Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults). Michael N. Marcus

for permission to go to the boys’ room or girls’ room to urinate.

      Normal teachers gave spelling tests to encourage children to learn to spell. Quinn gave spelling tests to build group loyalty and destroy friendships.

      She wasn’t satisfied with our learning to spell new words each week; we had to memorize them in alphabetical order. On quiz day, each group had to recite and spell the new words. The first child did the first word, the second child did the second word and so on.

      But if anyone said a word out of order—even if it was spelled correctly—the whole group failed.

      A child who goofed up in class was often beaten up after class.

      Chapter 14

      My one cool teacher

      Cullen S. Hodge had been an aeronautical engineer, a guy who designed airplanes.

      The way he explained it, one day while sitting at his drafting table, he looked out of the window and saw a plane flying by. He was suddenly stunned, suffering with paralysis of the pencil. He realized that if he specified the wrong size screw, a plane could crash and hundreds might die.

      He changed career paths, becoming an excellent high school physics teacher. He was dignified, scholarly and extremely knowledgeable. Mr. Hodge seemed overqualified, perhaps more suited to be a professor, not just a high school teacher.

      His class was difficult, but he was fair; and if he was not liked by all of his students, Mr. Hodge was respected. He’s one of the few teachers in this book who gets a “Mr.” before his last name. I didn’t think about it. It happened automatically.

      In addition to teaching physics, Mr. Hodge was advisor to the philosophy club, math club and chess club, and to the pompous and short-lived Committee for Research into Existential Metaphysics and Ethics.

      Despite his often aloof demeanor, our class was not without laughs. He made coffee in a calorimeter and taught us to cook hot dogs by swinging them from a pendulum through the flame of a Bunsen burner.

      One day a messenger came to our classroom from the principal’s office. He gave Mr. Hodge a square, flat package from the Columbia Record Club.

      Mr. Hodge paused his lecture on the Brachistochrone curve to carefully slit open the container.

      He removed, held up, and smiled at Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain, and carefully slid the empty package across the front counter until it fell off the end and precisely dropped into the wastebasket.

      Stephanie Abeshouse, the one girl in our class, started frantically waving her hand, and said “Mr. Hodge, Mr. Hodge, your bill is in the package you threw away.”

      Mr. Hodge calmly replied, “Do not worry, Miss Abeshouse. They will surely send me another.”

      Cool.

      Chapter 15

      The last girl on Earth

      (and hiding hard-ons and nipple hunting)

      Sally was a petite seventh-grader with an enormous ego, better suited to someone with greater beauty, brains and talent. So great was her opinion of herself, and so low the opinion that others had of her, that there seemed to be permanent graffiti in the street in front of her house proclaiming, “SALLY IS CONCEITED.”

      She and I attended Cotillion, a ballroom dancing school that also attempted to teach the social graces to young teenagers on Friday nights. One Friday night was also Halloween night, and Cotillion management wisely realized that the only way they could get 12-year-olds to forsake trick-or-treating for dancing school was to have a costume party with prizes.

      For me, this was the second best reason to go to Cotillion. The best reason was to dance with the 18-year-old female dance instructors who had breasts and hips.

      Halloween was my favorite holiday. I started preparing costumes in mid-summer and consistently won prizes for my efforts.

      I don’t remember what I wore that year, but as I expected, I won “Best Boy,” and my peers applauded. My prize, unexpectedly, was not a trophy or even a big bag of candy.

      I got to choose to dance with any girl I wanted to.

      Conceited Sally assumed she was the leading candidate and, aware of my rock-bottom social status, she tried to hide behind some taller friends. She wasn’t completely hidden, however. I moved close to the microphone, looked at her and announced in a deep voice, “Don’t worry, Sally, I wouldn’t pick you if you were the last girl on earth!” There was thunderous applause, especially from the other girls.

      Then, instead of skinny, flat-chested, conceited Sally, I picked Gloria, one of the 18-year-old instructors who had breasts and hips.

      Gloria was much nicer than Sally and gave me a kiss on the lips to congratulate me, and then we did a slow Foxtrot in the spotlight. We danced much closer than normal for 12-year-olds, but probably normal for 18-year-olds.

      I can still remember the Foxtrot steps from over 50 years ago: Forward. Sidestep. Back. Feet together. Slow. Cross that foot.

      Gloria did a grind against me and gave me a woody.

      It lasted for a long time and I didn’t dance close with the next girl because I might have been banished from Cotillion for being a pervert.

      In seventh and eighth grade, as our female classmates were starting to “develop” and male hormones were also raging, schoolboys often had wet dreams in bed at night and inflated pants in school during the day.

      One time I was called to the blackboard in Spanish class while aroused. I walked bent over at the waist to avoid revealing my erection and then practically buried my dick in the wall at the front of the room.

      I suppose in the 21^st century, teenage boys are proud to wave their flagpoles in the classroom, but back then we were advised to wear jockstraps every day, to take a lot of cold showers and to stop thinking about breasts. It’s impossible for heterosexual teenage boys not to think about breasts. (See chapter 67.)

      Summer times were great for breast watching. At our beach club, the 14-year-old boys in Titty Club would float in the deep end of the pool with diving masks and snorkels, facing the diving board, ogling females who’d dive off the board. When they’d plunge down to the bottom of the pool and quickly reverse direction to swim up to the surface, sometimes their bathing suit tops would pull back and we’d actually spot a NIPPLE.

      A few times we got really lucky. Some girls had not tied their bikini tops tight enough before diving and they lost them in the water, and we got to see TWO COMPLETE BREASTS. Our diving masks made them look even bigger.

      For a change of pace, the horny divers would swim around the pool to try to spot pubic hairs popping out from teenage girls’ bathing suits, or head for the shower shows.

      There were undetectable peepholes under the benches in the individual shower rooms. Whenever a hot female went into a shower room, one of us would go into the adjacent room. Sometimes our view was blocked by a towel, but we saw a lot.

      Like anthropologists studying apes in Africa, we gave our subjects nicknames based on their physical characteristics. A woman with oversize areolas came to be known as “Helmet Nipples” and was one of our favorites. So was her young teenage daughter, “Helmet Nipples Junior.” Years earlier, I had played doctor with HNJ and we got naked and wrapped each other with gauze. Later I was her first date.

      WRONG “PLAY”