IF YOUR DARLINGS ARE ENROLLED IN DISD, you’ll be happy to learn that paddling is still an option. Maybe you missed it, but over the summer, DISD trustees toyed with the idea of putting an end to paddling. In an editorial, the Morning News even said to the district, “Please, put the paddle away.” But good sense—and a pastiche of metaphors—won the day, with trustee Ron Price arguing, “A paddle is part of a principal’s toolbox. If we remove that tool, we may open up a can of worms that cannot be closed.”
While neither Price nor any other trustee mentioned it, the reason we should continue to paddle our schoolchildren should be self-evident: because one time I got it good.
In 1983, I attended Alex W. Spence Middle School in East Dallas (go Hornets!). For my class picture that year, I sported a red Hawaiian shirt with a skinny metallic turquoise tie. And I had a $10 bill conspicuously poking out of my shirt pocket. Very luau gangsta.
But I was harmless, really. I’d made it to the seventh grade without ever having been in an actual fight. So on the last day of school, when the morning announcements included a zero-tolerance warning against any and all foolishness, with the specific punishment for fighting being an automatic one-week suspension, thereby generating a number of unexcused absences sufficient to cause the combatants to repeat their grade, I was all, like, Whatever, dude.
You can see where this is headed. I don’t recall the kid’s name or what started the fight, so I’ll go with the standard excuse: I had darn good intelligence that he was carrying weapons of mass destruction. Neither of us threw a punch, but our display of Greco-Roman wrestling was surely a fearsome sight to behold.
The instant we were separated, I realized I’d have to repeat seventh grade. Then I began imagining my mother’s reaction when I got home and told her middle school would last longer than planned. I thought I was going to vomit.
Mr. McFadden, the assistant principal, was an enormous man whose thick, hairy arms stretched the seams of his short-sleeve white dress shirts. In the waiting room outside his office, he stared hard at us. Then the gods intervened. Since this was the first time either of us had been in trouble, Mr. McFadden said he would let us go with just a paddling.
Fine, I thought. My rump’s gonna be so red, I’ll look like a baboon in heat. But at least I’ll be a red-rumped eighth-grader.
Mr. McFadden ushered the other kid into his office and shut the door. Then came the hitting and the screaming.
Thwack! “Yeahow!” Thwack! “Ooagch!”
Five of them. And this other kid, I remember, was tough. So Mr. McFadden must have really been giving it to him good. I tucked in my shirt for a little extra padding and started psyching myself up.
The door opened, and the other kid walked out rubbing his backside, his head hung low, probably ashamed for having wailed like a girl. Mr. McFadden was actually smiling as he invited me in to his office. What an evil bastard, I thought. He was casually tapping the paddle against his thigh. It looked like an oar. Naturally, he’d drilled holes in it to decrease wind resistance and accelerate hide tanning. I promised myself I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of hearing me scream.
“Assume the position,” he said. “Bend over. Hands on the desk.”
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I did my best to relax my butt, because everyone knows that if you tense up, it only makes it worse.
It was so loud that it made me jump: thwack! Thwack! Thwack! But I didn’t feel a thing.
I turned around, and there was Mr. McFadden, grinning like a madman, paddling the bejesus out of a phone book. “Get out of here,” he said. “And I’d better not have any trouble out of you next year.” In the waiting room, the other kid was cracking up, so pleased with his own performance.
After the eighth grade, I transferred to a private school where Hungarian priests with strong fingers pulled the short hairs on the nape of my neck. Somehow, it wasn’t the same.
