So you think you had it bad when you were a kid? Think that you had a horrible childhood? Did it suck? Well at least you didn’t have the childhood that I had. I was a stupid kid.

Worse yet, I think my parents enjoyed the fact that they had a stupid kid. See, we didn’t have cable until I was like 13 so my folks had to get their entertainment from some other source and they must have considered themselves very lucky that they had a stupid kid in their midst to be their personal source of immense enjoyment. I say this because instead of telling me what I was doing or believed was the dumbest thing they had ever witnessed, they encouraged me instead.

Case in point, in second grade we had a class assignment to trace the heritage of our family. We were to find out about the history of our family and read a report about it to our class. Instead of being smart like the other cheating bastards in my class and just have my parents do the report I decided to try to research the answer myself. I did this by looking in the “Children’s Big Encyclopedia of Facts!” book my mom had bought at the drug store.

Man, this book was just crammed full of information! I mean it was page after page (10 in all!) of brightly colored pictures depicting all of the knowledge a kid should have. Since I read on a 3 year old level, I trusted these pictures to educate me on the subject that I was researching-just where the hell I came from. I really liked the pictures of ancient Egypt in the book and decided that since it was cool and since I was cool, my family must surely come from Egypt.

So the day comes that we present our reports to class. My parents are sitting among the others that had come to listen to their kids give their presentations. However, unlike the other parents, my mom and dad were wearing disguises and pointing a video camera in my direction.

“My Family’s History”
By Ray Tice

My family comes from Egypt. I think that my grandpa was a mummy once. Please stop pushing me off the merry go round at recess.

The End

While other parents looked at me with a look of sorrow, my parents were giving each other a high five and saying to the other moms and dads, “Check out that idiot. His parents must want to feed him bleach.”

Case in point part two-I thought my lunch box was completely kick ass because my mom told me it was. All the other kids had the sleek plastic lunch boxes with pictures of Garfield and The Snorks on them. These were the lunchboxes kids were supposed to have. I, on the other hand, had a big metal “Happy Days” lunch box with a picture of the Fonz giving a thumbs up on the side. Yep, the coolest character in the history of television was pretty much saying, “Heeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy, kick this kid’s ass!” We would sit at the lunch table with our boxes and open them up-the other kids boxes would open with a silent “pwoof” and I would open up my machine of a box to the sound of a giant screeching metal on metal contraption put on this world only to cause embarrassment and ridicule. This would then be followed by the sound of a table full of kids moving away from me to sit somewhere else.

My mom would even put a note in it for me-

“Ray, please let me know what the other kids did when you came to school with this. Take a picture if you can.”

-M

Case in point three-Halloween. What did you dress as for Halloween? Oh yeah? That’s cool. I mean, I never really did like those costumes that were pretty much a trash bag shirt with a plastic mask only held to your face with a rubber band. The eye holes never lined up and I never did understand the small slit over the mouth part of the mask. It was hell trying to shove a Starburst through that thing.

When I was about 5 I decided to make my own costume. I told my parents my decision and they looked so happy as they encouraged me to do so. I thought that they were just excited to see the masterpiece that I would create. They were excited, but replace “masterpiece” with “piece of crap”.

I made the gayest looking robot costume in the world out of paper bags and tinfoil. There’s still a picture of me in this monstrosity-I looked like a pile of wadded up paper bags with a hole cut out so that only my right eye could see anything. I can imagine the conversations that took place at the houses that I went to visit that night:

Woman: Ah, weren’t they so cute?

Man: They sure were. I gave the retarded one with paper bags taped all over him an extra Snickers bar.

Woman: It’s good they let him out.

Worse yet, it was raining that night so soon enough I was wearing wet paper bags with a wet paper bag mask that kept falling over backwards so that I kept craning my head around so I could see out of the one hole that I had cut out for only my right eye. My parents called it “adorable” but in all actually, they were probably calling it “the funniest f**king thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”.

There’s more, but I’ll save them for some other time. I’m just glad that I was able to get past my stupid, awkward beginnings and become the brilliant individual that I am now. Right? RIGHT?!

Copyright © 2005 Ray Tice
Please do not remove the copyright from this work.

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