Kick Me (7 page)

“Think you can make it all the way this time?” chuckled Mrs. Handler. Oh, I can make it, all right. Just make sure you all have something to distract yourselves with because I might be up there a while. If it’s anything like it was last week, I might climb right up through the gym ceiling and take the rope with me.

I nodded and headed up the rope. At first, nothing was happening. I reached the point where the feeling overtook me last week but still there was nothing but the unpleasant realization that I was climbing a big, stupid rope in gym class. What had I done? Had I run through my life’s limit of rope feelings in the past week? Had my momentous discovery revealed itself to be my Frankenstein’s monster, turning on its master and taking all that is precious from him? I started to feel as if life had lost all purpose.

Fortunately, I found the fortitude to pull myself up one more time. There, at the ten-foot mark, I once again felt the stirrings that I had spent so much of the past week attempting to re-create. Another few pulls and the religious feeling returned. Boom boom boom.

I froze. Keep moving, I told myself. Stick to the plan.

But I can’t, came another voice. If I move, it’ll stop.

It’ll get better, I swear.

It’s already about as good as I can handle.

That’s what you think.

Okay, okay, I thought. I’ll do it. Muscles locked and tight, head spinning, throat clamped shut, I moved my hands up to pull. Unfortunately, my arms were Jell-o. My stomach suddenly seized into a cramp and my head and shoulders pitched backward. My legs flinched and contracted and the next thing I knew, I was plummeting downward. I heard a girl scream and Mrs. Handler yell “Stand back!” as I thudded heavily onto the mat.

“Maybe climbing the rope isn’t your cup of tea, Paul,” Mrs. Handler said sympathetically.

“No, I know I can do it,” I said, my voice trembling from the continuing contractions taking place in my body. “I just think I need to keep trying. Is it okay if I come back after school today?”

That afternoon on the playground, my friend Brian came over to me with urgent news. “Paul, I felt it! On the ropes today!”

“You did?” I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or not. I had been leading myself to believe that I was the Chosen, that “the rope feeling” was mine and mine alone, something that Mother Nature had given me to make up for the fact that I was so goofy and girls didn’t seem to really like me.

“Yeah. It was weird. It felt really good.”

I stared at him for a second, thinking. Should I let him in on the fruits of my bathtub research? All great scientists share their work in order to let others reproduce their results. And yet, was I hoping to have others benefit from my hard work or was I more interested in keeping this breakthrough for myself? Although I was convinced that I should probably just keep my mouth shut, the lure of bragging about my genius simply proved too strong to resist.

I leaned in close to him. “I figured out how to get that feeling without a rope,” I said in the same way a guy in prison might tell a fellow inmate about a tunnel he’d been digging for years with a teaspoon. “You can do it in the bathtub.”

Brian’s eyes went wide and he immediately wanted to know everything. And so I filled him in. He sat, rapt, taking in every detail. I told him about all the different techniques I had tried, the ones that had failed and the one that worked. I mentioned that shampoo bottles provided an interesting feeling because of the smoothness of their sides when used in conjunction with the soapy bathwater. I impressed upon Brian that while the inside of my thigh seemed to be the surface of choice, he should experiment, too, and see if he could find a surface that was even better. By the time I finished, I could tell I had planted a seed in Brian that would grow into the same overwhelming crop that I myself had harvested all week—that he might feel that force of nature that makes you run, not walk, home from school and head straight for the bathtub.

The next day, I noticed Brian giving me dirty looks as we passed in the halls before school started. We weren’t in the same class and so I didn’t see him at length until recess. As I sat on a parking block, avoiding any and all competitive activity, Brian walked over and sat down next to me.

“Thanks a lot,” he said angrily.

“Why? What happened?”

“I got my thing stuck in the shampoo bottle. My mom had to come in and take it off. She’s really mad at me now.”

I was flabbergasted. And then I was mad. Try to give a guy the keys to the city and all he does is open the door to the broom closet. “Why did you stick your thing
in
the bottle?”

“You told me to!”

“No, I didn’t. I said to rub it on the side.”

“Well, now my mom’s making me read the Bible. She says she’s even going to make me go to church camp.” Brian looked at the ground and shook his head.

I immediately felt mature. I knew I was clearly way ahead of my classmates when it came to feeling pleasure and figuring out the mysteries of the human body. I studied Brian as he sat there, staring at the asphalt, knowing that his quest for sexual gratification had led him to ruin, and I kind of felt sorry for him. I could tell that his humiliating episode last night had probably soured him on ever trying to re-create “the rope feeling” on his own again. And while I celebrated the fact that I was now in possession of the greatest morale-boosting activity of which I could ever conceive, I felt bad that Brian wouldn’t be able to attain the heights that I knew I would—many, many, many times—over the course of my life.

Oh, well. At least he didn’t tell his mom that I was the one who’d told him how to do it.

Brian stood up and started to walk away. After a few steps, he turned back and looked at me, a bit sheepishly. “And my mom said I’m not allowed to hang out with you anymore. And she says she wants your phone number so she can call your parents.”

Hello, church camp.

I WAS A POET AND, YES,
I
DID
KNOW IT

A
t some point in our lives we all want to be special. We all want to be that person who walks into a room and whom everyone immediately notices and says, “Hey, isn’t that so-and-so? I’m a huge fan of his.” And even though most of us know that the only real shot we have at achieving anything like this is through hard work and diligence, we all secretly dream that one day we’ll sit down at a piano and miraculously bang out “The Minute Waltz” or pick up a paintbrush and quickly lay down the sequel to the
Mona Lisa.
But it never happens that way. And that’s why most of our closets contain one abandoned saxophone or drawing kit or pair of tap dancing shoes. Because life’s just not that generous.

At least, it’s not supposed to be. And that’s why I was so surprised when one morning, when I was in the third grade, the gods looked down from on high and for some unknown reason decided to make me a poet.

It’s possibly the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. I awoke one day with a poem stuck in my head. But it wasn’t a poem I’d ever heard before. No, by some bizarre twist of neurological fate, the neurons and synapses in my brain had combined and interconnected during REM sleep and formed a fully written, ready-to-use poem that sat waiting for me in my frontal lobe. I woke up and there it was:

I’m a knight in shining armor

I’m the bravest man in town

I fight off dragons from the queens

I give kings back their crowns.

The only thing that bothers me

It gets me in the head

By the time I get my armor on

It’s time to go to bed.

Just like that. A humorous poem, delivered sight unseen to my third-grade brain. I didn’t know where it came from. I hadn’t watched any medieval shows or read any Arthurian books lately. In fact, I didn’t even
like
that kind of stuff. I searched my memory, trying to figure out if maybe it was a poem I’d heard on TV or on the radio or read in a book. But I hadn’t. No, for some unknown reason, a fully formed Round Table verse had just popped into my head and now it was mine.

I went to school that day bursting with pride over my poem from beyond. I wasn’t sure how best to share it with the world, but I knew that I wanted to impress Miss Patton with it. I’d always had the feeling that she thought I wasn’t very smart, especially since I consistently pulled up short during our times-tables races in her class. There was just something about the way she looked at me every day, a hint of annoyance on her face that said, “I wish you weren’t really here.” As a kid, you get used to people smiling at you and acting like they’re happy that you’re around. They’d always seem to go into overdrive when they spotted you standing with your parents, and their reactions could range from giving you a quarter to the antiquated gesture of pinching your cheeks. The latter didn’t happen often, but if you were ever brought before an old woman and heard the term “the Olde Country” used within a description of her, then the odds had it that you were in for a good ol’ fashioned, capillary-bursting cheek pinch. But not from Miss Patton. Even before I compared her to the fourth level of human evolution, she’d never seemed that impressed with me. But now I had a chance to change all that.

And so, around midmorning, while the class was reading an assignment, I took out my binder, wrote the poem down on a piece of loose-leaf paper, and went up to her desk.

“Miss Patton, I wrote a poem.”

“A poem?” she said. Miss Patton gave me a perplexed look, since she had neither requested a poem from me, nor had we ever even talked about poetry during class. She looked at the notebook paper and read my verse. Then, to my surprise, she laughed.

“Paul,” she said, looking at me with what I can only describe as utter amazement, “this is
very
good. When did you write this?”

Not wanting to sound like I hadn’t put any effort into it, I immediately embellished. “I wrote it last night.” Not truly a lie but enough to make it seem as if I hadn’t just dreamed the poem up with no thought process whatsoever. Which I had.

“Well, I am impressed.” And with this she stood up and got the class’s attention.

“Everybody, stop reading for a second and look up here. Paul Feig has written a poem and I would like him to read it to you.”

She handed me my notebook paper and gestured for me to step front and center. My heart raced. Much like a guest host heading to the spot marked with a star on the floor where Johnny Carson stood to deliver his monologues on
The Tonight Show,
I was being invited to stand in the spot where Miss Patton, the woman in charge of our third-grade education, stood daily. On top of this, Miss Patton was now smiling at me in the same way that fans smile at their favorite celebrities. Through eight simple metrical lines, hewn out of a night of random brain activity, I had accomplished what throughout the year I’d assumed to be impossible—I had turned Miss Patton into my groupie. I walked up to the spot of honor and faced the class.

They were all staring at me, unsure. They knew me, since I’d been in the same class with most of them since kindergarten, and a few of them I could even call my friends, but at the same time, they’d never heard the words
has written a poem
spoken in the vicinity of my name. So it was clear no one had any idea what to expect. For all they knew, I was going to recite some flowery tribute to my cat or my grandma. I looked down at the piece of paper, took a breath, and started to read.

“I’m a knight in shining armor / I’m the bravest man in town / I fight off dragons from the queens / I give kings back their crowns. . . .”

When I read the final line of the poem, everybody laughed. It wasn’t an uproarious laugh, the kind you could always get by pressing the heels of your hands against your mouth and blowing to create a fart sound, but it was a good, solid response. Miss Patton then stepped forward and had the class applaud for me. I couldn’t believe it. It was mind-boggling. When I went to bed the previous night, I was just Paul Feig, the kid who was trying to figure out how to get girls to like him. But thanks to a random act of unconscious nocturnal wordsmithery, I was now getting a round of applause from my peers. Something in my brain snapped. Like getting your first shot of heroin, I was now immediately hooked on the forced adoration of my classmates. And I was overjoyed knowing that Miss Patton now viewed me as not just another third grader, but as an artist.

I returned to my desk and Miss Patton started to talk to the class about poetry. She said that she had wanted to teach us some fundamentals but didn’t know if we were ready for it or not. But now that I, her eight-year-old poet laureate, had broken down the wall, she said that she was sure we could all handle it. And so she told the class that in the next two days, she wanted everyone else to write a poem, too.

When we were all leaving for home, Miss Patton called me over and told me how proud she was of me for doing something on my own. To her, the previous night I had decided to throw off the shackles of mindless television viewing, pull out a quill and parchment, and spend the evening indulging and exploring what was clearly a prodigious talent. “I wish that more students were like you,” she said. “And I hope you’ll keep pursuing this gift you seem to have.”

Now I had a gift! It was getting better and better. Miss Patton was putty in my hands. I had broken through into a whole new world, a world in which I was my teacher’s favorite student. I’d heard the term
teacher’s pet
bandied about derisively in the past and always thought it sounded like something a person should strive to avoid being. However, I was now starting to see the other side of it. Becoming the teacher’s pet could be a
good
thing. It could be the key to grade-school happiness. If I was her pet and she was going to start heaping praise upon me for the things I did, then my entire life would change for the better. I had to play this right. I had seen contests on the news where a kid would win the chance to push a shopping cart around a toy store for one minute and during that time anything the kid threw into the cart would be his or hers to keep. For free. I’d always been envious of the kids who got the chance to do that and was constantly outraged when they’d either dumbly fill their cart with a bunch of crappy cheap toys or else simply grab a Barbie’s Dreamhouse or boxed G.I. Joe Army Jeep and shove it into the cart, thus insuring they couldn’t fit anything else in there other than a few thin coloring books during their final fifty-five seconds of gratis shopping. I had always vowed that if I were to get that opportunity, I would figure out in advance the best toys to grab by making a preliminary trip to the store to calculate their weight, volume, and price. With a bit of planning, my shopping cart could be packed in such a way that the store would go out of business from lost profits. And this was how I knew I had to play my emotional shopping spree, courtesy of Miss Patton’s newfound respect. Maximum effort to ensure maximum returns.

That night I stayed in my bedroom, working diligently, as my head slowly began to expand. Miss Patton had asked me to write out my poem on a large sheet of poster board to hang in our classroom, so that she could refer to it while she taught my fellow students how to analyze verse. I figured she wanted it up as a visual aid that she could use to show the other kids what I had done so right in my poem and what they were surely going to have done so wrong in theirs. As I drew light pencil lines on the poster board in order to keep my lettering straight, I imagined the poems that my classmates would bring in. Probably childish verses about trees or birds or their parents. Inferior works artistically equivalent to the “roses are red, violets are blue” school of greeting card poesy. All quite earnest and populist, true, but could anybody possibly hope to achieve the depth that my poem had? Could my fellow students transport their audience back through the ages, letting their words and images amaze and amuse the listener with tales of mythical knights in chivalrous times as I had? Would they be able to consider themselves junior Chaucers with their clumsy rhymes and
Romper Room
verse? Of course not, I mused as I carefully wrote out my masterpiece with a black Bic Banana marking pen. Poetry was for the Chosen. And you didn’t choose poetry—poetry chose you. The best my peers could hope to achieve was to imitate my style and possibly scribble out some veiled homage to my masterpiece. I pitied them as I breathed in a nontoxic whiff of my Bic Banana.

The next day I arrived at school with my wall-sized poem. In addition to writing it out, I had also taken the time to draw pictures of a knight’s helmet, a horse, and the head of a damsel who looked a lot like a princess I’d seen in an old Bullwinkle cartoon. I’d had some trouble getting the poster board to school because it was an excessively breezy day and the large floppy piece of cardboard kept catching in the wind and flying away from me like a kite. I didn’t want it to bend and so I ended up pirouetting around the school yard with it in order to keep from creasing it against my body. I didn’t want any blemishes or imperfections on this placard to distract from my poem’s grandeur. When I got into class, Miss Patton smiled happily and took the poster board from me, pinning it up on the corkboard in the front of the class. It was the centerpiece of the board that was normally covered with flash cards and posters of the presidents, and I couldn’t have felt cooler.

During the course of the day, Miss Patton taught us all about the different forms of poetry, about meter and rhymes and even dipped into iambic pentameter. As she lectured, my attention was much more on the other kids in the class than on what she was teaching. First of all, I already knew what she was talking about. I mean, I didn’t know the terms by name or by their official definitions but, as was quite clear, I was a prodigy. I knew that all this technical stuff she was talking about was for the benefit of those without the gift. If you had to be spoon-fed the basics of poetry, it was only because the gods had not chosen you to receive such an immense capacity for greatness. A prepackaged set of rules was your only hope for scaling the heights of creativity that just seemed to be preprogrammed in the small minority of we, the gatekeepers of art. I watched my peers’ faces as Miss Patton lectured and saw looks of confusion at the concepts she was laying out before them. Occasionally, Miss Patton would throw me a look that said, “
You
know what I’m talking about, don’t you, my talented ward?” Oh, yes, Miss Patton, I thought.
I
know what you’re talking about, but heaven help these other poor saps who are being forced to perform in my wake. I’m sure that they, too, will one day discover they have some small talent in another area, modest though it may be. But what’s the point of having prodigies if they are a dime a dozen? No, the burden of enormous talent is heavy, but it is borne for the sake of humanity. My suffering was worth the price.

That night in my house, alone with my muse, I sat down to compose my next poem.

There are times when our brains protect us from traumatic and embarrassing past memories, in order that we may continue to live our day-to-day lives unfettered by the pain of remembrance. In the years since third grade, time has erased from my memory and my records the words I composed that night. I remember sitting at our kitchen counter with a pile of notebook paper, waiting for the inspiration to hit me. Words started coming into my head and I wrote them as I heard them, secure in the growing genius of each. The words were forming some kind of verse about a parade going through a town. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow and so simply gave in to my unconscious. Unlike my previous metered effort, my emphasis wasn’t on trying to be funny or clever or even making sense this time. I simply knew that if I was channeling the same source that delivered the “Knight in Shining Armor” poem, then these words had to be good.

Instead of giving me another a-b-a-b sequence of couplets, my otherworldly inspiration was now giving me an a-a-b-b little ditty. The only lines I can remember from the poem are the following: