FIFTEEN MINUTE BREAK June 2, 2003

This week I'm resuming the Stepfather smack Coatney in the Chops week. the grade school wonder years.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time that ROGER fist of juvenile justice sent me sprawling across the room. It was way back in Kindergarden- and I knew, even though I couldn't read at the time, that I was bringing home my very first bad report card from school- so I thought I do one of those adolescent conspiracy theory things- ditch the report card so your parents don't find out or least stall for some time. I think while walking home from school, I conveniently dropped the card in someone's front lawn and attempted to bury it in some weeds or a pile of raked autumn leaves. I thought it was a genius masterplan at the time, but little did I comprehend that the owner of that property simply found the card and returned it to the school. It wound up being mailed to my house, and when my mom confronted me about the issue, I just blatantly told her that it must have fell out of my bookbag or something to that effect- but my mom didn't buy the casual explanation and had made me confess about burying it under someone's raked leave pile. Then the ROGER got wind of it- and even though he was sick in bed with the flu, snatched the report card and started to go over it with me. I remember most of it being in diagram form and underneath each graphic or a depiction of what a student does in class, either being attentive in class by raising his hand, or taking a nap- there was a letter grade. And since I got shit marks across the boards and since I was kicked out of nursery school, costing my stepfather a bundle of money, he wasn't going to hear about it. As he went over the card, he pointed out everything I did wrong and each item he nitpicked about he then proceeded to smack me across the face with the back of his hand and I went and hit the wall a few times, almost connecting with the radiator. My mom came to the rescue until she had seen enough, and told me I was to be grounded in my room. But as soon as I got in my room, I realized my hamster had escape from it's cage and crawled up my drapes. So I figured the only way to get the hamster down was to yank the whole goddamn drapes down from its' hinges. The sound of the drapes being ripped from the wall was enough to break the ROGER's fever. Then I got it twice from my stepfather in one day.

What galls me to this very day was the fact that this guy had no legal right to lay on me- but I wasn't the only immediate family member to feel the wrath of the ROGER.

To be continued - when I have a spare fifteen minutes,

~

Coat