Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  As I was heading for the door, Mrs. Olmstead suddenly remembered something she’d meant to say, something that was obviously quite important to her. She began talking about a new teacher who was coming to the school, “someone we’re very proud to have.” He was scheduled to teach philosophy. Was I perhaps interested? I didn’t know what philosophy was. But somehow I associated it with airy speculation, empty nothing. It seemed an agreeable enough way to waste time.

  Last year, I had declined the chance to be in the Advanced Placement history class, even after Mrs. Olmstead had told me that some students would kill for the privilege. You had to read books over the summer.

  To get out of the office, I conceded, provisionally, on the philosophy question. I’d check my credits myself. If there were enough, I figured that I could ditch the philosophy and get a study period. Football exhausted me. Study hall was a fine place to sleep.

  SO THERE I was—it had turned out that I did need the credits—in a well-lit top-floor room, pondering the Nietzsche quotation and feeling dumb as a rock, a sentiment with which I, at seventeen, had no little prior experience. But what really had my attention was the strange fellow up front and the possibilities he might offer for the major Medford High School indoor sport—teacher torment.

  Lears pointed in the direction of the quote—read it if you can—and asked us to write a few pages interpreting it, as “a limbering-up exercise.” As I recall, but my memory is uncertain here, the Nietzsche passage was this one: “Genuine philosophers, being of necessity people of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, have always found themselves, and had to find themselves, in contradiction to their today: their enemy was ever the ideal of today.”

  A limbering-up exercise! A few mental stretches and twists, the cerebral equivalent, maybe, of the Alabama Quick-Cals, robotoid calisthenics, jerky, stiff choreography with which we began every football practice. The fact that we might not be able to understand a word of the quotation seems not to have occurred to Lears. This was an excellent sign. It indicated that he was utterly out of touch.

  Lears seemed to be set on overlooking the standard day-one protocols of the only sort of teacher who could glean respect at Medford High, the disciplinarian. This was the time to take roll call, as they did in the army, in the factory, and in jail; to assign seating; to look out into the class; and to discern, with the aid of a submaster’s report or two, who the troublemakers were likely to be, then to get them separated. One needed to decide on the fateful question: troublemakers up front, where you could keep an eye on them, or in back, where their carryings-on might not suck in the whole class?

  It was the day to gesture toward the clock on the wall, which was painted the yellow of prolonged depression, a yellow that no sunlight—and the classroom was benevolently, brightly lit—could lift to a pleasing shade, and toward the sign that sometimes appeared under it (Lears, perhaps, had taken his down), which said TIME WILL PASS; WILL YOU?

  Clock-watching at Medford High was a complex activity. The clocks worked in mysterious ways. Rather than proceeding forward silently and regularly, as clockwork is supposed to do, these clocks were prone to stand still, like gate guardians who had fallen into a deep doze and left the aspirants outside, waiting in the cold. Then finally, when it seemed time to call for repairs or scream out against the injustices of the universe, the minute hand leapt forward, three or four or five minutes in a shot. The irregularity of these movements made our clock-watching a more absorbing, more anxiety-edged pastime than it was most anywhere else in the world.

  It was time, too, this first day, to lay down the law and to sing a song in a dead key about quizzes and tests and lateness and pink slips and blue ones. It was time to get emphatic about bathroom visits, hall passes, sitting tight in your seat, raising hands as a prefix to all utterances. It was the day to inform the students that rewards would pass only to those who could do their homework, do their duty, mind their own small business.

  Franklin Lears did none of this. He let the fifteen of us sit where we wanted (which meant boys all together in the back, girls tending to the front). And then, as though assuming we might be gathered for some shared intellectual endeavor, he asked us hard questions about someone not involved in football or local politics or Stag’s poolroom (poo’room, as it was pronounced).

  It began to dawn on us that this might well be a teacher who didn’t know his business. We felt the air expand with possibilities. We set right to it. We started, in the universal high school parlance, to fuck around.

  It was the natural instinct of the Medford High School student, particularly if male, to push any teacher as far as possible. The English teacher, Miss Cullen, had been brought to tears by our stealing her glasses, our purloining her rank book, our locking her in the supply closet. All this had been achieved under the leadership of Ted Cunningham (who wore Miss Cullen’s glasses on the tip of his nose for the space of a class period) but with the general bear-baiting connivance of all the rest of us.

  Miss Cullen was probably in her late forties, though she looked sixty-five. Her hair was gray, undyed, uncombed, unkempt. She was forgetful and easily distracted. She talked to herself. She often murmured stagy asides that she took to be witty and were not. Her clothes were ineptly ironed; they were not always clean. Her stockings had runs in them. She was, to us, like someone’s alcoholic grandma who was staying in an attic room, with a lock on the outside of the door and maybe some iron on the windows, too. And for these high crimes we had reduced her, on more than one occasion, to tears.

  Fucking around was a sign of high spirits and vitality, we believed, though too much of it could get you sent to the office of one of the submasters, Fran Todesco, or the universally feared Charlie “Jingles” McDermott: Jingles because he had the habit of jamming a hand in his pocket and making loud music with his keys and his change before meting out something cruel and unusual. You needed to stay just below the teacher’s mental radar, fly at a level where you didn’t quite register as a major irritant. You needed, in order to maintain the dignity of yourself and the race of your fellow students, to do what damage you could to the teacher’s evolving program, but do it without getting identified as a standout miscreant, crucifixion material in the making.

  Donald W. O’Day, also known as the Doober, Dubby, Dubbsabond, what have you, was a prince of fucking around, professional-caliber. And we had not been in Frank Lears’ class for long when Dubby interpreted the salient signals and took a chance. Dubby began modestly enough. While Lears talked in his sweet, melancholy voice and stroked his Proust-on-the-town mustache, the Doober began to manufacture spitballs. He did this dutifully, perfunctorily, with just a slight air of irritation, as though this were something he was obliged to undertake, somewhat against his will. There was a minor boredom in all his movements, as if he were working at the behest of a higher power.

  And in a sense, he was. For as Dubby tore, rolled, chewed, swirled, extracted, and enacted one quality-control inspection after another, all over Medford High, all over America, kids were playing a similar game: screwing around, preparing trouble, getting ready to annoy the authorities. All were enmeshed in the longtime and by now perhaps genetically coded animosity between proletariat kids and their teachers.

  Dubby began lining his desk with a poised, military row of saliva-gelled spheres, Lilliputian armaments for the war with gentility’s Gulliver. He may or may not have wanted to do this—as I say, it was part of a transpersonal program, something that was larger in dimension, silly though it may have been, than our mere selves.

  Dubby O’Day was, I had to admit, my closest friend in the class. He was tall and pipe-cleaner thin, with an onion-shaped head, bulging a bit in the middle, and a long, Alice-in-Wonderland periscope-up sort of neck. But he was also, in a certain way, handsome; mothers picked him out, with an unerringly confident mothers’ aesthetic, as a “good-looking boy.” Boys so selected were, it is almost needless to say, of virtually no interest to girls their own age. The mothe
rs chose these boys because their soft looks and compliant faces made them seem like viable alternatives to the mothers’ craggier, more wayward husbands, some of whom had themselves looked like mothers’ darlings before they were married.

  The Doober had blond, almost sun-colored hair, a kindly grinning Irish face, which could quickly, under the right circumstances, assume a morose Hibernian frown, red cheeks, and blue eyes, sky blue, and a trickle of zits—they seemed a little like blood rivulets—running down each side of his chin.

  The Doober was a fatalist. He swore over and over again—and theatrically, having, as he did, played Hamlet in a ninth grade production (I was the ghost, a part Shakespeare himself played, it’s said)—that everyone could write him off as a nothing, a failure, useless, a walking cipher, soon to be heard of (and probably to live) no more. Our friend Art Mondello, who helped me give Dubby a haircut that disfigured him for two months, claimed that the Doober was destined to be a fireman whose status in the firehouse would run about equal to the station house’s pet dalmatian—provided Dubby refrained from befouling the floor.

  Like Huck Finn, Dubby was determined to go to hell, the place the righteously indignant had set aside for his type, in hopes that when they were box-seated in heaven they could entertain themselves, as Tertullian, the Church father, said all good orthodox people would have the right to do, by looking down at the torments below. But Dubby only aspired to be bad; he was actually sweet-natured, wounded, put upon by a frantically loving mother, and—here we reach the inner squares of the Doober’s private hell—preternaturally bad at math.

  In grade twelve, the authorities claimed, he was functioning at the math level of a ninth grader. In days past, Dubby, like George Orwell at his British public school, would have been caned into a rudimentary knowledge of the subject at hand: For some reason—it puzzles Orwell, but he can’t figure out what it is—he has to admit that the prospect of a good hiding does wonders for the capacity to conjugate Latin verbs. Under the current school dispensation, with its multiple titles and entitlements, Dubby could have himself declared the victim of a numerological deficiency encoded in his biological string and demand to be served, sultanlike, with tutors, emotional advisers, test exemptions, and prime seating. As it was 1969, Dubby was designated as plain dumb and left to fend for himself.

  And the news had just broken over Dubby’s good-natured head that he was once again to be the mathematical ward of Mr. Leo Repucci. Mr. Repucci was a teacher who had, from early in life, one might imagine (he now was about fifty), gone over to caricature. He was a small, bent man, with the expression of a puzzled burlesque-show attendee—worn, tired, quietly greedy, not unfamiliar with disappointment in its many guises, a sort of washed-out Jiminy Cricket type, if you were ill disposed. And Dubby was, extremely.

  But one quality of Leo’s stood out beyond the rest. He was prone to harsh mockery, to the humiliation of his students. And he did it all in the only voice he had, that of Elmer Fudd or his slightly calmer, slightly less sententious (but just slightly) younger brother. As in: “Weww, Donawd, here for anoder term? What do you think your chances are dis time to pass geometwy? I am vewy dubious, speaking for myself.” This was pronounced in a half-keening singsong tune. What Leo probably took to be a genteel discretion informed his speech. Donald fought back by developing—he was an actor of parts; he’d played Hamlet—a Leo (“Weo”) accent to top Leo’s.

  One of Leo’s tasks, probably self-appointed, was to patrol the boys’ bathroom beside his class, scolding the boys for smoking, for taking too long on the toilet, for chattering at the urinals. One day, the story went, a furtive smoker caught what he took to be the Doober’s rendition of Leo’s punishing voice, telling him to get rid of his cigarette and to join the happy throng in the classroom, pondering the value of x. The smoker wasn’t having any. He cat-whooped out from the toilet: “Screw you, Donny.”

  “I’m sewious.”

  “Eat me, Donny.” Members of the male, aggressively heterosexual population of Medford High were perpetually issuing homosexual invitations to one another.

  “It is not Donawd. No. It is Mr. Wepucci. And it is big twobble foh you.” And of course it was, or should have been, big trouble.

  The problem was that teachers like Leo were in an impossible position. To get the reprobates punished in a fitting way, they had to take them before one of the fiery submasters, Fran Todesco or Jingles McDermott. Detention would be handed down. But in the process, a story about the misdemeanor would have to be told; the story would make Leo look ridiculous. And then the tale would slither around the teachers’ lounge all the next day. So Leo would take revenge by flunking his tormentor, flunking the Doober, and then next year he’d be back in the fourth row, last seat (this was in fact Donny’s third run with Mr. R), and the drama would begin again, with predictable last act.

  So far, it looked as though this Frank Lears character might have come with the same meager throw weight that Leo did. He seemed to be absurdly mild, easy to mock, a rank pushover, someone against whom we might score a collective victory to assuage us for the defeats we’d suffered from the truly fierce and respected teachers, the disciplinarians, like Mace Johnson and the hockey coach, Paul Tuppermann, who was perpetually having us copy questions out of the history book while he . . . what? Drew up hockey plays at his desk? Are there plays in hockey?

  Yes, it looked as though this Lears guy was someone on the order of Repucci or of Manny DeNofrio, who wore a set of false teeth that looked like they’d come from a joke shop, white-of-the-eyes white, far-protruding, and synthetic in appearance, as though if someone wound a key tightly in them they would leap from his mouth and traverse the floor, making a rackety sound. On the paperweight that he used to hold down his math tests, someone had written in cruel red pencil, legible all the way to the back of the room, the words Joe Choppers.

  There was Mr. Sweeney, who one day became intoxicated with an image from Hawthorne of someone spitting up blood and began to pantomime the event, signifying the blood with his shaking, compulsively manicured fingers: Again and again, he repeated the action of the blood bubbling up through his windpipe and out his mouth, as though he were being afflicted by a hilarious case of consumption. Then he toppled forward in hysterical laughter, staggered, had to sit down, and could not continue the class. There was sad Miss Cullen, the English teacher who served extended time in the supply closet and who one day, humiliated by John Cosgrove, the class smart kid, on some factual quibble or another, simply called out in Cassandra-like grief, “John! I went to college! I am right!”

  Dubby had provisionally filed Lears in the bin with these weaklings and on the other side of the world from enforcers like Mace Johnson and Paul Tuppermann, and Ed “Dirty Ed” Bush. It was said that Jimmy Brown, the greatest football player ever to live, was once asked by Johnny Carson who the nastiest player was that he had faced. He skipped over the likes of Sam Huff, the Giants’ middle linebacker, and cited Dirty Ed Bush, of Northeastern University, my gym teacher. Ed was an enormous polar bear of a man, pale, with a white crew cut, and black GI glasses. He was so ferocious that you half believed he would kill randomly and then devour his fallen enemy on the site.

  Dubby worked assiduously, lining his desk with the miniature cannonballs, about to fire the opening shots of the war. Now it was time to cast the cannon. Easily done. Dubby put the point of his Bic pen into his mouth, bit down hard around the tip, pulled once, then again with his Wonderland neck, extracted the metal nib and the tiny thin-plastic sheath and spat the whole business out onto his desk. In front of him lay a standard school weapon, a spitball blowgun. By now, Dubby had about divided the audience with Lears, who was talking on about the tactics we might use to interpret the Nietzsche passage.

  Who would the Doober fire at? This question meant a good deal to me. Dubby was no alpha male, maybe not even a beta. But because of his acute—albeit non–number processing—intelligence, he readily sensed the pecking order that was in place at Medf
ord High. If Dubby shot a spitball in your direction, you were a small-time player.

  It was clear enough who Dubby would not shoot. He wouldn’t shoot the star quarterback, Cap, or our wide receiver, Rick Cirone. Cap had a thick beard; he needed a second shave by four o’clock. Not tall, about five-feet-nine, he was heroically muscular, with a low brow and a thick, slightly protruding jaw. He was simple and direct in his feelings, an almost courtly guy, whom I never saw commit a mean act. He was egalitarian, generous to just about everyone, a little pious, but with a small streak of whimsy. What Cap was preeminently, though, was a splendid athlete, who could run and bound and dodge in ways that made the local sportswriters search the whole bestiary for comparisons. He had a beautiful, rarely dispensed smile.

  Rick and he had grown up together, and though they both had Sicilian good looks, they were much different boys. Rick’s astrological sign was Taurus, the bull, and he was a strong Taurian, down-to-earth, realistic, a lover of strong tastes and smells, fiercely drawn to girls. He was dead practical, knew how much money he had in his pocket. But Rick was also a musician, played drums and guitar, and revered not so much the Beatles and the Stones as Jeff Beck, a guitarist with a lightning hand. Rick was circumspect but also witty, a splendid mimic, much liked, caustic, unexpected. At football, he spun off imitations of the great running backs, hopping over tackling dummies like the Packers’ Paul Hornung, spinning down the field with Gale Sayers’ stride. (He insisted on wearing a white plastic one-bar face guard, like the one Sayers had worn; it was flimsy and put his face in constant danger of rearrangement.) He could sing in various pop-parodic voices. Rick was an alpha type, seemed to know it (most of the time), and laughed about it internally. He talked about playing guitar with a kick-back country-rock band and living in a flurry of girls. Cap dreamed about going pro.

  Rick is drumming the desk, moving his feet, living in his self-made music as Cap, it appears, tunes out Lears and lives in the sound of the crowd on Saturday. No way the Dub would hit either of them.