Suck This, Berkshire Country Day School!

Note: The post below has been changed to protect the privacy of the middle-school bullies I originally mocked in it. I have now given them all more suitable names, rather than using their real names. Although bullies deserve to be outed (and flogged ruthlessly through the public square), I'm getting tired of deleting the spammy comments that have poured in from some loser with too much time on his hands who clearly didn't like seeing his name here. Hereafter, he shall be called Jujyfruit Assbat. The name of the school, however, I ain't changing. They deserve the sucky press that comes when teachers don't protect kids from being bullied.

The original post with edits is below!

Because of the vagaries of the Facebook universe, I recently came across the name of a fellow classmate from 9th grade, when I attended a special little hellhole called Berkshire Country Day School.

Let me tell you about this school. I arrived as a 14-year-old, having moved from Greece (where my family spent about a year due to my father's work at the time). I was naive, awkward, and completely unaware that I had the smoking-est body of my entire career (which I swathed in chamois and LL Bean couture). I had horses on the brain and often waded around in stables. I sat around at night musing about poetry, and generally wondering why my lot in life was to go to BCD.

There were exactly 9 kids in the 9th grade class; all had been together since kindergarten. Let's just say they were a tight-knit bunch. There was one hose-beast named Baconback Dix, with an emphasis on the DIX (she sort of looked like she might have one, or several). Two trashy chicks named Slutteree Dinglebrack and Angela Iddlethwap, who wore tapered jeans with zippers near the ankle. And a horsey lady named LaLa Lovelace. She was all right, sort of. The males consisted of a lovable, goofy guy named Boofah, a strange and goofy guy named Heehaw, a brace-faced Blue Oyster Cult lover named Lump (who briefly and sadly became my boyfriend), a pretty cool and weird guy named Frog, a redheaded fucknut named Sludge, and one all-star mutherfuckah named Jujyfruit Assbat. The latter is the very same whom I encountered on Facebook. The only person out of that group I might want to say hello to these days is Frog. Like I said, he was a pretty cool guy. I guess I'd give old Boofah and Heehaw and Lump a handshake, too. Maybe I'd nod at LaLa Lovelace.

This school was just a rotten place. It might have been nice for those in "the club," but for outsiders it was very, very bad. The funny thing was, all my siblings had attended this school years back and had loved it. Loved it! They thought the place was the cat's ass. Of course, my sister later revealed that she hadn't liked it very much, really. And I never heard my brothers talk so highly of it, either. So I think my parents were delusional. They specifically went out of their way to send me to this fuckhole. They thought they were doing me a big favor.

My classmates decided I didn't fit in (thank god, in retrospect, because they were grade-A assfaces) and so some of them would make fun of me. And here's the kicker--one of the teachers, whose name was MISS JUICY FATBACK, decided she would laugh right along with them when they made their stupid cracks! Miss Fatback was a big, fat, swollen lump of a woman. She was pretty young; I think she got a kick out of the 9th grade boys liking her. They called her (inexplicably) Miss Taboobstake. And she liked that! One of the ways she got them to like her was by laughing at their inane jokes, even at the expense of a poor lil' 14-year-old girl. Her ass was about the size of Ohio so I think she was a little insecure. I mean, what kind of place is it when teachers join in on the bullying?

Then we had Madame Slap, the French teacher. I took tutoring with her because I was placed in a higher class than I should have been. She was so old, my sister had also had her as a tutor. When you got an accent mark wrong on your French compositions, Madame would reach out and viciously scratch a pen mark on your arm. If you did really badly, your arm would be cross-hatched with ballpoint marks when you left her little studio.

There were probably some decent teachers there--I seem to remember liking the English teacher a good deal, and the science teacher wasn't so bad, either. The art teacher I deem worthless because I have bad memories of being tormented there, too, and the teacher blithely ignoring it. Teachers who don't defend kids deserve a special place in hell. Yes, you, Miss Taboobstake.

BCD was a very bucolic-looking campus, with small buildings dotted around a large expanse. There were cross-country ski trails on the property, and a swimming pond. It felt like I had to take about 8 buses to get there because it was so far from the farm-like homestead where my parents had temporarily set up shop. I think it was a 40-minute journey in all, and every bit of it rotten. The bus ride was like a classic movie in which the cool kids combed their hair and talked about their inane lives, while I sat hunched in my seat with a kid two years younger who decided to be my friend. I think his name was Tate. He was a good kid, all right. It plays very well in the movies, these mismatched friendships. We used to make up puppet shows with a pair of mittens.

Lots of kids at the school played Dungeons and Dragons. In retrospect, the place was lousy with geeks. And also jocks. The athletes were spilling out of the woodwork. Since I'm channeling Holden Caulfield tonight, I'll just say they were a bunch of crumby phonies, the lot of them. Just about every kid there felt entitled, and acted like a prize monkey. The kids would hang around in big groups and pick on other kids who were smaller, or who looked different, or whatever. It was frightful. Jujyfruit Assbat, the rotter whom I encountered via Facebook, would dance after me down the walkways shouting "Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!" This really happened, people. (He's an "actor" now, but I deleted the link to the heinous photo of him with hair as big as a wolverine's pelt. Funny, a friend of mine was casting a movie not so long ago, and who should show up in the stack of resumes but....our friend Jujyfruit Assbat. He was summarily recycled. Oh yeah, Jujyfruit, it's always wise to be nice, because I could have helped you a wee bit in your dumb career. I won't even explain how or it would make you cry in your soup. But I'm not enough of a bully.)

For a long time after the miserable six months I spent there (the latter half of my ninth-grade year) I received solicitations for money from the school. I have never had less inclination to give money to anyone. Although I haven't thought of it much in years, I take a special pleasure now in slagging the joint. Thank you and good night!