All that soon came to an end. Every May, the kindergarten held a Letter Person Parade. The Letter People were balloons shaped like people designed to help us learn the alphabet. Each letter had a corresponding characteristic beginning with that letter. For example, Mr. M had a munching mouth. For the Letter Person Parade, each kid dressed up like a letter person of their choice and pranced around the grass outside the school.
Most kids chose to dress up as the first letter of their first name. I had the misfortune of being named Chris. The “C” in Mr. C stood for cotton candy. He was distinguished by the fact that he was the only Letter Person who could be described as pink and fluffy.
Completely oblivious, I decided I would dress up as Mr. C. It was only natural, after all. My mother and I spent the night before dyeing cotton and one of my sweatshirts pink and attaching a bit letter C to the front of my outfit. I skipped merrily into school, the very personification of femininity. I may as well have worn a dress. At least people had seen that before. My classmates had never seen anyone dressed like a fluffy pink cloud.
That day was significant because I received my first swirly, where the victim’s head is submerged in the toilet as it is being flushed. I received a few of these just before the big parade. My mother--who found my outfit hilarious--was disappointed to see that after all her hard work, I trudged around the field covered in soggy, dripping cotton with pink dye running down onto my khaki pants and sneakers. The beatings continued throughout the day and were often quite creative. Ms. A cornered me and pelted me with apples. One Mr. L licked several of his lollipops, stuck them to my hair, and then ripped chunks out of my scalp. Mr. T punched me several times in the mouth and adorned his costume with my bloody front teeth.
Luckily, kindergarteners are on the whole more mature and forgiving than preschoolers. Rather than becoming a victim of constant physical abuse, I was simply shunned from any and all social interaction. I tried to think of this only as a vacation and enjoyed my newfound spare time. With no friends to distract me over the summer, I learned how to whistle, play a few songs on the piano, and ride a real bike with training wheels.
But when I came back to school in September for first grade, I was determined to win my new classmates back. Luckily, most of the kids from my kindergarten class had other teachers and I used this to my advantage. I tried to tried to learn from the mistakes I made in kindergarten and only targeted a select few candidates for friendship. It worked and I soon was able to blend in to the first grade crowd.
Meanwhile, I struggled with my studies. Though I had near encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaurs and trains, I had trouble with everything else and no interest in improving. This frustrated teachers which frustrated me. I didn’t have good relationships with any of my early teachers. I got in weekly shouting matches with my second grade teacher. I made my third grade teacher so angry that she stole my coat and wouldn’t give it back. My fourth grade teacher was the worst. She gave me bad grades on my homework so I stopped doing my homework. She gave me bad grades on tests so I stopped taking tests. She kept me in from recess every day so I brought dodge balls into school in my backpack and threw them around the room all day. This inspired me to write a thinly-veiled story about an awful teacher for our mandatory Creativity Time. In retaliation, she put RAID in my sandwich one day at lunch and I was hospitalized for a month and a half. She remains in jail today.
The teacher who replaced her when she went to prison was wonderful. He was my doctor as well and he agreed to fill in for the rest of the year, only six weeks. Having known me personally for many years, he took a special interest in me. He instilled in me an enthusiasm for learning that I had never felt before. He nurtured me and I my reading, writing, and math all improved dramatically. Unfortunately, he did not last for the remainder of the year. It turns out he was a cokehead. He was discovered in his office one morning snorting lines off his desk while children sat outside in the waiting room. He was arrested for cocaine possession and imprisoned as well.
My parents were understandably shocked when they heard that the pediatrician we had all grown to love was a raging drug addict. In retrospect, this probably could have helped to explain why I had been misdiagnosed with ear infections on seven separate occasions and shed a new light on his sometimes-manic behavior. It seems he wasn’t so much fun-loving and good with kids as he was completely out of his mind.
