Teacher (24 page)

I do not believe that he had ever considered this an actual possibility. His kids killed in Vietnam, sent off, as it were, to a far-flung province of TV land and delivered home in a flag-draped box not much bigger than the modest beds in which he every night gave them their good-night kiss but from which they would not be empowered to wake the next morning.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

“It could happen!” I screamed. “Why couldn’t it happen?”

“Because,” he said. “You’re being ridiculous, that’s all.”

But of course it was not ridiculous. I had applied to college, which would at the time have given me a student deferment, but as my guidance counselor had informed me, my prospects for getting into a good school were less than bright, and I had applied only to good schools. What I did not want to think about—nor, by all evidence, did my father—was that in a few months I would be out of high school, eligible for the draft, and would have the chance to put my football prowess to work in a place where the business about being first off the deck and being lean and mean and agile and all the rest was both about the best advice you could have and absurdly, blackly laughable.

My father went silent—my father, who never, prior to this moment, had left an argument with me without being in a position to declare complete and utter victory. Wright, who believed in razing the last residue of the charred defeated ramparts of his opponent and then sowing the ground with salt, walked away from this one. He left it in the air. For once, my father had nothing to say.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe that what I had done was to propel my father to an encounter with the underground and buried river of furious, inarticulable love that he possessed for both his sons, a swarming flood of emotion in a far-inward place that he himself could not travel to through his own volition but which was no less real for that. Being entirely unfamiliar with the terrain, with everything looking so strange, he had no choice but to stare in amazement and be silent. And so he was.

A great victory of thought and inspiration on my part? I was against the war because it might kill me and my brother—and for nothing—before I had the chance to start a real life.

I was being small-minded enough, I suppose. But, raised in America, one often acquires the sense that life, at least life at a certain remove—and it can be a very short remove at that—is not entirely real. Life beyond Medford was something that you watched on TV, that you’d never be pulled into until—Jonesy talking here—it came along and bit a full-size chunk from your ass.

Before the chunk, and maybe before it ate me live and whole, I was awake at least to the possibilities. In Medford, you could readily believe in the prospect of one of the South Medford Bears stomping the life out of you—that’s right at hand. But the Cong and the NVA, who are even less graciously disposed, well, they come on after
Gunsmoke
and before Johnny.

My cry was small-minded, selfish—say what you will. But without many forces bearing on me, without Lears and all he had brought, I probably would not have mustered the wherewithal to cry out at all. I would have stood straight and walked into the army or marines and done the drill with no thought, with no critical power applied, just as I’d been taught to do things in football, where the head, the helmet, is reduced to a simple weapon, aimed by others, the coaches and the manly code. Being able to scream in horror about my own doom and my brother’s was a sloppy, slobbering blow against the code. (Do what you’re told!) Later, maybe, I’d be able to slow things down, ask myself a few better, Frank Lears–style questions, think things over on my own.

Chapter Ten

SOCRATES ROCKS

The Doober and I succumbed to the course, succumbed to Frank Lears, at about the same time. Though I have to admit, Dubby’s secular salvation was a shade more flamboyant than mine. I think I saw the stirrings in the Doober well before anyone else did, maybe before he himself knew what was going on.

It started one day—it was probably in late March, spring coming on—when Frank Lears turned up in class with a record. This had become fairly common practice. He’d gotten hold of a beaten up old phonograph and installed it in the back of the room, and every Friday, and any other day when Lears was inclined, we got some music. I remember hearing Billie Holiday, Mozart, the Incredible String Band, the Velvet Underground. He also showed us art books, and read us a poem from time to time. Usually, the music was something I—and probably most everyone but Rick—hadn’t heard before. But today he had the Rolling Stones (we all knew the Stones), and he was playing a song called “Connection,” in which Mick—no surprise—laments his inability to make one. “Connection, I just can’t make no connection. / But all I want to do is get back to you.”

Lears played it once, then he played it again. He cranked the thing up and let us get a full blast of the messy, hardscrabble sound. We all held our breath for him. We half expected a gang of submasters and sports coach–types to come bursting in, axes flourished, like Eliot Ness’s men in
The Untouchables,
ready to send their thick blades through the contraband, which in this case wasn’t hard liquor but American blues, as created by the likes of Robert Johnson, Satan’s star guitar pupil, it was said, then remade in grimy, fish-’n’-chips-and-urine-stinking London, and sent back to us, here on the well-lit top floor of the Medford High School building.

When Mick and the boys started laying down their high-hearted, piss-anywhere noise, Dubby suspended his major self-appointed task, the coloring in of the
o
’s in Freud’s
Group Psychology.
(The Doober was by now a couple of books behind in the coloring project, the creation of a pointless connect-the-dots puzzle on each page of his book, and fretted no end about his inability to keep up, to meet his responsibilities, to pass the highly fraught subject of
o
-coloring.) But the music got him. He looked like a scholarly monastic who’s been sitting at his high-backed chair illuminating one of the lives of the saints when suddenly he hears the sound of a lute, perhaps (he thinks) a lute with a perfumed damsel bending o’er, pouring through his open casement.

When the song was over, Lears began asking questions. He asked us what connection we thought the Stones had in mind. Why Lears was asking questions about rock music, we had no clue. But we liked him now. He was our man. So we did our best to answer.

Was it about wanting to connect with someone you loved, hoped would love you, etc., etc.? (Carolyn)

Was it about feeling connected to the world? A part of all that is, ever was, and shall be? (Sandra)

But then the Doober raises his hand. Raises his hand! This is about the fourth time all year that he has done so, the other incidents being associated with bathroom trips and wisecracks that, for the purposes of contrast, seemed best prefaced with a piece of official protocol. (Lears, on reading a passage of poetry: “Some people have described these lines as breathtaking.” The Doober, face fire-engine red, cheeks popping, eyes rolled back, rigor mortis attacking his legs, sends a diffident hand into the air. Recognition from Lears. “Can I, can, can I, can I breathe now?” “Yes, Donald, breathe away.” A bellowslike suspiration, followed by mock postcoital collapse. “Thank you, Mr. Lears. Sir.”)

This time the Doober wonders aloud if maybe Mick isn’t trying to make a telephone connection, maybe to someone he’s left behind while he’s on tour.

Lears, obviously, is not pleased. So far there’s been lots of half smiling on Lears’ part, getting progressively less amiable, as though we were kids who, given a fascinating new toy, at first couldn’t figure out how to play with it and then, frustrated, began working to dismantle the thing. Now all he can spare for the Doober is a very light frown.

But Lears has it all wrong. This is a breakthrough. The Doober, the doughnut repository, the human beer-recycling op, the near– bridge jumper, the math dope, the self-professed failure in this life and beyond, has anted up and tried to answer a question. His answer is nowhere, at least as far as Lears is concerned. But the Doober has tried, by his lights, to answer seriously a question posed in a class. Lears, who should, in the provinces of his own mind if nowhere else, be walking up a dense roll of carpet, gunboats sinking deep into the crimson plush, to get the teacher-of-the-century award on the basis of this moment alone, or at the very least commending the D with a “Not half-bad,” doesn’t appear to notice.

Instead, he keeps after us. He won’t let it drop. “What kind of connection?” “What’s going on here?” “What do people think?” Finally, in a voice that actually displays a hint of petulance rather than the varying and not easily parsed blend of affection and irony that’s standard with him, he says, “Did any of you ever think of a drug connection? He’s interested in scoring some drugs, isn’t he?” We all nod our heads in brief homage to the more highly developed hipness of our teacher. Dubby grins like a junior-level fiend who’s quickly climbing the career ladder. He’s recently discovered pot.

But why was Lears badgering us on this, of all things? Lears, as I say, brought in music, and as time went by, he began to bring in more and more rock and roll, including some stuff we all
had
heard. And he questioned us pretty hard about it. What do you suppose this Pepperland is about? Why can’t Mick get satisfied? What is the Jefferson Airplane keening about? Why are the Grateful Dead so blissed-out?

He must have been trying to get us to listen to and think about the music we only heard. For me, rock was background music, aural ambience that I surrounded myself with as I sat in my room avoiding my homework, and dreaming. I used it the way the eighteenth century used Bach, as aural tapestry, though my tapestry was loud tie-dyed, not velvet brocade, intricately patterned.

But in fact, once Lears began asking questions, I could see that rock, or at least some of it, unfolded a vision. The vision was often foul (the Stones specialized in this one), but sometimes it bodied forth a world that conformed to the best human wishes (or to the entirely self-vaunting wish of the guy with the long, strong guitar in his hands). When I was sitting in my room stumbling through my favorite tunes, I was singing songs of innocence and of experience, regaling myself—and any unfortunate who happened to pass—with tales about utopia and disaster, and much else as well: I simply didn’t know it, had no clue. I was a little like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the character who speaks prose all the time, without knowing as much.

In a way Lears eventually helped me see, I wasn’t quite the uncultivated, unwashed alien I imagined myself to be: For a few hours a week, listening to the radio, putting on records, I was a member of a ragtag tribe initiating its mythology. I wasn’t seeing the deities being born, exactly, but I was present while the demigods—Mick’s devil, John and Paul’s Walrus, the Beach Boys’ surfer girl; there was no end to them—were being set loose to stumble or fly in the world, to be worshiped in good, vulgar fashion as newborn glowing deities, archetypes to be adored and (maybe) emulated, or cast aside as too campy, inspired by dreams far too vapid for the times or just flat-out dumb. (Little surfer girl! Jayzus!)

These musicians, Lears might have told me if he were the sort who’d assert much of anything, were trying (and often enough failing) to be the Shelleys and Byrons of the moment, similar in their aspirations for shifting their audience’s inner weather and just as readily detested by all the paragons of tired virtue. (“Shelley the atheist is dead,” a British paper cried after he drowned. “Now he knows whether there is a hell or not.”) For were the rockers not here to do something on the order of what the Romantics had tried to do: to re-create consciousness—sometimes with an assist from a mind-blasting substance, sometimes not—and in so doing renew a portion of the world?

The reason Lears got ticked off when we didn’t come up with the drug-connection answer wasn’t that we were all being so dim. We’d behaved in much dumber ways without provoking his mild ire. The reason was, I think, that all of us, or a good many,
knew
the answer—I did—and wouldn’t break the taboo against talking about something like drugs in school. We were keeping the conversation timid and artificial when, as Nora had showed us, and Socrates had long ago averred, it ought to be conducted full-out: “This discussion is not about any chance question,” the philosopher says, “but about the way one should live.”

Dubby was trying to answer. He was offering the best he could. And, to his credit, he hung in, undaunted by Lears’ dismissal. He kept listening, tossed in a word or two. Once he was on the road, even his guide and mentor wasn’t going to boot him off.

Why did I listen to this stuff? Why was I, by this time, something like a rock addict? Prodded by Lears, I groped around for some answers. The Stones were here to unfold a jump-back-rat’s vision of the world—crumbling, smoke-blackened, teeming and fetid, with, here and there, behind polished, bolted-oak doors, a pocket of pleasure for the lucky and bold. The only way to counter this world, they knew, was to follow their lead and live without illusions, to be a grinning predator rather than squealing prey. The Stones hated the world as it was, or affected to, and stored some contempt for the worldliness they had to develop in order to get along, and more than along. In a way, they were chanting the secret history of Medford life: Never kept a dollar past sunset; never want to be like Papa, workin’ for the boss every night and day. Just gimme some love, fast and loose, to keep my grin up, keep me happy.

With the Beatles, you dreamed and then awoke to live inside the dream and never leave. In their most memorable songs, memorable at least to me—“Strawberry Fields,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—and dozens more, the iron law of compensation was off. You simply didn’t have to pay for your pleasures. The colors were soft and pure, all gentle sunset wash, and the world was an opium vision that never faded. You floated across cloud fields, free for once, and never had to come down. The Beatles looked out on Medford High life and said, “No, thanks”; rather than diving deeper and deeper into the wreckage, like the Stones, they set sail, on perfumed breezes (and a little of whatever the dealer had today), for another world. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

Perhaps I never quite had these thoughts—not full-out, anyway. But I began to feel intimations of them, began to feel that I lived in a certain singular time, had a culture, was part of something, and largely because Frank Lears simply asked me to lift up my head, hear what I listened to, and see where the music might lead.

TEACHERS WHO matter sow seeds like this all the time. Some land on the rocks, some in sand, some flow away with the river, as the Bible assures us. But some take root, too, and they produce and yield. The sad part is that often it takes the seeds twenty years or so to break ground and produce green shoots, and because the beneficiary doesn’t remember who tossed them from his bag, or because the sower has sped away to some other world, he never knows. He acts simply on faith, knowing that someone did it for him and that, maybe, he can do it for another. Lears, with an assist from a thug genius, the sort of guy he probably couldn’t have spent a comfortable ten minutes with, did that much for Dubby—and for me, too.

It wasn’t
The Stranger,
the book that touched Nora as it had, that got to me and the Doob. No, the book that conquered us was Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Cuckoo’s Nest
is now something like an American myth: You know all about it; you’ve read it even if you haven’t turned a page. It’s a little like the Frankenstein story: You seem to get the basics simply by virtue of living for a decade or so.

So everyone knows the story of how Randall Patrick McMurphy—initials RPM to denote force, dynamism, unruly power—turns up in a mental hospital dominated by the Big Nurse. Big Nurse is the queen of the Combine, the system that keeps the patients (that keeps us all?) docile and cowed. She uses fancy psychiatric diagnoses, subtle humiliation, head-on ridicule, and, when need be, electric shock to hold the patients in line. Big Nurse and McMurphy recognize each other as blood enemies from the start. The opposition is nearly Manichaean, as though a couple of comic-strip antagonists, or maybe a pair of warring deities, are facing off. Big Nurse is all for order, routine, submission, the dream of all-conquering Apollonian perfection. McMurphy is a throwback to an earlier, rowdier, more righteous time. He’s grit and self-reliance, a two-fisted Emerson, scarred, sexy, always ready for a brawl, made to rumble. He’s a high Romantic avatar, who wants to be all in all in himself.

It was on about the fifth day of reading Kesey aloud in class and discussing him (I and most of the rest of the group would still read nothing at home) that a chance remark that Lears made caught my attention. He said that prisons, hospitals, and schools were on a continuum and that Kesey, with his bitter portrait of the mental hospital, might be seen as commenting on all these places at once.

The idea, elementary as it was, smacked me like revelation. Here was a writer who was not on the side of the teachers, who in fact despised them and their whole angelic apparatus. Here was someone who found words—gorgeous, graffiti-styled, and apocalyptic—for what in me had been mere inchoate impulses, unheard groans of the spirit laboring away in its own darkness.

I can hardly express how I savored that novel. When McMurphy and his crew of sickos broke free and went fishing and partied and got drunk and thumbed their noses at Big Nurse and the pip-squeak shrinks she controlled, I had to throw the book up in the air and holler. They were rebelling against Medford High as well as against that hospital. And when they put McMurphy on the gurney and wheeled him back to the ward after his lobotomy, I was stunned with grief. This is what
they
would do—the omnipresent
they
—if you stood too squarely in the way of their machine, the ever-threshing Combine. When the Chief smothers the “fake” McMurphy and sends the humongous tub through the window, breaks out of the institution, and goes sane, I myself jumped up and danced around the periphery of my room at 58 Clewley, gleeful that for once, if only in someone’s roaring imagination, the Combine had lost.