Nor would he dare to hit Nora Balakian, by male consensus surely the most comely girl in the room. (And what is high school but a sort of debased Classical world, where beauty and physical might matter more than all else?) She is dark, contemplative, poised, with black hair and gray-flecked eyes. She’s intent on Lears but so far hasn’t said a word.
As to me, no, I wasn’t a likely target. Dubby was my friend, and besides, the demon in me who occasionally exploded on the football field, creating general havoc, might always spring to life. All of Dubby’s friends periodically threatened him with physical harm, if only to give him the chance for some artful, Buster Keaton–style cringing.
I didn’t think Dubby would aim at Tommy Buller. Buller was stumpy as a boss troll, thick-necked, scowling, with no social consequence whatever, a kid with a pack of younger, admiring friends at home, maybe, and aspirations to open his own auto-body shop. He had acne so livid it looked like someone had rubbed steel wool over his face that morning, with Buller’s encouragement. He wore Sears, Roebuck stain-holding shirts that reeked of the night shift. He was so angry that it seemed like a fierce dog, a Rottweiler maybe, was always there beside him. You wanted to pull the fire extinguisher off the wall and turn it in his direction so as to put the nasty fire that was Buller out. Tommy was too mean to trifle with.
Then there was Sandra Steinman, the school’s only hippie. Sandra, like Tommy Buller, was not a player in high school society. But Buller didn’t know where the game was, didn’t know that a game existed. Sandra did, and disliked it all—intensely.
On this, the first day of school, she’d opted out with her wardrobe. Sandra, who had always dressed “normally” in past years, came to class that day in loose, sloppy blue jeans and a man’s dress shirt, long and untucked. She had wire-rimmed glasses pushed close to her face. And, abomination on abomination, she was wearing work boots: men’s work boots. Sandra was well-to-do. Imagine—we hardly could—that wearing work clothes would be someone’s idea of style. But it was more than mild class rancor that beset me, and the other boys too, for we all gasped in some derision when first Sandra came clomp-clomping in with the big-ditch mud slappers. Sandra was pretty, or would have been without the self-mutilations. She had ringletty blond hair and a sweet, slightly mischievous face, the face of a lower-order angel, maybe, who’s perpetually annoying the higher castes, the thrones and dominions, as they’re called; her twin brother, John, was endlessly popular with the girls. But here were the work boots, first day of school, and what they said was that she wasn’t even going to try to be attractive to the local boys. It was as though the swan had gotten annoyed with all the attention and decided to turn back into an ugly duckling. She seemed to be telling all the boys, who wanted to imagine fine times with such a pretty, poised girl, exactly what she thought of them.
What would Sandra do if she got popped with one of Dubby’s pellets? It seemed that Sandra was, in her own mind, about five years older than the rest of us and lived on the newly discovered planet of peace and love. Her response would be too unpredictable. No way Dubby would shoot at her.
Come to think of it, the work clothes probably scared us for another reason, too. They reminded us, I suspect, of what we would ourselves be putting on to head out to the factory, head off for the ditch, down to the road crew. We wanted one year more of glad rags and great good times before moving into what we did not want just now to imagine, thanks anyway for the invitation. This year was our time on the stage. High school at the time worked this way (and I suspect it still does): For three years, from ninth grade through eleventh, the students seem to be an undifferentiated mass, roiling and stumbling along through their lives. But then at the onset of senior year something happens. Identities crystallize. Kids become themselves in stark, hyperintense ways. By midyear, all the stock figures have gelled. Up until then it is a grand audition, with people pushing hard in an almost Darwinian heat to do what they need to in order to coalesce as the highest embodiment of their type.
Senior year in high school, it seemed to many of us, was the last chance to flower, the last chance to become who you are, with some verve. That was the vocation of the senior—to come into one’s own, but within set categories: jock, brain, cheerleader, heartthrob, junior entrepreneur, femme fatale, class clown. There is something archetypal about the world of high school, something allegoric. The kids have formalized roles. The teachers have nicknames that fix their place in the meager cosmos. Even the building is full of highly charged locales—the place where this or that clique hangs out, the corridor where the fight took place, the detention room where Big Fran, the submaster, had to call the police. There is something eternally burning about this world; it lives in the mind ten, twenty, thirty years after the fact, as though it had been concocted and instilled by a small-time Dante, who had himself once been injured by it and wanted it preserved eternally as a reminder.
High school is, one fears, where ultimate identity is conferred. For it is here that, for the last time in life probably, people will pull back and tell you, or at least demonstrate in no mistakable terms, what they truly think about you. Once high school is over, the conventions of civility begin to take over. Mocking someone to his face is, by and large, out in adult life, unless you join the army or become a corporate demigod. But the fear is that high school was the last time the world was willing to offer you an up-front, unbiased readout of who and what you were. And that if the readout was negative—and it probably was—you’ve stayed fixed and everyone knows as much but is simply too polite to let on.
Most people suffer abominably from this dispensation, where everything is in the open, like in the last act of an Ibsen or an O’Neill play, when the truth comes out, with no quarter given. But some actually thrive in this cosmos. The way a few of my contemporaries took to high school might have made you believe in reincarnation. They knew precisely what to expect. They had mental clocks that chimed in their heads to forewarn them of mixers and socials and parties and official functions the necessary two months in advance. On the reincarnation theory, Suze Rodino must have been passing through high school for the fourth or fifth time, and she was getting better at it with every go. She was luminously pretty, dark-complected, with inky-black hair, and always had her schoolwork done and never missed a sorority social night and had a boyfriend (whom she’d marry) and a college picked out (the University of Connecticut) and a profession (physical therapy), and at Christmastime, once, sewed jingling bells to her slip so that when she walked or skipped (yeah, she did skip) down the halls, ringling holiday sounds came with her. She was unremittingly benevolent to all (and I mean all; the most noxious social outcast got a smile and a spray of kind words from Suze) good-hearted, curious, uncloyingly sweet, and always up. No, Suze had done it before; she was near high school satori. Had Dubby thought to mistreat Suze Rodino—she wasn’t, as it happened, in this class—an invisible ring of social approval would have risen around her, guarding her high-note happiness, and, like a force field, sent the offending particle to the ground.
Against this high school world, Lears was already taking his first small step, though it was a step we could not perceive. The quote from Nietzsche had a point. It was simply that in order to be a thinker, in order even to study philosophy, you had to be willing to fall out of joint with your times. “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.” To be at war with today and the ideal of today? That, of course, was exactly what we did not want. Everyone in the class, Sandra Steinman and Tommy Buller perhaps excepted, had bought all the rules that high school laid down, and we wanted to conform to them as well as we could. We wanted to look like experts, the way Suze did, to look like people who were passing through the gauntlet for the twentieth time and knew every step. This fellow Nietzsche and his diminutive friend Lears were telling us that by showing any in
terest in philosophy, we’d signaled a willingness to put ourselves a step or two at odds with the dance. And where would that leave us? Well, with the future in our hands: We’d live in the day after tomorrow, no? But by then the philosopher has taken another step forward, and again no one likes him terribly much.
It is the Socratic type that Nietzsche is talking about and praising in the passage about being untimely. For Socrates does not fit in. He annoys people. The Delphic oracle, fount of all wisdom for the Athenians (though often wisdom of a cruelly enigmatic sort), informed the world that Socrates was the wisest man alive. This puzzles him no end. So off he goes to talk with all the people the Athenians take to be wise. He chats with politicians, craftsmen, and poets. And what comes out of the discussions, according to Socrates, is that these people know nothing whatever that’s worth knowing. They can’t tell you what justice is, why one should tell the truth rather than lie, what kind of government is best. So Socrates draws a simple conclusion. He decides that what makes him wise is his awareness of how ignorant he is. At least he, Socrates, knows that he knows nothing. This process makes the people he has questioned—the poets, tradesmen, and politicians—very angry. They become angry enough, in fact, to try him on trumped-up charges: They indict him for pretending to know what goes on in the heavens and beneath the earth, for teaching people to make the weaker argument appear the stronger, for corrupting the young. Then they sentence him to death.
THE DOOBER is shifting into third gear. His ritual is to wait for the small, pale fellow up front to look away, then take aim, shoot, and duck behind the back of the guy in front of him, like a desperado dodging behind a cactus. Ping—duck. Ping—duck. He nicks John Vincents, who wears his soccer cleats to class. But Vincents is so good-natured and fond of the Doober—they’ve known each other for about a decade—that he doesn’t care. Then he tags Donald Bellmer again and again, Bellmer, with his Dumbo ears and big feet and hands. Bellmer was tall and pale and so shy and indrawn that he almost seemed like a ventriloquist’s doll who was waiting for the master to come along, prop him on his knee, and let the show begin. He hit blond, open-mouthed Carolyn Cummer, and then he looked at her apologetically, like a low-rung courtier who’d sullied the empress.
Almost everyone is watching Dubby now. He’s in the position of the prospector who’s perhaps struck a vein of gold. Out ahead of us, he has taken the necessary daring step and quickly revealed what looks to be the way things will go with this new guy.
Tired of shooting, the Dub gets into another line. He stomps his feet a little, offers a few animal noises, maybe a lip-fart or two. And Lears lets it all go. He pays the Doober no mind, though he seems to see Donny working away. Probably he’s too afraid to confront him. Probably he doesn’t know what to do.
We begin to loosen up. We drum the desks; we yack as loudly as we care to with our neighbors. We pull out newspapers. A few lay their heads down and begin a nap. Some kind of discussion does seem to be going on—yes, Sandra is dropping in a word here and there. And this Lears character, ignoring our antics, is talking back, taking her seriously. He thinks he’s in an actual school. Occasionally, he stops and looks at all of us, contemplating the group en masse.
And what did he see as he looked out at us? Lears, you have to keep in mind, was here on leave from Pepperland. He came from the world where men wore beads and earrings and carried little purses and displayed muttonchop sideburns and walrus mustaches and decked themselves in army-surplus gear. They sported pink-tinted granny glasses, headbands, multiple rings, bell-bottoms, Mexican sandals. The idea, often, was to reach to both extremes. The real stylists would mix macho touches—boots, spurs, a Confederate cavalry cap, say—with female odds and ends—silver amulets and love beads and a sweet little braid or two.
The women wore minis (there were rules against these at Medford High) and long bread-baker skirts, and hair like bed curtains, hanging evenly down, and no bras (no bras!) and absurdly bright peasant blouses. Lears’ contemporaries were at the time busy forming a ragtag peasant parody army, high as magpies on weed, mushrooms, and acid, pushing the pigs against the wall (and being shoved there in turn), getting it on, and reinventing (or trying to reinvent) America wholesale. Lears’ legacy suit, with the lapel paper clip and the gunboat shoes, was a costume; he was goofing on the whole idea of straightness. He was fresh from the revolution, out of that great tragicomedy that’s since been dubbed the sixties, but at the time simply looked like a standard-issue re-creation of the world from top to bottom that was going to continue forever.
What Lears saw was Dubby stupidly lurking behind the prop that was Rick’s back and the rest of us following his antics like chimps seeking their lowest level of common amusement, straining to achieve our ultimate goal, which was to turn everyday life into a species of our favorite diversion, television. Yes, if you could turn school into TV, that would be fine indeed, well worth the labor of getting up, doing the ablutions, and boarding the bus.
What he saw when we sat still and tried to listen was also in some measure the world created by TV. For we looked like nothing so much as people who aspired to be in family sitcoms, aspired, that is, to a certain wholesomeness, fed as we were on American cheese and Wonder Bread, with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches and sloppy joes on the weekends. The girls wore jumpers and pleated skirts and had their hair militantly lacquered, into imposing helmets. What our school alone used in hair spray would have been enough to burn a considerable hole in the ozone. He saw the boys all looking pretty much alike, with our modest bangs, courtesy of the Beatles, and our crewneck sweaters that made us look just a little clerical, and our penny loafers and socks that matched those crewnecks, or were supposed to. (A bit schizoid in the sartorial department, I wore this sort of stuff sometimes, and other times wore semi-greaser getups.) Perhaps Lears also sensed the reservoirs of anxiety and rank horniness and confusion, along with maybe a little bit of potentially usable desperation. Overall, he saw what must have looked like the most god-awfully unhip concatenation of people yet assembled in one small room in the West in the fall of 1969. We had no idea what time it was. People’s Park and the Panthers’ insurrections and the March on Washington had all taken place over our heads, like those scenes of heaven in Wagner-inspired paintings where the gods feast and cavort on high and the mortals toil stupidly below. He must have been ready to walk out, slapping the gunboats on the linoleum, and go back to Cambridge and get his commission reinstated in the anti-army of hip, get his proper togs back and rejoin the revolution.
He was in one of his legacy suits, a green twill number, hanging and disheveled, I think, of which I would one day, not quite knowing what I was up to, buy an imitation in a New Haven thrift shop. He had on a skinny tie, tamed-snake black, with a modest stripe down the middle, and the inscrutable paper clip. Lears was dressed in a certain kind of drag, but nobody in the room got it (except maybe Sandra); nobody moved with the joke.
As for us, we continued with our antics, raising the volume progressively. To look at it all from a distance, of course, is more than a little appalling. We were seventeen, a point in life where other people, at other places and times, are beginning to do their life’s work, are writing bad early poems, scribbling music, concocting business schemes, or picking up the rudiments of a trade. And the world around us was more than alive. Our nation was busy bombing a peasant population into Buddhist rage and Buddhist renunciation of that rage. And here we were, with all the promise and absurdity that are inseparable from being seventeen, regressing as quickly as we could. We were regressing, maybe, as a sign of rage at how often—stand in line, don’t talk, no short skirts—we were rewarded for regression. All right, I’ll play along; I’ll go where the conveyor belt seems bound to send me, and I’ll go capering and grinning, too.
Now Mace Johnson or Paul Tuppermann or Dirty Ed Bush would have whipped around like a G-man, in a quick Eliot Ness pivot, sensing the apostasy at his back, and sought the “ringleader.” Any one of them would have ripped Dub
by from his seat—especially Dubby—and pulled him like a human mule, limbs flying, up the row toward the front, stretching, maybe tearing the collar of his new madras shirt, so new that the little band of cloth fixed between the shoulder blades, known as the fruit loop, was still intact.
Franklin Lears simply looked at us en masse and with an expression of mild bemusement. He didn’t seem at all discomfited by our antics. He didn’t seem ready to rush out the door in anguish at the way we’d messed up his first day of school. Perhaps he understood that the ability to be humiliated and take it in stride is crucial to a certain kind of teaching, the kind that will convey two virtues, which rarely come together—a modesty so intense that it borders on self-mockery, along with a conviction, absolute and unflappable, that one has to see it one’s own way, speak one’s truth, that having experimented in the chaotic laboratory of life, one must, for better or worse, publish the results to the world.
Socrates, after all, got brained with a plate of urine, thrown by his wife, Xanthippe, who was angry at him for neglecting domestic affairs. When people teased him about it in later life, Socrates simply said that with Xanthippe, you could be sure that after the thunder—after her shrewish harangues—would inevitably come the rain. During his early years as a philosopher, Socrates decided to define man as a featherless biped. He got a plucked chicken thrown at him for his pains. The sage took pleasure in these things, saw them as conducive to a modesty that was the obverse side of the mental fearlessness he also cultivated. As Falstaff, an Elizabethan Socrates, says, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”
Lears simply kept talking to Sandra and calmly ignored the rest of us. As time went on, we would get to him. How could we not? But on this, the first day, he held his ground. He continued with a demonstration of what real teaching might be like—though we were too dim to see as much. For what we saw was rank weakness; another teacher had arrived who did not know his trade. The Doober, our guide, had shown us the way. This class was going to be fabulous. We could do anything we wanted. Good times were about to roll.
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