Tonight I bring you part one in a 4 part series of Vanilla Gorilla-The High School Years. All these stories are true, whether you chose to believe them are up to you. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And now, with that out of the way, I bring you the Freshman year.
I remember waking up on the first day of school to Lou Bega's "Baby Keep Smilin". You see, in 1999, Lou Bega was on top of the world. He was a black man, from Germany, who did mambo music. What would be next, a white guy from Michigan doing rap music? So, my first day of 9th grade wasn't off to a good start with that god forsaken garbage being played. My bro was in 12th grade, so for the entire year, I had to put up with him going to the same school as me. He wasn't a bully or anything, he was only about 5'7" at that time, where as I was easily 6'1", so if I wanted to, I could give him a proper thrashing, James Corcoran style (if you get that reference, you rock). But I'm a nice guy, so I never did. Anways, high school gave me the chance to do what I always wanted, slack off. In middle school, if you didn't do your assignments, the teachers actually cared. That didn't seem to be the case in 9th grade. I went weeks without doing a single assingment in Algebra, and I know for a fact that my teacher at that time didn't give a crap. He was this gumpy looking dude who seemed to just ignore me. I would walk into class 5 minutes late, eating a bag of Cooler Ranch Dorito's, and he wouldn't even bat an eye. He knew I wasn't there to learn, so he didn't bother to even teach me. He was a good man. One of the things me and my friends liked to do was mash on the keys to this calculator one of us had, then hide it somewhere while it went crazy with super loud, annoying beeps. It was a hoot, and it REALLY pissed off the other 20 students who were actually there to learn. Those nerds. One time, a friend of mine told me he would give me $20 if I pulled my pants down and sat bare assed in my seat for the entire class. Of course, I took him up on his offer, since my desk was in a corner, and it would be almost impossible to see that my pants were down around my ankles from the front of the room, where the teacher stood. 45 minutes later, I was $20 richer.
I guess the reason I didn't do anything in 9th grade was because I thought I had 4 years to get my act together, and that I really only needed to apply myself in 11th and 12th grade. Well, after finishing the first half of my frosh year with a GPA under 1, I was really behind the 8 ball. Did I care, hell no. In fact, back then, I didn't even care about my own personal safety. There was something I did in Phy Ed class one day that would make me a legend for all time....
Remember in Phy Ed, when there was that one week where you had to do swimming stuff? Well, at least in my high school there was. Our school was big enough that it had it's own pool, so for a week or two, we had swimming class. Since I didn't know how to swim, I would usually just ham it up in the shallow end, you know, wrestle with the big rubber shark, or chuck water polo balls at the fat kids, or just sit in the corner and have the water jets shoot up my ass. But one day, I decided to do something wild. I decided to jump off the diving board. It looked so damn fun that I just had to do it. I didn't have the forsight to wear a safety jacket, because I thought I could just kick and paddle my way over to the side of the pool. Keep in mind that the deep end that I was diving into was about 15 feet deep, this was a big pool. So I get up on the board, and everyone is waiting for me to pull off a 450 splash into a belly flop. I bounce off a couple times, then hurl myself into the water. As I opened my eyes under the water, I knew that I was in trouble. I barely made it to the surface of the water, then started kicking and flailing to see if I could get to the side of the pool and grab onto something. No dice. I wasn't going anywhere. As I screamed profanities and "HELP ME GOD DAGLUPGPL", the other people in the class laughed and laughed. They thought I was just joking around. As I kept going under the water, finally, the instructor thought that I actually needed help. She slowly untied her shoes and took her socks off, then jumped into the water. Thank god she was there to save me, or else my classmates whould have let me drown. But hell, if you can't die for comedy, then what can you die for? She grabbed me and pulled me out of the pool, while all my friends where busting a gut with laughter. The instructor told them all to get out of the pool and go change, and to come back to the pool area in about 10 minutes. She then proceeded to ask me what the hell I was thinking. I told her I thought I could get to the side of the pool. She then brought in the rest of the class, and told everyone that this incident is not to be talked about, and that nobody else should know. So about 10 minutes later, I'm walking into the cafeteria, and I swear to god I see almost everyone watch me walk in. They all had one of either 2 looks on their face: "man that guy is a crazy mo fo", or "jesus, what an idiot." It was to be the single greatest highlight of my high school career.
That happened later in the year, and since i'm a god awful writer, now I'm gonna bring you back to the beginning of the year. Remember 9/9/99, the day the Dreamcast came out? I do, mainly because that was the day our school got its first bomb threat. I was sitting in class, and all of a sudden the fire alarm went off. But instead of going to the usual spot, the teachers herded us all out onto the infield of the track. We heard from one teacher that someone had phoned in a bomb threat. Needless to say, about 98 percent of the student body was psyched at the possibility of our school getting blown to pieces any second. In fact, the asian kids were all so excited, they formed a big break dancing circle. I'm serious, a break dancing circle.... So the school ended up sending everyone home, so me and my friends just walked home. But on the way there, we stopped at McDonalds....
I had a bunch of money for some reason, but I always wanted more. So when I asked one of my friends if he would give me $10 if I could eat 40 Chicken McNuggets, the game was on. I ended up spending about $15 on 2 20 piece boxes of nuggets and a large Sprite. I was able to down all 40 nuggets, along with 7 packets of BBQ sauce, in a great feat of amatuer eating. That's right Kobayashi, I'm coming for your title! And the funny thing was, I probably could have eaten a couple double cheeseburgers after that.
So there you go, there's the story of my freshman year. I left out a bunch of other stories, mainly because my shoulder is getting tired from typing. But hell, I'm sure you're getting tired of reading all this, huh? Check back tommorrow for Vanilla Gorilla-The High School Years: Sophmore year.
Log in to comment