My biology teacher thought about my proposal for a second and then issued the command, “Cut.”
As I made my initial incision into Mr. Dead Frog, fighting back the gag reflex, the thought occurred to me, How does the school get its hands on all these croaked croakers? There was probably no place you can order them from, or was there? I made myself a mental note to check the phone book when I got home to see if there was somebody in the business of selling dead frogs to schools for tenth-graders to mutilate.
What if there was no such place? Then how did the school get their frogs? Does the biology teacher call up the chemistry teacher and one of the assistant football coaches late in the summer and say, “Hey, guys, it’s almost time for school, how about helping me go out and get some frogs?” Then do they go out to a pond somewhere, sneak up on a bunch of frogs, catch them, and put them in a sack? And if they do that, how do they kill them? Or do they put them into jars of formaldehyde while they’re still alive?
Just then, my biology teacher walked behind and asked, “How’s it going?”
“I’m on my way to the stomach right now,” I answered. “By the way, how did you get your hands on all these dead frogs?”
The question obviously made my biology teacher uncomfortable. He stammered around with an answer for a couple of seconds and then said, “Keep cutting.”
Hmmmmm. So, there was something fishy (we also had to cut up a perch one day) going on here after all.
There were two things I noticed about myself at that point.
One, I obviously was a budding animal-rights activist and, two, I just as obviously had what every newspaperperson should have—the proverbial “nose for news.”
I also discovered something else about my nose. It didn’t like smelling formaldehyde and dead frogs. Before I finished my dissection, I did have to be excused while I went to the boys’ room and threw up. I also swore to myself I’d never eat frog legs, which brought up another question: What do they do with the rest of the frog when they take off his legs for frying?
I was a deep thinker as a young man.
Anyway, algebra, biology, chemistry, geometry, and such were quite unappealing to me during my formative years. I did like some history, especially the part about George Washington slipping out his window at night during rainstorms in order to rendezvous with one of his slave girls and subsequently catching a cold and dying.
You didn’t know about that? It was in all the papers.
That was when I realized something else about myself: I really like famous people being involved in scandals, which is an explanation of why I thought the Rob Lowe thing was the best story to come out of the 1988 Democratic Convention.
I did pay a great deal of attention in English class, however. I was learning my craft there. I probably—no, I was—the best diagramer of sentences in the history of Newnan High School. I didn’t care how long or how complex the sentence, if it could be diagramed, I could diagram it in a matter of seconds.
I originally thought this rare ability might get me some girls, but it didn’t.
I was fascinated by grammar. I thrilled at the term “antecedent.” I was Mr. Appositive. And how could anybody be interested in delving into the innards of a dead frog when there were onomatopoeia, hyperbole, similies, and metaphors to be studied?
And English literature. I dived deeply into the satirical writings of H. H. Munro (the biting “Saki”). And Thurber’s visit to the bank. And “Quoth the raven” and “Me and my Anabelle Lee.” I even enjoyed Shakespeare and wondered what he would have written if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. (I probably ought to take a stab at his lead, but to be quite honest, I have forgotten most of what I knew about Shakespeare, and since he was English, he wouldn’t have known very much about baseball in the first place. Plus, if he happened to be working for the sports section of The New York Times, they’d probably have him off somewhere covering a yacht race anyway.)
I read Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Frost and Sandburg. They weren’t that bad to be as old as they were. I also discovered the humor of such writers as S. J. Perelman and Henry Wodehouse. O. Henry was a newspaperman, I learned, and “The Ransom of Red Chief” was my favorite of his works. He played a major role formulating my own style as a columnist. Poor O. Henry had to come up with all those stories on a daily basis. That’s a lot to make up, but I decided if O. Henry could do it, so could I. That’s where I got the inspiration to, when I became a columnist, make up a lot of stuff and never let facts get in the way of a good column.
There were several of my high school teachers who influenced me and inspired me. One of them wasn’t my biology teacher, of course. I have no idea whatever happened to him, but I hope he was eventually arrested for doing something like trying to dissect his neighbor’s cat.
Richard Smith, an English teacher, should be mentioned first. The man loved words and writing as much as I did. One day in the tenth grade, I asked him why my talent with diagraming sentences with such speed and accuracy wasn’t getting me any girls. He answered, “I don’t know.”
This also helped me later in life, because, if you work for a newspaper, people think you know more than they do and they’re always asking you questions like, “Why the hell didn’t Rob Lowe look at the girl’s driver’s license before he started videotaping her lesbian sex acts?”
I was able to answer, “I don’t know,” and not feel guilty about it. Actually, however, I do have an answer to that question, but it didn’t come to me until I’d been asked it a hundred times.
The answer comes from a scene in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack Nicholson, playing the part of a mental patient who had more common sense than his doctor, was being interviewed by a psychiatrist, who brings up the fact Nicholson’s character had an arrest record that included having sex with an underage female.
Nicholson’s excuse for committing such an act was something like, “Doc, when you’re this close to [a part of the female anatomy], you don’t go asking for no driver’s license.”
Richard Smith did more for me than what I just mentioned, of course. He knew of my interest in writing, and one day I asked him another question:
“Do you think when I grow up I can make a living writing?”
He answered, “A meager one, perhaps, but it beats selling shoes, which is what Norman [the Monk] Montgomery is going to wind up doing.”
The Monk was stupid. In fact, he was the only member of my senior class not to graduate on time, which brings up another of my teachers who impressed me, the late Miss Maryella Camp, who taught senior English.
Miss Maryella was an elderly lady. She was quite southern and called everybody “shugars.” She also could recite The Canterbury Tales in the original auld English, and brought the Bard alive for me in her classes. Come to think of it, I probably should have asked Miss Maryella, such an expert on Shakespeare, what his lead might have been if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. She might have had some idea that I could have used on the previous page where I, instead, copped out.
What Miss Maryella did for me that was most important, however, was to teach me that the best way to deal with stupidity is by the use of humor.
Miss Maryella’s best line had to do with the Monk, as a matter of fact. She was also senior-class sponsor and called us all together as graduation neared.
“Shugahs,” she began, “only one member of the class is not going to be able to graduate—Norman Montgomery.” At this point, the Monk uttered a “god-dammit” under his breath, only the Monk was so stupid he uttered under his breath the way most people screamed, and Miss Maryella heard him. She immediately replied, “Don’t blame Him, shugah, He’s not the one who failed Senior