Grunter

Here’s the story of how Homer and Grunter become the best of buddies.

One September morning at the Smoky River Junior High Penitentiary, Grunter’s hunched over his workbook in Coach Rookie’s general business class, nibbling on a thumbnail and making like he has no idea Martin Finkmeyer’s answers are right there in plain sight. Grunter’s small and quick (as a flanker, that is) with corkscrew black hair, Fresca green eyes and protuberant lips. Even in the winter, he goes sockless in black Converse high-top tennis shoes. (That’s how he showed up for the first day of full-gear football practice, prompting Coach Rookie to yell at him to get some socks and cleats.)

He’s known as Grunter, because whenever something occurs beyond his belief, he slaps a hand over his face and slides it slowly down, grunting the whole way, in deference to the celebrated seventh grade social studies teacher Mr. PFC Funck, a WWII veteran with cumulus-white hair and a flaming red face who reinforces his daily maxims and platitudes with slight hand-slicing motions at the air, punctuating each with a barely discernable grunt.

Of course, through the seasons, the boys have developed the grunt into mythical proportions.

This morning, while Grunter clandestinely helps himself to the fruits of Martin Finkmeyer’s melon and Coach Rookie faces off with Poppin’ Fresh about the pros and cons of pop quizzes, Homer slides out of his desk and ambles—innocently enough, or so it seems—to the pencil sharpener in the back of the room; as he passes Grunter’s desk, however, his pencil does a nose dive and kablooeys all over Grunter’s latest four-point heist. Staying on the move, trying to feign obliviousness, Homer glances back in time to catch his victim in the classic pose: hand sliding down the front of his grimacing, contorted face, which appears to be grunting severely. Homer fights back a battery of gut-busting giggles.

When he’s recovered sufficiently, Grunter returns the favor, and the great Second Hour General Business War officially is under way.

With each strike, it seems, the damage is more extensive. The scarred and crumpled pages pile up. And in time, Homer becomes somewhat of a grunter in his own right.

What makes the assaults worth grunting over is the sheer, deliberate, calculated causticity with which they’re conducted; for instance, as Grunter tip-toes by Homer’s desk, pencil poised, upper lip curled under, front teeth bared like a beaver’s and eyebrows raised in supreme innocence, he unleashes a psychopathic flurry of scribble marks, some of which cut right through the page.

So that’s how Homer and Grunter become the best of buddies.

And their affection for one another evolves into a beautiful thing, manifesting itself in gradually more masterful displays of savagery, such as when Homer opens his locker after third hour one day and discovers his general business workbook bent in four and crushed beneath a pile of hardcover textbooks. It can mean only one thing: Grunter has spies.

Momentarily paralyzed by the revelation of how multifarious the offensives have become, Homer only is able to give Grunter a massive, know-all grunt as his saboteur coincidentally passes him on the way to fourth hour, flaunting that sleazy beaver grin, teeth bared, and those raised eyebrows and stretched-out neck, head bobbing innocently side to side.