Who’s up for a quick dash through the cemetery of painful memories? Neither am I. But I’ve been working on a new story that requires me to revisit some very painful moments of classroom and relationship embarrassments in order to achieve the necessary subtextual authenticity needed to make the story really funny.

As I’ve discovered, pain is funny. Men in pain is twice as funny. The simple mathematics of comedy. The reason why that should be true evades me, and probably something I should take up for deep, philosophical consideration at a later date.

So, I’m strolling through the burial ground, checking for the stench of a truly unsettling episode of embarrassment that I can reshape into comic motivation for the main character I’m writing in the new work.

One especially fertile patch of ground is where I buried the emotional turmoil of my one and only unrequited schoolyard crush. From fourth grade to high school, that emotional entanglement provided plenty of debasement. I can trace my development as an expert black-belt, grand master, poobah in emotional self-defense to that imaginary relationship and all of the episodes of humiliation that flowed from it.

Moving around the vast acreage of interred memories, I wandered over to the stale earth I’d shoveled over that particular series of situations. The smell was as pungent as ever. The rich offal of those terrible feelings would make for some very authentic character development. Why waste it? Writers, I’m told, use everything, leaving nothing sacred untouched.

It was fourth grade and it was my turn to be health monitor. In fourth grade back then, there weren’t a lot of ways for teachers to provide leadership opportunities. This was the teacher’s way of making each student special, if only for a few minutes. There wasn’t much to the role except to follow the teacher around with a clipboard and a pen. She’d give each student the once over, nodding, smiling, having the health monitor put a check mark in the boxes indicating that the inspected student was neat, tidy, appeared to be in tolerable good health. All generally positive.

My turn in the rotation for that responsibility came and I was delighted to be the slightly off-center of attention as the teacher moved up and down the rows of desks, examining my classmates. It was a secret joy just to look on the object of my affection, having been deputized into exercising that right and responsibility in my role as health monitor.

We reached the last desk in the row where the object of my affection looked at me with sad, welcoming eyes. It’s a look that I’ve since interpreted as the kind of humble gaze we all reserve for undeciphered authority figures before we know for sure that we owe them obedience or scorn. It was sweet, and felt sort of, kind of, maybe somewhat like affection.

Done with the duty, I followed the teacher back to her desk and handed her my clipboard and pen. She looked down at the page, skimming along with the point of the pen. She cleared her throat and said, “Would you go back and ask the object of your insanely unrealistic affections if she brushes her teeth?”

Of course, the teacher actually said the girl’s name, but what I heard was the bit about insanely unrealistic affections. Because, of all the students in that classroom – the guys who could beat me up after class for embarrassing them by asking such a question – the guys who would melt into the earth, more embarrassed than me at such an insinuation – the girls who made not a single whit’s difference to me – the teacher asked me to go back and ask the one female in all the world whose esteem I desired, if she brushed her teeth. Without my clipboard and pen. Without the teacher’s reflected authority when she’d been standing next to me. Just plain me.

I hadn’t yet learned to evade direct instructions from authority figures, so I went. I stood over her desk. I cleared my throat. I asked the question.

I do not remember a single minute of what happened the rest of my fourth grade year after that. Not a single, blessed thing the entire rest of the school year. Nothing. I didn’t come out of my stupor until I was in fifth grade in Fayetteville, North Carolina after my Dad had been transferred to Fort Bragg. I’m sure I got through the rest of fourth grade, since I was clearly in a fifth grade classroom, with other fifth graders. But what I did? How I fared? How I got back to my desk after asking that hellacious question? Not a clue. It must have been bad. God had to give me an entire year in another state all the way on the other side of the continent until her look of disdain finally faded from my fertile, adolescent imagination.

That should be good for half-a-book’s worth of motivation for a self-destructive character whose miscreance in love is completely unfathomable to the outside observer, wouldn’t you think? Probably don’t even need to change the names.

There’s not the slightest chance my secret crush will recognize herself in the new work. I’m sure she didn’t agonize over being asked about her dental hygiene by some stupid boy one row over and three seats up - in case that helps jog her memory.

But if she did, it may help for her to know I didn’t take the stitches out of that particular wound in my psyche until well after high school.

If it still matters.

Text (c) Scott Parson

Image 1 & 2:   foamcow is licensed under CC BY 2.0