Austin Duerst
Problem Child
To talk about my earliest childhood is a very dark subject to approach, mostly because of what happened in preschool. Still to this day my parents get visibly shaken if I bring up this period. It was a time when they had begun to doubt themselves as parents, and reluctantly entertain thoughts of having given birth to a monster.
This is all because I was almost expelled from preschool.
What I remember about this time is vague to say the least, but there are bits and pieces I remember with an odd sort of clarity. I was around five years old, and I remember my cousin stealing a girl from the classes’ Pound Puppy. These were those pregnant stuffed animals that gave birth to a litter of cloth puppies, where you could reach into their stomach and surprise yourself with the color of the dog that came out. If disappointed, you would just stick your hand with the dog right back into the stomach and reach for a new one.
In retrospect, I wonder if my parents ever fantasized about this.
What else do I remember? Other details. There were the wooden cubbies that lined the entrance to the room, where every morning the class would discard there coats and backpacks. There was the carpet separated into 26 colored squares, each containing a bold letter of the alphabet where the class would sit during story time. At the end of the day, we would put the classroom in order and have to sing a “Clean Up” song, one I had learned at home from watching Barney and then unlearned when my older brother had insisted “Seriously, Barney sucks.”
And of course, the wooden blocks.
I believe playing in the blocks was my favorite part about preschool because it afforded me the opportunity to creatively build cities and townships from scratch, to play God with the two by two inch colored blocks. Playing with them took me to a place in my mind where anything was possible, and I can vaguely recall spending most of class free time immersed in construction, aligning the blocks with acute attention to build the tallest and safest towers, all according to class building regulations and safety codes.
There was a boy in class who I can remember not liking very much. I cannot remember his face or his name, but in the dark recesses of my brain filled with torture devices and chains is a silhouette of this little bastard’s face. Memory is a funny thing. It is unclear to me whether my hatred for the boy was established after the incident, or if I had hated with the kind of passion only a toddler is capable of all along. Either way, it doesn’t change what happened. The scars still exist as proof.
What frightens me when I see preschoolers to this day is how unconsciously in-tune they are with the world around them. For instance, there is really no reason that any kids at that age should not get along. For the first time they are being introduced to a social setting, and you’d think they would be happy to be away from their parents, spending the day playing with others there own age. But this is not the case. If you look closely, already the divisions are being formed. The class structure is established that will haunt these children until they graduate high school, and already you can see the formation of clichés, the will-be jocks excluding the eccentric artists who finger paint all day from recess activities. I suppose I fell in some outlier category of the two of these extremes (I was both eccentric and athletic), but the point I am trying to make is that little kids can hate each other too, even if it is for no good reason.
Which brings us to the incident.
One morning I was placing the final block atop a tower I had spent the previous hour laboring over. It was to be my Eiffel Tower, my St. Paul’s Cathedral. All the skills I had mastered came together on this one project, and if I were older, I would have called it Mecca. If I were older still, I would have called it something else, knowing that “Mecca” is not a building.
Such perfection had never been seen at such a small scale.
You can probably see where this is going. It still makes little sense to me, except I will give my best attempt at a fair and impartial explanation. Sometime during the day, this boy I did not like saw what I was building, and I assume he was a little jealous. The structure stood at a height of four feet in the middle of the room, and I feel that this boy noticed the attention it was gathering. Somewhere in his prepubescent brain he noticed the girls of the classroom, and how when they looked at the structure they began to sexually mature before his eyes, as if the beauty of the phallic structure had awakened something deep inside them, something primal and older then the stars. When the girls started to gather around and compliment my structure, he noticed that they walked different, that their voices were somehow deeper. Probably an abused child, he could not handle seeing such excitement geared towards anyone but him.
So in an attempt to assert his alpha male status, he did the unthinkable.
He kicked my tower over.
Imagine burning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in front of Michelangelo after he painted it for four years and nearly went blind.
In the heat of emotion, I did what any person would do after watching a terrorist attack on their grandest creation. I found the biggest block I could find, and I retaliated.
It is the story of my life that I missed my intended target, somewhere in the boy’s chest region or maybe even towards his knee caps. This would later be a problem for me in little league baseball, where at the pitchers mound my arm’s bloodlust would get the better of my body and act independently for its own sick revenge. The wooden missile left my hand, and to my psychotic arm’s extreme pleasure, it hit the boy right in the face, more accurately, right in the nose.
In his defense, there was a lot of blood, the most I had ever see come out of a human being at that time, so I can’t really blame the teacher and all the other students for being a little spooked. In my defense however, the boy screamed like a stuck pig, and if preschool is the first steps for building character for men in this world, then I felt the little prick was not doing his homework.
As the teacher frantically ran towels under the sink to clean the boy’s nose, I was sent outside to sit on the infamous wooden bench, a holding cell for the future convicts and despots of America. Next to me on the bench was a another boy who had threatened to stab someone with scissors. He gave me a look and a nod as if we were kin, a look that said, “We are one in the same.”
The rest of this story was told to me by my parents, as I was not present during the inquisition that followed. They asked my parents all kinds of questions, whether they abused me, whether I tortured small animals, things of that nature. Administration wanted to set me up with a child psychologist to work out any feelings of “rage” I might have, and were considering “removing me from the school until I was of healthy mind.”
I think it was my Grandfather who eventually negotiated a plea bargain. He was responsible for picking me up after preschool because my parents worked during the day, so he calmly had his say in the matter. He admitted that it was a irresponsible act, but that I was a child, and sometimes children get pissed off and sling weapons of mass destruction at people when they are hurt, not thinking of the consequences of revenge. It was agreed that if I behaved the rest of the year without incident, that I would graduate preschool. For the rest of the year I had to come home every day with a gold star pasted onto a white note card, the school’s way of saying “Your son hasn’t killed us all yet.”
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