Me Talk Pretty One Day (8 page)

Whenever I felt in danger of losing my authority, I would cross the room and either open or close the door. A student needed to ask permission before regulating the temperature or noise level, but I could do so whenever I liked. It was the only activity sure to remind me that I was in charge, and I took full advantage of it.

“There he goes again,” my students would whisper. “What’s up with him and that door?”

The asthmatic transferred to another class, leaving me with only eight students. Of these, four were seasoned smokers who took long, contemplative drags and occasionally demonstrated their proficiency by blowing ghostly concentric rings that hovered like halos above their bowed heads. The others tried as best they could, but it wasn’t pretty. By the end of the second session, my students had produced nothing but ashes. Their hacking coughs and complete lack of output suggested that, for certain writers, smoking was obviously not enough.

Thinking that a clever assignment might help loosen them up, I instructed my students to write a letter to their mothers in prison. They were free to determine both the crime and the sentence, and references to cellmates were strongly encouraged.

The group set to work with genuine purpose and enthusiasm, and I felt proud of myself, until the quietest member of the class handed in her paper, whispering that both her father and her uncle were currently serving time on federal racketeering charges.

“I just never thought of my mom going off as well,” she said. “This was just a really… depressing assignment.”

I’d never known what an actual child-to-parent prison letter might be like, but now I had a pretty clear idea. I envisioned two convicts sharing a cell. One man stood at the sink while the other lay on a bunk, reading his mail.

“Anything interesting?” the standing man asked.

“Oh, it’s from my daughter,” the other man said. “She’s just started college, and apparently her writing teacher is a real asshole.”

That was the last time I asked my students to write in class. From that point on all their stories were to be written at home on the subject of their choice. If I’d had my way, we would have all stayed home and conducted the class through smoke signals. As it was, I had to find some way to pass the time and trick my students into believing that they were getting an education. The class met twice a week for two hours a day. Filling an entire session with one activity was out of the question, so I began breaking each session into a series of brief, regularly scheduled discussion periods. We began each day with Celebrity Corner. This was an opportunity for the students to share interesting bits of information provided by friends in New York or Los Angeles who were forever claiming firsthand knowledge of a rock band’s impending breakup or movie star’s dark sexual secret. Luckily everyone seemed to have such a friend, and we were never short of material.

Celebrity Corner was followed by the Feedbag Forum, my shameless call for easy, one-pot dinner recipes, the type favored by elderly aunts and grandmothers whose dental status demanded that all meat fall from the bone without provocation. When asked what Boiled Beef Arkansas had to do with the craft of writing, I did not mention my recent purchase of a Crock-Pot; rather, I lied through my rotten teeth, explaining that it wasn’t the recipe itself but the pacing that was of interest to the writer.

After the Feedbag Forum it was time for Pillow Talk, which was defined as “an opportunity for you to discuss your private sex lives in a safe, intellectual environment.” The majority of my students were reluctant to share their experiences, so arrangements were made with the audiovisual department. I then took to wheeling in a big color television so that we might spend an hour watching One Life to Live. This was back when Victoria Buchanan passed out at her twentieth high-school reunion and came to remembering that rather than graduating with the rest of her class, she had instead hitchhiked to New York City, where she’d coupled with a hippie and given birth to a long-lost daughter. It sounds farfetched, but like a roast forsaken in the oven or a rescheduled dental appointment, childbirth is one of those minor details that tends to slip the minds of most soap opera characters. It’s a personality trait you’ve just got to accept.

On General Hospital or Guiding Light a similar story might come off as trite or even laughable. This, though, was One Life to Live, and no one could suddenly recall the birth of a child quite like Erika Slezak, who played both Victoria Buchanan and her alternate personality, Nicole Smith. I’d been in the habit of taping the show and watching it every night while eating dinner. Now that I was an academic, I could watch it in class and use the dinner hour to catch up on All My Children. A few students grumbled, but again I assured them that this was all part of my master plan.

Word came from the front office that there had been some complaints regarding my use of class time. This meant I’d have to justify my daily screenings with a homework assignment. Now the students were to watch an episode and write what I referred to as a “guessay,” a brief prediction of what might take place the following day.

“Remember that this is not Port Charles or Pine Valley,” I said. “This is Llanview, Pennsylvania, and we’re talking about the Buchanan family.”

It actually wasn’t a bad little assignment. While the dialogue occasionally falters, you have to admire daytime dramas for their remarkable attention to plot. Yes, there were always the predictable kidnappings and summer love triangles, but a good show could always surprise you with something as simple as the discovery of an underground city. I’d coached my students through half a dozen episodes, giving them background information and explaining that missing children do not just march through the door ten minutes after the critical delivery flashback. The inevitable reunion must unfold delicately and involve at least two-thirds of the cast.

I thought I’d effectively conveyed the seriousness of the assignment. I thought that in my own way I had actually taught them something, so I was angry when their papers included such predictions as “the long-lost daughter turns out to be a vampire” and “the next day Vicki chokes to death while eating a submarine sandwich.” The vampire business smacked of Dark Shadows reruns, and I refused to take it seriously. But choking to death on a sandwich, that was an insult. Victoria was a Buchanan and would never duck into a sub shop, much less choke to death in a single episode. Especially on a Wednesday. Nobody dies on a Wednesday - hadn’t these people learned anything?

In the past I had tried my hardest to be understanding, going so far as to allow the conjugation of nouns and the use of such questionable words as whateverishly. This though, was going too far. I’d taught the Buchanans’ Llanview just as my colleagues had taught Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Mississippi, but that was over now. Obviously certain people didn’t deserve to watch TV in the middle of the afternoon. If my students wanted to stare at the walls for two hours a day, then fine, from here on out we’d just stick to the basics.

I don’t know who invented the template for the standard writing workshop, but whoever it was seems to have struck the perfect balance between sadism and masochism. Here is a system designed to eliminate pleasure for everyone involved. The idea is that a student turns in a story, which is then read and thoughtfully critiqued by everyone in the class. In my experience the process worked, in that the stories were occasionally submitted, Xeroxed, and distributed hand to hand. They were folded into purses and knapsacks, but here the system tended to break down. Come critique time, most students behaved as if the assignment had been to confine the stories in a dark, enclosed area and test their reaction to sensory deprivation. Even if the papers were read out loud in class, the discussions were usually brief, as the combination of good manners and complete lack of interest kept most workshop participants from expressing their honest opinions.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the stories were thinly veiled accounts of the author’s life as he or she attempted to complete the assignment. Roommates were forever stepping out of showers, and waitresses appeared out of nowhere to deliver the onion rings and breakfast burritos that stained the pages of the manuscripts. The sloppiness occasionally bothered me, but I had no room to complain. This was an art school, and the writing workshop was commonly known as the easiest way to fulfill one’s mandatory English credits. My students had been admitted because they could admirably paint or sculpt or videotape their bodies in exhausting detail, and wasn’t that enough? They told funny, compelling stories about their lives, but committing the details to paper was, for them, a chore rather than an aspiration. The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers. Even if someone had used his real name and recounted, say, a recent appointment with an oral surgeon, I would accept the story as pure fiction, saying, “So tell us, Dean, how did you come up with this person?”

The student might mumble, pointing to the bloodied cotton wad packed against his swollen gum, and I’d ask, “When did you decide that your character should seek treatment for his impacted molar?” This line of questioning allowed the authors to feel creative and protected anyone who held an unpopular political opinion.

“Let me get this straight,” one student said. “You’re telling me that if I say something out loud, it’s me saying it, but if I write the exact same thing on paper, it’s somebody else, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And we’re calling that fiction.”

The student pulled out his notebook, wrote something down, and handed me a sheet of paper that read, “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard in my life.”

They were a smart group.

As Mr. Sedaris I made it a point to type up a poorly spelled evaluation of each submitted story. I’d usually begin with the high points and end, a page or two later, by dispensing such sage professional advice as “Punctuation never hurt anyone” or “Think verbs!” I tended to lose patience with some of the longer dream sequences, but for the most part we all got along, and the students either accepted or politely ignored my advice.

Trouble arose only when authors used their stories to vindicate themselves against a great hurt or perceived injustice. This was the case with a woman whom the admissions office would have labeled a “returning student,” meaning that her social life did not revolve around the cafeteria. The woman was a good fifteen years older than me and clearly disapproved of my teaching methods. She never contributed to Pillow Talk or the Feedbag Forum, and I had good reason to suspect it was she who had complained about the One Life to Live episodes. With the teenage freshmen, I stood a chance, but there was nothing I could do to please someone who regularly complained that she’d wasted enough time already. The class was divided into two distinct groups, with her on one side and everyone else on the other. I’d tried everything except leg irons, but nothing could bring the two sides together. It was a real problem.

The returning student had recently come through a difficult divorce, and because her pain was significant, she wrongly insisted that her writing was significant as well. Titled something along the lines of “I Deserve Another Chance,” her story was not well received by the class. Following the brief group discussion, I handed her my written evaluation, which she quietly skimmed over before raising her hand.

“Yes,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I have a little question.” She lit a cigarette and spent a moment identifying with the smoldering match. “Who are you,” she asked. “I mean, just who in the hell are you to tell me that my story has no ending?”

It was a worthwhile question that was bound to be raised sooner or later. I’d noticed that her story had ended in mid-sentence, but that aside, who was I to offer criticism to anyone, especially in regard to writing? I’d meant to give the issue some serious thought, but there had been shirts to iron and name tags to make and, between one thing and another, I managed to put it out of my mind.

The woman repeated the question, her voice breaking. “Just who… in the stinking hell do you think … you are?”

“Can I give you an answer tomorrow?” I asked.

“No,” she barked. “I want to know now. Who do you think you are?”

Judging from their expressions, I could see that the other side of the class was entertaining the same question. Doubt was spreading through the room like the cold germs seen in one of those slow-motion close-ups of a sneeze. I envisioned myself burning on a pyre of dream sequences, and then the answer came to me.

“Who am I?” I asked. “I am the only one who is paid to be in this room.” This was nothing I’d necessarily want to embroider on a pillow, but still, once the answer left my mouth, I embraced it as a perfectly acceptable teaching philosophy. My previous doubts and fears evaporated, as now I knew that I could excuse anything. The new Mr. Sedaris would never again back down or apologize. From here on out, I’d order my students to open and close the door and let that remind me that I was in charge. We could do whatever I wanted because I was a certified professional - it practically said so right there on my paycheck. My voice deepened as I stood to straighten my tie. “All right then,” I said. “Does anyone else have a stupid question for Mr. Sedaris?”

The returning student once again raised her hand. “It’s a personal question, I know, but exactly how much is the school paying you to be in this room?”

I answered honestly, and then, for the first time since the beginning of the school year, my students came together as one. I can’t recall which side started it, I remember only that the laughter was so loud, so violent and prolonged that Mr. Sedaris had to run and close the door so that the real teachers could conduct their business in peace.

Big Boy

IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY IN CHICAGO, and my sister Amy and I were attending an afternoon dinner at the home of our friend John. The weather was nice, and he’d set up a table in the backyard so that we might sit in the sun. Everyone had taken their places, when I excused myself to visit the bathroom, and there, in the toilet, was the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life - no toilet paper or anything, just this long and coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito.