As a child, I attended school at A.P. Beutel (pronounced boy-tel) elementary. The way the classes are arranged at Beutel, kindergarten, first grade and second grade classes are taught in the main building, while third and fourth grades are taught in a separate wing known as the Tally building. Naturally, in the mind of a new third grader, it was something of a major life achievement to move from the little kids building to the Tally building. You get new classrooms, new playgrounds, and a new hall. Actually, the Tally building was exactly that. One long hallway with several classrooms, one boys bathroom, and one girls bathroom. Both bathrooms were at the very front end of the hall, with a fairly large gap between them and the first set of classrooms. So it was only natural that a bunch of stupid stuff would go on in those bathrooms. Like using the brown paper towels and half the soap in the dispenser to make the ceiling look like a bat cave, or skipping class to mess around with friends. Or that one time a particularly stupid classmate ran screaming hysterically from the bathroom and all the way down the hall after scaring the piss out of himself playing "I believe in Bloody Mary." One particular oddity in the bathrooms, however, was that in the larger handicap stall at the back of the row was a door. The door was a thin piece of plywood painted to match the colors of the walls, and was kept locked by a simple lock. There were often stories and rumors and the like about what was behind the door, but to my knowledge, nobody ever bothered to open it and see.
...Until my third grade year.
One thing you have to understand before I go on with this story is that I was never a popular child in school. I was something of a strange child, due to my astonishing naivete, sheltered home life and complete and utter lack of social skills. As such, I had only a very small group of friends, most of whom were also outcasts. There was a boy named Cameron, a girl named Sarah, and another boy in a wheelchair named Neil who was only part of our misadventures some of the time. I was undoubtedly the leader, though, in my own mind at least. We would spend our lunchtimes sitting at the far end of the table with a sizable gap between us and the rest of our classmates so that we could talk about nerdy outcast things and not be bothered. At recess, we'd go to the same spot every day that was far away from the regular play equipment and we'd play Pokemon. Not the video game, mind you, we weren't allowed to bring gameboys or trading cards to school. Instead, we'd play real Pokemon. I was always Ash, Sarah was always Misty, and Cameron was Brock on the days he cooperated. Cameron really always wanted to be Agumon, but we weren't playing Digimon, God damn it, we were playing Pokemon. We tried to let him play Agumon once or twice, but it never really worked out because digimon and pokemon don't fight the same way. Especially when it was Cameron Agumon versus our invisible make-believe pokemon.
With the way our little merry band of outcasts functioned, it was no wonder that when we caught word of a gang hanging around the school, our little brains took it too far. Lord only knows how or why we ended up with this knowledge, and to tell you the truth I don't remember the particulars of the story. I simply remember overhearing a teacher saying something about a gang on the school grounds. I think she was talking to another teacher, but it didn't matter. All I heard was "gang hanging around on school grounds" and it was too late. Aside from being an outcast, another important fact you need to know about third grade me is that because I had so few friends and such a naive idea of how the world really worked, my brain was programmed to function in terms of video games. I spent the vast majority of my time playing them as a child. I probably spent all the time I should have been spending making friends, playing outside and learning how to function playing video games instead. My favorite game by far, however, was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was fun, and I thought Link was the coolest guy ever. Ten year old kid suddenly learns he has this epic destiny, takes up a sword and charges off to battle the forces of evil? Hell yeah. I wanted to be that guy. In my mind, I was that guy. So upon catching wind of this alleged gang activity at the elementary school, naturally I couldn't just let it go and ignore what I'd heard. Would Link let these evildoers go unpunished? Of course not. He'd grab his Kokiri sword, hunt them down and smite their asses. Which is exactly what I suddenly felt inclined to do. I was the only one entrusted with this knowledge I was granted by eavesdropping in a hallway. It was my destiny. I didn't have a sword but a stick would work, and I didn't have a slingshot because Mom wouldn't let me have one, but I'd have to do without.
So off I went to tell my secret destiny to my outcast friends. Naturally they believed me. I mean, I heard a teacher say it. How could that possibly not be true? So that day at the lunch table, we became the A.P. Beutel equivalent of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. We spent our recess periods scouring the playgrounds for clues and signs of gang activity. Ultimately, we ended up with a collection of paper scraps, a pile of Bud Lite crown bottle caps, and a mountain of cigarette butts. (Because y'know, smoking and drinking beer were only things that gang members did. You can thank the Chicken Club and other anti-drug, anti-gang organizations for drilling that particular message into my naive little third grader head.) Once we'd gathered our little collection of trash, we were convinced. The gang was not only using the playground for their illicit activities and villainy, but they were in the school. They had obviously infiltrated the school and were using it as a base of operations, and we were the only ones who could stop it.
So we told our teacher. And we got laughed at. Not directly, of course, but still. And then she told us to go sit down, and that we shouldn't worry about things like that, and no gangs were at the school. Which was of course entirely accurate, but I wasn't going to be stopped by the ignorance of grown-ups. Obviously she hadn't paid enough attention to the clues. It was enough, of course, to stop Sarah and Cameron who gave up the chase then and there, but they didn't have a destiny. So as I sat at my desk, brooding and wondering how next to pursue this evil gang now that the teacher had ignored my warnings, I decided I needed a place to mull this over without the distractions of the classroom. Off to the bathroom I went.
And that's when I discovered the secret door in the fourth stall.
It had been there, all along. Staring me blind in the face, and I just hadn't made the connection. If a gang were in the school, where else could they possibly be? It was so obvious! Nobody ever went into this door. Nobody even knew what was behind it, or why it was there. So I decided to find out. For the sake of my classmates, my disbelieving teachers, and my destiny. So the next day, I brought a paperclip with me on my bathroom trip. And after a while, I tripped the latch and the mystery door opened.
The inside was not exactly what I was expecting. It kind of looked like my grandparents' attic, with plywood on the floor and walls. There was a bucket and a mop in there, and a folding card chair. There was a hanging light with a pull chain, and a bunch of other miscellaneous junk. I climbed inside tentatively, and to my surprise, the door actually led straight to an identical secret door directly in front of me. I crept over and opened that one, and promptly found myself in the girls bathroom. Fortunately, I was still weirded out by most girls at the time and their bathroom was a forbidden zone, so I quickly retreated. More fortunate than that, the stall I emerged into was unoccupied at the time, though I can only imagine what might have happened had that not been the case. It was dark in the little room behind the secret door, and I was afraid of the dark, so I quickly retreated back into the boys bathroom. However, as I closed the door to latch it back, I thought I caught a glimpse of a brown bottle... It had to have been a beer bottle. That was it. That was all the proof I needed. I immediately ran to the one person I knew I could trust with this information: the principal. Mrs. Vickers and I were very well acquainted. I spent part of almost every single day in her office when my teachers needed a break from my emotional outbursts and other disruptive antics. I even had my own special chair where I could sit and do my work and play with her Magic 8-Ball. That chair would have to wait today, though, because I had a special mission. I burst in and told her everything I'd gathered like a good little sleuth. I told her about the beer bottle caps and cigarette butts on the playground, and about hearing about the gang, and most importantly, I told her how I picked the lock on the secret door in the bathroom and found a beer bottle in there. The look on her face was one of concern and confusion, so she told me very reassuringly that she would look into it and sent me back to class. Satisfied with my job, I marched back down the hall and back to class, which I'd been gone from for a very long time by that point.
Now, looking back on this incident with my adult mind, I can only imagine what must have been going through my principal's head at the time. Here is this kid who's notorious for telling exaggerated, mostly untrue tales which could probably be called delusions of grandeur. He spends every day in this office for distracting behavior, refusal to do work, breaking pencils, crying, etc. And yet, despite the story and the delusions and all the nonsense, he claims to have found an empty beer bottle in the school. The only thing she could have done was to actually look into it.
I made a couple more excursions into the secret room after that, but the following week I found the door fitted with a shiny new deadbolt lock which required a key- an obstacle that exceeded my lock picking skill at the time. There was no more mention of the gang, and for all I knew, I had been victorious. In reality, I had seen a bottle. Of chemical cleanser. It was brown, but it was also plastic. There actually had been a conversation about a gang at the playgrounds, but there was never really a gang. Just a bunch of hooligan middle-schoolers hanging around on the playgrounds when school was out.
So that's the story of how I eavesdropped on a teacher, blew things out of proportion, hunted down a non-existent gang, made the faculty unnecessarily nervous, and had the janitor placed under investigation for alcohol use on an elementary school property.
I am so sorry.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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