Matt Mitrione: His Hate-Boner for Fallon Fox Turned Out to Be a Real One

 

The Anti-Garrison: He's Like the Antichrist, But For Me, Garrison

 

Every bully and abuser I've ever had is a brainwashed cult member. The Anti-Garrison is their god.

Silent Warrior, Chapter 3

Wandering through the high school hallways might as well have been an intercity marathon for Scott George. His legs felt as though they were tied to cinder blocks. His head hung low enough to obscure his vision. His breathing was shallow and measured. All he could muster up for dialogue was the occasional zombie groan. Exhaustion hit him like a baseball bat to the skull. Hell, any deadly blow would have been a welcome addition to this hellish day.

By the time he dragged his lifeless corpse into Tom Simpson’s history class, the teacher was already scribbling notes on the chalkboard and the rest of the students were either goofing around or filing in. As always, Scott took a seat in the back of the classroom and tucked his head low, which was a favorite tactic of his for avoiding Mr. Simpson’s attention. Scott rubbed his temples as a way of clearing up his blurry vision, but it was all for naught. Perhaps a trip to the vending machine before class for a Dr. Pepper would have woken his ass up. Too little too late. The buzzer blasted throughout the school to signify the first class of the day.

“Alright class, settle down! Take your seats! It’s time for the lesson to begin,” said Mr. Simpson in with Shakespearean authority. The students did exactly what he said, but there was still the occasional snicker from one or two of the quarterbacks. The history teacher straightened his flat black hair, moustache, and glasses before clearing his throat and officially addressing the class.

“Now then, when last we were together, we were on the topic of slavery in the United States. In 1843, the settlers…” To Scott, all of Mr. Simpson’s words started blending together and cannibalizing each other to where he was merely background noise on a TV. No different from a used car salesman. No different from a televangelist begging for cash. No different from a politician giving a boring speech on campaign finance reform (if that’s what it was called).

Scott could feel his eyelids growing with heaviness. No matter how hard he pulled them open, blurry vision would cloud his consciousness. The crescendo of exhaustion came in the form of an uncovered yawn that opened his mouth as wide as a Pink Floyd the Wall movie poster. What a familiar piece of cinema to him.

The thunderous pounding on his desk jolted Scott awake and quickened his pulse to at least a thousand beats per minute. Somehow Mr. Simpson had teleported to the back of the class and stared him down with malicious intent. “If you’re going to yawn in my class, cover your mouth first. Nobody wants to see what’s inside of that thing.” As Mr. Simpson made his way back to the chalkboard, Scott’s muscles tensed as the other students gave him mocking smiles.

“As I was asking you all,” said Mr. Simpson. “Does anybody have an example of what a slave’s living conditions were like?” The class was silent. “Anybody?” Still silent. “Oh, Mr. George, how about you?”

“I…uh…” Scott’s lips quivered as he struggled to find his words. “I didn’t raise my hand.”

“I really don’t give a damn where your hand was, Mr. George. I asked you a question and I expect an answer. Your grade depends on it,” lashed Mr. Simpson, to which the other students snickered at Scott again. The introverted student felt his cheeks warm up like a coffee pot as he struggled for more words. “Out with it, Scott!” belted the teacher.

“They slept in….shopping carts?” Scott mentally kicked himself so hard that he could have been a professional Muay Thai fighter in another life. Another possible occupation would have been comedian since the entire class burst into laughter and Mr. Simpson held his temples between his thumb and forefinger.

“No, no, no, no, no!” rambled the teacher while throwing his chalk to the ground. “The slaves did not sleep in shopping carts! When I first said at the beginning of the semester that class participation counted towards your grade, I did not mean giving foolish answers that you clearly pulled out of your posterior! Try again!”

A sea of chuckles and hateful smiles spread out across the classroom and Scott George was the captain of his own capsized boat. He drowned in embarrassment and anger rolled into one as his entire body heated up even faster. Mr. Simpson wasn’t even close to being as hideous as Aloysius Striker, but Scott kept his vengeful response measured anyways. “I guess that’ll be the last time I speak up in class.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me is that you’re willing to take a C or a D because you gave one stupid answer? Is that how you got to the senior level of this school? By giving up easily?”

“The truth is!” belted Scott, silencing the classroom gigglers. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I gave you a better answer like sleeping on mesh beds. It wouldn’t have meant a damn thing if I told you that’s where the phrase Nighty-Night, Sleep Tight came from. You know why? Because you wouldn’t have taken my answer seriously anyways. Anytime I’ve given you an answer, all you said was Okay and then left me hanging. And why aren’t you doing anything about these laughing pieces of shit?!”

Mr. Simpson wagged his finger at Scott and said, “Watch your language with me, young man. I don’t care how justified in your opinion you think you are; it doesn’t excuse such disgusting speech.”

“Disgusting speech?!” snapped Scott as he smacked his palms on the table. “Your students are fucking laughing at me and you’re calling ME disgusting? Is this how you treat all of your introverted students? By humiliating the shit out of them?!”

“Two things, Mr. George” sneered the teacher while folding his arms across his blue flannel shirt. “One, if I catch you using those words again, you’re getting thirty minutes of detention after school. And secondly, you can’t use some pop science personality test to justify not speaking up in class like you’re supposed to. All you had to do was give me a reasonable answer and instead you said shopping carts! Shopping carts! For god’s sake, Scott, get it together!”

“Yeah, Scott, get it together!” said a football jock off in the front corner, which earned a round of hideous laughter from the other students.

Every immature cackle sent a surge of lava hot adrenaline through Scott George’s body. His stomach twisted in painful knots. His head ached worse than a football concussion. His vision glowed bright red as he scanned the room for his first victim. He didn’t have to look hard to find his next form of pyromantic speech. “Shut the fuck up and stop laughing!” he screamed before shooting to his feet and throwing a garbage bin at the jock.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Mr. Simpson snapped, shutting the class up immediately. He pointed at the mocking football player and said, “I’ll deal with you later. As for you, Mr. George, I told you exactly what was going to happen if you swore again, so try not to be too surprised by the consequences. Thirty minutes of detention after school with me!”

“Like I’m going to show up!” said Scott as he sat back down and folded his arms.

Mr. Simpson’s face molded into weaponized anger as he marched towards Scott, placed his hands on either side of the desk, and stared directly into his introverted student’s puffy eyes. With a calm, yet sinister tone, he said, “Believe me, Mr. George, you will show up today after school. We’re going to clean up this classroom together. We’re going to spend some quality time with each other. And if you don’t show up to detention…a laughing football jock will be the least of your worries. Do you understand me, Mr. George? Do you catch my drift? Or do you need to recharge your introverted batteries and think about it some more?”

Scott spent the rest of the class trying to control his mild shivers. The rest of the class had nothing to laugh at anymore as they too stared on with trepidation. Mr. Simpson marched back to the chalkboard, scribbled some more notes (with a new piece of chalk), and glared at his students. “Since none of you feel like giving me the answers I need in a typical conversation, perhaps you’d be willing to do so on a pop quiz. Take out a piece of paper and a pencil. There are twenty questions on this assignment.”

Scott’s shivering intensified gradually as the other students glared at him with a sarcastic “Thanks a lot” stare. He couldn’t even hold his pencil and paper still as he took the pop quiz. Some of his answers looked reasonable while most looked like chicken scratch. He hurried through the questions so that he could curl back into his corner faster. He wished the buzzer would hurry up as well. Oh, what he’d give to lock himself in a bathroom stall or a janitor’s closet. What he’d give to release the tears that built up within his system. He’d give his left nut if it meant he could punch the shit out of Mr. Simpson until the end of time. Blood and tears were a tastier and more intoxicating cocktail than the finest of wines.

But before that fantasy could come to fruition one of these days, there was the ever looming timestamp in his mind of thirty long minutes. Thirty minutes of mockery. Thirty minutes of agony. Thirty minutes of hatred. The mental timestamp should have just read five minutes, because that was all Scott George needed to blow his stack and go into a rampage. Five minutes alone. What a glorious usage of time. Maybe he wouldn’t show up to detention just to spare Mr. Simpson the beating he rightfully deserved. Such a noble act of consideration from a guy whose blood boiled like a cauldron.

Laugh Like You're Dumb

The raven stared down upon the two hillbilly gangsters like a judge in his bench giving a lengthy prison sentence. The wasteland was the perfect place to dispose of a dead body since nobody came out here and the heat would cause the corpse to decompose faster. The only witnesses to this crime were the stoic raven and the leafless tree it stood upon. The two rednecks used shovels to dig a shallow grave for their fallen victim: a beautiful young girl in a bloodstained white dress. Even in death, she still had ropes bound around her body and duct tape over her mouth, the latter of which prompted one of the murderers to tell a joke.

“Hey, Billy-Bob, how do you start a conversation about rape? Peel the tape off of the victim’s mouth!” The sociopaths weren’t the only ones who got a good chuckle out of it. A college student named Daniel Jason let out an uncomfortably long hyena howl to where his ribs and back were both aching. And then everything went black and a pause symbol manifested itself on the screen.

The classroom lights went up and Daniel was slowly coming down from his laughter spell. The entire class, including the elderly teacher Jonathan McAvoy, stared at him with fire in their eyes and downward eyebrows. As the final few chuckles departed from Daniel’s belly, the blond-haired frat boy looked around and shrugged his shoulders. “What? What’s everyone looking at me for?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Jason, why is everybody looking at you?” asked the white-haired and fuzzy-bearded Mr. McAvoy rhetorically. “Would somebody like to explain to him why we’re all staring at him in disbelief? Oh, Miss Miller, how about you?”

“Sure, I’d love to,” said the short pink haired Christie Miller. She cleared her throat and said, “You know, Daniel, the reason we’re all staring holes into you right now is because you laughed at something nobody ever should. There’s nothing funny about rape or murder. It’s demoralizing, it’s traumatizing, and it’s the most violent thing you could do to another human being.”

“Give me a break, lady!” said Daniel while throwing his hands up defensively. “Why do you feminists have to ruin everything for the rest of us? We can’t laugh at anything anymore because it might be offensive to someone else. What happened to us? What the hell’s going on here?!”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said Mr. McAvoy as he walked up to Daniel’s desk and placed his palms on the surface while glaring at his student. “This isn’t about political correctness or artistic license. Over the years, some of us, not you included, have learned a simple philosophy that everyone should adopt: basic human decency. In other words, we’re supposed to treat each other like we ourselves want to be treated. Suppose a real life rape victim heard you laughing at that joke. Then what? Are they just supposed to ‘cowboy up’ and take it?”

“Yes! You’re damn right they should!” shouted Daniel back at his teacher, who then backed up a few steps. “I don’t have to dumb down my sense of humor just because there are pussies and wusses in this room! Nobody tells me what I can and can’t laugh at!”

Christie shot up from her seat and retorted, “Fine! Then you don’t get to tell the rest of us what to laugh at either! That means if you slip on a banana peel and smash your head open on the floor, the entire class is allowed to laugh at you because that would pretty much be the same thing as America’s Funniest Home Videos!”

Daniel chuckled sarcastically and said, “Please. You’re missing the whole point of America’s Funniest Home Videos, Crusty. They’re funny because they’re happening to somebody else. Of course it wouldn’t be funny if it happened to me.”

“Congratulations, Mr. Jason, you’ve proven to everyone in this class that you’re not capable of having empathy for others,” said the film studies teacher as he folded his arms. “You know who else doesn’t have empathy for others? Bullies, serial killers, rapists, animal abusers, basically the entire sewage system of our society. You wouldn’t happen to be one of those people, would you, Mr. Jason?”

Daniel scrunched his face and shrugged his shoulders in confusion while saying, “What the hell are you talking about?! Laughing about rape isn’t the same as condoning it! I don’t go around raping random women because I want a good laugh!”

“I’d really like to believe that, Daniel,” said Christie in a low, but tense voice. “I’d like to believe that you’re just a good person with a twisted sense of humor. Those people do exist. But then I go back to the other things you’ve said today, about how feminists are ruining everything and victims of abuse should just toughen up. How are any of us supposed to trust you knowing what kind of stances you take?”

“And just so you know, Daniel,” said Mr. McAvoy. “Feminists aren’t ruining anything in this country. If it wasn’t for them, women wouldn’t have the right to vote, they wouldn’t have the right to divorce their husbands, they wouldn’t have the right to embark on their own careers, basically, they’d still be second class citizens. In some ways, they still are and it’s all because of people like you who perpetuate that ignorant attitude we’re supposed to be fighting.”

During the last few seconds where he was being berated, Daniel sat at his desk looking down at his shoes while his anger boiled over in the form of shaking and heavy nose breathing. He finally pounded the desk with open palms and shouted, “That’s it! I’ve had just about all I can take of you stupid bastards! I’m leaving! If you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to the cafeteria to cool down! I’m going to eat a ham sandwich and watch Anthony fucking Jeselnik on my iPhone! And if none of you like that, you can all go straight to hell! Fuck you guys, I’m out of here!”

Daniel shoved his desk to the ground and flipped the entire class the double birds before picking up his backpack and stomping out of the classroom. “Don’t plan on coming back!” yelled Mr. McAvoy before he received an extra middle finger from the hissy-fit-throwing frat boy.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m really sorry about Mr. Jason’s behavior,” said Mr. McAvoy. “I’ll make sure he’s never allowed to set foot on this campus ever again. We don’t need that kind of ignorance in a place that’s supposed to be about education.”

“No!” yelled Christie while holding up a flat palm. After a brief moment of silence, she said, “Don’t expel him just yet. He may be a sexist pig, but he’s not completely without empathy. If you’ll all excuse me…I’m going to go give him some!”

It had been a whole half hour since Daniel Jason stormed out of Jonathan McAvoy’s film studies class. The frat boy sat at a table in the cafeteria by himself munching on a ham sandwich and watching dark comedian Anthony Jeselnik on his iPhone, just like he said he would. Every demented joke to come out of Anthony’s mouth made Daniel chuckle with delight and forget about the humiliation he suffered in the classroom.

And then the familiar throat-clearing sound got his attention. He looked up from his iPhone and saw Christie Miller standing across the table from him and smiling while waving. “Jesus H. Christ, Christie, what do you want? Are you here to tell me that I just offended a bunch of Christians by saying Jesus H. Christ? Those religious assholes say it all the time and nobody gives them shit about it.”

Still with a roguish smile on her face, Christie brushed her dyed pink hair back and said, “Relax, big boy, I’m not here to chastise you. I just wanted you to meet my new best friend. He’s into the same things you are and you two would really hit it off. Maybe you could let him into your little fraternity.”

Daniel suddenly felt a hard slap on his broad right shoulder as a muscular black arm was wrapped around him in an affectionate way. Daniel gulped a huge wad of saliva and shook nervously as he saw the big black football player standing over him with a seductive grin on his face. “Now hold on there, partner!” said the black dude. “Your ass is about to get some sweet Texas loving!”

The frat boy stared into his offender’s eyes with horror on his face and a quivering lip. He could barely get out a frail, “Uh-oh” before he shot up from his seat and tried to bolt out of the cafeteria in one piece. He didn’t get too far. He banged his knee on one of the tables and collapsed to the ground holding his knee, prompting everybody in the cafeteria, Christie and her “new friend” included, to laugh until their ribs ached.

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” yelled Daniel as he rolled around on the ground clutching his knee. They didn’t shut up. They grew louder in their donkey laughs, causing him to have a tear roll down his cheek.

As soon as Christie and her new friend got their back-splitting laughter out of their systems, the pink-haired student pulled out her wallet and handed the football stud a wad of twenty dollar bills. “Keep your money, baby,” he said. “That kid’s sweet little ass is payment enough!”