Around second grade, boys are able to join Cub Scouts, or at least they were forty years ago. I remember the first time I saw a bunch of my fellow second-graders wearing Cub Scout uniforms—I thought they looked like a bunch of slap-dicks.
Dark-blue uniforms with a yellow kerchief and the retard hat with the short bill. Our teachers had special duties for the boys wearing the blue uniforms. The ass-boys.
Not for me. The same went for patrol-boy belts. To me these fuckers were sucking up to the Man, doing the scut work and bullshit They didn’t feel like doing. This was for jerk-offs. These were the asshats who would go on to become the world’s “hall-monitors” and “gatekeepers,” polishing Goliath’s toenails.
Ass-kissers, boot-lickers, brownnosers, coatholders and towel boys. Ick. Give me the miscreants over these twats any day of the week.
Teachers started referring to me as a “misfit” almost immediately. In kindergarten, I once made a fort out of the big wooden blocks and was sitting in it quite happily when a shithead named Ray Bojacki decided he wanted to take down my wall and build his own. I told him to go find some other blocks and to keep his shithooks off of mine.
Ray Bojacki was a slow fucking learner and proceeded to try and dismantle my fort.
After I bounced a large wooden block off of Ray Bojacki’s head, he went running and crying like a tampon to the teacher, a buxom Teutonic number named Miss Hirst. Of course she went mental—lots of “poor Ray Bojacki…” I wanted to tell her everything would have just been fine if Ray Bojacki had exercised a little enterprise on his own and kept his mitts off my shit, but she wasn’t having any. She looked at me and told me I was a “misfit” and not a very nice little boy.
I wanted to say, “Why don’t you tell Ray Bojacki to sack up and fight his own battles, instead of bitching-up and running to the teacher?”
I didn’t say anything. She called my mother and my ass was kicked out and sent home.
I began to get the idea that school was going to suck balls. Kindergarten was only half a day. While angrily walking me home my mother informed me that next year I’d have to waste my afternoons with these assholes as well. I hated school. My teachers were largely simpletons who only wanted to work nine months a year. There was a lot of talk about “teamwork” and “having a good attitude” spewed by a bunch of mouth breathers whose lips moved when they read the comics. A lot of dipshits calling me “son” and asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
All of the other dopes wanted to be cops or astronauts or GI Joe or some shit.
I wanted to rob banks and trains like Jesse James.
Jesse was a badass; no pantywaist service positions in his future.
The railroad stole Jesse and Frank James’ mother’s farm and Jesse and Frank started stacking asses. The railroad had their own private cops—the Pinkertons. These were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the jagbags you see at Walmart with the spray and the stick.
Rent-a-Cops.
Jesse and Frank killed the shit out of these ass-hats.
In fact, Jesse left behind a drawer full of Pinkerton badges, cadged off the stack of dickheads he personally introduced to Jesus. I dug Jesse James. Being a train robber, to me, beat the hell out of eating shit and kissing ass the rest of your life.
In third grade, I wrote a report about what a cool guy Jesse James was and the nun was furious. She told me Frank and Jesse James were in Hell, and how would I like to join them?
I told her as long as she wasn’t there, that would be fine with me.
She sent me home with a note explaining I was in need of discipline. My Dad read it and told me that Jesse James shouldn’t have capped all of those guys—but some of them for damn sure had it coming.
He told me Jesse and Frank served in the Civil War only to come home to their mother’s sadness at having her farm taken via eminent domain for the railroad. The James Brothers decided to take some payback. When a law-man told Mrs. James how sorry he felt for her—her sons being train-robbers and all—she looked him in the eye and said: “I feel sorry for the railroad, Mr. Sheriff… But I guess you haven’t met my Jesse yet… Have you?”
