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  There was one exception to the Evil Teacher Club: Mr. Cooper, the science teacher.

  That man could teach.

  Granted, he was nothing to look at. He was pencil thin, with a shocking mat of uncontrollable, frizzly gray hair that leapt out every which way. Very Einsteinish. He’d comb it fastidiously during class, which only made matters worse.

  “Left your finger in the light socket again?” Ashley asked him.

  He laughed and laughed.

  You could say crap like that to Mr. Cooper. He acted like a human being.

  Mr. Cooper worshiped all things science. While most of the other teachers seemed content just to torture us and make our lives as miserable as possible, Mr. Cooper cared. He actually wanted us to learn.

  He was in love with what he taught. His body, all 100 pounds of it, would start to twitch and tremble at the mere mention of some exotic marsupial in New Zealand or a newly discovered orchid in Vietnam. If you correctly defined his “science word of the day,” he’d leap out of his seat, shout “Hallelujah!” or “Praise the Lord!” and flap his hands in the air, twirl and wiggle his way up to you, and give you a high five. He’d shout and perspire and pace and then stop dead in his tracks in the middle of the classroom, close his eyes and go into a semi-trance while he quoted Rachel Carson or John Muir or Aldo Leopold or some other long-dead environmentalist as if he were reciting the Sermon on the Mount.

  Mr. Cooper would have us make up songs about endangered species. Ashley and I did this lame rap on the black rhinoceros and from his reaction you’d have thought we’d saved the world.

  “Again!” he cried, clapping his hands and bouncing up and down like a four-year-old. “Sing it again!”

  Mr. Cooper would sometimes forget that we were sophomores and juniors with a few slacker seniors thrown in and he’d treat us like first graders, but no one seemed to mind.

  “Criss-cross applesauce!” he’d shout when one of us got out of our seats to poke or prod or pinch the kid sitting in the next seat over. It was usually Peter Rosnick or Charley Robinson or Michael Dabbs, ADHD boys incapable of sitting still for more than forty-five seconds. Boys, frankly, who should still be back in the first grade. Criss-cross applesauce meant sit the hell down, cross your arms and your legs, keep to yourself and stop annoying other people. The boys would hang their heads, grin, shuffle back to their chairs, cross their arms and their legs, and lamely try to keep still for another minute or two.

  Other teachers would scream and curse and scream some more. Not Mr. Cooper. All Mr. Cooper had to do was say “criss-cross.”

  In the middle of lab, when he wanted our attention he’d climb on the top of his desk, clap his hands three times, and shout, “One-two-three—eyes on me!”

  We were all supposed to stop what we were doing, clap our hands twice, and shout back to him, “One-two—eyes on you!” And then make circles with our fingers and put them over our eyes like we were staring out of binoculars. Pretty lame, but it always seemed to work.

  True story:

  Once, in the middle of the frog dissection lab, Ashley forgot she was still holding the poker she had her poor frog’s ovaries stuck onto when Mr.Cooper yelled, “One-two-three!” Ashley clapped her hands and the ovaries went flying clear across the room and nailed one of the sweeter sophomore boys, splat, right between his eyes. Perfect shot!

  “Ashley!” the boy cried out, wiping off the frog eggs dripping down his goggles. “You’ve lost your female thingy!”

  Poor Ashley. She turned five thousand shades of red. Redder than the strawberry poison-dart frog from Costa Rica that Mr. Cooper had only minutes before shown us a Power Point picture of. Redder than the Vidal Sassoon Pro Series Vibrant Red Hair Color dye that Ashley had secretly dumped into her hair in the back of Walmart when we were in the seventh grade, mistaking it for the Vidal Sassoon Pro Series Dark Cool Blonde Color dye she had meant to use. So red that if she blushed any harder I was afraid her face would fall off.

  When Mr. Cooper was on one of his tirades, pacing back and forth, waxing eloquently about coral reefs or laughing hyenas or some such natural wonder, he would comb and recomb his hair in hyperspeed fast motion. He’d comb his hair and then he’d take out one of those disposable flossers and floss his teeth. Seriously. Right in front of the class. Combing and then flossing and all the while talking and gesticulating wildly and pacing back and forth.

  Weird or what?

  “I’d like to play poker against that man!” Ashley said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Mr. Cooper. Think of the money you could make. Any time he had a decent poker hand he’d take out the comb and the flosser. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. You’d be able to read him like a book. I could retire on my winnings!”

  One of Ashley’s major goals in life was to make it big and retire early. Like at seventeen. Although something told me that selling Greenfield High School mascot T-shirts and playing Texas hold ’em with Mr. Cooper wasn’t exactly going to do it.

  There was another awesome thing about Mr. Cooper: he swore in class. He’d call politicians “bastards” and “sons of bitches.” If he didn’t like our homework he’d call it “a piece of shit.”

  Every so often a student’s parents would get their panties in a wad and go bitching to the principal about his ungodly language and demand that Mr. Cooper learn to hold his tongue.

  “They can go to hell!” we heard Mr. Cooper yell to the principal following one parental complaint.

  We liked Mr. Cooper. We liked him a lot. We liked him so much that Ashley and I would surf the ’Net in order to bring him late-breaking news of weird science, just to witness his orgasmic reaction. Doing something like that for other teachers was unimaginable.

  “Mr. Cooper!” Ashley yelled from the back of the classroom. “Do you know army ants make nests out of their own bodies?”

  Mr. Cooper lurched spastically, spilled his pile of papers onto the floor, and immediately launched into a spirited monologue on the wonder of colonial insects.

  I started sophomore year frankly not giving a goat’s turd about science. I had always thought of science as boring as hell, totally devoid of meaning.

  What did it have to do with my life? Nothing, as far as I could tell. I couldn’t care less about the subject.

  And then came Mr. Cooper, or Coop as we called him behind his back.

  He was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading us unsuspecting kids from the “science sucks” side of town, never to return. He was like the minister they brought in for the revivals at the Souls’ Haven Evangelical Church, but instead of the word of God he filled us up with the gospel of nature and the religion of science.

  Even some of the brain-dead back-row boys whose fathers cooked crystal meth and beat the crap out of them would stay awake and pay attention in class and occasionally, just occasionally, go so far as to even ask a question.

  “He’s like a rock star,” Ashley said about Coop. “A god.”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “I thought that was us?”

  “Oh yeah,” Ashley said. “Whoops!”

  5

  My father is obsessed with the American Civil War, or as some of the folks down here call it, the War of Northern Aggression. Bizarre as it seems, there are lots of folks down here who still seem to be fighting it.

  Bert Stanmere, one of the classic senior stupids and a real piece of work, has a Confederate flag on the antennae of his truck that he almost ran us over with and a bumper sticker with the catchy slogan “Hear My Rebel Yell!” Whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean. Once, when we were leaving school through the parking lot, Ashley flicked his flag with her middle finger. We didn’t see him sitting in the front seat smoking cigarettes with his equally stupid sidekick, Michael Mead.

  “Hey!” he yelled, opening the door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I just about jumped out of my skin, I was shaking so hard. Bert Stanmere, with his tatt
oos and his Mohawk, was one scary dude. A total One on the guy scale, aka Loser, but a hulky, bulky, frightening Loser.

  Before I could apologize and whisk us off to safety, Ashley had to go and open her big mouth.

  “Hey!” she yelled back, standing her ground, staring him down, one hand on her hip and the other giving yet another middle-fingered flick to his flag. “Why don’t you get the hell over it? The North won the war. Deal with it, asshole!”

  Then we ran like the mine was about to collapse.

  “One of these days you’re going to get us killed, Ash!” I said, practically peeing my pants.

  “Until then,” Ashley yelled back, “keep on running!”

  Anyway, back to my father. He is an American history professor at the community college in Charleston and knew more about the Civil War than any other man living or dead. Ask him about something that was happening in 2015 and he was totally clueless. Ask him about something that happened in 1864 and he knew every intimate detail down to the color of the buttons on a Union colonel’s britches.

  With no wife to rein him in, our “vacations” are endless explorations of Civil War battlefields. It wasn’t until I was about ten that I realized there were even other vacation destination possibilities. I had just assumed that all kids did what we did, and I felt totally ripped off when I found out that those lucky-duckies with enough money went to places like Six Flags or Disney World or the beach or someplace sweet like that.

  Last summer, for the millionth time, we were being dragged around the battlefield at Bull Run when my father leapt onto a cannon.

  “This is sacred ground!” he cried out.

  “Get down, Dad!” Britt and I pleaded. “Please! Get off the cannon!”

  It was humiliating. Beyond embarrassing. Tourists looked at him like he was a crazy man and backed away. Others thought he was part of the show and took pictures. One kid even asked him for his autograph.

  The really pathetic part was that this was not an unusual occurrence. As soon as we get off the main road and turn the corner into yet another Civil War battlefield in Virginia or Tennessee or Pennsylvania or whatever state we’re in, my father goes off into one of his trances. He leaves the present and becomes part of the past. To him, it isn’t 2015. It really isn’t. It’s the 1860s and the height of the American Civil War.

  “Charge!” my father hollers, stopping the car in the middle of the road and leaping over a stone wall, imaginary rifle in his hand and fury in his eyes. Britt and I have to beg some anxious park ranger to cut my father a little bit of slack and not drag him away to the loony bin.

  Fortunately (or not), after so many repeat performances in the same battlefields, the park personnel have gotten to know him. Some are amused by his antics, some annoyed, but as long as he doesn’t harm anyone they let him go off and do his thing, no matter how clinically insane it seems to be. I could tell they felt sorry for Britt and me.

  “Where’s your mom?” a park ranger once asked us while we were touring the battlefield in Petersburg, Virginia, and my father was screaming obscenities at General Burnside for totally botching the Battle of the Crater during the siege of 1864. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable hanging out with her?”

  I gave the ranger the evil eye.

  “My mommy is dead!” Britt said, taking her thumb out of her mouth while still holding tightly to Mister Wiggins, her stuffed bunny. She was five at the time.

  That shut him up.

  The most embarrassing moment of my life happened at Gettysburg when I was thirteen. We were on a pilgrimage to that battlefield and my father was pacing back and forth, staring out over the distant cornfield at the Triangle, past the split-rail fences to the far line of distant woods, waiting for the assault of General Pickett and his men. It was a hot August afternoon in 2012, but in my father’s head it was the early morning of July 3, 1863—the last day of the battle of Gettysburg, the “High-Water Mark of the Confederacy,” the beginning of the end for the South.

  Joy of all joys, at that very moment I got my period for the first time.

  I was standing there, anxiously watching my father, hoping he didn’t do anything too embarrassing, when suddenly I looked down and my white shorts were stained a brownish red.

  “Aiieee!” I screamed in total panic. “I’m bleeding!”

  My father, in a frenzy, came running up, took one look at me, and went off the deep end.

  “You’ve been shot!” he cried, scooping me into his arms. “My daughter’s been shot! The attack is on! The Confederates are advancing! Fall back, you fools!” he yelled to a crowd of elderly tourists that had just gotten off a park bus. “Fall back!”

  Wild-eyed and practically frothing at the mouth, my father plowed into them, knocking some blue-haired woman with a walker flat on her ass.

  It was total mayhem. The old folk thought it was a terrorist attack or something. They were practically climbing over each other, frantically trying to get back on the effin bus. I was wailing, “I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding!” My father was shouting, “Fall back! Fall back! Bring up the 69th Regiment! Give ’em hell, boys!” Poor Britt had been grabbed by the tour guide and whisked onto the bus for safety.

  In the nick of time, a park ranger (female, thank God) came running up and straightened out the whole ridiculous mess. She brought me back to park headquarters, gave me a five-minute lesson on feminine hygiene, hooked me up with a couple of pads and a pair of shorts from the lost-and-found, and returned me to my father, who, somewhat chagrined and at least temporarily back in the present, was still apologizing to the blue-hair he had bowled over.

  “My daughter is menstruating!” he proudly announced to the entire bus. “For the first time! Right here at Gettysburg! Right here at the pivotal point of one of the greatest battles ever fought. Who would have thought?”

  The whole tour bus erupted into applause.

  If I could have crawled under a rock and died right then and there amongst the corpses of the 50,000 Yankees and Rebels, I would have gladly done it.

  6

  Lots of fathers have hobbies. They hunt. They fish. They go to football games.

  Not my father.

  Embarrassing as it is, my father has gone beyond simply dragging us to Civil War battlefields to becoming a full-fledged American Civil War reenactor. That means he dresses up as a Confederate brigadier general and plays Civil War make-believe on weekends. It’s a hobby for history buffs with issues.

  Sad. Pathetic. But, unfortunately, true.

  It’s sort of like a cult. There should be laws against it.

  I used to hate with a passion being dragged to battle reenactments with my father. Sometimes it seemed like every damn weekend we were off fighting the Civil War. I’d be bored to tears, with my only amusement being tormenting Britt and making her cry and fighting with her like Yanks and Rebels.

  Once I pissed Britt off so much that she sprinted through the field of battle to tell on me to my father. Dodging soldiers in the middle of an intense Confederate charge she clung to my father, whimpering and sniffling and droning on and on about what a meanie I was.

  “Daddy!” Britt whined. “Cyndie told me I’ll never get boobs!”

  “Have you no decency!” my father shouted back, not to Britt but to the attacking Union infantryman, expertly blocking the fake bayonet thrust with his officer’s broad sword.

  “Have you lost any shred of compassion!” he screamed again, his eyes shooting sparks, his voice booming even louder than the artillery fire from the opposite ridge.

  “Have you no humanity? There are civilians on the field! For the love of God, man! Civilians!”

  The Union soldier, lying on the ground with my father’s officer boot planted firmly on his chest, burst out laughing.

  I thought it pretty funny myself, but evidently my father and Britt did not.

  •

  And then, just like that, everything changed.

  Everything.

  It was the third weekend
in September. A bright beautiful West Virginia beginning-of-fall day. There I was stuck at a Civil War reenactment at the Trans-Allegheny Haunted Lunatic Asylum. Yup. You heard that right. A Civil War reenactment at a historic 1900s lunatic asylum that is supposedly haunted. I am seriously not making this crap up.

  It’s a major living-history event, the highlight of West Virginians’ Civil War reenactment year, the day reenactors have circled in red on their Civil War calendar and salivated over for months. There are tents and bayonet drills and storytelling and cooking demonstrations and a fashion show and old-time music and a mock battle and all kinds of crap like that.

  Like I said, these people are obsessed.

  Whenever I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, to these moronic events I either waste my time picking on Britt or I hide away where no one can see me obsessively texting Ashley and reading trash magazines and eating fattening crap food and pretending that I have nothing to do with the modern-day lunatics and their clinically insane antics.

  But, for some crazy, unfathomable reason, for that one event, on that one day, I had succumbed to intense pressure and let myself be persuaded by Auntie Sadie to actually partake in the madness.

  I was cursed with a family of reenactors, Auntie Sadie having fallen under their evil cult spell as well. Not as a soldier, though she could have kicked ass at that one. The Union lines wouldn’t stand a chance with Auntie Sadie marching toward them. At the mere sight of her hulk they’d have broken ranks, reenactment or no reenactment, and bolted screaming for the hills.

  Auntie Sadie played the part of a Civil War nurse in a frontline operating room. She had gone so far as to take a ten-week class on Civil War medicine.

  The lengths people went for this crap!