Well, maybe more of a novella. It was 50 pages long. Although come to think of it, part of it was written on little kids' paper, so maybe it was more like 20 big people pages. You know the stuff that I'm talking about. The paper that's somewhere in between grocery bag material and industrial paper towel in terms of texture, so that occasionally your O's would look like Q's because your pencil had to jump over a chunk of wood pulp. It had like eight extra lines on it of all different colors so that you could see how bad your penmanship is.
"Diesel, the top of the loop of your 'd' should be on the red line."
"What 'd'? I don't see any 'd'."
"Right here. In the word 'ditch.'"
"Nope, don't see it."
"Here! Right here, plain as day!"
"Well if it's plain as day, why are you making such a big deal out of it?"
"Diesel!"
"I think I might have that dyspepsi thing you were talking about."
"Why?"
"That's not a 'd'. I'm writing a story about you."
Actually my 2nd grade teacher was really nice. Also, she loved me. Early in the year she instructed the class to write a story, and I wrote one about Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. No, not The Eagle. Thee Eagle, is in, "Hey, is that Thee Eagle?" And it was. Although my teacher later renamed Thee Eagle to Thee Eagle With A Line Through the Second 'e,' for reasons that were unclear to me. I guess she just wanted Captain Bill's spaceship to have a more unique name, in case it ever needed to race Seabiscuit.Anyway, Captain Bill and his crew had all kinds of adventures in their big black ship that resembled a partially peeled and very overripe banana. I recall that they went to Jupiter, but I'm not sure why. Then again, why does anyone go to Jupiter? It's the strip clubs and legalized cockfights, am I right? What happens on Jupiter stays on Jupiter. Mostly because of the crushing gravity.
The story of Captain Bill and Thee Eagle never ended, for the simple reason that once I finished the story I would have to do insufferably dull things like add 3 and 7. I didn't understand why they needed me to do this. I was like, "It's 1977, people! Arabic numerals have been around for 1400 years and nobody has figured out 3 plus 7 yet? Don't you people have scientists for this sort of work?" I mean, hell, we even had calculators back in 1977. I used to cart mine around in a radio flyer. But no, they insisted that we do this drudge work by hand. And not only that, but after a while I realized we were doing the same problems over and over. "Who is keeping records at this place?" I demanded. "I swear I just multiplied 3 by 4 yesterday! Oh, that was 4 times 3. Nevermind. Man, I wish somebody would discover the commutative property of multiplication."
"So... do I need to do math now?" I would ask Mrs. P.
"Oh, you just keep working on your story," she said.
No freaking way! I thought. Mrs. P. is the coolest teacher ever! After that, Mrs. P. started making appearances in the story. Captain Bill and she once took some unauthorized leave on Jupiter, if you get my meaning.
In this fashion, the saga of Captain Bill and Thee Eagle went on, and on, and on, page after page after page until I ran out of grocery bag paper and moved on to the real stuff. It must have been the longest story ever written by a second grader. I never did end it. Eventually I think I lost the manuscript (I was forever losing things as a child), and had to move on. But in some ways the story still lives on. Sometimes when I'm weighed down by the drudgery of life, I imagine Captain Bill swooping down in Thee Eagle to save the day.
"Thank goodness you're here, Captain Bill! I'm a church treasurer now and I could really use your help. What's 3 plus 7?"
And Captain Bill would just shrug and say, "Dunno. Let's get wasted and go to Jupiter. I left Mrs. P. frozen in carbonite, so she looks the same as she did in 1977."
"Sweeet," I'd say, with an extra 'e' just for the hell of it.
Captain Bill once squared off against the entire fleet of humor-blogs.com.
Labels: Anecdotes, Exemplary Police Work, Science Fiction
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