I
Once upon a time, a six-year-old boy began second grade at Freedom Elementary School in Eldersburg, Maryland.
His new teacher, Ms. Soracoe, was a very pretty woman in her mid-twenties who was as sweet as could be. All the kids in her class adored her. She’d give each of her students a friendly hug when they left her classroom after their bus number was called. That little boy looked forward to Ms. Soracoe’s hugs. And sometimes, she’d give him a peck on the cheek.
That boy was me.
Do little second-grade hearts fluttering over our pretty and sweet teacher count as a first crush? I don’t think so. Ms. Soracoe was a grownup. At six, grownups are old, even in their twenties!
II
The first ‘official’ and age-appropriate crush I remember was a girl named Meredith. The lengths I went to for her attention were noteworthy, and for a time, she entertained them. At that age, it meant sitting next together in class or at lunch, or playing at recess.
“But Kev, didn’t I read in Episode II that many of these kids teased and picked on you?”
I did. Meredith was new to Freedom Elementary that year. I think that when she and I first began sitting together and playing at recess, she’d not yet been spoiled by the bullies.
Then one day, a nosebleed hit me during class, and that’s when the freshest wave of mockery began. In shame, I’d retrieve some tissues from Ms. Soracoe’s desk and glance at Meredith uncomfortably as I returned to my desk. I was waiting for the look of horror to wash over her face or maybe snicker with the other kids. It didn’t happen at first.
Fortunately for me, Mom kept a ‘baby book’ titled “Out baby’s first seven years,” which offers a lot of insight into the era between 1971 and 1979. It’s interesting to note from Mom’s notes that Meredith was the first person I wanted to come to my seventh birthday party in 1978 at Liberty Fair Lanes, a bowling alley on the other side of the Liberty Reservoir bridge. I assume we played the duckpins since we were far too little to pick up a regulation-sized bowling ball.
The presents list was interesting. Lots of Star Wars-related stuff. My parents gifted me a Riviton set. Since we’re also exploring Gen-X culture, permit me to deviate for a moment about the Riviton set.
III
Billed as “The toy that makes toys,” Parker Brothers’ Riviton construction system hit the market in 1977 with a significant impact. They were available in three sets (100 Basic, 200 Extended, and 300 Master), all aimed at kids between the ages of six to fourteen. The kits included flexible plastic shapes, rubber rivets, and a riveting tool. To build different projects, such as buildings, cars, planes, and even insects, kids placed the soft rivets onto the Riviton tool and squeezed the handle. The pliable rivets stretched and fit easily into the holes of the plastic pieces. The Riviton tool used mechanical action – no batteries or electricity required. The system’s flexibility and reusable rivets meant kids could build and rebuild a wide variety of toys and models.
According to Parker Brothers, they play-tested Riviton over two years. Advertising at the time highlighted the more than “20,000 cards and letters from mothers,” indicating their approval of the creative appeal, simplicity, and safety of the Riviton system. The company’s due diligence paid off as the toy sold over 450,000 units during the holiday season of 1977. Back then, that was a lot!
I have little doubt I was one of those kids who wanted one. I fucking loved that toy!
But as Robert Frost once postulated, “Nothing gold can stay.”
My first memory of the Riviton recall involved Mom telling me that a friend of hers, Judy, informed her that two kids somewhere had swallowed and choked on the rubber rivets. Judy wasn’t wrong. In April 1978, an eight-year-old boy from Wisconsin suffocated after swallowing a rivet. An investigation by the Federal Consumer Product and Safety Commission concluded that product misuse caused the death and that Riviton continued to meet all industry and government product safety standards. They cleared Parker Brothers of any wrongdoing.
But then, in November 1978, the same month as my seventh birthday, a second child died for the same reasons as the first. The death was also ruled accidental, but Parker Brothers began a voluntary recall anyway.
Judy took her sons’ Riviton set away. Mom assured me I could keep mine if I didn’t put the rivets in my mouth. I don’t remember if I verbally articulated the thought, but I recall thinking, “Who would do something so stupid?!”
Two kids who didn’t read the instructions or have any common sense whatsoever, that’s who.
But I digress.
IV
By the spring of 1979, Meredith decided she didn’t want to sit next to me or play with me at recess anymore. Whether she lost interest or succumbed to peer pressure, I can’t say. What I know is that she eventually began joining in with the same taunts I’d endure when a nosebleed hit.
It was disappointing, to be sure. It also made me angry. I wasn’t despondent because Meredith didn’t want to be my friend anymore; it was the reason I perceived in my seven-year-old mind in that she became one of the mockers and joined in the ridicule. That shit festered for weeks. As with everything else I kept bottled up, the rusty wire that holds the cork eventually gives way.
Whom did I blame?
If you said God, you’d be right.
I had those temper tantrums from time to time until I gave up on the concept of God and religion somewhere around middle school.
After I told God what I thought about him, which was primarily negative, I raged at Meredith. Not to her face, though. Privately, in the confines of my bedroom.
Why did she have to be like the others?! It’s not fair! I’m sick and tired of being the kid everyone picks on. It’s not my fault I keep having these nosebleeds. Fuck Meredith for being like all the rest, and fuck God for giving me all these goddamned nosebleeds!
V
The sad thing is that my parents tried to solve the nosebleed problem in July 1977.
I had my tonsils removed via my first operation. They promised me all the popsicles I could eat on the other side of that surgery. That’s probably every five-year-old’s dream. Yet, when the operation was all over, and I was recovering, the allure of unlimited popsicles quickly faded. Not only because my throat was too sore, but also because my nose was heavily bandaged, thus forcing me to become a mouth breather. During the tonsil removal, the doctor also cauterized my nose by burning out the blood vessels close to the skin’s surface. Mom noted in my baby book that the operation ‘appears successful.’
Maybe it was for a little while, but those damned things eventually returned with a vengeance. The frequency of them would ebb and flow, usually with the weather.
It wasn’t until eight-grade that we tried nose cauterization again as the bleeds had become unmanageable.
I was awake for the entire procedure. I still don’t know why. Charlie took me to have it done at a medical facility somewhere in Baltimore. Maybe he didn’t want to pay the extra money to have me put to sleep? I don’t know. The doctor tried to numb the inside of my nose with a topical. It didn’t help. The pain was as bad as the aftermath of the gunpowder blowing up in my face a year later.
Charlie held me down in a chair as the doctor stuck a device that looked much like a soldering iron up my nose and cooked out the blood vessels. I could hear and smell the burning inside my head. I screamed louder than I’d ever in my life. I can’t imagine what the people on the other side of the door leading to the waiting room thought. Not that I cared.
That went on for several minutes. At the end of it, they wrapped my nose up again. I’d have to stay wrapped up that way for a week, barring bandage changes. It meant no school, which was the only bonus.
Would you like to know how Charlie compensated me for all that pain and suffering? Three dollars to spend at High’s, a local convenience store similar to 7-11.
The son of a bitch should have applied those three dollars to whatever drug would’ve knocked me out and billed me for the rest. He would’ve, too. He tried to bill me for other things as I grew older.
VI
It became my observation in those formative years that if one curses God, he’ll exact punishment and enjoy it. Now, listen…I can already hear the devout saying, “That’s not how it works. God doesn’t work that way.”
Uh-huh. Sure. To each their own opinion.
Or maybe there is no God, and some people are simply born under a bad sign.
Scorpio is clearly a bad sign.
In May 1979, as second grade wound down, God let me know he was displeased with my insolence. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
I have absolutely no memory of that day or even the days before. That’s always bothered me. Recalling traumatic events is the cornerstone of my anxiety. It’s worse not remembering.
Mom explained that I’d been riding my bike at the top of Arthur Avenue, the dead-end road where we lived. To put it into perspective, we lived at the bottom of that road as it sloped down a long hill. That puts the top of the road two hundred feet short of a mile.
Reportedly, I was with neighborhood friends Erik and Kevin F. We’d been riding around in circles. I hit a rock, turned the handlebars and went over them, connecting face and head first into the old asphalt road.
After I’d fallen, two kids biked to my house to tell Mom what had happened.
My first memory afterward involved continually spitting blood out of my mouth. I didn’t know it, but I was in an ambulance. When Mom regales this tale, she says she was in the ambulance with me. My eyes were wide open as I looked directly at her and begged for my mother.
That’s spooky.
I’d suffered an unnaturally large bump on my head. My lips and the inside of my mouth were severely lacerated, and my entire face was swollen and bruised. Also, the inside of my mouth wouldn’t stop bleeding. I remember someone put two stitches in my gums to prevent it. Finally, I chipped my right front tooth. It required a silver cap until a permanent replacement could be arranged.
According to the notes in my baby book, I spent three hours at the hospital. I don’t remember those, either.
There was a long-standing tradition at my elementary school where if a student got sick for several days or had an accident, the entire class would make handmade cards for that student using construction paper and crayons.
Several days after the accident, I received my packet of cards made by all the students of Ms. Soracoe’s second-grade class. That surprised me. Not only because the tradition slipped my mind, but because some of those cards were from established bullies, and the words weren’t mean and cruel.
I got lots of cards from other people, too. Relatives, neighbors, and people Charlie worked with that I knew from various get-togethers (many of his coworkers had children in my age bracket).
I emphasize again; I remember little from the weeks surrounding the bike accident. For many years, it really bothered me I couldn’t. When one has razor-sharp memory recall, a memory gap of that magnitude is disconcerting.
A week after the accident, I was back in school. Predictably, the taunting began again. All it takes is something for the bullies to latch onto like a fucking leech, and they’ll not let go until something better presents itself.
They replaced the nosebleed teasing with the silver cap adorning my front tooth.
“Silver tooth, funny face.”
I fucking hated school. I may have mentioned that before.
VII
By third grade, Meredith was just another face in the gallery that would giggle and point every time I had to leave class to go to the health room because I couldn’t stop the bleeding.
By fourth grade, she was no longer part of Freedom Elementary’s roster.
I’d found a new girl to crush on by then. Tammy. This time, I didn’t make the mistake of showing any interest in being her friend. Primarily because I was shy and didn’t know how to approach her, but also because I didn’t want to deal with that disappointment again. Tammy wasn’t in my third-grade class. In fourth grade, she was. Eventually, I had to interact with her, and for my part, it was totally awkward. A few times, I tried to be witty. She’d merely stare at me and say, “You’re not funny, Kevin.”
This was also mildly disappointing. If I can’t make someone laugh and they’re clearly unimpressed, then I move on. Revealing to Tammy I ‘liked her’ would’ve backfired epically.
I never told her. She never knew.
Toward the end of fourth grade, I broke open a phone book and looked her up. Since I don’t want to use surnames for apparent reasons, I’ll simply say her surname was unique, and there was only one in the phone book for our section of Maryland. I tried a handful of times to call her so I could attempt to correspond with her out of school, but each time I chickened out and hung up. Thank goodness caller I.D. wasn’t a thing in the early eighties, or my ass would’ve been busted, and no doubt humiliated.
Later on in life, when Facebook became mainstream, I looked her up. Before you raise your eyebrows and label me a stalker, understand that I looked up a goodly number of people I went to elementary school with and friended some of them. I had a handful of friends back then who ignored the bullies and the unpopular opinion of me.
Tammy got married, but damn, she’s still a stunner.
I never found Meredith.
