Soft in the Head Read Online Free PDF

and you choke on it. All you want is to spit it out and starve rather than feel this way again.
    My teacher, Monsieur Bayle, was a vicious force-feeder. He scared the crap out of me. There were days when he only had to look at me and I’d nearly piss myself. Just the way he said my name: Chazes ! I knew he didn’t like me. He must have had his reasons. For a teacher, having a halfwit pupil must be a pain in the arse. I can understand that. So, he took out his frustration by making me come up to the blackboard every day. I had to recite my lessons.
    I had to recite my lessons in front of the arse-lickers, who elbowed each other and jeered with their hands in front of their mouths, but also in front of the dunces, who were relieved to see that I was dumber than them. MonsieurBayle never helped, in fact he did the opposite, he made things worse. He was a real bastard. I can still hear him now, I don’t even have to try, his voice is permanently drilling into my ear.
    “What’s the matter, Chazes? Your brain still in bed?”
    “What’s up Chazes, too cool for school?”
    “It seems that young Chazes is up excrement creek!”
    This would make my classmates laugh.
    Then, he would add:
    “Well, Chazes? I’m waiting, we’re all waiting, your friends are waiting…”
    He would shift his chair just a little to turn it towards me. He would fold his arms and stare at me, nodding his head. He would tap the floor with the toe of his shoe, saying nothing. Tap, tap, tap… was the only sound I heard, that and the tick-tock, tick-tock of the clock on the wall. Sometimes it went on for so long that the other boys finally shut up.
    The silence engulfing the tick-tock and the tapping of the shoe was so great that I would hear my heart pounding in my head. Eventually, he would sigh and wave me back to my seat, saying:
    “Decidedly, my dear Chazes, I fear you’re a few cards short of a deck.”
    The other boys roared with laughter, enjoying the spectacle. Me, I wanted to kill myself. Or to kill him, if I could have. Killing him would have been better. Grinding the bastard’s head under my large boot like the chalk-dusted cockroach he was. At night, in bed, I would revel in thesemurderous thoughts, it was the only time I felt happy. If I didn’t grow up to be violent—or no more violent than necessary, anyway—it’s no thanks to him. Sometimes, I think that thugs learn to be brutal because people have been cruel to them. If you want to make a dog vicious, all you have to do is beat him for no reason. It’s the same with a kid, only easier. You don’t even need to beat him. Jeering and mocking him is enough.
    In primary school, there are kids who learn their conjugations and their multiplication tables. Me, I learned something more useful: the strong get off on walking all over other people, and wiping their feet while they’re at it, like you would on a doormat. This is what I learned from my years at school. It was a hell of a lesson. All that because of some bastard who didn’t like kids. Or at least he didn’t like me. Maybe my life would have been different if I’d had a different teacher. Who knows? I’m not saying it’s his fault I’m a moron, I’m pretty sure I was one even before that. But he made my life a misery. I can’t help thinking that other teachers would have given me a hand up. Something I could use to grab on to, instead of sliding down to the bottom of the hole. But unfortunately there were only two classes in the school back then, one for the babies and one for the bigger kids. We were stuck with Bayle from age eight to age ten. (Eleven, in my case.) I know I wasn’t the only one who got it in the neck. There were other kids whose lives he ruined with his meanness and his cruelty. He was full of himself just because he was a teacher. He looked down on us, whichwasn’t exactly hard since we were only kids and didn’t know anything. But instead of being proud, of being happy about all the things he