What were you like as a kid?

K-8, I had a temper problem. I was mouthy. Drove teachers and my parents crazy. Got picked on a lot until I hit a growth spurt in the 8th grade and became bigger than most of my classmates.

 

Fat

 

/

My parents divorced when I was 8 and it was about as messy as one can be without the police getting involved, although they were called once (non-violent)...

My dad had polio as a kid and has a complete Napoleon complex even though he's still 5-8. He hated that I was a good athlete. He hated that I was taller than him by age 14 and he hated that I'm almost 6-3, even though all of his brothers and their kids are tall. His sister was taller than him and I think that was a source of a lot of grief for him growing up.

I was moderately heavy from age 8 to 10 and my dad just made my life a living hell during that time. It was a combination of being on the verge of a growth spurt and emotional eating as a result of the divorce. I was glad my mom left him, but it was tough because she was upset all the time for about 2-3 years and my dad was just insufferable.

When I was in high school one of my friend's dads approached my dad at one of my football games and congratulated him. My dad said, "For what?" and he said, "You got a great kid..." and my dad just waved him off like it was the most idiotic thing anybody had ever said to him.

It's one of those things, we learn a lot from our parents and if I learned anything from my dad, it was basically what not to do. How not to treat your wife, how not to treat your kids, etc...

 

Is your wife cool with you sleeping with teachers now?

 

That's the flip side of the problem. Flash forward 40 years and all of the hot young teachers have a study hall full of strapping young 15-year-olds from whom to choose. Even if I wanted to, it ain't happening. My moment came when I was a college junior and had a fling with an assistant dean.

 

Yeah, back in my day the only teachers banging students were the 20-year-old assistant soccer coach having a not-so-secret affair with the hottest girl on the team and the physics teacher who made googly eyes with the smartest girl in school who he married (and later divorced) shortly after she graduated from MIT.

 

I never missed a word on a spelling test from 3rd to 11th grade. Not one.

So I get to 10th grade English class and we have a new teacher who starts handing out spelling tests. I start getting them back marked -1, -2, etc etc.

So immediately I start piping up, "Excuse me, Ms. Thomas, this word isn't wrong."

"Oh yes it is."

"Uhmm, no it's not."

"It's wrong. Let's move along."

"Let's go to the dictionary and check it.'

"Nope, I know it's wrong."

"Ms. Thomas, do you remember the last time you got a spelling word wrong on a test?"

"It was quite some time ago."

"Well I remember the last time I did; it was October 1966."
(Gasps from the audience. This was taking place in Sept. 1973. You don't tug on Superman's cape.)

"Too bad your streak is over; let's move on."

"I don't think so; let's go to the dictionary." (Several other people -- really most -- in the class start chiming in that the word was marked incorrectly. They didn't want their grades screwed up either.)

"All right, if it will make you all happy, we will go to the dictionary, but I don't want to hear any crying when you're proven wrong."

"Don't worry, Ms. Thomas, we won't be."

She opens the dictionary. "OK, here we are. Oh shiii........"

 

I was a know-it-all asshole. Go figure.

 

I won my school's spelling bee as a 5th and 6th grader. I still have the dictionaries I got as a prize.

In 5th grade, I won the city spelling championship and the regional championship and finished ninth for the state of California. The teacher who tutored me and was a huge reason why I went that far, was later convicted of molesting the little brother of a friend of mine.

The girl who won, Rageshree Ramachandran, won the national spelling bee a few years later. We went to the same high school. She graduated in 2 1/2 years...

 

My eighth-grade history teacher handed our final exams back, and announced to the class that I scored a perfect 100.

She then, presumably in an attempt to use me as an example, asked me how long I studied for it. "About 15 minutes," I said. Which was true, because I had a photographic memory back then.

She said there was no way that's possible, and accused me of cheating on the exam. She made such a huge deal of it that my parents had to get involved to clear my name.

That bitch can get fucked.

 

I was exceptional at art. In the fall of '65 my second grade teacher, Mrs. Sterenberg, assigned everyone to draw, color and cut out leaves from construction paper to hang in the big-ass casement window panels. At the end of the assignment, there were still five or six empty panels, so Mrs. Sterenberg asked me to do an extra sheet of leaves to fill in the remaining windows. Offended at being asked to do more "work" than the other kids, I colored all of the leaves black. She sent me to the school psychologist and alerted my mom.