The Strange Tale of P. Mooney & the Impoverished Children in OD OG

The 80s education system loved a puppet. I don’t know why, but back then, the teachers often used puppets to teach us morals and anti-drug messages in our tiny, rural school. We had a whole program where Recovering Reggie taught us DARE platitudes, in order to keep us off of drugs…We learned about stranger danger this way, too. And how to make friends. Solving ethical dilemmas. All of this taught with our teacher’s hand up a puppet’s ass and flapping their mouth along to the sound of a record telling a story. I’m assuming it was the same in some other schools in that era, as I had an ex who went to school an hour and a half away from me that railed against a dolphin puppet named DUSO that was used in his elementary school. DUSO was also used in my school, but no one else I have ever met knew what I was talking about when I mentioned him. I began to consider that my trauma addled brain had misremembered yet-another-thing….till this ex was reminiscing one time about hating being taught by that fucking dolphin puppet. You mean DUSO? At the time, I thought it was a sign we were meant to be together, either remembering or sharing the same hallucination somehow…A Folie a Deuxso, if you will. But then I remembered, I tend to date at least 11-16 years older than me-so typically we’re not sharing the same generational phenomena. They learned from Howdy Doody, not Howdy Duso.

Anyway…

I went to a school of mostly feral, poor kids. We lived in the country & life was hard for most of us, almost like we were also crops planted in rocky fields. We were poor, our parents worked in mills or on farms—a town of generational poverty. For most of us, we wouldn’t aspire to much. Experiencing child abuse at home was common amongst many of my classmates. It was well known that some of these situations were happening, but there was a different culture at the time in that town about such things. I remember actually telling our 3rd grade teacher that my best friend, Jen’s dad was beating her severely enough to break bones. Casts appearing on various body parts that we all signed over and over. While I never reached out for help for myself, I made the attempt to help my friend. My teacher immediately shut me down, telling me that discipline was a family matter and what happens behind closed doors, stays behind closed doors…Her answer was like superglue on my lips. I never opened my mouth to ask for help again-for myself or anyone else. (And I was a kid that desperately needed help being protected from my pedophiliac uncle and the ratfuck greaseball friend he occasionally passed me to…) The only hope for many of us that grew up there seemed to be just to bide your time and hope you would eventually get out and never return.

The ticket out for many of my male classmates was joining the military. We lost a couple over in Iraq that way. Many of my female classmates had less options and got pregnant early, subjecting their child to the same kind of life they wished to escape themselves. Some of us, like myself, began drinking early, as our form of escape till we could disappear. Others found drugs as their destiny. One of the girls we grew up with, actually got her life straightened out and moved to Syracuse, only to get brutally murdered at age 18.

But back in 1988? We were all just innocent kids in Ms. Welker’s kindergarten class, strangers to our own futures.

On a regular basis, the ineffectual school counselor would come down with her suitcases of rotating casts of puppets to teach us lessons that meant nothing to most of us. It’s hard to learn about morals, when you’re concerned with survival. The worst days, though, were the days that she brought the puppet named P. Mooney. P. Mooney was this self-righteous motherfucker of a puppet. He was insufferable. Even worse, he looked like a combination of both Hitler and the gym teacher, Mr. Dobreski. Though I didn’t know about Hitler’s atrocities yet, Mr. Dobreski had already struck fear into the heart of most of us. He was long-legged as a spider. He had a little Hitler-like moustache. A stereotypical gym teacher haircut. And he was mean. He once scared Mike DeFonzio so badly that Mike shit his pants in the middle of class. A clump of the offensive material rolled down his leg onto the gym floor and as he saw Dobreski angrily striding across the gym at him, Mike panicked and kicked the shit across the gym floor. It was the fecal equivalent of a drug addict tossing drugs out the window while in a high-speed chase. It only made the situation worse. In later years, I clearly remember Dobreski telling a classmate she looked like a slut with her midriff bearing top. She was 10. (Small aside: She did grow up to be a major whore…but I often wonder how much of it was informed by people telling her that she looked like a slut when she was just a kid, wearing clothes her mother picked out for her. We often become the lowest expectation that people have of us, if that is what is told to us the loudest.) Real prince, Dobreski was. And this puppet fucking resembled him.

Every time we had to sit through another P. Mooney lesson where he helped us with how to handle an ethical dilemma in this condescending way of his, I would be in a foul mood the rest of the day. It was just so tone deaf, this curriculum…knowing what most of us went home to at the end of the day. My mom would always ask what was wrong when I came home fucking pissed off, as I loved going to school typically. It was my sanctuary. It was the only place I got any kind of positive input. And I would simply tell her, “P. Mooney.”

One day, I came home positively gleeful, giddy with news. The words came tumbling out of my mouth like clowns piling out of their tiny little car. I told her that one of the other kids had ripped P. Mooney’s head off. Miss. Welker had tried to reattach it, but he was simply not salvageable. His too-big rubber head kept bobbling and falling off, rolling towards the class of shrieking children that she had sitting on the rug. Once, it stopped at my saddle shoes, his face staring at me judgmentally. It was all I could do not to kick his smug, decapitated head. Shawn Hayworth, the child who had savaged the puppet was one of the more behavioral children in class. He had 2 mothers, unheard of in our small, conservative valued town. He also had an uncountable number of siblings that had been conceived somehow prior to his mother going full les—so he learned to be tough and how to scrap early. I had always kept my distance from Shawn Hayworth in the classroom. Due to the abuse I was experiencing from my uncle and his friend, I was afraid of most males—but Shawn was an unsung hero for what he did to P. Mooney, in my opinion. He was a fucking awesomely destructive rockstar. We never had to learn from P. Mooney again.

Years and years later, after my youngest brother started school, my mom decided to return to the workforce. She became a pre-k aide at the same school where my siblings & I had gone to school. My brother was still a student there, in fact—although I was nearly out of school altogether. This was the first pre-k class they had had entering North Bay El and there was not enough room for them to have their own classroom. My mother’s class was housed in an old supply room where gym supplies were kept. Amidst the smell of rubber, waffle patterned, kick balls and the squeaky wheels of those finger-crushing scooters, my mom and the pre-k teacher cleaned to make a little room for their class. She would often come home and talk about the strange items they found, that had been stashed there by teacher that had long since been retired. Some of these items all 4 of her childrens’ hands had probably touched at some point…old jump ropes, plastic counting beads, old floppy discs with Oregon Trail on them that were not compatible with any of the computers in use. A museum of all that had come before at North Bay El. She had frequent interactions with Mr. Dobreski who had not yet retired. He often asked about me, remembering me more fondly than I ever remembered him.

Later that year, I graduated from high school. My relationship was especially volatile with my mother by then. I believe that was the year she attempted to push my face into a bowl of scalding ramen. She told me to die at Christmas dinner. I had just a see-through wisp of a hint of a relationship with my dad, after he & my mother had nearly divorced during the winter. Life was pretty hard for me and I was just counting down the days till I could pack my bags and go to college a few hours away. I just peeled page after page from my mental calendar, trying to reach that day circled in red marker when they would drop me off at campus and leave me the fuck alone till Christmas break. In previous years, my parents had forgotten my birthday or not celebrated it. I assumed my graduation would be just another one of these days of their cruel neglect. I made plans to hang out at my friend’s house, post-graduation and then go to the beach with our usual crew of rascals to buffer the disappointment of having a family that not only didn’t give a shit about me, but actually seemed to hate me.

That’s why I was especially surprised when my mom handed me a box before my graduation ceremony. I remember having this carbonated feeling of hope in my chest. Bubbles of optimism. Like, maybe this was her attempt to show she cared…maybe we could repair this broken winged thing before college. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I opened the box and pulled out a scrap of musty smelling fabric first. I was puzzled, it looked like a doll shirt with a piece of masking tape around the collar. What the…as I turned the shirt over in my hand, I knocked the box over and out rolled a head. A small rubber head with a little push-broom moustache, the paint worn from his eyeballs, giving him a creepy vague look. The fuck? P. Mooney. That was the gift I received for graduating 6th in my class from school.

My mom started cackling at my confused response. “I found him in our room at school when we cleaned. I just had to bring him home to you!”

Of course. The perfect gift to summarize the shit relationship we have: No matter what good you do or how hard you have worked to achieve it, I will be here to ridicule you and remind you of things that ruin your fucking day. Why, you’re welcome, daughter.

When I went to college, P. Mooney became a sort of litmus test for people that I thought I might want to let in my life. If they laughed and agreed it was fucked up or could contribute a worse story about their own traumatic upbringing, I knew they could hang with this chick. If they just stared at me oddly and awkwardly searched for something to say, I would know…they gots to go. I once passed out on this guy’s lap, drooly & drunk, after telling him about P. Mooney. He never spoke to me again. Clearly, he couldn’t hang. (Although, it might have been the fact I was so inebriated I passed out and drooled on his clothed crotch & I was emotionally slutty with too much of my fuckedupness…but clearly, either way, that’s what I had to offer at that point. Best to figure out early this isn’t something you’re willing to put up with and then make your exit.) My favorite response was from a violinist friend of mine at college, Karen C. She was a bit of a bubblehead, a ditz–but a talented musician. She had been homeschooled and reeked of naivete. Just to test her, I regaled her with the story about P. Mooney and when I was finished, she just looked at me and said, “It sounds like a pirate phrase. ‘Yargh, Me Pooney.’” Ok. You clearly weren’t listening-but I will still accept that answer. And, I have to say, I was lucky enough to find many friends who passed the P. Mooney litmus test.

I don’t know where P. Mooney is these days…I disgustedly left him in a bin in my parents’ basement before leaving for college. So…probably still there. (Although, I wouldn’t count on that bastard to stay put–seems like the type to do surveillance and creep around like that fucking Elf on the Shelf nonsense. His head and body working in concert to sneak about, as he tries to garner material for a future lesson about perseverance in the face of adversity.) Along with P. Mooney’s whereabouts, I don’t know any of my classmates’ either, for that matter. I don’t speak to a single person from those days. I was one of the ones that left and I avoid returning, even for visits. Too many ghosts to box with in that poor little hamlet. North Bay Elementary was closed down years ago. I’m not even sure if it’s still standing. I have forgotten the country roads I took to get to Jen’s house on my bike…. the ones I raced to get home on time before dinner on those long summer days…cows lowing at me from the fields as I coasted down the giant hill on the turn off of California Road. My only connection to the place is my sister who lives in the house we grew up in and we’re estranged.

Still, I wonder what happened to Shawn Hayworth…Mike DeFonzio…Jen….the other kids I grew up with. I like to imagine them somewhere sunny, where the air smells like dryer sheets…Maybe they have an orange tree in their yard that their dimply, towheaded child plays under as they sit happily watching. I like to imagine them in love, a well-fed, lifetime kind of love. The type of person that has friends to throw them surprise birthday parties. I hope if they ever spare a thought for me, they do the same–construct a dream life that in no way resembles the rocky place we came from. And if they can’t do that, I hope they know that I’ve done ok with what I’ve been given. I have a wonderful love in my life that lights up the corners of the dark rooms I sometimes mentally find myself in. I have 2 amazing kids who know they’re loved. I have loyal friends who accept me perfectly, even as imperfect as I am. I have a job where I help others. Overall, I’m doing ok, better than P. Mooney could have ever predicted. Then again, he never did teach us anything about survival, we did all that by ourselves.

Last updated January 27, 2024