Snuggies, Wedgies and Chili Dust

When I went to junior high school in Minneapolis, I was one of many kids bussed to the northern part of the city in order to racially diversify the student body. Many of the black kids would constantly harass the more vulnerable white ones but I don't think it was too bad. They'd note their targets in the boys locker room, turn off the lights while our alcoholic teacher was imbibing in his office, then pummel away until someone managed to get the lights back on. Not fighting back marked you for life but for the price of a fight or two you could get yourself left alone, pretty much. It seems like today, with gangsta music, violent video games and other forms of violence acceptance, newer and more serious forms of bullying may have arrived. I'm just glad I'm too old to find out.

The Snuggy Patrol formed spontaneously on one semi-evil lunch period and lasted for several weeks. A butterfly flapped its wings somewhere which led to the formation of a group of thugs who administered violent snuggies to whomever was handy. After peeling their underwear from their foreheads and stuffing it back into their corduroy Levis, the newly initiated would become part of the mob and enter the hunt for further victims. I was never Snuggied although it took all my natural speed as well as the will to abandon school grounds and enter the surrounding neighborhoods with a swarm of crazed seventh and eigth graders after my pants.

Until Mrs. Gilger. In class. On her desk even. Worse, I didn't even see it coming.

Each trimester, school would continue for a week after the final tests had been administered. The reasons for this were never clear to anyone. The smart kids would get their parents to write a note excusing them both from the extraneous classes and the stepped up abuse that filled the tedium of time spent in school with no work. The key to making this work, though, the absolute rule that must not be broken EVER, was to not tell anyone that you were through after the tests were over. You couldn't tell your best friend, the girl you wanted to impress, your buddy from the third grade, NO ONE.

Or you would pay. My, how you would pay.

Here's how I did:

I had a wonderful choir teacher named Mrs. Gilger. An enormous woman, she was able to reach her students through a combination of humor and respect and I really enjoyed being her student. I let her down once when she was trying to get into a locked box that contained some sheet music she was after. She didn't have the key and she told me that I looked like a hood, I should be able to open it. To a boy in the seventh grade there could be no higher praise. Armed with a paper clip I bent and twisted and poked and turned and made no headway on the problem whatsoever. Another kid took the paper clip and popped it open in twenty seconds. This ended my career as a hood - I wasn't good enough with a paper clip.

Anyway, I liked Mrs. Gilger and as this was the end of the school year, I didn't know if I'd ever be in her class again. So I told her, very slyly, no one could overhear, about the note. "You mean this is your last day?" she asked. "Oh, yes," I said, feeling, if not like a hood, at least fiendishly clever. "Well, then," Mrs. Gilger said, or something like it, and reached her bulky form across her desk, swallowed my undersized wrists in a single bear-like paw, then reached down the back of my pants with the other and gave me the single most destructive snuggy I had ever received.

I'm not sure I became a man that day, in fact I thought it was hilarious, even while the skin burns were forming. This probably explains why I was never that good at fighting, I just couldn't work up the anger to be very interested in it.

Today I picked up a menu from a granola bar restaurant that had a dish called "Criss cross mango." It is described as "half a ripe mango with lime wedgie and a pinch of secret chili dust." That's the whole description. I read it and all I could think about was how, with the addition of just a few choice ingredients, it could match the description of what transpired that fateful June day across the desktop of my seventh grade choir teacher.

Is there a moral to be gleaned here? I doubt it, but perhaps it would be that you should never trust a teacher, no matter how much you may want to or how innocent it may seem. Or maybe that if that many people want to give you a snuggy, wedgie, or whatever the term of the day may be, you ought to just hold your arms out from your sides and let it happen. Give up wearing underwear by the sixth grade? Maybe breakaway underwear, where the preadators can get their hands on it but as you run away it pulls apart leaving them holding something they'd rather not.

If I knew where Mrs. Gilger was today, maybe I'd ask her.