Jacke Wilson's Blog, page 80

Last Chance For Free Books! [Update: The Contest Has Closed]

Goodreads Book Giveaway


The Promotion
by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Hello! It’s crunch time, people! Only six hours left in the Goodreads Giveaway for my short novel, The Promotion, the “full of intrigue and deadpan comedy” book that everyone’s talking about. What’s the giveaway? Five lucky readers will be sent a signed paperback copy of the book, FOR FREE.

Of course, if you’re not a Goodreads member, or if you’d rather not roll the dice in a contest, you can always purchase the books at Amazon.com (Kindle and Paperback both available). It’s less than five bucks, so hopefully it won’t break anyone’s budget. And if you’re a reviewer, I still have review copies available, so let me know and I’ll ship you one for free. Everyone wins!

UPDATE: The Contest Has Closed!

Winners have been notified and will receive their books shortly. Thanks to everyone who participated (over 900 of you)! If you were one of the unfortunate readers who missed out this time around, but you are still interested in receiving a FREE review copy, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. And to all the winners, I hope you enjoy The Promotion! Onward and upward!

Book Review: “An Incredibly Astute Novella About Ego and Politics…”

“Smart, well-written, and frequently funny, The Race offers some interesting speculation into the mind of the American politician…” - Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews

Readers, it’s another great day here on the Jacke Blog. My short novel The Race has received another wonderful review, this time from Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews.

(For those of you who missed the previous review from My Little Book Blog (“warm and full of life”), feel free to catch up on the review itself or my reaction to it.)

Schuster’s review begins with a perfect encapsulation of the book:

Jacke Wilson’s The Race is an incredibly astute novella about ego and politics that attempts to explain why anyone in their right mind might run for political office. The answer, it turns out, is that they wouldn’t, as the political arena is reserved for the eternally deluded and arguably insane.

Awesome. “Eternally deluded and arguably insane” could be the title!

And this is also a very shrewd (and generous!) assessment:

There’s certainly plenty of dry humor to be had in the proceedings — particularly as Olson [the former governor at the heart of the book] does his best to turn the rancid lemons of his tattered political career into saccharine-sweet lemonade — but the real strength of Wilson’s writing is in its Marxian critique of American politics.

Man. “[R]ancid lemons of his tattered political career into saccharine-sweet lemonade” is a phrase I should have used in the book itself. Simply perfect.

And then there’s this, which once again really gets at the heart of what I was trying to accomplish:

[The Race's main character] demonstrates that what truly drives politicians is a desire to control the narratives of their own lives, as his tragically optimistic efforts at running for office are forever haunted by the specter of the good man he was before throwing his hat into the political arena.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. What a great review.

My thanks to Marc for giving my little book a chance and for crafting such a thoughtful, well-written review. You should definitely check out Small Press Reviews – Marc’s clearly an intelligent guy and he’s doing some really good work over there.

And of course, you can find The Race at Amazon.com (in Kindle and paperback versions) and other formats and locations.

Are you a reviewer? Leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll ship you a free review copy. Or you can enjoy the 100 Objects series, which is still going strong. 

Two Days Left! Sign Up For Free Books Now! [Update: The Contest Has Closed]

Goodreads Book Giveaway


The Promotion
by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Happy Monday! Just a quick reminder that there are only two days left in the Goodreads Giveaway for my short novel, The Promotion, the “full of intrigue and deadpan comedy” book that everyone’s talking about. What’s the giveaway? Five lucky readers will be sent a signed paperback copy of the book, FOR FREE.

Of course, if you’re not a Goodreads member, or if you’d rather not roll the dice in a contest, you can always purchase the books at Amazon.com (Kindle and Paperback both available). It’s less than five bucks, so hopefully it won’t break anyone’s budget. And if you’re a reviewer, I still have review copies available, so let me know and I’ll ship you one for free. Everyone wins!

You may be wondering to yourself, “Jacke, how did you get so good at promoting these things?” Good question! I learned from a master:

Only $69? I’d buy that NOW. Who couldn’t use an enormous tower stereo sitting in the corner of their living room! Wonder years, I’m coming to join you!

UPDATE: The Contest Has Closed!

Winners have been notified and will receive their books shortly. Thanks to everyone who participated (over 900 of you)! If you were one of the unfortunate readers who missed out this time around, but you are still interested in receiving a FREE review copy, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. And to all the winners, I hope you enjoy The Promotion! Onward and upward!

Two Days Left! Sign Up For Free Books Now!

Goodreads Book Giveaway


The Promotion
by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Happy Monday! Just a quick reminder that there are only two days left in the Goodreads Giveaway for my short novel, The Promotion, the “full of intrigue and deadpan comedy” book that everyone’s talking about. What’s the giveaway? Five lucky readers will be sent a signed paperback copy of the book, FOR FREE.

Of course, if you’re not a Goodreads member, or if you’d rather not roll the dice in a contest, you can always purchase the books at Amazon.com (Kindle and Paperback both available). It’s less than five bucks, so hopefully it won’t break anyone’s budget. And if you’re a reviewer, I still have review copies available, so let me know and I’ll ship you one for free. Everyone wins!

You may be wondering to yourself, “Jacke, how did you get so good at promoting these things?” Good question! I learned from a master:

Only $69? I’d buy that NOW. Who couldn’t use an enormous tower stereo sitting in the corner of their living room! Wonder years, I’m coming to join you!

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #11 – The Bench

I don’t know why I stopped in Nanjing on my way to Beijing. Someone had said it was good. Buddhist temples, a mausoleum for Dr. Sun Yat-Sen… Why not? I had time to burn and no place else to be.

It was only after I arrived, hot and grimy and exhausted from late night travel on a crowded train, that I learned from a guidebook that Nanjing was called one of China’s Three Furnaces. And of course, it was August. Fantastic. The sweat was already pooling in my eyes.

After hauling my backpack across the city I learned something else: the hotel for foreigners would not open until late that afternoon. I stood in shock, desperate for a bed that would not be available for six more hours. Behind the counter they were hosing down the cement floor of the foyer. I wanted to lie down on it. I don’t need a bed! Just let me take off my shirt and lie down there! Just let my skin absorb the cool, clean water!

I babbled some Chinese, attempting to propose this alternative, clarifying the request by citing the example of the lizards that absorbed water through their skin as a means of hydration.  The man behind the desk stared at me as I spoke, his hand slowly reaching for the phone. I’d seen this before: invariably the call would be to the authorities, and a man in uniform would soon arrive to shout a million questions at me. I left before anyone could confiscate my passport and returned to the full blast of the furnace.

Only six hours. And also: six whole hours! A sign on a bank said it was 38 degrees Celsius; I was too tired to do the conversion to Farenheit but knew it was over 100. Beyond that point, what does it matter?

I trudged through the hot heavy air as if I were walking uphill through a crowd of people. What would I do for six hours? I had seen a picture of the mausoleum, it had a million steps and no shade. I needed rest first.

I found myself in a park with exactly two trees. The sun pounded me and everything I could see. The concrete was bright white and reflecting heat like a solar oven.

I needed not to move. This was the best place I could find where I would not be arrested. Others were here, lying sprawled on the benches. They looked like dead bodies, struck down by the heat. It looked like a better than option than standing up or walking around.

Every square inch of shade from both trees was occupied. Even the outskirts of the shadows were mobbed, as people had anticipated the movement of the sun and the new shade that would be cast.

The benches were all initially taken too, but in a great stroke of luck a man rolled off one and fell onto the ground. He crawled away, finding some comfort underneath another bench. I waited a minute to make sure he had left the first one behind. He had! Completely abandoned! All mine now!

And a second stroke of luck: a flagpole, unseen before, was casting a thin strip of shade across part of the bench! I could position my body so it covered my eyes. Or my neck. Whatever I wanted! I could fold my body, or try to shrink it, to maximize the benefits of this incredible gift.

It should have been inspiring, being so in touch with my body, living in nature the way I was, forcing myself to endure and survive. I had read that in some forms of Buddhism even non-sentient things can have a soul. Maybe that’s true under certain conditions. But it’s a lot easier to believe in the life force of inanimate objects when gazing upon a mountain or waterfall than it is when you’re staring at a cracking granite bench spotted with birdshit.

How had it come this? How had I fallen so far? Who was I? I hated this bench for what it meant: I alone had lost my way. I could feel no awe. Nothing sublime. Just regret and shame. I felt like I owed everyone I knew an apology for having blown whatever confidence they had ever expressed in me. My friends were all secure in their jobs, they all had professions, they were all on a road to success, which was where I should have been too. But no. I had six hot hours on a filthy, rock hard bench with a single strip of shade.

Apology? Maybe I owed one to myself.

But first, there was this bench, this stupid, idiotic bench, the emblem of my misery. Maybe I didn’t need to feel awe for inanimate objects like the bench. Maybe I didn’t need to respect it. Maybe I could just hate. Hate and hate and more hate. Was that a form of respect for something? To hate it? Because I truly hated this bench: hated the fact that it was here, hated that it was all I had left, hated that my life had come to this.

All my frustration and fury focused on this one stupid bench, and I reveled in how disgusting it was because it helped to concentrate my hate and incite it further. I had never seen such a worthless piece of junk in my life. It was the ugliest bench in the park, in the world, with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Completely pathetic.

Look at you, I thought with disgust. People are sitting on the ground rather than you. You have only one purpose, one function, just one single reason to exist, and you’ve failed at it.

In the end the heat overwhelmed me. I collapsed onto the bench and slept like a dead man. I had a dream that I was drinking water straight from the spout of a kettle. The water was boiling; as I guzzled it melted my flesh away and I was left a skeleton lying on a dusty slab of rock at the bottom of a canyon, my mouth wide open in that creepy way that skulls have of looking desperate and dumb but also kind of laughing, my bones slowly bleaching white.

Hellish dreams have a way of making reality seem better. When I woke up the sun had finally dipped and I felt refreshed. Finally a few shadows stretched across the park. My six hours were over and I could look forward to a shower, an ice-cold bottle of beer I could press to my forehead, and a soft bed with fresh white sheets.

Spirits renewed, I lifted myself off the bench. Every bone in my body hurt. It would take me a while to recover.

I felt nothing toward the bench. I’d kick it if I thought it deserved that much from me. But no: the bench might confuse that for affection. The bench might think I was playing. The bench might think I owed it something.

Good bye, bench. I hated you once. Now I am completely indifferent. You are nothing to me.

I resolved never to tell anyone about the bench. No one would understand. Everyone would think I was still dirty, as if spending so much time on the bench had stained me in a way that couldn’t come off no matter how much soap and scrubbing I applied.

And then, as I got to my feet and heaved my pack over my shoulders, I looked back down and noticed something odd: on the bench, there was something that had not been there before. The shape of a human being, like the traced silhouette of a dead body after a shooting.

The shape of me. The remains of my sweat and grime, leaching out of me for six hours.

For some reason I thought of those cartoons where the character dies and his soul rises up from his body. The body lies still, clueless and inert, but the soul knows something the body doesn’t. The soul glimpses a truth.

I was alive, but I was changed and new. I had risen out of something I was leaving behind, but something had been revealed to me. Something to govern the rest of my days, to guide me through the world and my position in it. To let me know where I stood, not just in relation to my fellow human beings, but to all the objects that surrounded me, from the tiniest speck of dust to the biggest purple mountain, and to everything in between.

I had been given a new truth.

This bench, this odious, disgusting bench, had not stained me.

I had stained it.

#

Nanjing! The furnace! I did climb those steps to the mausoleum, which nearly killed me all over again. I have visited an awful lot of dead people in my day. That’s tourism? I guess it is. I can’t think of anything else it could be. If you enjoyed this, please let others know where you found it. And feel free to run through the rest of the series:

#10 – The Spitwad – a high school teacher confronts a bully, with a little help from the heavens
#9 – The Intersection - Hamlet Dad goes to the movies
#8 – The Burger Car – a father orders burgers with a slice of Proust
#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns a child’s dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from buying a motorcycle in Taiwan and learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and pays a visit to a therapist
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes a dramatic turn
#1 – The Padlock  - a doomed football coach struggles to survive a winless season

My books The Race and The Promotion are available at Amazon.com (the link is to the author page).

A review of The Race (“warm and full of life”) can be found on mylittlebookblog. I also posted some follow-up thoughts.

Are you a reviewer? Free review copies are available! If you’re interested in posting a review on your blog, or if you’re willing to write a review at Amazon (or anywhere else), just let me know and I’ll ship you a book. And many thanks for helping to get the word out! 

Image Source: World of Stock

Free Books! Let the Goodreads Giveaway-ing Begin! [Update: The Contest Has Closed]

Goodreads Book Giveaway







The Promotion



by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Here we go! The folks at Goodreads have approved the application and are now hosting a Goodreads Giveaway for my short novel, The Promotion, the “full of intrigue and deadpan comedy” book that everyone’s talking about. That’s right! Five lucky readers will be sent a signed paperback copy of the book, FOR FREE. What’s the catch? Well, Goodreads encourages you to post a review afterwards, but it’s not a requirement. No catch!

What are you getting? A sleek novel about a hard-luck lawyer asked to direct the recruiting efforts for his firm. As he and his miserable colleagues attempt to reel in some idealistic young law students through lies and misguided bonhomie, his mounting disillusion gives way to an obsession with a mysterious woman, culminating in a quest to discover her true identity – and perhaps to learn something about himself.

How do you sign up? Follow one of these links:

Goodreads Book Giveaway







The Promotion



by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I’m excited to see how all this works. You have a week to sign up. I’ll keep the link on the sidebar until then.

Of course, if you’re not a Goodreads member, or if you’d rather not roll the dice in a contest, you can always purchase the books at Amazon.com (Kindle and Paperback both available). It’s less than five bucks, so hopefully it won’t break anyone’s budget. But if you’re a reviewer, I still have review copies available, so let me know and I’ll ship you one for free. Everyone wins!

UPDATE: The Contest Has Closed!

Winners have been notified and will receive their books shortly. Thanks to everyone who participated (over 900 of you)! If you were one of the unfortunate readers who missed out this time around, but you are still interested in receiving a FREE review copy, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. And to all the winners, I hope you enjoy The Promotion! Onward and upward!

Free Books! Let the Goodreads Giveaway-ing Begin!

Goodreads Book Giveaway







The Promotion



by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Here we go! The folks at Goodreads have approved the application and are now hosting a Goodreads Giveaway for my short novel, The Promotion, the “full of intrigue and deadpan comedy” book that everyone’s talking about. That’s right! Five lucky readers will be sent a signed paperback copy of the book, FOR FREE. What’s the catch? Well, Goodreads encourages you to post a review afterwards, but it’s not a requirement. No catch!

What are you getting? A sleek novel about a hard-luck lawyer asked to direct the recruiting efforts for his firm. As he and his miserable colleagues attempt to reel in some idealistic young law students through lies and misguided bonhomie, his mounting disillusion gives way to an obsession with a mysterious woman, culminating in a quest to discover her true identity – and perhaps to learn something about himself.

How do you sign up? Follow one of these links:

Goodreads Book Giveaway







The Promotion



by Jacke Wilson

Giveaway ends June 04, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I’m excited to see how all this works. You have a week to sign up. I’ll keep the link on the sidebar until then.

Of course, if you’re not a Goodreads member, or if you’d rather not roll the dice in a contest, you can always purchase the books at Amazon.com (Kindle and Paperback both available). It’s less than five bucks, so hopefully it won’t break anyone’s budget. But if you’re a reviewer, I still have review copies available, so let me know and I’ll ship you one for free. Everyone wins!

Coming Soon: A Goodreads Giveaway!

Readers, big news! I just signed up for a Goodreads Giveaway, which means that FIVE SIGNED COPIES of the paperback version of The Promotion will be given away FOR FREE to Goodreads members who sign up for the contest. That’s right, soon five lucky readers will be given the chance to immerse themselves in 105  pages of misery, obsession, and madness. (“Laugh-out-loud funny,” a reader told me last night. There are a lot of miserables in this world!)

So why post now? Well, I just thought I should give a heads up to all my readers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Free books are on the way! Oh, and of course, the giveaway is open to all my readers in THESE countries too:

Afghanistan, Aland Islands, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (keeling) Islands, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote D’ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (malvinas), Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Heard Island and Mcdonald Islands, Holy See (vatican City State), Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of, Korea, Republic of, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Micronesia, Federated States of, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Palestinian Territory, Occupied, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Pitcairn, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Réunion, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, South Sudan, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, United Republic of, Thailand, Timor-leste, Togo, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Virgin Islands, British, Virgin Islands, U.S., Wallis and Futuna, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Stay tuned, Wallis and Futuna! Check back soon, Svalbard and Jan Mayen! Watch this space, British Indian Ocean Territory!  More details are on their way… and in the meantime, onward and upward!

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #10 – The Spitwad

Here’s something I’ve learned: teachers are human.

That’s it, but it’s important. They’re not superheroes or gods. Not saints or demons. They’re human beings, with flaws and weaknesses like all the rest of us.

Don Ward was a fine man who taught high school biology to undeserving students in the same crumbling, run-down building for forty-three years before retiring five years ago.

How bad was our school? When I was there, ceiling tiles used to fall crashing to the floor. I’d never actually seen one drop, but at least once a month we’d see one in the hallway by the lockers, broken on the ground with a cloud of white smoke that was probably 100% asbestos. In the ceiling, there’d be a gap that stayed there forever, never to be filled. No money in the budget.

Not such a great workplace for Don Ward. Did it bother him? It was impossible to know, because he exhibited no personality whatsoever. Zero. His face barely moved when he spoke. With his plain brown mustache covering his upper lip, you literally could not detect any change in his expression for hours at a time. He never smiled. It was like being taught by Buster Keaton without any of the physical comedy.

That was our biology class. Day after day, Mr. Ward stood in front of the class in his drab plaid shirts, droning on about chlorophyll and flowering plants. And in exchange for his years of service he was mocked and jeered and verbally abused by the teenagers who knew everything and had all the power.

Yes, power. Who knows where this power comes from? Teenagers are desperate, scared, and self-conscious. And also cocky, fearless, and totally in control.

I used to feel sorry for Mr. Ward. If only he’d tell a joke once in a while, he’d probably have a better chance connecting with some of the renegades forced to take his class. That’s all it took for other teachers, who could pal around a little. Anything to prove he was not a robot. If only he’d ask if anyone had seen the World Series the night before. Or say he heard something interesting in church last week. Or raise his voice in anger. Or smile.

But no: Donald Ward delivered his lecture in the same way, sentence by boring sentence, until the class, forced to submit to this for months at a time, had developed a kind of of pent-up frenzy. Students had to act up. These were high school students, after all. Adolescents! Their insides were full of raging energies that had to be discharged. They needed to show off, to thump chests, to flirt, to challenge authority. They needed all this to survive.

In other classes, the teachers released this energy with a few little quips now and then, letting the students laugh and tease and push back, so the air would clear and the business of learning could begin. It was like the quick open-and-shut of a pressure valve.

Not in Mr. Ward’s class. In Mr. Ward’s class it was all pressure, no valve. For months. Something had to give.

Which brings me to the glorious day when Mr. Ward told a joke. Well, sort of a joke.

“Okay class,” he began. “Today we’re going to talk about buds. Now I don’t mean ‘Hey, Bud’ or ‘This Bud’s for you.’ I’m talking about the embryonic shoots on flowering plants…” And we were back into the lecture.

Not a great joke, to be sure, and gone as soon as it came, but there it was. Personality! His mustache even twitched a little, making us think he at least could smile, even if it was not 100% clear that he was doing so as he delivered his joke.

We all looked around at each other to make sure we were not imagining this.

“Wow,” my friend Bobby mouthed at me, shaking his head in wonder.

I had new hopes for Mr. Ward. He had (sort of) told a joke! And a few kids had even laughed!

Granted, they seemed to be laughing at him, at the craziness of the moment. The guy waits five months to tell a joke and that’s all he can come up with? It was not even really a joke with a punchline. It didn’t work as a pun, exactly. If you analyzed it carefully, as I have many times over the years, you would probably conclude that it was basically a statement.

So yeah, it wasn’t really much of a joke. And so the general abuse returned. The pent-up fury was still rising.

And the next day, when Mr. Ward strangely repeated the joke, word for word, Ernie Starks was merciless.

Mr. Ward: Okay class. Today we’re going to talk about buds. Now I don’t mean “Hey, Bud” or “This Bud’s for you.” I’m talking about the embryonic shoots on flowering plants…

Ernie Starks: What the fuck, dude? You told that same exact thing yesterday!

(Let’s pause here to appreciate the second sentence that emerged from Ernie Starks’s unwitting mouth. You told that same exact thing. Not told that same exact joke. Not said that same exact thing. It flew right past me at the time, but looking back, I realize what happened: Ernie was planning to call it a joke but couldn’t bring himself to give it that much credit. It did not rise to the level of a joke. It was more like a thing. Ah, Ernie: proving that sometimes even excited utterances can contain moments of linguistic genius.)

We all waited to see what would happen. Mr. Ward looked “surprised,” which for any other human being could be described by saying he “paused for a few seconds longer than normal.”

Mr. Ward: I did?

Ernie Starks: What is you, ignorant?

Mr. Ward checked his lesson plans at his desk and returned to the front of the room, flustered and apologetic. “Sorry, class,” he said. “I had my days mixed up.”

That joke, that non-joke, that thing he told, was in his lesson plans. He said it six times a year to six different classes, year after year after year. And in our case, he told it twice, word for word.

In other words, we were not exactly dealing with Richard Pryor here. But why should we have expected that? We were being taught by a good man, a hard worker. A tireless public servant. A human. Wasn’t that enough? Of course it wasn’t. Not for any of us. And especially not for a guy like Ernie Starks.

Ernie Starks was human too, but more on the criminal side of the spectrum. He was a mean kid, a troublemaker since kindergarten, a bad seed. He lived by the funeral home and used to shoot his BB gun at the processions of cars that drove slowly past his house on the way to the graveyard. Can there be a less human instinct?

But that was Ernie Starks: foul-mouthed, a jerk, a bully since he was old enough to sneer, a ceaseless fountain of pranks and negativity—and strangely charismatic! That’s the weird thing about high school. In regular society he’d be in prison. In high school he was the leader of the classroom, when he wasn’t actually serving detention or suspended from school.

It was easy to envision Ernie’s future: for the next several months he’d lead a small band of fellow criminals and wreak havoc on the school until he dropped out or was expelled, which would let him get on with his true calling of bar fights with pool cues and baseball bats and everything ending with a high-speed chase with the cops on the backroads of rural Wisconsin.

Poor Mr. Ward: his joke-thing, the highlight of his semester, had disintegrated. And right in front of Ernie Starks, who had all the power and was unforgiving. Ernie stared hard as Mr. Ward finished his apology, grinning in his sadistic way.

We all knew what was happening. Ernie Starks was not yet finished with Mr. Ward.

When Mr. Ward turned around to draw a diagram of photosynthesis on the chalkboard, Ernie Starks reached into the winter coat that he wore year-round and pulled out a Bic pen, which he converted to a weapon by pulling out the back end with his teeth and letting the ink cartridge fall to the floor. His expertise in executing this maneuver was impressive and seemed almost lethal; a trained Green Beret could have done no better. Then he ripped a page out of his biology book—the page on photosynthesis, a nice poetic touch but probably an accident—and tore it into eight pieces.

We all knew what this meant. Spitwad time.

Sure enough, Ernie loaded a square into his mouth and started chewing, a fiendish gleam in his eyes. His jaw churned; his tongue rolled around his cheeks. He was a spitwad master; years of practice had gone into perfecting his craft. His spitwads were especially disgusting because he chewed tobacco all day. This was in defiance of school rules, of course, but that didn’t bother him and it had a glorious effect in terms of spitwads: the paper came out soggy and brown and perfectly prepared for maximum distance and accuracy and impact. These were spitwads as elevated to an art form. I could swear they even sounded better than the spitwads prepared by lesser mortals.

Mr. Ward was drawing the chloroplast. Ernie Starks loaded his weapon.

Fffftooo. The ugly brown mess shot through the air and splatted against the chalkboard, six inches from Mr. Ward’s hand. Ernie grinned. In the back of the room, a couple of Ernie’s cronies sniggered.

Mr. Ward did not turn around. Had he not noticed? He must have. The thing was sliding down the board, leaving a brown stain.

Ernie frowned. This was the point where he was usually tossed from the class, his preferred result. Finally he shrugged. His face grew more determined. Okay, pal. This is how you wanna play, this is how we’re gonna play.

He loaded a second shot. Nobody stopped him. Maybe we were afraid of Ernie. Maybe we thought Mr. Ward was so ridiculous he didn’t deserve our help. A joke in his lesson plan? And not even a funny one? How much of this were we supposed to endure? Of course Ernie Starks would try to liven things up. Anyone who knew the guy knew he had no choice.

Fffftooo. Another soggy missile smacked the board. This one hit the drawing. Still no response. Mr. Ward started labeling the diagram.

Fffftooo. A third hit the board just below the word sunlight. Nothing.

Fffftooo. The word glucose now read “g—e” with a brown splat in the middle. That one had just missed Mr. Ward’s hand. Still he kept writing. Still he kept his back to us.

Ernie smiled his cruel smile and held up his hands to the class, shaking his head. He had a whole textbook full of paper and plenty of spit. We could do this all day. I imagined an entire board smeared with wet brown pulp. Probably not an ideal educational environment.

Ffftooo.

We stared in shock. This one had hit Mr. Ward himself, who now had a dripping brown wad stuck to the back of his neck, above his collar and below his hair. It looked as if he’d been dive-bombed by an enormous beetle, which he had smacked with the palm of his hand, so that now all that remained was a dead carcass oozing with brown blood.

Ernie smiled with cruel satisfaction. He had hit skin! The shot of his lifetime, one in a million. In the back of the room, his cronies high-fived each other: their leader had demonstrated his ability, and their discipleship was justified—nobody else in the school could have pulled it off, or would have dared.

“Holy shit,” Bobby mouthed at me.

Mr. Ward paused for a moment, his hand in mid-letter. Still he did not turn around.

After a half a minute, Ernie Starks started to chuckle. Then he began to laugh. Then he leaned back, put his hands behind his head, kicked his chair up on its back two legs, and laughed harder.

He was not alone; the rest of the class started laughing as well, although we did so nervously, somewhat afraid and somewhat ashamed. But we had to laugh, we couldn’t help it. This had been the strangest day: first the repeated joke, then the spitwads on the blackboard, and now a spitwad right on the neck of our boring teacher.

If you’d been in class with Ernie Starks for ten years, as most of us had, you knew how much this meant to him. His whole life to that point had been building to this. Years of bullying and cruelty had all built up to this one single moment. And for everyone else in the class, who had been tormented by him for so long we had come to understand that his cruelty was just part of his nature—well, we couldn’t help but feel like he’d met his perfect victim and carried out his perfect crime. There’s something inspiring about witnessing the pinnacle of any endeavor, no matter how pointless or disgusting.

Our laughter wasn’t because we liked Ernie. We laughed because we knew him, truly knew him, in a way that only kids who’ve grown up together over a long period of time can understand.

And yet, even as we were laughing, we felt sorry for Mr. Ward. Why did he have to be such a patsy? We had to put up with Ernie’s abuse. But Mr. Ward was an adult, with resources to draw upon. Why did he just take it? Was he so embarrassed about the joke fiasco he couldn’t even muster up the courage or energy to send Ernie to the principal’s office?

Finally Mr. Ward turned around. Everything in the room changed in an instant. There was still no change to his expression. But his eyes were lit up like I’d never seen them before.

The class fell silent immediately. Not even Ernie made a sound.

Of course Mr. Ward knew exactly who had done it: Ernie’s book, with the half-torn page, still sat on the table. Not that any evidence was needed. We had a lot of bad kids in our school. But there was only one Ernie Starks.

Mr. Ward took a step toward him, surprising us all. Ernie dropped his chair onto all four legs. His hand closed his book. His eyes were still on Mr. Ward. He was not afraid, but he waited like the rest of us. In the charged atmosphere it seemed like anything could happen. I suddenly wondered, for the first time, whether Mr. Ward could beat up Ernie Starks.

The teacher, the notoriously unexcitable Mr. Ward, kept walking slowly, still not saying a word or changing his expression. His eyes were almost hard to look at, full of an intensity we did not know he possessed. He raised his index finger.

Nobody in the class could breathe. We thought he might burst into tears, or quit his job on the spot, or scream and attack Ernie Starks with his bare hands. Who knew? Twenty years of teaching, twenty years of putting up with guys like Ernie Starks. What happens when the dam finally bursts?

He stopped, his index finger still raised. Now he was within five feet of Ernie, who returned his stare with unyielding defiance.

And here was the problem for Mr. Ward, even the animated Mr. Ward who had suddenly appeared. What could he do to Ernie Starks? The guy had been punished since he was five. His parents didn’t care. He hated school and couldn’t wait to be expelled. You’d have to kill him to wipe that smirk off his face. Even that probably wouldn’t do it.

Mr. Ward’s mustache twitched, enough to make us think he was about to speak. His index finger was still pointing upward.

No one in the school would have believed what happened next, had there not been thirty eyewitnesses.

Because at that moment, at that very instant, with Mr. Ward staring at him and pointing up and not saying a word, a heavy ceramic tile fell from the ceiling directly above Ernie’s head. It whisked his nose on the way down and landed smack on the table in front of him, shattering into pieces with a huge cracking sound. A cloud of dust flew up into Ernie’s face, whitening his face and hair.

Everyone gasped. Mr. Ward did not change his expression.

“Next time it won’t miss,” he said flatly.

Suddenly it seemed as if he too had been getting ready for this moment for a long time. He lowered his hand as if he were a sheriff returning a smoking gun to its holster. Then he turned around and walked back to the board. The spitwad was no longer on his neck. There was no sign of it anywhere, not even a stain, though I couldn’t remember seeing him remove it.

Ernie Starks sat for a moment, his lips trembling and his body shaking, something I could hardly bring myself to watch. Finally he stood up and rushed out of the room. At first I thought he was going to the bathroom to wash his face and brush the dust out of his hair. But no, of course he wasn’t: we heard his motorcycle start up and roar out of the parking lot. It was the Way of the Bully: he could not live in a world where the balance of power had shifted from himself to Mr. Ward. He never came back.

The rest of us never got over the experience either. To everyone else it became a funny anecdote, a school legend, but for those of us who were actually there it was something larger. The unchanged expression. The intense eyes. The unworldly coincidence of the ceiling tile just missing Ernie Starks. The spooky magic of it all.

And then the perfect line, next time it won’t miss, delivered by the only man in the world who could have kept a straight face as he said it. It was the funniest thing I had ever heard any teacher say. A joke, a real joke, on the very day Mr. Ward needed it the most.

If indeed it was a joke, which I’ll never know. In the end I don’t think it matters. Thinking about it makes the hair on my neck stand up either way.

Yes, as I said, over the years I’ve learned that teachers are human.

And sometimes, every now and then, they’re a little bit more.

#

Ah, Mr. Ward. I remember absolutely nothing about embryonic shoots, and yet in a sense I learned more from this class and the Incident of the Spitwad than all my other classes combined. If you enjoyed this, please share it with as many people you know, particularly any bullies deserving comeuppance and of course all of your favorite teachers. Let’s show them a little love! And a sense of triumph! And feel free to run through the rest of the series:

#9 – The Intersection - Hamlet Dad goes to the movies
#8 – The Burger Car – a father orders burgers with a slice of Proust
#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns a child’s dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from buying a motorcycle in Taiwan and learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and pays a visit to a therapist
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes a dramatic turn
#1 – The Padlock  - a doomed football coach struggles to survive a winless season

My books The Race and The Promotion are available at Amazon.com (the link is to the author page).

A review of The Race (“warm and full of life”) can be found on mylittlebookblog. I also posted some follow-up thoughts.

Are you a reviewer? Free review copies are available! If you’re interested in posting a review on your blog, or if you’re willing to write a review at Amazon (or anywhere else), just let me know and I’ll ship you a book. And many thanks for helping to get the word out! 

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons

A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #9 – The Intersection

 

I missed The Lion King the first time around, but they re-released it for people like me. Parents with young kids looking to kill an afternoon at the movies. A new generation.

“Jeremy Irons is in it,” my wife says, trying to generate enthusiasm.

“Oh yeah. Him. And Randy Newman songs?”

“Elton John. You know, Circle of Life and all that. Hakuna Whatever.” She scans the computer screen. “Huh. It says here the story’s based on Hamlet.”

It’s enough to persuade me. Hamlet? That at least will give me something to look for while the boys are plowing through popcorn and candy and I’m holding a pile of napkins on my lap that nobody ever uses. If I get bored, I can always think about Hamlet.

So there I am, sitting in between my boys, six and four, watching the cute little lion cub play with his awesome dad. And then he goes running off into the jungle against his father’s instructions, hmm, that’s obviously not good, and—oh come on!—the father lion runs after him and… the father gets killed! And really, he’s not waking up! He’s actually dead!

And suddenly I can feel the air conditioning blasting away and freezing everything. Because what’s going on? This isn’t Hamlet! Oh sure, in Hamlet the father’s dead, he appears as a ghost, we all know that. But the play does not start out with a cute little boy romping around with his awesome dad. Hamlet does not show the awesome dad getting killed because of something the cute little boy did.

Suddenly I’m not imagining myself as Hamlet, gazing at a skull and thinking dreamy thoughts about my romantic soul and artistic temperament and the vengeance I may need to carry out against my uncle. No! Somehow I have become the father who gets killed. Whose only hope of any kind of existence is to be a ghost.

And look at poor Simba, who lost his awesome dad because he didn’t listen. What a tragic loss, not to have his awesome dad around! And think of the remorse that will weigh him down for the rest of his life!

And the more I think about Life, the more I realize how insane it is that we even bother. Circle of Life? What a lie! There’s nothing circular about Life—it all goes one way and always, always, always ends! Having kids doesn’t make it a circle! Life is a relay race run on a straight path by generations of runners who all die!

And Hamlet, stupid Hamlet, that sneaky, stupid play, is not just a tragedy because of the carnage at the end—the tragedy starts even before the play does! How appropriate, because isn’t that was what life really is too? Oblivion before! Oblivion after! And short little lives burdened with grief and sorrow and remorse in between!

And suddenly Elton is singing at me, asking whether I can feel the love tonight. Yes! Yes I can! Love for my wife, love for my boys, love for life itself. I can feel it tonight—and I want to feel it tomorrow night too, and the next night, and the next night, and on and on forever. Except that won’t happen!

My boys are gorging themselves on Hi-C and Dots. My wife’s checking her phone. And I’m sitting next to them, freezing in the air conditioning, rubbing my legs with napkins to make sure they’re still there, my mind demonstrating once again that if left alone too long it will overwhelm itself for no good reason at all.

#

As soon as the movie ends, I shed the gloom and emerge from the theater like everyone else, smiling and blinking in the light and humming the catchy tunes. What kind of ghoul thinks about Death all the time? That’s no way to parent. Besides, the weather is fine; it’s a beautiful late afternoon in the city; we’re headed to the pizza parlor. A great day to be alive and to celebrate life. Hakuna matata! No worries, people!

And isn’t that the point? So what if we die eventually? We can feel the love tonight. No sense dwelling on what we can’t change. Far better to enjoy the moments we can. Life is too precious to waste it away by dwelling on our mortality.

On the sidewalk, the boys are so excited they can’t help but race ahead. Their enthusiasm is inspiring.

“Boys!” I call out. “Make sure you wait at the intersection!”

“We will!” they call back.

Sure, it would be nice to hold their hand and have them close beside me, the best way to keep them safe, but I have to let them go. It’s part of their maturing process to venture forth, and part of mine to give them their freedom. It’s the progress we all make.

I smile. They’re walking on the imaginary tether that keeps them just the right distance ahead. I’ve spent years developing this tether: first by carrying them in my arms everywhere, then pushing them in a stroller that they are literally strapped into, then by holding their hand, then by letting them walk a little bit ahead, never too far. They’re like puppies who have learned not to leave the yard, only this education wasn’t done in a weekend. Years of solid, attentive parenting have gone into creating this.

It was not so long ago that my youngest used to test his imaginary tether by stopping and turning around every few steps. He would always look a little scared by the newness of his freedom, a microsecond of panic before he saw my face, which would cause him to break out into a huge smile.  Just wanted to see if it’s okay to move this far ahead of you, Dad. Just wanted to make sure you’re still there.

And I would always smile back. It’s okay, son, don’t worry. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

Now they just run, looking forward, never looking back. As I watch them head to their next destination, I feel proud that they no longer need me quite as much. And besides, what does it matter? We’ll all get to the same place eventually. Hakuna matata.

But then, at the next intersection, the walk sign flashes and they cross with a crowd of strangers and my heart jumps. In an instant they’re in the road, unprotected. Off the imaginary tether! If there were a jungle nearby, they would be in it, tempting the hyenas.

I rush toward them, my wife only a step behind. As soon as I see that they’re going to be okay, my fear turns to astonishment. How could they defy me? Did they forget? Didn’t we just see a movie about this? What if they’d been hit by a car? Or what if I had chased after them and a bus had run me down? They would be Simbas! They would need to live with that heaviness for the rest of their lives—the very point of the movie we just watched!

At the other side of the intersection they realize what they’ve done. They await the reckoning.

“What was that movie about?” I ask. “What was the theme of that whole movie we just saw? What was the point?”

They look at me with frightened, penitent faces. I decide to let the moment ripen. Most of the time my advice falls on deaf ears, but this is different. Here we have just seen a movie about a boy who fails to heed his father’s warning, with disastrous consequences. It’s not often that a teachable moment coincides so perfectly with the very wisdom you are trying to impart. In parenting, good timing is everything.

I raise my index finger and lift my eyebrows. The boys gaze up at me with wide-open eyes, eager to hear what I have to say. Waiting in awestruck silence for the pronouncement of the Dad King—

“It’s you will replace your father,” my wife says.

I stare at her, aghast. The boys nod: lesson learned.

Still stunned, I watch the three of them stroll down the sidewalk without me, getting smaller as they recede into the distance—but of course, that’s a matter of perspective. From their vantage point, I would be the one who is getting smaller, standing in place as they travel farther away.

Eventually they turn the corner. And as soon as I can no longer see them, it is as if I am the one who has disappeared: the ghostly father, vanishing into the shadows as the hero takes the stage.

#

I know, I know, I know: Enough with the bleakness, Jacke! And yes: parenting is full of light moments too. Not every paper sailboat on the pond sinks under the weight of my angst. Can I redeem myself by telling you I cut thousands of words from this one, mostly elaborate metaphors for Death? (You’re welcome!) How about I tell you that the number 10 is optimistic and full of hakuna matata? In the meantime you can read the others in the series:

#8 – The Burger Car – a father orders burgers with a slice of Proust
#7 – The Keyboard - a music teacher pushed beyond her limits turns a child’s dreams to nightmares
#6 – The Mugs - while slicing up life into tenths of an hour, I get a sudden ray of hope
#5 – The Motorcycle - learning a life lesson from buying a motorcycle in Taiwan and learning to drive one (in that order)
#4 – The Sweater - a Wisconsin boy moves to the big city and pays a visit to a therapist
#3 – The Blood Cake - in which I recount my experience sharing an office with Jerry Seinfeld
#2 – The Spy Drop - a neighborhood war waged by five-year-olds takes a dramatic turn
#1 – The Padlock  - a doomed football coach struggles to survive a winless season

My books The Race and The Promotion are available at Amazon.com (the link is to the author page).

A review of The Race (“warm and full of life”) can be found on mylittlebookblog. I also posted some follow-up thoughts.

Are you a reviewer? Free review copies are available! If you’re interested in posting a review on your blog, or if you’re willing to write a review at Amazon (or anywhere else), just let me know and I’ll ship you a book. And many thanks for helping to get the word out! 

Image Credit: The Lion King, courtesy of lionking.org