Animals

11/07/2022

Merriam Webster defines cryptid as “An animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster) that has been claimed to exist but never been proven to exist”. Wiktionary (the Wikipedia dictionary) defines it as “A creature known only to folklore or legend, the existence of which is not proven by scientific observation”. The teacher of my 2-week cryptozoology class seems to define it as “anything airing on the History Channel at 3am”. The majority of class time was spent watching clips from highly dramatized tv shows, primarily MonsterQuest, which follow bored middle aged white people in middle America as they headed heavily armed out into the forest to find creatures they could use to lord themselves over the self-righteous, so-called scientists who think they know more than them simply because of their decades of accredited academic study and widely accepted, highly detailed research. In the first week alone, we saw people from all walks of life; Wisconsin white, Ohio white, old white, and slightly-less-old white; don REI camo and large rifles to search for creatures like Bigfoot, Dogman, Mothman, the Ohio Grassman, Rougarou, Chupacabra, and a green Alaskan killer mermaid called Qalupalik.

Well, I’m glad they have a hobby.

The more interesting story, however, was being told in the corner of the room, where a series of events occurred that have taught me a key life lesson:

Young people cannot be trusted with whiteboards. As I sat in the back of the room, a 15-year-old named Quinn stood near the front, expressing her horniness through dry erase imagery, primarily of teenage-ified superheroes with angular jawlines, fluffy hair, and pronounced muscular shoulders. These characters, more often than not, were shown madly in love with each other. Surrounded by hearts and notions of gay male romance, they stood staring deeply into each other's poorly drawn eyes, wondering what they did to deserve such a horrifying fate. 

I wanted to tell her to stop fetishizing gay men, but I knew exactly how that would end. The gaggle of the attention-seeking, teenagers with more sensitivity than sense, that sat around her would turn on me at once, calling me a prude, uneducated bigot for not wanting my people, whom I have seen beaten, threatened in public, and even killed in acts of terrorism, to be reduced to objects of blind teenage sexual desire. And no, I don’t mean superheroes. I mean gay people. 

You do not get to reduce the struggles of an oppressed group to a cute aesthetic simply because it makes you wet.

The most bothersome thing about that whole situation, however, was the seeming refusal to acknowledge that sexualized imagery of any non-educational manner is completely inappropriate for a school environment. We were in high school, me a senior and them juniors and sophomores. Written on a nearby wall in incredibly large print was the phrase “I <3 feet'', alongside a drawing of a four toed foot. That is disgusting. You are allowed to think that. In some places, such as a support group or sex dungeon, you may be even allowed to say it. But only on an application for a school of podiatry are you allowed to write it.

“Eh,” said the teacher, “what are you going to do?”

Umm, I wanted to say, stop them?

As it was, I was too stunned to do anything. This was only the first day of what was to be a nine day class. There were plenty of other people there, people who mostly sat in corners of the room on their phones or laptops, playing games or scrolling through social media, waiting patiently for each day to be over. What was truly amazing was that none of them seemed to care about any of the madness that was going on around them. I wanted to ignore them as well, but their combined volume alone kept me from ever being able to concentrate on anything else.  

Before the teacher had finished her introductory presentation and before most students were even awake, they decided it would be a good idea to hijack the class and argue about the swastika. Sure, it was once a Buddhist and Pagan symbol of peace and seasonal harmony, but that’s what it means anymore. 

They started to argue, as you would if you were unconscionably stupid, that people in the modern era can still use the swastika, because after all the Nazis stole the symbol, and everyone should accept it only as it was centuries ago. I would like them to present that opinion to a Rabbi, or better, a holocaust survivor, and see how they respond.

Thankfully, however, I didn’t have to wait for that to happen. Upon receiving all the uncomfortable looks and side-eye from even the dumbest students in the class, they realized that they are not, in fact, in a cozy online bubble and that they would be held accountable for their words and actions. Their internet hot takes that have no regard for the actual world would not fly here, no no. Here, where there are people with different values and ideas that cannot be simply forced or drowned out, extreme ideas of all types are regarded with the same level of distaste. Hence, they were forced to backpedal.

“I mean, uh, it is, um, important to, uh, acknowledge that meanings can change with time!” they said, trying to maintain their illusion of morality. “If… if everyone understands that something means, you know, what it does now, they, um, the meaning of something can change and it, um, the older meanings can still be there but, um,” and on and on and on.

It was incredible. Watching these people stammer just as the people they hate so much do when confronted with the same type of real difference, it was tantalizing. 

Of course, it didn’t last. After they had finished their backpedaling speech, they backpedaled literally, into a corner of the room. Annoyingly, this was the corner where I was sitting, mulling the deliciousness of their ideological suffering. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as socially liberal as the next guy, but these people formed all their views without ever going outside and touching grass, so they tend to be just a little bit outlandish.

Now concentrated in the corner, they formed a class of their own. While the teacher stood in the center, trying to continue her presentation, the volume of the corner steadily grew until it outshined everything and everyone else. 

“Oh my god!” they said, “do you remember the Avril Lavigne music video?”

“Yes! Oh my god!”

“Which god?” I asked.

“Oh my god, shut up!”

Pulling out their laptops, they went on a hunt for the strangest examples of cultural appropriation I’ve ever seen, from photos to Katy Perry wearing any manner of things, to a Taco Bell ad from the 90’s featuring a chihuahua with a grown man’s voice saying “Yo quiero Taco Bell”.

I’m pretty sure the entire concept of Taco Bell is cultural appropriation. Or, at the very least, an insult to all peoples from Spanish speaking countries.

They sat gawking for almost an hour, feeling more and more offended by things that had nothing to do with them. Most of them were oyster cracker white, and yet they felt personally victimized by corporate insults of cultures other than their own. Never once was there a mention of the deeply rooted stereotypes that perpetuate the behavior of Katy, Avril, or the taco-desiring yap dog, only how disgusting the tip of the iceberg is.

How is it that these people can be so enthralled by victimhood and not by actually being helpful?

The class was taught by Summer, a charismatic middle-aged woman who, in many ways, thoroughly represented what I would imagine conservative parents of the 2000s would be most afraid of. She held a Master’s degree in theater set design, a thing which I was not aware you could get a discrete graduate degree in. Before she turned 25, she’d born a child out of wedlock, and by the time she was 30 she had been married more times than she had fingers remaining on her right hand. Her parents were polyandrous, one mother married to two fathers, and the three of them bore 11 children together, Summer being the second youngest and the only girl. She lived in the woods with her wife and maintained various boyfriends, including the head of a motorcycle gang, the former drummer of the metal band Slipknot, and an inordinate number of alcoholics named Brian. One of her neighbors lived in a pickle tank which, I can only hope, after retiring from pickling duties, was thoroughly cleaned.

She started at my high school as a long term substitute for the 11th grade English teacher while he was on paternity leave, and she quickly became a student favorite. Her grading policy was, in essence, that spelling your name correctly at the top of the page warrants full marks, and she never pushed anyone to actually do the work they were assigned. The few times she had taught before, she had been a community college teacher, and in college if you don’t do the work you fail the class. This is in stark contrast to high school, where teachers will hold your hand and lead you through work unwillingly, ensuring you pass and graduate on time and in the process holding everyone else behind. Her class was relaxed. I did some great work and wasted some great time chatting with her about old cars and three wheeled electric motorcycles.

She stayed on after the regular English 3 teacher returned the second semester as an on-call sub and a teacher of classes during intersession, the two-week period that the cryptozoology class resided in. Her forte was a class called Norse Gods and Goddesses: More than Just the Marvel Universe. Every day she would show up to that class wearing an ornate nordic outfit she had made herself as part of her membership to a historical preservation society for old-fashioned dress, and she put on a full show for all audiences. Students made shields and swords out of whatever materials they could find and, as a fun activity to finish off the two weeks, her students would invade the class next to them. This was most often the Theater class, full of students who were enthused by the prospect of being invaded as it would give them a perfect opportunity to practice their theatrical deaths. 

She never actually wanted to teach anything else, but had been coerced by the school into teaching something else in the morning, restricting Norse Gods to the afternoon only. Cryptozoology, then, was her effective cop-out. She had some sort of qualification in anthropology, and was able to sell the class on that basis, knowing full well that her intent was to teach absolutely nothing. I don’t blame her for that, in fact I appreciate it. It was exactly what she promised it would be, at least in private. I was a senior, I didn’t want to learn. I wanted a break. She promised a chill space with some vague and silly topics for conversation, and that sounded perfect to me. Had I known what would actually happen, I probably would’ve picked something else.

I don’t know why I was surprised the morning of the second day as I walked into class to find a small child in an orange squid hat standing in front of another whiteboard, now covered in poorly drawn images of hairy feet, some adjacent to blushing faces with extended tongues, licking them. Some of the captions included: nice feet, beautiful feet, amazing feet, I love feet, I love feat, cute foot, damn nice foot, feet lover, yummy feet, yo quiero comer feet, and ex-bestie #1 (Devian).

I stood in the doorway for what felt like an eternity, just staring at the horrors that had been written before me. It was like looking at a car crash, the bodies of the deceased drivers splayed out on the inside of the windows. I took a deep breath, plugged my nose, and joined them in the back seat.

Soon after, the kid in the squid hat was forced into the closet behind the whiteboard, screaming “I’m not gay, I’m not gay!” as the door was closed on his struggling arms. He emerged a few minutes later, now with a curly Poirot-style mustache drawn in black marker on his upper lip. After he forced his way out, somebody else went in, this time more willingly and without the cries of a lack of homosexuality. Then, Squid Hat began making out with a backpack.

If any of them had severe learning or developmental disabilities, this sort of behavior would be, if not excusable, then explainable, but I cannot bring myself to believe that was actually the case. Instead, the best explanation I could find was that they were just children who found a method of attention-getting in 5th grade and simply stuck with it for 5 or 6 years. 

These kinds of people are the prime evidence for my theory that the world would be better if children were not allowed access to the internet until age 15. When the immaturity of a 9 year old meets the power and horniness of a 15 year old, the result is as deadly as any disease or war throughout history. Provide these children with a time machine set to send them back to mid 1940’s Japan and they could’ve caused the conservative hearts of the members of the imperial governments to split clean in half. Indeed, they could end any international conflict quite quickly simply by giving the old-fashioned religious or government officials in charge confusion and horror induced strokes.

Not long ago, my friend Annika told me a story about a similar instance in Pride Club, which she ran. The people there are the same as the people here, white gay San Francisco suburbanites whose parents make more than 150 thousand dollars per year and whose closest encounter with actual oppression was when a drug addict on the street called out a slur they weren’t entitled to. The club, much to Annika’s chagrin, cultivated a similar environment to this classroom. The words of the outraged bounced off each other, ever growing in insanity and volume, never seeming to reach any critical mass.

Despite being the club leader, Annika was powerless to control them, and this quickly became a problem. She is autistic and, like me, has a high degree of auditory sensitivity, and she made the brutal mistake of pulling the autism card when asking them to calm down.

“Can everyone please try to not talk over each other?” she asked. “I’m autistic, and I’m having a lot of trouble with the noise.”

“Well…” they started, after a pause, “some of us have ADHD, and we can’t really help it. So, we have to be allowed to do this, otherwise you’d be suppressing us based on our mental illness.”

What?

The really unfortunate thing about this whole situation was that the bevy of strangeness these students were laying at my feet wouldn’t be there if not for Summer. Her laid back style and penny dreadful backstory made her the center of gravity for the people most likely to cause this sort of destructive atmosphere. Their desire to lay waste to everything in their path combined perfectly with her inability to care.

As well, they felt as though they could take ownership of her. They were all in some sense gay or queer, and Summer was the only teacher to my knowledge who had openly held an LGBT identity. She represented an obvious figurehead for them. Still, from what I could tell, they didn’t actually seem to like her very much. They were willing to overlook her ideological transgressions and poor life decisions and instead make their moral judgments of her in the same way that they would a character in a TV show. Sure, some of the things she has done are questionable, but she is interesting. How could a polyamorous woods witch not be? 

They saw her as a curiosity more than as a human, and that enraged me even more. The person they acted as though they looked up to was really just a puppet. They would ask her for a story about her life as if they were putting a coin in a slot machine and pulling the lever, and she would provide and let them bask in the glory of the spinning wheels and flashing lights. Why was she giving them what they wanted? I brought this up to her once and all she could do was shrug her shoulders. Perhaps she was just used to it. It makes sense that people would generally have a hard time looking at someone’s humanity when there are so many more interesting layers in front of it, but it saddened me to know that she had resigned herself to the fate of being a funny side character in other people’s lives. I tried my best to see her personhood in day-to-day life, but it was genuinely hard. Almost everything she had to say was so outrageous that it drew all attention away from anything else. No matter who she was talking to, she was always the one talking. Every detail of her romantic or professional life was splayed out, and when you tried to turn her monologue into a conversation, it would always be reeled back to her. I was never her discussion partner, I was her audience. 

Summer was the teacher of the cryptozoology class, she had the power to stop everything that was going on and force the disrupters to stop, but she didn’t. They were her audience, her fans, and if she tried to rein them in, she would lose them. That is the real reason why they liked her: she enabled them to do whatever they wanted to do. If she stopped them, they’d move on to someone else. 

The group didn’t encompass the entire class. There were maybe 10 of them in a class of 20, and almost every member of the friend group school-wide was accounted for here. One particular inclusion to that group that confused me to no end was Jet, a junior whom I had gotten to know the previous year. I was a teacher’s assistant in chemistry and he was in my class. He was one of the smartest students in that room at any given time, the questions he asked were well thought out and logical, he always got his work done, he always paid attention. His place amongst a group of disruptive, poorly informed, self absorbed megaphones seemed especially wrong.

Over the 10 minute break in the middle of class, the two of us got to talking.

“What on Earth are you doing hanging out with those people?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like social protection, I guess. I mean, you know the other people that go here. Do you really think I would fit in with them?”

I looked at him, nearly 6 feet tall with shoulder-length hair, half dyed blue, half black. “No,” I said, “I suppose not.”

The other people in the class were certainly not paying attention; why would they care about a half-assed “documentary” where the same piece of grainy footage gets played over and over again? They were all goofing off in some way, but unlike the other group, they were quiet. I didn’t mind so much that they weren’t participating in the class or doing anything of substance, they weren’t being problematic. They weren’t being disruptive. Summer’s laid back attitude is similarly what had attracted me to her in English 3, but I couldn’t help but see myself as different. I wasn’t paying attention, but I also wasn’t taking the opportunity to be horny or loud or problematic or disruptive, I was just sitting in the corner, writing in my notebook. 

This cryptozoology class was Summer’s second attempt at teaching an intersession class other than Norse Gods. The first was a class about how to hand-spin yarn using a drop spindle, a primitive instrument that looks like a jack or dreidel with a long stick on one end and a hook on the other. The class was called Drop Spindle Spinning after the original name, Spin, Stitch, and Bitch, had been rejected. Similar to Cryptozoology, Drop Spindle was a cop-out, an excuse to waste several hours doing something mindless for course credit, but unlike Cryptozoology, it was actually calm. The 15 or so students just sat around chatting and spinning yarn, and I absolutely loved it. 

But, of course, good things don’t last. Four days into the class, I was stopped on my way in the building and pulled aside by a school administrator.

“Hey,” she said, “come with me. I wanna chat.”

“Um, why?” I asked.

“Just things,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.”

You shouldn’t need to specify that.

She led me back to her office where she sat me down at a large table and asked me a series of vague questions about Summer. Has she been acting strangely? Is she doing a good job leading the class? Has she said anything odd recently?

The moment I sat down, I went into politician defense mode. Being the brash, controversial character she is, Summer was under a fair bit of scrutiny at all times, so my one and only goal was to dissuade her from thinking that she could’ve done anything wrong. 

“I’ll level with you,” she said, finally. “We got a report from a student that Summer may have recently shown up to school drunk. We know that you and her are close, so we wanted to ask you about her.”

Oh, shit, I thought. Summer had been making jokes with some students about alcohol and drug use for the past few days, and it would appear as though someone didn’t get the joke. In my opinion, having teachers and respected adults talk candidly about things like that is important. Young people need to have a genuine idea of what it’s like to be an adult with access to legal drugs, because that’s exactly what they will be. Some people obviously disagree, prudes, I would say, but prudes evidently have a lot of power. To be fair, an allegation of that nature is very serious and must be handled that way, however, in this case, it can be rather easily put aside by the realization that Summer is extremely allergic to alcohol, and if she attempted to show up anywhere drunk she would die before she got there.

After the questioning was over, I charged upstairs into class.

“Summer,” I barked, throwing my bag down on the floor by an empty seat, “we need to talk.”

“Now?” she asked.

I walked right back out the front door, stopping before. “Yes.”

She walked to meet me outside. “What, what’s wrong? What happened?”

“You need to shut your mouth,” I said. “Lilia just pulled me into her office to question me about you.”

I told her about the report and the probable investigation that would ensue and she thanked me for the heads up. When we went back into class, she kept her mouth sealed when the discussion turned to topics of ill-repute. I’m not really sure how much my warning helped, though. She told me the next day that she had been questioned after class ended, and she texted me later that day to tell me that she was out.

They actually told me I'm not allowed to text you but I'm texting you anyway I am on paid administrative leave so fuck these guys, she said.

We were told the class was going to be taken over by another teacher, and when they failed to show up, it was canceled outright. We were randomly assigned places in other classes to fill the remaining week, and that was the end of it.

That set priority number 1 for Cryptozoology: make the class last. Somehow, someway, we needed to convince the school that what in reality was a group of disinterested students pretending to watch the History Channel was actually a full exploration of mythical creatures. We assumed that this would be fairly easy. The perpetrator of the drunkenness allegation was not in this class, and barring another complaint, we should be just fine. After all, what could be easier than doing nothing? What we encountered is what can be described as the George Constanza problem: doing nothing becomes much harder when there is someone hanging over your head, expecting you to do something. 

On the second day of class, we were visited by another administration member, Klieman, tasked with “ensuring the success” of each and every class. When he entered the room, he did not see a particularly successful class, instead he saw students playing games on their phones and drawing on whiteboards while the person who was supposed to be leading, Summer, sat in the corner knitting.

He was most displeased.

“Hey,” he said to Summer in his patented, softly condescending manner, “hey, um… what’s going on here?”

“The kids are just watching a video,” she said over her knitting.

“Oh, okay,” he said, looking out at our now concerned faces. “Um… are you sure?”

Summer laughed, “Well, I think so!”

“Look,” he said, reducing his voice to whisper that he thought we couldn’t hear, “you gotta get these students more engaged. I’m gonna come back after break and when I do, I wanna see these students really… having a good time.”

“Okay,” Summer got up and started ushering him out of the room. “Okay, well, we’ll make sure of that, yes.”

She shut the door behind him and looked back at me, mouthing the word shit. 

“What?”

“We have to actually do something when he gets back.”

“Really?” I groaned.

“Yes,” she said, looking slightly hysterical. “Fuck.”

“Where would he get the idea that we aren’t doing anything?” I asked, gesturing to the room full of people playing games and chatting. “Everyone here is so incredibly engaged!”

“Oh shush.”

I looked down at my notebook which I had been using as a distraction, writing down in detail the idiosyncrasies and faux pas of my classmates. 

“What if I read to the class?”

“Hmm?”

“There’s this Borges book I read a while ago, The Book of Imaginary Beings. What if I sat in the center of the room and gave an overdone dramatic reading of one of the sections?”

I pulled up a pdf of the book online and showed her one of my favorite chapters, A Bao A Qu, about a creature that lives in a tower in the Mewar region of India. 

“That is excellent,” she said.

When break was over, the class assumed their places around me, sitting in a high chair in the center, ready to begin. A scout was sent outside the room to wait for his approach, and when she saw him she came running back in.

“He’s coming, he’s coming!” she said, sitting down hastily.

I waited a moment, and then I began:

If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway gives access to this terrace, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb up.

Klieman came in through the front door and stood for a moment, looking puzzled at the circles of people gathered around me. The class was ooh-ing and aah-ing at the end of every sentence and every clause, just as I had instructed them to. He walked, slowly, over the Summer’s desk. She was still knitting. I felt powerful.

At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiraling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims.

He whispered something to her and pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket. My attention was split between him and my laptop. At this moment, I was in complete control of the room in front of me. On my command, they would hem and haw over what I had read them. I was given both the opportunity and the duty to read something silly in the manner of an overdramatic, Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Hamlet. My audience, not wanting to break the illusion of interest, kept their eyes locked on me, at center stage. It was false, I knew that; none of them would be looking anywhere near me unless they thought the future of their class depended on it. Still…

At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. 

Klieman handed back the slip of paper, now covered in his chicken-scratch handwriting, and began quietly making his way out. Backing into the door to open it, he flashed a thumbs up in my direction. 

When the door shut behind him, the class let out a thunderous roar of excitement and laughter. They returned to their original seats and restarted both the video that had been playing and their various distractions. Summer showed me the sheet of paper he had given her. On it he had written “Great job empowering a student to lead the class!” We didn’t hear from him again for the remainder of Intersession.

I never got to finish the story. By the time he left, I was around half way through, and understandably no one really cared to hear the ending. He was gone, so what would be the point? 

I sat down at my seat in the back of the room and continued reading where I had left off, this time silently, to myself:

Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralyzed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk.