The Eagles

Dear Penthouse Forum,

I always thought your letters were made up until one day, when I was 14 years old, I went camping with some friends…

As I like to proudly state, at the time I went to junior high, my school was reportedly the largest junior high in the country. My 6th grade class at Interlochen Elementary had about 30 people in it, and they were basically the same 30 people that had been in it since kindergarten. My 7th grade class, however, had 800 people in it – there were 2500 kids spread across three grades in one large, hellish, adolescent compound. And there was something about my class that seemed particularly bad. We had a couple of teachers quit during my 7th grade year, and the district madly scrambled around to fill the vacancies.

My 8th grade English teacher (in a school this size, there were half a dozen 8th grade English teachers teaching 6 classes a day), was an elderly, joyless woman patiently working her final year before retirement. She was dead meat. We were so bad, so rambunctious and disrespectful, that we made her quit at Christmas (well, I say we, but of course I don’t mean me, I was always an embarrassingly good and well-behaved student, but my classmates were terrors, it's all I could do to stay out of their way). By that point, filling out her pension had become considerably less important to her than getting the hell away from us, and we were greeted on the first day back from Christmas break with the message, written on the board, that we would have a new teacher for the rest of the year. Miss Somethingorother.

The class buzzed with speculation about who the new teacher would be. The fact that it was a Miss was encouraging – maybe she’d be a babe like Mrs. C, the foxy 23-year-old English teacher that my best friends Mel and Lenore were fortunate enough to be assigned to. Keith, the guy who used to sit in front of me and then turn around and bite my pencil or pull my bookmark out of my book (while taunting “Confucius say pickle makes squooshy bookmark”) , was especially fervent in his hopes for some pretty young thing.

Be careful what you wish for, Keith.

When the bell rang, our new teacher walked in and you could hear a collective gasp from all the guys. She was drop dead gorgeous, with a tight skirt and a loose top. The temperature must’ve gone up several degrees as 15 pimply adolescent boys struggled to gain control of their mamboing hormones. What was worse was that she knew she was hot, and she wasn’t afraid to use her powers for evil. It was the perfect way to control the class, as all the boys immediately fell into stunned silence and stayed that way for the entire semester. Her short skirts and billowing blouses – especially as she leaned over to help you (and, believe me, we never needed so much help in our lives) – subverted all the rambunctious, antisocial behavior that our class was known for and turned all the worst trouble makers into the most attentive students.

And poor Keith had it bad. Every time she crossed her legs and adjusted her skirt, you could hear him let out a small tortured groan. He was always the first one in the room and the last one out – soaking up as much of her raw animal sexuality as he could stand. She, of course, knew this, and used to just torture him.

One day, near the end of the year, we had a spelling bee. The way she ran them was to have everybody stand up around the perimeter of the class and take turns spelling words. If you missed one, you sat down, and it continued until there was only one person left. In standard spelling bee format, our teacher would say the word, use it in a sentence, and then repeat the word. When it came time for Keith, who was standing next to me, she turned towards him and licked her lips.

“Quiver,” she said, looking into his eyes. “He makes my body quiver.” And then, almost a whisper, “Quiver.”

Poor Keith. He flushed and stammered and mumbled, “K, um, W, er…” and then ran for his seat, happy to fail and not let his condition become visible. As it turned out, I won that particular game when I correctly spelled “cunnilingus” (just kidding).