The Downside of Being Up
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY ALAN LAWRENCE SITOMER
ALSO BY ALAN LAWRENCE SITOMER
Nerd Girls
The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez
Homeboyz
Hip-Hop High School
The Hoopster
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS•A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.
Published by The Penguin Group.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.
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M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.
Copyright © 2011 by Alan Lawrence Sitomer.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sitomer, Alan Lawrence.
The downside of being up / Alan Lawrence Sitomer.
p. cm.
Summary: All Bobby Connor wants is to survive middle school, but puberty is making that
difficult for him as his body conspires against him.
[1. Penis—Fiction. 2. Middle schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal
relations—Fiction. 5. Family life—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.S6228Do 2011
[Fic]—dc22 2010044203
ISBN : 978-1-101-53565-3
http://us.penguingroup.com
For guys everywhere who get it.
And girls everywhere that don’t.
1
Look, I’m just a kid. I’m not a dork, a jock, a brain, a freak or a perv. I like cheeseburgers with ketchup, video games and movies. No, I’m not the most popular student in school, yes, I am toilet trained, and okay, once in a while I pick my nose. Also, I like baseball.
But I have absolutely no control over what goes on in my pants. I get eighteen boners a day.
Literally.
I get them when I’m emptying the dishwasher. I get them when I’m putting on socks. I get them when I’m in the cereal section of the supermarket. Why would cereal straighten my weinerschnitzel? Really, I have no idea. It just pops up out of nowhere. And when I say pop I mean pop! It’s like having a steel pole rise in my pants.
Not a very big pole, though. I’ve measured. Right now it’s four and five-eighths inches long. Let’s just say I’ve already prayed to the penis gods and offered ’em a trade. I told them I’d swap my left pinkie toe for an extra two and one-eighths inches of manhood. That would bring me close to seven. Pretty fair exchange, right? Sure, I may limp for the rest of my life, but at least I’d be packing a bit of thunder. I mean right now I don’t even have a rain cloud in my jeans. On the naked self-esteem scale I score a negative ninety-three.
Holy cow, I don’t even know why I’m talking about all this. Actually, I do. It’s because no one ever discusses this stuff. It’s like some sort of sweep-it-under-the-rug topic that no one ever talks about even though all guys go through it. I mean, the closest anyone ever comes to even mentioning it is in sex education class, except in there all they do is show pictures of limp penises (or penii, whatever you call them) and they’re always attached to an inner gland or something. Barf!! Is there anything on the planet less attractive than a side-view medical diagram of a soft beef kabob? Really, just shoot me right now.
Basically, I get stiffies all the time for absolutely no reason and they are ruining my life.
Seriously, I want them to stop.
But they don’t, or won’t, so I’m forced to hide them. Oversized shirts that I wear untucked. Baggy pants with enough room inside the crotch for a microwave oven. Dictionaries I keep on my lap as if I am eager to look up fourteen-letter vocabulary words just for the “exuberating experience of exponentially enhancing my grandiloquent education.”
Yeah, right. The only thing a big ol’ Webster’s is good for to a kid like me is hiding my ding-dong when it stands at full attention. Fact is, my wang has completely flipped its wong and though I’m not sure when it happened, successfully hiding my boners has become the greatest battle of my life.
Yet, one time I failed. I blew it. I got busted with a sky-high pork pipe. That’s what forced me into “correctional erectional analysis.” Yep, therapy. A shrink. Writing about it is supposed to help. At least that’s what my therapist says. My second therapist, that is. My first therapist, well, let’s just say that my correctional erectional analysis seems to have sent her zooming into some sort of psychotic midlife crisis of her own . . . but her meltdown’s another story.
Really, this is my last chance. I just hope that scribbling down the hard truth about my out-of-control bologna pony is going to allow me to get a grip on life and move on.
It’s cruel. It’s torturous. It’s Bonerville Middle School, a place where all red-blooded boys eventually have to go.
And it ain’t no fun. It ain’t no fun at all.
Especially when ya, you know, kinda like a girl.
2
There’s only one person in the entire world I know who would bring a cockroach to math class and think it’s cool.
Alfred Finkelstein.
I hate Alfred Finkelstein. I hate his pimply skin. I hate his snorting laugh. I hate the fact that his parents took him to the cheapest orthodontist in the city for braces and allowed his mouth to be filled with enough metal to build a warship. If someone holds up a giant magnet, Alfred Finkelstein’s face is goi
ng to get sucked across the room like a piece of lint being slurped up by a Godzilla-size vacuum cleaner.
Worst of all, though, is that Alfred Finkelstein is one of those kids who needs to add a dash of sexy flavor to his orthodontic madness. Now sure, lots of kids these days get color choices, but regular kids choose red or blue or pink. Finkelstein’s cheapo orthodontist only offers second- and third-level choices, like “vomit green” or “diarrhea brown” or “urine yellow.” This week Finkelstein is wearing the color “dog-poop upchuck” on his teeth. I swear I can’t tell where the food he ate for breakfast that got stuck in his metal grill begins and the dental design Dr. Dento Demento has provided him with ends. When Finkelstein smiles, I want to gag.
“Hey, Bobby,” Finkelstein said, holding his new best friend in his hand. “Check it out. I put a booger on the back of this cockroach and he’s carrying it around like a backpack.”
I turned and saw a chunky green boulder sitting on the back of a one-inch brown roach. Immediately, I wanted to yak.
“Wanna see him do the booger boogie? I trained this sucka to dance.”
“Get away from me, Finkelstein. And don’t touch me, you freak!”
Finkelstein snorted a laugh—“he-hurrggh, he-hurrggh”—and then affectionately petted the back of his cockroach like it was some kind of fluffy kitten. It scares me to think that one day Finkelstein is going to become an adult with a job, a car and his own place to live. There should be a law in the United States that ships putzes like Finkelstein off to a farm to drink the milk of cloned goats or something, to see if there will be adverse effects on the rest of civilization. At least that would put his existence to some sort of productive use because right now, Alfred Finkelstein is an outright waste of human flesh.
“Okay, class. Turn to the next page on fractions and decimals,” came the no-nonsense voice of our math teacher from the front of the room.
“Get down . . . Boogie-oogie-oogie. Get down . . . ,” Finkelstein sang from his desk behind me, still playing with his cockroach.
“Shut up, Finkelstein. You’re gonna get me in trouble like yesterday.”
“Takes two to talk in class, Bobby.”
“That’s why I’m sayin’ shut up, Finkelstein.” Jeez, was he mentally incapacitated? Sometimes it felt like the city of Bonnerville had an idiot factory and all their reject samples ended up as kids on our campus, with Finkelstein being their number one moronic product.
I looked at the front board and tried to see what riveting thing we’d be doing today.
Oh, look, numerators and denominators. What joy.
My math class was taught by the oldest, dustiest, most crustiest teacher ever, Mrs. Mank. I think she taught my mom, my mom’s mom, and even the mom of my mom’s mom. During her first year as a teacher, schools didn’t use chalkboards; they used abacuses. Mrs. Mank was old like protoplasm.
“Jenny Stoops, please go to the board and solve equation number one.”
I turned the page in my textbook and Uh-oh . . .
No. Please, no, I thought. There was absolutely no reason for it. Noooo.
I tried to make it go away. I thought about baseball. I thought about canary birds. I thought about earwax and the armpits of old people and toe cheese.
No luck. It was Boner Time!
“Please, go away,” I said. However, my south-of-the-border sausage salami had a mind all its own. Seems that Mrs. Mank’s mathematical conversion from fractions to decimals had set it off. And I was wearing thin, white Nike track pants, too, the worst possible boner-hiding outfit ever.
So stupid. Why did I even buy these things? I mean, looking cool for school is one thing, but sporting uncontrollable wood is completely something else.
I gazed down at the tent I was pitching in my pants. Really, sometimes my brain freezes like when you drink a slushie too fast.
I slowly moved my math book off of my desk and onto my lap, then checked around to make sure no one was looking.
Coast was clear.
But this rod was a mean one. How come a guy’s downtown equipment didn’t come with an off button or something? Like was that a design oversight? It just doesn’t make any sense that these things appear out of nowhere all the time for no good reason whatsoever. Someone needs to invent a pill or something.
“No, that’s not how you do it, Jenny. Remember how we talked about moving the decimal point over two spaces?” Mrs. Mank showed Jenny the correct way to solve the equation and then turned back to the class to select the next volunteer. “Michael Demmings, you’re up. Please come to the board and solve problem number two.”
Michael went to the board. I felt relieved. Since Michael sat one row over from me, the next person Mrs. Mank would call would come from the other side of the room. When it came to board work, teachers never called on people from the same side of class. They liked to spread the pain around.
“Oh, this is not that hard,” Mrs. Mank said in a frustrated voice as Michael screwed up problem number two. “Bobby Connor, please come to the board and show us how to solve equation number three.”
“Me?” I said. Secretly, I reached under the book in my lap. Hard as a golf club.
“Yes, you,” Mrs. Mank answered.
“Um . . . ,” I replied. Go down, go down, I told my Popsicle. Go down.
Nothing. My banana was still hard enough to dent a door.
“Let’s go, Bobby, hurry up,” she said. “I have a lot of material to get through this week.”
“Um . . . I don’t know how to solve it, either, Mrs. Mank.”
“Bobby Connor, you know as well as I do that this is simple stuff. Now, please come to the board and show us your mathematical abilities.”
“Look, Teach, if I come to the board, I am going to show you a whole lot more than just my mathematical abilities.”
Well, I didn’t say that, but I was thinking it.
I paused. What to do, what to do?
“Bobby!” she snapped. “Get up here right now and stop wasting my time.”
I didn’t budge. She glared. Kids in the front started to turn around to see what was the matter with me.
With a boner like this, it would take a whole football team to drag me from my desk. No way was I standing up. No way at all.
Just then, I had the biggest stroke of luck ever.
“I think I know how to do it, Mrs. Mank,” said Donnie Daniels, raising his hand. “Can I try?”
Donnie “Dipstick” Daniels was the dumbest kid in school. His skills were so bad that the Fs he got on his report card were actually higher marks than he had really earned. He was a Z student. Donnie didn’t just fail regular classes like science and history; Donnie flunked lunch. Essentially, this meant that if Donnie was volunteering to go to the board to solve a math problem, there wasn’t a teacher on the planet who was gonna stop him.
“Okay, Donald,” Mrs. Mank said, still glaring at me. “Come on up.” I looked at the clock on the wall. With only four more minutes until the bell rang, I was in the clear. I’d been saved by Donnie Dipstick.
Suddenly I felt a tickle on my neck. An itch of some sort. I reached up and scratched. A moment later something fell lightly into my lap.
I looked down. Finkelstein’s booger roach was crawling up my leg.
“Aaarrgggh!” I screamed, leaping out of my seat.
Ew. Yuck. Eeee!! I jumped up and down and shook and twitched and wiggled and screamed. The cockroach flew into the air and then landed on the gray tile floor. It started to crawl away. I raised my foot and smashed it.
And smashed and smashed and smashed!
Everyone looked at me like I was nutso. Then their eyes slowly rotated from looking at the crazy expression on my face to looking down at the center of my white Nike track pants.
Nathan Ox, the class numb-nuts, was the first to speak.
“Look, everybody, Bobby’s got a boner!”
Every eye in the room stared at my crotch.
“And it’s only the size of a c
rayon!”
Bahhhh-hahahaha!! A huge shriek of laughter exploded from the room.
“What in the world is all the commotion? Now sit down, Bobby, and . . . Aarrggh!” Mrs. Mank suddenly screamed. My erection had surprised my math teacher so much that it caused her to fall backward, trip over a garbage can, bang her head against the board, collapse forward onto a chair, then slam to the floor.
Holy cow! I’d never seen an old lady take such a fall.
“Urrgghh,” she groaned.
The class, of course, laughed harder than any other class in the history of school. Watching Mrs. Mank bonk around like a human pinball was obviously the most hysterical thing they had ever seen.
Right then I knew I had to get out of there. I mean, even the quiet girls, the ones who never even dared chew a piece of bubble gum, were pointing at my pants with tears of laughter flowing from their eyes. I grabbed my backpack, bent over at the waist and dashed for the door.
Then I ran.
And ran.
I ran through the halls, I ran out of the building, I ran past two students who were hanging a large purple banner on the outdoor bulletin board advertising the traditional Big Dance that our school held every spring, and I didn’t stop running until I was at the front gate of campus.
“Hey, you!” came a booming voice just as I was getting ready to sneak off of campus by crossing through the teachers’ parking lot. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Before I knew it, Mr. Hildge, the meanest, nastiest, rudest, most kid-hating vice principal that ever lived, stormed up to me with a walkie-talkie in one hand and a bullhorn in the other. His neck was thick like a tree trunk.
“I said, where do you think you’re going?” He grabbed me with his bear-size hands.
Suddenly, his walkie-talkie crackled with life. “Code green! Code green! We have a teacher down in the math department. Code green!”
Life as I knew it was over.
3