When I was seventeen years old passing high school wasn't high on my priority list, I'll admit that first and foremost. In fact; Snowboarding, hanging out with friends, and making silly videos were much more important to me. I knew that I was not planning on going to a four year college and that I would most likely end up in a community college if I ended up anywhere at all. I was confident of this because I knew I wasn't going to get the kind of marks that earned a scholarship and paying for college with loans was a terrible idea. Furthermore, I knew that I wanted to do something in the arts and that art school couldn't even guarantee me a job making chalk menu specials. I also knew that community college didn't give two flying shits about your GPA as long as you gave them money for classes and bought their stupid books for a hundred dollars a piece. I took all this in and weighed it against my passion for skipping class to ride down the mountain and decided that I would aim for my diploma and nothing more. I researched what the absolute minimum required grades were to accomplish this and discovered that straight Ds with a C in math for some strange arbitrary reason was what was needed.
Everything went as planned right down to the wire except for my government class. My government teacher was known to run a tough class with no slack. She was an outspoken member of the NRA and talked with a booming voice through her wide mouth. Like most classes, grades were based on a point system and the final project made up half the points in the whole class. I needed to pass it with flying colors to make up for the lack of points I had not accumulated throughout the semester. The problem was I had procrastinated even on this dire project and was faced with only a day left and I hadn't started. Buckling down and working through the night was not going to be enough so I decided to exploit a loop hole in the system I had figured out a few years back. If I were to do something that got me a multi-day suspension, the teacher has to accept my work late since I'm not allowed on school grounds in the mean time. I didn't like going to school anyway so I decided to go for it.
Getting a three day suspension was my goal. This was a tough situation. I Had to do something clearly worthy of more than a single day suspension but no where close to permanent expulsion. One sure fire way to do this was to get in a good 'ol fashioned fist fight. I considered a short list of guys that deserved it but couldn't rationalized hurting someone just so I could circumvent the system to graduate. To be certain, I had to find something that had been done multiple times by different people that always earned three days. After revealing my plan to my lunch table, it was unanimously decided that starting an epic food fight was pretty reliable especially since it had become a thing that year and the staff had had enough of it. Also, food fights are awesome. Cameras were recently installed in every corner of the cafeteria to assist in the prosecution of the perpetrators so I knew I would have no problem getting caught.
That day at lunch I went through the line at the sandwich bar. Standing shoulder to shoulder with six or so fellow sandwich artists, I began loading up with everything piled way higher than a normal portion.
"Are you gonna eat all that?" asked a geeky dude standing across form me.
"Nope. I'm going to throw it" I calmly replied. Now I had the attention of everyone around me.
"I'm going to start an epic food fight" I continued, "would any of you guys like to help out?" I went on to explain my plan to be a martyr and told them where to stand to be out of range of the cameras if they wanted to help initiate the chaos. I recruited two guys and then returned to my table.
My friends saw the tower of lettuce and tomatoes and without speaking cleared out immediately leaving me all alone. I knew it was time so without aiming, I launched it over my head behind me and immediately heard screaming. The return fire happened fast and in mere seconds the cafeteria was a haze of muti-colored flying food. Girls ran down the isle to escape only becoming prime moving targets. Someone threw a chocolate milk carton and it exploded on the glass window with a sheet of brown. It was the third or fourth full out food fight that year so people knew the drill. It was; forget your hunger and throw what you are eating. Hit somebody. Anybody. It's worth it.
As I expected, an hour later I was sitting in a chair in front of the principals desk while he and two of his cronies stood above me. One of them pressed play on a VCR plugged into a television they had wheeled in on a cart. There I was, easy to spot at the one table with no one else sitting at it. In choppy twelve frames per second I got to see the replay of my glory through the cockeyed fisheye lens. They stopped the tape when they saw the slight smile forming on my face when the fight started erupting.
"Well Jon, we have no choice but to suspend you for three days" one of them said. I sat there quietly for a moment before I broke the awkward silence to ask if I could go home.
With phase one of my scheme to graduate complete I was faced with another problem. The project was so huge that even though I had plenty of time to do it, I still really didn't want to. Senioritis was kicking in pretty seriously now that I was not at school and it was hot and sunny weather. I went back to the drawing board to see how many points were necessary to barely pass within the project itself. I checked the fine print of the syllabus and discovered that the visual aid was 30% of the grade. This was way out of proportion compared to other similar projects I had that year so I thought if I could ace the visual aid part then I could almost fail the other sections and still scrape by with a C. My topic had to do with Bovine growth hormones so I did what I do best and made a paper mache cow that stood about 4 feet high. It was obnoxiously huge and painted well. It commanded the room's attention during my presentation a week later and earned me my C I needed to get a D in the class. I successfully graduated highschool.
"Bessy" became a mascot of several parties that ensued during the weeks that followed graduation. The fourth of July was coming up and I was about to make my yearly visit to Boom City to prepare Bessy for her final hurrah. Boom City is the name of a large collection of firework stands on the Indian reservation an hour north of my house. A few years earlier while haggling at a stand and probing for the big stuff, I met a seller named Jimmy who invited me to the trailer he lived in for a more serious consultation. He had tennis balls with long wicks coming out of them and red tubes the size of toilet paper rolls. Some of them had duct tape on them. The first year I bought a couple of the smaller red tubes and was delighted by the results. This year, I bypassed Boom City and drove straight to Jimmy's trailer. He remembered me and invited me in. I explained my plan and upon his recommendation I bought a tennis ball.
I made an incision into my flour and newspaper friend and installed a small system of fireworks. It started with a Roman Candle firing out her ass and ended with the wick tied to the tennis ball. Bessy was now more than a mascot for the 4th of July party I was attending. She was a bomb.
The location of the party was ideal. It was in an old house that existed at the end of a long road in the woods. Developers were planning on building many houses on the street but all they had installed at the time was a larger than usual cul-de-sac. When the time came, Bessy was placed in the center and I instructed all my friends to stand on the perimeter. I emphasized the importance of not stepping into the cul-de-sac during the demonstration. Everyone was making wagers to what would happen. Some suggested the head would reach the grass, others were not so optimistic and pictured it just ripping out the center. I was hoping for a good show but I personally had no idea what was in Jimmy's tennis ball.
I lit the small wick sticking out of Bessy's ass and ran to the driveway. After a moment of tension she started shooting out multicolored balls that looked like psychedelic farts. The force of the shots were just enough to hilariously scoot Bessy forward a few inches with each shot. Everyone was laughing hard, then it stopped. What seemed like an eternity passed as she silently stood there for the next 30 seconds. I began to wonder if my wick tying strategy had failed and how long it would be before I would be confident enough to approach her. Then it happened. There was no spray of sparks or crackles just one large BOOM! The blast was much larger than anyone had hypothesized. There was no head left to discover later on the neighbor's lawn. In a fraction of a second there was nothing left of Bessy that could be measured larger than a quarter. The shock wave hit people in the chest and knocked a few down. After a small awkward moment where everyone panned the scene to make sure no one had lost an arm, everyone cheered.
I was the hero that night. Bessy not only helped me graduate high school but delivered a spectacular show for my friends for which I am grateful for.
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