Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People Page A

costume, though I figured that that couldn’t be far off. I’m not sure what movie it was that convinced teachers that dressing up like a cowboy made you a great teacher, but more than one had tried it over the years. One had even stopped calling us students and started calling us “varmints.” Even after he stopped wearing the costume.
    Had he been alive during the Revolutionary War, I’m sure Wilkins would have been the guy grabbing his musket and running toward the British army screaming, like he was having the time of his life, while everyone else was marching in formation. Then, when they were all huddled around the fire, tending their wounds and trying not to starve or freeze to death, he would have been saying, “Come on, you guys! Let’s all sing ‘Yankee Doodle’ for the three hundredth time!” He would probably have been hanged from the highest tree early on. I pictured this series of events in my mind fairly often; maybe after
La Dolce Pubert
I could make a movie called
Wilkins Goes to War.
Or maybe
The Road to Cornersville,
like all those war movies with Bob Hope that my grandfather has on video.
    I didn’t really go in for the paper-throwing or “penis”-shouting matches, but I still sat in the back row. Everyone knows that not only are classes more exciting in the back row, but the back row is also better for grabbing a nap or for working on a drawing instead of taking notes, which is what I was doing. I had this great thing going where every few classes I’d do a drawing in the top corner of a sheet of notebook paper, and some of them weren’t half bad. I had a good drawing of a knight on a mountain and one of the back of a guy’s head, as he was staring down a road at a UFO. Every now and then I’d fantasize about collecting all of them into a book called
Corner Drawings
that could maybe set the art world on fire.
    About midway through class, Coach Wilkins looked up and noticed that there were a handful of students in the front couple of rows and the rest of us were in the back. The middle rows were like a little gulf of empty desks.
    “Can all of you in the back move up a few rows, please?” he asked. “I’d like to have everyone sitting up close.”
    “It’s Manifest Destiny!” I shouted, raising my fist toward the ceiling. “We’re going to expand our classroom all the way to the back wall!”
    You don’t have to be smart to be a smartass. But it helps.
    He stared at me for a couple of minutes. Well, it seemed like a couple of minutes. It was probably just a couple of seconds.
    “Well,” he said, “at least you’re paying attention.”
    I wasn’t really.
    When my corner drawing—a Picasso-style abstract portrait of a cowboy—was finished, I started scribbling down ideas for the video. We were all supposed to turn in outlines of our movies in activity period the next day. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to manage the whole “sperm cell flying over Rome” sort of thing, but there was a lot I could still probably do on no real budget. Pretty soon, I had it together.
    The opening would be a whole bunch of pictures of famous paintings of naked people, along with a whole bunch of weird stuff that didn’t seem to make sense. Like if I showed a bunch of tadpoles swimming around. It would seem weird, but then someone might notice that tadpoles looked sort of like sperm, which would make it all make sense. Sort of.
    There would be rock music in the background the whole time, plus a narration about how everyone changes, everyone thinks about sex, everyone jacks off, and it’s all totally normal, even if the movie itself wasn’t normal at all. That was a nice touch, I thought. Having the movie not be normal to show kids that they were. Then, of course, I would end it with a kiss scene, then an explosion. Avant-garde art was always showing things like that—an act of love followed by an act of pure destruction. It made some sort of point.
    Yeah, that looked like a pretty good