by Zachary Schechter
“Jack Peters please report to Mr. Bouldoug’s office”
Goddammit, what does that old windbag want now?
I’m sure that’s not the most compelling beginning to a story you’ve ever heard but that announcement, and, I suppose, my subsequent thought regarding said announcement, were the beginning of what I would describe as the “turning point” so to speak of my life. Plus, calling people “old windbags” is a time-tested and proven method of getting a reader’s attention so there’s that as well. Either way, the announcement may have been the catalyst for what happened next but I suppose saying that that was the beginning of the story would be a tad dishonest. You see, I was not the most well-behaved student in my high school’s history, in fact many highly respected individuals would testify to the fact that I didn’t even come close. However, on the flip-side of things, I was definitely a contender for “worst-behaved student” though I don’t believe there is an official award for that. An exasperated teacher once threw a crumpled up piece of paper at me, but of course, I don’t still have that. I wrote some obscenities on it and taped it to the windshield of her car, as one does. Anyway, on that particular occasion I was being called to our esteemed principal, Mr. Bouldoug’s office for vandalizing school property, my fifth offense in that particular category for the semester. I had written a rather violent and profanity filled “epic” on the walls of the first floor bathroom. I was just about ready to take my sixth period nap when the Boul-Dawg, as we sometimes referred to him, made his life-changing announcement. I groaned and made a show of how annoyed I was at the principal’s summonings before standing up and slowly shuffling to the door. I may have imagined it, but I’m fairly certain my teacher audibly sighed with relief as I left the classroom.
I had no intention of actually going to the principal’s office then. Like I said this was already my fifth crime against the school’s walls and I’d already heard Mr. Bouldoug’s spiel about respecting other people’s property four times, it was alway the same. Every. Single. Time.
“People work hard to keep this school looking the way it is, Mr. Peters”
“You pay people to make the school look like this?”
“Don’t get smart with me Jack.”
“Can I get that quote written down sir? I’ve been trying to come up with a way to explain my math grades to my parents and a direct order from the principal seems pretty good to me.”
I’d already used all my best lines the previous four times, I didn’t trust myself to be able to come up with clever responses if I had to hear the same speech a fifth time. So I planned on simply leaving. I figured it would be a while before anybody noticed I was missing, I would be long gone by then. You could get a lot done in “a while” in terms of skipping school. So when I left my classroom I hung a quick right instead of walking left towards the Doug-House, as we sometimes called Mr. Bouldoug’s office. I walked down the stairs, jumping from the fourth to last step in a display of my athletic and acrobatic prowess and… ran right into Mr. Bouldoug standing by the front doors to the school.
I’d like to take a quick detour from the story here, to actually talk, or, well, write, I suppose, a little about Mr. Bouldoug. Now that he’s actually shown up in the story I mean. I guess I could’ve described his voice before, in the beginning of the story, when he made the announcement. But I’d prefer to just have it all in one place here. He didn’t really look like how one would imagine a person with a last name sounding like “bulldog” would. He wasn’t short and stocky with a heavy underbite and jowls that flapped when he spoke, he didn’t have black beady eyes or floppy ears or a short little bulldog tail. He was more or less the exact opposite, not in the sense that he had a long bulldog tail, he didn’t have any tail at all, though on occasion I’d been known to draw him with the triangle-tipped tail of the devil to amuse my friends. Mr. Bouldoug was tall and lean and I was fairly certain he’d be more worried about running into me, or someone who looked like me and possessed more violent tendencies, in a dark alleyway than I would fear running into someone who looked like him. His eyes were bright blue and they had a way of pulling the truth or a confession out of guilty students when they were aimed directly at them. His hair was predominantly black but it was beginning to gray at the temples. I’d often been told by his secretary, Doris Marks, that there’d been no gray hair at all until 2011, which “coincidentally” had also been my freshman year at the school. His face was clean shaven to the point where, if it hadn’t been for a photo of Mr. Bouldoug sporting a spectacularly goofy looking mustache in an old yearbook, we’d have thought him unable to grown any facial hair at all. He had maybe three different wrinkled suits which he alternated every two days. Navy navy. Black black. Gray Gray. Today was a navy day, I wasn’t sure if it was day one or day two because I had regrettably been forced to call in sick the day before. A rather terrible bout of “I-just-wasn’t-feeling-school-itis” I’m afraid.
Mr. Bouldoug seemed to register my surprise at seeing him standing guard by the front door and smiled softly to himself before addressing me.
“I saw you take a wrong turn on the cameras, I was afraid you’d get lost so I came to help you on your way to my office,” he said. His words always had a way of sounding rehearsed, as if he’d planned for this exact situation weeks in advance and he been practicing and refining his speech ever since.
“Oh thank goodness you showed up,” I said dryly, “I got lost and y’know I would’ve asked for directions but… male ego and all that jazz.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the concept, I’ll accompany you to my office if you’d like.”
“That’d be absolutely fan-tas-tic,” I said, drawing out the word, “thanks,” I was at the point in my schooling career of putting only the minimum amount of effort into concealing the venom in my voice when talking to basically anybody.
He walked past me up the steps and we walked to his office in silence. Apparently whatever it was that he needed to say to me couldn’t or shouldn’t and certainly wouldn’t be said to me in the stairwell or in the hallway on the way to his office. He unlocked the door to his office, somehow selecting the correct key from his keyring on his first try. This was always something that impressed me. I’d managed to nab the keyring one day in my sophomore year but had been caught a scant thirty minutes later and appropriately reprimanded. I only had to serve two nights of detention though, I hadn’t even been able to open a single door during that time, it had taken me half an hour to find the correct key to Bouldoug’s office on that god forsaken ring.
“Right this way Mr. Peters, take your usual seat.”
“Aw really? I thought maybe we’d mix it up a little this time, maybe trade chairs.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if one day you were in my chair Mr. Peters.”
“Yeah, but that’d get me a one day suspension for sure.”
“Nothing you haven’t braved before.”
Mr. Bouldoug sat down in his leather backed office chair behind his spacious black wood crafted desk. The desk was littered with framed pictures, some facing the principal, some facing whichever student had the misfortune of sitting in the uncomfortable armchair across from him. Facing Mr. Bouldoug were pictures of his family, his friends, personal pictures that I’m sure gave him strength throughout day. Facing me at the time were pictures of school events, some of which I remembered, some of which were before my time, some of which I had ditched for whatever stupidity had been of more interest to me. There were also -of course- random assorted papers and pens and files and folders and other such things you would normally find on a school administrator’s desk. And of course his Dell nineteen-ninety-something era computer, which at the moment I was sure displayed my permanent record. Mr. Bouldoug occasionally liked to read me off some of my greater offenses. I think he believed that hearing them all consecutively might cause me to see the error of my ways. I kind of just saw it is a countdown of my greatest hits.
“‘Jack Gayl walked the empty streets of his newest hometown of Columbus, New Mexico with a look of pure concentration on his face.’”
It took me a moment to register what exactly was happening and when I did I was surprised by my response.
I smiled.
“You read it,” I said, still smiling.
“Of course I read it, that’s why you’re here. Why else would you be here? Wait, unless you did something else I should know about.”
I shrugged, “I dunno, I just figured, someone reports writing in red sharpie on the bathroom walls, you just clean it up.”
“We had to read it to find out who had done it,” Mr. Bouldoug said softly.
“I didn’t exactly sign my name.”
“You may as well have, your main characters are named ‘Jack’ and ‘Peter,’ and you have a fairly distinct style of writing,” Mr. Bouldoug said, and if I wasn’t mistaken he sounded a bit impressed.
My heart was racing but I was determined to keep up my cool guy facade, “So… what’d you think?”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Really?” I said a little too excitedly. I coughed, regained my composure, “I mean, really?” still a little too excitedly for my tastes. Oh well.
“Yes, really, your writing is actually quite good.”
“And the plot twist at the end?” I asked, not even bothering to hide my excitement anymore. It wasn’t every day that my principal complimented me on my stories about werewolves that I had written on the bathroom walls.
“When the werewolf turns out to be Jack? I loved it, though if I could just make one suggestion…”
“Yeah?” I said, hungry for some constructive criticism.
“Next time, write it the old fashion way, pen and pad, word document, whichever you prefer but as you know-”
“People work hard to keep this school looking the way it is,” I said completing his sentence and reciting the old speech from memory.
“Exactly,” Mr. Bouldoug said as he pulled open one of the drawers on his desk and rummaged through it in search of something.
“Y’know you shouldn’t squander this talent of yours Jack, I think we may have finally found an appropriate outlet for all of your pent up extraneous energy,” he said as he handed me red leather-bound notebook.
“What, like I should write more?” I said taking the notebook and opening it. The inside cover already contained my name written out in neat cursive. Mr. Bouldoug’s handwriting, I recognized it from all those notes home and unexcused late passes I’d accrued over the past few years.
“Yes, that’s exactly like what I mean,” he said, “Every time you think of acting out or disrupting a class or pulling some kind of prank, open up this notebook and-” he handed me a black fountain pen from his desk, “write about it instead.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply write about whatever you were going to do instead of actually doing it yourself, not only will it keep you out of trouble but if you write enough I’m sure you’ll be able to greatly improve and refine your skill as well.”
“I dunno…”
“Just try it.”
“I don’t really like writing about myself…”
“Then write about someone else. Write about some fictional character in some outlandish scenario where the only way to save the planet is to write out a distress message or something in red ink on a bathroom wall,” Mr. Bouldoug said.
I twirled the pen around in my fingers, the metal casing felt good against my fingers and I brought it to a stop when it was nestled between my middle finger and my ring finger in a writing position.
“All right, I’m game,” I said.
“Excellent, you can bring me the stuff you write if you’d like, I’d love to see it. I can be your editor.”
After that meeting I guess you can say my high school career took a rather drastic turn. I certainly got in trouble less and my grades even began to improve in some, but not all, of my classes. And once a month I would come to Mr. Bouldoug’s office on my own accord and show him what I’d written and he’d make suggestions and comments and offer words of encouragement. He bought me three new notebooks over the course of that final year of high school and he even got one of my stories published for me in a local literary magazine as a graduation gift.
After high school I continued to send him stories I’d written though now it wasn’t through face to face meetings across his black wood desk but rather through email correspondence. Me using my MacBook, him using his Dell nineteen ninety something. Throughout college he remained my sole editor and my biggest fan always offering me helpful suggestions and kind words. At the end of my first year of college Mr. Bouldoug suggested that I start working on a manuscript to be published. I wasn’t sure that I was ready for it at the time, I was much more comfortable writing short stories. They didn’t take long to write which meant I could still write one or two a month even on top of all my school work and they didn’t require as much of a commitment. If I didn’t enjoy where a story was going I could always stop writing it and begin writing something else but with an actual book that would be much more difficult to do. Still, based on Mr. Bouldoug’s advice I began working on my first novel. A fantasy land adventure title “King Of Belvania.”
Half way through my college career, however, I ran into some rough times. My father, Dr. Martin Peters, fell ill, his colleagues at Mount Sinai Beth Israel told us it was lung cancer. He’d started smoking before the true horrors of cigarettes became known and by then, he’d been too addicted to quit. He was sick for a year before he lost his final battle with his smokey disease and passed away in the late Spring of 2017. I was absolutely devastated, I slowly felt myself relapse to the way I’d been before Mr. Bouldoug’s announcement. I began skipping classes and staying in my dorm room all day, smoking pot or sleeping or watching movies and little else. I didn’t touch “King of Belvania” for an entire year. Well that’s not entirely true, sometimes I’d open it up on my computer and stare at it half-lucidly, not typing anything and eventually, sometimes after hours of meaningless staring, I’d get up, close my computer, and go back to sleep, having accomplished absolutely nothing. Once again I have Mr. Bouldoug to thank for my eventual mental recovery. If it weren’t for him I can only imagine, or write about, what might have become of me.
In January of 2018 I received an email from Mr. Bouldoug. It was quick and compact, straight to the point, in classic Mr. Bouldoug fashion.
“Dear Jack,
I hope all is well. I’d love to see how your novel is coming, email me.
-Sincerely, Brian Bouldoug”
I wasn’t sure at first how to react, I hadn’t heard from Mr. Bouldoug since before my father had passed away and on some level I think I was angry at him. He hadn’t emailed me in nearly a year, surely he’d had to have heard of my father’s passing. In the end though, after going through several drafts in my head, I decided to simply be honest with him.
“Dear Mr. Bouldoug,
I have nothing more to show.
-Sent from my iPhone”
I assumed that would be the end of it, I’d either hear from him in another year or so or he’d realize that I had no intention of ever finishing my manuscript and leave me alone. Instead I felt a faint buzzing in my pocket, Mr. Bouldoug had emailed me back. I glanced at the calendar at my phone, fastest year of my life.
“Dear Jack,
I will be in your area tomorrow, I’d like it if we could meet.
-Sincerely, Brian Bouldoug”
I thumbed back a half-hearted “fine” and he responded almost instantaneously with a time and place. I didn’t really have any intention of showing up though, it might cut into my smoking and sleeping and watching movies and staring blankly at my computer screen time. And for obvious reasons I couldn’t have that.
The next morning, well morning is probably the entirely wrong word, I’d thrown out my alarm clock as having to rationalize my ditching my morning classes every single morning had become too depressing for me. A cursory glance at my phone told me it was close to noon when I heard a knock at my door. I groaned as I rolled out of my bed and onto the cold dormitory floor, quickly grabbed the nearest pair of pants and shirt and shuffled over to the door. All accompanied by one, really long and protracted groan of course.
“Whosdare”
“Open the door Peter, we have lunch in twenty minutes.”
I instantly became alert, it was the first time I’d heard that voice in three years.
“Yessir,” I said without the slightest trace of irony as I opened the door to the sight of Mr. Bouldoug standing in the hallway.
It was a black day, probably the second one judging by the increased wrinkles on his pants, though that might have just been due to the suit’s age. His hair was almost entirely gray now, though I’m certain I wasn’t the cause of all of those gray hairs. Aside from that he looked nearly exactly the same as he had three years ago at graduation. Though he may have put on a little more weight and his face was a tad more wrinkled and his bright blue eyes seemed slightly less bright blue than I’d known them to be during my time in his school.
“You look like shit,” he observed lightly, using a tone that made it sound as if he been speaking of the weather or last night’s sports game. Though naturally he still managed to make it sound as if it wasn’t something he had only observed just now, as if he’d known what state I’d be in weeks ago and had been planning what he was going to say to me accordingly.
I had been taken aback by the bluntness of his words and so I just nodded dumbly. Back when I had been in high school it had always been a treat to hear your teachers curse and it caused me a great sense of pride when I had been the source of a teacher’s exasperated swearing. Now, however, it just frightened me. Though as soon as he said the words I knew that they were, of course true. I did look like shit. Everything about my life looked like shit at that moment and only then did I finally realize it.
“You’re right,” I said in the same even tone his observance had been made in. As if I too had come to the same realization weeks before.
“Get yourself cleaned up and then let’s go get something to eat, I’ll be out here in the hall when you’re ready.”
“Ok.”
I shaved and showered and put on some nice clothes all the while wondering why I was trying to impress my old windbag nemesis and educator anyway. I had seemingly forgotten how much I owed that man, or at least I had unconsciously pushed it to the back of my mind.
We walked to a cafe on campus in complete silence, I had long ago learned that Mr. Bouldoug was not one to fill walks with small talk or meaningless chatter. That was fine with me, I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to him anyway.
“Why haven’t you written anything?” he asked when we had sat down with our lunches.
“My dad died,” I muttered as I absently picked at my sandwich.
“Yes I know, I was very sorry to hear about that. Did you get my letter?”
His letter? What letter? No, I had not gotten his letter I told him, my sandwich suddenly no longer of any interest to me. He had sent me a letter, he told me, or rather, he had sent it to the address that he had on file for me, the house that I had lived in when I was still in high school. The house my parents had abandoned in favor of the old folks’ paradise of Florida when I had gone off to college. He told me that he had written the letter as soon as he had heard of my father’s unfortunate passing and that he was deeply ashamed that I had never gotten it. He had sought to comfort me during my time of need and to encourage me to not stop writing. Stopping would be the easy thing to do, he informed me now. To allow myself to succumb to my grief instead of rising above it would be an absolute travesty. I needed to take all of the emotions and emptiness that I was feeling and pour it into my writing. He said that he would’ve understood if I had neglected my manuscript in favor of writing things that meant more to me emotionally but the fact that I had ceased writing anything all together was simply wrong.
I felt absolutely terrible, like I had failed not only him but also myself and maybe even my father’s memory though Mr. Bouldoug assured me profusely that I had done none of those things.
“You haven’t failed Mr. Peters, you’ve simply hit an impasse in your career, a road block at which you can either choose to go around or simply turn around and go off in a different direction. The choice is yours Jack, though if I might make a suggestion,” he said as he rummaged through his pocket in search of something.
“Anything,” I said.
Mr. Bouldoug held up his hand, which was now holding a small, pocket-sized red notebook, “I suggest you write about it.”
Once again Mr. Bouldoug had effortlessly saved my life. He pulled me back from the brink with a few wise words and a small, pocket-sized red notebook. I began writing again, just simple short stories at first, filled with light-hearted humor and whimsical, cocksure characters who could do no wrong. Eventually I began writing more serious stories again, allowing myself to mine my own spectrum of emotion to produce truly moving pieces of work. They were a bit clunky and heavy-handed at first but after a few stories I regained my stride and my writing slowly but surely became better and better. Mr. Bouldoug was of course by my side, figuratively speaking, the entire time offering little nuggets of wisdom and encouragement every single step of the way and when he suggested that I return to my long abandoned manuscript I did so right away. I had begun to view him almost as a father-figure of sorts.
With Mr. Bouldoug’s guidance I completed “King of Belvania” by the end of the year and he arranged for me to meet with a publisher in Manhattan, an old friend of his from college. I jokingly thanked him for being friends with a publisher but Mr. Bouldoug insisted that it wasn’t his friendship that had secured me a meeting, he had sent his publisher friend a couple of my best works and the publisher had asked to meet me himself. I was extremely grateful and my manuscript finally began it’s journey towards publication. It was a long and difficult journey, though most journeys worth taking are. After countless arguments with my non-Mr. Bouldoug editors and countless more rewrites and edits and drafts my book was finally ready to be printed and published and read by millions of people across the country. I, without hesitation, dedicated this first step in my career as a real writer to “Mister Principal Brian Bouldoug” and for a brief period everything seemed right in my life. As if all the pieces had truly and finally fallen into their correct places.
**
The very same day King of Belvania was beginning to officially appear in newsstands and book stores everywhere a terrible tragedy was in the making nearly three hundred miles away. Mister Brian Bouldoug was involved in a terrible car accident with a drunk driver on his way home from the school where he had worked for what would have been thirty years that June. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where, after undergoing several hours of emergency surgery, he surrendered to his injuries and passed away in his hospital bed. His wife called me later that night, they didn’t have any children of their own and so his students were his main source of pride. My name had come up an innumerable amount of times, she told me, he had all of my stories printed out and contained in a neat little file that he kept on their coffee table. She asked me if I would be able to attend his funeral and I told her that there was nothing on this Earth that could stop me from being there. I arrived at the funeral hall early, a first for me as far as appointments with Mr. Bouldoug went. I stood by myself in the back of the room as Mr. Bouldoug’s friends and family took the stand to eulogize a great man. They described a man who was caring and kind and smart and even funny at times and at once I felt extremely guilty. I felt guilty for the stupid kid I had been in high school when I had, for the most part, squandered an opportunity to become close to a truly great man. I felt guilty for the year we had fallen out of touch, for my decision to stand him up when he had invited me to lunch. I felt guilty for everything I had allowed him to do for me over the years, I had done nothing to deserve his help and everything to deserve his scorn. Yet I owed everything I was to him. And then I remember his letter. The letter he had sent me. The one I had never received. Where he had instructed me to stay strong and not let myself fall victim to my own grief. To rise above it and use to it my advantage, to become stronger. And so I decided to write a letter of my own. A letter describing the relationship between an unruly student and his harried but dedicated principal. The relationship of a boy who deserved nothing and a man who, in turn, gave him everything. A letter describing the complexity and compassion of a man who knew wasted potential when he saw it and who dedicated his life to helping every child who passed through his school find his or her own path in life. This is a letter for the greatest man I have ever personally had the privilege of knowing. This, is a letter to the editor.
-With love and fondness, Jack Peters
