the bad chair

elementary memory

     It fluctuated throughout the room, like an island free of its plates. I can still remember the smell of the steel. The steel swan-neck that loomed over the hard acrylic platform shackled to steel legs, the smell of metal breaching my senses as i attempted to concentrate on mathematics. To this day I believe it to be the reason accumulation of numeric principles in my mind were never architecturally sound; a crack in a young foundation. This chair, the long neck ushering your spine into an anti-scoliosis position, was the antagonist of the classroom. There were squabbles, brawls, political coos to strand certain children on the gallow of discomfort, and with all this Tate’s Circle corruption the teacher performed no adult diplomacy. It was as if she reveled in the constant rotation of who drew the short straw of the day. In retrospect, the chair was a device against tardiness. It was the only sure way not to end up in the awful, forsaken, seat, arrive early. Not on time but early. You needed minutes before other kids in order to sabotage premeditated plans, do the swap without confrontation, or, the solution with the least likelihood of violence.

     As I said, violence was routine, and I was never much the fighter.

     That’s why on what I would find to be my last day of school for quite some time, I was sitting in the chair. Diane Rowles had made a deal with Mike Delone. She was to be assured a comfortable chair and he would reap the reward of a kiss. Not just ANY KISS, but the FRENCH kind that she had seen in a movie with her older sister. So when Mike arrived that morning and saw me sitting next to the bad chair, and only one normal seat left, his resolution was to topple me out of my day dream and onto the floor. In front of everyone, so that he and Diane got their chairs. I didn’t even look to the teacher for assistance, just scampered like a beaten pup to the bad chair. I was deep in what I would find to be a fever dream, and was the first symptom of my sickness. The entire day was like piecing together a foreign film after the reel was sliced and thrown on the floor.

 

      I made it home to hear my mother gasp at my colour;

      made it to the hospital to hear the word pneumonia.

 

 

     After a month, near everyday spent in bed, I was up and prepared to get a good seat…far from the bad chair. I chose cereal that I could eat with little effort spent chewing. My hair was cropped low like mown grass, I brushed my teeth and washed my face and booked out of the house towards the bus stop. I remembered the new bus driver and how he was direct and wasted no time on kids running and late for the long yellow ride, and knew he’d get me to school with plenty of time.

     The hallway was just a blur of mud, the murals dashing in and out of vision like a mouse from its hole. I saw, avoided, and passed the teacher on my way to the classroom. I was on fire for my revenge! I would do this every day. Even better I devised a plan to set the bad chair in the far left corner of the room, which I would sit diagonal of. As I remember that morning, I can’t help but to think about how it was really Darwinism that surrounded the bad chair. When I was defeated and forced into the bad chair there was no judicial protection or retribution. The good guy got the chair! How perverted is that?

     But I was running that morning with no thoughts akin to that. I was slowing my pace as I saw the door numbers decrease and as I opened the door to my classroom…

 

                           All bad chairs!

 

Bonnie Billy told me at lunch that it had happened the day before I came back. As he popped the lid off his pudding he asked if I got to eat snacks and watch television all month. Obviously he wasn’t the one gathering the class and homework for my parents to pick-up. “I don’t have a television in my bedroom”. He looked horrified. Pudding dove from spoon to shirt. And just like that, the future of my mathematical skills was decidedly doomed.