The Monthly Rag

It was in 1991, my sophmore year at high school, that I joined The Timberwolf Howl staff at age fifteen with the encouragement of an English teacher and close friend. To describe me at the time as one happy and willing little writer would be an understatement. A diagnosed obsessive compulsive earlier that year (after a humiliating incident that involved being escorted over to St. Helena Hospital for “psyche evaluations”), my chapped and red teenage mitts were poised to do some serious work. The first few months were exhilarating to a young would-be columnist. My mother went out and bought me this leather bound notebook, with a nice expensive ink pen, and there I was, all set to report to the school newspaper like a complete dork, smugly professional with my ostentatious effects. The first assignment that I lobbied for was a simple movie review, being the film fan that I was, and as Oliver Stone’s The Doors was coming to home video I was more than ready to do a spotlight on the new format arrival. I think I perfected that article something close to the way Stone worked on his film, ridiculously meticulous and cocksure. I remember snagging the poster from a local rental store, bringing it in to be snapped by our staff photographer, and then waiting in anticipation resembling Christmas day glee for the print to finish and see my writing on real newspaper.

In my hands on the day of release, I had what I think was my first creative orgasm. I took stacks of the issues and handed them out to people, set them all up in strategic places that caught the eye, and kept about twenty for myself to send home to friends and relatives.When the crowds cleared at the last bell, and I saw how many copies were laying abandoned in the quad and all over the rest of the campus, a cold despair burst my adrenaline high. It seemed the students would pick up a paper, read the sports section, and then just toss it on the floor. Perhaps a few of the more appreciating would scan the rest, but all that work and build up to then spend an hour cleaning them up and sticking them in the archives just didn’t seem right at all.

I finally just sat down and read the damned thing, front to back, which I had done a few times before in the past but never in much of an objective fashion because I had always been pining away about being a part of the production process. What I soon discovered was that The Howl was a fairly boring written affair. All style and no substance, much like the majority of pop music that would end up dominating the radiowaves for the next decade. I wandered home, disappointed, and thought about all the things I would like to see in a school newspaper. Poll questions like “how do you like the new school colors?” and commentaries on the presidential debate weren’t going to grab your average high school imagination. At least, I didn’t think so. I had visions of wall to wall record reviews, movies, parties that happened over the weekend, video games, condoms, foul language, and all the other things we really cared about in life that our parents told us were off limits.

Such was my determination that during the following story assignment Monday I proposed a few changes to the editors. This was actually very hard for me, especially then, because I was quite shy and speaking to my superiors made me visibly shake in my size twelve Converse hightops. A girl named Tracy (some last names are going to be left out of these recollections, unless the asshole in question really deserves a printed reaming) was the entertainment page editor at the time, and I went before her and inquired about expanding our creative literary wares.

With cold precision, I was pretty much told “no one would read that”, and back to the lowely movie review position it was. I pushed down my thoughts and illusions, remaining my worker ant self, and forgot all about such endeavors for just a little while. Several months and more than a few reviews later, a sort of detached mentality found me. I wanted to do something new but instead clung to the familiar because everything else in the paper interested me about as much as reading through foreign electronics manuals. It was a genuine sandtrap, and the zero period mornings didn’t help it any. My natural disposition for being a night owl and what was then a manifesting insomnia left dark circles under my eyes, and the world became a sort of blurry, indecipherable haze. The routine set in nicely; watch movie, talk about movie, rough draft, red pen corrections, fixed draft, more red pen corrections, and final draft. Hand over to editors. Go back to forgetting I had just showcased a flick nobody in the school would ever bother to watch. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There were a few other worker ants on the team that began to also have the same sort of problem. One of them would end up being my other half in the mayhem that was to come, and the other wasn’t a very big fan of mine at the time. In fact, he and I were constantly fighting over who got to review movies, because whichever one did meant the other had to do something they hated. Story days were interesting in that regard–somebody was inevitably left screwed and more than a little bit pissed off. That somebody became me, eventually, and after a particularly grueling rally I lost my beloved review column to my dear adversary. My replacement job, filled in by the great council at their utmost pleasure, was to write a sports article. And not just any sports article, mind you. The worst kind of sports article you can get stuck with.

Let’s talk about physical games and me for a second though first. I can play them with friends. I can even enjoy them on occasion. Organized competition eludes me, however, and due to being overworked on a soccer team as a child and a stint of asthma in my pre-teens, my tastes for the craft never developed far. Also, I find machismo to be utterly boneheaded, and watching guys chest beat over physical prowess makes me ill and embarrassed for my race. Worse still in my book is watching sports. I can understand the allure for many, sure, but I just kind of zone out and think about my last sexual encounter, or a movie that I really enjoyed and wished I’d made. My mind is in a different place, clearly. No disrespect to those of you who like to play spectator…to each their own, as they say. But you can imagine my disdain when not only did I have to write a sports follow-up on our school team, but that it would be about wrestling. Sweaty high school boys rolling around on mats, grunting, then standing up and calling each other fags in the shower room for casting accidental glances in the wrong places. Not my cup of tea. My heart just wasn’t in it. The days ticked on, the deadline approached, and still I had not gone to the school coach for stats, watched a game, or even set a single word to paper. I began to feel I was going to seriously let my contemporaries down.

So the night before the project was due, I decided to at least make an attempt. It was far too late to do anything on the school team, but perhaps…yes, WWF was on this fine Sunday evening, and I tuned in for the true horror show that it was. A parody found itself forming in my head, a nice “wrestling” article that could take the place of the one I had been appointed to. It would be Mean Gene and Jesse the Body Ventura, commentating, watching Randy the Macho-Man Savage beat the shit out of somebody called “Joe Happy.” You know this drill, right? A star is always put against a nobody–Macho-Man would begin to lose, the crowd would go nuts, and then in a bursting surge of amazing energy, Randy would find his happy spot and grab his opponent by the genitals. The commentators would swim in hyperbole while the bodybuilder swung the average s.o.b around by his tackle and then pinned him for a showy win.

Pro-wrestling, in a nutshell. And this is basically what I turned in. I waited, while it was proofread, and then slunk in my seat when the class advisor came unglued.

“WE CAN’T PRINT THIS!!! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!”

Well, I was thinking it was kind of funny, but apparently not.

CONTINUE TO PART 2