Teacher (4 page)
So far, it looked as though this Frank Lears character might have come with the same meager throw weight that Leo did. He seemed to be absurdly mild, easy to mock, a rank pushover, someone against whom we might score a collective victory to assuage us for the defeats we’d suffered from the truly fierce and respected teachers, the disciplinarians, like Mace Johnson and the hockey coach, Paul Tuppermann, who was perpetually having us copy questions out of the history book while he . . . what? Drew up hockey plays at his desk? Are there plays in hockey?
Yes, it looked as though this Lears guy was someone on the order of Repucci or of Manny DeNofrio, who wore a set of false teeth that looked like they’d come from a joke shop, white-of-the-eyes white, far-protruding, and synthetic in appearance, as though if someone wound a key tightly in them they would leap from his mouth and traverse the floor, making a rackety sound. On the paperweight that he used to hold down his math tests, someone had written in cruel red pencil, legible all the way to the back of the room, the words
Joe Choppers.
There was Mr. Sweeney, who one day became intoxicated with an image from Hawthorne of someone spitting up blood and began to pantomime the event, signifying the blood with his shaking, compulsively manicured fingers: Again and again, he repeated the action of the blood bubbling up through his windpipe and out his mouth, as though he were being afflicted by a hilarious case of consumption. Then he toppled forward in hysterical laughter, staggered, had to sit down, and could not continue the class. There was sad Miss Cullen, the English teacher who served extended time in the supply closet and who one day, humiliated by John Cosgrove, the class smart kid, on some factual quibble or another, simply called out in Cassandra-like grief, “John! I went to college! I am right!”
Dubby had provisionally filed Lears in the bin with these weaklings and on the other side of the world from enforcers like Mace Johnson and Paul Tuppermann, and Ed “Dirty Ed” Bush. It was said that Jimmy Brown, the greatest football player ever to live, was once asked by Johnny Carson who the nastiest player was that he had faced. He skipped over the likes of Sam Huff, the Giants’ middle linebacker, and cited Dirty Ed Bush, of Northeastern University, my gym teacher. Ed was an enormous polar bear of a man, pale, with a white crew cut, and black GI glasses. He was so ferocious that you half believed he would kill randomly and then devour his fallen enemy on the site.
Dubby worked assiduously, lining his desk with the miniature cannonballs, about to fire the opening shots of the war. Now it was time to cast the cannon. Easily done. Dubby put the point of his Bic pen into his mouth, bit down hard around the tip, pulled once, then again with his Wonderland neck, extracted the metal nib and the tiny thin-plastic sheath and spat the whole business out onto his desk. In front of him lay a standard school weapon, a spitball blowgun. By now, Dubby had about divided the audience with Lears, who was talking on about the tactics we might use to interpret the Nietzsche passage.
Who would the Doober fire at? This question meant a good deal to me. Dubby was no alpha male, maybe not even a beta. But because of his acute—albeit non–number processing—intelligence, he readily sensed the pecking order that was in place at Medford High. If Dubby shot a spitball in your direction, you were a small-time player.
It was clear enough who Dubby would not shoot. He wouldn’t shoot the star quarterback, Cap, or our wide receiver, Rick Cirone. Cap had a thick beard; he needed a second shave by four o’clock. Not tall, about five-feet-nine, he was heroically muscular, with a low brow and a thick, slightly protruding jaw. He was simple and direct in his feelings, an almost courtly guy, whom I never saw commit a mean act. He was egalitarian, generous to just about everyone, a little pious, but with a small streak of whimsy. What Cap was preeminently, though, was a splendid athlete, who could run and bound and dodge in ways that made the local sportswriters search the whole bestiary for comparisons. He had a beautiful, rarely dispensed smile.
Rick and he had grown up together, and though they both had Sicilian good looks, they were much different boys. Rick’s astrological sign was Taurus, the bull, and he was a strong Taurian, down-to-earth, realistic, a lover of strong tastes and smells, fiercely drawn to girls. He was dead practical, knew how much money he had in his pocket. But Rick was also a musician, played drums and guitar, and revered not so much the Beatles and the Stones as Jeff Beck, a guitarist with a lightning hand. Rick was circumspect but also witty, a splendid mimic, much liked, caustic, unexpected. At football, he spun off imitations of the great running backs, hopping over tackling dummies like the Packers’ Paul Hornung, spinning down the field with Gale Sayers’ stride. (He insisted on wearing a white plastic one-bar face guard, like the one Sayers had worn; it was flimsy and put his face in constant danger of rearrangement.) He could sing in various pop-parodic voices. Rick was an alpha type, seemed to know it (most of the time), and laughed about it internally. He talked about playing guitar with a kick-back country-rock band and living in a flurry of girls. Cap dreamed about going pro.
Rick is drumming the desk, moving his feet, living in his self-made music as Cap, it appears, tunes out Lears and lives in the sound of the crowd on Saturday. No way the Dub would hit either of them.
Nor would he dare to hit Nora Balakian, by male consensus surely the most comely girl in the room. (And what is high school but a sort of debased Classical world, where beauty and physical might matter more than all else?) She is dark, contemplative, poised, with black hair and gray-flecked eyes. She’s intent on Lears but so far hasn’t said a word.
As to me, no, I wasn’t a likely target. Dubby was my friend, and besides, the demon in me who occasionally exploded on the football field, creating general havoc, might always spring to life. All of Dubby’s friends periodically threatened him with physical harm, if only to give him the chance for some artful, Buster Keaton–style cringing.
I didn’t think Dubby would aim at Tommy Buller. Buller was stumpy as a boss troll, thick-necked, scowling, with no social consequence whatever, a kid with a pack of younger, admiring friends at home, maybe, and aspirations to open his own auto-body shop. He had acne so livid it looked like someone had rubbed steel wool over his face that morning, with Buller’s encouragement. He wore Sears, Roebuck stain-holding shirts that reeked of the night shift. He was so angry that it seemed like a fierce dog, a Rottweiler maybe, was always there beside him. You wanted to pull the fire extinguisher off the wall and turn it in his direction so as to put the nasty fire that was Buller out. Tommy was too mean to trifle with.
Then there was Sandra Steinman, the school’s only hippie. Sandra, like Tommy Buller, was not a player in high school society. But Buller didn’t know where the game was, didn’t know that a game existed. Sandra did, and disliked it all—intensely.
On this, the first day of school, she’d opted out with her wardrobe. Sandra, who had always dressed “normally” in past years, came to class that day in loose, sloppy blue jeans and a man’s dress shirt, long and untucked. She had wire-rimmed glasses pushed close to her face. And, abomination on abomination, she was wearing work boots: men’s work boots. Sandra was well-to-do. Imagine—we hardly could—that wearing work clothes would be someone’s idea of style. But it was more than mild class rancor that beset me, and the other boys too, for we all gasped in some derision when first Sandra came clomp-clomping in with the big-ditch mud slappers. Sandra was pretty, or would have been without the self-mutilations. She had ringletty blond hair and a sweet, slightly mischievous face, the face of a lower-order angel, maybe, who’s perpetually annoying the higher castes, the thrones and dominions, as they’re called; her twin brother, John, was endlessly popular with the girls. But here were the work boots, first day of school, and what they said was that she wasn’t even going to try to be attractive to the local boys. It was as though the swan had gotten annoyed with all the attention and decided to turn back into an ugly duckling. She seemed to be telling all the boys, who wanted to imagine fine times with such a pretty, poised girl, exactly what she thought of them.
What would Sandra do if she got popped with one of Dubby’s pellets? It seemed that Sandra was, in her own mind, about five years older than the rest of us and lived on the newly discovered planet of peace and love. Her response would be too unpredictable. No way Dubby would shoot at her.
Come to think of it, the work clothes probably scared us for another reason, too. They reminded us, I suspect, of what we would ourselves be putting on to head out to the factory, head off for the ditch, down to the road crew. We wanted one year more of glad rags and great good times before moving into what we did not want just now to imagine, thanks anyway for the invitation. This year was our time on the stage. High school at the time worked this way (and I suspect it still does): For three years, from ninth grade through eleventh, the students seem to be an undifferentiated mass, roiling and stumbling along through their lives. But then at the onset of senior year something happens. Identities crystallize. Kids become themselves in stark, hyperintense ways. By midyear, all the stock figures have gelled. Up until then it is a grand audition, with people pushing hard in an almost Darwinian heat to do what they need to in order to coalesce as the highest embodiment of their type.
Senior year in high school, it seemed to many of us, was the last chance to flower, the last chance to become who you are, with some verve. That was the vocation of the senior—to come into one’s own, but within set categories: jock, brain, cheerleader, heartthrob, junior entrepreneur, femme fatale, class clown. There is something archetypal about the world of high school, something allegoric. The kids have formalized roles. The teachers have nicknames that fix their place in the meager cosmos. Even the building is full of highly charged locales—the place where this or that clique hangs out, the corridor where the fight took place, the detention room where Big Fran, the submaster, had to call the police. There is something eternally burning about this world; it lives in the mind ten, twenty, thirty years after the fact, as though it had been concocted and instilled by a small-time Dante, who had himself once been injured by it and wanted it preserved eternally as a reminder.
High school is, one fears, where ultimate identity is conferred. For it is here that, for the last time in life probably, people will pull back and tell you, or at least demonstrate in no mistakable terms, what they truly think about you. Once high school is over, the conventions of civility begin to take over. Mocking someone to his face is, by and large, out in adult life, unless you join the army or become a corporate demigod. But the fear is that high school was the last time the world was willing to offer you an up-front, unbiased readout of who and what you were. And that if the readout was negative—and it probably was—you’ve stayed fixed and everyone knows as much but is simply too polite to let on.
Most people suffer abominably from this dispensation, where everything is in the open, like in the last act of an Ibsen or an O’Neill play, when the truth comes out, with no quarter given. But some actually thrive in this cosmos. The way a few of my contemporaries took to high school might have made you believe in reincarnation. They knew precisely what to expect. They had mental clocks that chimed in their heads to forewarn them of mixers and socials and parties and official functions the necessary two months in advance. On the reincarnation theory, Suze Rodino must have been passing through high school for the fourth or fifth time, and she was getting better at it with every go. She was luminously pretty, dark-complected, with inky-black hair, and always had her schoolwork done and never missed a sorority social night and had a boyfriend (whom she’d marry) and a college picked out (the University of Connecticut) and a profession (physical therapy), and at Christmastime, once, sewed jingling bells to her slip so that when she walked or skipped (yeah, she did skip) down the halls, ringling holiday sounds came with her. She was unremittingly benevolent to all (and I mean
all;
the most noxious social outcast got a smile and a spray of kind words from Suze) good-hearted, curious, uncloyingly sweet, and always up. No, Suze had done it before; she was near high school satori. Had Dubby thought to mistreat Suze Rodino—she wasn’t, as it happened, in this class—an invisible ring of social approval would have risen around her, guarding her high-note happiness, and, like a force field, sent the offending particle to the ground.
Against this high school world, Lears was already taking his first small step, though it was a step we could not perceive. The quote from Nietzsche had a point. It was simply that in order to be a thinker, in order even to study philosophy, you had to be willing to fall out of joint with your times. “Genuine philosophers, being
of
necessity
people of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, have always found themselves, and
had
to find themselves, in contradiction to their today; their enemy was ever the ideal of today.” To be at war with today and the ideal of today? That, of course, was exactly what we did not want. Everyone in the class, Sandra Steinman and Tommy Buller perhaps excepted, had bought all the rules that high school laid down, and we wanted to conform to them as well as we could. We wanted to look like experts, the way Suze did, to look like people who were passing through the gauntlet for the twentieth time and knew every step. This fellow Nietzsche and his diminutive friend Lears were telling us that by showing any interest in philosophy, we’d signaled a willingness to put ourselves a step or two at odds with the dance. And where would that leave us? Well, with the future in our hands: We’d live in the day after tomorrow, no? But by then the philosopher has taken another step forward, and again no one likes him terribly much.
It is the Socratic type that Nietzsche is talking about and praising in the passage about being untimely. For Socrates does not fit in. He annoys people. The Delphic oracle, fount of all wisdom for the Athenians (though often wisdom of a cruelly enigmatic sort), informed the world that Socrates was the wisest man alive. This puzzles him no end. So off he goes to talk with all the people the Athenians take to be wise. He chats with politicians, craftsmen, and poets. And what comes out of the discussions, according to Socrates, is that these people know nothing whatever that’s worth knowing. They can’t tell you what justice is, why one should tell the truth rather than lie, what kind of government is best. So Socrates draws a simple conclusion. He decides that what makes him wise is his awareness of how ignorant he is. At least he, Socrates, knows that he knows nothing. This process makes the people he has questioned—the poets, tradesmen, and politicians—very angry. They become angry enough, in fact, to try him on trumped-up charges: They indict him for pretending to know what goes on in the heavens and beneath the earth, for teaching people to make the weaker argument appear the stronger, for corrupting the young. Then they sentence him to death.