After my now-legendary fire speech in Mr. C’s class earned me three days of in-school suspension, I decided it was time to take my education seriously.
Naturally, I chose pornography.
This was back in the late ’80s or early ’90s, when the internet hadn’t yet arrived to ruin society efficiently. If you wanted adult entertainment, you called a 976 number and listened to a recorded woman pretending to be interested in you while your parents watched the phone bill slowly develop a criminal record. and there was a hole in the Vaseline bottle.
Those numbers had names like blowjob, assream, and probably something that required a rotary phone and a priest. The voices were advertised as young, beautiful, and available. In reality, they may have belonged to a tired mother whispering from a laundry room while her children watched cartoons three feet away.
My own introduction to puberty came from a Penthouse magazine I found in my father’s closet. The cover featured George Burns and a nude Miss America, which was apparently considered a tasteful juxtaposition at the time. The title was something like Oh God, She’s Nude.
I remember that first private encounter with adolescence vividly. It was confusing, spiritual, and medically unnecessary. I had discovered a new hobby, and unlike baseball, it required no equipment besides poor judgment and a locked door, with a sock.
So when I began planning my next speech, I asked myself: How could I possibly top the fire speech?
The answer arrived immediately:
A giant poster board covered in pornography.
Not a tasteful poster. Not a medically accurate diagram. I wanted the kind of educational display that made people reconsider the entire concept of public schooling.
I asked my mother for a huge piece of poster board—roughly four feet by five feet. She happily supported what she believed were my academic ambitions. There is no more tragic sentence in parenting than, “I’m so proud he’s taking school seriously,” spoken shortly before a child constructs a homemade museum of human indecency.
Then I raided my father’s magazine collection.
My father owned enough adult magazines to qualify as a small, badly lit library. High Society. OUI. Swank. Hustler. The full historical record of a civilization that had apparently decided reading was still important, provided nobody wore clothes.
I felt guilty cutting them up at first. Then I remembered I was on a mission. This was no longer vandalism. This was research.
I wanted the poster to be inclusive. I didn’t discriminate. There were all kinds of bodies, all kinds of people, and enough anatomical variety to make a biology teacher resign on the spot. The poster became less of a speech aid and more of a crime scene assembled by someone with access to scissors. I had big cocks, little cocks, thick cocks, big tits, small tits, black ones, Chinese ones, chicks with dicks and guys with pies!!!
By the end, I had created what could only be described as a multicultural summit of bad decisions.
I covered the finished poster with two large garbage bags and brought it to school. Nobody could see what was inside. That was important because, legally speaking, suspense was the only thing keeping the project from becoming an emergency.
I was excited to give the speech. I may even have experienced a physical reaction, though I prefer not to discuss that in a setting where the word “school” appears this frequently. ok I had a huge erection!!!
Unfortunately, class ended before I could present. Mr. C told me I would be first the next day. I asked if I could leave the poster in his office.
He agreed.
That was the first mistake.
The offices were upstairs, surrounded by windows. From the hallway, you could clearly see anything displayed inside. Posters. Announcements. Fire evacuation maps. Possibly the face of God.
I walked into the office carrying my masterpiece and immediately realized I should not hang it in the window.
I wrestled with the decision for approximately two seconds.
Then I lost.
I told myself this was a public-health announcement. People needed to understand the dangers of those 976 numbers. Society had to be warned. I was basically a teenage epidemiologist, except my clipboard was covered in nudity.
So I removed the garbage bags and placed the poster in the window.
For four hours, nothing happened.
That was the longest period of peace the school had experienced since construction began.
Then my name came over the loudspeaker.
“Mr. Funk, please report to the office.”
There are many ways to hear your name announced at school. Academic achievement. Sports. A lost lunchbox. Mine was summoned by a poster that looked like the walls of the Paradise Club and The Pivot nightclub
I was escorted to the vice principal’s office, where my poster had been covered up and my father was waiting. He had no idea what I had done, which made the next few minutes feel less like a disciplinary meeting and more like a live execution.
The vice principal asked me to explain the poster.
I gave a vague summary. I omitted several important details, including the fact that I had transformed my father’s private collection into a public installation.
My father listened patiently and said, “That doesn’t seem like such a big thing.”
Then they made me open it.
The room went silent.
Not ordinary silence. The kind of silence that occurs when adults suddenly realize a child has too much free time, access to scissors, and no functioning internal editor.
My father stared at the poster. Then he looked at the vice principal and delivered the greatest line of the entire incident:
“Can you believe he cut up my magazines to make this?”
That was the moment I realized I had made a terrible mistake.
Not because of the pornography.
Because I had destroyed the collection.
I received another three days of in-school suspension. My dad lost several magazines. The school lost whatever faith it had left in my future. And somewhere upstairs, behind a covered window, my educational legacy remained folded beneath a garbage bag like the world’s least successful public-service announcement.
Funk & The Flipside 