The Blind Bow-Boy's Butt-Shaft

Image via WikipediaA memory... it's high school. Grade 9, I think. We're in English class struggling with Shakespeare. This time it's his grand albatross Romeo and Juliet, and we're all surprised to discover that it's actually not that bad, all told.

Okay, it wasn't a sudden love of great art. It was a sudden love of Olivia Hussey, who, let's face it, was incredibly hot if you were a grade-niner and your teacher was actually showing you fifteen-year-old titty in the classroom. Now that's how to pique a child's interest in literary greats.

So there we are in class, and the teacher has doled out certain roles to certain students. There's the lumbering, ponderous and ineloquent Scott, a friend of mine at the time, ploughing through Mercutio, in that empty, halting monotone with which kids read Shakespeare if they have no idea whatsoever what the words they're reading mean. He gets to this:

Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench's black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft: and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

It's been tough going, trying to manage page after page of text we can barely understand, Shakespeare's greatness cloaked behind a heavy curtain of ourincomprehension. Scott attempts to carry on, but discovering the word 'butt-shaft' in Shakespeare is just too much. His voice breaks and he tries to avoid cracking up.

It's a dismal failure. Within five seconds, he's completely collapsed in hysterics, and the whole class has followed. It wasn't merely the phrase 'butt-shaft' but the clumsy, ridiculous alliteration in which it appears. And it wasn't just the awesomeness of the phrase but the teacher's complete lack of understanding. She was smiling at our mass hysteria, but she couldn't share in it. She didn't appear to get the joke.

But all those years later, my main memory of that day is of the sudden realisation that a group of teenagers were way cooler than Shakespeare and than the entire English-class industry devoted to Shakespeare-worship. That six-word phrase was an in-joke for years and would still remain so for me, were there anyone in my life today who would get the joke.

Jailbait

Image via Wikipedia

Just a memory that's been on my mind lately...

It's the summer of 1993. I'm working at a tree plantation, picking weeds. It's a horrible job, up at 4 to start work at 6 out in the boons, sunstroke every other day, dirt stains on your fingers that just never go away... the foreman was regularly stocked with that kind of speed that used to be legal at American truck stops, so we'd speed our way through the piecework, every now and then touching our heads to feel that tingling-handprint that cheap speed will leave on your scalp.

Anyway, I'm 19 and I'm working to save up a bit of money over the summer between high school and university. Most of the rest of the crew are men in their thirties and forties working their mandatory 90 days in order to go back on unemployment. A few weeks in, a girl starts. From the area where we were working (so small-town) and, as I recall, 15. Sweet at hell and quite pretty too. So she gets started, and she and I get along really well. You know, just share the same head-space, laugh at the same jokes, whatever. The other crew members, undersexed pervy old men, start talking about how she's 'jailbait'. They say it to each other, and they say it to me, in a watch-out-son kind of way.

So, properly spooked, I maintain that respectful distance and go all big-brothery on the girl. Spend the rest of the summer strictly hands-off and 'platonic' and whatever. I've been thinking about this because at the time it seemed so clearly the 'right thing to do' - 19 is an adult and 15 is a kid. In our rush to become 'adult', we go out of our way to draw lines between ourselves and people who are still 'kids'. Looking back on it now, though, I'm really not sure there's anything really all that untoward about a 19 year old guy and a 15 year old girl. Or is there? I'm not sure.

The one thing, though, that weirds me out is this: like it or not, I can come to terms with the fact that I'm 34 years old now. But to think that that girl is 30 now? That's just incomprehensible to me. It seems impossible.

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