Teacher (20 page)

You could discern from the strains of his yelp that it truly was all about him, and that, right as he may have been, he cared nothing for the rest of us at all. He was simply shocked, stricken in his pride, by the fact that the government, which had previously been a few songs and parades and diversions for the menials and the mentally overtaxed, had now taken an interest in him and was considering fracturing his well-greased life. Now the machine wanted to give
him
a mandatory graduation present, a close haircut, an un-stylish uniform, day-to-day commerce with people who’d grown up on farms and in urban shitholes and never heard of Hegel, and, most of all, the chance to get his ass blown off by devilish Asians. No, thanks—that was someone else’s destiny, not what Peace Hawk saw in
his
crystal ball.

Jonesy would have counted in the Peace Hawk’s estimation as one of the shrunken members of the herd, and Jonesy would have sensed as much. Jones was the football team’s preeminent hitter. He was about five-feet-ten and 160 pounds. He was our middle guard, the nose tackle, and when he unloaded on some fat-assed offensive lineman, he could send him off like a beach ball bouncing in big loops down the highway.

Jonesy had about seven brothers and, from what I could gather, about four of these were in the army, a couple maybe in Vietnam. Jonesy loved these brothers, though when they were home I suspect they fought each other—kicking, biting, and gouging encouraged—if only to keep the dull times at bay.

Jonesy loved his football pals, too, though he made a distinction between those who liked to hit and who made it to practice every day, for whom he would have done anything, particularly if it involved damaging a third party, and the skills players, ends and backs, who did not savor contact and who were
faggots
(the word pronounced with some irony, not always that much).

I knew something about Jonesy’s views on Vietnam because they’d come out at football practice. Of course, everyone knows how it was bound to be with a bunch of football players from a working-class high school in 1969 when they got to the subject of Vietnam. Football players are supposed, in all social mythology, to be the school reactionaries, abusing and beating those who step out of line, going off to the peace marches to help their hard-hat dads attack the doves. But that’s not how it went with us.

On October 15, the day of the first Vietnam Moratorium demonstration, we looked up over our heads to see a plane writing in the sky. We were running what was called team offense, practicing the plays we’d use in the game the next week, going at three-quarters speed. They were the same old plays; it didn’t require much concentration. The major activity was speculating on what the skywriter was trying to create on the blue canvas overhead. It looked like the beginnings of a woman. Naked maybe? No. An animal then, a whale? A camel? Nope. Soon it became clear that it was a peace sign, a celestial totem for the crowd on the Boston Common protesting the war. Jonesy screamed out that what we were seeing was the footprint of the great American chicken. But Rick Cirone and Fred Tommasso, the class president, and Jackie Lane, the black kid on the team, threw their hands up and flashed the peace sign back. Jonesy and a fair number of the lineman in turn gave the sign the middle finger, upraised. It seemed, to put it a little crudely, that the defensive backfield was pretty solidly against the war, that much of the interior line was pro-, and that there was a great unsaluting middle, of which I was a part.

For the next three weeks or so, the war got constant discussion in the locker room, and if the discourse never reached the heights of the Platonic academy, it was not the stupidest talk one could hear in America on the subject. For some time, at Medford High, the only place that I heard any opposition to the war was from football players. Strange? After up-downs and after head-banging block-and-tackle drills that left you bleeding from the nose and mouth and, if you were very unlucky, the ears, it wasn’t likely you’d back off an opinion for fear of what someone might decide to say to you by way of rebuttal. In any event, if you look at the MHS football team photos, fall 1969, you can see Fred, and perhaps Rick, too, laying two splayed fingers out over their bent knees—the peace sign.

Jonesy now told the Peace Hawk what he’d told us in the locker room before. First, he gave barely two shits about the justice of the Vietnam conflict. A couple of other principles were uppermost in his mind, and he described them with bitter fluency to the Hawk Man and his cadre. He admitted that it was a stupid conflict to be in, but when you are in a fight, you win. Or you destroy yourself trying—you destroy yourself rather than quit. If you quit, you sacrifice your honor, and without honor, it is, as Achilles knew, not possible to live.

Second point: Joneses were involved, Joneses actual and Joneses metaphorical. He had friends in Asia. Other people he knew had friends and brothers and husbands there. The Cong and the NVA were trying to kill these guys; ergo, fuck the Cong. Let them burn in screaming napalm hell.

When the Hawk Man got explicit about his support for the NVA, talking about the impending victory of the forces of national liberation, Jonesy became furious.

“Do you have anyone,” he said, keeping his voice under control, keeping from roaring, “do you have a single real friend who is in Vietnam? Do you have any relatives there?”

The war was hitting Medford much more directly than Harvard. In the
Medford Daily Mercury
you read about kids coming home dead who not long ago had been high school athletes.

A few nights before, I’d seen Rat Pelagrino, a hard guy from Barry Park, in front of Brigham’s. He had just met up with a friend of his back from Asia. The guy was in a wheelchair, minus a leg and an arm, with a ruined face, and not much time to live. Rat caught this sight while high on mescaline. His friend’s face, a horror as it was, had seemed to turn grotesque shades, yellow and green and pink, Rat said, and begun to melt before his eyes. Rat, wearing his friend’s army jacket, was huddled into a ball, knees to his chest, face down, weeping furiously in the doorway of Brigham’s. His body shook, as though a horrible wind were blasting through and only he felt it. “I can’t believe what they fuckin’ did to him,” he said. “We used to be kids.”

Back apparently untouched was a guy named Frank Politian, who had been a Ranger up in the mountains, fighting alongside the Hmong. He was in fine fettle, it seemed, handsome and strong and obscenely fit. But in the middle of Brigham’s parking lot one afternoon, he invited me, for no particular reason, to fight him to the death, bare-handed. A pleasure, but no thanks. It turned out he was issuing this invitation fairly regularly. No one, as far as I know, took him up on it.

As the year went on, kids kept coming back, maimed in one way or another. They were drunk all the time and fighting, often in crazy brawls, where they seemed desperate to lose, take some punishment. They were grossly ashamed of something, it often turned out, but it took a while before we all had any idea what it might be.

As for me, I was getting calls from a marine recruiter; my pal Ryan, fellow lineman, drinking buddy, and brawling friend, had given him my name. It looked to him, the recruiter said, like we could get the whole offensive line there in a unit. We could go in on the buddy plan. Ryan said the recruiter was an amazing guy—he could do thirty pull-ups and he told fabulous stories about Chesty Puller, the most formidable marine in history, and how mangy (the reigning word for tough, crazy, indomitable) all marines were. I promised that I’d stop by to talk. What else did I have to do?

The Peace Hawk and his cadre wouldn’t answer Jonesy. They tried to engage other students. Sandra had a question. Buller had a word or two to drop in. But Jonesy was a middle guard, and what you do as a nose tackle is to keep coming at the center and the guards on either side of them. You keep it up, and in the beginning, the first quarter maybe, they push you all over the place, because you’re always being double- and triple-teamed. But you apply your fist to their helmets and make their heads ring like the inside of Notre Dame when the hunchback pulls the bells, and eventually they lose heart. They see that you wear a helmet cage to protect them, not your own precious face, because in piles you would gladly bite them, tear at their throats if you could.

Jonesy kept badgering the SDSers with the same question. “Is there anyone in your family in Vietnam? Because if there was, I’m not sure you’d go on about the impending victory of the glorious revolution or any of that other horseshit. I’m not sure you’d say that.”

And finally, pushed to the wall, the politburo had to admit that it had no people in Vietnam but that this did not make the war any more just or true or good or what have you. What they should have said, perhaps, was that all people were brothers and sisters, all men and women out of a human family, and that they cared for the fate of the Americans on the ground as much as they did for the Vietnamese. But these words coming from the mouth of the Peace Hawk would have turned to ashes on the floor. For the boss man gave not one damn for anyone but himself and other mental alphas. Jonesy—“Thanks, that’s all I wanted to hear”—climbed off the top of the chair and sat down in it, stretched his legs out, and looked like someone who has just succeeded in sending the corrupt judges off to jail.

How did Lears take all this? Was he angry that his SDS pals had been buzz-sawed by an honorable junkyard dog who would probably end up climbing poles for the electric company, if he didn’t join and head to Asia to help his brothers out? For it was probable, from words that Lears dropped from time to time and that we puzzled over like Gypsies competing to interpret a scattering of tea leaves, that he himself was not in favor of the war.

But it seemed to me he was nearly gleeful—by his standard, that is—the day the commies came. People who usually did not think, who hardly ever talked, were doing both. Buller finally piped up to ask why the hell they didn’t go and join the North Vietnamese if they loved them so much. Sandra asked why the antiwar movement was getting violent. Dubby wanted to know if there was any kind of war they would fight in. Rick asked what they thought of hippies who just turned on and dropped out, got high, listened to music, and ignored the government and the war. A lot of the kids were silent, sure, but they all looked like a current was running through them, as if they were replete with juice, instead of zombie-walking it through the day, asleep in the inner life, as they usually were.

So my guess is that Lears was getting a contact high off the exchange. He wasn’t especially interested in making people think the way he did. He didn’t look for converts. What Lears really wanted, I believe, was simply for people to think. He wanted them to examine their old ways of doing things, and if the result of the examination was that they liked those ways well enough or that they wanted to get more conservative, more government-loyal, more institutionally acclimated, that was all right. So long as they took up a distanced position from their beliefs and had a look.

To do this kind of teaching, you need a vigorous discipline. You’ve got to hold your own thoughts in abeyance. Never show your cards, never lose your temper, do not help people cut to the chase. You care about a process, not the results. So most of the time your students leave you as works in progress, works that may never be completed. You can’t think of yourself as a craftsman who shapes beautiful souls.

For there are teachers, and they can be great ones, who aim to do just that. They’ve considered things from all sides, contemplated all the major questions, and they believe they know what’s what. Plato, Socrates’ greatest student, was one of those teachers. He knew how to craft that beautiful soul—reason ascendant, the passions and the appetites subordinate—so one could live contentedly and do no harm. Everything in moderation for Plato, except his conviction that he knew the transcendental score. On the subject of truth, Plato was immoderate in the extreme. For Socrates, of course, it was very different. Irony was his position—he had no more to offer. Lears did have more. Few of us, especially in our twenties, have the strength to go through life without any investments of the spirit. But at least while he was in class, Lears worked as hard as he could not to dispense any truth. He offered freedom of mind, and loneliness, too.

The Plato-style teacher, the great dispenser of truths, creates disciples. He is surrounded with smaller versions of himself, who vie for his love and spread his word. And, too, he creates apostates, people who fall in love with him and his works, then out of that love with a violent crash. Such people often have vengeance in mind. The Plato-style teacher must be preternaturally strong in spirit, in that he is constantly calling up all the dreams and hopes of his students, stimulating their long-suppressed wishes for perfect authority. He needs to fight against becoming a small-time deity or a demagogue: Often he fails. The ironist needs to fight against resignation that borders on despair when he sees where his students, left to unfold their own minds, can end up.

Yet often, as Coleridge liked to say, extremes meet. The teacher who dispenses truth finds his best pupil not in a disciple but in someone who needs to concoct a potent but very different countertruth. So Aristotle did in response to Plato.

Or the great truthteller finds himself lumped together with other great truthtellers, to be just one color in an extensive palette, from which the student draws to concoct her own eclectic vision. Or the ironist finds people who both adore him and rebel against his never-ending skepticism by creating a great system of their own. The permutations never end.

But this much may be true: If you would be a genuinely great teacher, you may have to pick one path, that of the ironist or that of the truthteller. For those are the ways to push your students into full mental gear. Most of us waffle. Most of us take the easy middle way, not having the discipline to keep the ironist’s game going or the strength to lay our truth out to the insults of the world.