by Mike Adamick
Third Grade

The crazy began in third grade. Mrs. Rudolph, my teacher, was circling the classroom with a new assignment, cackling about its difficulty like a grade-school Elmira Gulch. Only instead of riding a bicycle and threatening to put down Toto, she pointed out that she had spent all night conjuring up the most horrendous quiz we could imagine.

“Good luck,” she sneered, leaning over my desk.

I was wondering why she singled me out specifically—did I need it? Jesus, was I the dumb one? What did she mean?—when I saw it. Her nose. Her nose started like a lump of fleshy pudding between her eyes and then suddenly sprouted forward as if someone had installed a tiny stick in the taste treat that was her main feature. The stick came to a sudden stop and seemed to split at the tip. The forked effect was frightening.

Considering how big of a witch she was, it didn’t necessarily surprise me that she had what amounted to two pointy noses, but it was still discomforting to behold them up close. I stared too long, a moment too much, and Mrs. Rudolph recoiled a bit, as if to say, “What?” So it didn’t put me in her good graces when my hand instinctively reached for my own nose, to feel whether my proboscis split as well.

She put her hands on her hips and huffed, “And what exactly are you doing? That’s not polite, you know.”

But I couldn’t help it. I was enthralled. My fingers felt around my nose, examining the tip points. Just like Mrs. Rudolph, I had two nose tips as well. Only mine were buried beneath a layer of flesh like a normal person.

It quickly became an uncontrollable habit. Whenever I saw Mrs. Rudolph, my hands jumped to my nose and felt for the two tips. At some point, as the year progressed, I began to feel sorry for the poor woman, as I hounded her with habitual nasal mimicry. She began to avoid looking in my direction, as I would spend hours staring at her nose while examining my own. Most children picked inside their nose. I felt mine up. But her nose had cast a spell on me, and it became something of a ritual to enter the classroom, glance at her face, and then put my hands to my own, assuring myself that my nose hadn’t visibly split over night.

It was my first quirk, my first small, nascent bit of what would become a lifetime devotion to crazy.
A few months later, I entered the class to find Mrs. Rudolph with her back turned, engaged in a conversation with another broom-rider. I was devastated. Didn’t she know so much depended on our new routine? If I couldn’t see her nose right away, I couldn’t feel my own and then I couldn’t walk the exactly three steps to my desk, circle it once and sit down so that both of my butt cheeks touched plastic at the same time. Didn’t she know that my quirks were reproducing like rabbits and that her oddly-shaped features were the cause of my burgeoning personal torment? I stopped in the doorway as other students pushed around me. But I couldn’t move. I craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of her nose.

“I know you’re there Michael,” she said suddenly, her back turned. “Just take your seat.”

My feet were glued to the floor.

“Go on,” she insisted, “I’m not in the mood for your little antics.”

My foot lifted off the ground and simply fell back in the same place. It tried again. And again. But I was motionless. I could see my desk. It was only three feet away. But I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t move.

It would become a familiar feeling throughout my life, this inability to function if my quirks and superstitions weren’t first sated. Some people can’t leave the house, for instance, without checking the coffee pot or making sure the lights are off. A lot of people can’t go to bed without first checking to see whether the stove is turned off. But how many people have to touch each dial, ensuring they are all in the off position before crossing the room and flipping the light switch exactly twice? I’ve been playing in a Sunday softball beer league for seven years now, and I have yet to step on the third or first base line, and every time I jog into the outfield, I am forced to pick up a clump of grass and toss it into the air to test the wind—even on perfectly calm, windless evenings. Flying is of course a nightmare, as the entire flight hinders on whether I can utter an exact phrase exactly six times in the time between the first engine roar and take-off. That kind of responsibility is daunting.

But it gets really embarrassing when I have to knock on wood.

A lot of people subscribe to the superstition that if you don’t knock on wood, whatever fate-tempting statement you just made may well come true, or not. A lot of people don’t know, however, that you have to be precise in the administration of this superstition. What if, for instance, you accidentally knock on wood more than the usual two times?

In my view, if you accidentally knock three times, you have to knock one more time to make it an even four. But four, oddly enough, balances out two knocks because it is the polar opposite—it is double two knocks, in other words, and therefore carries more weight. So if you accidentally knock on wood three times instead of two times in the very beginning, you have to just go ahead and knock on wood six times to make the number round and to cancel out all the ill-effects of having an accidental knock in the first place.

But did you know that six is part of the devil’s notorious numbers, 666?

You have to go higher than that—but you can’t stop at seven because it’s an odd number, and you can’t stop at eight because it’s double four and therefore evil. Ten seems too even for some reason, so why not just go up to twelve? But wait a minute—how many knocks have you done now?

Was it twelve or thirteen?

Friday the thirteenth?

You can’t risk that.

Just keep going to fourteen, but wait—there’s a four in it. Fifteen … no. Sixteen? Please, it’s double of eight, which is double of four—you might as well just give up, go lay down somewhere and wait for the Fates to destroy you.

So there you are—approaching twenty knocks on wood because you said something a little too gloating, too wishful or boastful.

Once, I knocked on wood 522 times.

The worst part is when I’m around someone else who knocks on wood three times. It is apparently my lot in life to even things out for these imprecise imbeciles. At a work party a few years ago, a coworker knocked on wood three times. My boss was just a few feet away, and because I was relatively new to the job, I didn’t want to appear as out and out loopy as I usually am, and so I didn’t run to a nearby table or door frame in search of wood. Rather, I relied the one allowable substitute for wood: my head. I stood there holding a drink with one hand and tapping my head with the other.

As I was approaching thirty knocks, my new boss nudged me on the shoulder, and asked, “Um … are you OK?”

“Whatever do you mean?” I replied, trying to play it off by using my finger instead of my knuckles. I lost count, however, and had to start over. At the time, I imagined I simply appeared thoughtful, tapping my reddening pate with a finger as if pondering something important. In retrospect, tapping yourself 58 times in the side of the head probably doesn’t come off as intelligent. I remember thinking that if I didn’t wind up fired or institutionalized the next day, my new coworker owed me his annual bonus.

Almost every time I knock on wood or check the stove or skip lightly over the third base line, I am taken back to standing in the classroom doorway in third grade, waiting for Mrs. Rudolph to turn around so I could see her nose. The bell rang and she still hadn’t turned around, which meant I couldn’t touch my own nose and then find my desk.

It was a pivotal standoff—we were nose to nose, so to speak. And to this day I wish I had backed down. I wish I had simply returned to my desk and forgotten all about this fledgling system of twitches and quirks.

Sadly, Mrs. Rudolph turned first, pointing a finger in my direction.

“Don’t you dare—do you hear me?”

And there it was—her nose. It was a two-pronged beacon, pulling me toward a lifetime of regret. I tried my best, I really did. But there was no stopping my hands. They jumped on their own accord to my face and felt the tip of my nose, as Mrs. Rudolph shook her head and sighed. She went to her desk and pulled a slip of paper out of a drawer.

“Try explaining this to the principal,” she said, while I fondled my nose, hopped over the doorway, being sure to land on my left foot, and took a long, precise route to the school office.

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