Content Disclosure: Intense Fight Scenes; Mild Language; Death or Bereavement
Remember David Hackman?
That’s how we like to start: Remember that crazy son of a bitch?
The question is rhetorical for those of us who went to Stoneybrook Elementary. Of course we remember him. We talk about him every chance we get. At parties, at bars—anywhere enough of us have gathered.
Two or three of us doesn’t cut it. We need numbers. And we need the uninitiated:
David who? they’ll hopefully ask.
Where to start, we’ll say, even though we know exactly where to start.
The first thing you need to know about David Hackman, we’ll say, is that he was a spaz.
We don’t mean that in a bad way, we’ll say.
Not at all, we’ll say.
It’s just a statement of fact. David Hackman was a total fucking spaz.
That’s why he went to the Spaz Box.
The what? one of the uninitiated will hopefully say.
The Spaz Box, we’ll say.
We’ll play it straight for a few seconds, wait for one of them to ask, What’s a Spaz Box?
A box for spazzes, we’ll say. Duh.
A room for spazzes, we’ll amend.
Finally, we’ll break: We know how that sounds now. But back then it didn’t seem weird or harsh at all. It sounded logical. We had a handful of spazzes in our school, kids who had a tendency to have conniptions.
—meltdowns—
—tizzy fits—
—kids who would lose their shit at a moment’s notice—
—every elementary school has these kids, right? —
—we called them spazzes—
—and when they did that—
—when they spazzed the fuck out—
(This is how we tell the story—all of us talking—our voices bleeding into one cumulative narrative.)
They got sent to the Spaz Box, which was just a room where this counselor
—What was his name again, Patrick?—
Chris?
(I’ll say it like it’s a question—even though I know that was his name. I don’t want this story to be mine; I want it to be ours.)
—Right, Chris. Chrissy—
—That was David’s name for him: Pissy Chrissy—
—Pissy Chrissy and the Spaz Box. We really were little animals, weren’t we?—
Yeah, but it wasn’t just us. Everyone talked like that. Even the teachers.
—It’s true—
—No way—
Okay, so they probably didn’t actually call it that. I mean, they couldn’t have, right? But I honestly don’t remember what else it was called—
—Neither do I—
—Nope. Me neither—
In my memory, Ms. Tollackson would say, “Dave, go to the Spaz Box.”
—And he would—
—Just like that—
He’d be chasing someone with a glue bottle around and around the room, but when Ms. Tollackson gave him the Spaz Box order, he’d stop on a dime and say, “Wonder what Mister Pisster’s up to.”
—He didn’t even need a chaperone or anyone to check on him—
—Except for the day Chris wasn’t there—
That was the day Dave climbed into the ventilation system.
(We’ll wait here for the inevitable reaction: Really?) Really, we’ll say.
—I don’t know how he did it—
—Maybe he used a coin or something to unscrew the vent cover—
However he got in there, he wriggled his way up the vent.
—Wriggled. That’s perfect, Patrick. He didn’t just crawl. He fucking wriggled—
—No he didn’t. Come on. You all keep saying that, but he didn’t actually climb into the vent; he just talked into it from Chris’s vent, through the wall, and out the vent facing the hallway—
—Screw you, man. He absolutely did climb into the vent. Jesus. We’re trying to sprinkle a little pixie dust here, and you’re fact-checking the best parts—
—Fine. I take it back. He wormed his way into the vent and pressed his face to the slats on the other side. Happy?—
—Ecstatic. So there Dave is, in the vent as we all agree he was—
—He was skinny enough to do it, that’s for sure—
—Dave? Dave was a lot of things, but skinny wasn’t one of them. That dude rippled—
—Not skinny scrawny. I mean skinny lean—
—Didn’t have an ounce of fat on him—
When he got to the other side of the wall, where the other vent was, he was about head high.
—That’s when he started talking to students as they walked by—
—“I am your conscience”—
—That’s what he said!—
—All whispery and deep, but loud too—
—“I am your conscience. Give Dave Hackman all your candy”—
—So fucking funny—
—“Give me, I mean Dave, all your Combos”—
—Remember Combos? I liked the pizza and
