Teacher (5 page)

THE DOOBER is shifting into third gear. His ritual is to wait for the small, pale fellow up front to look away, then take aim, shoot, and duck behind the back of the guy in front of him, like a desperado dodging behind a cactus. Ping—duck. Ping—duck. He nicks John Vincents, who wears his soccer cleats to class. But Vincents is so good-natured and fond of the Doober—they’ve known each other for about a decade—that he doesn’t care. Then he tags Donald Bellmer again and again, Bellmer, with his Dumbo ears and big feet and hands. Bellmer was tall and pale and so shy and indrawn that he almost seemed like a ventriloquist’s doll who was waiting for the master to come along, prop him on his knee, and let the show begin. He hit blond, open-mouthed Carolyn Cummer, and then he looked at her apologetically, like a low-rung courtier who’d sullied the empress.

Almost everyone is watching Dubby now. He’s in the position of the prospector who’s perhaps struck a vein of gold. Out ahead of us, he has taken the necessary daring step and quickly revealed what looks to be the way things will go with this new guy.

Tired of shooting, the Dub gets into another line. He stomps his feet a little, offers a few animal noises, maybe a lip-fart or two. And Lears lets it all go. He pays the Doober no mind, though he seems to see Donny working away. Probably he’s too afraid to confront him. Probably he doesn’t know what to do.

We begin to loosen up. We drum the desks; we yack as loudly as we care to with our neighbors. We pull out newspapers. A few lay their heads down and begin a nap. Some kind of discussion does seem to be going on—yes, Sandra is dropping in a word here and there. And this Lears character, ignoring our antics, is talking back, taking her seriously. He thinks he’s in an actual school. Occasionally, he stops and looks at all of us, contemplating the group en masse.

And what did he see as he looked out at us? Lears, you have to keep in mind, was here on leave from Pepperland. He came from the world where men wore beads and earrings and carried little purses and displayed muttonchop sideburns and walrus mustaches and decked themselves in army-surplus gear. They sported pink-tinted granny glasses, headbands, multiple rings, bell-bottoms, Mexican sandals. The idea, often, was to reach to both extremes. The real stylists would mix macho touches—boots, spurs, a Confederate cavalry cap, say—with female odds and ends—silver amulets and love beads and a sweet little braid or two.

The women wore minis (there were rules against these at Medford High) and long bread-baker skirts, and hair like bed curtains, hanging evenly down, and no bras (no bras!) and absurdly bright peasant blouses. Lears’ contemporaries were at the time busy forming a ragtag peasant parody army, high as magpies on weed, mushrooms, and acid, pushing the pigs against the wall (and being shoved there in turn), getting it on, and reinventing (or trying to reinvent) America wholesale. Lears’ legacy suit, with the lapel paper clip and the gunboat shoes, was a costume; he was goofing on the whole idea of straightness. He was fresh from the revolution, out of that great tragicomedy that’s since been dubbed the sixties, but at the time simply looked like a standard-issue re-creation of the world from top to bottom that was going to continue forever.

What Lears saw was Dubby stupidly lurking behind the prop that was Rick’s back and the rest of us following his antics like chimps seeking their lowest level of common amusement, straining to achieve our ultimate goal, which was to turn everyday life into a species of our favorite diversion, television. Yes, if you could turn school into TV, that would be fine indeed, well worth the labor of getting up, doing the ablutions, and boarding the bus.

What he saw when we sat still and tried to listen was also in some measure the world created by TV. For we looked like nothing so much as people who aspired to be in family sitcoms, aspired, that is, to a certain wholesomeness, fed as we were on American cheese and Wonder Bread, with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches and sloppy joes on the weekends. The girls wore jumpers and pleated skirts and had their hair militantly lacquered, into imposing helmets. What our school alone used in hair spray would have been enough to burn a considerable hole in the ozone. He saw the boys all looking pretty much alike, with our modest bangs, courtesy of the Beatles, and our crewneck sweaters that made us look just a little clerical, and our penny loafers and socks that matched those crewnecks, or were supposed to. (A bit schizoid in the sartorial department, I wore this sort of stuff sometimes, and other times wore semi-greaser getups.) Perhaps Lears also sensed the reservoirs of anxiety and rank horniness and confusion, along with maybe a little bit of potentially usable desperation. Overall, he saw what must have looked like the most god-awfully unhip concatenation of people yet assembled in one small room in the West in the fall of 1969. We had no idea what time it was. People’s Park and the Panthers’ insurrections and the March on Washington had all taken place over our heads, like those scenes of heaven in Wagner-inspired paintings where the gods feast and cavort on high and the mortals toil stupidly below. He must have been ready to walk out, slapping the gunboats on the linoleum, and go back to Cambridge and get his commission reinstated in the anti-army of hip, get his proper togs back and rejoin the revolution.

He was in one of his legacy suits, a green twill number, hanging and disheveled, I think, of which I would one day, not quite knowing what I was up to, buy an imitation in a New Haven thrift shop. He had on a skinny tie, tamed-snake black, with a modest stripe down the middle, and the inscrutable paper clip. Lears was dressed in a certain kind of drag, but nobody in the room got it (except maybe Sandra); nobody moved with the joke.

As for us, we continued with our antics, raising the volume progressively. To look at it all from a distance, of course, is more than a little appalling. We were seventeen, a point in life where other people, at other places and times, are beginning to do their life’s work, are writing bad early poems, scribbling music, concocting business schemes, or picking up the rudiments of a trade. And the world around us was more than alive. Our nation was busy bombing a peasant population into Buddhist rage and Buddhist renunciation of that rage. And here we were, with all the promise and absurdity that are inseparable from being seventeen, regressing as quickly as we could. We were regressing, maybe, as a sign of rage at how often—stand in line, don’t talk, no short skirts—we were rewarded for regression. All right, I’ll play along; I’ll go where the conveyor belt seems bound to send me, and I’ll go capering and grinning, too.

Now Mace Johnson or Paul Tuppermann or Dirty Ed Bush would have whipped around like a G-man, in a quick Eliot Ness pivot, sensing the apostasy at his back, and sought the “ringleader.” Any one of them would have ripped Dubby from his seat—especially Dubby—and pulled him like a human mule, limbs flying, up the row toward the front, stretching, maybe tearing the collar of his new madras shirt, so new that the little band of cloth fixed between the shoulder blades, known as the fruit loop, was still intact.

Franklin Lears simply looked at us en masse and with an expression of mild bemusement. He didn’t seem at all discomfited by our antics. He didn’t seem ready to rush out the door in anguish at the way we’d messed up his first day of school. Perhaps he understood that the ability to be humiliated and take it in stride is crucial to a certain kind of teaching, the kind that will convey two virtues, which rarely come together—a modesty so intense that it borders on self-mockery, along with a conviction, absolute and unflappable, that one has to see it one’s own way, speak one’s truth, that having experimented in the chaotic laboratory of life, one must, for better or worse, publish the results to the world.

Socrates, after all, got brained with a plate of urine, thrown by his wife, Xanthippe, who was angry at him for neglecting domestic affairs. When people teased him about it in later life, Socrates simply said that with Xanthippe, you could be sure that after the thunder—after her shrewish harangues—would inevitably come the rain. During his early years as a philosopher, Socrates decided to define man as a featherless biped. He got a plucked chicken thrown at him for his pains. The sage took pleasure in these things, saw them as conducive to a modesty that was the obverse side of the mental fearlessness he also cultivated. As Falstaff, an Elizabethan Socrates, says, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”

Lears simply kept talking to Sandra and calmly ignored the rest of us. As time went on, we would get to him. How could we not? But on this, the first day, he held his ground. He continued with a demonstration of what real teaching might be like—though we were too dim to see as much. For what we saw was rank weakness; another teacher had arrived who did not know his trade. The Doober, our guide, had shown us the way. This class was going to be fabulous. We could do anything we wanted. Good times were about to roll.

Chapter Two

MUSTANGS

If Franklin Lears’ so-called philosophy class was going to be a circus, all to the good. I detested school; a little diversion would help me get through the day. What I cared about—and with an intensity that bordered on religious devotion—was football. The football field was where my real life was going to unfold. For I had grand hopes for this, my senior year. When I think back on the game and what it meant to me—and what it meant for Lears to pull me from it, as he eventually would—one day in particular stands out.

This was our last day of double sessions, two-a-day practices. (It might, in fact, have been the day that Frank Lears got his first look inside Medford High, faculty orientation day.) On the field, it was brutally hot. Eighty degrees is bliss on a leafy New England street; on a high school practice field, where the ground is so hard that you and the ballcarrier bounce like a couple of india-rubber dolls when you make a tackle and the dust billows perpetually in an ongoing simoom, it’s something else again. I felt like I was being boiled alive in the cauldron of my helmet.

This was the only day all year that we did grass drills. As far as I know, the last pro football coach who could regularly get his team to do grass drills, or up-downs, as they’re also called, was Vince Lombardi, the man of whom the defensive tackle Willie Davis said, “Coach treats us all like equals, treats us like dogs.” Lombardi was a legend even during his life.

Mace Johnson was here today. He was my history teacher, our last year’s backfield coach, now in charge of his own team on the other side of Boston, and he was legendary to us. Johnson had come to revisit his old squad, whom he’d keep track of through the year almost as closely as he did his new team. Though physically absent through the season, he often seemed more with us than the new coaches who had come on to take his place.

Most anything Mace Johnson asked we would have done, and what he asked for on this particular day was grass drills. It was time, as he said in his staff sergeant’s drawl, to “get ’em up.”

He is there, standing in front of us, in blue coach’s jersey and shorts, with his close-clipped hair and his whistle dangling. Johnson was six-feet-two, about 190 pounds, all prime-grade Marine Corps muscle. He was handsome, with a face that looked like it had been cut from a block of marble. The cheeks were long and smooth, the forehead high and similarly unlined. Johnson had close-set eyes, soft blue, and a nose unremarkable and perfectly proportioned to the rest of his face. There was a simplicity and purity in Johnson’s appearance, as though he were a knight who knew that he served the best of kings and that his causes were just. There was no room on the face or behind it for self-dissatisfaction, ambiguities, mysteries, doubts.

Johnson had the whistle between his teeth and he was striding up and down the rows in which the team was arrayed and running in place, his great thigh muscles rippling and relaxing with each step. When Johnson blew the whistle, we stopped our running, kicked our legs out behind us, and threw ourselves at the ground as though we were going to hit luscious feather beds. It was, he proclaimed, only the beginning of the second quarter—we’d just begun the drill—and we would have to push much harder if we expected ever to win a football game, if we ever expected to survive a football game alive and standing.

Someone passing by would have seen the arresting sight of sixty bodies, dressed a little like astronauts, a little like gladiators, heads and shoulders expanded, waists waspish, tightly feminine, all of us suspended for a moment in the air, as though by magic, on invisible carpets. Then down to the ground we went, onto the dusty near-concrete surface. There was the thud and the bounce, then up again onto our feet, and running, running in place, as Mace Johnson orated. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun roared in the sky. We sweated and strained and watched Johnson, and hated him and adored him with about equal verve.

Doing grass drills at the end of what has already been a vicious practice, pushing toward what you know will be your far edge, you enter a hallucinatory state; you see the world as a gross illusion, the way grinning, half-mad convicts are supposed to. Nothing out there—not the chanting players pounding on their thigh pads or the bawling coaches or the stands that line one side of the practice field—is entirely real, and so your pain is part illusion too. But it’s got to be dealt with, so you drop down inside yourself, stumbling and uncertain, and what you come upon is pooled rage, good octane, high-combustion stuff. I didn’t have great physical skill or remarkable strength, but I had enough hot rancor to push myself through this drill and plenty more like it.

As we sweat, Mace Johnson’s rhetoric is climbing higher, into the provinces of Christopher Marlowe and Herman Melville, masters of swelling poetic style. Johnson is launched. Up and down in front of our military rows he strides, hollering out to us that it’s getting later in the game and that the team that guts it out is the one that will win; he tells us that we’ve been pussyfooting all day, we’ve been pussyfooting through our hit-and-shed drills, dogging it during wind sprints; that we’ve lived our lives in obscene luxury and that now it’s time to wake up and become men. He tells us that in not too much time, many of us will be soldiers; some—the best of us—may be marines. He never mentions the Viet Cong by name, but it is after all 1969 and somewhere on the far side of the Hormel Stadium practice field, the Cong and the NVA are waiting, and they are doing something more drastically preparative than grass drills.

He bellows out one of his favorite injunctions: “You’re gonna be lean, mean, agile, mobile, and hostile.” Then a scream: “I mean hostile!”

Running in place next to me, wearing his helmet with the signature white-plastic face mask, Rick Cirone, my fellow philosophy student, rounds off Johnson’s litany: “How ’bout infantile?” Rick can clown well enough, but he can also play. Neither of these things can be said with confidence of me.

Up-downs are like a collective madness; you get high, the whole group does, and you hear yourself say things, hear yourself call out injunctions to yourself and the other players, scream the baseline phrase “Get ’em up!” and bellow the line that will be with us for the first month of the season: “Beat Somerville!” “Beat Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” Somerville is our local rival, the team that broke the Medford Mustangs’ winning streak last season in a game where player after Medford player was carried off the field, bloody and weeping. The chants shift. “Kill Somerville!” we scream. Neither Johnson nor any of the other coaches says a word to stem the blood lust.

Mace Johnson himself is off the Tamerlane-like tone and is now hitting a quasi-philosophical note that I’ve heard him touch before. “These are the best years of your lives, boys!” he cries at us, in a knowing, almost statesmanlike voice. “Best years of your lives!”

And as he says it, my heart gums up with fear. Could this possibly be true? Is there a chance that from here it runs downhill? For I cannot imagine anything worse than high school—at least anything inside the chain-link park-fence bounds of American life—that is more tedious, mean, anxiety-ridden, and sad. If this is the best, then I think I will do away with myself before I have to taste what’s left simmering in the pot.

“Third quarter!” Johnson hollers. And I and all my compeers in pain scream out in antiphonal response, for this is religion, American religion: “Third quarter!” Kill Somerville (and the invisible Cong)! No mercy, not for anyone, least of all us, in the best years of our lives.

Mace Johnson was a man of mantras, talismanic phrases that sewed life together at its seams. “Atta boy!” was the leading commendation, applied to any display of guts. “First off the deck!” was another, meaning that once you’d gone down, you had to spring up first, faster than your opponent, and go block someone else; then you were two men rather than just one forked thing scrambling on the field.

Johnson’s pet verbal formula, the one that, from his perspective, I imagine, elevated him to higher grounds of urbane eloquence, went this way: “There are three things in life that I cannot abide: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and [fill in the third spot with whatever abomination has just assaulted his eyes] quarterbacks who won’t stand in and take a hit”; “linebackers who don’t stick their heads into a tackle”; “runners who cannot understand that a good back
never
loses a yard.” I’m sure Johnson was serious about the small mutts. He was the sort of man who would own a mastiff or a Doberman, and that dog would be
trained.
But did he really abhor women smoking in public? Did the new Virginia Slims—cigarettes of, by, and for the female—cause him bouts of anxiety as women hoisted to their lips derogatorily reduced versions of the royal scepter and manly wand? I can’t really say.

Mace Johnson had little capacity for the ambiguous or the equivocal, much less for being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (Keats called this negative capability and I had, up until Frank Lears, who eventually displayed it in remarkable measure, never met anyone with a turn for it.) It was Johnson’s emphatic downrightness, his willingness to promulgate and live by a code that was nearly chivalric, that drew us to him. Here was a blue-collar bastion of Camelot, created by the coach; here was a place where you could be measured by a discerning eye and given a seat—or denied one—at the Round Table. You’re not a man, it’s been said, until the other men acknowledge you as one. In Mace Johnson, overemphatic, loud, monovocal, we had identified someone with the right of investiture.

It was a touch absurd, this male business—we saw it even then. We’d pass each other in the halls and call out “Atta boy!” or “Get ’em up!” and fall out laughing. But the whole enterprise was elevating, too; it pushed you to places you would never have reached on your own.

Football is a Homeric world, and like the assault on Troy, it attracts hitters, orators, and orator-hitters. In every coach there is the urge of Nestor or Odysseus to rally the troops with high-sounding hymns to fathers and manliness. Girls watch and chant madly from the sidelines, spinning and prancing, urging on the combat.

It’s important that Achilles, the apogee of heroic culture in
The
Iliad,
the apogee of all male warrior culture up to the present, really, isn’t just the great doer of deeds, the man, that is, who kills so many Trojans one day that he gluts a river with blood until the river god is revolted and tries to drown him. Achilles is also a great orator. His powers of expression are nearly incomparable. But you don’t go to Achilles for an elevating discussion. He makes speeches, lays down the word, and in his orations he unfolds the heroic code. The code revolves around one issue—honor—and its preservation, enhancement, and demolition. Achilles always knows what he must do—what god he must respect; when he must sacrifice; whom he must kill and despoil. And when Achilles speaks, everyone goes silent and listens. If you don’t, you’ll be blood on the sand. The most maladroit peewee football coach urging his kids to hold the line is tied, however pathetically, to this rap-and-wreck tradition.

Socrates, who comes on later in history, is not prone to speeches. He’ll give them if he’s pushed, but he’d prefer to pose questions, endless questions. With them, he hopes to get his interlocutor to know something about himself. And, too, Socrates aspires to be improved by the exchange. Unlike Achilles, who assumes he knows everything worth knowing (including the fact that he’ll die very young), Socrates says he knows nothing. For this, the oracle at Delphi commends him, calls him the wisest man in Athens. As soon as Achilles opened his mouth, Socrates would have begun badgering him with questions.

Though they are not entirely unlike, these two, Achilles and Socrates, they are much opposed. There was only one Socrates; we’ll never see his like again. But his spirit is always abroad in the world, and when it meets up with the spirit of heroic manliness, Achilles’ spirit—and this will happen before my eyes, soon—then one has to give way. And it will not always be the homely figure with the ready laugh who steps aside.

MACE JOHNSON, the spirit of football, the spirit of manliness, call it what you like, had anointed me at the end of last football season—though such investitures can always be revoked. Here is how it happened.

I came to football with precious little aptitude. My first year on the varsity, junior year, I was six feet tall, radically uncoordinated, tallowy in body, and bat-blind without my glasses. I missed getting cut from the team by a hair. On the fateful day of the last cut, the linebacker coach, Brian Rourke, pulled me aside and informed me that I was utterly without ability and that the only reason, the only reason in the world, I wasn’t going to be cut was that I “hustled like a bastard” on the field and was an example to the “lazy shits” with which the team, that year, was rife.

Rourke came on like a Thoroughbred: He’d been the captain of the Malden Catholic team and had then gone to Harvard, where he was a star football player. The next year we heard he skipped away to Harvard Business School, and today, for all I know, he owns great expanses of cement and steel and whole choirs of computers and is worshiped by phalanxes of cell phone–yammering princelings of global commerce. At the time, what came through was that he was deplorably handsome, a movie star in the flesh, and absurdly tough. He spat tobacco juice down on us while we pushed the blocking sled along, him riding atop it like Darius of Persia. He was a triumph of prole genetics, was Rourke; I was a mutt, just managing to bark along after the team as it strode through the stadium.

Rourke was not a subtle motivator; he wasn’t, I’d wager, trying to inspire me with a brash challenge. No, he was simply calling roll, letting me know where the scales of justice were poised. He was in charge of order and degree, like Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, and he was going to let me know where I stood in that great chain of being on which he held such an exalted place. He was good at everything; I, at nothing. Rourke, I surmised, believed that you either were born top-flight or should do the world a favor and cut from the nearest bridge.