Wayne’s Whirl Son’s Wild Classmate Elicits A Mix Of Awe And Sympathy

School is in session, thank heavens. Now I can get my daily fix of Wild Wayne.

Wild Wayne - his real name is even more striking, but I’ve had to change it, to protect the guilty - is a barely-under-control boy in my son Noah’s sixth-grade class who behaves like a human Alka-Seltzer tablet plunged in the waters of life, fizzing and hissing, throwing off bubbles in a self-destroying seethe.

You probably knew him when you were in school yourself, the loud, fat kid who sweats too much, is always late, can’t keep his hair combed, gets into one godawful scrape after another, goes crying to the teacher to rat on his classmates, gets caught red-handed in mischief all the time, forgets his homework, gives preposterous excuses (though it is gratifying to see that dogs in America have not lost their appetite for homework since I was young), brags about stuff he could not possibly have done or seen, and is inevitably exposed as a liar and held up to ridicule, after which he rages, sulks and swears - and tells an even taller story the next time.

The great thing about Wild Wayne is, he never learns. All the teacher’s tsk-ing, all the gasped “ah-woo-oo” amazement on the part of his classmates rolls right over him. He is heroically incorrigible. Wild Wayne views each new day as an opportunity for a new piece of grossness, an embarrassment that will be talked about for weeks.

“Oh, man! This sucks!” Wild Wayne exclaims whenever he’s caught or punished, which is practically every day.

He says it within earshot of the teacher, too, and this usually results in extra punishment. But Wayne barrels on like Toad in his motorcar, unstoppable.

“You wouldn’t believe what he did today,” Noah begins, and we are all spellbound. “He got out of the car and called his father a bald a—. Everybody heard him, too.” Wild Wayne is adopted, we have learned, and his parents are on the Vatican’s short-list for sainthood.

“Talk or walk,” I tell Noah when I pick him up from school. He knows what I want, he’s got what I need: Wild Wayne anecdotes.

“Well, he was drinking Slimfast at lunch today, and everybody got onto him for that,” Noah offered. “He said he was drinking it for the nutrients, but we all believe it’s because he’s fat. And when people made fun of him, he blew up and called them all names, and Mrs. Shelfer heard and came over and bawled him out. And no sooner had she walked away than he said: ‘Oh, man! This sucks!’ Really loud. So she came back, and he got busted again.”

I could listen to these escapades all day. Gossip beats news all hollow, and Wayne-gossip is the real goods. Wild Wayne exemplifies the amazing intensity of the schoolyard and classroom, a terrific time and place whose bright colors and cataclysms are far more thrilling than the grown-up world, with its neckties, car payments and job-drudgery. Adulthood is vastly overrated.

Noah says Wild Wayne wouldn’t get into so many scrapes if he wasn’t so sensitive. Children can detect a sensitive child in their midst like mosquitoes homing in on a blood-meal. This makes Wild Wayne a queerly sympathetic character to me: He is half-perpetrator, half-victim.

“He doesn’t have much hair on his legs, so the kids were needling him, saying he must be shaving his legs,” Noah reported recently. “He went ballistic. He said he had a disease. They asked him, ‘What disease?’ And he made one up: ‘varicitis.’ He even went to the science teacher and said everyone was making fun of him for having varicitis. And, of course, the teacher had never heard of varicitis, but he turned to us and said, ‘You boys couldn’t survive unless you had Wayne to bother, could you?’ And we agreed.

“Then, there was the time he said he knew George Lucas personally. He loves ‘Star Wars.’ He has ‘Star Wars’ stuff all over his bedroom, but that’s not enough. He said he e-mailed George Lucas on his computer, and George Lucas answered him. And everybody was like: ‘Awwwww, Way-ayne!’ And he got furious that nobody believed him, so he slumped his shoulders over like this” - Noah bowed his shoulders gloomily - “and went over to the playground fence somberly and stayed there for about 15 minutes, waiting for somebody to go over and console him. And, of course, nobody did.”

Note the words “somberly” and “console.” Telling these stories about Wild Wayne is adding breadth and color to Noah’s vocabulary.

Last year, Wild Wayne ended the semester in a blaze of glory. Noah’s class was involved in putting together some sort of in-house “newscast,” with real video cameras and other electronic equipment, that was to be broadcast to a captive audience of second-graders.

Anyway, the newscast was a disaster. You can’t put that many young smart-alecks in front of a video camera without getting some high jinks, and the result went down in school history as a pioneering and subversive experiment in alternative TV. Kids made animal noises off-camera. Some went further and made finger-horns pop up behind the heads of the anchor-students (haven’t you ever wanted to do the same thing to Dan Rather?). Someone may actually have shot a bird, but the video is apparently unclear on this score. The second-graders thought it was great, but their teacher was appalled, and soon all the young rapscallions responsible were so deep in the doghouse that the fleas had right-of-way.

Everybody had to write multiple apologies and read them out loud in front of the second-graders, who found this spectacle even more thrilling than the original newscast. Witnessing their upperclassmen making these hangdog, insincere, breast-beating apologies was nectar and ambrosia to them. The young hounds actually made faces at the penitents when the teacher wasn’t looking, hoping to make them crack up.

Wild Wayne had been in the thick of it. His strategy was characteristically bold. He denied everything. He swore everyone else had misbehaved, but he had resisted temptation manfully! He had even tried to dissuade his perverse classmates from their mad scheme, but the obstinate wretches wouldn’t listen to him! No one was more shocked than he at this revolting spectacle! The teachers could rely on him as an informant in the future, to prevent any such recurrence, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, Wild Wayne was caught on videotape, in living color, making more noise than anybody else.

He was furious at being caught. His dog ate his written apology, so he wound up having to do a second draft over the lunch hour, then deliver it separately. “Oh, man! This sucks!” he could be heard grumbling as he wrote.

“Why don’t you invite Wild Wayne over some afternoon?” I asked Noah. “I’d like to meet the little hellion.”

“Dad, do you know what happened to Mitchell when he invited Wayne over?” Noah winced.

And he recounted a weekend of such hair-raising escapades that I cannot list them all here. The visit culminated with Wild Wayne chasing his host all over the house, brandishing a replica German sword that belonged to the boy’s father.

I understand the young man’s grades are godawful, but he has his sights fixed on higher things. Wild Wayne is carving out imperishable fame for himself. He could be the next John Belushi or Alice Cooper.

One thing is certain: His schoolmates are going to remember him when they are old men and women.