A Pimp-Walk and a Prayer

So I have a story to tell all of you (both of you), but what you’ll need to know right off the bat is that I’m a trained educator. I know, you'd never know it with all my grammatical errors and foul language, but it's true. I don’t have a permanent job as a teacher or anything, so I just fill in for schools whenever they’re short-staffed or need some extra help. I’m kind of like a mercenary, a mercenary that people refer to as a supply teacher. Anywho, you're up to speed now.

LET’S DO THIS THANG!

So, this morning, I am getting ready to go to a school, and I’m in a rush to get out of the house in time. I’m 99.9% ready, the only thing I need is my belt. Usually, I can’t find my belt in the mornings, but I was smart last night and left it in the pants I had on yesterday. BRILLIANT MANEUVER, says I to you.

So, I locate yesterday's pants and I start trying to slide the belt out of the loops. The problem is the belt is old and worn, and the breaks and creases in the leather get caught up on the belt loops. I’m cursing and freaking out at these pants that won’t let go of my belt and I think, Are you really going to be made a fool of by an old pair of jeans and a worn-out leather belt? 

NO WAY! 

So, I tells myself, I’m a MAN and I’m not messing around with this screwy belt no more! 

I use my man-muscles to yank that mischievous belt right on out of those loops. When I do this, two unexpected things happen.  First, one of the belt loops in my jeans rips (now I have four belt loops and one denim tassel on these jeans). The second thing that happens is that my belt snaps in two, leaving a much shorter belt which would only fit a much thinner man. As it is, I am beltless.

"Greeeat," I spit sarcastically, "No belt!"

"You’ve got your blue and white one" my girlfriend says groggily from beneath a pile of blankets on our bed.

The belt she’s referring to is a white leather belt with a bright-blue and black diamond pattern on it. I bought it as part of a clown costume a while back, and I had worn it once or twice with jeans just to show how hip I was when it came to ironic fashion. What is ironic now, however, is that my ironic belt is the only one I have, and I’m not nearly hip enough to wear it to work with black dress pants.

With no time to sit and think, I let out a sigh and decide that I’ll simply have to wear my old black dress pants; the ones that are tight enough around the waist to stay up on their own. I nab these pants and throw them on, they sag a little, but they’ll have to do. I charge out the door and head to school.

The morning goes reasonably well until I’m on my way inside from supervising the kids on recess. On my way into the school, I snag my pants pocket on the door handle and hear a tic-tic-tic sound as the button from my pants skitters down the hallway and into a sea of moving feet. I’m still moving forward, but I can feel my already sagging pants loosening and my zipper beginning to inch downward. It would be helpful to have a belt at this point. At this moment, I would pay $500 for a nice white leather belt with really loony blue and black diamond patterns on it.

I manage to zip into the staff washroom and slam the door closed just as my pants drop to my ankles. On the back of the bathroom door there’s a long mirror which forces me to look at myself in this position. I'm dressed professionally from the top of my head all the way down to my waist, and then shit gets weird. There's a surprise of colour provided by my Ghostbusters boxer shorts, then it's pale legs down to the black dress socks that are sticking up from out of the crumpled pile of my dropped pants. This is an unacceptable scene. No one else can be permitted to see this. 

I look at the time on my cell phone. DAMMIT! I only have 4 minutes before I’m supposed to be supervising some Grade 2 kids for one of the teachers.

With nothing at my disposal, I get my pants up and zip the zipper as high and tight as I can. I do a quick knee-bend and the zipper rockets down.  My pants are on the floor again. I try again, but this time I don't try to test the zipper with the knee-bend. It holds, for now. I look at my phone; I have 1 minute left. I'm going to have to risk it and just take things as easy as I can until I can find some time to fix this.

Fearfully, I exit the washroom. I take a deep breath and start walking. I walk slowly and smoothly, leaning backwards a bit and carefully placing each foot forward and then easing my weight onto it. I pass classrooms where some of students stare out at me in confusion as I pimp-walk my way to class with nothing but a prayer holding up my pants.

I ease around the classroom, trying as best I can not to make any sudden movements. One kid drops a bookbag full of stuff all over the floor and I watch coldly as they pick it up. Sorry, Junior, you're not going to be getting any assistance from me, I've got my own problems here. The class goes by without a hitch, and by the time the regular teacher comes back, I've relaxed a little bit. We're chatting away with one another when I feel the zipper slip down a bit. Immediately, I lose all interest in our conversation. While she's talking, my face goes slack and my eyes get hazy and distant. I'm not really talking now, I’m just nodding and saying "Mmm Hmm", and "Oh yeah?" every few seconds. In my head, I'm pleading with whatever deities might be out there: Please, please, PLEEEEASE don't let my pants blow wide open while I'm talking to this woman.

I tell myself that if the worst happens, if these badboys drop, and this woman and a whole classroom of 7-year olds sees me in my Ghostbuster underwear, I'm just going to do a Van Halen-style jump kick, yell "WHO YA GONNA CALL?!" while in the air, then walk out....possibly into oncoming traffic.

The pants hold, and my conversation with the teacher comes to an end. Finally, I have a few minutes to fix this problem. Actually, I have exactly 10 minutes. I pimp-walk my way back to the staff washroom, but make a stop at the office to grab some supplies on the way. Not knowing exactly what I'm going to do, I decide I better take anything that might be useful: rubber bands, paperclips, clamps, scissors, and a stapler. The secretary looks at me like I might be crazy, and I look back at her like she might be right. Then it's into the bathroom.

At first I try one of those black clamps with the little metal levers. It's a no-go, so I get more extreme. I hold my pants closed and try to staple them shut. This sounds like a better idea than it is, and it doesn’t even really sound like that good of an idea. The waist of my pants is too thick to staple together and when I try to drive an open staple into the pants to act as a "hook", all I manage to do is drive a staple into my bikini-zone. Scrapping the stapler plan, I move on to rubber bands. Surely this will work. I use the scissors to cut a hole where the button used to be and try to loop the rubber bands through with the hopes of tying them. Both of the bands snap in half. 

I check the time. I have 2 minutes. Enough fucking around.

I pull out two heavy-duty paperclips and call upon my man-muscles for the second time today to straighten the clips out. I feed them through the two holes in my pants, cross the ends, and start to twist. I twist them up until the remaining ends snap off. Where the button used to be, I now have a sharp little knot of twisted metal that pokes into me whenever I lean forward. I haul on the pants and shake them and test my work. 

It's perfect! I'm not even sure how I'm going to get these pants off later. It's then that I realize I probably should have taken that piss I've been holding in for the past hour before I tied my pants shut with twisted steel.

I spend the rest of the day holding in my piss and being scared that somehow the paperclip knot digging into my body is going to let go. I have the junior high kids in the afternoon, and I reeeeally don’t want to lose my pants in front of them. With the little kids, I might have been able to laugh it off. I mean, come on, they do embarrassing shit all the time, but the older kids, that would be awful. They would tease me ruthlessly and I would probably die of embarrassment. If I did, there'd be no one to explain what had actually happened. All anyone would know is that I dropped my pants in front of a bunch of kids. I'd be that known as that sick bastard who wore underwear with cartoons on them and drove staples into his own groin for kicks. No, I can't have that happen to me, so I just take it reeeaaally easy for the rest of the day, playing it safe by pimp-walking everywhere even though I probably don't have to.

I manage to hold my piss in until the end of the day. I'm thankful for this because the only thing worse than dropping your pants in front of colleagues and students is pissing your pants in front of them and then not being able to get the pissy pants off your body. There’s no way I could have undone those pants at the school. When I got home that afternoon, I had to use a pair of wirecutters to get out of them while I did the potty-dance. I managed to pinch myself twice with the cutters.

Anyway, that was my day. My groin took a beating what with all the staples, pokey metal knots, and the wire-cutter pinches, but you know what, that's the life of a supply teacher.

And that's that.  I'm going to bed.

The Ladies Man

I used to go to Prince Edward Island every summer when I was a kid.  For a few years there was a kid there named Josh who was approximately the same age as me—about 13 or 14—and who stayed in the cabin beside the one my family stayed in.  Josh and I were best friends during those summers.   We liked the same things (cheeseburgers and candy) and both loved hanging out at the beach where we could stomp on dead jellyfish and kill crabs.  Ah, youth!

One summer, there was a new family on the other side of our cabin who had two kids about my little sister’s age as well as a daughter who was a year or two older than I was.  My sister had become fast friends with the two younger kids, and spent most of her day playing with them while I hung around with Josh.

Now, it just so happened that one afternoon Josh and I were lounging on the deck of the cabin when the eldest daughter of the family next door happened to come outside to sunbathe.  The girl looked like an angel.  She was like D.J. Tanner from Full House.  She was goddamn perfect.

Being 13 year old boys, we nonchalantly (actually, it was probably very fucking chalant) moved our lawn chairs to a position where we could stare at this poor girl all afternoon.  Whereas before we had been talking about movies we liked, now we said nothing, we just sat silently in our chairs behind our mirrored sunglasses.  Not creepy at all.  When she went back inside—after about 10 minutes—Josh and I immediately started in with the locker room talk.  Never mind the fact that this girl’s cabin was only 10 feet away and she was only behind a screen door, we were all about this girl, we didn’t care if she heard us.  She was a “total babe”.  Our conversation was full of all those testosterone-fueled comments that teenage boys like to think sound manly but really only prove how little they know about anything. 

“I’d put my hand in her back pocket”

“I’d French with her”

“She could sleep over at my house, ANY time”

We were pathetic.

Later that evening, Josh and I were inside the cabin eating our way through an oversized bag of cheap-ass no-name wannabe-Doritos with a picture of Garfield wearing a Sombrero on the front when my Dad came in and said that there was going to be a big campfire in the backyard that night with my sister’s friends and their family.  Josh was welcome to come as well.

Josh and I thought the same thing, That babe is gonna be here!

Then we both thought the same thing again, But which of us is going to be her boyfriend?

And then again, one more time, we both thought, I am!

We decided to be gentlemen.  We’d each take our shot, and to the victor would go the spoils.  We agreed to take some time to get cleaned up for the evening, then meet back at my cabin in about an hour.  I showered, put on my newest-looking swimming trunks and my best Batman t-shirt.  I kicked on my least-stinkiest flip-flops and took a look in the mirror to see what my hair was doing these days.  Roguishly windblown.  That was perfect.  Mix the unruly hair with my tanned skin and freckled face and I looked like the very spirit of youth.  I looked like Tom Sawyer.  Who could resist that?  [Sadly, it would turn out that most women could resist that, and for years to come.]

I went outside onto the deck and sat down in the chair.  The air was rich with the smell of the salt water, and a warm breeze carried the scent of smoke from the various campfires.  It was going to be a magical night.  Josh was taking a while so, while I waited, I fantasized about showing this girl off to all my friends back home.

“Hey Dudes, what’s up?  Oh, her?  Pfft, that’s just my girlfriend.  Yeah, she’s from the island.  Yeah I guess she does sort of look like D.J. Tanner, no big deal or anything.  I’m actually getting kind of bored with her”.

Then she comes over and I totally put my hand in her back pocket like it’s not even a big deal either, and I am immediately crowned King Shit.  There might actually be a crown, I’d just have to wait and see about that part.

Yeah, that’s how this shit was going to go.  After tonight, a lot of things were going to change.  Tonight would mark the beginning of my rise to power.

Eventually I heard the screen door on Josh’s cabin screech open and bang shut.  He walked towards me in the twilight.  At first my heart sank, and then it began to fill with rage.  This piece of shit coming towards me was wearing dress shoes, new blue jeans, a maroon windbreaker (with no t-shirt on underneath), and a gold chain necklace.  He was dressed to kill.

“Hey”, he said, “I’m ready”.

As he stood next to me, the smell of the campfires surrendered to the overpowering scent of his Old Spice.  His hair had been over-gelled and combed straight back like a cool 80’s movie villain. 

Dammit, I thought, Ladies love the badboys.  This guy’s done his homework.

He looked like a young Val Kilmer and I looked like one of the Little Rascals.  I had lost this shit already.  I felt sick.  With disappointment in my heart, I walked behind Josh to the fire.  That was my place, after all, behind him.  Second-place.  Always last.  Sigh  We got to the fire and stood there for a bit.  Everyone was there except for the babe.  After about 15 minutes, we managed to snag her little brother for a second.

“Where's your older sister” I asked.

"She went to a campfire down the beach with some guys...your Dad bought us SPARKLERS for tonight!"

Josh jumped in, "What did he say?"

The little boy repeated, "We got SPARKLERS!"

"No, not that" Josh spat at him, "where is your sister?"

"I dunno, some campfire on the beach somewhere"

Josh sounded desperate, he clearly had a lot riding on this.

"Where on the beach?" he demanded.

But the kid had already lost interest and was running away with his arms out, pretending to be an airplane, a very unhelpful airplane.

We stood there for a bit longer, and I could see Josh was trying to think of a plan.

“Wanna go for a walk?” he asked

“Where?” I replied, just to piss him off.

“I dunno, down the beach or something”

“Sure, I guess so” I said, not really wanting to go.

We trudged up the beach one way about a mile.  There were only a few fires on the beach because the tide had just gone out and everything was still pretty wet.  When we did come across a fire, Josh would veer towards it enough to get a look at who was there.  Mostly it was older teenagers who said things like, “Don’t you guys look romantic?”, and “Nice fucking windbreaker!”  Once we had gone the mile, Josh insisted we turn around and check about the same distance the other way.  We spent most of the night walking on the beach being harassed by guys with backwards baseball hats who made it clear how ridiculous they thought we were and, in one case, threw handfuls of wet sand at us.

The walking wasn’t bothering me; I was wearing shorts and flip-flops, but Josh’s dress shoes were soaked from walking through the wet sand, and his pantlegs had taken on water and become so heavy that he had to hold his pants up by the pockets as he walked.  The effort had caused him to break out in a sweat and his windbreaker stuck to his clammy skin.  Eventually he gave up his search, and we trudged back to the fire at the cabin, Josh grumbling the whole way.

He plopped himself down in a lawn chair in front of the fire and let the heat dry his shoes and pantlegs.  The heat of the fire also loosened the product in his hair.  It mixed with his sweat and dripped down onto his forehead and shoulders in globs, drying to leave disgusting white spots.

The night wasn’t a total loss.  The campfire at the cabin was nice, and I did get the consolation prize of listening to the little kids tell Josh all the gross things they thought his too-much-cologne smelled like until he got so mad he had to go inside to wash some off and towel some of the sweat-gel out of his hair. I also watched in quiet satisfaction as the sparks from the campfire and the sparklers my Dad had bought melted little holes in his fancy-ass maroon windbreaker while he sat unaware, pounding marshmallows into his face.

Now, here’s the best part.  Before the night ended, the Total Babe came back from her fire (wherever the hell it had been) and checked in with her parents at the one we were all at.  She was only quickly introduced to everyone before she went into the cabin to watch television, but when Josh got his turn to say “Hello”, he tried to do it all smokey-voiced and didn’t even look at her.  He just thrusted his marshmallow roasting stick in the fire a few times, like “Yeah, pffft, whatever”.  Everyone noticed, and the parents kind of smirked at how silly he looked.

I just stared at him and smiled.

Yeah, that's it. Enjoy those tasty marshmallows, cool guy.  Your shoes are wrecked, your cologne made people sick to their stomachs, your hair looks fucked, and that sweat-bag you call a coat is ready for the garbage.  You’re gonna sit there looking like a homeless person and play hard to get when you’re clearly hard to want?  Nice strategy, Ladies Man!

So, neither of us got the girl.  It was actually the first in what would become a long run of romantic failures for me.  I’m not sure how Josh made out with his love life, but I like to think he failed a lot too, and that he probably got beat up at least twice a summer for most of his life.

That was actually the last summer Josh and I hung out.  The next year my family went to Old Orchard Beach instead of Prince Edward Island, and I made friends with two Dutch boys .  They couldn’t speak English worth a damn, but they had a smoking-hot mom who traipsed around in a bikini all day and called me “Zveetheart”. 

Top that, Josh.