I didn’t want to ask what the girl in the word problem bought next because the sub would definitely make fun of me again. He didn’t know anything about my short attention span because he was a short-timer himself. So I wrote another minus sign and just made up the final number: 7.50.
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Chaffapopoulos. “What exactly did Diane buy for seven dollars and fifty cents?”
The classroom tittered in anticipation of my dumb answer.
“Um, dog food?”
The whole classroom burst into a big laugh. After the laughter peaked, the whole classroom started chanting: “Stupid, stupid, David is stupid!”
Mr. Chaffapopoulos tried to make them be quiet. It didn’t work. Like I said, he was a sub.
This was when Michael exploded.
“Rrrrrggghhh, hicklesnicklepox! David isn’t stupid, you flufferknuckles! He’s my friend, so stick your grizzlenoogies in your boomboolies and leave him alone.”
“Huh?” said Kaya, who was still in our class (we just couldn’t shake her).
“Sit down, Michael,” said Mr. Chaffapopoulos in his most menacing voice. “Sit down this instant!”
“Ah, sludgepuggle, you flufferknuckle! Sludgepuggle, sludgepuggle, sludgepuggle!”
Mr. Chaffapopoulos gasped in horror. “Enough! I’m writing a note to your parents, Michael.” He started scribbling something on a small pink pad. “They need to teach you what words are appropriate to use in school and what words are not. Then they need to wash your mouth out with hand sanitizer, Mr. Pottymouth!”
“Ha!” laughed a bunch of kids. “He’s Mr. Pottymouth!”
Yep. This was the day Michael became known as Mr. Pottymouth, which, in less than a day, was shortened to Pottymouth.
Michael’s House of Pottymouthing
After school that day, we went to Michael’s house. Mr. Chaffapopoulos had demanded that Michael have both his parents sign his pink note to prove that they had read and understood what was written on it.
Slight problem. Michael didn’t really have parents. He had foster parents. That meant he lived in their house and the state paid them to take care of him. He’s never met his real parents. Before foster care, he lived in orphanages.
He and I have both been wondering if his real folks would like to meet him now that he’s kind of famous.
Well, if they do show up, Michael told me he’s going to look at them and say, “Stick your grizzlenoogies in your boomboolies, you lazy flufferknuckles.”
Where was I? Oh, right. Third grade. (See what I mean about my short attention span? There are gnats that remember stuff better than me.)
We walked into Michael’s foster home with the pink slip. Mr. and Mrs. Brawley were both out of work back then. (Come to think of it, they’re still both out of work.) The only money coming into the house was the cash the state paid them to take care of Michael and five other foster kids.
I’m not an expert on this stuff, but that day in the Brawley house, I think I figured out where Michael picked up his colorful language skills: the same place most pottymouths do. Home.
Since his foster parents didn’t have jobs, they spent pretty much all of their time watching TV and fighting.
“Give me the @#$&% remote control, Shirley,” his foster dad was saying when we walked into the living room.
“Why should I give you the @#$&% remote, you &@%#!?” answered his foster mom.
“Who are you calling a &@%#, you &@%#!”
I actually thought Michael’s words—hicklesnicklepox, flufferknuckle, grizzlenoogies, boomboolies, and sludgepuggle—were way more inventive than the words his foster parents used. They were just saying the same old words all grown-ups say when things don’t go their way or they hit themselves on the thumb with a hammer.
“I want to watch @^&*# Judge Judy,” said Michael’s foster dad.
“Because you’re a !#&@*,” said his foster mom. “Everyone knows Judge Joe Brown is a better @#$%+ judge than that $#@^& Judge Judy!”
While they were fighting, Michael saw his chance.
“Um, you guys?” He put the pink slip of paper on the tray table between them. “I need you both to sign this snifflefliggly thing.”
“What the @^&*# is it?” asked his foster father.
“A &@%#! slip of pink paper,” said his foster mother. “Are you &@%#$ blind?”
Furious, Mr. Brawley glared at his wife and signed the piece of paper without even looking at it. “At least I know how to spell my $#@%^ name!”
“I know how to spell your %$#@& name too: L-O-S-E-R!” Mrs. Brawley said as she glared back. Eyes locked, they were in a classic stare-off. Neither one wanted to be the first to blink or look away.
Yep. She signed the pink slip just like his foster father had—without even glancing at it.
“Thanks,” said Michael, swiping the signed paper off the tray table while his foster parents kept up their stare-off.
We spent the rest of the afternoon up in the tree house that some of the older foster kids had built. Michael sat in one corner fuming. I sat in the other and nodded because I knew what he was thinking, the same way Michael usually knows what I’m thinking.
“I don’t care what Mr. Snuffleupagus says,” said Michael. “I’m not a pottymouth.”
“I know. I was thinking the same thing.”
“Hicklesnicklepox.”
“Yeah. I was thinking that too.”
PROFESSOR H. R. TWEED, PHD
Language Expert
What Michael Littlefield has done is nothing short of extraordinary.
He has created his own words. His own secret language, if you will.
The fact that nobody else understands what he is saying (except, perhaps, his best friend, David) does not make his linguistic accomplishment any less extraordinary.
Michael’s achievement reminds me of Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, a fascinating new language spoken only by people under the age of thirty-five in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about seven hundred indigenous citizens in Australia’s Northern Territory.
When I informed Michael that I hoped to write a scholarly article about him and his extraordinary new language, he called me a flufferknuckle.
I must conduct further research on what that means.
A Few Years Later…and Nothing Much Has Changed
Four years later, Michael and I turned twelve.
We’d also been Pottymouth and Stoopid for nearly half our lives. Most of the kids in our seventh-grade class didn’t even know our real names. During roll call, when the teacher said, “Michael?” some kid would always shout, “She means Pottymouth!” Same thing when she said, “David?” Someone would yell, “Just call him Stoopid!” Everyone else would laugh. It was hysterical.
Unless, of course, you happened to be Michael or me.
So I don’t want to give you a blow-by-blow account of grades four through seven. Why should we make you suffer through it all too? But I’ll give you a few of the highlights.
Like the time we had to take an IQ test.
In case you don’t know, an IQ is a person’s intelligence quotient. This test was supposed to measure how smart we were. Most people have IQs of somewhere between 85 and 115. Only 5 percent score above 125.
Everybody was guessing I’d score somewhere in the 50s.
I remember one of the questions: “What are clothes made of?” You were given a bunch of answers to choose from: cloth, paper, wood, glass, and I don’t know. When I saw that question, I seriously started wondering about the intelligence quotients of the people who wrote the IQ test. Come on, the answer’s right in the question! If clothes were made out of glass, they’d be called glasses.
They never told us our IQ scores. I didn’t want to know. I was probably afraid to find out that I really was stupid.
Another highlight? Hanging out in Michael’s tree house reading comic books instead of going to school. Neither one of us ever won a perfect-attendance certificate. In fact, we both hated sch
ool so much, I think we would’ve won the district-wide competition for most unexcused absences if, you know, they had an award for that.
We weren’t too good with after-school activities either. They kicked me out of the robotics club when I said I wanted to meet C-3PO. The chess club gave us both the boot because Michael liked to make up funny voices for the king and queen pieces: “Off with their heads!” “Yes, dear.”
Even trick-or-treating on Halloween was a nightmare. One year, Michael and I made an extremely unfortunate choice of costume.
Okay, I admit it was truly stupid.
What can I say? We both loved the movie. The first one. Not the sequel.
On the plus side, for one night at the end of October, nobody called us Pottymouth and Stoopid.
We were just Dumb and Dumber.
Air Stoopid
One thing I might’ve actually been pretty good at if I’d ever gotten the chance?
Sports.
All that fidgety, squirrelly energy I had back in kindergarten was still with me in seventh grade. But now that I was older, I could run and jump like crazy.
Once, Coach Ball, the phys-ed teacher, told us to run around the gym four times.
Everybody else did four laps, but I did about eighty.
You see, I thought Coach Ball had said “for the whole time,” so I kept going until the bell rang.
I might’ve been pretty good at basketball, but in gym class, nobody ever picked Pottymouth or me when choosing up sides. We always spent our gym time “riding the pine.” That meant we sat on the bench and watched other guys play.
We got so bored, Michael would slide his butt across the bleachers so it would make squeaky noises that sounded like all sorts of different farts, which he gave all sorts of different names to.
The Chinese Firecracker. The Power Saw. The Quiver. And, of course, the Rusty Gate.
Michael always cracked me up. He still does.
After school (and on those days when we skipped school), we played our own brand of basketball at his house because, years ago, one of his foster brothers had put up a hoop over the garage door. The net was long gone, but all we needed was a hoop and a backboard.
We’d make up imaginary games and narrate them. I did most of the dribbling and shooting. Michael did most of the commentary.
“David for three from the top of the key!” he’d say in his best courtside-TV voice. “He shoots! Frizzlenitts…no good. Off the front of the rim…wait…now David grabs his own rebound. He slam-dunks it for an easy two and picks up a foul from that hoopiedoodle hicklesnicklepox who just elbowed him! David’s heading to the line. It’s up. It’s good. Sludgepuggle, sludgepuggle, sludgepuggle!”
We played so much one-on-one against each other, so many games of HORSE, we got kind of bored with regular basketball and invented our own brand-new kind.
Michael called it Skateboardball. Because, if you haven’t already guessed, it combined skateboarding with b-ball.
You scored extra points if you added tricks—maybe a fakie or a goofy-foot—when you shot. Pretty soon, I could do a kick-flip, spring off the board, and dunk. It was like I had springs in my legs. It was totally awesome.
You Can Look It Up in Our Anna Britannica
Somehow, Michael and I convinced ourselves that we were so good at Skateboardball, we should try out for the middle-school basketball team.
“Who did this?” said Coach Ball when he saw our names on the sign-up sheet. “Who thinks this is funny?”
Not exactly a vote of confidence for us.
“Um, we signed up ourselves,” said Michael bravely.
Coach Ball squinted. “You’re the kid who makes up all those weird words, right?”
“Snifflepiggle. Sometimes.”
“Sorry, kid. No way am I risking you trash-talking the other team. Pottymouthing is considered unsportsmanlike conduct. You’d pick up so many technical fouls, we’d have to forfeit every game. Try the gardening club instead.”
So much for our pro-basketball ambitions.
The only good thing that came from basketball tryouts was meeting Anna Brittoni, the unofficial scorekeeper for the team.
By unofficial, I mean she liked basketball so much she asked Santa Claus to bring her a scorebook every Christmas so she could sit by herself at the games, eat stadium popcorn, and make little marks in her book.
Anyway, after Coach Ball refused to let us try out for the team, Michael and I trudged toward the exit, feeling dejected. There was only one person sitting in the bleachers on that side of the gym—Anna.
“I heard what Coach Ball just told you,” she said, her cheeks turning bright pink because (we found out later) she was extremely shy. “He was wrong. I mean, about the technical fouls. In the middle-school league, once you earn two technical fouls for unsportsmanlike conduct, you’re automatically ejected from the game. So your ‘pottymouthing’ would cost the team, at most, four points per game. Ergo,” she said.
“I think there’s some other reason Coach Ball doesn’t want you on his team,” said Anna.
“We know,” I told her. “In case you haven’t heard, Michael’s Pottymouth and I’m Stoopid.”
“Oh. I’ve heard about you two. I’m Anna Brittoni.”
We were all about to shake hands when Kaya Kennecky and her friend Tiffany Blurke strutted across the shiny gym floor.
“Why, look, Tiffany. It’s Pottymouth, Stoopid, and Anna Britannica.”
Anna’s cheeks turned pink again.
“Um, are you from Britain?” Michael asked.
Anna shook her head. “Britannica is the name of an encyclopedia.”
“Like Encyclopedia Brown?” I asked.
Anna nodded. “Kaya and her friends call me Anna Britannica because being smart isn’t exactly considered cool at this school.”
“A lot of stuff is considered uncool around here,” I said. “Being smart. Being different.”
“Or,” added Michael, “just being me and David.”
COACH ED BALL
Gym Teacher
Guess who’s feeling stupid now?
We’ve lost every basketball game this season. The popcorn guy gets more cheers than my first-string team.
The other day, I found this DVD in my mailbox. Anna Brittoni sent it to me. It was a video of that kid David dunking!
Sure, he did his dunk off a skateboard, but the kid’s got game. I could’ve used him.
No, I needed him.
So call me Stoopid.
All the other coaches sure do.
Grandpas Are Always Right
Did I mention that Michael and I live on the same street? Our houses are kind of simple, one-story deals. There are no jumbo-size McMansions on our block.
My mom and I moved to this house right after my ex-dad dumped us. At the time, he thought he was going to become a famous author. The next Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s the guy who wrote the book about the old man who goes fishing in the sea, which, you know, is a good place to find fish.
At the time, Ex-Dad wasn’t writing books about fish or old men. He was writing TV commercials about used cars for a local advertising agency called Finkle, Fry, and Farnsworth. They did some totally annoying spots for Big Bob’s Auto Barn, the ones where Big Bob’s big head floats around his car lot.
Yeah. My ex-dad came up with that one.
My mom had three different jobs. Weekday mornings, she waitressed at an IHOP. After that, she rang a register and restocked shelves at Walmart. Weekends, she cleaned doctors’ offices.
She wasn’t home much. Home was basically where she slept between shifts.
Good thing Grandpa Johnny (Mom’s dad) lived with us.
He was a wacky old guy. He used to be a rodeo clown and a test pilot for the U.S. Air Force. That was before he invented Velcro, but his partner totally ripped him off, so he never made a penny off it. After that disaster, Grandpa Johnny found his true calling and opened a string of bakeries called Johnny’s Cakes, which made him a mill
ion dollars, all of which he lost “when the bottom fell out of the cupcake market,” he said. “It made a mess—all those cupcakes with no bottoms, just frosting.”
At least that’s what Grandpa Johnny told Michael and me, because he knew it would crack us up.
Mom told us “the truth.” That her father used to own a diner downtown called Johnny’s.
“It had the most amazing pastries and cakes,” she told me.
Mom had waitressed at her dad’s diner when she was in high school. Unfortunately, Grandpa’s landlord jacked up his rent, and Johnny’s went out of business.
But every day after school, Grandpa Johnny would bake chocolate chip cookies for Michael and me. When it was cold out, we’d get hot cocoa with them. In the spring and summer, he’d make us a chocolate egg cream, which is a fizzy drink with no eggs or cream, just chocolate sauce, milk, and seltzer water.
I remember one afternoon, out of the blue, Grandpa told Michael, “You’re such a funny kid. You have a way with words. You make me laugh.”
“Um, thanks, I guess,” said Michael, because he wasn’t used to getting compliments.
Then Grandpa turned to me. “David, you and Michael are going to be friends for life. I guarantee it. Remember where you heard it first.”
Grandpa, of course, was totally right.
Very Weird Science
Hanging out after school with Grandpa Johnny on a semiregular basis got us both thinking the same thing: maybe we weren’t the total losers everybody said we were.
“You know what,” I said to Michael, “we should do something that shows the whole school, once and for all, that we’re not just a pair of numbskulls.”
Pottymouth and Stoopid Page 2
