Chapter 2
“Butt Baby”
Mrs. Benedetto was standing at the board, her dark brown eyes staring at her second grade class. Her chubby cheeks cradled pursed lips and her head scanned the room slowly.
The skirt she had on was just a tad short for the size of thigh she owned. One leg was in front of the other with the knee bent slightly. She rested a fist on her hip.
In her other hand was a small piece of yellow chalk, held with the intent of writing something on the board as soon as one of us was brave enough to venture a guess at this incredibly difficult math problem.
Adding two-digit numbers together? Most of my classmates were thinking “You’ve got to be crazy lady.”
But not Eric Flagler. He was the brain of this operation. A regular know-it-all brown-noser if ever there was one. It would have been easy to be jealous had he not been so cool, too.
I mean, what other kid would show you a hacked off bloody finger in a box that wiggled when he opened the lid? Never mind that he had cut a hole in the bottom of the box and stuck his own index finger in from underneath used red marker to make it look bloody. It looked so real.
Eric Flagler had been my best friend for at least three weeks when he put on a magic show for me and my brother Steve, who was 1½ years younger.
Steve and I were pretty impressed with Eric Flagler’s ability to make a cake in his tall black magician’s hat. We never did figure out what happened to those raw eggs he cracked and plopped into the hat.
One time, when Eric and I were playing in his backyard, he told me to tilt my head back and balance a marble on my nose. When he gave the signal, I was to bring my head slowly forward and let the marble roll off the tip of my nose into the big opening of a funnel, which was inserted into the top of my corduroys.
When I started tilting my head forward, he poured a glass of water into the funnel, making it look like I’d wet myself.
I didn’t much like that really, but he had a cute sister in fourth grade who saw the whole thing from the window. And she came out shortly after the wetting incident, told Eric he was mean and put her arm around me, asking me if I was OK.
So, I gave Eric another chance. Ended up spending a lot of time over at that old brick house on Woodland Avenue the next few years.
But Eric Flagler’s biggest gift wasn’t introducing his friends to Katie. Or grossing out his friends.
No, Eric Flagler’s best attribute was his ability to save the class from Mrs. Benedetto’s wrath. She would get so upset when we didn’t quite catch her drift that she would tap her foot on the floor over and over. Man, we thought she was going to do a tap dance right on our wretched little bodies sometimes.
Eric always had the answer, though. I don’t know why he waited so long before finally raising his hand sometimes. I think he wanted to see how worked up he could get the teacher. Or maybe he just liked scaring us to the point we’d be begging him with our eyes to answer the question.
Once saving our butts, he’d be in a position to request anybody’s dessert at lunch. Man, what power that boy wielded at an early age.
This time, Eric slowly put his right hand into the air when Mrs. Benedetto was looking in his direction.
“Mr. Flagler, do you know the answer?” she said, knowing darn well he did.
“Yes, Mrs. Benedetto. It’s 45,” he said smugly, looking around to bathe in the chorus of sighs he knew he’d get from us.
“Correct, Mr. Flagler,” Mrs. Benedetto said. “Now, the rest of you all will need to work on this at home tonight.”
Homework? Well, that stunk. But it was better than having that old teacher hiss at us like she did the one time Eric Flagler got sick and wasn’t at school during a particularly difficult lesson.
That time, she called us a name that none of us knew what it was. But I think it had something to do with a swear word or sex or something because the teacher next door, Mrs. Dodds, came over and asked Mrs. Benedetto to come out into the hall for a moment.
Before long, she came back in and was the nicest teacher we’d ever known for the next couple days.
Eric asked me about it at our weekly touch football game at the high school the next Sunday. Our family’s Sunday ritual included services at St. James Catholic Church, the highlight of which for me was when they let Bobby McGuire play his guitar. He was no Pete Townsend, and never was going to be at church, but at least it was better than the old lady playing that pipe organ and the choir droning on and on.
After church, Steve and I were force-fed a steady diet of black-and-white TV reruns of “Superman” and the “Bowery Boys.” An episode of “All-Star Wrestling” or roller derby usually set the stage for lunch and then suffering through another loss by our beloved Packers.
Then it was off to the back yard or the high school’s athletic field for our pick-up football game.
Eric Flagler was usually one of the better kids on the football field. But it’s not like he was head and shoulders obviously above everyone. He was in school, though, and I tried not to let it irritate me.
I was always second best in class to him. He’d get 100s on his tests. I’d get 98s and 99s. I knew that Russia wasn’t the name of the country; it was the Soviet Union. Eric Flagler knew that as well as the names of seven of the Soviet Union’s republics. I didn’t even know their states were called republics.
I had glasses and was kind of scrawny with somewhat rounded shoulders even though I was pretty good at sports. Eric didn’t wear glasses and while he was no Charles Atlas, he was pretty strong.
But if Eric Flagler thought you were cool, then you were like a made man. Nobody could badmouth you … at least none of the second-graders. Even the one bully we had kind of liked him (as much as a bully could like somebody I guess) and wouldn’t mess with Eric’s friends as a favor to him.
Eric Flagler liked me because I could make him laugh. We were walking home together after school one time when we started talking about those stupid girlie songs we had to sing in music class. There was the one about some girl named Mary who skipped and danced on her tiptoes and then went in a meadow and frolicked, whatever that meant.
So, I decided to come up with my own stupid songs for boys. My first one was “Butt Baby.” It only had two words in it …. “butt” and “baby.” Not exactly my best work as a lyricist.
The melody wasn’t exactly original either. I ripped off the “Batman” show theme song and just sang “Butt Baby” instead of “Batman.”
And I can’t really say that my singing was very good. I did like to sing, and did a mean David Cassidy impersonation when my cousins and brothers got together. We’d break out a section of Hot Wheels car track and use those orange plastic strips as guitars while we performed to The Partridge Family Greatest Hits spinning around at 33 rpm on our old mono record player.
No, what made “Butt Baby” such a popular song with the second-grade class at Franklin Elementary in Wauwatosa, Wis., and especially with Eric Flagler, was the dance that went along with it.
When I invented “Butt Baby,” I knew it needed a signature move. So I stood on the sidewalk with my knees bent and my butt sticking out.
“Watch this,” I said to Eric with a glint of youthful tom foolery in my eyes.
I started humming the tune, kind of rocking from side to side, my little posterior wiggling in the cool fall air. Finally, when I go to the “Butt Baby” part, I quickly leaped into the air, turning halfway around so I was now facing away from Eric.
When I landed, I made sure to yell “Butt Baby!” as loud as I could while also making sure I shook my butt hard, protruding it as far toward him as I could.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone cry from laughing so hard before. I thought Eric Flagler was going to puke his bologna sandwich and my Ho Ho’s all over Woodland Avenue he was laughing so hard. He grabbed his stomach and started crying out in pain that his belly hurt.
Jerry Hawley’s mom even slowed her car down and rolled down the window as she passed to make sure Eric wasn’t dying.
From then on, “Butt Baby” was a hit.
Well, until that fateful day that I decided that Eric Flagler wasn’t going to be better than me in everything at school.
Eric and I had a crush on the same girl for almost a whole week. Sue Greene was one of the tallest girls in class. She had long black hair and bright green eyes. She had a pretty smile and always wore dresses and black shoes. She wasn’t one of those girls that everybody was interested in. But there wasn’t anybody that hated her either. If she was a guy, she’d be a friend of yours. But in second grade, you either had a crush on her or you hated her (she was a girl after all).
During art class one day, Eric and I took turns boasting about how each of us was going to be the first one to tell her we liked her.
“She gave me the best Valentine,” Eric said. “My babysitter says that means she thinks I’m groovy.”
“Oh yeh? She gave me one of her Space Food Sticks at lunch yesterday,” I volleyed back at him.
“Those things the astronauts eat?” Eric said. “Those things taste like chalk! She gave it to you cause it makes her puke. That means you’re puke.”
“Am not.”
“Are, too!”
“Oh yeh?” I ended that exchange because I knew we could go on like that for minutes. “I’m gonna tell her I like her,” I predicted somewhat boldly.
Eric gave me one of those I-don’t-believe-you looks.
“When?” he asked.
Um. I hesitated as I hadn’t thought about that. You couldn’t just blurt it out in the middle of art class … or math or reading or social studies for that matter.
“Ha!” he said, thinking he had one-upped me again. “I’m going to tell her after art.”
Oh no. That’s in 10 minutes. If I was going to get the upper hand on Eric Flagler ever, I had to do it now and I only had a short time to figure something out.
I went back to molding the clay head that would become my mom’s Christmas present in a few weeks. My mind raced like Richard Petty with thoughts of what to do.
Let’s see. After art we go to the cloak room and put away our smocks. Then we head back to our seats. If Eric’s going to follow through on his plan, he’ll get to Sue between the cloak room and their seats. I’ll need to intercept her.
I’d never told a girl I’d liked her before. My heart was pounding hard in my chest and my breathing was quickening. But I was more nervous about letting Eric Flagler beat me yet again.
So, when Mrs. Kinney announced the end of art class with a “OK, students, time to turn in your heads,” I raced to put my smock away first. Then I exited the other end of the cloak room and waited.
Kids filed out one by one until Sue came by.
“Hey,” I said, stepping in front of her.
“Hi, Joe,” she said, stopping. I have no idea what was going on in her head. But she looked at me knowing I had something else to say.
“I have a secret to tell you,” I said softly.
“OK,” she said, looking a little puzzled since I hadn’t really talked to her much before.
As the last kid walked out of the cloak room, I motioned Sue back in there.
Once we were safely out of eyesight from the rest of the class, I leaned over toward her ear and mumbled some nonsense softly for a second or two.
Then I quickly puckered up and planted a fast peck on her cheek. I didn’t wait around to see what kind of a reaction I was going to get. This little 7-year-old boy skedaddled right out of that cloak room and never looked back.
In fact, I don’t think I looked at Sue Greene for the next day and a half and was too scared to talk to her until we were in science class together as sophomores.
But I made sure to tell Eric Flagler every detail.
That day on the way home from school, he told me I lied about kissing Sue Greene and he didn’t even like “that stupid ‘Butt Baby’ song” anymore.
But he still snickered when I did it. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it.
