Love in the Time of Climate Change (9 page)

I had just come back from working out at the Glenfield Y, trying to stick with my new forty-minutes-on-the-elliptical-four-times-a-week routine.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He looked up. “My, you're looking buffier and buffier. She's going to have a hard time keeping her hands off of you.”

“Who?”

“You know who. Captain Mad Sam or whatever you said her pirate name was.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Check it out!” He turned the computer towards me.

“Christ! Now you're stalking her?” I took a hit off the joint and sat down next to him.

“Got to keep you in the loop, dude. There's news to be had.”

I looked at the screen. There she was, a new picture of her up on her Facebook page, this time in proud pirate profile. It was the same outfit she had worn during Talk Like a Pirate Day. She had a huge smile on her face and she was kissing the stuffed parrot.

“I'd love to fire my cannon through her porthole!” Jesse murmured.

“Shut up. You're worse than my students.”

“She'd find out why me Roger is so Jolly. I'd ask her to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder in an instant.”

“God, that is so wrong. Will you please get off that page!”

“She is so hot! How do you hide your hard-on in front of the class?”

“Stop!” I tried to grab the laptop from him.

“Not so fast. Not so fast. Notice anything different?”

“No. What. Tell me.”

“Look carefully.”

Even though I could have stared all day, there wasn't a whole lot of material to work with. Just a few images.

“I'm not seeing it,” I said. “What?”

“No more lezbo shot.”

“Jesus, will you stop already with that. You are so …”

“Seriously, dude. The woman she was holding hands with—gone.”

“You know, if it wasn't funny the first time then you can pretty much guarantee it's not going to be funny the tenth.”

“Gone. Disappeared. This is good news, dude. I'd even call it great news. From lesbian to pirate. You must be working your magic. It's quite a switch! Unless, of course, she's a lesbian pirate, and in that case.…”

“Shut up!”

I got up, stormed out, stomped into my room and loudly
slammed the door behind me. Christ, it was middle school all over again.

I lay on my bed, buried my face in my pillow and cursed my eternal adolescence, cursed my lame, thirteen-year-old brain trapped in a thirty-two-year-old body, cursed the squeaking goddamn hamster wheel that was my life, endlessly cycling through the fucking seventh grade. After all these years, I would have thought the bearings would have rusted, the wheel torn asunder, the metal chewed apart … but no,
squeak, squeak, squeak
, on and on it went, around and around and around, until all that was left were twenty-nine-year-old pirates glaring, snarling, laughing at what a loser I was.

Seriously, it was enough to make one piss on one's own two feet.

I
T WAS A
W
EDNESDAY NIGHT
and the Roommate had done it again. In all of my thirty-two years, I had never known anyone who could clog a toilet the way that he could.

“Christ!” I groaned. “I've heard of wanting to be regular but enough already. What is this, the third time this month?”

“Fifth,” he said. “If you count the ones at work.”

“Work? For God's sake, don't tell me you did it in one of those mega-industrial flushers?”

“Twice in one day, thank you very much.”

“You're like a freak of nature,” I told him. “How do you keep doing this?”

“Oh, so you've never clogged a toilet before?”

“Actually, no, I can't remember the last time I did such a thing.”

“That's because you're always full of shit.”

“Very funny,” I said, trying not to smile.

“Anyway, we have a problem.”

“No, you have a problem.”

“Actually, we do. I broke the plunger.”

“You what?” I asked.

“You heard me.”

“How can you break a toilet plunger?”

“No clue. It snapped right in half.”

“You've got to be kidding me. Jesus, you're amazing. Is there like a Guinness Book of World Record for this kind of shit? If so, you're there bro. Your claim to fame—number one on number two!”

“Thanks for the vote.”

I groaned again.

“So, do you mind?”

“Mind what?”

“Going out and getting one?” Jesse asked.

“No, no, no, no, no. He who breaks it, gets it.”

“Come on, you know I hate to drive at night. And my stomach is still a little on the queasy side from these three burritos I had for lunch.”

“Jesus, no wonder you clogged the damn toilet! You ever heard of self-control?”

“You know my motto. Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

“I'm not going.”

“Please?” he begged.

“No way. I'm not going out at eleven at night and getting you a toilet plunger.”

“Getting
us
a plunger. Remember, dude, there's only one toilet and you don't want to go anywhere near there. I can
see
the smell.”

“Go across the street and borrow one from Scary Man,” I said, doing my best to suppress the gag reflex.

Jesse genuflected.

Scary Man, in the house adjacent to ours, was always glaring at us. Three “Romney for President” signs dotted his lawn. His gas-guzzling car, which he'd let idle for what
seemed like hours every morning before he left for work, had a bumper sticker with Obama and a slash through it. He incessantly, constantly, obsessively mowed his lawn.

He thought we were a gay couple. Just to annoy him we held hands and one time even kissed while he watched.

We hated him.

“Are you kidding me?” Jesse groaned again. “I can't even look in that direction without getting the heebie-jeebies. Come on, I'll fix dinner the next two nights.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Done.”

I grabbed my jacket and headed for the car.

I realized immediately that there was one significant problem. One huge obstacle standing in the way of a successful plunger retrieval mission.

The only store open at eleven at night was Walmart.

Walmart! God, I hated that store. I loathed it. I despised it. It creeped me out even more than Scary Man. It was the mistress of the big-box bitches. It epitomized all that was wrong with capitalism run amuck. Out to make a dime, they couldn't give a damn who or what they had to run over to get it—their workers, employee health and safety, small-town downtowns, the environment. If corporations were people, like our enlightened Supreme Court has so fascistically ruled, then Walmart should be tarred and feathered, water-boarded, and then lynched. Not necessarily in that order.

Ugh! Walmart! But the glaring reality was that we had a toilet to unclog. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Cursing the Roommate and his prolific bowel movements, I headed out to the devil's store.

Depressingly enough, I could barely find a place to park. Almost midnight on a Wednesday and the store was absolutely packed. And, of course, finding any sort of
live person inside who could help you was an absolute impossibility.

Attention shoppers: Best of luck finding anything!

Emergency supplies? Housewares? Toiletries? Where the hell would they put plungers?

After about ten minutes of fruitless wandering, I began to get paranoid.

One: What if I didn't find one? God knows, the house had been intolerable enough when I left. Coming home empty-handed was clearly not an option.

Two: Even more of a concern, what if a student saw me here? How would I explain myself? For all my vocal “shop local” and anti-corporate rhetoric, for all my litany of environmental atrocities that Walmart has spewed, getting busted here could significantly damage my reputation.

Three: Worse-case scenario, what if
She
were here. I couldn't imagine a scenario like that possibly unfolding, unless maybe she had experienced a similar clogging emergency.

I couldn't go there.

I began to sneak a peek down each aisle before venturing forth, furtively spying on shoppers for faces I knew, slinking from toys to women's clothing, and then, damn it, somehow back to toys again. I grabbed a pack of compact fluorescent lightbulbs as a cover, a pathetic attempt to mitigate the grossness of my shopping transgression should I get spotted.

I could plead an energy-efficient-lightbulb emergency; after all, I had to see in order to grade papers. Feeble excuse, but it was the best I could think of.

After what seemed like eternity, and on the verge of abandoning all hope, I stumbled around the corner of Kleenex and paper towels and, hallelujah, praise the Lord, there they were—toilet plungers! A rack to themselves, marked down to half price, three types to choose from. Victory was within my grasp!

I took what looked to be the sturdiest design, then went back and grabbed a second as a backup, and plotted my escape.

I was a shadow, flitting from section to section, unseen by shoppers' eyes, the Invisible Man. The checkout was within sight, the finish line in plain view.

“Hey Mr. C! What's up?”

I jumped. It was Charlie from the Climate Changers. Sometimes they called me Mr. C. It was a nondescript nickname that had stuck.

Curses for my bad luck!

“I wouldn't have thought I'd see you here,” he said, smiling in what I took to be an evil kind of way.

“Hi, Mr. C!” said the checkout woman, a student in one of my classes.

Double curses!

I waved the two toilet plungers over my head and babbled some incoherent gibberish concerning roommates and bowel issues and mitigating circumstances.

The two laughed at my obvious discomfort.

Trying my best to hide my growing embarrassment, I checked out and started to leave the store. Suddenly, a man stepped between me and the exit, blocking my way.

“Excuse me, sir. What is that in your pocket?”

“What is what?” I replied.

He opened up his jacket and showed his badge.

“Walmart Security,” it read.

He pointed to my pants.

I looked down and there, sticking out like a giant erection, were the light bulbs. In my anxiety over being discovered, I had somehow, inadvertently and stupidly, thrust them into my pocket. I had meant to hide the plungers, but where would I have put them?

“Shit!” I cried. “Seriously, I had no idea. I mean, I am not a shoplifter. Especially from this store!”

“Excuse me?” the guard said, raising his eyebrows.

“No, no. That's not what I meant. Seriously!” I was totally flustered. “I grabbed these as a cover. You know in case I got caught.”

“Caught?”

“No, no, not that kind of caught. I would never do something like this. Shit!” I cried again.

After a brief interrogation, fortunately lacking tar, feathers, water-boards, and rope, plus outstanding character references from both giggling students, I was somehow allowed to go free. Minus, of course, the lightbulbs.

“I hope you had a nice shopping experience,” the Walmart greeter said as I made my escape.

I managed to self-edit and, wanly, smiled back.

Reputation? What reputation!

—

What keeps me going and glowing, as a teacher, are those truly spectacular gems of moments when what goes down in my classroom is nothing short of brilliant. I'm on, the students are on. There's animated discussion, witty asides, articulate back and forth. So many lightbulbs (compact fluorescent of course!) flashing above student heads that it sears the ceiling. No one antsy or disengaged, no squirming or fiddling with backpacks.

Class ends and students seem reluctant to leave. Some don't. They remain, immersed in passionate discourse, still hammering away at saving the world. Enough “aha!” moments in an hour and a quarter to fill a pirate's treasure chest.

When the room empties, I sit on my desk, pat myself on the back, and think, Wow, damn good class. Socrates, you got nothing on me, bro.

It certainly makes work worth getting up in the morning for.

All right, so that's only happened a few times in the last
five years. Well, maybe twice. But when it
has
happened: Somebody stop me! Absolutely awesome.

Then there are those times, unfortunately quite a bit more frequent, when things don't go as well as one would hope. Classes that, frankly, suck.

Really suck.

Like yesterday.

I was droning on and on and on about the difference between direct causality and structural causality. How you couldn't blame this last single extreme weather event on climate change (there was no direct cause and effect; A was not directly responsible for B) but there was a structural systemic basis for causation. I know, I know, you probably just fell asleep reading that last sentence. But I thought it was interesting. Important. Something I thought that we all need to know.