oey
wasn’t a killer. A moron, yes. But a psychotic madman? Ha.
No way. But you couldn’t convince the students and parents
of Pleasant, Missouri.
On Sundays, most people went to church so they could learn things
like never questioning God and how to ignore May Keenan’s
singing over the choir. Joey didn’t go to church, so one
Sunday he went to the woods. He brought his rifle with him, and
he blasted beer cans he had emptied the night before. When he
ran out of cans, he shot at tree limbs, and then he lusted for
blood. Behind Joey, the bushes rustled. A bunny hopped towards
him.
Joey spun around, quick as a Flash, and the .22’s barrel
landed in the bunny’s face. The bunny’s nose wrinkled.
His whiskers twitched. He nibbled at the end of the barrel.
He concluded it wasn’t a carrot.
“Aww,” Joey muttered, his heart melting. “That
is so cute.” Joey had never seen a real bunny before, and
he didn’t know he was allergic to them.
Joey sneezed, and his fingers twitched. Ka-boom! The sound bounced
off the trees and echoed for three seconds. The bullet ripped
through the bunny, and the bunny wasn’t as cute when it
resembled strawberry frappe flying through the air.
“Well, damn,” Joey muttered. Joey hadn’t meant
to do it and felt rather bad having destroyed something so innocent.
But Joey was a male, and males of Joey’s species were discouraged
from feeling sympathy because it made other males think they had
small wieners. And besides, the bunny had exploded like an M80.
Joey chuckled. That had been pretty cool.
See, Joey’s bunny had gastrointestinal problems. Since
rabbit society had not developed antacid tablets, Joey’s
bunny had to wander about the forest gassy, and methane built
up in its intestines. The bunny was basically a fuzzy, hopping
bomb. All it needed was a small spark, and it would explode violently,
making a huge mess of fur and guts nobody would bother cleaning.
The next day, Joey went to school. He didn’t want to,
but his government had passed laws saying everyone his age must.
He never had a say in those laws and usually tried to skip school,
but he knew he wouldn’t get away with it this time. When
class started, he thought about the bunny. Then the middle-class
Caucasian man who ran the school called Joey to the office. This
man was called the principal. He wanted to talk with Joey. Joey
had been late, and there were no spaces left in the parking lot
except on the front row. The front row was reserved exclusively
for the teachers and administrators of the school, and students
were forbidden to park there. The principal explained, quite condescendingly,
that Joey’s car had called immediate attention to itself.
Of course it had. Most of the teachers drove nice vehicles that
guzzled fossilized dinosaurs. Joey’s car was falling apart,
and he called it his F.P.O.S. That was an acronym for “darn
piece of poop.” Well, somebody had looked inside the “darn
piece of poop.”
In Joey’s backseat, there was the rifle, a few shells,
and the bloody T-shirt he had taken off because he perspired a
lot. Most schools had always had a rule against bringing guns.
However, years before, some kids miles away brought several guns
to school. Then the kids used the guns on their classmates, turning
the classmates into strawberry frappe just like Joey’s bunny.
People across the country were very upset by it and called it
a great tragedy. They were so upset they couldn’t stop watching
the footage on their televisions and cried with mouths full of
microwavable burritos and warm beer.
Even though the incident happened miles away, Joey’s school
decided it should never happen there. So the school adopted a
policy called “Zero Tolerance” which later became
the title of a mediocre X-Men storyline. The policy basically
meant that no matter how much Joey pleaded, no matter how he explained
that it was an accident, it didn’t matter. He was still
in a ton of trouble.
Joey was in quite a bit of F.S.
The principal expelled him, and the police escorted him from
the building. The police were men in blue uniforms. They didn’t
get in trouble for carrying guns into the school because they
had the kind that made people safer.
Joey’s expulsion was the headline of the local paper,
cleverly titled The Daily Paper. It was a clever title
because the paper was not actually daily; it wasn’t published
Saturday or Monday. And the rest of the week, it wasn’t
published well. So while the article was factually accurate, most
people didn’t bother trudging through the swamp of commas,
hyphens, and misplaced modifiers. But they heard the story nonetheless.
Or at least they heard versions of the story.
Everybody told the story. And each person added his or her twist.
In some versions, Joey had assault rifles. In others, he had a
trench coat full of knives. In one version of the story, he had
a samurai sword. One particularly jackassy individual said Joey
had a rocket launcher in his pants.
It didn’t take long for the story to become quite the
epic. People wanted to know the back-story, and since there wasn’t
one, they had to create it. Joey had been a disgruntled kid, angry
with all the other kids for being pretty and not having man boobs.
So he thirsted for revenge. He stayed up late, putting kittens’
heads on pikes and drinking the blood of squirrels. He listened
to heavy metal music with lyrics like “Slit your grandma’s
throat then rape her poodle Tinkles!” One day he asked out
a cheerleader, and she shot him down. Nevermind that in many versions
of the story he was gay, bisexual, and occasionally a eunuch—he
always asked out that cheerleader, and she always rejected him.
That was the final straw. He made a list with the names and addresses
of all his enemies—the storyteller always had a friend or
relative on that list—and Joey started building bombs out
of firecrackers and Legos in his basement. The blood on his T-shirt
was harder to explain, but supposedly he had killed a second grader,
needing practice before he killed a real human. The police were
still looking for the second grader’s body…and for
parents who had reported a missing second grader. In Joey’s
car, the police found seventeen hand grenades, two shotguns, a
pistol, a butcher’s knife, a map to China (for his getaway),
six pounds of marijuana, a syringe, Captain Howdy’s Discount
Vodka, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (though
The Wall is vastly superior), and a note that read:
Dear everyone I hate,
I hate myself and want to die.
With love,
Joey.
P.S. All your mothers are whores.
The line about all their mothers being whores really set people
off.
Of course, since everyone heard the story, it was only a matter
of time before parents heard the story. And every one of them
had pretty much the same reaction.
After they cleaned out their pants, they grabbed their phones
and yelled at the school’s administrators. How could this
happen? It was the school’s job to protect their sweet,
innocent, harmless little angels who humped other sweet, innocent,
harmless little angels like drunken badgers on the weekends.
One man summed up the parents’ concerns by shouting, “Violence
has no place in our schools or community!”
The next day, a coworker asked him, “Say, about that Joey
kid, what do you think the law should do to him?”
“As a father who loves his daughter dearly, I think that
boy deserves to be hung!”
Nobody told him he meant hanged.
The school saw they clearly had a problem on their hands. The
parents demanded the school be made safer, but the school had
always been pretty safe before the incident. There wasn’t
really anything else the school could do. The school board talked
it over, ruminated, drank a lot of coffee, and bit their thumbs
as they racked their brains. Finally, they put down the Rubik’s
cubes, and someone said, “Umm, how about metal detectors?”
“That’s a good idea. And we could put in security
cameras too.”
“Yeah! And how about armed guards stationed around the
school?”
“Oh! Oh! And a look out post!”
“And barbed wire around the campus!”
“And let’s electrify it too!”
“And tie guard dogs to it!”
“And import Africanized killer bees! The bees will protect
us!”
The chatter became jovial as the school board discussed all
sorts of creative measures to protect their beloved students.
They came up with a plethora of devices to make the school as
safe as Fort Knox or as hard to get into as Batman’s daughter’s
underpants.
The board members were so excited that they couldn’t wait
to hop on the Internet and start ordering all their high tech
school protection. They just had to check the budget first. When
they opened the books, their faces fell. They had forgotten the
budget was tight. They had been denying teachers’ requests
for more chalk and had spent the last of their money a week before.
Somehow, the basketball coaches had convinced them the team’s
shoes needed to be dipped in gold.
Every board member felt like a child receiving underwear for
Christmas. And not fun underwear, like lace thongs or boxers with
elephants on them, but boring underwear, like granny panties.
“Well, shoot fire fuzzy,” a board member grumbled
when they met again. “We have to do something.”
“I guess we could pass some rules. Rules are cheap.”
“But what kind of rules?”
“I don’t know. How about the students must have
see-through backpacks, so we can tell if they’re carrying
guns?”
“That’s a good idea. And we should ban long coats
so they can’t hide stuff there.”
“But they could still hide weapons in those baggy pants
that are keen these days.”
“Hmm, there’s no way we can address all
clothing issues….”
“Yes there is. Let’s make them wear school uniforms.”
“That’s an excellent idea! And they can be the school
colors too! Black and white!”
“Wait, what about girls with long hair? They could hide
needles in there or something.”
“Hey, boys with long hair can do that too.”
“And boys with short hair could spike it and stab people
with their heads!”
“Hmm, well, we’ll just make a rule saying students
aren’t allowed to have hair.”
“That’s good. I think we should ban piercings too.
They can be taken out and used as weapons.”
“Well, of course piercings have to go. If nothing else,
they’re just so darn distracting.”
“What about lockers? You could hide a small atomic weapon
in one of them.”
“And wallet chains? They can be used as flails!”
“And charm bracelets. Some charms are sharp!”
“Necklaces. A student could grab another’s necklace
and strangle her to death.”
“Keys could be shurikens!”
“You’re right. You’re all right. All of those
things, they simply must go.”
“What about pocket knives?”
“Well, of course!”
“But my son works on a farm. Sometimes he needs a knife
to cut stuff.”
“Well, I suppose pocket knives can stay.”
“But the band program must go! Have you seen some of those
instruments? You could easily kill someone with a tuba!”
And so the problem of school violence was solved in Pleasant,
Missouri. Over the next few months, school violence dropped a
whopping 100%. It had spiked with the barely adverted Joey incident,
reaching a record number of one in the previous five years, and
it dropped back down to a comfortable zero in the months following
the school board’s ruling. All the parents rested easily.
And all the students felt safe. Of course, the students also felt
bored and kind of sleepy.
It wasn’t easy navigating the halls in the giant padded
suits the school board required students to wear. The suits had
to be worn at all times when walking between classes. It was so
the students wouldn’t trip, fall, and break something. After
all, the issue was about school safety, not just school violence.
The suits took fifteen minutes to put on, and then another fifteen
minutes to take off, so most students were late to their classes.
The hour after school reserved for detention looked just like
any other hour in the school day; no student could avoid the maximum
three tardies so everyone had detention every day.
The thirty minutes devoted to climbing in and out of the suits
left only twenty minutes for class time. Not that class was that
important. Mostly, the teachers stood at the front of the room,
yammered, and stared at blank faces. The teachers did not know
if anyone learned anything because the students were not allowed
to talk. The school board decided that questioning authority was
a sign of delinquency, so asking questions was forbidden. Then
they realized back talking a teacher was just as bad, so they
banned speaking all together. And the teachers’ could not
give tests because all the pencils and ink pens had been taken
away since a resolute student could drive a pencil or pen through
someone’s sternum.
Gym class was always an exciting part of the school day. The
students were no longer allowed outside since snipers could pick
them off or a low flying bird might smack them in the face. They
didn’t run, or play, or even do sit-ups because then a student
might accidentally pull a muscle. Or fall. Or spontaneously combust.
So gym class consisted of sitting on the floor, in a big circle,
and imagining playing football. Or imagining playing basketball.
Or imagining being whipped with towels if you were a particularly
nerdy individual. Towels had been banned too. They could be used
as fuses in Molotov cocktails.
But imagining playing games wasn’t much fun because the
students didn’t know what the others were imagining. The
students weren’t allowed to talk to each other either. The
school felt it had taken a big risk by letting them imagine, and
if the students were allowed to talk amongst themselves too, it
could be disastrous. The students might form a conspiracy. Or
worse, a coalition.
The English program was cut completely. There were just too
many books out there to give students bad ideas. To Kill a
Mockingbird had the word kill in the title, and Catcher
in the Rye rhymed with the command “Scratch her in
the eye.” And someone had heard The Giver encouraged
gang rape. The same policy applied to history. Some student might
learn about Hitler and say, “Hey, if Hitler did it to the
Jews, then surely I can gas other students. I’ll start with
the basketball team!” Of course, there wasn’t a basketball
team to gas anymore. Too many ways to get hurt. A student might
build up self-esteem, miss a basket, and let out his aggression
by taking a cheese grater to another student’s face. The
science classes were cut too. Chemistry and physics, obviously,
because a student could create some kind of explosive with the
chemicals. Biology was cut simply because the parents didn’t
want their sweet little angels to learn about the human body.
Not that it mattered. Most of them learned about it on the weekends
anyway. Math still existed, but most students found equations
difficult to solve without paper, pencil, or a calculator. The
paper had been taken away to avoid fatal paper cuts, and the calculators
could have been rigged into time bombs. The proposal to cut band
was approved, citing the aforementioned deadly tuba, but choir
stayed intact. Since the kids couldn’t talk, they couldn’t
sing either, and the class became a lesson on mime street performance.
Art stayed, but the board banned all the scissors, knives, pencils,
brushes, and clay (it could be used to build all kinds of terrible
weapons like a 5.56x45 mm NATO caliber Baretta SCS 70/223 carbine
with a 670 rounds per minute firing rate and an effective firing
range of 500 meters), so the kids were left to stare at still
life and wonder why they bothered coming to class that day.
Then they remembered it was a law.
The only class that wasn’t affected was remedial study
hall. It remained just as popular as ever.
One day, the superintendent stopped by the school, and he stood
next to the principal in the hallway. They smiled and just watched
as the children in the safety of fat suits waddled to class. “Ah,”
the superintendent said, “I take great pride in knowing
we have the safest school in the district.”
And it was true, too. Pleasant High School had fewer fights,
arguments, altercations, homicides, suicides, rapes, and xenocides
than any other high school in the state. It also had students
earning negative scores on the ACT, a test that measured how fit
students were to go to college and then the real world. But that
didn’t concern the parents. The parents only cared that
their children were safe and no longer at the mercy of all the
horrible violence they faced in the past. Things had been so terrible
back then, and things were much, much better now. Everybody said
so, so it must be true.
The next fall when school started, Joey was allowed to come
back. He hadn’t heard about the school’s decisions
since he had been in the juvenile detention center, and he showed
up the first day and just stared, his mouth agape. He saw kids
softly bouncing through the halls in fat suits, looked back at
the empty parking lot (automobiles had been banned—they
could explode if they were carrying dynamite and someone shot
the gas tank), and raised his eyebrows.
“Okay. Seriously. What the fuck is going on here?”
Every eye landed on him. Joey had been back in school a total
of forty-two seconds, and he had already broken ten rules: he
wasn’t wearing a padded suit, he spoke aloud, he asked a
question, he had facial piercings, he had hair, he wasn’t
wearing the school uniform, he drove an automobile to school,
he had braces, his backpack wasn’t clear, and his ears were
shaped funny. Joey was expelled immediately.
News of the incident traveled around the town like syphilis.
“Did you hear what that Joey kid said?” people would
ask. “They say that Joey kid walked into school and said…”
And the teller would look around, all shifty eyed to make sure
no one overheard. And then he or she would lean real close, and
whisper, “They say he said the f-word.”
The f-word, or fuck, was a bad word. Despite its versatility,
it offended some people. It meant “to have sex,” and
the idea of having sex upset everyone, even though everyone really
liked sex, even old women. Old women couldn’t hump like
drunken badgers, though, because it might break their hips.
The school board’s phones rang once again.
“Well, what are we going to do?” a board member
asked at the next meeting.
“I thought the not talking rule would have prevented this.”
“We all did. We must think of some other way to protect
the children from such awful language.”
“I suppose we could make ear plugs mandatory….”
“But they could still see. What if they read a bad word
or someone used dirty sign language?”
The debate raged for a couple of hours, and finally they decided
the students would wear earplugs in their ears, blindfolds over
their eyes, mittens on their hands, and huge black censor bars
on their crotches at all times.
And Pleasant, Missouri, had the safest and least vulgar school
in the entire nation.
[END]
© 2006 Brad Brown - Contributor's
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