I Was a Teenage Squarewolf

You must know, after our years of correspondence, that I wasn't anything like that when I was a kid. Funny, though, I had plenty of friends and I was reasonably happy. Of course I was anxious to grow up and get out of that town, but I think I tried to make the most of it while I was there. All that stuff you call "cool" was something that other kids did, and I had no desire to be like them. The only thing I envied about them was their sex life, but I couldn't have that without buying into their whole program, and I thought that their price was too high. I found out years later that their sex life was mostly imaginary anyway, so I don't think I missed much.

Speaking of sex lives, I find it hard to believe that there are significant numbers of kids that look, dress, and act like the opposite sex. I didn't see anything like that in ten years of school bus driving. I saw lots of goofy acting kids, but not like that. When I saw that bit about it on the TV news, they interviewed one of our local principals (I think it was Traverse City), and he said that they didn't have any LGBTQ kids in his school but, if they ever did, he would deal with it when the time came. For some reason, though, our state school board thought it was an important issue that needed to be addressed. Maybe it's an urban thing.

You said something about having lots of bathroom problems in the elementary schools where you subbed. What kind of problems? The only thing I remember from Sawyer was that there was never any toilet paper or paper towels in the boys' bathrooms. After a couple kids shit their pants in first grade, our teacher started keeping a roll in the classroom for emergencies. I carried my own for awhile, but then I guess my guts got used to not shitting in school, and I don't remember it being a problem after that.

Shortly before graduation, our principal came to our eighth grade class and asked us if we had any suggestions about improving the Sawyer experience for future generations. I told him that it would be nice to have toilet paper and paper towels in the bathrooms, and he was surprised to hear that there wasn't. The girls said that they had those products in their bathrooms, and maybe some other products that we didn't need to know about, so it was only the boys' bathrooms that were lacking. The principal said that he signed a requisition every month for supplies like that, and he wondered where all those paper products were going, so he sent for the janitor and asked him about it right in front of the class. The janitor explained that, if he put those products in the boys' bathrooms, the boys would just use them to make a big mess, so he only put them in the girls'. The principal then asked him what he did with those products that he didn't put in the boys', and the janitor said that he took them home so they wouldn't go to waste. At this point the principal told the janitor to return to his duties, and that he would talk to him about this later. Looking back on it now, it seems hard to believe that something like that could go on for eight years before somebody said something about it, but it did. I never said anything before that because I assumed everybody knew about it and that was just the way it was.

Then there was Pissing George, who could knock a fly off the wall from eight feet away. The boys' bathrooms at Sawyer had two banks of urinals facing each other with a divider between them. George would piss right over the divider and rain down on the boys on the other side, who couldn't tell who was doing it because they were too short to see over the divider. Somebody must have caught him eventually because he stopped doing it, but I didn't learn his identity until years later. One evening I observed my friend George pissing outdoors and commented that I had never before seen anybody piss that far. He said that he didn't know how he did it, it just came naturally to him. George then confided that he had been the Pissing Bandit of Sawyer School some years previous. George was a strange boy, that's for sure, but at least he never tried to change himself into a girl. Such a thing was unheard of in those days and, as far as I'm concerned, it still should be.