Peter tossed a look at the other kids, shook his head in disgust and sauntered gingerly across the ice toward the bully. Then—something snapped. Peter had finally had enough. In his mind things had come this far and would now go no further. He was going to stand up to Noonan once and for all. Tell him where to go and how fast to get there. But there was only one problem—speaking of speed. Peter’s feet were moving so fast in an attempt not to slip that he realized he was in fact gaining a great amount of gusto—too much gusto—he was heading straight at Noonan with no way to stop and so his brain stem sent the signal This Is It! Fuck Noonan! Kill Him Before He Kills You! He Has A Secret Kung Fu Move!
Much to everyone’s surprise, instead of stopping and placing his lunch money into Noonan’s grasp, Peter instead leapt forward onto Noonan’s chest and as the bully fell backward Peter inadvertently—only because of gravity and other scientific relationships between two moving masses—raked his arms down the overcoat and ended up ripping the two pockets off as he landed on top of him.
The lunch money of many flew out—coins bouncing off the cold cold ice, dollar bills billowing out on the wind.
Thinking quickly, Peter got to his feet and tossed the two pockets down onto Noonan’s very scared and shock-filled face. Where’s your Kung Fu now, asshole? Hah? he said, standing over him. Then he made a very dainty, delicate retreat—the ice underfoot not allowing him the swaggering John Wayne exit he would have preferred.
“Look what you did to my cool new coat!” Noonan whimpered.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Peter replied, struggling to keep his balance.
All the kids watched in awe as Peter minced up the icy street with his head held high. Had the bully pushed Peter over the edge? Was this cold snowy morning’s demand just the final straw in a long and seemingly endless battle? Was justice finally getting its due?
Nope.
Kung Fu and Spock’s Vulcan Death Grip had just scared the crap out of an entire generation of kids—to the point where some kind of revolution was inevitable. Bullies everywhere had taken the power of gossip and TV and turned it against the masses, much to their own chagrin.
Noonan was never again to collect lunch money or even stand in front of his house spitting and taunting. Bobby Burns was reduced to just another idiot who forgot to wear a shirt. Noonan became known as No Pockets. Eventually shortened to just Pockets.
Those were the days. You fought your own battles and sometimes you won and sometimes you lost and sometimes Mother Nature actually stepped in to lend you a secret hand. Just getting from one place to another was fraught with peril and potential karate chops.
We were lucky to be alive and our parents reminded us of that almost every other day. Starving kids in China and Africa and Ireland itself. I can’t count how many times teachers and parents would say think of the poor kids over in Vietnam—and they weren’t just referring to the Vietnamese. Ray Kelly who lived in the building next door got drafted. Another kid two streets over joined up. In the working class it was always an option—you wanted out of the neighborhood—a fresh start—you probably couldn’t afford college so you signed up with the army. And sometimes they just came and took you. Your number came up. Literally. It used to crack me up later in life when I’d meet people my age who grew up with money and they talked about Teen Tours—trips they took in the summer during high school where they visited Rome or Paris or the Swiss Alps. Yeah—we had Teen Tours too. To goddam Saigon. Or the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
We walked our skinny asses to school or down to the bus stop and it might as well have been the wild wild west: bullies on one corner, drunk drivers on the other and once you got to school you dealt with women dressed up like penguins who wielded wooden yardsticks as if they were light sabers and pedophile priests who lurked up and down every single hallway.
Nowadays parents show you videos or photos or tell you stories about how their kids are climbing and standing and saying such and such.
Hey—you wanna impress us?
Show us pictures of the kid falling down and getting stitches and stuttering to speak and swallowing nails or munching on a pigeon or just staring into the camera with scabs all over his head. Then we might be impressed. Show us a photo of the world’s ugliest kid and say “hey, look—my baby looks just like an orangutan!” This would really lead to a round of applause.
First of all—they are SUPPOSED to start climbing and standing and grabbing and kicking—if they aren’t, then take them back to the hospital and ask for a refund. And as far as him or her saying such and such—bullshit.
People other than the actual parents can’t understand a single sound a kid is making. It all comes out as gibberish. Save us all some precious seconds and call us when the kid can say “I gotta go poop.” No one—with the possible exception of the grandparents—really cares.
I’m tired of hearing the convoluted explanations of how special or talented or blessed with ability every single asshole’s kids are today. I don’t wanna hear how he tests in the something something percentile of his class or how she was judged to be blah blah blah by a panel of mathematics experts.
It’s gotten so bizarre that some people are actually trying to circumvent the system and get their idiotic children DECLARED special-needs.
Parent pair after parent pair digging through books and trawling the Internet in search of symptoms that match up with their underachieving imbeciles.
A lot of them turn to the gold standard excuse—Attention Deficit Disorder. ADD. Holy shit. I was never diagnosed as being ADD but I’ll bet if they tested back in the sixties I would’ve come up ADD-HD—High Definition. I can barely keep my focus long enough to stay on this subject. I mean—have you been reading this chapter or not?
Lemme give you an example.
I am truly, honestly going to stop typing for a moment and see whether I can think of something to say about attention deficit disorder and I will type the first two things that come into my head.
Here we go.
Gimme like—five seconds.
Okay—start counting.
Why do old people drive so goddam slow? You have had the experience—stuck in a forty-mile-per-hour speed zone on a one-lane road behind some brittle, ancient creature who’s barely going thirty as he daydreams about LBJ. Meanwhile, YER in a rush but the old asshole’s driving as if he’s got all the time in the world. Hey—I got news for ya, shithead. Yer eighty-seven years old. Death is not only right around the corner—he might be riding shotgun. If I were eighty-seven years old—full well knowing I might have a heart attack or an aneurysm or if I cut a hard fart the wrong way it might actually blow an internal gasket and make my entire insides explode all over my leather 1994 Cadillac Seville seats—I would drive so fucking fast you would barely be able to identify my car if I ran you over. And what if I did run you over—what’re they gonna do, give me life in jail? I’m eighty-goddam-seven! I think old people should be forced to actually drive the same speed as their age. Eighty-seven is your age AND your speed limit. You better hope I don’t hit my late eighties or early nineties because I will guarantee everyone right now—you better get the fuck out of my way. I’ll kill young people just for spite. And when I say young I mean anyone under seventy-five.
See? Wait—watch this:
Everyone talks about how crazy Tom Cruise is because he believes in Scientology—a religion based on the idea that aliens came to Earth many many years ago and created the human race blah blah blah. Yeah. That sounds pretty crazy to me. But not as crazy as the religion I was brought up to believe in—the Catholic Church—where we were taught that a chick got pregnant without having sex and gave birth to a guy who could walk on water and feed thousands of people with one loaf of bread and a fish. Hmmm. Who’s crazy now?
See? Wait wait—one more:
They just announced on my desktop satellite radio feed that lame-duck President George W. Bush is going to sign into law a bill that will keep the mentally ill from being able to purchase g
uns. Great. At least Britney Spears won’t be able to shoot herself in the head. Then again—neither will Kevin Federline.
I could keep going for almost forever.
Have you noticed that all the women Roger Clemens injected with his Hall of Fame semen started out very petite and pretty and blond and ended up—after the affair had run its course—far bigger with larger butts and faces? And that semen was supposedly steroid-free? I don’t think so, Rocket Man. We don’t need no stinking syringes—let’s just do a Pap smear or two or three or—how many girls was it again?
Sorry. I’m stopping now. I think you get the idea—what was I talking about?
Oh—right. Attention something something.
All these Ritalin- and Adderall-addled kids are simply a result of their parents’ wish not to have to pay more attention to them. If your son is unable to focus on his homework for longer than five seconds it doesn’t mean he’s got a learning disability—it means he’s got a pair of balls. EVERY BOY EVER BORN has a short attention span—it’s in our DNA. It’s why God invented tits—so we would have something to focus on while women were talking to us about how emotionally unavailable we are. Tits, trucks, t-bone steaks and video games. That’s what boys are built for.
By the way—if you think there isn’t a direct relationship between forcing your child to take prescription drugs in order to do better in school and the current boom in prescription drug abuse in high schools across the country—then keep your head planted firmly up your ass. Three decades ago they were concerned about my generation smoking pot snorting coke and shooting heroin. Now? They have commercials on TV warning about how kids raid their parents’ medicine cabinets to get pills. Give yourselves a big dumb round of applause, America—you’ve home-schooled your kids on how to get fucked up without even leaving the house. And better yet? It’s free!
You wanna use ADD as an excuse for not doing well in school—then I want a do-over.
The same thing goes for parents who bring charges against all these high school teachers who are having sex with students. Hey—look at it as free sex education. With NO unanswered questions after the class. These teachers are giving your kids firsthand knowledge they will DEFINITELY use later on in life. In my line of work, all the crap I heard in science and math and physics and algebra went in one ear and right out the other—but head from my homeroom teacher? THAT would be permanently emblazoned in the very front of my frontal lobe.
Where were these teachers when I was in high school? I’d love to go back in time and learn how to feel up Sister Sharon—the real hot nun who eventually left the convent and married one of our lay teachers—Mr. Ridley. Ironic term for a teacher who isn’t a priest in a Catholic school who ends up fucking a nun—a LAY teacher. In retrospect—man, was his title an apt one.
There are lawsuits flying left, right and center against priests in Catholic schools who sexually abused their students. I did twelve years in that prison and not one single priest even made a pass at me. Not even the priest who was involved in helping with the high school musicals. I mean, if there’s gonna be a gay priest—THAT guy should be the most obvious candidate, no matter what school we’re discussing. But not one pass. Maybe I should sue for lack of sexual attention. Maybe they had a negative affect on my self-esteem.
That’s a whole separate ball of asshole wax: self-esteem.
CHAPTER 6
AUTISM SHMAUTISM
In my day self-esteem came from actual performance and a clear understanding of your place in the world. The facts were laid out almost from the get-go—if you wanted to be a model and you were a girl you had to be tall and thin. If you wanted to play baseball there was no goddam wiffle ball or a special “soft” pretend, fakey baseball set up on top of a standing tee—you had to learn how to hit an actual pitched HARD baseball. Which sometimes would hit you in the face if you didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Which would break your face. Which would hurt like hell. If you wanted to be in a rock band you had to learn how to sing and actually play an instrument. While on drugs. Lots of drugs. If you were ugly then you were ugly and there was very little hope you were going to change the way you looked unless the baseball that crushed your face rearranged the bones and let you come out the other end looking like George Fucking Clooney. These were the cold, hard facts of life and your parents were in charge of supplying you with every single one of them.
There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumbass kids can’t compete academically so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks and psychotherapists to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don’t give a shit what these crackerjack whackjobs tell you—yer kid is NOT autistic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.
I know a couple of autistic children and let me tell you something they both have in common—they are extremely bright and attentive and—much like Rain Man—have individual talents and abilities that would lay your empty little tyke’s video game-addled soul to waste. A truly autistic child may be able to reproduce music he or she hears with perfect pitch—entire classical pieces, the rock opera Tommy, the latest hit Broad-way musical—over and over again. OR tell you instantly upon hearing what your birthday is—what day it has fallen on every year for the last four decades. What the weather was on those days. Who the president was at the time. What the number one song on the radio was just before singing it note for note and word for word. THAT’S an autistic child. Not some fat-assed simpleton whose brain has been fried by television and the Xbox and no proper daily attention from his or her supposedly caring parents.
Maybe your kid is not autistic. Maybe he’s just a dolt. And thank your lucky stars for that. Face the facts.
Autism is up and who knows why—parents who wasted time, their brain cells and a lot of healthy DNA on way too many recreational drugs is this doctor’s guess—but I refuse to sit here and believe that half the idiotic offspring I come across even amongst my own friends and family are a part of that problem.
I recently heard an interview with the brother of acclaimed author Augusten Burroughs. This brother guy invented the gizmo that allows smoke and a small fireworks display to spazz out of electric guitars onstage. He did it while working as a roadie/techie for the band Kiss. Ace Frehley turned to him one day and said Hey, can you make smoke’n shit fly outta my Axe while I’m playin’ it? So this guy did so. Not a huge contribution to society but hey—it is what it is and he made a good living at it. The reason I bring this up is: the interview was about a book this brother had written because when he was about fifty years old he almost completely self-diagnosed himself as having Asperger’s syndrome.
In the interview he said that all of his life people thought he was odd. He would talk to people but had trouble making eye contact with them and he knew—somehow, somewhere deep down inside—he was different. Because they wouldn’t talk back. They would usually just nod and walk away.
Uh-huh.
Here’s the textbook definition of the disease:
Asperger’s syndrome is one of several autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Characterized by difficulty in social interaction and restricted, stereotyped interests and activities. People with Asperger’s are not usually withdrawn around others, they simply approach others by engaging in a one-sided, long-winded speech about one of their own favorite topics.
Where I come from, we don’t call a guy like that a victim of Asperger’s. We just call him an Asshole Who Won’t Shut The Fuck Up.
You wanna find people who don’t think it strange or boring or mind-numbing to listen to you ramble on and on and on about what it takes to plug electronic boxes into electro converters and then into tubeless amplifiers THROUGH a remote-access special effects board and blap blappety blap until shit shoots out of a guitar played by a guy wearing fourteen-inch-high platform-heeled leather boots and a girdle? Here’s the list:
1. The guy in the girdl
e
2. You
3. People with Kiss T-shirts on
That’s it. You don’t belong in the spectrum of autism disorders. You belong backstage with a shitload of AA batteries and a suitcase full of roman candles.
Long-winded and one-sided.
I heard the guy on the radio and believe me, folks, long-winded ain’t the least of it. This guy had his head so far up inside his own ass he could be interviewed about his memoir and perform his own colonoscopy at the same time.
Odd? Yeah—you became a roadie for a rock band that dresses up in superhero costumes and wears twenty-seven pounds of makeup? Where and when is that considered normal. AND you made money at it? Sorry, pal. You don’t get to make guitars blow up for a living and then stake a claim as some kind of social retard. Lucky? Yes. Rain Man? No. Not on my planet.
Two days later I hear another person on the same show—a chick who made a documentary about her brother—another Asperger’s victim. This guy was incredibly smart and socially adept but for some reason couldn’t keep a job or cook or clean or do his own laundry and therefore was still living with his parents at age forty-two. My cousin has this version of Asperger’s. It’s called Mikey Ain’t Moving Away From Home syndrome. It’s a disease that makes you suddenly realize—hey, I gotta good thing goin’ here—rent-free—so my ass ain’t goin’ anywhere. Some guy tried it in Italy a few years ago and his parents kicked him to the curb. He actually took his parents to court—at the same age, forty-two—and the courts told him to grow up and move out. I know a ton of Irish and Italian guys who would still be living at home being waited on hand and foot by their doting mothers if their dads didn’t one day decide to lay down the law.
Why We Suck Page 10