What Is It?

It had to have been my freshman or sophomore year in high school, any later and I want to believe I would have been much to "cool" to have participated. The one thing I'm certain of is that it was a high school fund raiser and I want to think that it was most likely for new band uniforms. That's one of the multitude of ways I would have found me there in the high school gym that evening and thinking I had to be right in the middle of everything. No matter, it would become one of those moments that would leave a scar on my psyche to this day.

I don't recall all the ways the students and faculty came up with to raise money but there are two I'll always remember. Oh, I'm sure there was a bake sale, even during the Clinton era bake sales were an important source of revenue for everything from band uniforms to lowering the National Deficit, and this was long before the Clinton era, but I do remember there was an old automobile in the center of the gym floor sitting on top of a really big tarp. And there was an auction that night.

That car sitting there was an unbelievable hit, literally. I suspect that folks likely paid ten cents for a swing at that old junker. You paid your money and for it you got a five pound sledge hammer and one swing. In those days ten cents bought a sixteen ounce draft beer in the bars for the guys who would swing that hammer that evening. Those dimes were treasured by the men I knew. On the other hand for me that dime would have procured two packs of baseball cards complete with slabs of bubblegum as big as the cards themselves. But on this evening those dimes weren't going for either glasses of beer or baseball cards, they were going for a swing with a hammer at an old car.

It was a sight I'd never have imagined, full grown men swinging that sledge with an ferocity that was never witnessed and seldom heard of in our little town. Men showing emotion was something left for closed doors and family if it was ever shown at all. And here it was at ten cents a swing , that emotion and that unbridled intensity so seldom seen by anyone, in full view of not only family and friends but the entire town. All of it directed at an old junk car that had likely never done anything but it's constructed job to anyone during its' existence. And for reasons not yet understood by me men young and old spent their dimes to pick up that hammer and swing, some with muttered epithets, at whatever part of the once proud product of Detroit that was potentially the most vulnerable to utter destruction. And damage was the only objective in their endeavor.

The evisceration of that hunk of glass and steel continued through the evening with whoops, hollers, screams of joy from bystanders watching as the roof finally caved in or there was no longer anything recognizable of the grill, and all the while the grunts of men throwing all they had of themselves and their emotions into humiliating an inanimate object that brought out so much in them. Those men who farmed the land, who constructed stainless steel tanks for hauling milk, who worked the railroad or shifted gears in eighteen wheelers across miles and miles of highway, those men from the shops and the stores and yes, even the schools, all took their turns with that hammer and a hunk of metal that symbolized so many dreams.

It would later be reported that the car smashing event was a complete and total success.

As for the auction I recall nothing of what was sold there that evening other than the item that I found myself involved with. And to be totally honest, to this day I can't tell you whether or not there was a sale. But I can tell you there was a question.

You'd think that one of the last things to be put up at any auction is a kitten. Oh sure, you're in some fancy place with a bunch of folks looking for only the finest in felines then I get it but this wasn't the case. In fact I'm pretty sure that even the richest of the folks living in my little town had more or less the same opinion of cats and kittens, they were a dime a dozen and why would anyone want to buy one? And yet here I was with kitten in my hands holding it up before a crowd of folks.

Now the truth is I'd never even thought about cats while I was growing up. I didn't even think about dogs well, other than Lassie that is. I didn't have any pets, except the goldfish that I managed to suffocate when I was about four, and none of my friends had pets. Oh sure, Billy Rabuck had a couple coon dogs we'd go out hunting with but nobody I knew had dogs or cats running around in their homes. Farmers had dogs and cats but I didn't have them, I wasn't around them and I sure didn't know much of anything about them. And therein lay my ultimate humiliation.

So I'm standing there on the stage with this kitten that really doesn't want to be there and for sure doesn't want to be held up in front of a noisy auditorium with a bunch of folks looking up at it. I'm doing my best to try and keep this poor critter under control while being fully aware of the fact that I don't have a clue as to what I'm doing. And for the inexperienced holding an unwilling kitten is something that at the least can be a challenge and at the most an experience with perpetual motion complete with razor sharp claws. I was inexperienced and can attest to bleeding red.

If you've never experienced a thing before, or something somewhat similar, you more than likely don't have any way of being prepared when it comes your way. If you're a young and naive teenage boy you almost certainly don't have a chance. Had I known what I know now the odds would have been at least fifty/fifty that things would have turned out alright. On this night I had walked into a situation that would haunt me for ever. Not because I did or didn't do something but because I didn't know. For me on this night it was a single question and a question that in that little more or less rural town should not have been a problem for most anyone, but it was for me.

I didn't know who he was, never would come to find out who he was, and yet he forever left his mark when he yelled out his question. In the end the not knowing was bad enough but the laughter was worse. All these years later I still can hear the laughter.

He asked a simple question and I suppose I should have had the answer but as I stood there trying to figure out the answer for him the smile started on his face and then the chuckle and finally the laugh that said it was alright for others to join in and so they did. They laughed while I stood there holding a kitten in my hands and completely unable to answer his question. Unable to the point of being paralyzed.

It's maybe hard to understand today but in that world and in those years some of us really didn't know anything about sex. All I really knew was that girls were somehow different from me and yet I wasn't exactly sure how. After all, the best player on our Little League team had been a girl and she was just like us only different somehow I guess. Well, I did know they were different enough that I was strongly, and I mean strongly, attracted to them but beyond that I can honestly say on that night in that high school gym I still wasn't really clear on what some of the details were on the differences in sexes.

"Is it a male or female?" That was the question he asked. An honest question to a young man without a clue. Well, I sort of had something of an idea but it wasn't based on fact, more dumb luck guesswork than anything else, so I started to try to figure out the answer. In my memory I must have looked the ultimate fourteen year old boy without a clue as I tipped the poor cat this way and that trying to come up with an answer. As I recall I never did, someone else tried to rescue me, and in the end I never would have a cat as a pet.

It wasn't the cats' fault, it was just an unwilling particiapant in the whole event. But to this day I remember that moment standing on that stage in front of all those people and feeling those feelings because I didn't know and they laughed.

For whatever reason and however things work in life today I remember standing in front of people and having them smile and laugh too. The difference comes in the fact that today I sort of know what I'm doing when I stand there. And I always make sure no kittens are part of the act.