Weekly Screed (#926)

How Little Donny 

ended up in military school

By David Benjamin

“Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”

— Anonymous official, National Weather Service, Birmingham

QUEENS, ca. 1955 — All the kids in Mrs. Otterbein’s third-grade class looked forward to Little Donny Shaftoe’s show-and-tell oral reports — because they were captivatingly extemporaneous. They never knew what Donny would try to sell them. They leaned forward eagerly as Little Donny shuffled to the front of the class and adjusted his tie. Part of Donny’s fascination for the other pupils was that he was the only kid who came to school at P.S. 1040A in a blue serge suit, with a bright red tie that hung down to his knees.

“Today,” Donny said portentously, “I will be telling you everything I know — and I know more than anybody — about butterflies!” Donny paused for applause. There was none. A girl in the last row giggled.

Donny pressed on. He held up a Mason jar. With a stunted finger, he pointed at an object barely discernible inside the smudged and blurry vessel. He said, “This is a tiger swallowtail butterfly.”

At this, Smartass Hillary, the least popular girl in the whole third grade, raised her hand in the first row, waving it right in Little Donny’s face, and cried out, “Mrs.  Otterbein! Mrs. Otterbein!”

Although it was customary not to interrupt oral reports, Smartass Hillary was a flagrant teacher suck-up, so Mrs. Otterbein nodded her assent and Hillary shouted: “That’s NOT a  butterfly!”

For a moment, the class was frozen in shock at this extraordinary assertion. Hillary seized the lull and elaborated. “Look at it!” she demanded. “You can see! It’s a dead cockroach!”

The class remained stunned at Hillary’s disrespect toward Little Donny. But a few of them, intrigued by the brazenness of her claim, peered more closely at the inert brown insect inside the jar.

“This is New York, for Pete’s sake!” Hillary raved. “We all know what a cockroach looks like! Donny prob’ly just found it on the boys room floor!”

Donny, by this time, was orange-faced with rage at Hillary’s naked disloyalty. “You’re such a fake, you nasty girl!” he snarled at her. He spread his arms and addressed his classmates.

“Who you gonna believe, friends? Me or the girl who I beat by 14,000 votes in the election for Hall Monitor, even though all the dagos and spics voted for her three times each! Three times! Not that I have anything against dagos and spics. They love me! The coloreds, too!”

Mrs. Otterbein, seeing that the discussion had wandered, told Little Donny to get on with show-and-tell. He began by reminding everyone that his daddy was a billionaire slumlord, richer than anyone in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and all of New Jersey. “My dad went personally to the Amazon River in Africa and brought me back this rare tiger sparrowtail, which can only be found in the unexplored jungles of Anacostia!”

“If that’s a butterfly,” retorted Smartass Hillary, persistently, “where are its wings? That COCKROACH doesn’t have any wings! It’s lying on its back. Its legs are sticking up!”

“Isn’t she nasty?” replied Little Donny. “Let’s hear it, folks. All together now: Shut her up! Shut her up! SHUT! HER! UP!”

For a few rounds, the pupils were transfixed by the rhythm of Little Donny’s seductive refrain and chanted along with him. But Mrs. Otterbein rapped a ruler sharply on her desk, restoring a semblance of decorum.

“You stupid girl! This incredibly, tremendously rare butterfly doesn’t have wings ’cause I had to rip ’em off. Ya know why?” continued Little Donny, clutching the Mason jar under his Brooks Brothers suit and glaring down at Smartass Hillary. “Because of the danger! If I dropped the jar and it broke, and this swallow tigertail got out, people could die. You could die! We could all die! Horribly! ’Cause tiger yellowtails are the only known vampire butterflies — VAMPIRES! — on the face of the earth! My daddy, who was born in Germany and saved Mayor LaGuardia from a horrible death in the crash of the Hindenberg, risked his life catching this dangerous, horrible butterfly! Horrible!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Mrs. Otterbein.

“If I break this jar, we could all DIE! In minutes!” said Little Donny. But then he added, parenthetically, (“Except me. I got vaccinated.”)

“Vampire butterflies?” cried Smartass Hillary. “That’s crap! Everybody knows there’s no such thing!”

The class ignored this. They were gripped in terror at the possibility that Donny might drop the jar and set loose the monster.

“Hillary’s right,” said Mrs, Otterbein, as calmly as she could. Still, several pupils broke for the door. Others took hold of Hillary and were poised to beat her gleefully to a pulp.

Mrs. Otterbein soldiered on. “Class, there are no vampire butterflies. You need not be afraid. The bug in Donny’s jar is a cockroach. And it’s dead.”

“Fake news! FAKE NEWS!” screeched Donny. “Mrs. Otterbein! Enemy of the third grade. Lock ’er up!”

“Donny, please,” said Mrs. Otterbein, “try to calm down. You might think you have a butterfly there. I don’t know if you do. The whole idea is insane, even though half of your classmates seem to be convinced that you have a vampire butterfly from the jungles of Anacostia, where there are no jungles. But I can only conclude, Donny, that you’re either lying to cover the fact that you came to class totally unprepared and know nothing about butterflies. Or, perhaps worse, you’re deluded.”

“I am, I am!” shouted Little Donny triumphantly. “I’m Da Looded! I’m da biggest Looded in da tri-state area. I’m da King Looded. I’m da Looded to end all Loodeds!”

“No, Donny, I said ‘deluded.’ Don’t you understand?”

“YOU don’t understand. I understand everything. I am Da Looded!”

“You got that right,” muttered Hillary from beneath a pile of classmates.

At some point, Mrs. Otterbein lost control of the class. When she tried to take charge of Little Donny, he defiantly flung the Mason jar at the blackboard, where it smashed. This occasioned a wild panic among the pupils, who were convinced that the air was suddenly thick with blood-sucking lepidoptera. The exception was Smartass Hillary, who stood with her hands on hips, shaking her head at the fatuousness of her peers.

As the room cleared. Mrs. Otterbein finally cornered Little Donny, took a firm grip of his prematurely thinning peroxide hair and marched him down the hall toward the principal’s office. He continued to scream, “Unfair! Everybody’s unfair to me! Horrible! Disgusting! I’m Da Looded!”

Smartass Hillary was left behind. She picked up the dead bug. She said, “It’s a cockroach. It’s a dirty little dead cockroach.”

This was true. But nobody was left to hear.