I was taking in breakfast at the gas station this morning, wait, not really breakfast. It was just the coffee and cigarettes, no food. Yeah, pretty healthy start to the morning, I know. Okay, let's start over a bit more accurately:
I was having coffee and cigarettes at the gas station this morning, passing the time before I hit the office and start another dreary day. Like many other days, I was not looking forward to what lay in the hours ahead, this was just another dot in the path from one point to the next in my so-called life. So I just sit there looking bad-ass, or at least trying to be as bad-ass as I could possibly look like. You know the drill, try to look cool and aloof yet secretly ogle at every chick that walks past you. Of course we want them to notice us, were doing all this sitting around being bad-ass bit for the sake of them noticing us, but we don't want them to know that we notice them, because, well, that seems desperate. (Which in reality, we are) Obviously, this never really leads anywhere, but we do it just because it's inherently programmed into our hard drives, like those male lions who never really do any hunting but just sit there looking really rad and regal and important.
Yes, I'll admit it, men are idiots. But somehow I have this sneaking suspicion that I didn't need to tell you that...
*****
Now, moving on to a smaller version of men, today was a Friday, which means whole legions of third graders are out on field trips. Why they do this, I've no idea. No one ever learns from these things anyway. All I remember from past field trips is that time when I threw out perfectly good Kool Aid from my jug to fill it up with free Coke.
Anyway, back to these little gremlins, a bunch of them (approximately 500 of the pip squeaks) were laying siege to the gas station convenience store. They were from my alma mater, a catholic boy's school who try to pack in as many students as they can into tiny classrooms with tiny chairs and tiny tables. They were friggin' everywhere, sorta like the cockroach infestation that I have at my apartment. I probably stomped on a dozen of the little buggers while walking to the counter to pay for my coffee. They were running, walking, hopping, slithering and turning somersaults all around without a care in the world that you couldn't turn a corner without bumping into one of them.
Walking to my table, I couldn't help but be irritated by the squeaks their huge, oversized basketball shoes made on the ceramic tiled floor. You see, it is a fact of life that parents will always buy their kid a shoe at least 2 sizes bigger than their actual foot size. This gives these parents the false hope that the shoe they purchased will last at least a year or two before their kid outgrows them. This also gives fair warning with each noisy footfall that the little runt is in the area and is undoubtedly up to no good. Unfortunately for parents though, it is a fact of life that little boys love having shiny new basketball shoes, preferably a knock-off from the latest season of the NBA. So their one goal upon getting their gigantic new pair of shoes is to wear them out and wreck them as soon as they possibly could, so their parents would be forced to buy a new pair for the next NBA season. You could just imagine the amount of whining, groveling, begging, tantrums, shouting and bargaining that happens whenever Kobe Bryant decides on a whim that he likes another style of basketball shoes better.
Then a hot teacher walks by. Young, vibrant, eager and full of life. You know, the kind that just started her career in educating these kids. She was surrounded by a phalanx of pre-pubescent boys, every one of them trying to get her attention by giving her candy or asking the dumbest questions (Teacher, why is that perv who's smoking and drinking coffee over there staring at your ass?) Wait, my mistake, not really everyone. The whole lot of them were merely distractions, while one of them was designated to try a grope on some ass or boob then tell everyone in class what it felt like. Lucky bastard.
Sitting there, watching the dynamics of the swarm, I couldn't help but look back at that time of my life. It was an odd time, the concept of the "future" wasn't there yet. All I could think of was that all this school crap was interfering with my career at playing marbles, or reading comics, or preparing for my impending smackdown with the Ultimate Warrior.
The good thing about being in a class of 500 is that you seldom get noticed unless you're either at the top of the class or dead last (or get caught trying to look down your teacher's cleavage). The relative anonimity that one gets is just perfect so that you could get a feel of what is to be the future, when a heck of a lot of us become drones and lose whatever feeling of being special our parents have imposed on us. Unlike the schools which offer extra attention to the kids by maintaining small classes and more supervision, my old school doesn't hand out awards and consolation prizes to everyone. That's the crap kids already get at home, at school you find your real place in society, which is something right out of a "Where's Wally" comic. Let's face is, high self-esteem is overrated anyway. No one ever gets what they think they deserve, only what they do.
*****
Some of the kids gathered round a table, and took out their tops. Wait, I don't think they call it a 'top' anymore... Bey blades, I think is the in-thing. They've got this fancy plastic launcher and plastic spinning tops with blunted metal edges. Basically it's the same game only with different equipment.
I miss the old tops, those made out of hardwood spheres with a rusty nail sticking out the bottom. They didn't have any fancy spring-type launchers, though, only a meter-long piece of string with a bottlecap on one end. You wrung the string throughout the circumference of the top and use this whipping motion to let her loose. It wasn't easy, it took lots of practice and skill to pull off the perfect 1-minute spin. With more practice, you could launch the top in mid-air and catch it on the palm of your hand. It was a neat trick, though like all cool things, the 'chicks' never did appreciate it.
I owned only one top in my day, a rather heavy one made out of a dark mahogany. I used it for years and won a lot of 'money' (we used discarded cigarette packs as currency) with it. One time, though, one of the bigger kids joined our play and challenged us for our tops. This was a common wager then, he won't really take your top, but he'd be allowed to disfigure it with his own by taking a whack at it. There were 4 of us and 1 of him, we figured this was a fair opportunity to earn some street cred, so we obliged. One by one, the older kid beat us at every game, no thanks to his superior throwing technique which thrust his top at a spin that our puny little 10-year old arms couldn't match. After the humiliation, the punishment came. He lined up our tops, burying each into the ground so that only the tops stuck out. Then he tied his top securely to the string, and whacked away. Our tops were so disfigured that they never spun right after that.
So there we were, 4 kids desperately trying to fix our tops. When we realized that they were now worthless, we took them back home and cried over them.
That's right about the time we started playing with marbles.
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