Cooties

This much was certain. 

She had cooties, 

and because of it, no one 

would sit next to her. 

Now if you asked them 

what cooties were, well… 

that was sorta 

hard to define, but… 

they weren’t stupid. 

They knew that if 

you had cooties it was bad 

and by golly, Sherry 

had allot of cooties. 

Oh yea… and she was 

mentally retarded too. 

I figure it’s fairly important 

   to let that be known. 

I suppose that, for them, 

cooties kind of came 

hand in hand with 

mental retardation. 

I’m not exactly sure 

how they came by such logic, 

but I think this 

would be a good place to 

define the word ‘stupid’. 

It might just be instructive. 

Was it stupid for me to 

not know that mental retardation 

and cooties went together, 

or adversely, 

stupid for some 

to make that connection  

a little too easily? 

Was Sherry a girl of 

special needs? 

Well yes, of course. 

And here we should define 

“special needs”. 

Other than Sherry, 

there were the special needs of 

everyone else on that bus. 

They needed the other; 

    the outsider; 

        the lesser; 

            the substandard. 

The most ultimate of that 

   which they were not. 

And what with the 

presence of Sherry, 

it was pretty easy to 

score high on the 

bell curve of intellect. 

And so… okay. 

Maybe I can understand the 

need for Sherry’s existence in this 

ever expanding universe; 

on this spinning Earth; 

on this one particular traveling bus. 

People want to be seen as smart 

and how can you ascertain 

your level of intelligence 

without some lower benchmark 

to base it on? 

So if I put you on the spot… 

If just now I asked you to 

define mental retardation, could you 

do that for me? 

Substandard intelligence 

   relative to what? 

Did Sherry possess that which was 

   substandard compared to say… 

   the family dog? 

Was Sherry smarter than 

the smartest dog that ever existed? 

Well yes. 

That’s obvious. 

And yet Sherry could not and 

would never be able 

to do calculus; 

never understand 

complex astrophysics; 

never comprehend 

quantum mechanics. 

But then… 

What the fuck? 

Neither can I. 

So Sherry and I have this in common, 

and though both of us 

know how to tie shoelaces, 

we will never master higher math, so... 

I guess graded on the bell curve, 

the both of us fall into the 

lesser class of mental retardation. 

Having said that, 

I didn’t always have cooties. 

Not yet anyway. 

But of course 

there was that one day, 

so many years ago, 

when I climbed onto the bus, 

made my way down the aisle,  

and of all those empty seats, 

took the one next to Sherry. 

And there from the back of the bus 

came an immediate chant: 

“Jack’s got cooties! 

 Jack’s got cooties!” 

Yes. Perhaps I did, but 

let’s just call it what it was. 

    An inoculation. 

You see, 

it could be that cooties 

are very much like a virus 

and once you’re exposed to them, 

you’re inoculated 

from further infection. 

A lifetime inoculation…  not 

against being retarded, 

but rather,  

against that 

which existed 

there at the back of the bus. 

Something of which even I of 

limited mental capacity, 

could easily define 

not as that of 

superior intelligence, 

but rather 

that which fell 

under the 

simple nomenclature 

of  

“absolute 

    idiots”.  

©06 Jack Hubbell