Wednesday, November 25, 2015

The Award

I'm not sure if it still exists today, but my elementary and middle schools (first Mountain Gap, then Challenger) had an advanced academics program called SPACE*. The so-called gifted kids in the program spent about a fifth of their class time with special teachers doing fun and educational projects while learning at an accelerated rate. In high school, these students would be automatic candidates for advanced placement classes, earning college credit before even stepping foot on a university campus.

I didn't actually know any of this stuff when my 2nd grade teacher recommended that I be tested to see if I qualified for SPACE. But like much of my adult life, I was eager to be accepted regardless of the consequences. There's something extremely attractive about exclusivity. However, the test proved to be too difficult and my teacher notified my mother that I wasn't right for the program. This was a huge disappointment at the time, though my mom consoled me with the fact that the recommendation itself was an intrinsic honor.

The next year, I was recommended by another teacher to take the 3rd grade version of the test. The ideas behind the questions and challenges were basically the same: spacial reasoning, problem solving, etc. Even though this was decades ago, I can still remember one puzzle from it now, and only because I'm certain that I got it wrong. I was asked to piece together silhouetted sections of a cardboard horse in a set amount of time, but I placed a part of its body where the horse's neck should have gone. Poor little pony. Regardless, I apparently did better than I had the first time and was given the SPACE seal of approval, which was a note to my teacher and a phone call to my mom. Soon after that, I was ushered into a gleaming world of magic and wonder.

Well, not exactly.

Twice a week, the other SPACE kids and I would go to a classroom with a special teacher and spend the full second part of the day there. The teacher, Mrs. K, was a fun and slightly eccentric woman in her thirties. She kept us busy for much of the time with logic problems, the kind where you have to figure out what fictional characters did and had based on given clues. For instance one of the clues might be "Bobby hates sledding and one of the girls brought a baseball glove." So, then we'd go to the grid and mark an X at the cross section of "Bobby" and "sledding", along with all of the boys and "baseball glove". You can imagine how quickly the charm of these little gems faded.

But there was one large, month-long project that I'll never forget. One day Mrs. K announced to the class that we'd be divided into teams and tasked with building model bridges out of toothpicks. Even the thought of it now fills me with an existential dread. Mrs. K told us that each team would present their model after four weeks and she would judge the results based on certain qualities, the most important naturally being how much weight the bridges could carry. But she hinted that other attributes like best design and most creative features would also be considered. It sounded like fun at the time and, more importantly, a long break from the world of stupid logic problems.

I was placed in a normal team (that qualifier, "normal", will make sense soon) and we began talking about ideas for structure and the benefits of glue over other binding agents, such as Scotch tape or bubble gum. I wasn't as much interested in these conversations as I was interested in doodling on graph paper and making jokes, which Mrs. K took notice of pretty quickly. This lack of focus continued and, at the end of the second week, I found myself heading up a new team. Mrs. K had rounded up all of the "dead weight kids" from each team, put us all in a group, and named me their leader.

I was a little offended to be singled out as a shiftless layabout at first, but I quickly embraced my role as king of the too-cool-for-bridges squad and announced to my lazy cohorts, Mrs. K, and all of the normal teams that we would continue goofing off. I reasoned that we'd only need a couple of days at most to build the toothpick bridges. After all, these weren't real bridges and no lives were at risk if our bridge was the worst. And yes, our team was destined to lose by the very nature of our origin story - this inherent limitation was not lost on me at the time.

As the following days and weeks went by, Mrs. K would occasionally check in on my group's progress. Having nothing to show in terms of actual work, I would shield from her whatever funny cartoon I was working on and report that we were still in the planning stage, but that everything was perfectly on schedule. Then she'd walk off and I would nervously look around the room to the normal teams, all of them hard at work on mostly-completed, perfect little toothpick bridges. Then I'd shrug and go back to my hilarious doodles.

Reality set in on the day before the competition. I'd practically trained the rest of my team to blow off any notion of work, so I found myself alone on an island of panic. I quickly learned that toothpicks are a tricky building material and my very rudimentary sketch of a bridge was a poor blueprint. I spent the last hours of class time in failure mode, but I held my brave smile anytime Mrs. K walked by with her left eyebrow arched. I told her that I'd be finishing the model myself at home that night.

I don't remember much from that evening. I probably begged my mom and sister for help, but I think I was left to go at it solo, one glue-drenched toothpick at a time. I stayed up past my bedtime constructing the world's worst model bridge. It was the kind of work that's both sloppy and slow, done neither fast nor correctly. At the end of the night, I sat back and marveled at the slight, precarious embodiment of procrastination that I had created. It couldn't support an ant. Right now you might be thinking two things: 1) that building a bridge out of toothpicks doesn't sound so hard (you're wrong and probably not a nine-year-old kid), and 2) that my bridge probably wasn't as bad as I'm describing it (you're right - it was much worse).

The next day's grand finale competition went about as well as anybody could have expected. Mrs. K elected my team to go first, just to get us out of the way, really. She added a series of floppy disks suspended by string to test the strength of the bridge and, surprisingly, my sad model didn't break or fall apart. It just kind of leaned in until it touched its cardboard base...and stayed leaned in once Mrs. K removed the weights. Regardless, I counted the weak demonstration as a major victory, though any bravado that I might have exhibited that day was there purely to mask embarrassment. I'll spare you the details of the awesome designs and constructions that the other teams presented, as their victory is not what this story is about.

After each of the bridges was tested and judged, Mrs. K began handing out awards. They were certificates that she had created and printed out herself, each with 1980's-era clip art and titles such as "Strongest Design" and "Best Teamwork". I clapped along with the others, occasionally pretending to be shocked when we failed to win a category. After all of the awards had been handed out, Mrs. K gave a short speech about the importance of leadership. I sunk in my chair, thinking that the hammer would surely fall my way once the moral of the story kicked in.

She looked at me and smiled; I cringed. Then Mrs. K surprised me. She told everyone that I had shown a special quality in leadership and that I deserved a special award for what I had done. Her smile grew as she handed me - not my group, but just me - a certificate with my name on it. The picture displayed a man treading water, so that only his head was visible. Surrounding him, fins peaked through the surface of the water, alluding to the deadly sharks circling him below. Atop the certificate read, "Coolness Under Pressure". It was my very own award, and believe me when I tell you that I earned it.


* For the life of me, I can't remember what the SPACE acronym stood for. I've tried searching for mentions of it online to no avail, which leads me to believe that it was a local program for Huntsville, AL. It makes perfect sense that the powers-that-were would choose a term to reflect our civic Rocket City, USA identity. However, the fact that I also couldn't remember what SPACE stood for when I was still in the program tells me that I probably wasn't the best candidate for it.


Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Counterfeit Captivity

Kirby Bresling had almost served his first year at Belew Correctional before he pieced together that he wasn't being held in a real prison. His first hint was that he hadn't received any visitors since he'd arrived, nor did any of his phone calls ever reach friends or family. The guards, wearing their mismatched uniforms - perhaps another clue that the prison wasn't official - would tell Kirby that nobody loved a convict and that he should just stop thinking about the outside world. The other 27 inmates at Belew seemed to have accepted this sad philosophy, though Kirby never stopped thinking that the outside world cared...and also that 28 total inmates was a shockingly low population for a prison.

Meals consisted of either name brand microwaveable dinners or takeout food from one of the neighboring town's many chain restaurants. On holidays, the prisoners were treated to home-cooked meals courtesy of the warden's wife, Erika Eleniak of Baywatch fame. However, Kirby detected a certain ingredient in everything they were served, regardless of the meal's origin. Mozzarella Geoff, a large inmate known for his love of stuffed crust pizza, told Kirby that the kitchen staff added elderberry to every food item so that specially-bred dogs could easily locate convicts if they tried to escape.

Escape. The word kept circling in Kirby's mind. The prison's many oddities, coupled with the fact that he hadn't committed a crime or faced any sort of trial, convinced Kirby that he needed to escape if he was ever going to breathe free air again. He asked around and was told to seek the help of Greater Than James, a medium-sized inmate known for his love of comparison symbols. Greater Than James told Kirby that he'd need to hide out for a few weeks in one of the many unused cell blocks, staying out of sight there until any search parties or "find 'em soirees" would pass. He'd also need to avoid any food laced with elderberry, since the dog kennel was right next to the shortest fence in the prison yard. If Kirby could pull this off, Greater Than James assured him, he'd get his real chance to leave Belew Correctional for good.

And, well, that's what Kirby did.

After the final search had come back empty-handed, the dogs' heads lowered in shameful defeat, Kirby waited until prisoner nap time and took off on foot. He crawled right past three guards who were playing poker with some of the we're-not-sleepy inmates. Avoiding the dog kennel completely (even though he'd heard that one of the females had just had puppies), Kirby scaled the second tallest fence surrounding the fake prison and he skipped off into the late evening. Unfortunately, skipping caused him to twist an ankle so he limped the rest of the way to town, making it to a bus stop just in time to catch a bus without having to wait another ten minutes for the next one. He took the bus all the way to the end of its line in north Cincinnati, where he stole a car and drove it to his home in nearby Columbus.

In the years that followed, Kirby anonymously stayed in touch with his friends still held in counterfeit captivity through social media and disguised personal visits. He would regale them with tales of his life in the free world, which they would pretend to be impressed to hear about. Kirby also became a fan of Baywatch re-runs, and had to resist the urge to send fan letters to the warden's wife. And even though it wasn't something he ever would have imagined that he'd do in freedom back in the days when he was still holed up at Belew Correctional, Kirby added elderberry to every meal that he ate for the rest of his life.


Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Roller Coaster

Clyde awoke at dawn and went to the refrigerator. He felt compelled to check on a turkey sandwich that he had made the previous night. Due to the elongated surface area of the bread he had bought the week before, the sandwich was very large, too big to fit into one Ziploc bag. Clyde had been forced to seal the two halves separately.

Sitting side-by-side on the top shelf, Clyde saw that both halves were still sealed in their separate zipper storage baggies, but only one half of the sandwich had been preserved. The other half, the part laying on the right-hand side of the shelf, had visibly spoiled overnight. He began to think of what possible variables could have caused the strange inconsistency when he heard Gresham and Nell take their posts at the roller coaster next door.

"Hey, Nell!" Gresham called out to the tall, surly girl across the platform. "What'd you get into last night? I heard you let Shawn Decker get to home plate." Gresham wheezed out a harsh laugh as he crossed his thin, pale arms. He was wearing another punk-looking, sleeveless shirt. Clyde had never heard of anybody named Gresham before, but knew his name from overhearing many conversations between the two college dropouts during their daily shifts at the roller coaster.

Nell lowered her sunglasses and extended a middle finger in Gresham's direction. Still holding it up, she walked over to a large, lectern-sized control panel and pressed the offending finger onto a red button. Grinding clicks and mechanical groans sounded as the roller coaster roared to life. Nell flipped her hair from one side of her head to the other. Clyde had observed that, on weekends, she liked to dye it dark red and spike it up, Mohawk-style. However, it hung in a pinkish blonde, limp cascade on this Tuesday morning, the red not entirely washed out from the previous weekend.

Clyde stared at the vulgar young people through his kitchen window and thought back to the days when the lot next to his house was nothing more than a pile of wreckage. He missed the chirping of birds and the gentle spraying sounds of lawn sprinklers the most. All of his neighbors had moved away once they heard that a single-standing roller coaster would take the place of the demolished Blockbuster Video, but Clyde had opted to stick around and see just how bad it would be before deciding if he would leave or not.

Three short months later, he had to admit that it was pretty bad. The kinetic vibrations from the coaster's first large drop tended to rattle Clyde's wine glasses and often knocked picture frames off of the walls. Also, the loop-the-loop was right next to his bedroom, so the screams of elated passengers would keep him up until the roller coaster closed for the night, usually around midnight.

Taking a deep breath, Clyde lifted the window and called out to the lone-ride carnival employees.

"Morning, gang!" he called to them in his most chipper voice. The ornery teens glared up at him. Clyde cleared his throat. "Uh, yeah. Hi. I'm not sure if you got my letter last week, but would it be possible for you to ask your guests to not litter or, you know, urinate upon my lawn?"

"I'm sorry?" Nell asked him, cupping her ear. She was standing further away from his house than Gresham, but Clyde suspected that she had heard him just fine.

"It's just...the noise is bad enough, but the litter and, you know, urine smell is just getting intolerable."

Nell locked eyes with Clyde and began to walk toward his kitchen window. One of the long roller coaster trains rushed along the rails, grinding to a halt in the platform's passenger loading station. Without stopping or even looking down, Nell skipped up onto one of the cars and glided across it, glided as if it had been there for her all along. She pushed by Gresham, passing by him without taking her eyes off of Clyde. She then stopped and rested her forearms on the platform's railing, which stood less than three feet away from Clyde's window.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you," she said to Clyde. Her voice was low and sexy. Clyde knew it wasn't genuine, but it gave him a chill all the same. She batted her eyes. "Is there some sort of problem, Clyde Brinkman?"

"Well, it's just..." Clyde looked to Gresham, who now was wearing a merciless smirk across his pimply face. The punk had thrown his arms around a metal rod that was resting on his shoulders and Clyde could see reddish underarm hair sprouting from the sleeveless section of his shirt. Nell reached over the railing and grabbed Clyde by the chin, forcing his lips into a sloppy pucker. He sputtered a bit and finally said, "No, it's just...I was just saying 'good morning'."

Nell leaned in close to Clyde, close enough so that he could smell her passion fruit lip gloss. "Well, good morning, neighbor." She quickly released his chin and smacked his forehead hard, pushing him back into his kitchen a bit. Gresham howled with laughter as Nell sauntered back to her post at the control panel.

From over a block away, Clyde could hear the first wave of thrill seekers arriving. Just like any other day, their yells and cries would attempt to dominate the the noise of the roller coaster, eventually settling for second place. A deafeningly close second place.

"Time for a test run," Nell announced. Gresham hopped into the first car of the train as Nell started the ride. As the roller coaster rose up into meet its first summit, Gresham pumped both of his middle fingers into the air and sneered at the world. Clyde could only stand and watch.

Flashing a smile at their reluctant voyeur, Nell called out, "Let us know if you ever want a ride, Clyde!" She then laughed at the rhyme as though it was the funniest thing she'd ever said or heard.

Clyde closed the window, along with the blinds. He backed up into the darkness of his kitchen, listening to the swooshing noise of the roller coaster outside. His fists clenched, he walked back to the refrigerator and peered into it again. Clyde saw that one half of the sandwich was still good and the other was still bad. However, the spoiled one, its elongated bread covered in a thin layer of blue-green mold, was now on the left-hand side.

"How about that," he said to himself, loud enough so that he could hear his voice over the noise of the roller coaster next door.