It was one of those ideas… You know the kind. The ones which – by description alone – you know are just plain bad, like “Let’s taunt the jaguar with a laser pointer!” or “Let’s bob for curling irons!” or “Let’s go to Arby’s for lunch!” They get into your head and, no matter how stupid and ridiculous and painful you know they will be, you know with even greater certainty that you’re just flat out going to do it. The reason why you’re going to do it is irrelevant. It could be a matter of principle, or it could be that you simply lack the capacity for higher thinking. Whatever. Long before you can even get your mind around why you’d do what you’re about to do, you’re midway through taking the irrevocable steps that kick it into action – even though it means certain doom.

And that’s why I peed in the rear right corner of my 2nd grade classroom.

There’s no nice way to say this: Mrs. Snyder was a bitch. I hated her. It didn’t matter that I’d only known her for two weeks – during that time, it had already come out that 1) she didn’t take kindly to the fact that my family wasn’t natively from this, the lovely north Georgia town of Toccoa, and 2) that she felt it was a sin for a child to be as large as I was. And she made these facts known in front of the rest of the entire class.

Multiple times.

Which, of course, further encouraged kids who really needed no further encouragement to call me names like “fatty” and “city boy” and “fatty city boy” and “city boy who is also fat.” When, on my second ever day of attending that school, the class bully of Toccoa Elementary (I forget his name, honestly, so let’s call him Brock) decided to purposely trip me and make me eat asphalt on the way to recess, Mrs. Snyder recommended that I might “go run off a few of those pounds and quit being a tattletale.” And when Brock and his pals decided to steal the fries off my tray nearly every day during lunch, she opined openly that it “Might do you some good to cut back anyway.” And she’d smile this old woman smile and the lines in her face would spread and move much like a car window that had just been shattered.

Now, the rest of the town of Toccoa, at that time, didn’t take very kindly to us “city folk” moving in either. In fact, they had an unspoken rule concerning out-of-towners in Toccoa – “If they get out of line, kill them.” This is no joke. The week we moved into the gigantic white house on Tugalo St., we saw police outside of the home of our across-the-street neighbor just about every day, gathering evidence and generally just hanging around on the city’s dime. After some checking, it came out (at least my mother remembers it coming out) that the lady who lived in that house had been the recipient of a rather surprise delivery of a few pellets of buckshot to the head, simply because – and I swear I am not making this up, even though I don’t quite know how to cite a reference – she was running for city council, and she was not a native Toccoan.

And while the law and decent Christian ethics may have kept Mrs. Snyder from taking a 12-gauge to a seven year old who had the unfortunate consequence of being born to a man who found work at a budding television station in a rural mountain town in Georgia, neither the laws of man or God kept her from performing the verbal equivalent.

“No, MISTER Adams,” She said snidely, calling me by a last name I commonly forget I once had, before the man who is my father adopted me, “You may NOT visit the restroom.” She was clearly perturbed that I’d just interrupted her grave mission of writing involuntarily misspelled vocabulary words on the board (the students in Toccoa weren’t the only ones who needed education, apparently). “Bathroom time is in twenty-seven minutes. You can hold your urine for twenty-seven minutes.”

“But… I really gotta go,” I said.

“Shut up, Fatty!” Brock yelled, throwing a piece of wadded notebook paper at me. It hit me squarely in the left ear, which – even though it IS just notebook paper – hurt a little.

Now, here we have a teacher who is dealing with two issues before her – one child is sitting in his chair, begging to go to a toilet which was situated not twenty feet behind him and to his left so that he might relieve himself. The other has just assaulted, both physically and verbally, another student. So, what did the esteemed Mrs. Snyder do to handle the situation?

The same thing she did the last time it happened (only choice number one was a student who needed to get a drink of water), and the time before that (during which the first student was simply answering a basic mathematics question):

“MISTER ADAMS! That will be QUITE enough!” She walked over to the wall and pulled down a gigantic, dark-blue wooden paddle; brandishing at me much like the Black Night from Monty Python would. “One more word out of you and you’ll get the paddle!”

Now, ordinarily, the PADDLE was a big, big deal. It was the deathbringer, the peacemaker, the alpha and the omega, all combined into a big plank of wood with a handle and a leather tassel by which it hung on a peg on the wall – that is, until bad children misbehaved. And ordinarily, I was scared to death of that thing. I’d met the business end of it once before, on a day where I decided to sneak a few bits of candy into class with me and was caught munching a Clark bar during class.

And you know what that experience taught me?

The paddle? It didn’t hurt. Sure, it might have the capability of hurting, if it was, say, swung by someone other than a seventy year old woman suffering from any number of joint-swelling afflictions.

“Oooooh. The PADDLE,” I screamed aloud. Wait… What the HELL was I doing?!?

Some of the kids giggled. Wow. I’d never been giggled WITH before…

“Mister Adams!” She yelled, red-faced. “I am not toying with you, young man! You straighten up right this moment!”

“Or what, you’ll hit me with the paddle?” I asked. “I have a fat butt! It won’t hurt!”

Laughter. Real, honest to God laughter. And it was coming from these kids who normally only laughed AT me. Wow.

“That’s it, mister!” She said. “Up! UP UP UP!” She stepped toward me.

I got up out of my desk and ran to the back of the room. “No, you old… You OLD COW!” I screamed. The kids flew into hysterics.

“Get over here this instant!” She yelled.

“NO!” I yelled back. “I have to PEE!” And the kids nearly fell over themselves with laughter. Because pee is funny.

“Don’t you DARE go into that bathroom!” She demanded.

“WHY NOT!” I cried. “I have to PEE!”

“Because I told you NOT to!” She said bitterly, her eyes nearly glowing red. “GET. OVER. HERE.”

I stood there for a moment, considering my next move. I was very clearly in a bit of a “do or die” situation. On the one hand, I was already in a pretty large amount of trouble, and there wasn’t much of anywhere for me to run to – and Mrs. Snyder was livid. On the other, I really, REALLY had to pee. And on yet a third hand, this was quite possibly the most popular I’d ever been with the kids in any school I’d attended up to that point. I wasn’t really ready to lose that.

So, without any semblance of rational thought, it occurred to me that my only option was to just simply drop trou right there in class and take a piss in front of everyone.

I don’t know why this, of all things, became – in my head – my only option. I guess it’s because Mrs. Snyder demanded that I not go into the bathrooms, and for some reason at that point, I still had a weird respect for authority... Nevermind the fact that I was standing there taking a leak on the linolieum. After calling the teacher a cow. And screaming my head off.

But she DID demand I not go in there, and being the good little boy I was, I followed the letter of the law - and that just goes to show that, sometimes, when you make demands, you can get exactly what you want and still not be very happy. And boy… Was she not very happy.

And the kids? They went ape. It was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

Shortly after my stream died down, Mrs. Snyder yanked me by my ear and carted me out of the classroom, down the hall, and directly the principal’s office – all with my pants dangling around my ankles. When she explained what I’d done, the principal very nearly glowed, he was so red. He was all fire and brimstone as he laid down the law and told me what a filthy, terrible, horrible child I was.

And all I could think of was that, for the first time ever, the kids in the class liked me.

I was suspended from school for 10 days. And man, what a terribly unpleasant 10 days those were. My mother was furious. My birth-father was… Well, a raging alcoholic who really didn’t need yet ANOTHER reason to smack me and tell me how worthless I was. But he left town on the 2nd day of my suspension to go to some engineer’s conference and was gone almost the whole time, so really, after about three days of having to do chores invented by my mother, I just ended up playing with my Transformers all day.

When I went back to class, I was greeted with whispers and some laughs. I smiled and held my head high – only because I didn’t realize that THESE laughs weren’t really laughs WITH me about my zany antics, but laughs AT me for being such a disturbed fatty city kid with a pee problem. But it didn’t matter. I’d gotten what I wanted.

And Mrs. Snyder had to clean up my pee.