Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  “Thank God, we have somebody real on the show this morning!” she’d said. “There are no heroes anymore. Just celebrities.”

  Once they reached their destination, she rushed him into a shiny building on Ninth Avenue as if she expected him to get snatched away, brought him up to the studio floor, and left him in the care of a brisk and efficient Southern makeup lady called Tammy who told him he had a good look for television and urged him to “lose the glasses.” Then he was sat down in the greenroom with an Academy Award–winning British actor, a famous diet doctor having a panic attack, and a gimlet-eyed rock and roll girl singer who kept wandering around, asking production assistants, “Anybody got a Tuinal?”

  A few minutes later, David was led out into the studio, outfitted with a microphone on his lapel, and seated next to the blond and genial host of the program, Brian something—a world’s-smartest-tennis-pro type—who thanked him for coming and fawned over him effusively as soon as the red light on top of the camera went on. The video clip of Seniqua’s rescue was played on an overhead monitor and David again had that peculiar out-of-body feeling, as he heard himself saying things about stoicism and responsibility. Only it wasn’t really him. It was that inauthentic self that had been released before the cameras and microphones outside school yesterday.

  Oh what utterly ridiculous bullshit, the real David thought. How can they stand me? How can they not see through me? But when he looked off-camera he saw Stephanie Kwan smiling giddily and sound technicians holding their chins thoughtfully, listening to him. After fifteen years teaching public school, it was gratifying to get such undivided attention. He wondered if Renee and Arthur were watching at home and seeing him in a different light.

  Before the morning was over, he went through the whole routine two more times on the other two morning shows, barely managing to keep track of whom he was talking to. It all seemed to blend together in a weirdly giddy, intoxicating way. People were listening to him. The only thing that changed was the state of the rock and roll singer, who seemed to be disintegrating as she followed him from program to program. By the end of the morning, she was being escorted out of a greenroom on one high heel, muttering, “Beer and acid, beer and acid,” as if it were a revolutionary political slogan.

  But that was over now.

  As fourth period began, Seniqua Rollins walked into the classroom, mumbled, “Thanks,” to David, and sat down among the other kids, accepting high fives and chucks to the back of the head.

  The rest of the class was buzzing. On the left, the hip-hop girls were doing their cheerleader/war chant thing. Ray-Za and Obstreperous Q were playing bumper cars with their chairs in the third row. And Kevin Hardison was standing up by the radiators in the back, giving his play-by-play version of yesterday’s events at the top of his lungs.

  “All right, all right, cool out, party people.” David raised his hands. “Everybody take a chill pill. Since we didn’t get to make our trip to the museum, I’d like to begin our Odyssey discussion now.”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” someone said.

  “Yeah, get the fuck outta here,” one of the hip-hop girls shouted out.

  The Great Hormone Experiment was continuing. It was predictable, the kids being so agitated. Yes, a lot of them came from neighborhoods where there were shootings and murders every week and gutters strewn with used rubbers and drug paraphernalia, but still—they’d seen their school bus blow up, just seconds before they were going to board it. Their driver had been killed and one of their classmates had almost burned to death before their eyes. And by now, after being interviewed by detectives and counselors, as well as having their bags searched thoroughly, they had to be aware that someone within the school might have been responsible for the blast.

  Homer had lasted for three thousand years; he could wait another day. The kids needed to talk. Besides, after making the morning talk show rounds, David hadn’t done an adequate job of preparing for any of his five classes today.

  “Okay, disregard what I said before—let’s open things up a little this morning.” He sat on the edge of his desk, more Cool Daddio–style than pedagogue. “Something pretty heavy went down yesterday, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.”

  He went to the blackboard and wrote the words: To be afraid of oneself is the last horror. — C. S. Lewis.

  Then he looked over and saw Seniqua was wearing the same style Tommy Hilfiger jacket she’d had on yesterday. Unbelievable. Kids had stopped chucking her on the head and were now huddled around her, murmuring in awe and touching its hem and sleeves as if it were a war souvenir.

  Okay, thought David, that’s one way of dealing with it. Getting on top of the fear. Acting like you own it.

  The real jacket was probably being tested for traces of explosives and accelerants by the investigators. The school was already crawling with cops. David had seen the bomb squad guys threading their way past repair crews outside school this morning. A sensory memory of the first explosion hit him again and he felt an uneasy stirring in his gut.

  Who the hell did this? A side of him got angry thinking about it. Somebody had tried to kill them all. Not just him, but his kids.

  But what if it was one of the kids? He found himself scanning various faces around the classroom, considering students as possible suspects. What about Yuri Ehrlich? He certainly had the technical ability to put together a bomb, and David remembered the odd look on his face after the explosion. Or how about jealous King Shit, the jailed gang leader? Maybe he’d gotten word of Seniqua straying and had dispatched an emissary to take her off the count.

  It was too disturbing and distracting to consider, one of the kids being involved. The likelihood was that it was someone not connected with the school at all, he decided. Someone upset with the governor. A political statement.

  “Anyway,” he told the class. “You guys must have some response to what happened. Who wants to start off?”

  Richie Wong’s hand shot up. A motor-mouthed Cuban-Chinese kid who was always playing cards in the hallway.

  “Yes?” David called on him.

  “My mom said she saw you on TV last night. What show were you on?”

  David laughed, caught off guard by the question. “I think it was just the regular news,” he said. “There were a lot of reporters out there, in case you didn’t notice.”

  Little eddies of conversation went around the room. Apparently some of the kids had caught his act. He wondered if they’d seen through him. Keep it real, they were always telling each other. Keep it real.

  Kevin Hardison raised his hand. “I wanna know what that Sara Kidreaux is like.”

  “She was one of the people interviewing me yesterday?”

  “She fly.” Kevin nodded. “She slick.”

  “I don’t know.” David shrugged. “She seemed very … cordial. I guess. But listen, I don’t want to get sidetracked here, talking about the media. There are important things we need to discuss. How did everybody feel about what happened? Were you scared? Shocked? Paralyzed?” One way or the other, he was trying to turn this into a lesson.

  Seniqua Rollins raised her hand so suddenly it threatened to bring the rest of her body up out of her seat with it.

  “I wanna know why they had you-all on the shows this morning, instead a one of the real victims. What’s a matter? They don’t wanna put niggahs on they program?”

  “Um.” David cleared his throat. “I don’t know if it was a racial issue necessarily, Seniqua.”

  “Dawn.”

  “What?”

  “Call me Seniqua Dawn. I saw God yesterday and he wanted me to change my name.”

  David stared at her again. Hadn’t Seniqua just quietly thanked him for saving her life? On the other hand, what did you expect from a seventeen-year-old speaking out in front of her friends? It was practically a Board of Ed rule: every student must bring at least two personae to class.

  He wondered if she’d been to a doctor to make sure the baby was oka
y after yesterday. “Anyway, Seniqua—I mean, Seniqua Dawn—I don’t think they had me on because I’m white and you’re black.”

  “Yeah, right!” An anonymous spitball of teenaged sarcasm hurtled from the back of the classroom.

  David had no idea who said it, but he decided to press on. “Come on, you guys. You’re being ridiculous. We’ve had discussions about thinking critically about what you hear in the media, and now you’re letting yourselves be hypnotized.”

  Of course, he hadn’t shown much critical perspective himself, getting sucked into the phony melodrama of today’s interviews.

  He noticed Elizabeth Hamdy staring at him intently from the third row, somehow both earthy and ethereal in her white head scarf. A Coney Island angel. She seemed to be looking right through him, like he wasn’t there. Or maybe she wasn’t there. She appeared to be staring at something far away, beyond the walls of the classroom. Probably she was just trying to picture the scale of the explosion, since she’d missed the whole scene.

  Tisha Cornwall raised her hand, each nail painted a different color. Her hair was a history of hairstyles: some of it plaited, other parts dreadlocked, ponytailed, shaved, dyed, styled into bangs. “Are you-all gonna be on Howard Stern?” she asked.

  David felt his jaw slacken and his shoulders sag.

  “Yo, come on, y’all,” Ray-Za called out. “Keep it real.”

  “Exactly,” said David in frustration. “I think we’re all losing sight of our priorities here. This isn’t just some media package. This is real life. We’ve all been through a terrible trauma. A friend of ours died and a student here nearly burned to death. This isn’t a television show. It’s reality. Have we forgotten how to tell the difference?”

  “Yes!” Seniqua Dawn Rollins called out enthusiastically.

  12

  “I’M NOT BUYING THIS,” said Judy Mandel, perpetual-motion machine.

  She was at her desk in the New York Tribune newsroom, tapping computer keys, chewing gum, and watching the President’s morning press conference on a TV set suspended from the ceiling.

  “Not buying what?” asked her friend, the columnist Bill Ryan, who was sitting across the partition from her.

  The President was saying the era of big government was over. He said it was time for people to take charge of their own lives. He gave the example of parents in California who’d organized their own school, talked about a woman in Alabama getting off welfare after twenty years, and mentioned David Fitzgerald saving the children from the burning school bus in Coney Island.

  There it was, a lightning strike from the heavens reanimating the story. Without the President, David Fitzgerald would be a trivia answer and a segment on When Disaster Strikes 2 by next week. But now the story had new legs.

  “He didn’t happen to mention the California parents had median incomes of $70,000, did he?” Bill turned away from the set.

  “There’s something weird about this business with the teacher,” said Judy, spitting out her gum and chewing on a pen cap. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

  The press conference ended and the morning talk shows resumed.

  “Can’t go wrong distrusting authority.” Bill cranked two sheets of paper into an old Remington typewriter, one to type on, the other to protect the roller. “Lord Acton said great men are almost always bad men.”

  “Why’d he keep the kids off the bus? And why did he say it was a bomb when the police haven’t even announced that yet?”

  Bill took an empty pipe out of his desk and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Are you going to ask Nazi to leave you on the story?”

  She looked across the newsroom to the enclosed office where the paper’s editor, a wiry, gray-faced Australian called Robert “Nazi” Cranbury, was pacing back and forth, berating his three deputy editors, known around the office as Prime Evil, Grudge Fuck, and the Death of Hope.

  “No,” said Judy, crossing and uncrossing her legs, unable to keep still. “Now that the President and the governor are getting into the act, it’s going to be a major gang-bang political story too. He’s going to let all the old hacks and police shack guys cover it.”

  “And what does he want you to do?”

  She sighed and laced up her Doc Marten boots. “He wants me to stay on the Sex Change Singer.”

  “The who?”

  “You haven’t heard about this?” She framed her face with her hands, voguing in exasperation. “The guy who’s had the number one record in the country the last four weeks is supposedly coming to New York for ‘sex reassignment surgery.’”

  “I’m an old man!”

  “Nazi wants me to stake out the doctor’s office.”

  “That’s one of the advantages of being seventy-five.” Bill chuckled and started to put on a Walkman so he could listen to Mahler while he wrote his column. “Our masters prefer to spare my gentle sensibilities and leave my column back by the used-car ads where it can’t do any harm.”

  She watched him for a few seconds, a thin white-haired man tapping at his old machine and puffing away on a pipe deprived of tobacco by office rules. He was like some monument to mid-twentieth-century journalism plunked down in the middle of a modern corporate newsroom. Ideas and trends crashed around him, but he remained stolid and unchanging, anchored by his intellect and inner life, a rock in the middle of the ocean. She wished she could be like him, but she kept getting swept away.

  She was still struggling desperately to make a name for herself at the paper. It had been easy in school, where she could command attention by sitting splay-legged and acting saucy in class. But New York newspaper people had seen that bad-girl act too many times. After a year and a half at the paper, she was still writing briefs for page 9 and actor-slugs-the-photographer captions. She felt herself slipping into a kind of lonely corporate anonymity. If she didn’t watch it, she’d become one of those middle-aged “News Nuns,” who worked all the time and came home to cottage cheese and white wine in the refrigerator.

  “Hey, why don’t they put Riordan on the sex change story?” Bill took off his headphones.

  “What?”

  “Your old boyfriend.” Bill nodded in the direction of Terry Riordan, who was on the phone some twenty-five feet away, swiveling in his chair and applying Chap Stick to his lips. “Didn’t he write a feature about the plastic surgeon to the stars last month?”

  Judy looked over at Riordan, a vain young society reporter whom she’d dated briefly during the summer. “Yeah, he loves that crap.”

  “So tell Nazi to let him do it. Riordan’s got all the show business connections anyway. You stay on the teacher.”

  “Think he’ll let me do it?”

  “Like you said, it’s a major story because of the video and now the President. Nazi will do anything to stay out in front if he can. Make him think you have something.”

  “What do I have? The detectives on the scene wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “But you’re a hot number. Look at you, with your little skirt and your black stockings and your Lulu hair. Cardinal Spellman couldn’t resist you.”

  He was an old man, but not that old, she realized. He’d dined with Bacall and danced with Monroe. If he wanted to pay her a compliment, she’d take it.

  “Anyway,” he said. “John LeVecque’s the police spokesman now. That moron who used to be with the Post. Go down to Police Plaza and rattle his cage a little. Get him to tell you something he doesn’t want to tell you about the investigation.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Be provocative. Be ruthless. Ask the hardest question you can think of. Manipulate the manipulators. And for Chrissakes, be interesting about it.”

  “Is that it? Anything else?”

  “Yes, always write in the active voice and try to hold on to a portion of your dignity.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re old.”

  He chuckled and started to put his headphones on again. She stood up, straightened her skirt, and flipped
back her hair, getting ready for her talk with Nazi.

  “By the way.” She looked back at Bill, lowering his magnificent white mane toward the keyboard. “If great men are almost always bad men, what are bad men?”

  “Worse than they seem.” He pushed the typewriter’s carriage all the way to the left. “Nose pickers and card cheats, the lot of them.”

  13

  ABOUT TEN MINUTES from the end of fourth period, there was a knock at the door of David’s classroom and Michelle Richardson, one of the principal’s secretaries, came in. She was usually aloof and contemptuous of mere teachers; for years, David had seen only the side of her face because she was always turned away, talking to somebody more important on the phone. But now she sidled up to him, as intimate as a kitty-cat.

  “Larry King’s people just called and there’s a camera crew from NBC downstairs,” she said softly, her lips near his ears. “They want to talk to you. The President just mentioned you in a speech.”

  “Well, it’s really going to have to wait,” David answered quietly, looking up at the clock.

  Yes, it was nice, all this excitement, but he was still a teacher. Though a part of him was curious: What did the President say about me?

  “The principal thinks it might be good if you spent some time with these newspeople this afternoon.” Michelle breathed against his neck. “He thinks it can only help the image of the school.”

  “So I’ll try to make time for them,” David said.

  “He wants you to do it now.”

  “Are you sure?” David glanced at the restless faces, the swinging legs.

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Okay, guys.” He faced the group. “You’re getting early dismissal. Don’t all start crying at once.”

  He could barely be heard above the racket of students laughing, giving each other high fives, and still using their clickers. He scanned the faces again. Still wondering: could one of them have done this? He’d only hurt their trust in him by asking too directly, but he decided to leave the door open a little. “And listen, guys. I know there are counselors in the library today, but if one of you wants to come by later and talk to me about what happened, I’ll have office hours.”