Trash, Carrot Shavings and The Salem Fart Trial

Remember when  I told you I’d written some stories about feeling like a misfit growing up? Here’s another one. You’re welcome.

The high school where I served my tour of duty had an open campus policy for upper school. This meant if you were in eleventh or twelfth grade you could do as you pleased during lunch but if you were in ninth or tenth grade you were stuck on campus like a prisoner. It wasn’t fair! I needed to breathe! I needed to hop in my car and drive 20 feet away and then drive back about 20 minutes later, like a civilized adult! Why was the school depriving me of my freedom? Most sophomores didn’t pay heed to the Draconian rules. As there was no one to prevent them from driving off campus, they just did so as if it was their right and no one was the wiser. Back they’d come, toting purloined booty from nearby far-off lands—a ketchup blob on the upper lip that glistened like no cafeteria ketchup I’d ever known. A rich burp redolent with the scent of Dr. Pepper when everyone knew the only prune-flavored beverage the high school threw its government money behind was watery Mr. Pibb. The most brazen would toss their exotic take-out bags in the trash with a flourish and then walk into class, their color ruddy and their eyes bright. They were cage-free chickens while I was one of those sad beakless numbers sitting in a five-deep stack of fellow featherless friends.

Being the unpopular kid that I was, about six months after everyone else started going off campus I decided that I too wanted to have an illegal lunch escapade. Through a series of notes scrawled on loose-leaf binder paper a plan was made. My older friend Karen would drive the getaway car—in this case an orange Volkswagon “Thing”—and before long we’d be chowing down on delicious not-made-in-the-cafeteria food and stretching our legs so far away from campus we wouldn’t even hear the bell, we’d have to consult our watch dials to know when to head back. I could taste the freedom already.

That day we met in the back parking lot. I’d like to say we floored it and burned rubber out of there like freed convicts however Karen’s car did a max of about 15 miles an hour, sputtering and wheezing the whole way. In terms of getaway cars, it left a lot to be desired. We made it to the nearest strip mall though, which happened to be across the street. This was bad decision number one. No sooner had we sat down to a lunch of bread sticks and marinara sauce then who should saunter our way but Ron Howard. He was the school enforcer and star of a bit of graffiti which I passed each morning and which, as I write this, I’m sure is still there: “Ron Howard is a masteurbator” [sic]. He waddled toward us brandishing a pen and pad. I held very still, as if in doing so I might appear to be part of the bench.

“Name?” He demanded.

To my horror I heard myself give my own.

“Grade?”

Just say you go to a different high school. He doesn’t know who you are. Or better yet, pretend you don’t know what he’s talking about and say you’re 35 but look great for your age. Tell him you’re home schooled. Pretend you don’t speak English. Just whatever you do don’t…

“Um, tenth,” I heard myself say again. I was no good under pressure!

And then he was gone as slowly as he came, huffing and puffing back to his golf cart. I spent the rest of the day worrying about when the shit would hit the fan. I’d never been in trouble before so this was all new to me and frankly, I didn’t have the constitution for it. In third grade I was having difficulty learning my multiplication tables so the teacher asked me to stay after school to review. Confused, I thought I was being punished and began to cry. That’s how tough I was.

I was in psychology class staring at the back of Darren Miller’s head when I received a pink call slip—the administration’s chosen method of communication—summoning me to the vice principal’s office. My heart pounded and my stomach felt fluttery. I don’t recall specifically what I thought about on the way there, I certainly don’t think it was, “How can I make this situation much worse for myself?” and yet as soon as I sat down I requested the chance to explain myself to the humorless VP.

“I got a concussion in math class earlier this year,” I began. This detail was actually true. One minute I was sitting in class minding my own business and the next I was coming to as Sharon, a fellow unpopular kid who’d morphed into a cheerleader in high school, and Tom, a hulking, dumb-as-rocks water polo player were hovering over me with concerned looks on their faces, saying my name repeatedly. Apparently Tom, needing to hurl a wadded up piece of paper across the room as one does in math class, had swung his arm back into my right temple with enough force to knock me out. Instead of going to the school nurse, I tried to downplay the injury, though the dull head pain I walked out of class with blossomed into a strange jabbing sensation in my eyebrow by lunch and a pretty severe headache by evening. Still, I didn’t want to tell my parents because my dad is an overprotective doctor who practices a religion of worst case scenarios and I knew he’d freak out if I told him. Eventually the pain got the better of me though and I revealed what happened. Two neurologists, three MRIs and a series of tests later it was confirmed that I wasn’t going to die of a brain hemorrhage, I was just going to have headaches for a while.

“And so you see, ever since I got hit in the head in Algebra I get these horrendous head aches and I had one today and I didn’t have any Advil and I called my parents to bring me some but they weren’t home,” I explained as if the implication was obvious. “So my friend drove me across the street to get Advil.”

I’m not quite sure why I lied—it’s not as if it was a pursuit at which I excelled—and yet something about being so out of my element (i.e. in trouble in school, where I was regularly a cross between invisible and nerdy) had me going all in. Maybe this was how the cool kids did it! Maybe they just cobbled together a bunch of words and then sold them to unhip adults with conviction! I tried to muster some of that but even I knew the story was pretty unbelievable. Why wouldn’t I just go to the school nurse? And what’s more, everyone knows the only possible way to use health as an excuse is to come up with something that makes the male teacher so uncomfortable he just wants the whole thing to go away. I got my period, I had horrible cramps, I think I had a miscarriage, I just gave birth in the bathroom, I stabbed my friend, I crapped myself, etc. But a head ache? For which I needed to leave campus to get Advil?

To be honest, if ever I’d experienced a headache as massive as the one I was hoping to convince him of, I would have just gone home. I’d gone home for far less, including the niggling suspicion that high school was bullshit and my time could be better spent elsewhere. But I did like the image of myself I was painting—so dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge that I wasn’t going to let crushing pain keep me from my studies and yet resourceful enough to take matters into my own hands. Alison Rosen: studious to a fault; a problem solver. Pretty sure I was a shoe-in to win the Ayn Rand essay contest.

Evidently the VP didn’t agree because he reiterated the rules—sophomores aren’t allowed off campus.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. Had he not heard the same gripping story I’d just heard myself tell? Did he not understand that I was injured on his campus and was now bravely picking up the pieces and moving on? I’d battled the odds and done it my way! I was a bright young mind—a puzzle solver!—who should be applauded for innovative thinking! Apparently he’d only be content when I was suckling at the teat of mediocrity like the rest of the student body.

“So let me get this straight,” he began.

“By all means,” I announced, doing my best to radiate confidence, which mostly just meant speaking loudly.

“You had a headache, so you went off campus to buy Advil.” He said the words as if they left a bad taste in his mouth.

“Well first I called my parents to see if they would bring me some,” I explained. “But they weren’t home.”

“Right. So then you went off campus, to buy Advil, knowing the rule is that sophomores are not allowed off campus.”

“The pain was very intense, Sir. So bad I couldn’t think straight.”

“And I suppose the reason Mr. Howard found you at Pizza Andiamo—“

FUCK!

“was because you didn’t want to take the Advil on an empty stomach?”

“Exactly!” I said, unblinking. “Exactly, absolutely, yes.”

He leaned back in his chair and pushed his glasses up on his head. He massaged the indentations on the bridge of his nose while he exhaled.

I felt pretty good that he’d let me off with just a warning.

“I’m assigning you Saturday detention,” he said.

What?! I thought of my fellow tenth graders who went off campus without incident every day. THE INJUSTICE!

“And I’m going to suggest you see a doctor about those headaches. In the meantime have Ms. Barnes take a look.” He handed me two pink calls slips, one indicating I had detention on Saturday and one sending me to Ms. Barnes, the school nurse who smelled like spinach and asked everyone if they might be pregnant.

I wondered if I could just accidentally lose the slips but figured now wasn’t the time to push my luck.

I shuffled out of the VP’s office and made my way to the nurse’s office. It reeked of band-aids and rubbing alcohol. Spinach Barnes read the slip.

“Headaches?” she asked, putting a thermometer under my tongue.

I nodded.

“Let me ask you something, and you can be honest. Is there any way you could be pregnant?”

I shook my head vigorously.

“You’re absolutely sure?” she pressed.

I’d never been kissed, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t pregnant.

Barnes read my temperature, which was normal, gave me some cough drops and an ice pack and sent me on my way.

That Saturday I woke up bright and early. I’d never had detention before so while I suspected it was going to be a waste of time, I harbored vague hopes that it would involve some kind of adventure or caper. Maybe I’d fall I love! I put on my most attractive prisoner-of-war outfit—leggings, an oversized blouse, giant earrings and a giant hair clip—and reported to campus at 8am. There were about twelve other sleepy looking kids whom I didn’t know, as I was never in trouble and they, presumably, were future criminals. “Okay, you know how this goes,” said a tired and disinterested Coach Waters. If he’d ever guided a team to victory, you couldn’t tell. He was a coach past his prime, all receding hairline, beer gut and and veiny old man legs. He had the look of someone whose life took the wrong turn at some point and he’d given up trying to fight it. These days he worked as the school’s history teacher but everyone still called him “Coach” which is the way that title works. Like President or Doctor or Officer, it just becomes affixed to your name, sometimes taking the place of your name, long after active service is over.

The sad, paunchy man began handing out oversized trash bags. “Thanks, Coach,” we each said. Our punishment was to clean up the campus which was kind of ridiculous considering the school employed a fleet of illegals to keep the grounds manicured. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trash we’d be picking up had been taken out of a trash bag only moments before for the express purpose of building our character. It was like a giant punitive version of 52-card pickup.

We made our way to the basketball court but the God-awful stench— like rotten eggs, rotten raspberries and vinegar—made its way to us before we got there. Sitting on the blacktop was an array of foul detritus—cans, eggshells, food containers with bits of food in them and milk cartons. My eyes watered. My nose was offended. I was pretty sure this was both cruel and unusual. I tried to breathe through my mouth and look away as I lifted a crushed juice box out of the heap and put it in my garbage bag. I imagine I was supposed to be thinking about what I’d done and feeling bad about it but mostly all I was thinking about was how I was annoyed I’d been caught and how if I’d just lied successfully the first time, when I was busted off campus, I wouldn’t have had to lie unsuccessfully the second. The truth did not set me free!

This wasn’t the first time my skills as a scholastic prevaricator had been called into question, nor was it the first time the truth had let me down.

In fourth grade I’d been a party to something I refer to as the Salem Fart Trial. I went to a private school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. It was one of those super selective and expensive private schools that runs itself like a tiny college and does extensive admissions testing. Parents put their kids names on the waiting list before the precious bundles of joy are even born. Preference is given to parents who contribute money, which mine didn’t, so I was never on the fast track or in with the in crowd. Ironically this saved me a few years later when a P.E. teacher with a rap sheet who clearly hadn’t been vetted joined the faculty and set up an after school Judo club. Only the super popular athletic kids were invited to join—and then invited to participate in an initiation ritual involving, according to the police reports, a pink vibrator with a mermaid on it. I’d been warned about this P.E. teacher before any of the details came out. My parents sensed something off about him when word spread that he told the female P.E. teacher that some of the girls really needed to start wearing bras because they were “jiggling.”

“What’s he doing looking at 12-year-olds’ chests?” my mom asked. Later he pantsed one of the boys and locked him out of the locker room which struck me as particularly sadistic. The school, in a stroke of utter stupidity or pure evil or some combination of the two, kept him on until the whole thing coalesced into the county’s biggest misdemeanor and felony molestation case. The school was liable but parents were afraid to sue for fear their kids would be kicked out, which is odd considering it’s not as if things had been going gangbusters for them there at this point. There’s no accounting for school spirit.

But all that was yet to come. It was a simpler time in fourth grade. I’d just begun reading preteen romance novels, which I mostly didn’t understand (not only did I not know what a virgin was but I wasn’t sure whether it was pronounced with a hard or soft g), and occasionally my fellow dorky best friend and I would sneak into the bathroom with an eraser to erase some of the popular kids’ graffiti, which we thought was an act of deep rebellion. Also, the whole fourth grade was enrolled in recorder class which everyone thought was super lame—as in you had to think it was lame and annoying and cause for bitching and moaning—but I possessed mad recorder skillz so I began leading a woeful double life of publicly rolling my eyes but privately and diligently practicing hits like “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?” and “Greensleeves”. These really came to life on recorder and I longed to be free of the social shackles that prevented me from embracing the instrument. I could have been the fresh face of recorder music! But instead I’d shoot the teacher an apologetic look as if to say, “Please forgive me for pretending I hate this.” Something deep in my soul stirred when I made sweet recorder music, but that’s as far as it ever went.

My biggest hurdle in fourth grade was a kid named Travis Burton. He sat to my right but was left handed, so our arms constantly banged into each other which just seemed like poor planning on the part of the teacher. Also, he was a bully.

One day he suddenly asked me if smelled “that.”

“Smell what?” I asked innocently. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t smell THAT?” he asked. There began to be a bit of a hubbub as other students got wind of the fact that I didn’t smell that. I sniffed the air. I genuinely didn’t smell anything! Plus I thought we were operating under Whoever Smelt It, Dealt It, in which case my being unaware of said odor should have worked in my favor. Instead, I was unwittingly playing into their hands. Apparently, upon further review, the finest minds in fourth grade had recanted their position on fart ownership and decided that whoever didn’t smell it dealt it, because, went their bold new logic, one is immune to the smell of one’s own farts.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to find fault in this argument. One may not mind one’s own farts as compared to those of a classmate, but not minding and not being able to detect the scent of are two very different things. Moreover, let’s just say for the sake of argument this was somehow possible, that somehow your entire olfactory system was disabled when it came specifically to your own farts, as if perhaps the mere act of farting temporarily disabled your sense of smell, probably for self-protection, even if that were the case you’d still know you farted. It’s not as if the way you discover you passed gas is because of smell­—that’s how other people know, barring of course any musical accompaniment—and so robbed of this ability farts would be sneaking out constantly while you went about your business unawares, chatting away your day in an ignorant cloud of farts. But this kind of elegant argument would be lost on these cretins.

The class was quickly overtaken with a sort of Fart McCarthyism as each person interrogated his or her neighbor as to whether they “smelled THAT?”

“You do or you don’t smell it?” asked Travis.

“I, I don’t know,” I said. “I think so?”

“So you do?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you?” asked one of his henchmen.

I thought about it and sniffed the air again.

“I guess I don’t,” I admitted. They’d made me crack!

Quickly a shortlist of those who did not smell the offending odor (which I honestly did not smell) zipped to the front of the room and then back again where it was declared that I was the distributor of the apparently noxious plume of fart gas threatening to suffocate the class.

“God Alison! Gross!” one student whimpered loudly, faux-gagging.

“Could you crack a window? Please!” gasped another, dramatically burying his face in his cardigan.

Even the turncoat dorks loudly lodged their complaints.

And so it was for the rest of the period until recess, all because I’d been operating under the wrong Fart Laws. Why couldn’t I have fibbed and said I did smell it? I was too innocent for that world. I had my head in the fart clouds.

In seventh grade I was once again made truth’s bitch. The aforementioned private school—the expensive one with the farts and the molestation—sent its students on three overnight field trips in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. These were rugged outdoorsy affairs involving canteens and trust falls. I’m probably the least outdoorsy person alive, seeing as I’m stupendously uncoordinated, and I grew up hearing a story about a friend of my mother who cracked her head open during a trust fall. Plus my dad liked to recount a possibly apocryphal story about a father who said to his kid, “Jump, I’ll catch you.” The kid jumped and the father didn’t catch him. “The lesson,” my dad would say, as if he were about the reveal the answer to a riddle or brain teaser, “Is that you can’t believe anyone who says they’ll catch you!” So you can see how I’d be somewhat less than excited about the prospect of bonding with my classmates in the wilderness.

The week in Sequoia National Forest was pretty awful, my cabin mates were a couple of extremely blond giggly girls whose perfume, I feared, would attract bears, and there’s only so much hiking and learning about pine cones a person can take. My teachers, too, seemed not to be enjoying themselves, probably because they’d ceded control to a round-the-clock tour guide named Andy who was a naturalist at Sequoia and, as far as I could tell, an asshole. On the third day we were rousted from our cabins and bussed seven miles to another area of the forest where we’d sleep outdoors and write in our nature journals. The catch was there was no return bus back. We’d be hoofing it the following morning. It was like we’d descended from one circle of hell to the next.

As per the suggested items shopping list provided by the school, I’d brought along a sleeping bag pad which was a thick piece of black foam to go under my sleeping bag on the extreme overnight portion of the trip. My mom had told me I could throw it out after using it, since I wouldn’t need it once we got back to the cabins and she figured, rightly, that I wouldn’t want to be toting extra unnecessary crap. After a fitful night of sleep I woke up, rolled up my sleeping bag and set out in search of a pay phone to ring my parents and arrange for them to come pick me up. As I couldn’t find one, which just figured, I made mental note to seek one out when we got back to the base camp. On my way back to the group, I saw a trash can and stuffed my sleeping bag pad in it. Unfortunately it was the kind of trash can with the metal door you pull open—like a mailbox—which creates a sort of narrow clearing through which your refuse must fit. Try as I might I couldn’t get the pad to smush all the way down in a way that would allow the door to close so I left it sticking part way out of the can, holding the door ajar. It didn’t seem like a problem to me.

Later that morning I was sitting with my classmates eating a breakfast of gravel and tree branches when Andy made it clear he had some pressing matter to discuss with us. “I found this!” he said, producing the sleeping bag pad which was creased from the metal door and had bits of garbage and leaves stuck to it “in the trash can!” Whatever reaction we were supposed to have, we didn’t. He glared at us. We looked around nervously. I squirmed. He went on to explain that this sleeping bag pad was perfectly good and still usable and how could someone just throw this out? He was waving the sleeping bag pad around wildly now to punctuate his point. Bits of trash flew off. The leaves clung. “Now I don’t know who would do a thing like this,” he thundered. Someone who no longer needed a sleeping bag pad? “But it’s very troubling! Does anyone want to come forward?” he asked. I thought about it and decided against it. I was going to let the team take this one for me. “Fine,” he said,  “I’ll take it back.”

Sadly it might have come in handy as a flotation device that afternoon when we began our hike back to semi-civilization. At one point we had to cross a shallow river by climbing across some boulders. I had a suspicion it wasn’t going to go well for me which was confirmed when I lost my footing on a slippery rock and found myself standing waist high in sludgy river water, my backpack floating on the water’s surface behind me. Classmates scrambled to help me out as I heard the crunch of footsteps on brush behind me. I turned to see Mrs. Jones, our English teacher who’d been trailing behind spin around and hightail it in the opposite direction. “I’ll take the bridge!” she announced. There was a bridge? And yet I’d been made to crawl across the rocks? That shady bitch!

Because apparently I’d missed the directive to bring two pairs of pants and shoes on the overnight portion of the trip I only had one of each with me so I changed into pink sweatpants and slippers. All I needed to complete my disguise as a miniature lunatic would have been a shopping cart, some hair rollers and a megaphone.

Later we broke for lunch and I began plotting my escape once more. I figured by the time we got back to the base camp it’d be about 7pm so if I called my parents and they left that night they should have me sprung from the hellmouth by morning.

“These your carrot shavings?” Andy demanded, staring at my friends Heather, Debbie and me. They were all of our carrot shavings. He’d given us dirty carrots for lunch so we’d—and by this I mean all of us on the trip—used a plastic knife to try to scrape off the outer layer. This wasn’t going to fly with the nature Gestapo though, who explained that the shavings would be eaten by squirrels and that would then throw off the entire ecosystem of the forest. “Are they yours?” he asked again. I nodded because I was too tired to fight him. “You all need to pick them up.”

Was he for real? Had he not watched all of us shave the carrots? And might that not have been the time to mention that it was a problem? This guy was too much. I rolled my eyes and sighed and began picking up shavings.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that picking up slimy carrot shavings in the wilderness when you’re wet and dirty from the waist down because you fell in a river is a worse fate than picking up pieces of garbage on a basketball court. And that sometimes it doesn’t matter whether you tell the truth or not—you’re still going to end up picking up trash.