Teacher (9 page)

Lears gives a softly regretful look and swings his right wrist, which rests on his thigh, as though he’s practicing his baseball card toss. I grew up flipping cards in games like farsies (furthest card wins), topsies (put one card atop another and win the pot; edgies don’t count), and leansies (knock down a card propped against a concrete wall and take the lot), so I knew the motion. Unlike many of his movements, this one is not tentative; it’s his standard nervous tic: He works at it all the time and has grown very adept.

Then comes Lears’ interjection, which is one of his classroom mantras: “Well all right, Thomas. What do others think? What do people think?”

What do people think?
He says it all the time. The phrase has circulated through the first week’s class meetings, generally in the manner of a worthless coin, a counterfeit. Because, quite candidly, people don’t think. No, thanks. No one but Sandra does the reading assignments. No one, except maybe Sandra, could understand more than the rudiments of the rather elementary Durant text. We sit there like deaf, dumb, and blind kids. We know nothing and couldn’t care less. We’re dwelling in Plato’s cave, where people, chained in servile rows, see only imitations of imitations of life and never know enough to pine for the real thing, for Truth and Beauty. We loved the show in the cave. In fact, we wanted it displaced further, made more illusory. Give us some TV, a movie—a film strip if that’s all you can muster. Get us three removes from the real rather than the customary, disconcerting two.

If Lears’ head had burst into flames, alight with inspiration, we would have sat like painted clay figures waiting for the clock to jump and for the bell to ring so that we could get back to home-room (Lears’ was our last class of the day), then out into the street, where we could talk about football and beer and proms and skirts and legs and money and pool, and where life could be reignited in earnest.

So we sit, thick and dim, in the circle where Lears can see us all and where it feels strange, as though some sort of ritual is supposed to happen. When Lears turns away for something or stares down into his book, some of us come to life, the way the toys—especially the malicious toys—are supposed to do on Christmas Eve after the family has gone to bed. We throw paper balls, poke and pinch each other, crack jokes, run small-time riot, until he looks up again. Then we return to our poses, stolid and uniform as a bunch of bowling pins. We dare the sage to knock us down, even to move us around a little bit.

There are two exceptions to this rule of dead silence. One is Tommy Buller, who talks frequently, often without invitation, to say how stupid and wasteful and tedious whatever Lears is going on about truly is. He is tremendously, spectacularly rude, like a cross between Jimmy Hoffa and Nikita Khrushchev. It was easy to imagine Tommy reaching down to pull off one of his shoes, letting loose the tattery argyle’s overpowering stench, then slamming the desk a few times for order. He never did the reading; he barely knew what Lears was talking about. But Buller was one of the two most engaged students in the class.

As to the rest of us, we thought Buller was very, very funny. We’d crack up when he issued his Khrushchev ultimatums to Lears. He was a grotesque, greasy clown, to be sure, but he was doing our business for us. Rick Cirone, sitting judge of relative cool in the classroom, would smile a knowing smile, looking bemused and mildly disgusted, and speed up his production of “Wipe Out,” played with hyperactive drumming index and middle fingers on the writing arm of the chair, when Buller popped off.

The other exception to the talking-in-class embargo, the thinking embargo, with which we hope to starve Frank Lears into some kind of submission, is Sandra Steinman, the hippie girl. Sandra comes to class prepared. She actually reads the book in a more than cursory way. And, give or take, she knows what’s going on there.

Buller clearly hates her. My guess is that he has associated her from the start with everything that makes him quake internally—with money, with status, with intelligence, with bourgeois living rooms, where the couch is a work of art and the curtains are gripped back from the picture window by elegant cloth drape holders with mock-gold pins to secure them in place. But mostly, I think, he hates Sandra because she is associated with something he has heard about on TV—with hippies, and with a particularly noxious branch of hippiedom, something then called women’s lib.

For though existentially, for want of a better word, we are buried deep in Middle America—where Sunbeam bread rules and Dad soaps the car luxuriously on Saturday before heading out to get loaded and run riot with the boys, forty-plus in age that night—we are also living in Greater Boston, not far from the Boston Common, which the summer before was colonized by the hippies. They came to Boston in unwashed multitudes, like the early Christians, to hang out and to display themselves. We saw them on the channel 4 news all summer. Almost no one from Medford actually goes into Boston, unless it is to visit a doctor or go to court; TV has to do.

And there they were, the hippies, smoking dope on the sly and giving each other weary, theatrical hugs, consoling hugs, as though someone had just died, and wearing their love beads and head scarves and sandals, doing a broke-Gypsy routine, even though we knew that they were all rich as can be. They turned the Common into a kind of lazy utopia, and no one could figure out how to kick them off. The household fathers went into a rage when the hippies appeared on the screen. They hollered out to them to get a job, to cut their hair, to go home to Wellesley, to cut the shit. My father, who was nonplussed when the sons of the doctor who used to live across the street from us in Malden returned from college and started going around barefoot on their front lawn—barefoot in Malden, Massachusetts!—was, to say the least, agitated by the invaders. He was not talking about a National Guard action or a vigilante assault as some other dads were, but he was surely not pleased.

And Sandra, it’s pretty clear, has spent time with the Gypsy hordes. She walks differently than she used to, and than anyone else at the high school does. She has a dreamy, otherworldly sway to her approach, as though she’s in a mild trance, on a ship maybe, sailing somewhere delicious, guided by perfumed winds. Her movements are slow and deliberate in their grace. She is always smiling a little bit and ready to expand slowly—not burst—into a larger, more embracing smile. She may or may not be literally stoned. But her ethos, the Boston Common ethos, is to go around cloud-walking, looking stoned whether you are or not.

She is also highly intelligent. She’s articulate, modest, goes back and forth with Lears in an easy, often humorous way, simply not caring that the rest of us are enraged at her for breaking rank.

Sandra, from what I can gather, thinks Tommy Buller is a deeply annoying person but not past salvation. And by making the dismissive remark about Plato, he’s put himself in the way for what might actually be an edifying exchange.

She does not look Buller in the eye. Locking eyes with Tommy is not a wise course. Sandra is no paragon of street smarts, but she does live in Me’ford. To make contact with opposition, even if not bodily opposition, if only the opposition of one psyche to another, might send Buller into a full-blown rage. The idea of such opposition coming from a female could make him combust spontaneously. He is a seriously pissed-off individual. So Sandra, her eyes down on her book, takes the Platonic-Buddhist line and runs with it.

She says that if you hurt someone, it throws you into disorder. The uglier passions triumph over the better parts, and once they’ve tasted this kind of triumph, it’ll happen again and again. You’ll start out hurting people and things you think you hate, and before long you’ll be hurting things that are close to you, things you love. Because every faculty wants to dominate the others. Only reason knows how to dominate without suppression, stay on top without crushing the other desires.

She repeats herself (and Plato): “If you hurt others, you’ll end up ruining yourself. It’s always better to receive an injury than it is to do one.”

To which Tommy mutters simply: “Bullshit.”

And in my heart, if that is the place where such things occur, I all but second his response. On the football field, you have to deliver the first blow. You have to establish mastery, rob your opponent of his confidence, then ruin him if you can. Throw him down, send his helmet bouncing like a lopped head across the lovely grass. The latter-day Homeric warrior, the one who can hold his own with Tommy Sullivan or with Frank Ball—or with Le Duc Thanh, who is practicing busily, getting ready for us with twenty-cent shoes made from castaway tire rubber and a thousand-dollar rifle—believes that after a line has been drawn, harm’s got to be done. So I side with Buller. But.

But there is this. Walking to a class a few days later, I see Sandra sitting on the top step of a flight of stairs, looking into a book. I climb to a step or two from where she’s perched, and she looks up and smiles sweetly, with unaffected, nonflirtatious goodwill. “Hi, Mark,” she says. “What did you think of class the other day?”

I cannot answer. She is simply too much for me, in her work boots and her man’s shirt and her sitting where people are not supposed to sit, damnit. And she is asking me an inane question, asking me to take school seriously. I cannot do it. I cannot answer her. I don’t even shrug. I simply pretend that she is not there, and I walk on.

And I am aware enough to know that I have done her harm, have snubbed her—this good-humored, smart, and, most of all, kindly girl whom no one will talk to, whom nearly everyone writes off as absurd. She is against the war, and I am for it. She is a hippie; I am from Medford. (Which is no small distinction: A friend who lives down the block is picked up hitchhiking, and after a ten-minute conversation, the driver asks him if he might not by chance be from Medford. “How did you know?” “I’m not sure. I think it was the way you said ‘mother.’ ”) Given the chance, I do Sandra harm. And for the rest of the day and for the week to follow, thanks to her and to Plato and to Frank Lears, I smart for it. And the truth is I would rather—far rather—that someone had treated me so. At least then I would not have to go around thinking myself a mean lout.

It’s better to receive harm than to do it. It is very hard to get this idiotic idea out of my mind once it’s lodged there. (But I will succeed eventually—I am determined to.) It is better to be Sandra, roundly humiliated, than to be me, the executor of the snub; better to be the Blind Girl that Paulie spins than to be prince of the poolroom; it’s better to be Franklin Lears, despised by your students, than to be one of the circle of kids, one of the knowing herd with its designated scapegoats. Very peculiar this notion, very strange. It lives for a while in me—it does—but then, wise Medford kid that I am, I will, as they say at the poolroom, smarten the fuck up. I will cast the thought, knowingly, away.

Chapter Four

MY FATHER, FRANK LEARS, TV, ME

About two months into the class, late October or thereabouts, a couple of odd things happened. The first was that my father, who never exhibited curiosity about much of anything, began to take a pronounced interest in Frank Lears and the philosophy class. The second was that we—me and Rick and Dubby and John Vincents, my pals in the course—began imitating Lears, mimicking his speech and gestures and doing it in ways that were, to say the least, peculiar.

The day when the imitation thing got into gear Tommy Buller was in a particularly foul mood, straining hard on his chain. We had begun the sitting-in-a-circle business sometime before, but whenever we entered the classroom we would feign forgetfulness about the new design and plunk down in the established rows. (Apparently, the prior class—whether it was Lears’ or not I can’t say—used the old detention pattern.) So we did on this particular day, not giving Lears the satisfaction of showing that we understood, much less welcomed, the teaching innovation he had cooked up for us.

It was a hot autumn day, and Lears, as I recall, was wearing an off-off-white rumpled suit, a size or two large as usual, and looking, particularly if you could have added a Panama hat, like a planter who had recently lost the plantation. He told us, wearily, to form a circle. Most of us sat still. We generally wanted to compel teachers to use the maximum force to get us to do anything, no matter how minor. But to Dubby and to John Vincents—a soccer and track star whom Dubby had nicknamed the Navajo, because his family once turned up at a soccer game wrapped in blankets—this was an opportunity. They began sliding their desks into each other, banging and ricocheting away so as to approximate the pleasures of a well-loved Revere Beach attraction, the bumper cars. Donald Bellmer, the reedy, pale kid Dubby had bopped with spitballs on the first day, joined tentatively in, and the Doober, seeing an opportunity, slammed him as hard as possible.

“Owwwww!” Bellmer cries, his blanched face going into a pained mask. We all watch and giggle. No one else moves.

So Lears, in a rare burst of physical action, a rare burst of motion that does not savor of the workings of a man in his fifth decade rather than at the start of his third, takes action. He delivers himself to the back of my chair, grasps it from behind, and leans away, so that he looks like a driver pulling back to balance a team of sled dogs. Then he gets his feet—the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack
—moving sloppily, haphazardly, and the chair begins to slide backward. I weigh about 190 pounds. On the football program, I’m listed at two hundred, having included the weight of my pads (wrongly, Jackie Lane, the only black kid on the team, has told me; we’ve argued the point no end, like a couple of Aquinian scholastics). Lears puffs and huffs theatrically.

“That’s a lot of weight you’re pulling there,” says Rick Cirone. “He plays defensive tackle. Very hard to move.”

I mumble something about playing lately with singular lack of success. It’s true. Despite the pronouncements about all my promise made at the end of last year by Mace Johnson—and even, with some equivocation thrown in, by Rourke, who perhaps comes to think I have better genes than were initially apparent—and despite a murderous program of summer weight lifting, I’ve been relegated to the position of all-purpose backup lineman, popping in and out (much more out than in) of the games. I’m enraged. How could this be?

Without my glasses, I could discern only glowing blurs flying here and there on the field. Every play, I would fire forward and smack one of these blurs. Sometimes the blur would prove to have the ball, sometimes not. My drawback had come clear to the coaches one day in practice when, in a tackling drill, one on one, I rampaged completely past the guy with the ball. Manly chuckles all around. The next play, I locked the ballcarrier in the radar and hit him so hard that it was truly surprising to see him rise again. He walked around for five minutes like a man feeling out the effects of his new frontal lobotomy. But the damage was done. Football is not blindman’s buff, or shouldn’t be. One kid on the team, Pooch, dubbed me a future all-pro blindbacker. My career was finished unless I could somehow afford contact lenses, to say nothing of figuring out that I needed those rare and pricey objects.

On being told that my football hopes were in a state of ruin, Lears simply said: “Still, I wouldn’t want to run into you in a dark alley.” This was mockery. At least I was pretty sure it was. He had been no less dismissive on seeing my copy of
Instant Replay: The
Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer,
by the Packers’ formidable offensive guard. I had gotten the book free with a razor and shaving cream. The most affecting passage in the book, at least as I saw it, was the one where Kramer described himself as having lost a little of his stature, maybe as much as an inch, from the beginning of his pro career to the end. The shrinkage was the result of his neck being slammed back into his shoulders with repeated hits, so that his vertebrae contracted. I found the dedication that would result in this kind of thing very moving.

When Lears saw
Green Bay Diary
on top of my copy of Will Durant, instead of praising me for reading something, anything, he had simply said, “Are there pictures? I’m sure there are some pictures.”

This was ridicule, to be sure. Had Lears aimed with a degree or two more subtlety, he would have missed me entirely. Henry James would have had no hope with us. We would have flummoxed the Master entirely. But to be chided in terms even as subtle as Lears’ was a great novelty to me, who was accustomed to imprecations out of Bedlam from coaches and friends’ fathers and neighborhood bullies and from other demented males of every description.

The little metaphysician took his seat and began to work away at the resisting stuff in front of him. He read aloud from the Durant script, he paraphrased, he tried to provoke. But nothing happened. Sandra was sleepy that day. The only one awake on the scene was Buller, who raised his hand and tried to get Lears to recognize him. But Lears, no doubt wanting to avoid a Buller collision, looked away. Finally Buller dissolved the protocols and began to harangue Lears. It was nonsense, idiocy, crap. He, Tommy Buller, had had enough.

“Ah, Thomas,” said Lears, hand-swinging, head-nodding. “That doesn’t seem at all germane to the question at hand.” Germane! What the hell was
Germane
? A form of German?
German
as pronounced at Harvard?

As Lears talked, Dubby and Rick began routines, hand-swinging, head-wagging, tongue-tsking in Lears’ peculiar way, and laughing at themselves, and at Lears, who was invited, of course, to look over and to observe, then to make of it what he would. If he saw, Lears was too shrewd to take the bait.

But this began the period of intense Franklin Lears imitations. I had one, Dubby and Rick did, John Vincents would do it, and so, ineptly, humanely, would Cap, who hadn’t enough meanness in him to mock anyone with much success. A couple of modes of imitation were ascendant. In one of them, we would kick off with a Lears standard (“What do people think?” being the most common), and then go stumbling into Lears-like polysyllabics, as though we were learning incantations from a wizard: “Oh, Thomas, you have to consider the prosaic, propinquitous passions of Plato.” And, to be fair, Lears
was
singularly attracted to enormous words. He remains the only human being I have heard use the word
propinquitous
in conversation. Rick wanted to buy him a pair of propinquities for Christmas.

But we had another mode of imitation, too, and this one at first seems weird beyond explanation. What we would do was to locate a subtext in Lears’ polished, detached utterances. “Thomas, I think you ought to reconsider some of the premises of your argument” would become “Buller, you moron, why don’t you go home and suck on the tailpipe of your old man’s car until you perish, you piece of shit.” That sort of thing. Or, from Dubby, doing Lears addressing the whole class: “You idiotic brutes, why don’t you all just go screw yourself rectally right now?” All performed in the soft, lilting Learsese.

What were we doing? Maybe we were bringing him down to our level. Perhaps we needed to believe that this person, who seemed so markedly odd, was in no way different from us. We thought and spoke in the most vulgar ways—and perhaps underneath that’s what Lears truly wanted to do. Maybe it was only his repressed high-class manners that inhibited him. Accordingly, we were better than he was, more honest, truer to the brutish human base.

But there was another possibility, too. Perhaps we were, in our bent way, identifying something we all felt but could not have expressed. We were conveying a simple fact: Lears obviously had a healthy dose of confidence. On some level, we sensed, he held us in contempt. There
was
a measure of derision there. He must have thought we were minor-league fools for not using this, our last chance before we were thrust live and whole into what was waiting for us. We had a final opportunity to think a little, to stand back and make assessments, before the powers in charge peeled back the lid of our tiny tin box of a school to pluck some for the factory, some for the office, some for the army, some for booze, some for dope. So with this odd mockery, odd imitation, we brought forward that part of Lears that was quietly at war with us.

This sort of derision was not absent from Socrates, either. Socrates “asked [his pupils] to open their souls to him,” says the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, “and let them know he did not like what he saw. He did not so much reveal to them their dark, shameful underside as refuse to accept their surface as his own, as a mode of life he could follow. He needed courage not only because he made his contemporaries face some difficult truths but mostly because he displayed his own disdain toward them.”

We were used to encountering teachers so shelled-out that they did not care one way or another how it went, or teachers who terrified us or whom we terrified. But to find someone who was actually engaged but wasn’t there to curry our favor, who felt himself to be better than we were, or at least further along the road, and believed that we were lucky to have him—this was strange.

Surely, too, our imitations, which we began to perform everywhere—on the bus, in other classes, even a few times at football practice—meant that we wanted Lears to be present even when he wasn’t physically on the scene. We wanted him on hand, to scrutinize and ponder. Somehow he’d colonized us, gotten inside our heads, and we didn’t even realize it.

AT MY house, too, Lears was becoming a presence. My father began taking an interest. I believe it was the business about TV that got him going.

This interest of my father’s in what was happening at school was, to put it mildly, unusual. My father was capable of driving his car, always a large one, a heavy-deco American whale, at least ten years beyond its Detroit vintage, past a scowling brick structure, constructed firm and fast lest the British make one more attempt on the old colony, and asking, in all innocence, what that particular building might be. On being told that the place was my school, or my brother Philip’s, he would grunt, inhale noisily through the resounding caves of his crooked nostrils (he had a radically deviated septum), puff on his omnipresent Camel (his “coffin nail”/ “coughin’ nail”), and file the information distantly away.

The only pre-Lears exception to this policy of school nonawareness came when I was in the eighth grade and struggling to learn French. Things got so bad that my father was summoned on the scene to talk. My teacher was named Miss Finkelman. Miss Finkelman was an enormous young woman who came at you like a large, heavily turned out vacation liner, someplace where they serve lunch nine times a day and irony is forbidden. She had yelping dyed-blond hair, great painted lips that bespoke prodigious oral interests, bulging eyes, de Gaulle’s Gallic honker, and a gregarious, good-humored way of taking up the room.

We had nicknamed her Skater. Why? Because Finkelman gives you
fink,
which gives you
rink,
which yields
skater.
Get it? That we had done no worse suggests in what general affection, or at least in what absence of blood hatred, she was held. And the temptation to flay her was considerable: This was during the time when Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the dragster impresario, was making automotive hay with a car called the Rat Fink.

Anyhow, Miss Finkelman relayed to my parents the not inaccurate view that I was failing French because I never did any of the assignments and spent all of my time in class dreaming of she knew not what. My father was generally a proponent of fate: You got what you got in life, and that was that. One of his pet sayings was “You can never win,” often said with considerable relish, as though he were secretly aligned with the forces in the universe that kept everyone, himself included, separate from victory. But this time, he claimed, he helped me out. He persuaded Miss Finkelman to relent and give me a D, a stigma, a sign of possible stupidity, but not a hold-’im-back-till-he-towers-like-Gulliver-over-the-class F.

My father was somehow charmed by Miss Finkelman, who was not the dully throat-sticking sort of pill the rest of my teachers seemed to him to be. He asked about Miss Finkelman from time to time, even when I was years beyond her class, had quit French, and had gone on to study Latin, a subject in which I could sustain consistent mediocrity without doing the homework.

(When I was in graduate school at Yale, I, braced by two years of college French and a visceral terror of having to pass the language requirement by studying
Beowulf
in Old English, signed up for a French literary theory course with the formidable Paul de Man. De Man was at the height of his reputation at the time. He and Jacques Derrida were the godfathers of deconstruction, which few academics could readily explain but was burning a hot path through American-literature departments nonetheless. De Man’s early Nazi affiliations had yet to be revealed. When my father heard that I was taking French again, he slapped himself on the forehead and sighed. “Am I going to have to come down to New Haven and talk to this de Man guy the way I did Miss Finkelman?” An encounter I would like to have caught.)