High School Vandalism

It may or may not be hard for you to believe that in High School I was voted “Most Likely to be Dead Before 21”. It was a joke, sort of a joke, but more people than not were certain it would be true. I drank a lot. I smoke a lot of pot. I did drugs the School Admin didn’t know were in the system. But even all that removed I was a very strange person in a very straight society. The things that seemed to camp out in my mind didn’t make any sense to anyone else. The things that were so very important to the rest of the world meant nothing to me.

 I started skipping out of school pictures in the ninth grade. Because my older sister was living with my mother and my younger sister was a few grades lower than I, no one knew when school pictures were at our High School. “I don’t know.” was my answer of choice when asked about anything having to do with anything. I don’t know when school pictures are. I don’t know when report cards come out. I don’t know when this happens or that happened. Ignorance is impossible to disprove. That’s why when you ask a little kid why they did something that tell you, “I don’t know.” You have to prove they do know before you can move on. It’s a mystery what my father and mother did for photos of me my last few years at home. Each and every day I became a little less visible to the real world. I felt as if I had fell into some weird form of Hell where I would spend each day trying not to be noticed by other students and teachers an then I would go home and hope my father didn’t notice me either.

After a visit to my mother’s home in Leslie Georgia one weekend, I came back to discover that I had been accused of breaking out a dozen or so windows at the High School. Better and better, the culprits were known associates of mine. I let the powers-that-be get right up to the point they were going to punish me for my sins before I made a phone call to mom and told her they were trying to railroad me for something that happened while I was gone. It was perfect politics. My mother was outraged because my father was letting this happen. My father didn’t realize that I had been out of town when it happened. All he knew was that all my buddies were in on something so he thought I had been too. ( I intentionally didn’t tell him it had happened while I was gone). The School Admin assumed I was lying. ( it wasn’t a bad assumption when this sort of thing happened, just not now) and now they all had to back down.

The very next day that everything was going down, my friends were having their fathers shell out major bucks for the windows, my mother was still chewing on my father, and the School Admin was having to deal with damn near having a student arrested who wasn’t even in the same county as the crime, so I detonated a rather large smoke bomb in the boy’s locker room. It was made up of over a pound of sulfur, gunpowder, and wax, just to make sure it wouldn’t go out this week. With most of the usual suspects already out for a nice little break, and with me as the Wrongly Accused, the School Admin found themselves with the unenviable task of accusing me of setting the bomb off. They didn’t think it out because collectively they were certain of two things, and two things only. The first is that anyone else that might have been guilty was already out. The second was this was an exceedingly dangerous stunt that had to have a guilty party punished for it.

 School Admin had a pretty good idea that if a student did something like this then they would go around bragging about it. That’s how they found out who broke the windows. They guys that broke the windows had been standing on the other side of the parking lot from the school and one of them said that he could hit the school with a rock from where they were. He couldn’t, of course, but they kept moving closer until one of them did. And it was a window that got hit. Well, as long as it was broken….

So the first thing School Admin did was ask around to see if anyone had heard anything. Then they sent the Brown Noses in to see if they could get someone to boast about it. Then they tried blackmail; they hauled me in and offer not to expel me for it if I would tell them who did it. I told them they couldn’t prove anything and unless they could…

The war lasted for the rest of that year, and for the next two. I never had a co-conspirator so I never got caught doing anything else. Anytime I felt like the school system was taking too much notice of me I would break something, and break something big, or I would break a hundred little things. I kept a five foot long keychain made from fire extinguisher pins. The school failed each and every fire safety inspection they had because of this. They would replace them and I would steal them. Nuts, bolts, and screw went missing out of every fixture they couldn’t keep a constant eye on. Athletic equipment went missing, and before I left I showed them the ceiling tiles that I had removed, stashed their stuff on top of them, and then replaced. There must have been several thousand dollars worth of stuff hidden right over their heads and they never looked up. They did find several sets of car keys on the roof of the school, and I trained them to look up there anytime a teacher lost keys.

“So you’re Mike Firesmith?” a new teacher asked me in my Junior year. “I thought you’d be bigger.”

 “Bigger than what?” I asked.

 “I don’t know, but I’ve heard about you.” She told me. “Am I going to have problems with you?”

 “Yes ma’am.” I said. “You are.”

 “We’ll just see about that!” She huffed at me with that “I’ve seen tougher students than you!” attitude.

It wasn’t a matter of toughness, and unlike other trouble makers, I wasn’t after attention. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to be left be, and the price for me not having my peace was no one else having any either. This one soon discovered that the lock on the classroom door could be subverted, and everything that she had written on the blackboard had been subtly changed. All of a sudden, the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened in 1862. Kennedy had been killed in 1968. And all the chalk had gone missing, until she got home that night and looked in the bottom of her purse.

The question you want to ask me right now is this one: Why? Why be so destructive? Why spend that much time and effort vandalizing an institution where you should have been learning? The answer is that I was not learning, or at least, they were not teaching. But the answer to why I was destructive is that I did not have an outlet for creation.

Destruction is creation, in its own way. You get to watch how something was built when you tear it apart. You learn about the process of order when you create disorder. When a fire alarm goes off in a High School, you get to watch the process of students being led out of the building. If another alarm goes off an hour later, they will still lead those same students out. But the third alarm is the one where they tell everyone just to sit tight. The fourth alarm goes off and no one even notices it. If you do this two days in a row they won’t even send the fire chief out to look at it anymore. What you’ve created in this case is the absence of illusion. They don’t believe the alarm is telling the truth anymore, and you realize they never really did.

Someone went into the school one morning and stole the grade books of five of the Freshman teachers. School Admin brought me in and they searched my car, my wall locker, and they searched the lockers of everyone I knew, and then searched the cars of everyone I knew. I didn’t take the grade books. I had no reason to mess with teachers two years past from me. But I had created the idea that anything that happened in that school was something that I did. The Myth of Firesmith Culpability was enough to blind them.

My Senior year they finally offered me a treaty. They would leave me alone, and I would stop. One of the football coaches angrily denounced the whole thing as cowardice but truth be told he was always afraid that I would go after a football game and do something to the lights, or something like that. I had threatened to for years. He never realized the reason I didn’t was I liked football.

Two and a half decades later, I realize that there was more wrong with me than even I knew, and a lot more than they feared. I look back at myself during that time and I wonder how the hell I lived through it. It was totally accurate to think I would be dead by 21, if not sooner. But one thing School Admin had taught me, and I never forgot, was that no matter how weird things got, if I was still alive, I could still fight back. Even when I didn’t know what I was fighting against, and even if it was me.

Take Care,

Mike