The woman who taught my class was named Mrs. Bradley. She was obese and spoke with a slight lisp, and she used a cane to help her walk. She told us that she and her husband had been injured in a car accident. Her husband also taught at Kelso High. He taught biology.
Mrs. Bradley liked to call things that made people feel good “warm fuzzies” and things that made people feel bad “cold pricklies.”
We were only required to write one paper for the class, an essay entitled “Why I Am What I Am.” At the time, I thought it was the stupidest thing that I’d ever been asked to write. I began my essay with a quote from Prince, the spoken intro from his Purple Rain album that ends with, “and if the de-elevator tries 2 bring u down, go crazy; punch a higher floor...” I ripped off the essay’s tone and style from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In places I even plagiarized it. I read my essay to a few of my friends before I turned it in. We all laughed at how clever and sneaky I was. I got an “A” on it. Mrs. Bradley told me that she’d been able to “read between the lines.” As she said this, she made little quotation marks in the air with her fingers.
Another thing we were required to do for the class was a “bulletin board project.” We were each supposed to team up with a partner and fill one of the bulletin boards in the classroom or one of the display cases out in the hallway with pictures, artwork, etc. that all shared a common theme. Each project was to stay on display for two weeks.
My friend, Dan, had the same class during another period. We decided to be partners on the project. I asked my father to bring home the front covers to any magazines that he came across which tried to appeal to the reader’s interest in sex, drugs, or alcohol; and he did. They piled up fast. Most of them had photos of semi-naked women on them. I remember that on the flip side of one of the covers, there was a color photo of two young and very thin, blonde women who looked like they might be sisters, sunbathing naked on a wooden deck or a dock. The women didn’t have the usual Playboy-style breasts. Their breasts were kind of pointy, with large, undefined nipples. For some reason, that made the picture seem more exiting to me. I remember masturbating at least once while looking at it.
Around this time, Dan was stealing “men’s sophisticates” magazines from the Minit Mart where he picked up the newspapers for his paper route. He especially liked the ones that featured photos of women with large breasts. I didn’t find out that he’d done this until years later. I think he didn’t tell me about it because he probably thought that he was stealing money away from my dad’s business. He wasn’t. The Minit Mart was responsible for any stolen merchandise. Dan is married now. His wife has large breasts.
Also around this time, I got my first girlfriend. Her name was Lisa. I met her on an all-day nature walk with the high school science club. Dan was in the science club too, and the two of us walked together. For part of the way, we sang the song, “Doo Wah Ditty Ditty Dum Ditty Doo.” Dan knew all the words. Lisa walked ahead of us, and Dan took pictures of her ass all along the way. I thought it was funny, but it also kind of bugged me. When I got to know Lisa better, I made him give me the photos and the negatives, and I gave them to her. Lisa was the first girl that I ever saw naked in real life. I remember that when I first started going out with her, I felt a little self-conscious because she had a bad complexion and small breasts.
I’m going to be married in a few months myself. My fiancée wears a “C” cup.
When the time came for us to decorate our bulletin board, Dan and I stayed after school and stapled up a collage of the covers my dad had brought home for me. We arranged them in such a way that all the nudity was covered. Over the top of it all in large stenciled letters, we stapled the words, “CONTEMPORARY VICE.”
It was a hit. The next day, it seemed like everyone in the school came to see it. I saw guys trying to peel back bits of some of the covers to expose the ones underneath. At the end of the day, Dan and I took a stapler and repaired our work as best we could.
When I got to school the next morning, Mrs. Bradley had all of the covers stacked neatly on her desk. She gave them back to me and told me that Dan and I had done a good job and that we each got an “A” on our project. I was angry, but I didn’t say anything.
Dan and I both live in Bellingham now. About a year or so after I moved here, I met an artist named Felicia. She told me she used to go to school in Denver at the University of Colorado. She said that while she was there, she built a sculpture for one of her classes: a large, cylindrical piece, made of chicken wire. It had cloth-covered Muppet arms and erect Muppet penises sprouting out all around it. Some of the arms were putting condoms onto the penises, and the others were plunging hypodermic needles into their fellow arms. Posted around the sculpture were photographs of Felicia shooting up several of her male friends, and around its base she wrote the words, “MY LOVER AND I SHARE EVERYTHING,” over and over again.
Back in Denver, Felicia’s best friend was named Roger. He was in one of the pictures on her sculpture. He died of AIDS a couple of years ago. Several of the people Felicia knew there have died from it.
Her sculpture was put on display in the administration building of the university, where everyone could see it. It received a lot of praise, but it also offended a lot of people. A group of students petitioned to have it removed, but the university refused; and so a bunch of them got together one night and tore the thing to pieces.