Teacher (8 page)

Playing in proximity to Stag on table two were a couple of girls, seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. Neither played particularly well; neither had ever been seen in Medford before. By the time they were partway through their game—a pointer it was, as I recall: The first one to sink twenty-five balls wins—there were easily sixty guys surrounding them. And, odd as this sounds, we were quiet as a gang of church mice. We watched, and waited for someone to lead the way with a piece of rank invective. But no one did. The girls looked only at each other, playing as if we were not there. They finished their game, paid up, and walked out. For the rest of the evening, the poolroom was quiet; it was as though a religious shrine had been subtly desecrated. Something had perished, however temporarily—we weren’t sure what—and we quietly played our games and mourned.

PAULIE, THE poolroom prince, came up to the Blind Girl, Dubby said, from behind, with his hands extended in front of him. There would be contact, no doubt about it, but Paulie, a Me’ford poo’room Brahmin, was about to finger an untouchable, so the less actual touching the better. She had cooties—the high school and elementary school term for the age-old religious notion of the unclean, the polluted.

According to Dubby, the Blind Girl was in a state of agitation. What could it be, she must have wondered, all metal and strut, that was pursuing her down the hall? She was clearly terrified. For his own part, the Doober froze where he stood, in the dark.

So she begins to move faster, accelerating, her eyes blinking. But Paulie is too quick. He comes up on her like a sleek pirate ship bearing down on a heavy frigate. When he gets directly behind her, he pauses to savor the moment, then he grasps her around the waist with both hands and he spins her around. Up in the air her cane flies. Her mouth opens further but emits no sound; her feet begin scrambling over each other. Fighting, fighting, she tries to hold on to her balance.

She’s nearly sent to the floor, but with the greatest effort—huffing and puffing and pulling and grasping out and a lucky catch at the glowing pine wall—she manages to hang on and stay upright. By the time this whole stumbling movement is over and she is safe, Paulie is halfway down the corridor. According to Dubby, he is whistling. He is, Dubby says, whistling a song by the Buckinghams, a lucky-day no-flies-on-me number, with a line that runs, “My baby is made outta love / Like one of them bunnies outta the Playboy Club.”

Dubby steps into the corridor and
now
Paulie sees him. Paulie sees Dubby—it is crucial to point this out, and Dubby swears it—
for the first time.
Paulie had obviously imagined he was alone in the corridor with the Blind Girl. Paulie of the Michelangelic countenance clearly had not done this to show off to the Doober or to anyone else. He was not an insecure boy set on making a name for himself. He wasn’t out to add to his reputation for outrageous behavior, Dubby was sure. On the contrary, this spinaround had been done strictly for his own amusement, his personal diversion. He did it on a whim. Paulie was fucking around in earnest and he was doing it with an eye toward entertaining no one but himself.

When he saw Dubby—who was probably a better pool player than Paulie, but without style, wearing, as he did, cockeyed glasses and sometimes a crazy beach cap when he played—he simply nodded and inquired whether the Doober would be in attendance that afternoon at Stag’s, as though it were some sort of salon. Maybe Paulie was going out of his way a little from guilt, since Dubby did not, in general, merit a word. But Dubby thought not. As Dubby recounted it to me, the whole action had been, for Paulie, simple, natural, and about as morally freighted as spitting your gum out when it turned gray.

How did I react to the story when Dubby laid it out, pausing over every nasty detail? Some unpleasant candor is necessary here, I’m afraid. On first hearing the tale, I was shocked by it, no doubt about that. I felt that Paulie’s caper was horrible; he’d crossed a line. But to be dead honest, I also took some satisfaction from the tale. I felt vaguely proud to be ensconced in a place, Medford High, that was conducive to something like this. It was the same sort of pride, perhaps, that certain felons feel when they’re in one of the worst lockups in the federal system and are contemplating one or another atrocity that’s gone down there.

Frank Lears had not yet arrived at our school at the time of the incident, and Dubby, as far as I know, never told him the story. Probably the newly arriving Lears would have thought of the event simply as an aberration, not the key to Medford High protocols that I knew it to be. He would have sighed and swung his hand and looked sorrowfully at the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack.
But it would have been a mistake not to find instruction here rather than in whatever reading he might have done about Medford and environs. Much is published, as his idol Thoreau said, but little printed.

FOR THE next couple of months, Franklin Lears was, to us, his enlightened philosophy students, something like the Blind Girl: We tried to spin him around.

It came naturally. He was, after all, a weird little dude. He did peculiar things. For instance, when we came into class at the end of the first week, on Friday, we found that he had reconfigured the room. The chairs were now arranged in an oval, a rather ragged one at that. We entered uncertainly, with double our usual reluctance, loitering and yacking and moving unsteadily forward, as if we were being herded in by an invisible and singularly inept shepherd, whom we obeyed out of noble boredom. What we saw was truly a puzzle.

Now of course matters are much different. Any classroom discussion that
does not
begin with everyone in a circle, Iroquoisstyle, is antediluvian. But at the time, this was unheard of, a true innovation: The possibility of moving the desks from out of their military rows had never crossed my mind.

The weirdest thing was that Lears was himself sitting down in one of the pathetic little chairs, just like ours, with the straight back and the writing arm attached. They resembled devices for some sort of Puritan punishment, these chairs. You looked for holes to stick your thumbs through. It was as though the students were being humiliated by being put into the tiny seats they had occupied when they were ten or eleven years old. Small as he was, even Lears looked absurdly large for his.

But there he was, sitting in an undistinguished place in the oval, not, as one might expect, close to the provision station and authority source of his desk. He was floating out at sea, in his sad-sack suit, with his head tipped down, studying the Durant book.

We all sat down. The Doober—never at a loss—got a routine going. He pulled his glasses from his pocket, squashed them haphazardly onto his face, slapped open his book, whipped a pen (unchewed) from out of his pocket, and began to parody a devoted scholar at work, began, if you were at all discerning about it, to parody Lears. Dubby went at the Durant book with his pen. He was writing in the text. He’d noticed that Lears had written things in his book. Why not the Dub? But if what Lears did when he wrote was to leave illuminating marginalia on the white edges, Dubby had a different end in mind. He began coloring in the
o
’s in his book. There are a lot of
o
’s on a page; in a book, there are numberless numbers. Dubby had a good deal of work to do.

The process was, for Dubby, relatively subtle. What was going to make it funny would be his sheer persistence. Dubby, as I readily understood it, planned to be doing this every day, with only an occasional break for, maybe, a glance up someone’s skirt or a sneer for pillish Jean Delmire, and for the rest of the year. This was going to be the content of a course in philosophy, the love of wisdom, for one Donald O’Day—sent, as we all are, weeping into the world, searching for succor or the right road—the regimented, ceaseless coloring in of
o
’s in a textbook.

With the class reconfigured and the Doob at work, Frank Lears initiated a discussion about Plato. His method was to bring up one idea after another from Plato’s work, or from Durant’s digest of it, then ask us what we made of it. That day, as I recall, he talked to us about Plato’s doctrine of the tripartite soul. He said he wanted to remind us of this rather beautiful vision from Plato, who had imagined the soul as a thing prone to the most horrible servitude. For the soul, Plato and Lears told us, was easily overmastered by passion; it then became like a chariot where the horses took over and pulled the poor rider wherever they wished him to go—often into error, humiliation, and grief.

But the good news was that the soul could escape this fate. Reason could assert itself against the passions. It could take its rightful supremacy and direct the appetites to moderation and urge the passions for violence and glory into their proper channels. By calming down, by living moderately, we could be saved from the only true enemy anyone has in this world, which is none other than oneself. For, as Plato insists, you can never do harm to a just man. It was on this point that Lears ended. You could never hurt someone whose soul was truly in order, because the only genuine and lasting pain there is in life is to suffer an ill-governed, turbulent soul.

And so, according to Plato, it is always better to receive harm than to do it. Because hurting someone means giving in to your passions, to anger or the urge for revenge, to the desire for glory (Plato is writing here against Homer and his war-thirsty heroes). And as to being harmed, well, if the soul is truly balanced, that simply won’t happen in any long-term way. The well-tempered soul knows how to deal with the loss of money and estates, the death of a friend, the prospect of dying. The just soul, knocked off center, recovers and rebalances itself.

It was likely that no one had read the book, and that if anyone had, he or she had probably understood barely a word. In fact Lears’ digest of Plato was at least partly opaque to just about all of us.

And the way he delivered it! He spoke in this queer, overrefined voice, a lilting, sweet tone that no self-respecting male would ever assume unless he were mimicking a woman or a fag. All this refinement, all this highly articulate business—sculpted sentences, architectonic verbal constructions, replete with words so remote and difficult that he might, at times, have been talking in another language: It was maddening. We phased back what little amperage we were putting out. A circle-wide brownout began. We folded ourselves into our standard schoolroom states, waking sleep, death-in-life.

But despite the almost mannered eloquence, it’s clear that this idea matters to Lears. As he talks, he’s entering further and further into Plato’s thinking, maybe without fully knowing it. This business about not doing harm, about preferring to be harmed even, moves him. He’s not near tears about it or anything. It’s simply clear from his voice that he’s touched.

Tommy Buller apparently senses this, and wakes up. Buller, in his own brass heart, was the troll king—a being who dwelled at all times deep in the earth and who, in the farthest reaches of sediment and sludge and rock, found his truth. He wrinkled up his prematurely aged face and rubbed his callused hands together and pulled at his ear, then cleared his throat, a sound in which you heard great digging implements laboring away far underground.

“Wellllll.” Buller yawned the first word. Buller’s opening words tended to be yawns, irritated yawns, as though you’d just woken him up from some highly nutritive, long-lasting dragon-sleep. He had the presence of someone who worked nights and who used the daylight hours to try to grab the requisite zzzz’s. “The thing is, that’s a stupid idea. I mean, if somebody burns your house and kills your family, then they can’t hurt you because your soul is in the right order? That’s dumb. But I’m not surprised. This Plato is an idiot, basically.”

Had Buller somehow discerned Lears’ investment in the idea? Is that part of what made him so rabid? I suspect so. A teacher, from the moment he appears in a classroom, has to understand that he brings more than his own character with him. He is himself and more than himself. For in the student’s mind, the teacher summons up, as if by some quotidian magic, the image of every figure who has ever presented himself as an authority. Frank Lears was not only Frank Lears but, to each one of us, also the whole concatenation of mentors and bullies and bosses and guides, tormentors and pseudo-angels, who’d made an imprint on us thus far in life. We not only reacted to him, we reacted to some archetypal form of authority that lived in the farther reaches of each of us.

And if the teacher awakens images of tyrants past—and for Tommy Buller, most of the authorities past were probably tyrants—then there is nothing to do but attack, try to get some of your own back. In every early encounter between a teacher and a student there are multiple beings present, multiple ghosts, many of them not beneficent.

Great teachers react differently to this fact of pedagogical life. Some of them never show their hand. They always turn the question back on the student. They never declare themselves. This is the way of Socrates, as it is of the expert therapist (Socrates is, among many other things, the first deep analyst of the psyche, the spirit), who functions as a mirror, always showing the patient her own reflection back. But there is another way of proceeding too, and it can be no less transforming. That is to expose oneself fully as a teacher, to be receptive to everything, every resentment, fantasy, affection, and hatred the student brings forward. And once those passions are alive, once they are in play, then let the student use them as energy for intellectual inquiry and thence for change. Such teachers are human incandescences—they have ideas, then the ideas have them; they promulgate theories, they burn brilliantly with them, and they are always, always right. They create disciples, smaller versions of themselves. They found schools. Freud was such a teacher. So was Plato. So, in his way, was Jesus.

What Socrates wants is rather different. Socrates wants you to know yourself and to become yourself, to pursue the good as it’s in your particular nature to realize it. So Socrates is very reluctant about voicing an opinion. His method is irony, questioning, hanging around, and being annoying. Lears, who was made for the Socratic mode, had just screwed up. He’d just laid his cards on the table and Buller had attacked. Lears was a beginner. He didn’t quite have the moves down.