Maybe I had reached an age where I started to realize that we were poor, that we were society’s cast-offs.  Or maybe everyone else had reached that age where not everyone is a playmate and some kids, the smelly kids that don’t wear clean clothes, are to be avoided and made fun of.  So … I decided not to go as often as possible.  In fact, there was a two week period where I simply didn’t go.  I told my mom I wasn’t going and she said, “ok”.

In all, I missed 59 days of school.  That’s ONE THIRD of the freaking school year.

To this day, there are gaps in my education as a result … I still have no idea what a participle is or who invented the cotton gin.

Religious Education

When I did attend, I was subjected to the personal briefings on Mr. Wilson’s religious views.  I’m guessing he was a born again Christian or a Baptist … basically oil to my water Catholicism.  And this was a public school.  During class, he would frequently lecture us on who he thought Jesus was and what He could do for everyone.  Something like this, “accept Jesus into your life and every day will be rainbows and sunshine.”

Hogwash.

When I was growing up my family was devoutly Catholic, my dad foremost among them.  We knew about Jesus, all of the apostles, attended church every Sunday, and even engaged in weekly arts & crafts on Jesus-related paraphernalia.  But guess what?  When we got home, and no one else could see, that’s when reality set back in.  Jesus did not give me a good dad that would tuck me in and scare away the monsters.  My dad was the Monster.  Jesus did not give me a good mom that made sure I did my homework and dreamed the biggest dreams.

As a little kid, it was hard to understand that faith in God and Christ was much more complex than Mr. Wilson’s bite-size Christianity.  Perfect values, imperfect people type thing.  So just in the same way that I was upset about attending a elementary school that honored an aristocratic, slave-owning racist … I decided that Mr. Wilson was an idiot.

Even then I knew that the Christians that talk the loudest about what Jesus could do for you, like He was a used car salesman, had the easiest lives.  Find me an African starving in Ethiopia to talk about his faith … or a priest sneaking into China to hand out Bibles … or sing me a Negro spiritual written by slaves that only had Christ.  That would have resonated with me then.

This guy was a shine job.  It’s easy to be a good Christian when life is rose colored.  So I tested him just like I did with my mom back home and ended up in the principal’s office on numerous occasions.

The Finger

The climax of this tale revolves around a finger.  But despite what you are thinking and I don’t blame you based on what I’ve divulged about my behavior at the time, it was NOT my finger.  It was his.

We were walking back to class after some activity in the cafeteria.  I jumped up to touch an iron stud set into the hallway wall.  I shouldn’t have been doing that … so he pulled me out of the line and told the rest of the class to go ahead.  He then put me shoulders against the wall, stuck his face four inches from mine, and jabbed his finger into my chest.  Mr. Wilson then said, “Robert, I love you.  I care about you.  I want you to succeed.  God loves you.”

There were a few things that struck me at the time:

1. The finger.  He was poking me in my chest as he spoke and I found it incredibly insulting.
2. He invaded my personal space.  I could smell his lunch.
3. The suddenness of his confrontation and its intensity made me immediately uncomfortable … like I was being cross examined by a rich person in the court of the poor or something.  He put me on the spot.
4. I thought it was patronizing that he thought I did not know about God.  Like I had a choice in what type of kid I was becoming?  Shouldn’t he be annoying my parents with his ill-timed witness?

Was I just to supposed to break out into tears like Richard Gere in An Officer & Gentleman?  How naive to think that would solve my problems?  I was watching my mother slowly collapse under the emotional strain of work and family when she had no tools to cope, no life skills of any kind.  She had tackled me to the ground in our dining room, laying on top of me, screaming and trying to beat me up.  And now Mr. Wilson loves me?

I had seen my dad beat my sister with closed fists like she was a stubborn mule.  I had seen my grandma threaten to shoot him if he came on her property again because he was such a bastard to her grandchildren.  I was a 5th grader thinking about suicide.  I used hold a knife in my kitchen or stand atop my roof, daydreaming about having the courage to do something.  And now Mr. Wilson loves me?

I didn’t need this happy-happy idiot … I needed child services to pull me out of that roach-infested house.  I needed to go back to Oklahoma where the only adult that ever did the right thing was waiting for me.

I grabbed his finger and pulled it off of my chest and said to him in a very even, calm voice, “I don’t want you to love me.”  He looked as if I had slapped him across his face.  As if his understanding of the world and the universe had just been struck by a nuclear assault.  I walked back to the classroom and didn’t say another word.  He called my house that night and expressed his concerns to my mom, but she waffled and wiffled just to get off the phone and back to the TV.  She never mentioned anything about it to me.  Later that week, I was transferred to another classroom.  The first time ever at Jackson Elementary.

And later that year, Mr. Wilson retired.  After just one year of teaching.  At the time at the height of my delinquency, I took it as a badge of honor that I had defeated him.

Hindsight

I didn’t know where this column was headed when I started.  I guess part of me thought it would be funny to talk about Mr. Wilson and his retirement, but the more energy that I invested into remembering and analyzing, the more I realized that this story wouldn’t fit into a simple, little box.  So with all of my thoughts now laid out on the table …

Do I feel bad for crushing Mr. Wilson?  Yes.

Yes, because I can see now that his heart was in the right place, though his tactic was brilliantly short-sighted.  He probably did care for me and thought that ‘convicting’ me with the Holy Spirit was the way to go.  Mr. Wilson probably became a teacher out a genuine desire to work with young people.  In fact, he wrote me a letter a year or so after he retired to talk about his renewed spiritual journey and what he was going to do with his life after teaching.  So I wouldn’t be Catholic if I said that part of me didn’t feel guilty.

And No.

Firstly, if you’re going to step into someone’s life to help them … you must first understand that life.  He had no clue who I was or what I was dealing with.  He had the misguided conception that I was a bad kid that needed a hug.  I was 12?  The truth is that there are no bad children, only bad parents.  I can say that as someone that has come out of that childhood as a nearly functional adult and as a very proud father.  If he wanted to help, he had to make a relationship first.  Like Mrs. Hamilton did in 7th grade.  Only then would he have had the credibility and understanding to jump in.

Secondly, if a 5th grade kid can cause you to quit your dream and question your faith, then what type of a Christian are you?  Faith was meant for foxholes.  If you don’t have it when life gets hard, then I doubt he ever had it to begin with.  Christianity flourished when early church fathers were being martyred by the Romans.  THAT is true faith.  It is like anything else that grows into maturity, problem is that most Christians in the United States never have to challenge that faith.  Life here is so easy.  It makes you soft.  They rarely if ever have to stand on the precipice of the abyss and decide exactly what they believe.

Another example.  In high school, I had a dear friend who was devoutly Christian and headed towards the pulpit.  His girlfriend broke up with him and we had a sit down at Pizza Hut to talk about what effect it had on him.  He was dead serious in saying to me that he was angry with God.  He decided that since God took away his girlfriend that he no longer believed.  I wanted to grab him by the collar and shout at his face – Are you freaking kidding me?!?!  Only because God had His finger on my shoulder, did I somehow just decide one day to get my act together … the decision of a 15 year old.  How else does that happen?  And here he is whining about his girlfriend?  That’s not faith.

You want to build your faith – do what guys like Chris Cullins and Ross Bebee have done.  Go to Africa and see true misery.  In that misery, if you find hope and faith where there should be none, soak it in and mimic it.  One of the reasons that I am largely silent on my spirituality in most instances is because my relationship with God and with Jesus is so intensely personal.  Trying to put into words how I feel about it would only lessen it.  I hold it that close to my heart.

So if my challenge to Mr. Wilson, even in the form of a little, long-haired brat, made him into a stronger Christian in the long run by questioning his beliefs then good.  God works in mysterious ways, maybe He used me just like so many others were used in my life.  To steer me away from irreparable harm before I got my act together.

And maybe it was for the best that Mr. Wilson retired.

2 comments