The Wungbat

I am now, and have always been, a judgmental person.  Usually based on whim, impulse or my mood, I will categorize a person, a place or a thing, within moments of having first encountered it.  One of two things generally results from this: either remarkably astute clarity and perception, or a mistaken assumption that comes back to embarrass, disgrace, belittle or endanger me.  My lifetime score on this is probably pretty close to fifty-fifty.


On the down side for me is the fact that I have a penchant for judging complex people in a very superficial manner, and sometimes in the same breath, infusing simple and basic situations with incredible (and unnecessary) elements of complexity.  Take that last sentence, for example.  Anyway - after fifty years of seeing things this way, there is one thing that I have learned -- and that is, that I will always tend to see things this way.  So I am determined to just live with it - sometimes I impress, sometimes I leave myself open to well-deserved ridicule.  In a few minutes we will know which of these categories this blog entry belongs in.  Sigh.


Growing up in a very small town in a very rural area, exposure to other people tends to be very limited.  Exposure to other people who are fundamentally different than oneself is almost unheard of.  When I was a kid virtually everyone around me, young or old, had always been there.  You knew everybody, everybody knew you; you walked down the street and every single person you saw was someone you knew, and knew things about (often too many things). If somehow there was cause for new people to move to town, new kids to enter the school, it was generally a big deal.  The core group of residents almost never changed, other than by birth or death. But the small percentage that were transient were generally the most interesting and talked about people around - at least when they first arrived, and especially when they weren't listening.


I used my "talent" for quickly categorizing (read, judging) people to good effect, in that nobody who moved to our town was there more than a few hours before I had (a) given them a nickname, (b) made up stories about their past or their future behavior, and (c) decided whether they were on my good list or my bad list.  It wasn't impossible for somebody to move from one to the other, but it was uncommon.


I'm pretty sure I was on a lot of people's bad list.  And with good reason.


I was part of a small group whose fantasy-filled imaginations resulted in us talking or acting in a way that made no sense to many of our peers.  In fact, I was one of the "leaders" of this group, if you can say there were any leaders - my vivid and perverse imagination provided a lot of grist for the mill of idiocy that we so tirelessly toiled at.  Basically we were weirdos.  And basically I was the Head Smartass.  The more normal kids (read: mundane, boring, of no real interest) either ignored us or did not care too much for us.  We had a knack for making people think they were being made fun of, even in the rare instances when it was not so.


All of this leads me to the brief and curious case of the Wungbat.


When I was in junior high school, we got a new student teacher - I do not even remember for sure what class or classes he was teaching in, probably English.  I remember this fellow's name but I'm not going to use it - at this point he should probably be allowed to rest in peace.  He was a young fellow who looked like he could be a bit of a misfit - but he was a pretty nice guy who didn't really rub anybody the wrong way.


First time I saw him I decided he was a dork or a doofus or something of the sort.  I started calling him "Wungbat" and three or four of my cohorts picked it up - and we were off to the races.


Like I said, he seemed like an OK guy - but of course he was a teacher; or worse yet, a "student" teacher - so we kind of had to let him have it.  He became the object of various kinds of low level ridicule and creative "fun" on the part of my pals and I (probably he got some of it from other sources too, being a novice teacher and all).


I was a character; I surrounded myself with friends who were characters, and I made other people into characters - or sometimes caricatures - through no fault of their own.  Wungbat was totally unassuming, he went about his business without making any waves.  We rewarded him by making fun of the way he walked, giving him a funny voice and then acting out scenarios where he said or did something ridiculous, nonsensical, humorous or just dumb - we built a whole fantasy world around this poor guy (well OK, mostly I did, but others helped) and had a running dialog with each other concerning the escapades and pitfalls in the life of Wungbat.


And don't ask me what this word means.  I don't have any idea now and I didn't have any idea then.  I just made it up, pinned it on him and never looked back.


Even before his term of service as a student teacher was up, we started to get tired of picking on this poor guy.  He was probably at the pinnacle of our creative abuse for several weeks, then most likely somebody else came along for us to direct this sort of foolishness towards.  So we started paying less and less attention to him.  He kind of drifted out of the daily regimen of harassment, mockery and abuse that pretty much defined my life at the time and filled most of my idle minutes and hours (but most of it actually was pretty funny, so don't forget that part when you start condemning me for this admittedly uncalled for behavior.  In fact ask any of the small group of people who tolerated this sort of thing - dare I say, enjoyed it and actively participated.  If you want names - well, start with my cousin, or the Senator).  The newness kind of wore off and so did the ludicrous fantasies.  He was just a normal guy, after all - although as a teacher he was a pretty inviting target.  And he never knew what sort of ridiculous scenarios he had been thrust into, in the imaginations of a bunch of creatively abusive junior high school idiots.


This sort of thing happened over and over, with me and my pals operating like some sort of humor and sarcasm infused herd of jackals, feasting on the flesh of our victims and then moving on.  I have forgotten many of the people we picked on or made up jokes and fantasies about.  I remember a few who kicked my ass for it, but mostly these people have vacated my memory and drifted on into obscurity.


One more thing about Wungbat, though, and it's part of the reason I remember him in this context.  I remember sometime near the end of his student teaching gig, he was standing in front of the class and started telling us about this event that he had witnessed.  And it was a very odd moment, and so I remember it still.


Wungbat, for some reason I cannot recall, started telling a story of something that he had seen happen in Great Falls.  It went something like this:


"I was at the court house in Great Falls and I was out front, by the steps leading up to the front doors.  There were a bunch of people around, and this lady came out of the court house doors and started down the steps.  She slipped and fell, and she tumbled all the way to the bottom of the steps.  She was lying there on the sidewalk and looked like she might be hurt.  But nobody went over to check on her, nobody would approach her, because she was such an ugly woman.  It was odd but no one would go and see if she needed help.  She was just too ugly."


Now can you imagine this guy telling this story, casually, to a bunch of junior high school students that he doesn't really know? There was no indication that he was helpful - just observant, I guess.  And I'm telling you, this guy was a really nice guy as far as anybody could tell.


But I guess this is the sort of thing you might do if you are, in your heart of hearts -- a Wungbat.


And I still don't know if this one goes in the win column or the loss column.