You Got a Butt For a Face!

The second grade was full of confused anatomical insults and other factually inaccurate taunts. It's the best you can do when you're eight. But the best thing about being a boy is that if the other guys are putting you down one year, they're probably going to be your friends sooner or later, especially if you can too can dish out whatever they're serving. The fact is, we boys just don't take things all that seriously because with insults like "Oh yeah? Well you got a BUTT for a FACE!" how can you take that seriously? At least when girls insulted you, they'd just say things like "you're ugly" or "you smell" or "boys are dumb." You know, things that are true. We say things like "hey buttface!" And it's seriously a case of, yeah, that's the best we've got. Psh! No big deal. "You're a buttface times infinity!" And there you go, friends for life. I rest my case.

I knew me my share of buttfaces in my day, because most kids in the 90s were butts... hot shot little shits always trying to prove something. That's all we were. Advertising was very good at turning us against each other in the competition of coolness, but there really wasn't any difference between any of us back then. In any case, if you were cool, then anyone else who wasn't you was a dork, a little above the worm in the hierarchy of life. If you were a dork though, like me, then all those "cool kids" were nothing but buttfaces. I don't know why "butts" were our metaphor of choice to describe "the other," but maybe because it was more ad-friendly than calling each other assholes.

In any case, the buttfaces I knew in the 2nd grade happened to consist of that same "flannel gang" of "cool kids" that I described in detail earlier on, and before I made my epic journey to become cool in their eyes, I was assuredly a dork. Once in gym class, we were doing one of those 90's New Age type "exercises" (they just couldn't let us play something that involved winning and losing or else we'd cry) when this battle of wits played out almost poetically. We were split into groups of three, and one had to be the leader and the other two had to mimic his every move. I happened to be the leader that time, and I thought it was kind of cool, being paired with two of the flannel jerks and being "in charge" of them. It was a pure "mwahaha!" moment.

But I quickly undid whatever was cool about it.  In my quest to make them look like idiots, I way overshot the runway. I started out doing these Russian-type kicks on the gym floor, and then got the wise idea to go down flat and do a "snake-like" slither. It was in the middle of my slither that I realized both my little minions were following my lead exactly, hurling light Russian-style kicks at my face! It was a reminder of just what I was up against.

The teasing became more verbal after that, with both of them finding ways to poke fun at my so-called puke-pooling ugliness. It was a time in life where one could get away hurling insults like the old "stare and avert your eyes" jab. One of them, who I naturally ended up becoming friends with a year later, even said after looking at my face for a second, and I quote, "Ah! I'm being blinded by the evil thing!" This happened quite a few times, but I was quite sharp, and retorted the same jab back. It wasn't so much an insult to me as it was just a funny thing to hear and say--that and the old, "Oh my God!" (mouth-dropped, eyes bugged)... which might have prompted me to go "what?" in all seriousness, and to which the reply invariably was, "You got a butt for a face!" How do you respond to a claim like that? You can't. Even if you say "no I don't!" you still look like a real "heinous anus" for even just debating the subject of your butt face.
 
I could be the acid tongue myself though. A kid came to class with a prescription bottle once and had it propped on the desk in front of him. Someone else asked, "what are those pills for?"  It was the age of Ritalin back then, so just picture three different prescription bottles instead of one for the modern equivalent. He got angry at this and huffed, "They're pills you put in your head to make you stupid!" Now I have to admit, he walked himself right into this one, and I couldn't resist taking him the rest of the way: "Oh? Then you must take a lot of those!"

So I did my share of serving and being served. For example, who could forget the classic bus-ride questionnaires.. "So, have you been PT?" "What's PT?" "Yes or no, have you ever been it?" You'd be tempted to say no, as I was, because it didn't sound good if you were to say yes, but then you'd be mistaken. "No," I said. To which he shot back, "Ew! You've never been potty trained?" You just never knew whether to say yes or no to those things. And who could forget the grand old "open your mouth and close your eyes and I'll give you a big surprise!" Or the "do you know what I think about that?" Prompting a "what?" followed by a rectal explosion of some kind and a smell so bad it could peal the paint off the walls! "Ah... that's what!" he'd say.

Surprisingly enough, afterwards this kid became my best friend in the 3rd grade, and I guess you could say we both became "puke-pooling butt-faced booger-brained fart smellers with flies on the side" for a while. It tends to rub off on others.