Kick Me (8 page)

Oh, see what’s in my hand

It’s a pin drop from the band

What was a “pin drop”? I had no idea. And I didn’t care. The words were coming and I was writing. I knew this was what inspiration was all about. Just sit back, I thought, and be the stenographer to the artist within. Take the minutes of the I’m-a-Genius-Poet club meeting and reap the rewards. “Paul Feig Has Done It Again!” is what the headlines would read after Miss Patton got a load of this new batch of poesy the ghost of Shakespeare was sending my way. My pen scratched furiously as the last line of my latest masterpiece came through my hand and onto my lucky sheet of Smithsonian-bound paper.

Spent, I set down my pen, sighed wearily, and thanked the Fates for another job well done.

As I read over the poem I had written in forty-five seconds, I remember wondering if it was any good at all. But I quickly put such destructive thoughts out of my head. Of course it’s good. How could it not be?
I
wrote it. And once Miss Patton read it and saw that I had segued out of humorous verse and into abstraction, her admiration for me would grow exponentially.

I walked into class the next day and saw my fellow students busily looking over their poems, making changes and handing them in to Miss Patton. I remember walking into the classroom thinking that my peers would fall silent, feeling the presence of the master among them and hoping that I would quickly read my latest creation aloud. But nobody seemed to notice me. I figured they were all too preoccupied with their quaint little verses and so took no offense. I walked right up to Miss Patton, who was busy stapling papers together, and said loudly, “Here’s my new poem, Miss Patton.”

It was the strangest thing. For whatever reason, Miss Patton took the poem from me like I was just another one of her students. There was no look of excitement, no calling the class to attention. There wasn’t even a thank-you or a small conspiratorial smile. I was thrown at first but then quickly realized that she probably didn’t want to appear to be showing favoritism by fawning over my latest yet-unread work. She must treat my next masterpiece the same way she was treating all the other stanzas that were being handed to her, I thought. My poem would have to stand on its own.

She had us all sit down and said she wanted each one of us to read our poems out loud.

Aha! I was right. This was how she was going to laud me. Let me present the poem myself without any prevoiced bias. Then let the accolades roll in. You’re a clever one, Miss Patton. Clever like an art-appreciating fox.

She went desk by desk so that our selection would be impartial. Other students got up and read their poems. As I suspected, most were about their families or about their pets or about the beauty of a tree or a summer day or any other standard verse subject suitable for a Carlton greeting card. There was nothing approaching the quality of a Hallmark-worthy set of metered lines, but their attempts were sincere, if not inspired. One kid even got a laugh with a poem about his dog stealing food off the dinner table. I chuckled supportively, glad that he had succeeded, happy that my poem wouldn’t have to be the only one worthy of praise. Of course, I knew my composition would be hands down the
most
successful work of the day, but that was like comparing apples to oranges. The depth of the lines I had written were beyond these childish verses. I looked up and started to resent my earlier success as I saw it pinned to the corkboard in front of me. To write about knights in shining armor is all well and good but to write an abstract poem about a parade was to break new ground. Once my new poem had succeeded, I figured that I would denounce my old work and take it down from the classroom wall, thus building my reputation as an artist who’s “hard on himself” and “a perfectionist.”

It was my turn. I stood up and cleared my throat. I launched into my poem, looking up at Miss Patton and the class alternately between each line. I read in a very grand, dramatic tone, so as to drive home the emotion and the irony of each line in this ode to a mythical celebration. When I got to the verse “Oh, see what’s in my hand / It’s a pin drop from the band,” I looked up at Miss Patton, sure that she would be nodding with a small smile playing across her lips, amused and amazed at my use of Lewis Carroll–like abstraction. Miss Patton stared at me, slightly wide-eyed, with no real expression on her face. There was a hint of questioning in her eyes that I immediately interpreted as absolute awe. She was blown away by my poem and I wasn’t even finished yet. I gave her a knowing smile and finished reading my magnum opus. When I concluded, I looked around at the class. They were staring at me with slightly confused looks on their faces. I nodded to Miss Patton knowingly and sat down. The lack of reaction from my classmates was what I had anticipated. They were new to the world of art and couldn’t be expected to understand the difficult concepts I was tackling. But Miss Patton surely would.

She had the rest of the class finish reading their poems, after which she said she’d grade all our work that night. Then she announced that we had spent too much time on poetry and had better get back to our basic math and English skills. And with that, she started to talk about decimal points. I was confused and a bit disappointed, having expected at least some perfunctory lauding to reward me for the forty-five seconds of soul-wrenching work I had performed the night before. But, once again, I figured she was probably shying away from favoritism.

When she handed back our poems the next day, I saw that most students had gotten A’s, with a couple of B’s thrown in for two kids who wrote their poems about Spiderman and Fred Flintstone. Then she handed me my masterpiece back. A large red D was written on it.

I was shocked. Clearly there had to be some mistake. I looked up at Miss Patton but all I got from her was a slightly angry look that I interpreted to mean “Man, you’re an idiot. What was I thinking?” It also seemed to carry the subtext “And
where
did you steal that knight poem from?” Then she turned and continued handing out the graded papers as I shrank down in my chair, too stunned to even turn my paper over to hide the terrible grade from the eyes of my peers.

There’s a verse in a song by the group They Might Be Giants that says, “I’ve got just two songs in me, and I just wrote the third.” Well, apparently I had just one poem in me and had faked my way through the second one in a cloud of youthful arrogance and laziness. I never spoke to Miss Patton about the grade and she never spoke to me about my failed parade poem. I was firmly back at square one with her, no longer the boy genius of verse but once again merely the kid who told Teresa Andrews that our teacher looked like the saggy-breasted ape-woman on the evolutionary chart. What one successful endeavor in the arts had erased, failure and hubris had restored to its original luster like a bottle of mental Turtle Wax.

Success had come easily and had vanished twice as effortlessly. I lay in bed that night feeling silly, mad at myself for squandering my reputation, and embarrassed that I had entertained such cavalier thoughts about my abilities and such patronizing thoughts about those of my classmates. Their poems had all been good. They had been sincere and had obviously been written with a fair amount of effort. I imagined how each kid had consulted his or her parents, had sought out advice about what subject to write their poems on, had toiled with finding rhymes, and had then read their works aloud to their pleased families, fielding both suggestions and praise. And while they were all bonding and challenging themselves, I was quickly dashing down a set of nonsense lines I knew deep in my heart were terrible so that I could spend the rest of that evening watching TV and ignoring my parents, sure that I was now far too advanced to need them around anymore.

Like the singing frog found by the construction worker in that old Warner Bros. cartoon, my gift from beyond had ended up ruining my third-grade life. Or at least my much coveted teacher’s pet status. I had shoved a Barbie’s Dreamhouse into my shopping cart and now discovered that I didn’t even have room for a few cheap coloring books of dignity. It was the most humiliated I’d ever felt in my eight years on Earth, and I knew I had to do something to erase my arrogant act.

I got out of my bed and sat down at my desk with a piece of notebook paper. Over the course of the next two hours, struggling with every word and rhyme, I wrote the following verse:

Miss Patton is so beautiful

On this we all agree

She tries to teach us every day

Teach you and you and me

And if there’s something we don’t get

It’s not her fault, it’s ours

That’s why Miss Patton is the best

Let’s all give her some flowers.

I never gave Miss Patton this groveling poem, but it didn’t matter. I had written it and I was awake when I had written it and it was really hard to write and I knew that what I had written was pretty bad. In other words, it was exactly the way I would have done things had my brain not seen fit to curse me with the Knight in Shining Armor poem. I smiled at my ode to Miss Patton, buried it in the bottom drawer of my desk, and went back to bed, dreaming of a shopping cart filled with cheap but still very fun toys.

SCARED STRAIGHT

O
ne Halloween, when I was ten, I decided to dress up like a girl.

For the past year, I had been playing around with a long blond wig my mother had in her bedroom. I’d discovered it a few years back while searching for my hidden Christmas presents. During my quest, I peered into the space between my parents’ dresser and the bedroom wall and came across a thick, short blue tube with a picture of a woman’s head on it. I took the top off the tube and found the flowing blond wig inside. It was the exact same style and color of hair that my second grade teacher, Miss Drulk, had when I was in love with her three years prior. Feeling as if I’d found some forbidden clue to the secret life of my perpetually big-haired mother, whom I had never seen wear a wig, I found myself overcome with the desire to put it on.

And so I did.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was amazed. Believe it or not, I actually looked like a girl in it. This was not major news to me because at that time I had rather long hair anyway and was constantly being mistaken for a girl by the old waitresses at the Canadian diner my mother and I used to eat in when we’d stay at my family’s cottage. This was always a source of much angst for me. I’d be sitting at the table, dressed in a cool new jeans jacket that I was sure made me look like the kind of boy who would have girls throwing themselves at him, only to have some grandmotherly waitress come up to the table and say, “Oh my, aren’t you a pretty little girl?” My mother would always correct the waitress, which felt even worse because it would bring on a chorus of “Oh, I’m sorry, you just look so much like a girl” and “With that long hair of yours, I could have sworn you were Elaine’s daughter.” Which would drive me into ten-year-old indignation. Didn’t these women know what the style was these days? Weren’t they up on the trends? Did they encounter no other men, right there in the early 1970s, who also had long hair? What a backward, one-horse hick town this place was, I would fume.

But suddenly, as I stood in my mother’s bedroom wearing her wig and staring into her mirror, I was seeing what all those old waitresses were seeing.

I really
did
look like a girl.

I stared at myself a long time, then started mincing around, tossing the hair back and forth with a flick of my head, pretending to be a shy woman at a ball, declining offers to dance, and obscuring my face coyly with my new, thick, long, luxurious blond hair. I did this for quite a while until the telephone rang and I immediately became self-conscious, certain that the caller could see through the phone and was now shocked at the state in which he or she had found me. I tore the wig off my head, stuffed it back in the tube, returned it to its home between the dresser and the wall, and ran away from the bedroom phone to answer the extension in the kitchen, in order to prove to the caller that I hadn’t been in my mother’s bedroom experimenting at being a girl.

Over the next several months, when I had the house to myself, I would pull out the wig and put it on. More than anything, I simply liked the way I looked in it. After a few times, I put on a string of multicolored beads my mom had in her dresser and decided that the addition of this accessory only enhanced my girlish qualities. This led to additional sessions that found me looking through my mom’s closet, trying to spot a dress that I thought might complement my hair and beads. One afternoon, when I knew my parents would be away until dinnertime, I pulled out a short blue sleeveless dress and, feeling like I was going to have a heart attack, slipped out of my school clothes and tried it on. The transformation was even more startling to me. I could pass for a girl, I thought. From this came a search through my mother’s shoes until I found a pair of high, white go-go boots that I had never seen my mother wear. I put them on and the transformation was complete.

I was a girl.

And, incidentally, I was a girl whom I found to be quite attractive.

Some geneticists say that we are drawn to potential mates who are physically similar to us, that it’s part of our survival instinct to stay among and breed with like kinds. And as I stared at myself in the mirror, I was on my way to proving that theory true. I went cautiously out to the full-length mirror in our hallway and looked myself up and down. I had nice legs. The wig was extremely flattering and looked as if it were my own hair. And my rather full face suddenly seemed to make sense, framed as it was by the long blond
That Girl
locks that surrounded it.

There was no getting around it.

I was pretty.

I put my hands on my hips and sashayed back and forth in front of the full-length mirror, trying to move like the women on TV I had crushes on—Dean Martin’s Ding-a-Ling Sisters, the go-go girls from
Laugh In,
the runway models on the fashion reports my mom used to watch. It was strange. The girl in the mirror was really turning me on. I almost felt as if I had found my perfect mate. I began wishing that somehow I could come out of the mirror and date myself. The message was clear. I had become completely enraptured with my feminine alter ego.

Over the course of the next few months, I would attempt to put on the full outfit again but seldom had any concrete guarantees that my mother would be out of the house long enough for me to spend any quality time with Mrs. Paul Feig, at least without fear of being walked in on. The few times that I could safely suit up and admire myself in the mirror, I found myself wishing I could let somebody else see me this way. I wanted to know if I truly looked as much like a girl as I thought I did, or if I was simply lost in some narcissistic haze that was keeping me from seeing the whole, like an unattractive girl who thinks she’s pretty just because she buys some new clothes.

But when October rolled around, I saw my chance. It was time for this debutante to venture out into society.

Halloween seemed like the perfect excuse to let the girl in me go public. Guys dressed like women for Halloween all the time. I’d even seen a couple of my dad’s Kiwanis buddies in dresses at a party and everyone thought they were really funny. Who would think anything of a ten-year-old boy putting on his mother’s wig and go-go boots just to get some candy? It felt like the perfect plan. If I didn’t look like a girl, people would laugh and I could pretend it was a joke. If they told me how good I looked, then I’d know my suspicions were correct. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do if I did indeed get the confirmation that I possessed a great deal of feminine pulchritude but that wasn’t my concern at the moment. This was strictly my opportunity to burst upon the scene and beguile, like a young actress who gets an “And introducing . . .” credit in her big-screen debut. Excited and nervous, I went into the kitchen to enlist my unwitting mother in my cross-dressing plan. Not wanting to out myself on the spot, I did some quality acting as I pretended to dream up the idea in front of her.

“Hey, Mom, I think for Halloween this year, I’m going to dress up either as Groucho . . . uh, a spaceman, or . . . um . . . I don’t know. Hey, you know what could be funny? I should dress up like a girl. Ha ha. That’d be pretty weird, wouldn’t it?”

If they handed out Academy Awards for childhood deceit, I would have at least gotten a nomination.

“Dress up like a girl?” my mother said, pondering. Then she smiled and laughed. “That
would
be very funny. You know what? Wait here a minute.”

She went into her room and I heard some rustling around. My heart almost stopped when she quickly reemerged with the familiar blue tube that held my blond wig in hand. Did she know what I’d been doing all these months and was now about to shame a confession out of me? I steeled myself and prepared several statements of denial in my head.

“I’ve had this wig lying around here for years,” she said, excited. “I almost gave it away last month.” My heart
really
almost stopped on that one. I made a mental note to self—
Hide that wig.
“I bet this would look good on you.”

She slipped the wig on my head, then laughed, a look of amazement on her face. “Wow, I’ve gotta say, honey. You really look like a girl in that wig.”

A wave of joy overtook me upon this confirmation of my feminine charms. I pretended to act surprised and went into another dramatic soliloquy.

“Really? You’re kidding? I do? That’s so funny. I can’t believe that I look like a girl in this wig. I want to look in a mirror. I’ve gotta see if I really look like a girl or not. How funny if I did, huh?”

It’s a testament to my mother’s blind devotion to me that she didn’t see through these terrible moments of overacting I was trying to pass off through the guilt and weirdness I was feeling. Even though it was going well, this whole encounter with my mother felt like the time she walked in on me as I was getting out of the bathtub and saw me fully frontal in my nudity. I had forgotten to lock the door that time but on this, my coming-out day, it felt as if I had left the door unlocked and asked her to come in so I could dance naked in front of her. I was enlisting my mother to validate this strange prepubescent game of dress-up that had become my obsession and something about it felt inherently wrong. But things were progressing at too quick and successful a pace to put the brakes on now.

We went to a mirror and I pretended to be shocked and amazed as I stared at myself wearing the wig I had already seen myself in oh-so-many times. Then my mother said we should pick an outfit for me to wear when I went out trick-or-treating.

“You can’t just go out with a long hair wig and your regular clothes and expect anyone to know you’re a girl,” she said, getting swept up in the moment. “People will just think you’re just a hippie. We need to pick you out a dress.”

“You really think so, Mom?” More bad acting. “Well, okay, maybe you’re right.”

We went into her bedroom and she slid open the door to her closet. As my mother looked through her tightly packed clothes hanging on the closet’s sagging, straining wardrobe bar, I pretended to be deliberating along with her as she stopped at different potential outfits. Then I went into my con.

“I think I should wear something, um, I don’t know . . . maybe blue,” I pondered aloud, making sure to perform the appropriate searching-face/vaguely-gesturing-hands action that went along with such a moment of fashion decision making.

“Oh, I think you’re right. You’d look very good in blue. Especially if you’re wearing a blond wig.”

Feeling cocky, I almost overplayed my hand with a moment of superhuman eyesight. “What about that dress there?” I said, pointing vaguely at the mass of clothes.

“Which one?” my mom asked, scanning her outfits, unable to see anything other than thin strips of color in the overstuffed closet.

“That one right there,” I said as I stepped forward, reached right into the dense crush of outfits, and pulled out the dress I had been wearing for the past several months.

“How did you see
that
in there?” My mom gave me a strange look that said either she was amazed at my bionic vision or she knew something was up. Fortunately for me, she would never have suspected that her only son, the boy whom she had taken to Sunday school every week since he was two, had been spending the better part of the past few months trying on her clothes.

“I just liked that color of blue, that’s all.” Careful, I thought. Don’t blow this.

I went into the bathroom and put the blue dress on. When I came out, my mother laughed girlishly, much the way I had seen girls in movies laugh when they would put makeup on each other at slumber parties.

“Oh, Paul, that dress is
perfect.
”

Her excitement growing, she started rummaging through her jewelry, looking for some appropriate accessories to enhance my natural beauty. While I had found the colored beads to be a good look for my Y-chromosomed alter ego, my mother had a more classic and elegant take on things. She pulled out a long string of fake white pearls and held it up to the dress. “Yes, I think these would go nicely,” she said, becoming giddy as she put the pearls on me. It was at this moment that I started to wonder if secretly my mom had always wanted a daughter instead of a son. She was clearly as into this as I was and it was starting to dampen the experience for me. But with the end of the tunnel so close, I decided to press on.

“What kind of shoes should I wear?”

“Gosh, I’m not sure if any of my shoes will fit you. Maybe you should just wear your tennis shoes.”

Perish the thought. I almost recoiled in disgust at my mother’s lack of imagination. How would that possibly support the look we were so carefully creating? I suddenly realized that maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t had a daughter whom she would encourage to walk around in dresses and tennis shoes like a rodeo clown. “No, I think I should wear women’s shoes. Or maybe boots.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you’ll be able to walk in them. Plus, people might get the wrong idea if you get too girlish.” My mother’s sudden backtrack threw me. I became self-conscious.

“I just want to look funny,” I said, my conviction wavering. “I think it’s funny if I dress up all the way.” As I stood there in my parents’ bedroom, the room in which I was conceived, wearing my mother’s clothes, jewelry, and hair, trying to force her into letting me also wear her shoes, I started to feel dirty. I began to envision God standing with his arms crossed looking at me and shaking his head slowly, muttering, “Oh, you’re gonna pay for this, friend.”

Fortunately, my mother saved the day.

“You know what? I’ve got these old white go-go boots that might work. I’ll pull them out and you can see if they fit.”

The plan was on.

When Halloween night rolled around, the girls who were my next-door neighbors came over in their costumes. We had all been going out together on Halloween for years, always with the master plan of making it to the rich neighborhood eight streets down from my house. Rumor had it they gave out giant candy bars and twenty-dollar bills. Our annual plan was to skip our streets and head directly for the rich neighborhood, get the costly booty we knew they were giving out, and then work our way back through the poorer, working-class houses that made up my immediate neighborhood. Every year, however, the lure of nearby candy would prove too tempting and we would convince ourselves that we could harvest all the treats from our blue-collar neighborhood as we worked our way toward the rich section, where we would then end the night on a high note of free cash and insanely big sweets. However, our energy would always flag after about four blocks in and so we’d hobble our way home, our pillowcases filled with normal lower-income candy, where we’d watch
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,
stuff our faces, and vow to bankrupt the rich neighborhood next Halloween. A couple of years later when we actually made it to the rich neighborhood, we were shocked to find out that half the houses were dark and empty, and the rest were giving away the exact same Smarties and “fun-sized” Snickers that my not-as-rich neighbors were handing out. Our dreams of twenty-dollar bills and enormous Hershey bars died along with our innocence that night, and it was the last time we ever went out trick-or-treating. But on this night, as I stood primping in my bedroom, fully outfitted as a girl, eagerly awaiting my unveiling to my friends, the spirit of Halloween optimism was strong in me.