Kiser and the jar of pee.

In 11th grade, I took what was supposed to be my last year of high school math. It was a total blowoff class, a very basic math class that was essentially free credits for me. I didn't do any of my homework and never studied, but I was able to pass it just by taking the tests. Unfortunately, it turned out that my guidance counselor, who was working his last year at the school, didn't know what he was doing, and I would end up having to take another math class the next year.

My teacher was a dude named Kiser, a first year teacher with a very young face and incredibly timid demeanor. His first year of teaching would also be his last, and in retrospect I feel terrible about the role I played in helping drive him away from the profession. I'm convinced, though, that even if I hadn't contributed to the shit he had to deal with, he still would never have made it as a high school teacher. Students walked all over him all day long.

My friend Jason and I used to cause trouble for him on a daily basis. We'd do things like turn a desk sideways, and then stand in front of it pretending that we were too utterly confused by the sideways desk to do any work or listen to him. I would sometimes sneak out of class and wander the halls, something I didn't dare do in any other class. Jason used to smoke pot in his class and blow the smoke into a cabinet near his desk, which did next to nothing to mask the odor. Afterwards, he'd go talk to Kiser with his eyes glazed over and his breath reeking of ganja, and Kiser would never do anything about it. We weren't the only ones in my class who gave him shit, though, it was pretty much a team effort, with nearly the entire class contributing. Within a month of teaching, he had already been in trouble twice for things that we had collectively convinced him were OK to let us do: going to lunch five minutes before anybody else was let out of class, and walking around outside on the cross country track (half the class came back completely stoned). As a general rule, nobody listened to Kiser, and everybody did whatever the hell they wanted.

Kiser used to let us get into groups to do our homework, but nobody ever did their homework, instead opting to talk and goof off. One day, the group I was in was snacking on a jar of pickles that one of our classmates had stolen from the home economics room. When the pickles were gone, somebody remarked on the similarity between the color of pickle brine and that of urine.

"Let me see that," I said, taking the jar. I put in under my desk and unzipped my pants. Everybody in my group started laughing, and even though I hadn't been serious to begin with, I decided it might be a good idea to actually pee into the jar. My group convinced me that it was, indeed, a terrific idea. I couldn't pee in front of people, so I stuck the jar in my pocket and asked Kiser if I could go to the bathroom. Generally, students were never allowed to go to the bathroom in any class, except in the case of a dire emergency, but Kiser had a policy of letting people get one bathroom pass per grading period. In actual practice, though, some of just got up and peed whenever we damn well felt like it.

I walked to the bathroom with the jar bulging from my pants, worried that some teacher might see it and ask what was in my pocket. I was even more scared on the way back, because there was no way I was going to be able to explain why I was carrying a jar of warm pee. Fortunately, nobody saw me.

When I got back to class, everybody in my group was silent as I sat down. They looked at me, and I looked at them. When I took the jar of pee from my pocket and set it on the desk, they erupted into riotous laughter. Pee is almost always hilarious.

The bell for lunch rang a couple minutes after I had set the jar of pee on my desk. My classmates encouraged me to bring it with me, or at the very least leave it on my desk, since we were coming back to that class after lunch, anyway. I was too scared, though, so I threw it in the trash on the way out.

About a month later, I asked Kiser if I could go to the bathroom.

"No," he said, "You already used your bathroom pass for this grading period."

"What?" I asked, feigning incredulousness, "When? I never went to the bathroom this grading period!"

"Yes, you did," he said, "Do you remember the pickle jar incident?"

"Are you trying to imply something?" Jason asked.

"Yeah, what are you implying?" I asked, doing my best to sound completely offended.

"Nothing," he said, "I'm just saying you guys were eating pickles that day."

The last thing I heard about Kiser was that he had grown a huge beard and become a missionary. Poor guy. High school kids are such dicks.

Abortion kits.

About four or five years ago, I went grocery shopping with the girl I was living with at the time. We bought a lot of food, and when we walked back out to the car with it, we realized there wasn't enough room. She was working at a dry cleaners, and had taken a couple of boxes full of wire coat hangers that they apparently no longer needed. In retrospect, it's entirely possible that she had stolen them, because that was the kind of shady person she was, and she did actually end up getting fired for stealing from the register. Either way, the only way we were going to get the groceries to fit in the car was by ditching the boxes.

"Do you have a marker?" I asked. I had a plan.

"No," she said, "Why?"

"I need to write on these boxes."

"I have some lipstick," she said, pulling a tube out of her purse.

I took the tube of lipstick and scrawled ABORTION KITS on the boxes. We dropped them in the parking lot, loaded the groceries into the car, and left.

I'm a pretty pro-choice guy, but I thought writing ABORTION KITS on two boxes of wire coat hangers was hilarious, because it could be offensive to absolutely anyone.

The humorless, stupid coworker.

I was working as a clerk, keeping track of a bunch of items that always went to the same group of people. We would hand out the goods in the morning and throughout the day, and then take them all back in the afternoon. I had one coworker who was my age, and the rest were old ladies. I think the youngest one was in her fifties.

I got along with the old ladies pretty well. They all seemed to like me, except for one: Alice. Alice hated me. She thought I was a slacker and had a poor attitude, and would always get on my case about how I needed to take incredibly trivial things incredibly seriously. I thought she was humorless, work obsessed, and just plain old bat shit crazy. There was no parking where we worked, so on a few occasions I rode in with her and another old lady in the morning. Each time, she would talk incessantly about what she was going to do that day at work, which would invariably be the same exact things she had been doing every day for the many years that she had worked there. She'd also conspicuously hide her purse every time I got into the car.

Alice would always try to get me in trouble for silly little things. Any time I didn't do things exactly by the book, she would go to my boss's office and tell on me. In nearly every instance, my boss, who loved me, would either not care, or think I was just awesomely efficient with my methods. There was only one time when she succeeded in getting me in any trouble at all, but it was so minor that I was entertained by the event.

Bored out of my skull one day, I wrote "Bill McDonald has Slavinizer #639b" on a sticky note and stuck it on the side of my computer monitor. It followed the format of other notes we'd make when somebody was in a hurry and/or the computers weren't working correctly. We'd write something like this down so we could enter it into the computer as soon as we could. I don't know what motivated me to write this note, but Bill McDonald did not exist, nor did an item called a Slavinizer. I assumed the note would either go unnoticed or get a couple laughs. If anybody made any effort to look for Bill or his Slavinizer, they would quickly see that neither was in the computer or in the books, and was obviously made up.

The day after I wrote the note, the phone at my desk rang.

"Second floor dispensing, this is Paul," I said.

"Bill McDonald has Slavinizer #639b," a voice said. It was my boss. "Does that ring any bells?"

"Yeah," I said, "I wrote that yesterday."

"Stop. I want you to stop," she said, her tone firmer than usual.

"Uh, OK," I said, wondering what the problem was.

"Alice said she spent three hours looking for Bill and the Slavinizer yesterday," she told me.

"Uh, oh, alright," I said.

Immediately after I got off the phone, my boss came to my desk.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, confused.

"I'm sorry for yelling at you, but I had to," she said quietly, "Alice was really mad."

"Yeah, you told me."

"Don't do that anymore, OK?"

"Yeah, sure."

My boss walked away, and I told the rest of my coworkers that Alice is stupid. I made sure everybody knew that I wasn't going to apologize to her because she had to go to the boss instead of talking to me directly. The old ladies gossipped constantly, so I know it got back to her.

The failed classroom riot.

My eighth grade math teacher was this little old lady who was putting in her last year before her retirement. My friends and I were needlessly mean to her, probably only because we were assholes and we figured out that we could get away with all kinds of tomfoolery in her class.

One of my staple gimmicks for her class was to swear loudly, but leave out the last consonant of a word so that I could get laughs without getting in trouble. I usually did this when she gave an assignment, indicating my displeasure with the work load.

"The assignment for tomorrow is page 42, problems 12-36."

"Shiiiiiiiiiiihh! What the fuuuuuuuuuuhh? Motherfuuuuuuh! Shiiiiiiiih!"

Some of my friends were in her class earlier in the day, and would always ask for blow jobs in class.

"Whoever solves this extra credit puzzle first will get a prize."

"What is it? A blow job?"

The kids would all laugh, and she would laugh, too. She must have asked somebody what it meant, though, because one day they said it and she started yelling at them never to use language like that again. This was one of only two times I had ever heard of her yelling at somebody, and yelling was the worst punishment she ever gave out

The other time I remember her yelling was when my friends came up with a way to make fun of her name in a particularly juvenile way. Her name was Mrs. Berenda, and somebody figured out that you could say "Mrs. Bare-end-a" for a cheap laugh. As soon I heard that, I had to go to class and say it to her. She started yelling at me and threatening to write me up, but I don't think she ever sent anybody to the office.

I had been obsessed with the idea of a schoolhouse riot, and one day when she stepped out of the room for a moment, I figured I'd give it a shot. The room was quiet immediately after she stepped out, because we were supposed to be working on an assignment. I got up from my desk.

"Riot!" I yelled, and flipped the desk in front of mine. Everybody just looked at me for a few seconds, and then the door opened. I sat down quickly as Mrs. Berenda came back into the classroom. She saw me sitting down, and knew I had flipped the desk.

"Paul, what happened to the desk?" she asked.

"I don't know," I told her, "It was like that when I got here."

She asked me politely to put it right side up, which I did. I was really disappointed, though, because I had envisioned everybody going crazy and smashing things up, but instead I had just gotten crazy looks from the entire class.

You're really hot.

I was in town visiting my parents and went to the grocery store with my mom and my sister. When we got to the checkout line, the cashier and the two baggers were having a heated discussion.

"It's not right, those people are sick, they shouldn't be allowed to be gay in public!" ranted one of the baggers, a pock-marked, greasy teenage boy.

"I don't see why you should care at all," said the girl bagger.

"I don't want to see them holding hands or making out! It's disgusting!"

"You know what?" interjected the cashier, an older woman. "You can't judge people. Only God can judge."

"That's exactly right," said my mom .

"Well, they just better not hit on me, that's all I'm saying! I might have to punch somebody!"

My mom paid for the groceries, and we started walking out. When I passed the bagger, I looked him directly in the eyes.

"You're really hot," I said.

"What?"

"You're. Really. Hot," I told him, saying each word slowly so he'd be sure to understand.

His jaw dropped open, and he just looked at me. He had absolutely no idea how to react. I smiled at him and savored the shocked look on his face as we walked out.

Sometimes, I just can't help fucking with people like that.

The fake crack.

In second grade, I found some coursely ground salt in the pantry and decided to convince my classmates that it was crack. I knew what crack was supposed to look like from drug awareness ads and the like, and I thought the salt looked close enough, though perhaps a bit small. I put some into a clear plastic bag, like I had always seen it pictured. When I brought in on the bus, I waited until everyone was aboard before I pulled it out.

"Look," I said, "I have crack."

Everybody looked at me incredulously. The general consensus seemed to be that I didn't actually have crack. I decided to prove them wrong. The problem was that I had no idea how crack was used, nor what its effects would be on the user.

I opened the bag, pulled out a pinch of the fancy salt, and put it in my mouth, trying not to visibly cringe as it overpowered my taste buds. I chewed it up and swallowed it.

"Yeah," I said, "This is some good crack."

Comedy can be so cruel.

I feel bad that one of my most hilarious memories was this kid in pre-school getting peed on.

I had been hanging out with this kid, Jimmy, and he had taught me this cool trick where you go inside of this wooden playhouse thing and pee all over the walls. I guess it wasn't much of a trick, but it was an excellent way to get urine on everything. One day we went in there and were getting ready to pee when this other kid came in.

"You have to get out of the way," Jimmy told him, "We're going to pee here."

"I don't have to," the kid replied.

So Jimmy peed on him. The kid instantly started crying, but for some reason didn't try to get out of the urine stream.

I still laugh whenever I think of it. That probably makes me some kind of an asshole, but I can't help it. It's funny when people get peed on.

Matt, his Nintendo, and my rage.

In the beginning of third grade, my best friend was this kid on my bus named Matthew Woods. I don't actually remember talking to him about anything other than the most important thing in the world at the time: the Nintendo Entertainment System. I only had a few games, and my mom limited the amount of time I could spend playing to basically nothing, but Matt, man, Matt was the guy who was so completely awesome because he was so enviable. He had every single game for the Nintendo ever (or at least claimed to have all the cool ones I could think of), and his mom let him play whenever he wanted, sometimes eating up entire days numbing his fingers on the sweaty plastic edges of his controller. Matt had my dream life, and thus I considered him my best and most awesome friend.

Until the bus broke down in front of his house.

There was another kid on the bus, Mike, who was a pretty cool guy, but not nearly as cool as Matt. We'd talk to him about Nintendo occasionally, but he didn't seem as interested, and certainly hadn't
played or owned as many of the games as Matt, so he was obviously inferior. Matt was friends with him, but I always assumed that I was Matt's better friend because we were the ones who were always hanging out and talking on the bus and at school. One key difference about the Mike and I surfaced when the bus broke down and we had to wait at Matt's house for a while. It turned out that while I had never seen Matt's house from anywhere but the bus window, Mike had actually been inside before. This fact played a critical role in what turned out to be the downfall of our friendship.

There were only a small handful of kids on the bus when it broke down, so it was decided that we would wait inside Matt's house while the adults involved took care of the bus situation. Matt immediately ran through a door at the end of the living room, into a smaller room where he had his Nintendo. Mike followed, and I tried to follow, but Matt's mom stopped me.

"I know Mike. I don't know you. You have to sit on the couch."

Mike seemed to feel bad for me being in such a predicament, but not Matt. Matt found it absolutely fucking hilarious that his mom was a crazy bitch. His chair was situated near the door to his Nintendo room, and while I sat there, he would periodically turn around, controller in hand, and point and laugh at me for not being allowed to play. I didn't understand how my best friend could be such a dickhead.

At some point I tried to get up and make a move for the Nintendo room, but his mom grabbed me by the arm. I tried to tell her she couldn't tell me what to do, but she raised her other hand like she was going to slap me. I cringed, she didn't slap me, and I spent the rest of the time waiting on the living room couch, enduring Matt's laughter while my rage grew.

By the time we were able to leave, I absolutely despised Matt.

Following this incident, I would harass Matt whenever possible. I learned that while I was friends with him, a crucial fact about his personality had escaped me: the child was prone to angry outbursts and temper tantrums for damn near no reason. I soon began to delight in tormenting him, as the slightest insult would send him into a violent rage. He was bigger than me, but he was never able to hurt me when he'd attack. He fought like a girl, and would scratch me and try to pull my hair.

I had always known that he had a huge crush on this girl at our school who had downs syndrome. Even as a third grader, I found that completely bizarre. I tried to tease him about it on the playground, calling out in a taunting voice, "Yoooooouuu'rreee iiinnn looooovveee wwiiitthh Saaaarrraaahhhh!!"

"Yes, I am!" he proudly confirmed, foiling my plan to provoke a temper tantrum.

So I punched him in the neck.

His face immediately turned bright red and he started screaming that he was going to kill me. He flailed his arms and kicked the air while I ran from him, laughing maniacally. Some teachers saw what was going on and took us both inside to miss the rest of recess.

While I sat at my desk while the rest of my classmates played outside, I fumed. Why should I be in trouble? All I did was make fun of some jerk and then punched him in the neck to make him go crazy. I racked my brain trying to think of the best way to get back at him.

And then it hit me.

The next day I came to school prepared for delivering the ultimate payback. I waited all day for the right moment, and I was excited as hell at the end of the day when I asked my teacher if I could go to the bathroom. She escorted me down the hall, but not before letting me get my coat from it's cubby-hole. I had told her I was cold.

I went into the bathroom stall and reached into my jacket pocket for my weapon of choice: a thick, green magic marker. I went to work and scrawled by revenge in foot-high letters on the wall of the stall.

MATTHEW WOODS IS A FUCKING ASSHOLE!

I pocketed my marker and left the bathroom, satisfied about my job well done. School let out shortly afterwards, and I went home, happy enough that I didn't even have to try to get Matt to throw a screaming fit on the bus.

The next day, when I got to school but before it was time to go to class, I brought my friend Jeremy into the bathroom.

"Check this out," I told him, leading him to the stall where I had left my bulletin to the world.

I was shocked to see that somebody had cleaned my message from the wall, but luckily I was still prepared. I took out my marker and left another one. This was a message that had to be heard.

MATT WOODS EATS FUCKING SHIT!

"Cool," Jeremy told me, and we went to class.

As soon as I sat down in my desk, my teacher came up to me.

"Paul, we have a problem. A message was found in the bathroom."

"How do you know it was me?" I asked, trying to seem incredulous but not realizing that I was admitting I knew what she was talking about.

"Well, we know you and Matt don't get along, and you put your jacket on before going to the bathroom yesterday afternoon."

"It wasn't me."

At that moment, another teacher came in and said that I had done it again.

They made me clean up the bathroom as punishment for my behavior. I maintained my innocence, even as I was scrubbing the walls down with a sponge. I don't even know if Matt ever heard about my attempt to defame his character, rendering the whole thing a failure.