| Billy graduated from high school without learning how to read. It doesn't sound possible from a distance, passing through twelve grades, each presumably more demanding than the last, without ever acquiring such a fundamental skill. They actually gave him his diploma two weeks ahead of the rest of the class, which only fueled the speculation and gossip. There was a rumor that he had threatened the principal with bodily harm and another that he leveraged the sheepskin with blackmail. I knew the truth of it at the time but since the innuendo seemed to be growing in glamour, I just let it fly.
I was five years or so behind Billy, still in junior high school and I reveled in the badass legend that was growing around my big brother. It was widely known that Billy was a martial arts devotee who could take care of himself and two or three other people to boot, so my kinship saved me from all manner of difficulty during my own adolescence.
The consensus on the grapevine was that Billy had gotten into a fistfight with his woodshop teacher and kicked his ass but good, before finally being subdued by a gang of three or four other teachers and dragged to the principal's office. The net result was inexplicable because for some reason he emerged from school that day sans assault charge, carrying a signed diploma.
The senior high and the junior high were separate facilities with connected parking lots and intertwined grapevines. Like the game of telephone, where news degenerates or is exaggerated with each new telling, the scuttlebutt that reached my school was startling and impressive. The word in the halls was that my older brother had strong-armed the principal into letting him graduate early, with failing grades. The reality, in Billy's case, turned out to be far more impressive than the fiction but I never let it slip.
You mustn't tell him I told you.
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The woodshop incident could have been easily avoided if the school board bothered screening teachers for latent sadism. Jack Penwick would have made a sterling SS officer or medieval dungeon master but as it was he drew his pay as a bullying high school shop teacher. He had scraped through college on a football scholarship, earned a Secondary Ed degree and teacher's certificate by the skin of his teeth and was hired at his old school as an act of nostalgic pity. His glory days as a linebacker at that high school secured his scholarship and dubious teaching credentials so they felt a warped sense of obligation to put him on the payroll when he graduated.
He liked being called "Mr. Penwick" so freshly out of college and delighted in the power he held over the children in his charge. The little monsters turned on him almost immediately and the salutation he treasured degenerated to the taunting, "Mr. Peewee" or "Seņor Pickywicky" or worst of all, "Master Pencil-dick." He despised the little bastards that he was paid to teach and spent a sizeable chunk of every class period proving to them who was boss. Penwick was a big guy, twice the size of the biggest kid in class, and he wasn't the least bit shy about throwing his weight around.
The same class distinctions existed in his day, the smart kids, the jocks and the burnouts but it seemed to Jack Penwick that the burnouts were now in the majority. It never occurred to him that wood shop and metal shop were the best places to manufacture drug paraphernalia and of course, every head signs up for a class that doesn't involve the gratuitous use of pencil and paper. His classroom was a veritable factory involved in the production of elaborate pipes and roach clips, disguised as everyday objects. One quick trip to the drill press and voila, what had at first glance appeared to be an innocuous table lamp is now a six chambered, meticulously carbureted hookah. Most of those hoodlums would have paid for access to unlimited raw materials and bitchin' power tools.
His students disgusted him, with their long greasy hair, their filthy leather jackets and their total disregard for his authority. He'd leave the shop for five minutes and return to find Led Zeppelin blaring, marijuana smoke wafting and his rage would shatter the surface. He was never without his "wicked stick," an eighteen inch oak dowel, three inches in diameter and stiff as hardened steel. He'd whack the stick on the workbench with a deafening crack to call the room to order and if one of the little freaks got a finger caught underneath, so be it. When he wasn't hitting things and people with his wicked stick he kept it snuggled in the crux of his arm, like the riding crop of the SS Oberstleutnant he was meant to be.
In the good old days, he and his buddies on the football team would have made quick work of these stoners.
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Billy and his buddy Rocco were putting the finishing touches on a gorgeous piece of work that Rocco called his "coup-de-grass." It looked like an ordinary walking stick but it contained a hollowed out chamber for contraband and a detachable threaded handle that would double as a pipe. They were fine tuning the pipe's functionality, my brother steadying the work in the drill press for Rocco's artistic hand. Billy had already finished his own project, an uninspired breadboard for which he received the grade of D-minus. He was shooting for the solid D but figured old Pencil-dick was pissed off about catching a splinter during its evaluation.
When big Jack Penwick snuck up behind them and smacked the red "STOP" button on the drill press with his wicked stick, Rocco knew he was busted. The hollow core of his carefully lathed cane could probably be explained away but the detachable hand piece they were working on looked an awful lot like a smoking utensil. All of the power tools fell silent when the enraged teacher shattered the plastic button and when he raised the stick over Rocco's head, even the most detached stoners gasped in horror.
There was only one girl in the class and she alone had the good sense to let out a scream to stall the violence. Two teachers and a custodian were standing in the hallway within earshot of the scream and rushed into the room just in time to see their manic colleague finishing the wild swing toward Rocco's head. Billy acted quickly, instinctively and foolishly.
He thrust his arm between the oak dowel and Rocco's noggin at the last possible second and let out a little yelp as the smaller of the two bones in his forearm snapped. The rest of the kids backed away in anticipation of increasing violence, creating a circular stage like an after school rumble, as the two teachers and the janitor dove toward the fray. The janitor wrested the wooden dowel from the crazed Mr. Penwick and the two teachers eventually managed to wrestle a righteously inflamed Rocco to the ground.
To the stunned silence of all assembled, Billy calmly reached toward the woodshop instructor with his unbroken left arm and appeared to gently touch the angry man's cheek. Every soul in that room stood frozen before the spectacle of the six-foot, five-inch, two-hundred-forty pound misanthrope dropping to his knees, sobbing like a baby. It seemed that Billy's gentle touch had sparked a powerful remorse in the monstrous man.
Billy was aware of something they weren't, that just behind every man's jaw, an inch or so beneath each ear, lies a small nexus of nerves. He knew that the slightest compression of that little bundle would cause a kind of world shattering pain that's as difficult to describe, as it is to endure. The sensation is something like having an anvil dropped on your head over and over again while wolverines tear the flesh from your bones, only a little worse.
Billy was never much for book learning but that was one little tidbit he thought might come in handy someday.
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The two teachers followed dutifully as Billy led the whimpering woodshop instructor toward the Principal's office. He calmly explained that he might need them to tell the Principal what they had witnessed should the blubbering ape be reluctant to confess. Billy cradled the small bunch of nerves between his thumb and forefinger and gave them a little tweak every few steps, just to remind old Pencil-dick who was calling the shots. Each minute application of pressure brought the former linebacker and current bully to his knees and elicited a stifled scream from the very core of his being.
Penwick was every bit as popular in the faculty lounge as he was in the classroom so it was everything the other two teachers could do to keep from laughing out loud at his comeuppance. They simply followed the phenomenon down the corridor, keeping a respectful distance, whispering about possible outcomes. They didn't doubt for a minute that Billy had the situation well in hand and that they had just witnessed the last day of their abrasive colleague's teaching career.
The Principal came around to Billy's way of thinking almost immediately. Mr. Penwick was on his knees on the office floor; his face locked in the expression of a silent scream, an uncanny impersonation of the famous painting. Billy was applying pressure mostly for kicks now, or to emphasize a particularly important negotiating point with a tiny shriek from his subject.
When it came time to sign the paperwork relieving the school of any liability for the incident, Billy had to free up his unbroken arm to affix his signature. He gave one last solid squeeze just for fun and unleashed a final, unbearable blast of anvils and screeching wolverines. The former bully fell blissfully unconscious in a heap and slept through his termination entirely.
The Principal signed Billy's sheepskin with a shaky hand but he signed it in ink. You could probably say that Billy graduated under false pretenses but graduate is a big word with many meanings. He eventually taught himself to read and now he goes through books like the average Joe goes through TV Guides, so all's well that ends well. At the time there was some murmuring about his illiteracy but I'm pretty sure that it never occurred in his presence.
One of the teachers who bore witness to the spectacle moved to help Billy when he noticed the terrible bruise forming on the fractured arm. He wanted to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital but Billy declined. He snatched the signed diploma from the principal with his good hand and tucked it beneath the broken one.
"When he wakes up tell him I want a D on the breadboard."
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