usadeepsouth.com
by Don Drane
Perhaps it’s unkind to speak ill of the dead, but since he lives on in the heads of many of us, the popular sentiment is that he’s not at all dead -- just buried.
As I counted the licks I suddenly lost track of how many times the man had struck me with the board. Rumor had it that he had an electric paddle in the closet in his office, but for some reason he chose to work on me manually with the standard plank. With each lick he paused and asked me again to admit guilt. All I could think of then was how I could get the beating to end, if indeed it ever would end. The stings turned to numbness and I finally blurted out, “Yes, I did it. I did it!” Then he stopped.
The goal of his “discipline” was not to change behavior or even to “teach me a lesson.” I don’t really know what his goal or motivation was. Perhaps he was just a little man in a classically misguided attempt to reinvent himself as powerful.
Years later I wrote this man a letter. He was an old man by then. I had no idea he would appear in the obituaries a year or two later. Neither did I know how therapeutic writing that letter to him would be. I reminded him of the day in 1956 or '57 when he snatched me out of my fourth grade classroom and slammed me up against the cinder-block wall. The closure device on the door to the boys’ bathroom was broken -- one of those hydraulic devices at the tops of doors that no kid could possibly reach. He said somebody told him I did it. These were the days before DNA.
I was perfectly clear in my letter to him. I confessed how this event had resurfaced in my mind many, many times over the past thirty or so years. I was totally honest when I told him that he had torn me up many times for things I had gotten caught doing or had been turned in for doing, and that for most, if not all, of those misdeeds I was guilty as sin. All of them, that is, except breaking the closure device on the restroom door.
I reminded him how he had literally torn my ass up and how I had finally confessed to something I did not do simply to get him to stop beating me with that paddle.
I still don’t know why this has bothered me all my life, but I went on to tell this “educator” that I was finally going to give it back to him, that it was now his problem and I hoped it would torture him for the rest of his life. (Incidentally, several years after that bathroom door closure beating he snatched me off the Merigold bus for addressing him by his first name. I still remember the bus number and driver -- No. 16 in black paint on school-bus-yellow.)
Of course we never knew or could have understood what the man’s personal problems were, but I suspect it was a “power/authority” syndrome like so many of our school officials, teachers and coaches had back then. We were too busy trying to deal with the fictitious problems he insisted we had. And cringing at the thought of things winding up in our “permanent record”--the same permanent record our history teacher assured us employers would look at any time we applied for a job.
Well, my permanent record no doubt required a separate two-drawer file. Given the admonitions about the dreaded permanent record, how was I possibly able to land a job that led to state retirement after 25 years? And then to start another career that allows me to pay for college educations?
When my permanent record was requested, the secretary no doubt forwarded a copy of somebody else’s instead of mine. Or could it be that permanent records were about as real as the tooth fairy the whole time?
At this age I will freely admit to anything I ever did.
I put a handful of dirt in a teacher’s desk drawer. I crawled out of the second floor window and painted the smokestack at the high school in ‘65. I scrawled some message in white shoe polish on the band room door in ‘63. I peeped in the girls’ dressing room in ‘62. Most coaches and more than a few teachers turned my bottom cheeks crimson on a real regular basis and I always deserved it. But, by God, I did not break the closure device on the boys’ bathroom door. And that was the worst beating I ever got.
What today’s teachers would give if they could trade current behavior problems for a painted smokestack or being called by their first name . . . or even a broken closure device.
What upstarts we were. Indeed. How could a smokestack painter become anything but a career criminal? How could someone who urinated in the chalk tray become a medical professional? How could a boy who stole money from pants pockets in the dressing room become a coach? How could a boy who regularly robbed the coke machine become a teacher? Those were fellow criminals housed on the same Cleveland High Cellblock as I. How dare all us little farts become successes in our professions! How dare we boys defy the legacy these people guaranteed us would follow our criminal behaviors.
I wonder if St. Peter looked at this man’s permanent record.
I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt to even assume he might have met St. Peter. He was probably given that job in Heaven where you have to squirt grease into door closure devices all day and all night . . . for eternity.
Write Don Drane at Don's addy.
Read more of Don’s stories:
Bottle tree: Out of Nowhere
Chief Dempsey’s Cold Plastic Couch
Jim’s Duck
Southern Fried Turkey
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