The Year of The Swat:...How I Broke School Rules & Paid The Price...Three Swats At A Time...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor-In-Chief

McALLEN, Texas - The plumpish secretary would look at me and say something like that my smile was not the smile of a kid about to be paddled by the principal. I'd say I know, I should smile more in class, but that Goddamned Mr. Stewart is such a dick that no one smiles in his history class. Who knows? Maybe it was just what a junior high school offered in the 1960s, old-fashioned teachers and swats.

The principal's name was Goelhke, a hard-ass, skinny German-American fond of pulling ears in the hallways; that or asking what it was we were saying in Spanish and following that by telling us no Spanish was allowed on school grounds. It was America's last shame, at least for me.

Anyway, Mr. Goelhke seemed to get a kick out of paddling. I say it was his hidden Nazi allegiance, but I didn't know it then. We had a pack of German educators at Travis Junior High on East Houston Street here. The head football coach was named Etnire and the assistant coach was a cruel fool named Zimmerman - two guys who would have looked just as comfortable in a Nazi death camp.

The swatting came behind closed doors. Mr. Goelhke would say some bullshit about it hurting him more than it would you. And then, he'd rear back and swing as if swinging for the Third Reich. At least he only asked you to lower your pants and not your underwear. The second swat would come with more force, and the third would push the air out of your lungs. I was - what? - 13.

He would finish me off by saying, "No more misbehaving, right?" That was followed by a killer stare of the sort Jews knew as bad news in Hitler's Germany. "Yes, sir," I'd say, throwing that fuckin' Stewart's rosy, pale face across my brain, thinking he'll pay at year's end.

And then I'd walk back to class, where I'd hand Mr. Stewart a note from the office saying I could re-join my classmates. Most of the boys - and some girls - in the room knew the swat drill. Junior high in the 1960s was one boring time, moved forward only by the arrival of the Rolling Stones and our belief that, surely, a rebellious time was coming for the entire country. It did, and it created the most ridiculous crisis for public schools - monitoring long hair, or, really, poking at boys and telling us a haircut was in order and that we risked being sent home to get one. I was sent home numerous times. For that!

Our high school leaders didn't swat as much as the junior high administrators; they simply suspended you for the silliest of reasons - kicking-in lockers, bringing a soda to class and purposely spilling it, showing a girl your tongue. My best effort along those lines was waiting for the teacher to turn her back as she went to the blackboard in Biology class and saying, loudly: "Black Power!"

She would whip around and ask the class who'd said it. I'd raise my hand and then walk myself to the principal's office to a round of applause, which she immediately shhhhed. It was high school, a time to throw a wrench into the bicycle spokes. Many of us knew the military awaited after graduation. Three swats or a three-day suspension seemed a minor price to pay for enjoying what could easily have been our last years on this God-abamdoned planet.

Mr. Goehlke and the coaches are likely dead. But the junior high school is still there. I drove by it the other day and told myself, "I can almost hear the sound of that wooden paddle smacking me in the ass."

It was a cool morning and school was in session. It struck me that the old school looked very much as it did all those years ago. I could imagine that paddle being passed-on from principal to principal as a new one took command of the school. I drove slowly, looking over as the row of classrooms moved passed me. My time there had been a bitch, one created largely by me.

I never did take the air out of Mr. Stewart's car's tires. One time, while home on leave from the Navy, I ran into a girl I'd known back then, and I'd asked her about our days at Travis Junior High. Her name is Ninfa and what she said was that she'd always thought that I'd enjoyed the paddling I'd received.

I smiled and threw out something I'd said to her many, many years earlier: "...May I see your breasts?" It would become my signature line when in college. Ninfa just stared at me and said, before walking away, "You better win the Medal of Honor if that's how you're going to live the rest of your life."

I didn't, of course.

Leaving the school behind as I rolled past it brought back a string of weird emotions. The lump in my throat would again surface on the day I walked off the U.S.S. Sperry for the last time at the submarine base in San Diego, and again when I signed my divorce papers, and again when my mother passed away three years ago.

There are friends and family members who openly believe that I should still be paddled - every day, in fact...

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