Posts Tagged “shop class”

Another great high school story from Charles Ries. Note: contains quite a lot of in-context coarse language. -Editors

Charles Ries
High School

By the fall of my senior year I’d completed all the classes I needed to apply for college and decided to explore the electives that were offered. Growing more comfortable in my identity as a member of the counterculture, I signed up for a small engine class. Other than running track drills through the far west corridor, I had never walked down this hall where classes for future piston heads and factory workers were held.

I walked into shop class on the first day and took my position at the table that would be my workstation for the next three months. It would be here that I’d learn the inner workings of the finicky one cylinder engine — commonly called “the lawnmower.” Across from me was Michael Buss. I only knew Mike to say hello to. He didn’t play sports. He kept to himself. I didn’t share any other classes with him. He was one of the invisible people.

“Ries, what are you doing here? You lost? You don’t need this s*** to go to college,” he said.

“I thought I’d learn a little about how the small engine built America. I can’t tell a piston ring from a carburetor. I figure it’s time to learn. Besides I wanted to try something different. I’m tired of hanging around with honors students,” I said, unaware that I sounded like an arrogant jerk.

“If you want to try something different, why not take Home Ec? At least they got lots of chicks to help you make your brownie batter better,” he said. We both laughed at the simple logic of his observation and, after he’d pointed this out me, I too wondered why I hadn’t signed up for baking 101.

Mike never made another mention of why I was there. He took me at my word and took me for who I was and we started fixing lawnmower engines.

We each took our engines apart while keeping a careful inventory of the parts and where they fit, and otherwise making sure we’d be able to put the damn thing back together again. I was a blaze of efficiency in dismantling my engine, but when it came to putting it together again, I began to sputter. “Ries, what kind of a mess you got there, buddy,” Mike asked, in his usual monotone manner.

“Ya, I’m having some problems getting these piston rings back. How’d you do that? I broke the last four,” I said, raising my greased hands up in a sign of surrender.

“You’ve got problems a lot bigger than your piston rings. I don’t want to stick my nose in your business, but you’ll never get that thing started. It’s a f***ing mess. You’ve killed it,” he deadpanned. “I’ve had my eye on you, Ries. Waiting for the moment you’d pull the ignition cord and it’d pee a pint of Pennzoil all over that button-down baby blue shirt of yours. You should stick to theater and politics, and let real men fix your engines,” he said.

“To hell with real men, I need help getting this thing together. For Christ sakes, I’m going to flunk an engine class. You’re right, I should have taken Home Ec.” We laughed and Mike did what he could to bring life back to my engine. When class was over we went our separate ways until following day when our worlds would meet again.

———-

The lunch hour was over and I’d stopped in the john to take a leak when a hardhead from the west corridor, Steve Dunbar, walked in with two of his pet apes, Jim Heinz and Mike Madison. The threesome smelled like cigarettes, beer, and car grease. They were incapable of being any place quietly. They walked loud, talked loud, punching each other, the bathroom door or anything else within reach of their fists. It didn’t matter the place or time of day, it was always time to hit something.

I was preparing to do my business as they entered the men’s bathroom when Dunbar came up behind me and slugged me in a little too friendly manner on the shoulder, “Hey, scrambled eggs for brains. This isn’t your f***ing pee-can. It’s time for you to go.”

At that moment, Buss walked in and while not seeing the initial blow, make a quick assessment, deciding that Dunbar wasn’t standing behind me to give me a shoulder rub and said, “F*** you, Dunbar.”

“F*** you. F*** me. F*** him,” Dunbar replied, turning and pounding my shoulder a second time.
Realizing that drastic action was required, I began to urinate and turned a 360-degree circle applying a well-placed bead of pee across the kneecaps of Dunbar and his two henchmen. Having completed my triple axle-spinning leap, I returned to my frontal pissing position and finished my business and Buss was beaming. He was in awe. He didn’t say a word as I zipped up my fly and turned to face Dunbar who was groping for the word, but could only produce a non-syllabic gasp of air.

“Oh…ffff…dam…my pants. You peed on my pants! Are you nuts?! You f***ing peed on my pants. You little balls for brains. I’ll kill you. My pants! You peed on my pants!”

I wasn’t clever enough to come up with such a disarming tactic as innovative as the 360-Degree Pee. I give full credit to Tom Wilson, one of my fellow Black Birds, who, one night after an eighth grade basketball game, demonstrated it to nine teammates who were unfortunate enough to be standing behind him. But it was only then, three years later, with a jerk breathing fire down my neck, that his brilliant move came back to me. I power-peed to save my life.

“You lay a hand on my friend and I will shove your head up your butt, Dunbar. We might never find you again, you got such a big butt,” Buss said. While Mike was a solid guy, he was no match for Dunbar. What made him scary was that he didn’t care if he lost. A much-talked-about fistfight the year before left him on the ground and beaten, but he never shed a tear and never asked for mercy. Buss was one of those mild-mannered guys who went crazy when they lost their temper. He transcended and became a swinging pain-free zone. You might win, but you would suffer and you would not get the pleasure of his asking for mercy.

The moment of reflective silence laid at the feet of these two mountain rams. Dunbar did not want to butt heads with Buss and motioned his two apes to the door snorting one final, “F*** you, Buss, good thing that putz has you to do his fighting for him,” and he left.

Mike raised his eyebrows and said, “Woo, I’m scared. In fact, I’m so scared I think I’ll take a ten-foot piss,” and proceeded to unzip, take aim, and hit the urinal with an arc of triumph. We were both laughing as we left the boys’ room, giving high fives and saying we’d see each other in small engines class tomorrow.

I didn’t get into fights, so “protection” was pretty much wasted on me, but once the word got out that messing with Ries meant you messed with Buss, a fight never came close to me. I didn’t see Mike much after our class was over and when we saw each other in the hall, he was as silent and polite as ever, just a nod of the head and a, “How’s it going, Ries? Make any good brownies lately?”

by Tanya Foubert
Junior high school

It’s the mid 80’s.  I’m 10 and in 7th grade.

I’m a loner and have been since nursery school. Even the idea of having a friend is completely foreign to me. My class is the amalgamation of the “smart” kids of the entire school district and we are all attending an full-time, every day “enrichment” program. It is 1.5 hours away by bus, meaning I leave home at 7:05am, well before sunrise for much of the school year. I am 2 years younger than all of my classmates. My entire wardobe consists of jewel-toned jogging suits and I am crowned with a bright red afro (thanks to an unfortunate haircut). I obsessively listen to the other kids but when I try to act social with them, even they can tell I’m mimicing. They think I’m a freak.  In a classroom full of kids that were supposed to be like me… I’m still a freak.

I discover that I really enjoy working with my hands when we start taking wood shop. I’ve begged to be allowed to take weekly wood shop class with the boys, because my other choices are home economics and art, and I already know how to bake, use a sewing machine and have no artistic skill whatsoever. Reluctantly, the teacher grants me permission to join the class when my homeroom teacher intervenes on my behalf. I am delighted.

Wood shop is apparently a proving ground for the budding adolescent male, where the jocks suddenly are on equal academic footing with the nerds.  The teacher belongs to the jock group, I can tell by the way he stands and who he jokes with, but beyond that classification the social nuances are lost on me.  For once I’m so different I’m left completely alone… a girl isn’t worth the time of the jocks or the nerds.

We do different projects to learn to use the different tools, moving from hand tools to power tools and then onto the machines, giant sanders, saws, lathes. My success is mediocre, but I don’t care! It’s new and I love the smells and sounds and solitude of the projects. After a few weeks, the teacher tells us to prepare on graph paper a design to cut out on the jigsaw. Something with some curves and some straight edges, and he’ll approve the designs before we’re allowed to copy it onto a piece of wood.  I spend the next week tracing and retracing the same design… a musical 1/8th note, where the note is a heart shape. I plan to carefully sand it and colour several different samples of the design for myself, trying to decide on what colour will look nicest hanging on my bedroom wall.  I painstakingly draw more than a dozen of them, trying to get the
perfect balance of heart-to-stem, the heart shape proportional and not to fat, not to thin, the stem not so thick as to throw off the balance of the picture, the tail on the eighth note gracefully curved and angled.

Finally, the morning of the class arrives and I eagerly wait my turn, to have my design approved so I can pick out a piece of pine from the scrap bin and start work. I watch while the teacher nods and smiles at the jock’s designs, and sighs but approves the nerd’s designs. I present my own coloured master plan, on graph paper as specified, and wait.

The teacher frowns. His eyes narrow. I don’t know how to read it yet.  Angrily, he gestures towards the drawing. “What is this supposed to be?”

“A love note!” I say proudly. I feel it is both clever and cute and am eager to learn how to use the jigsaw.

His face clenches, he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste-paper basket, tells me to sit at my desk. I’m too confused to cry while he steps into the next room, the art room, and speaks to the teacher briefly. I am shortly steered by the shoulder into art class, where I spend the remaining 6 weeks of the semester making a coil pot out of clay, my cheeks burning with shame because I still don’t know what I’ve done wrong.

The incident was never mentioned again.