by Paul Feig
“Aw, youth is wasted on the young.”
Amen, my chunky black-and-white friend. Amen.
Across the board, the things we want to know throughout our lives are the things people tell us we’re not allowed to know, and those things are more enticing to us than the world’s most sugary dessert.
Case in point . . .
When I was in the fourth grade, something happened that my friends and I were excluded from that really got our minds racing. It was something I like to call:
“The Day The Girls Got To Get Out Of Class.”
One morning, we were all sitting in Mr. Dukowski’s math class. My head was in its usual state of perpetual swimming as I tried once again to grasp the idea that numbers could actually be combined in a predetermined manner using set rules that would then result in a definitive answer. Everyone else around me always seemed to be able to grasp this concept and apply it in order to produce the right answers to the problems in our math books. However, for me, all the numbers and division signs and fractions were some type of ancient hieroglyphics, symbols of a lost civilization that were fun to look at because I knew they probably held the answers to some pretty interesting questions. The problem was that Mr. Dukowski and the school board wanted me to learn how to translate this strange language. I tried and tried throughout the years with only limited success but, alas, the art of numerical computation ultimately eluded me. I wasn’t proud of this and tried in earnest to conquer math, but the prosecution had already built a pretty strong case that any attempt I made to nurture a science or accounting career would prove to be a war as unwinnable and ill-advised as Vietnam.
As I sat there staring cluelessly at the number-covered chalkboard while Mr. Dukowski explained the concept of fractions to us, a female teacher came to the door of the classroom, cracked it open a few inches, and peeked inside.
“Psssssst!”
Mr. Dukowski looked over, along with the rest of us in the class, and saw her signaling for him to come into the hallway. Mr. Dukowski excused himself and disappeared. We all exchanged looks. Moments like this meant either that somebody was in trouble and was about to be dragged out of class or that there was some wonderful surprise heading our way. Unfortunately, “wonderful surprises” never occured in my school. But I had watched enough Little Rascals shorts on TV to believe that occasionally—and usually on the day that you played “hooky”—your teacher would throw you a cake-and-ice-cream party. I waited my entire school career for a cake-and-ice-cream party, and the closest I ever got was a tornado warning in which they let us all go home early so that we could be killed in our own houses instead of on school property.
Mr. Dukowski came back into the room and said, “All right, all the girls in the class should gather their things and go with Ms. Comforti.”
The girls exchanged looks and did as they were told. As they scooped up their books and purses and bags and filed out, all of us boys in the class were at a loss.
“What are they going to do?” asked Rob Leffert, a friend of mine whom I admired because he could draw cartoons of Wile E. Coyote that actually looked like Wile E. Coyote.
“Something that you’re not going to do,” Mr. Dukowski said with a sarcastic smile. These are the retorts that I now know seem really funny when you’re an adult but just bug the hell out of you when you’re a kid.
“Well, why do they get to leave when we have to stay here?” complained Mark Bennett, being far more aggressive than any of my circle of friends would ever dare to be. At age nine, Mark was definitely a cool guy in the making. I remember in my freshman year I saw him hitchhiking when I was driving with my mom. I asked her to stop and pick him up, thinking he’d be really happy to get a ride from someone he knew, and yet he just looked upset when we pulled over and told him to get in the car. After we drove less than a quarter of a mile he said we could let him out. I was confused until my mother informed me that she was sure that Mark was hitchhiking in order to meet girls. This blew my backward thirteen-year-old mind and it was then that I realized I was the most sexually ignorant kid in my school.
Mr. Dukowski gave Mark a look and then told us, “You guys are unfortunately stuck with me,” but that we would have our own fun learning how to add fractions. He chuckled again at his quip, and the feeling in the room was palpable. There was a great injustice taking place that the girls were benefiting from and it was quite clear that none of us were going to take it in stride.
As my friends and I walked through the hallway to our next class, we noticed that the girls were still nowhere to be found. It was as if we were in some science fiction movie where all the females had been taken away to another planet and we males were left to unravel the mystery. Discontent was everywhere.
“This is so unfair,” said my friend Mike.
“What do you think they’re doing?” I asked.
“I bet they’re getting to have a tea party or something,” chimed in the perpetually greasy-haired Art.
“No, I bet they’re letting them watch TV,” said Mike.
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re girls and they get to do all kinds of fun stuff like that,” groused Mike, who had been complaining about the unequal treatment he and his sister had been getting for a couple of years now. “My mom’s always taking my sister to buy stuff at the mall and eat out and go to ice-skating lessons. My mom won’t do any of that stuff with me.”
“Do you want to go to ice-skating lessons?” Art asked, obviously ready to accuse Mike of being a girl.
“No, but I’m just saying that girls always get to do cool stuff.”
As we young males suffered through our next class, our collective minds were spinning as we tried to figure out what the girls had done as a group to entitle them to all this time away from their desks. I had visions of them sitting in a room pajama party–style, passing around chips and cups of pop and exchanging stories about how stupid all us boys were. I saw flashes of the girls walking around at the zoo, being presented with the keys to the city, getting manicures and pedicures, being given bags of money and jewels, all for the simple reason that they were girls and had a different set of chromosomes than we did. Girls always seemed to get special treatment like that. We were told to be nicer to girls and that we weren’t allowed to fight with them. Girls could stay in the bathroom longer and seemed to be able to get out of all the activities I hated to do in gym. Girls didn’t have to play dodgeball or flag football and even had their own tetherball court and a much easier way to do push-ups—they got to keep their knees on the floor. I could have done hundreds of push-ups that way and won multiple Presidential Fitness Awards if only they’d have let me, but I was always forced to do push-ups the proper boy way with my knees straight and could therefore barely do ten. No, girls had all the advantages and there wasn’t a thing we boys could do about it.
But getting out of class because of being a girl? Well, that was just too much.
When the teachers told us it was time for recess, we all headed out. The unbounded enthusiasm we usually had for the playground had been cut by our collective angst over the missing girls. Recess now seemed to us like a cheap consolation prize for having been born a male. The girls had now been gone for over an hour and it wasn’t sitting well with any of us.
“They took them roller-skating, I’m telling you. I know they took them roller-skating.” Mike now seemed on the verge of tears, his frustration high at the gender injustice to which we were being subjected. “My mom always lets my stupid sister go roller-skating and she won’t even let me hang out at the creek.”
“Maybe they transferred them to another school,” said Art. “Maybe they’re gonna turn this into an all-boys’ school. My cousin goes to one and they make him wear a tie.”
Before we could really take time to be horrified by this thought, we walked out onto the playground only to find that, lo and behold, the girls were already out there.
They had returned.
What happened next I can only describe as a grade-school reenactment of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Before any of my friends could even process the reappearance of the girls, gangs of other boys from our grade saw them, stopped, and yelled, “There they are! Get ’em!” The boys burst past us and sprinted across the parking lot toward the girls. The girls’ instincts seemed to immediately tell them that there was trouble afoot because they all screamed and started running, too. The gangs of boys swarmed around them like border collies, breaking them into smaller groups and herding them into different parts of the playground. Apparently the angst that had made me and my group of friends so curious about what had happened during the girls’ sabbatical had driven the other guys in my class to the brink of insanity. Suddenly, the playground was filled with the sounds of screaming girls and the sight of boys strong-arming them into confessions. I saw boys pushing girls back and forth between them, backing them up against walls and the trunks of cars. I remember feeling very strange—that I was witnessing something inherently wrong. Outside of showing a girl a worm or pointing a spider out to her on a nearby wall, there weren’t too many times in a boy’s life when he actually got to hear girls scream in terror.
But today, screaming they were. Girls were crying, fleeing, trying futilely to escape to the top of the monkey bars, but there was no stopping the advance that was fueled by the adrenaline rush of a group of nine- and ten-year-old boys who felt they had been dealt a grave injustice. The message was clear: If you get out of class and I don’t, then kiss your peaceful existence good-bye until you tell me what happened.
As my friends and I stood there stunned at the battle before us, Gary Winnik—a kid whom we knew but weren’t particularly friends with because he was way cooler than we were—ran back in from the melee and came up to us.
“They saw a movie!” he reported proudly, like an enemy soldier who had just tortured sensitive information out of a prisoner.
“See, I told you so,” Mike said to us, angry that he hadn’t been taken seriously.
“What movie did they see?” I asked.
“It was a movie about being a girl.”
“What kind of movie is that?”
“It’s about going to the bathroom and underwear and girl stuff.”
We were immediately thrown. This was not the answer that any of us were either expecting or hoping for. We wanted to be indignant but suddenly didn’t know if we should feel cheated over not getting to see a movie that none of us would really want to see in the first place.
“Yeah? Well . . . how come there’s no movie about being a boy? That’s not fair,” complained Art. “Are we gonna get to get out of class tomorrow for that?”
As we all harrumphed in agreement, it was obvious that our indignation had given way to total confusion. A movie about being a girl? I remembered having seen a weird program on TV that showed girls sitting with their elbows in grapefruit halves, something that was supposed to make their skin softer. While this had perplexed me when I saw it because I couldn’t figure out why anyone needed softer elbow skin, I now imagined that these were the kinds of tips the girls’ mysterious movie had been filled with. My mind started to put odd pieces of a puzzle together. Since girls took longer in the bathroom, there must have been something in the movie that explained exactly why this was or gave them advice about what they needed to do while they were in there to make sure they were doing things properly. I’d heard from my friend Mary that women sat down when they peed. Armed with this disturbing fact and the thought that an entire movie was required to teach girls the specifics of bathroom usage, my mind started imagining all sorts of strange activities that they might be doing in their marathon lavatory sessions. I envisioned girls performing contortionist-like exercises and having to take off all their clothes in order to properly complete their feminine toilet duties. If grapefruits on elbows led to softer skin, then who knew what kind of fruit on what part of the body was being used in the ladies’ room, not to mention exactly what it might be softening. My head began to swim at all the details I realized I didn’t know about the opposite sex. I suddenly felt relieved to be a male, a species so simply and externally designed that, like a blow-dryer or a transistor radio, we could operate ourselves without ever having to consult the owner’s manual.
And yet it still didn’t seem fair that the girls would be allowed out of class to learn something as mundane as how to relieve themselves.
As my friends and I waded out into the chaos, we saw the playground ladies desperately trying to restore order. These out-of-shape guardians of our recess activities were running from group to group saying such effective crowd-control phrases as “Stop that—now stop that right now” and “Boys, you leave those girls alone!” The sight of the rotund Mrs. Warner’s enormous oldwoman breasts bouncing out of control under her “World’s Greatest Grandma” sweatshirt as she chased after a gang of marauding schoolboys would have been funny had I not been so consumed with my quest to decipher what this girl-movie was really all about. It was then that Tim Stepalonis, the dirtiest and skinniest kid in our school, ran up to us with more in-depth information. Tim was a kid who always scared me because, even though he was so thin that you thought he’d snap like a Pringle if you accidentally ran into him, he had an insane quality that made him seem like he would have no qualms about one day killing you when your back was turned. It was Tim who uttered the words “Man, if I did that my mom would kick my ass” when we were shown Gene Kelly’s famous downpour dance number from Singin’ in the Rain. But right now, Tim was the guy with the information I desperately needed and I couldn’t have been happier to see him.
“You wanna know what that movie they watched was about?” Tim asked, out of breath from running to us, clearly relishing the information he held.
“Yeah, was it about going to the bathroom?” asked Art uncertainly, sounding almost fearful of hearing that it was anything more complicated.
Tim got a scary smile and said, “No, it was about them having their periods.” The way he said that sentence made it clear that this was information we were supposed to find very funny and forbidden. Unfortunately, his factoid landed on the wrong ears. My group of cartoon-watching misfits and I stared at him, unified in our shared misconception, all puzzling over the suggestion that the movie was about punctuation for females. Tim immediately knew we had no idea what he was talking about and shook his head.
“Don’t you know what a girl’s period is?” he asked, incredulous. He said the word period as if he were saying the word boobs or vagina, two terms that all nine-year-old boys take great pleasure in overpronouncing.
“Yes, of course I do.” Mike was loath to admit that he didn’t know something, especially when it was something so clearly subversive as this mysterious girls’ “period.”
“Yeah? Then what is it?” Tim smiled smugly. He knew he had us all.
“Just tell us, Stepalonis,” Mike said, too curious to be embarrassed about his failed attempt to make himself seem learned.
“It’s when girls bleed out of their va-gi-nas.”
I can’t speak for my compatriots, but I know that the wave of horror that overtook me in that moment was as strong and mind-altering as the time I saw my next-door neighbor’s mother accidentally step on a large praying mantis in our driveway. “Why do they bleed?” I squeaked out, my head spinning.
“Because all girls do. That’s how they have babies, you retard.”
It’s hard to describe the dizzying assault of images that flashed through my brain at that moment; overscratched mosquito bites, scraped bleeding knees, and uncontrollable nosebleeds were among the highlights. But the most disturbing was the memory of something I had recently seen in a movie preview. The local Standard gas station by our house used to give away free passes to kids for a movie program that the Macomb Mall sponsored every Saturday morning. I used to go because the movie was generally along the lines of those harmless Disney Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar–type films, the ones in which
a rambunctious forest creature would befriend a park ranger and reek madcap havoc upon an outpost’s flour sack. But the previous week they had shown a trailer for the film Dracula—Prince of Darkness. And in it, Dracula had a woman hanging upside down over a white cement floor and before my mind could process what I was seeing, Dracula snatched a sword from its scabbard and swung it toward the woman’s neck, whereupon the film cut to a shot of the white floor and then a tidal wave of blood pouring down on top of it. So disturbing was the image to me that, as I watched the zany misadventures of a pair of bear cubs in the low-rent Canadian nature film that was the feature presentation, all I could see were flashes of the crimson cascade that Dracula had caused. Even an adorable pair of gingham-stealing chipmunks didn’t cheer me up, as I was now fixated on the thought that the chipmunks and the bears and even the befuddled forest ranger were also filled with copious amounts of blood. I felt faint envisioning that if Dracula were to show up and perform his dirty work, I’d be watching oceans of bear and chipmunk and ranger blood stain the meadows of golden wheat through which they were currently romping. The image haunted me all week and yet today that splattering blood wasn’t part of a movie anymore. It was something I was now convinced I’d be witnessing on my wedding night.