Two months before finishing fifth grade, my family moved to a new house in a neighboring school district. I was none too happy with the move. The elementary school I was switching into was named Sunquam. Popular lore held that “Sunquam” actually translated to “stink hole” in the local Indian language. I was never able to prove or disprove that translation, so I’ll just go on believing it. Anyway, that place sucked. For some ungodly reason, the layout of the school was in a crescent, rather than rectangular shape. The crescent arced around the base of a not-too-steep hill. I’m guessing they decided it would be “cool” to build around the hill, rather than just cutting away part of the hill, or using the land in a more practical manner. There was this one fantastically long hallway which stretched off into infinity, with all the classrooms arrayed off to one side.
Everything in this school was “bombed out and depleted” to quote Dave Chappelle. Less than a month before I graced the school with my presence, an extremely weird tragedy had struck. The gymnasium had one of those huge movable walls which they would use to section it off into smaller areas for classes. Evidently, the room was being partioned off one day, and a girl tried to squeeze through just before the wall closed. I believe her name was Deanna Moon, although I could be wrong. Anyway, most of these walls are built that if they hit resistance, the mechanism automatically switches off and the wall stops. But it was either broken, or had been intentionally jammed by one of the gym teachers for whatever reason, and the wall closed on this girl.
Honestly, I’m not really sure how this happened, because these walls moved so slowly, and usually, gym teachers were watching as they closed. But in any event, this girl got stuck in the wall, in front of like three or four classes of elementary school kids. I’m not sure if she died on the spot or in the hospital afterwards. But either way, it was an extremely weird place to be coming into, especially at such an awkward age as being a fifth grader.
And damn, on top of all this, I had the absolute weirdest teacher of all time. His named was Mr. Gaffney. I think his first name was Richard, and his friends called him Dick, and so did kids in his class behind his back. Anyway, Mr. Gaffney fucking LOVED aliens. And UFO’s. Like nobody’s fucking business. This dude taught a fifth grade class right, and at least one full hour of each day, he would spend reading to us from this strange series of books. Every single one of them was about aliens, UFO’s, abductions, and paranormal hoo-ha of all fucking shapes and sizes.
One particular story of his which I remember taking a real shine to involved Nikola Tesla, who was this kind of mad scientist version of Thomas Edison. I think they were actually rivals. Tesla is a wildly fascinating guy, by all accounts, and all sorts of near-mythical feats were subsequently attributed to this eccentric character. This one in particular centered around some kind of gigantic copper ray gun that he had supposedly created. In order to test this device, the story goes, Tesla pointed it at a certain star or maybe it was a planet. Yeah, a planet in our solar system. He pointed it at this planet and “fired” it, whatever that consisted of. Supposedly, he then looked in his telescope, and the planet had changed colors visibly after the discharge of the device. I forget exactly the next step, but I think it involved that beings on these planets then counter-attacked and fired something at earth. It was supposed to be the first time ever that inter-planetary war had been joined. I think the story ended that Tesla fired his gun again and the beings were obliterated.
Bear in mind, I was in a public school in fifth grade, and our teacher “taught” us this kind of stuff as though it were part of normal curriculum. He also would talk about things like if you built a certain type of pyramid, you could put milk in it and it wouldn’t spoil. Stuff like that. I mean, I fucking loved it. I’ve always been into this kind of weird edgy type of stuff, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. He would sometimes show videos after school about aliens and stuff. I heard that he used to show those in class, until kids started complaining to their parents about having nightmares and stuff.
Also, he ran a club that met on Wednesday mornings before school, called TV Club. TV Club did not ordinarily consist of watching tv though. Once in a while we’d dabble in the alien videos. Normally, what we would do is we would go to Mr. Gaffney’s truck, and pull out all these old broken tv’s and other appliances. His truck was one of those mobile toolbox type of things, where he had every single thing known to man inside that truck, like he was some kind of technological gypsy. So we would carry these tv’s down the long fucking crescent hallway to get to his classroom, and then we would proceed to take them apart, with no real rhyme or reason.
And it was fun as shit. I used to do that kind of stuff anyway at home with appliances my parents deemed unfixable. I never could fix them, but it wasn’t about that. It was just about tinkering and looking inside and seeing what was going on under the surface. Some of the kids who showed a particular aptitude for it, he would set them up with other projects. Mr. Gaffney was really into that magazine Popular Mechanics, which used to be a lot more fringe-y than it is now. He would talk about stuff like building hovercrafts out of lawn mowers and stuff. But the biggest thing I ever saw him do in class was teach this one kid, Adam, how to make a solar cell power a small motor. It was fucking awesome, and I was always real jealous that I hadn’t learned enough about taking things apart yet to graduate to that stage of the game.
The absolute all-time best day of TV Club though was this one morning where he lead me and all the other nerds and misfits to his truck, and then handed each one of us either a weed whacker, hedge trimmer, or a small chainsaw. I shit you not. This really happened. A grown man under the employ of a public school district saw fit to give potentially dangerous power tools to fifth grade boys. We then hiked a good bit up the hill, and just set to work. I don’t remember what exactly we did. I don’t think that was really the point. I think the point was just to give us this experience, and to treat us like “men” who could handle these tools and do productive things with them. But really, we were all just shocked out of our minds. We kept looking at each other with wide eyes and disbelief in that he was letting us do this. And goddamn, do I ever remember how fucking gleeful and glorious it felt to be up there on that hill with this strange man and these weird boys, using these forbidden powertools. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
I haven’t thought about Mr. Gaffney for a while, and honestly, I’ve never really treated my experiences with him as anything more than a curiousity or a weird story. But looking back, it all had an absolutely enormous and deep impact on me. And a positive one, I think.
Anyway, at the end of my fifth grade year, Sunquam was shut down permanently. Kids in lower grades were carted off to other elementary schools and I then moved off into the misery that was middle school. Nobody knows what really became of Mr. Gaffney after Sunquam was closed. Popular legend had it that he ended up in a mental institution. Looking at the man I remember and just described, I find that to be not an unlikely course of events. I never really bought it though. My theory is he finally made contact with the mothership.
Evidently, there was also a rather large park behind the hill by Sunquam. I think it’s called West Hills Park maybe. I heard from one of my mother’s friends years later - a completely normal and respectable woman - that there had been a whole slew of UFO sightings in that park over the years. She lived right on the edge of it. I’d like to think that Mr. Gaffney eventually climbed that hill, or drove his gadget-truck up there, camped out, built a pyramid, and the aliens finally came down and called him up where he always belonged.
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