DEAR, MR. HUNTINGTON, I AINT’ LEARNED SHIT

I think my mother thought I was an idiot.

In fact, I’m pretty sure of it.

I was a terrible student in High School. I was failing pretty much everything except art (including gym) and despite my mother’s constant attempts to set me on the straight and narrow, when it came to my schoolwork, things didn’t seem to be improving.

The problem wasn’t that I was dumb.

The problem was that I didn’t give a shit.

I didn’t care how bad my grades were or how much worse they would eventually get. It didn’t bother me one bit that my mother thought I was a lazy doofus and my teachers cringed every time they saw me in the hall. It didn’t matter that the letter “F” had become synonymous with my name and it unfortunately had nothing to do with how much I was getting laid because the ladies weren’t into me and I wasn’t getting laid.

Unless you count the magic marker face I drew on my hand as a “lady.”

If that’s the case, I got laid a lot.

I also couldn’t have cared less about college, or my future, or any of the things people who eventually find success in life and have more than sixteen dollars in the bank and some old comic books in their closets think about.

I honestly just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to silently brood in my bedroom with my Nine Inch Nails albums, the stack of porn hidden underneath my bed, and my mostly predictable teenage angst.

Unfortunately, my mother wasn’t a Nine Inch Nails fan.

“Steven, I signed you up for some tutoring sessions at the Huntington Learning Center.”

Gulp.

In case you hadn’t figured it out already, that was her, my mom. You see, she didn’t want me living in her house and still slogging around in my Spider-Man boxers well into my thirties. She wasn’t quite as ready as I was to give up on my grades and/or my future.

Jerk.

If you’ve never heard of The Huntington Learning Center, let take a moment to explain what it is. Basically the fine people at Huntington are overly expensive tutors.  The probably have degrees and they probably know what they’re doing for the most part. Their various degrees undoubtedly state that very fact.

Too bad their degrees didn’t mean shit to me. Their degrees might as well have been scribbled on soiled toilet paper as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to learn. Unless they were teaching me fifteen dollars (which doesn’t make any sense) for the newly released Nirvana’s Greatest Hits album, or how to get the football team to stop kicking my ass next to the dumpster in the school parking lot, I didn’t have any interest in learning.

Learning was stupid. It was annoying too. I had Marilyn Manson lyrics to angrily listen to and marker-lady fists to screw.

Learning could kiss my ass.

I considered telling my mother that I wouldn’t go, but she tossed her “your dumb ass is going no matter what” look my way.

There was no getting out of it.

Keep in mind that I was a freshman in High School at the time. I didn’t have a car, or the prospect of a car, or a bike, or even a decent public transportation system, or legs long enough to carry the weight of my pudgy torso more than fifty feet before collapsing. Since Huntington was in the next town over, I had to order myself a short bus to take drive me there, drop me off and pick me up twice a week.

I’d get home from school, call myself a bus and arrive at Huntington a mere forty-five minutes later.

It wasn’t all bad though.

“Hi, Steven! How’s everything going today?”

That was my main tutor-lady. She was young-ish, and she was overly perky, (I’m not referring to her personality) and she was always wearing low cut blouses.

See? There’s always a silver lining.

As much as I appreciated her attire, I actually sort of hated the fact that she was assigned to me. I wanted someone old – maybe someone with four or five big-ass warts on her face, and glasses, and boobs so droopy she could tuck them into her bloomers. I wanted someone who might have went for an orgasm ride on Lincoln’s beard.

Embarrassed, I mumbled something vaguely resembling the word “fine.”

I bothered me that my Huntington lady thought I was a dummy. Not that I ever had a chance of getting into her tutor-britches or anything. And it certainly didn’t bother me enough to buckle down and focus on my studies to impress her.

It still bothered me, though.

Math was first on the agenda during my visits. My boober-or, um, I mean tutor, would get out her little workbook, spend fifteen or twenty minutes going over some problems with me, and eventually slide a test in my direction.

At least, I think that’s what happened.

My eyeballs were busy rolling around in the heft of her cleavage like a pig in shit the entire time.

It’s possible I’m not remembering things exactly right.

After I inevitably bombed the test, we’d discuss what I did wrong and when that was over I’d grab my climbing gear and repel down the curvature of her oh so creamy left breast like a beard-toting Swiss climber scaling the alps.

Actually no. That was a lie.

Truthfully we just moved onto writing.

The writing section of my Huntington adventure was basically more of the same. BouncyTutor McJiggleChest would get out a workbook, we’d go over some stuff, and she’d leave me to take a test.

In this case, however, the term “take a test” actually means “watch her hips sway as she walked away while living the drool from my lips.”

If you’re thinking that I sound like the worlds biggest pervert, lay off. I was barely fifteen at the time. Like most fifteen year-old boys, I had been cursed with an erection that wouldn’t die. There wasn’t any blood going to my brain. The blood had bought a condo on the beach down south. It adopted dog from the local pound and it made some friends, and it had already changed the billing address on its credit cards. It wasn’t going anywhere.

At least not until I hit my thirties.

ButterCheeks McNippleShirt returned fifteen minutes later. “Okey dokey, let’s have a look, shall we?” She bounced when she sat down. My heat fluttered.

Did I say heart?

I meant wiener.

As she started to scan my answers she shook her head, sighed a sigh of absolute defeat and began making checkmarks.

Halfway through, she stopped.

The hypnotic ripples in her chest meat disappeared.

Her head lifted. Her jaw locked and her eyes narrowed. She bared her teeth and coiled her fingers into a fist. “Really?”

She looked pissed. I’d never seen her look pissed before, but she looked pissed.

I wasn’t sure why. “What?”

MassiveOrbs McSilkyUdders spun my answers around and slid them across the table with a frustrated growl. At first, I didn’t notice anything wrong. Everything looked normal. My answers were brief, and they were wrong, and she had put a checkmark by every one of them.

Then I got to question eight.

My answer to question eight was “Boobs.”

Damn it.

May answer to question nine was “Tits.”

Double damn it.

My answer to question ten was “Nips.”

Fuck my life.

I didn’t even know I was writing it. I swear I didn’t! It was my penis blood! It was that damn penis blood I tell you! My penis blood had hopped in a Winnebago and taken a surprise vacation north to visit some family, where it threw a party, got everyone drunk and trashed my brain.

AngryTutor McPissedOff called my mother and sent me home.

It was decided by both parties that maybe The Huntington Learning Center wasn’t exactly the place I needed to be.

I didn’t learn a damn thing during my brief stint at Mr. Huntington’s House of Plentiful Knockers and Tiny Shirts - unless you count the new masturbation fodder.

You probably don’t, though.

ROSE TAKES IT OFF

I was a virgin throughout high school. I never poked unknowingly a pair of boobs. I never squeezed a buttock that wasn’t my own. I never kissed a girl on the lips, or the face, or the hand, or blew one in her direction from across a room. I never went on a date. I never even had a female look at me without screaming at me to stop staring before unleashing their boyfriends on me.

I was as pure as a newborn baby - with a slightly more impressive penis.

Only slightly, though.

In fact, the only parts of a naked woman I’d ever seen were either in my head or in any of the various pornographic materials I’d managed to catch a glimpse of over the years.

To say that I was a teeny bit hard up for human contact would be the understatement of the century - the equivalent of saying Michael Bay is a bad director.

While true, it doesn’t even come close to telling the whole story.

My senior year in high school I earned a scholarship to an art college in Ohio. It wasn’t too long afterward that I learned the required courses of the first year included a figure drawing class – a nude figure drawing class.

Oh, yeah.

I was finally going to see some real life boobs!

I fully understand just how pathetic that last sentence must have read to the vast majority of you. I assure you, it sounded just as pathetic in my head. I’m not proud of it. It’s not something I’m going to put on my resume or tell the grandkids when I’m old. It’s out there and I can’t take it back. What’s done is done.

At the time I didn't even care that there would likely be a guy or two thrown into the mix. I’d been in locker rooms. I could suffer though a few eyefuls of penis for the chance to gaze upon the flesh and blood form of naked female.

It was going to be awesome - naked women awesome – which is the most absolute awesome of awesome when you’re a sad and lonely eighteen year-old.

Months passed.

During that time I moved to Ohio and I settled into the dorms at school. I was raring to go! I was chomping at the bit! I was chomping at the raring and going with the chomp!

I don’t know that that last one is supposed to mean and I really don’t care. That’s how excited I was.

It was the first day of the figure drawing class. I was at my desk with my pencils out and pad of paper opened. My fingers were tapping on the desk anxiously. They wouldn’t stop. The instructor said something along the lines of, "The model is getting ready. She'll be out in a moment."

She’ll?

He used the word “she’ll.”

Hells to the, yeah.

It was a woman - a girl – a female - a homo sapien with sexual organs entirely different than my own. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was going to have a womb.

‘Fo shizzle.

I slid my midsection a little more underneath the desk, on the off chance that something began to stir below. I wanted to be prepared.

Keepin’ it real, homie!

Moments later, the model walked into the room.

She was at least seventy-five.

Dayum.

In hobbled an elderly woman named, Rose. Her face was like a catcher’s mitt and her hair like an old bird’s nest. She was probably one of Thomas Jefferson’s mistresses and it was safe to assume she’d been getting discounts at Denny’s since the ‘80’s.

Rose dropped her robe and my world crumbled with it. She looked like a garbage bag filled with drippy-wet pee-poo diapers. She looked like a Barbie doll someone melted in the sun. She looked like a textbook definition of the word gravity. Needless to say, my fears about hiding my midsection were completely unfounded.

In fact, my penis took the initiative and hid itself.

I spent the next hour and a half drawing Rose in various positions I wished she’d never gotten into while listening to her complain that that she was cold, or aching, or that she needed a rest because the arthritis in her hands was acting up.

As I stared at the wrinkly exterior she called flesh and I called the Devil’s hammocks, all I could think was, "Those aren't supposed to be down that low, are they?”

I also never wanted to eat, or see someone eat, or be in the presence of a roast beef sandwich again.

Half way through the class the instructor gave everyone a break. While most of the students went outside to smoke a cigarette or throw up, or throw up then use the cigarette to burn their eyes, I sat in stunned silence. It’s not that I couldn’t move so much as I didn’t want to move.

I never wanted to move again.

With everyone gone, Rose put on her robe and started walking around the room, looking at the drawings everyone had done of her. She nodded her head at some and shook it at others.

Turns out she was a real art snob - you know, for a bag of old beef jerky.

She eventually made her way to me and stood behind me with one hand on her hip and the other scratching at those pesky black hairs dangling from her chin. There was little more than a thin sheen of nylon separating me from her wrinkled nakedness.

She was quiet for a minute, examining my work with her discerning, cataract-riddled eyes. When she’d seen all she needed to see, Rose leaned down and pinched my cheek from behind. "That's really wonderful, sweetie."

I'm not even kidding. She pinched my damn cheek.

Just like my Grandma used to do.

How I made it through the second half of class while comparing Rose to my nanny (who by a cruel piece of fate, also happened to have been named, Rose) is completely beyond me.

Rose, the nude model, was the very first woman who ever flashed me her junk while in something fairly close to the doggie-style position.

Rose reminded me of my grandma.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh at life.

Other times you want to throw a brick at it.