Below is a relic: the last surviving Carter Head.
The era of the Carter Heads took place during my senior year in high school.
Mr. Carter was an art teacher who had the classroom next to our art teacher's room. Because our school had two art teachers, there were two art student camps--each thinking their teacher was the better. Our teacher, Mr. Edwards, was, of course, the cool one. Mr. Edwards was a sweet guy; he liked and was very supportive of every student in the art department.
Mr. Carter wasn't. He despised us and constantly accused us of being behind anything that went wrong: stealing his supplies, taking over his display case space, and smudging his example drawings. He felt we didn't respect him and were plotting against him.
If anything, the Carter Heads just proved him right.
Mr. Carter prided himself on his appearance and wore well-pressed, highly coordinated outfits. He thought we (Mr. Edwards' senior art students) dressed like homeless people. He always teased up by calling us "lady killers" and asking where he could buy ripped up jeans, oversized dress shirts, and second-hand trench coats.
One day I came to school with a safety pin in my ear.
"Hey GQ," he called out. "Where can I get one of those things? Does Gucci make those?"
He'd always end these exchanges with an offer to teach us how to dress whenever we decided we wanted to "get up with the ladies."
One day my friend David drew a cartoon of Mr. Carter--the first Carter Head. Underneath was written one of Mr. Carter's favorite phrases, "You give me the blues."
I tore it out of David's notebook, snuck over to Mr. Carter's office door, and taped it above his name plate. When Mr. Carter saw this, he went ballistic, going from classroom to classroom asking who had drawn the picture of him. When he came into our classroom, he immediately focused on me.
"Hey Jordache," he said. "You know who drew this picture of me?"
I pretended to be clueless and Mr. Carter walked off to the next classroom mumbling something about "rectifying this silliness."
The next day, David and I both drew Carter Heads and taped them up in his classroom. Same reaction.
Things quickly grew out of hand. Two Carter Heads a day became four, then four became twenty. Within two weeks, we were running sheets of Carter Heads off on the library copy machine, then distributing them throughout the school. Everywhere you turned, there were Carter Heads: Carter Heads in library books, Carter Heads in the cafeteria fork tray, Carter Heads over the faces on every flier and poster throughout the school. Most of them were small, about the same size as the one above. By our estimation, we had created and placed almost a thousand Carter Heads.
Mr. Carter walked around in daze, it seemed to be the only thing he could talk about. He didn't get it, he'd exclaim. "These pictures don�t look anything like me."
As time went on, Mr. Carter stopped complaining about the likeness and started accusing his provocateurs of racism.
"They might as well draw me in black face eating a damn watermelon," he reasoned.
Despite their ubiquity and Mr. Carter's efforts, we remained anonymous. No one knew who was drawing or distributing the Carter Heads. Or so we thought.
Just when Mr. Carter started threatening to bring the matter to the teachers union, Mr. Edwards suggested we call it quits. He'd known the whole time, but didn't say anything.
"Perhaps it's time this joke ended," Mr. Edwards quietly suggested. We agreed, and eventually all the Carter Heads disappeared.
Over time, various rumors floated around about who had authored the Carter Heads--it was big skuttlebutt in our school. Eventually, the rumors settled on us--and Mr. Carter found out.
We expected the worse, but were surprised when he never said anything to us. By this time the school year was just about over, so we figured that Mr. Carter was just letting it go.
During the last week of class, we started to clean out our art projects and supplies and had them all lined up across the back of the art room. We came in one morning to find that someone had dragged a magic marker across several of David and my drawings. While it could have been an accident (substances get smeared all over an art room all the time), it sure didn't smell like one.
Later that morning we walked out of the art room and passed Mr. Carter's room. He was standing just inside the doorway, looking right at us, arms crossed, nodding his head slightly, with a smile ear to ear.
On the last morning of school, we asked Mr. Edwards for the key to the display case so we could get a few last things out of there. Instead of taking things out, we actually put something in--a massive five foot by three foot Carter Head.
After we locked it in, we walked out of the school for the last time--off to start the rest of our lives. As we reached the student parking lot, Dave opened his hand.
He still had the display case key.
With a nod of approval from me, he turned and tossed the key into the football practice field.
