Story series - trying to blend in anonymously, part two

Last week, I wrote about Bully #1 in my math class during my freshman year. Bully #2 was never in any of my classes, but we were both sophomores. He was someone I would walk by often in the hallways on my way to my classes.

My high school has 20 buildings on a sprawling campus. The campus was formerly used by a community college before my town got bigger and prompted the need for a bigger campus to handle the rising number of students. The vacated campus created a perfect opportunity for my town to split up into two high schools.

Bully #2 wasn't a jock, an artist, or even a popular guy. He was a nerd. Apparently, he couldn't stand the thought of having a deaf nerd in his clique. Yes, I was a nerd...how I acted with others didn't allow for me to fit into any of the cliques except for the nerds.

Physically, he was unremarkable - wore glasses, kept his hair short, didn't change his clothes often, and always preferred one pair of shoes. He was slightly heavier than me and about 2 inches/5 centimeters taller.

One day, he worked up some courage (or was it more likely his hatred moved him into action?) and he got physical with me by deliberately bumping into me with his shoulder, knocking the books out of my hands, pretending not to see me and get into my way.

I simply adjusted by getting a backpack (since I knew others would do the same thing) and stepping out of the hallway for a longer route to my classes. That drove him nuts since he couldn't get to me at all. Took him until the next semester before he could get to me again.

January came around and he put into action what he thought was a perfect plan. Let me explain the layout of the school. About half of the buildings are connected by hallways and every once in a while there is a small grouping of offices for teachers. One such cluster was largely abandoned (due to poor location and too few teachers) and that's where he was, hiding and waiting for me to walk by.

He came out and asked to talk to me privately. I knew what he had in mind and I wasn't scared of him at all. I followed him back into that "lounge" and he told me to go ahead and put my backpack down. The second I did as asked was the second he grabbed hold of me and pushed me back into a wall.

I was actually amused by that because of two things: 1) he wasn't really doing it roughly like he meant it and 2) his eyes were showing fear. Seeing my smile on my face scared him more and he twisted his fists deeper into my shirt. Big mistake.

I already knew what to do. Digging deeper into my shirt meant that his hands weren't readily available for defense and he was completely exposed. I had been in fights before; even took on three boys at once and lost that one...but not before I made the leader pay with a gash in his head and a lingering headache by making a brick wall meet his head.

I decided that the best way to deal with this scared bully was to make him temporarily deaf. I clapped my hands on his ears just hard enough to achieve that effect without bursting any of his eardrums. I wanted to burst one just for hassling me, but the school was notoriously tough on fighting - an immediate expulsion if caught.

He let go of my shirt in shock and cupped his ears. He stood there and did not say a word so I moved in and pointed at his face and said "Bother me again and I will burst your ears. If I see you in the hallway, I will burst your ears. You better turn around and walk away if you see me coming. Got that?"

He just stared at me, incomprehensibly. My voice got louder and sterner, "GOT THAT?" and he nodded. I smiled sweetly at him, picked up my backpack, opened the door out to the hallway, and walked away without even a glance.

I almost never saw him again until we graduated as seniors.

Part three will be published next week. This one is a doozy - you'll like it. ;)

Story series - that was it?

Bear in mind that this was in the early 80's when this occurred. The practices described below in the story was commonplace at the time. Relax and enjoy the story.

I had graduated a year earlier from a school for the deaf whose philosophy emphasized oral communication over sign language (meaning we learned how to speak and read lips) and I was mainstreamed; struggling to understand the brave new world in 7th grade where everyone was hearing and I was the only deaf student there.

Out of the blue, one of my "friends" had suddenly turned against me by spitting at me while at recess. What I meant by the quote marks on the word friends was I thought anyone who spoke to me and interacted with me was by definition, a friend. How naive I was.

Just like that, his spit landed on my shoulder near my neck. I was shocked by the insult and the shock quickly turned into fury. I spat back at him, making sure to hit his face and I nailed him a centimeter from his nose. That pissed him off enough to spit back.

I retaliated. He responded. This escalated to a spitting war on a global scale. A teacher ran in to break up the spitting war and I never forgot her reaction of disgust when she saw what had transpired.

She marched us to the principal's offce. The principal had only three chairs so we weren't far apart at all. The teacher then left us to face the principal. I had met him months earlier and he seemed cordial but supportive to me. He had understood that the school was having its first ever deaf pupil and he was setting the benchmark for all other students and faculty to follow.

The principal got up from behind his desk and came around and leaned back on his desk. He made a mistake of asking the boy first what had happened. The boy got very animated and tried everything under the sun to blame it all on me. I just sat there and waited for the principal to speak to me. I had learned that was a very important thing to do - wait and don't speak until spoken to.

The principal abruptly cut him off and then he looked at me and said, "So what happened?" I calmly explained how I thought he was my friend until today when he just spat at me for no reason at all. I had not done anything wrong to him and I did not know why he started this. The principal nodded as if all this made sense to him.

The boy, probably sensed that I had won the principal over, got loud and tried to speak over me and everyone else. The principal stood up and went to the cabinet as the boy loudly denied everything. He opened the cabinet and pulled out something large, round, and flat that I couldn't make out. He dropped it on his desk for sound effect and I could feel the vibration of that metallic thud from the large round flat object landing on the desk.

The boy shut up immediately. The principal questioned him again and the boy tried again, in a somewhat calmer tone to blame everything on me. The principal sighed and looked at me. He said, "what do you have to say?" I told him that I did spit on him only because he spat on me first and I was able to show the gobs of saliva on my clothes. That convinced the principal.

He went to the intercom and paged for a certain teacher to come in. After a minute, the teacher (albeit a different one) came in. The principal said to me, "Come over here." I got up and walked over to him. I was able to see what the object was. A paddle with holes drilled all over the area. "Why did he do that?" as I wondered while walking over to him.

"Bend over and grab your _____" and I thought he said "knees" so I did as instructed. He tapped me on my shoulder to get my attention and I looked at him. He pointed to my ankles and said, "No, grab your ankles." I did as told. He stepped away and after a moment, I felt a thud on my butt. I realized that he had just paddled me...but...what I thought was "That was it?" It didn't hurt at all. My dad had spanked me before and his hand hit HARDER than that paddle. Okay.

The principal tapped me and I looked at him. He said, "Go sit down." Okay. I sat down. The principal motioned for the boy to get over there. The boy didn't have to be told to grab his ankles - he did it right away. I got to watch how the principal used the paddle. Arm went up...high...pause to lock in the impact zone...left foot moved forward, swish, thwack! The boy jumped out of his grasp position and yelped and looked back at the principal...and he suddenly went back into the position.

I actually burst out in laughter and both the principal and the teacher looked at me sternly. I apologized while giggling, but it was just too damn funny to see a boy react so poorly to the exact same thing that didn't affect me at all...and not only that, but to see him JUMP BACK into the ankle grasp position...as if he would be punished again for breaking the grip.

The principal told us to not do it again. I nodded and shrugged. The boy was completely intimidated and barely nodded. It was my only time ever in my life that corporal punishment was administered to me by someone who wasn't my parent.

The boy tried to do a smear campaign on me afterward, but I made sure to tell everyone what had happened in the office...including my "That was it?" moment and how he reacted to the paddle. He became a non-factor in my life and had faded away into obscurity by the time we went on to 8th grade.

Emmy's question about reasoning & philosophy behind lipreading

Emmy from Right Turn Without Signaling left this comment on an earlier post, as verbatim: "My daughter's teacher who is deaf told us interesting stories about the philosophy of being raised deaf. She was forced to learn to read lips before they allowed her to learn sign language because of the philosophy at that time which was to make deaf kids "normal". What was your experience like?"

I can tell you from experience that she wasn't kidding about the mentality at the time. Doctors and educators felt that they knew what was best for all of us and told our parents what to do. The parents were given Hobson's choice - either learn the way that was recommended for the deaf kids or learn the way that was recommended for the deaf kids.

My parents told me the doctors had recommended to them that I go to a school with hearing children (commonly called "mainstreaming") but they felt I would benefit from deaf education. They opted for the kind of school that emphasized on oral communication rather than sign language because they were told that this was the best way.

I went to that school for several years before the school decided that I was ready for mainstreaming at the age of 13 years old. According to my mother, I tested well enough to be placed in 8th grade which is on par for kids in that age range, but extraordinary for a deaf kid. However, she felt that 8th grade would overwhelm me and opted for me to start in 7th grade instead. Looking back, I have to say she was right.

*Editor's note: I want everyone to know that I am not agreeing and/or disagreeing with what was decribed in Wikipedia's definition on "mainstreaming" - this was for your education on what that word means exactly. You are more than welcome to research this on your own time. :)