Teacher (7 page)

But after that day, a day spent banging heads and being a grim blind-as-a-bat warrior under Mace Johnson’s eye, the worst kinds of imaginings I had about the future receded a little. I thought that maybe there was hope for me, that rather than standing on the edge of things, I might enter into the game, such as it was, and not always go down. Life ahead may have looked harsh, but in some part of myself I was ready for that now. I had something in me as bad as most things out there, and that, oddly, was a comfort. I was not going to die stillborn. Though what sort of life I would have was still hard to describe. It was that feeling of hunger unslaked and with no object, but a hunger that now assumed a right to food, that made me good and ripped, if only internally, at the kind guidance counselor when she told me that Salem State was about as far as I was likely to go in the world. Before that day, when I’d tried by my lights to murder Tommy Sullivan, I would have bought it all and decided that State was surely the best I could do.

FOURTH QUARTER, final minutes. At this point hell, or your best high school conception of it, swallows you whole. The pain of leaping up and smacking the ground yet again brings you near to tears. You push and grind and pump, and suddenly there’s the feeling of the captive dancing in chains, sensing that he’ll never be free unless he so tortures his body that the right pain-conquering chemicals kick in and take over and the world disappears.

And now the coaches talk more forcefully, more fluently, risen as they are on the wings of our pain; they go on with epic panache about how, compared to what we’ll face someday, this is nothing. Compared to the burdens we’ll have to bear, this is just small potatoes. Not long ago, the United States Marines have gone nose to nose with the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. A war is being waged, prisoners taken and prisoners shot. And we are the raw material that is now being processed for that war. We’re being readied for a great jump into the dark. These are the best years of our lives. After this, the conflagration.

I once heard a pontificating expert deliver a derisive line about the American troops who went to fight in Vietnam. He said that their main preparation for the debacle was nothing more than high school football. High school football! And what poor chumps must they have been who went into the jungle with only that? High school football players, inept and maladroit and not ready for anything so bad as those heroic VC. Well, yes, I see what he meant. But a lot of those football players fought like Spartans, first for victory, then, years and resolution to win passing, for their lives and the lives of their friends. The war was the most appalling thing I ever encountered; it threw me out of love with America nearly for good. But I’d never say a dismissive word about the Americans who fought in it. I got ready with those kids for the same game. My ineptitude was theirs. (The fourth quarter, I can see, is almost over: The coaches are coming off their contact high, registering their impatience a little.)

For I was, even at best, going nowhere very special, and to have thrown myself into something and to have emptied myself to the bottom for it—well, football taught us that was not something to be sneered at. Or so I might have said then had I the words, as we began to walk, in tired World War II Sergeant Rock strides, off the practice field, across the running track, and into the Hormel Stadium locker room. There’s a dignity in getting as bone-weary as we were then—a feeling akin to triumph, though it is not easy to explain.

But when I think about it, I remember many of the men my father’s age, in their fifties, who came to his funeral. They were big; many were drink-ruined, with great hands and weary, weary expressions, as though they’d spent their lives rolling the boulder up an endless hill. They had done their work, laid concrete, driven the bus, dug the ditch, and now they were truly and honestly tired, tired and ready for the end. Uncomfortable, genuinely sorry, not knowing what to say, in their too-tight, once- or twice-worn Sears, Roebuck suits, they still exuded vast dignity. Working guys, from the beginning of life to the near end, they were pure proles, all class.

It was from this world—from their world and that of Mace Johnson and of football, and most of all from the world of my father—that Franklin Lears would wrest me away.

Chapter Three

BLIND GIRL

Paul Revere rode through Medford, Massachusetts, on his famous midnight ride (on the eighteenth of April, in ’seventy-five), immortalized in verse by my ancestor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, onetime professor of modern languages at Harvard, who, could he have visited Medford in the fall of 1969, might have been surprised at how far his descendant had fallen. Revere, seeing the two beacons burning in the Old North Church in Boston and so knowing that the British were coming by sea, took off to spread “his cry of alarm to every Middlesex village and farm,” flying through Medford (“it was twelve by the village clock, / When he crossed the bridge into Medford town”) on his way to Concord, where the Revolutionary War would begin.

Medford wasn’t entirely without distinctions beyond Revere’s ride. The great historian Francis Parkman spent summers there as a boy, hiking, swimming, and canoeing in what was eventually to become the Middlesex Fels Reservation. (My friends and I spent many hours there drinking beer and dodging the MDC police. Depending on whom you asked, MDC meant Metropolitan District Commission or More Dumb Cops.) The great aviator Amelia Earhart lived in Medford for a while; when she came back from her transatlantic flight, the town held a parade, for which 20,000 turned out. Four were arrested for pickpocketing. It’s said, too, that Medford was the site of the nation’s first traffic light. More certain is the fact that Fannie Farmer wrote her cookbook while living in Medford and that “Jingle Bells,” the Christmas song, was written there.

In the past, Medford had days of relative prosperity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a port town; ships were built there, and sailed in to dock on the Mystic River, which traverses Medford Square. (The city had relatively easy access to the local trading hub, Boston, eight miles away.) The most salient commodity in the town’s commercial life then was Medford Old Rum, touted as “the best rum made in the States.” The days of Medford Rum were the days of what historians refer to as “triangular trade”: New Englanders, sometimes the descendants of the Puritans, traveled to the coast of Africa, where they exchanged simple manufactured goods for slaves. Then the slaves traversed the horrid Middle Passage to the West Indies, where they were in turn traded for the molasses that, in America, in Medford, was distilled into rum. Various citizens of Medford, some of them perhaps stern abolitionists—slavery was abolished in Medford in 1787—profited from this trade no end.

By 1969, Medford was a sad, somnolent working-class city of about 60,000. It was full of triple-decker houses, dreary, weed-grown parks, and an unremarkable square, which to me was principally defined by Brigham’s ice cream parlor, Stag’s pool hall, and Papa Gino’s pizza joint. The majority of the population was Italian; there was an Irish constituency, along with a few Jews and, in West Medford, where I lived, a black neighborhood. Though only a few miles from Boston and Cambridge, Medford was substantially another world. Many residents of Berkeley and Madison would have known more about the cultural life of Cambridge and Harvard than we, a twenty-minute drive away, did.

All these things Franklin Lears understood about Medford before he arrived. He had probably taken a driving tour or two through the town. He had no doubt read up on the city in one book or another, sitting at his ease in the great reading room at Harvard’s Widener Library. But still, he would not really have gotten the flavor of the place, the high school in particular. You could stack up postcard visions and yellowing prose accounts forever and not convey the sense of what Medford, at least as I tasted it then, was all about.

One simple story tells more about the place than any exterior mapping could reveal. This is the Doober’s story, not mine, and Dubby could at times be a little wayward with the truth. Life wouldn’t always arch itself in quite the graceful parabolas that Dubby’s imagination required. Sometimes life needed help. But he told this story so graphically, with such conviction, that I had to believe him. True or not, let it stand as a metaphor for all that was true for me about Medford High School, circa 1969.

THE DOOBER’S incident occurred in the New Corridor, where I had gone to see Mrs. Olmstead to learn that my prospects on planet Earth were less than modest and the place that, for whatever it may be worth, most often appears in my dreams when they go back to high school. Dubby was on the far end of this corridor, the bright passageway through the old, burned-out sector of the school. Up at the other end, he spotted a girl who was known to everyone not by anything so civilized as her name but simply as the Blind Girl.

She was, from all appearances, stone-blind, navigating the halls and classrooms of Medford High with a cane and, on occasion, a Seeing Eye dog. She’d been in my Latin class (first row, first seat) and she was quite a good student, though the voice in which she offered her translations seemed to come from beyond the grave, a softly wailing cry. The teacher coddled her in that class, and after a while she coddled me, too. The girl and I had something of a bond.

It was an advanced Latin class, featuring a year-long troop through Virgil’s
Aeneid,
master poem of imperial triumph. I was, not uncharacteristically, one of the worst students there. I never brought the book home, never studied the stuff. When it was my turn to translate, I’d simply take a running whack at the text, making liberal use of English cognates and soundalikes and also of an overall sense of what was likely to happen next in the story. This I had acquired from my reading, somewhere around the age of eight, the Classic Comic Book versions of
The Iliad
and
The
Odyssey,
the poems on which
The Aeneid
is based. Actually, that’s putting it kindly: Virgil cribs outrageously from both. Thus there was some justice, as you’ll see, to what was going on in the class. I generally got a B or a C in the translation sweepstakes. But overall I didn’t acquit myself too badly, in part because I knew all the mythological references, based on an agreeably semi-pornographic illustrated book of Greek myths, which I’d also read when I was eight—my classical phase, you might call it. From time to time I would put the poor Latinist who taught us out of her misery by revealing, for about the ninth time, who Jupiter and Juno were.

But on this particular day the Latin matron, with her broom-straight backbone, detected something that made her frozen blood warm a little. It was maybe a rustling and a thrustling of papers under someone’s desk, a muffled, clandestine sound of some kind. But then maybe she had been preparing for this Latin class shoot-out for a while.

She flung herself toward the miscreant’s desk and at the same time shouted to all of us to keep quiet and not to move. We were to keep our hands in plain sight, on our desks. Cowboy TV junkie that I was, it sounded like a stickup to me. I raised both hands in the air. With her bony hand, she snatched something from off the desk, or perhaps from between the legs, of poor Betty Anders. It was a book, a paperback book. Was it possible that Betty was reading something in class, the way that she had read
Peyton Place
beneath her desk in ninth grade and been caught by Miss Tuttle? Miss Tuttle had crowed in rage at the “filth.” (We were then studying
Hamlet,
that fount of purity; when it came to the business about “country matters,” the territories between Ophelia’s thighs, and other such things, we simply skipped past.)

The book Betty was perusing turned out to be not a porn classic but an English translation of Virgil—a trot, as they were called. As she snatched the offending volume, our Latin teacher, tall and white-haired and straight as a chessboard bishop, called out that all of us should now surrender our cheat sheets.

Around the room she trolled, looking for erring souls. And she made quite a haul. From between the knees and behind the propped-up books and under the notebooks of nearly every student in the class she pulled a translation of the famous poem. Some were books; others, on the desks of the more industrious, were translations copied out in careful longhand. Almost everyone in that small class was apprehended as a scapegrace. Among the few righteous ones were the Blind Girl and me—me not because I was so silver-sheened honest but because I simply didn’t give a sufficient damn to figure out that this was the way to thrive and that, sitting in a middle row, in a very back seat, two seats deeper than my nearest neighbor on either side, I had never noticed the malfeasance. As to the Blind Girl, she was clearly innocent. Anyway, I felt a certain kinship with the Blind Girl. So what Dubby told me rang a somber bell; eventually it evoked the feeling of mortal kinship, the still sad music of humanity, as I’d later hear it called.

Anyway, here is the Doober’s tale. On one end of the New Corridor, the pine-paneled and brightly lit passageway where I’d ducked into the guidance counselor’s office, there is Dubby. He is late, per usual, for a dose of geometry (or
geometwy,
depending on your meanness quotient) from the teacher he’s taken to calling the Waskally Wabbit—that is, Mr. Repucci.

Enter from the other side of the corridor the Blind Girl. According to Dubby—a footnote here—the Blind Girl was not born blind. One day she simply popped on the bathroom light and took a full look in the mirror and was struck by what appeared and, lo, could see nothing. Is this too mean to write? Too cruel? It is simply the common coin of high school, the last place where Darwinian laws apply without amendment. Think back to the worst thing you ever did or said in those precincts before moralizing too fervently.

The Blind Girl looked like the figure in Edvard Munch’s much-reproduced painting
The Scream.
Her eyes were hollowed caves; her cheeks were indented. It was as though she’d fed on the winds. Her mouth stood open in a look of sorry expectancy: The worst might arrive at any minute. She had a ravaging case of acne. As she walked, she moaned quietly to herself, sometimes in ghostly melodies. She was a haunted being passing you by, a pained soul come back, Ancient Mariner–like, to tell you how it was with her and could readily be with you. But high school being what it was, no one much noticed or cared.

The Doober sees the Blind Girl, with her red-bottomed cane tapping her way down the New Corridor, where it is so bright that one almost feels it is stage-lit. But Dubby himself is in medieval darkness, waiting in the wings, for the areas that adjoin the corridor on either end are windowless. They’re full of classrooms with thick, dungeonlike doors, which are now—Dubby is late for class—slapped shut.

Suddenly, behind the Blind Girl’s subdued tap-tap, there rises up another pattern of sound, something aggressive and strong, summoning up the image of a well-engineered train, maybe, smacking its way down the track, very metallic, very sure. And soon there is a shape coming up fast behind the Blind Girl, who moves at an unvaryingly deliberate pace, making mystical-seeming half-circles over the floor with her cane.

He’s gorgeous: Sicilian hair, blacker than Presley’s dyed do ever was, slicked back in a phenomenally beautiful duck’s ass, which he strokes compulsively. He wears skintight pants that ride about two inches above his black knifepoint shoes. He’s decked in a jack shirt, a button-up that doesn’t tuck in, with two buttons low down over the belt to hold it in place. It’s trimmed with velvet, or velvet substitute, and purchased at (or boosted from) Medford’s preeminent men’s shop, Frank’s, a place where I myself can afford nothing but the socks when they are on sale (three pairs for $2.50), though I often go to look in wonder at the shark-wear splendors on display.

Paulie Costello, for that is who Dubby sees, has the composed face of a Renaissance sculpture, calm, indifferent, masterly, without any sense of burden or strain. He walks, generally, as if he were on his way to a liaison with a Venetian countess, to whom he need bring no offering of flowers or verse, nothing but his own immaculate and stunning form.

Though Paulie is only a sophomore, he is a significant figure at Stag’s pool hall. He plays at table one, the best lit freshly velveted table close up to the cash register. There, he participates in a seemingly never ending game of “action” with Hank the Hat, skinny, ball-pounding, in tiny porkpie hat and spaghetti-strap T-shirt, and with a leopard tattooed on his thin but sinewy left arm—where the leopard’s claws meet Hank’s flesh are flecks of inky blood. There too is likely to be Steve “Porky” Parrotta, bull-like, looking like a longshoreman, with a crusty, forty-year-old’s face, though he’s only seventeen, whose uncle was a prizefighter, whose grandpa was a pool hustler, and whose father is in meat-packing and is so prosperous that he can give his boy a full-size pool table down in his basement.

Stag’s was a male sanctum. One night Louis “Little Rudy” Valentino came running up Main Street, breathless with astounding news. Rudy had all the inflections of a street thug—
dis, dat,
dese, dose
—but his voice was so sweet that if you were only listening, not looking at him (he was thick-featured and wary), you swore you were encountering an angel who had somehow been shuffled early and unjustly into a boys’ reformatory, where he learned his rough cadences.

“Mahhk! Mahhk!” Rudy was coming on at a run.

“Mahhk, you’re not gonna believe this. There’s girls in the poolroom [poo’room].”

The news was traveling out in every direction, like vibrations from the midst of a spider’s web, and before long, guys from all over, from Brigham’s and Papa Gino’s and from down by the bridge, where they’d been emptying bottles of Bud, were flying downstairs into the sanctum. Stag, a fifty-year-old man with dense, white, well-tended hair, sat completely composed behind the desk, where he stored the balls and where the stud players kept their personal cues in a rack, as though all were fine and the world was not, effectively, cracking in the middle.

Stag had something of an urbane-thug style. One day, when I decided to forgo using a bridge and to climb up onto one of Stag’s tables to sink a quick eight ball—it was an easy shot once you were in position, a tit shot, as they were called at Stag’s; I can still hear the voice of poolroom denizen Oscar Venell screaming at top volume about an eight-ball shot that would have bolixed Minnesota Fats, “C’mon, get it over with, Mark. It’s tit. Just a piece of tit”—and Stag saw me draped over his property, in danger of toppling it, or at least warping the precious slate, he purred into his microphone, “Mr. Edmundson, are you shitting me there on table six?”