There was a time in this country when the public humiliation and beating of children by their parents and protectors was thought to be a good and righteous thing. I don’t know how it slowly died but I will guess it was through the onslaught of law degrees and that pied piper Hilary Clinton. It’s really a shame that we not only lost the paddling option, but even worse we lost the vicarious punishment through public humiliation that supposedly ruined self esteems everywhere but was just super effective. To remind you after so many years of what the combination of the two looked like I offer these gems from my own life.
After my mother passed, my family ate many dinners out at the L and K restaurant (the home of endless family turmoil and all you-can-eat-perch), where this evening my brother and I cannot stop saying the words ‘baked potato’ over and over again. Cut it, dad says. We stop for a few seconds and then quietly start back in ‘…bakebuhdayduh, bakebuhdayduh…’ until we are loud again. It’s one of those hypnotic words that when you say it often enough it gets addictive. Yes, kids, before the advent of interactive video devices, children used to have a high old time just saying the same damn word over and over again. Dad says cut it right now or you will go to the car. But we’re slaves to the phonetic rhythm and Dad now threatens us that if we don’t shut the hell up and mind he is going to…
“Take you out into the middle of this restaurant, pull down your pants, and spank you with a hairbrush”
This threat jumped clean to the perverse checkmate as it featured both pain and three or four levels of public embarrassment. Dad was always so grizzly-like when he said it, and even though my father never touched any of his children, never spanked, whipped, slapped, switch-hit, nothin’-- he couldn’t even yell at us without smiling afterward, we always believed he would really do it. And so this naked/hairbrush rant worked but now I wonder why? If I were the logical being that I am today, this episode would have begged the question, “Why a hairbrush? I can think of ten or twelve more interesting or terrifying items to beat a child with. Like a yardstick, spatula, flyswatter, hmmm…well, actually a hairbrush is inspired. And where would you get this hairbrush? We’re at a restaurant. I don’t have a hairbrush on me. Are you sending me off with a dollar to purchase one from the bathroom vending machine? If so, that’s anti-climactic and I’m crawling out of the window in there. Should I go table to table? Excuse me miss, if you have a hairbrush you can nod in approval while my father employs it to publicly shame me with it here by the salad bar while you finish your cream pie, so really Dad, really?”
I was finally whacked in high school so hard it left a black and blue welt on my ass in the perfect shape of a paddle. Miss Bryant, the girls’ gym teacher-slash-deliverer of pain, bred in the rich tradition of female PE teachers, all uniforms and showers, was small in stature but monkey strong, a semi-professional golfer, a skill which translated seamlessly to the field of educational ass-whooping. It was a Friday and I got sent to the office for really I-don’t- remember-I-did-so-much-stupid-shit-in-high-school, where it was pre-determined that on that exact visit to the office I had successfully unlocked the third level of discipline, and subsequent confetti release, the menu of which was now exclusive to injurious bodily harm. Performed by a female teacher. With two teacher witnesses. Yes...witnesses. People, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, is it still perversely satisfying and vicarious? No! As it was there was no shortage of teachers willing to witness this thrashing, for all I know that line forming outside the office may have been a lottery-style drawing. Besides, I myself could make at least a short list of folks that I might like to witness getting their asses pounded by a female P.E. teacher. But I deviate….So in the year of our Lord of Corporal Punishment, 1977, Miss Never-Married Bryant cocked her sun-leathered arm so far back she started her swing from the 8th hole at the Dinah Shore Classic in Palm Desert and its whiff-less flight broke all sound barriers as it landed successfully in the main office of Cambridge High School on my bony and lily white middle-class ass. Crack!
The room went dark. My eyes were in my glutes performing triage. I may have vocalized but not verbalized. Okay I may have said the word ‘fuck’. But it was really more like the F sound followed by the remainder of residual air and gases that have resided in my body since birth now being expelled through every orifice, like when a lung collapses, or upon death. Moments before, when I entered the office and assumed the position leaning against the table, Miss Bryant asked if I would take a couple steps to the right (clearly to accommodate her handicap, or the shifting wind direction from the oscillating fan). Perhaps in retrospect I could have used more polite linguistic forms as I fulfilled the request. But what did I care? I was Dead Man Walking and I didn’t know what I didn’t yet know. After the second whack my legs gave out and I fell to the ground. Well, now at least they were forced to stop at two; otherwise this episode would have altered history and the world would never know Rodney King.
I quickly rose to my feet with my brain still up my ass; to the voice of the principal in my face smiling and asking if I’d like to sign the paddle. Jesus, at least try to mask your glee. A quick scan of my psyche reveals that signing the paddle certainly seems like something I would like to do if my skin were not about to spontaneously melt off my backside. Of course in the movie of me I would sign it and spit on it but the real me needed a quick exit because I was starting to cry and that’s the polar opposite of signing the paddle. Even worse, I get home and my Dad has to look at my bruised butt and is shocked by the severity, but sadly not enough to avoid a two-day grounding.
So to bring these perverse yet commonplace occurrences into today’s standards, one asks, “Think any of that crap would fly today?” The answer without a doubt is, “Hell No!” Are there still folks that I could witness getting their naked butts cracked with a hairbrush in the middle of the restaurant? You bet. Let’s start with that loud obnoxious dick on the cell phone, chewing and talking, his girlfriend staring away and picking at her meal in isolated silence. Let’s crack that guy so hard it rattles his ancestors, while we all nod in approval.
--Lori Cannon is a writer of short web logs such as this one that have been published in her home computer printer and stapled together and enjoyed by her cats as poopy papers once shredded.
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