One simple story tells more about the place than any exterior mapping could reveal. This is the Doober’s story, not mine, and Dubby could at times be a little wayward with the truth. Life wouldn’t always arch itself in quite the graceful parabolas that Dubby’s imagination required. Sometimes life needed help. But he told this story so graphically, with such conviction, that I had to believe him. True or not, let it stand as a metaphor for all that was true for me about Medford High School, circa 1969.
THE DOOBER’S incident occurred in the New Corridor, where I had gone to see Mrs. Olmstead to learn that my prospects on planet Earth were less than modest and the place that, for whatever it may be worth, most often appears in my dreams when they go back to high school. Dubby was on the far end of this corridor, the bright passageway through the old, burned-out sector of the school. Up at the other end, he spotted a girl who was known to everyone not by anything so civilized as her name but simply as the Blind Girl.
She was, from all appearances, stone-blind, navigating the halls and classrooms of Medford High with a cane and, on occasion, a Seeing Eye dog. She’d been in my Latin class (first row, first seat) and she was quite a good student, though the voice in which she offered her translations seemed to come from beyond the grave, a softly wailing cry. The teacher coddled her in that class, and after a while she coddled me, too. The girl and I had something of a bond.
It was an advanced Latin class, featuring a year-long troop through Virgil’s Aeneid, master poem of imperial triumph. I was, not uncharacteristically, one of the worst students there. I never brought the book home, never studied the stuff. When it was my turn to translate, I’d simply take a running whack at the text, making liberal use of English cognates and soundalikes and also of an overall sense of what was likely to happen next in the story. This I had acquired from my reading, somewhere around the age of eight, the Classic Comic Book versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the poems on which The Aeneid is based. Actually, that’s putting it kindly: Virgil cribs outrageously from both. Thus there was some justice, as you’ll see, to what was going on in the class. I generally got a B or a C in the translation sweepstakes. But overall I didn’t acquit myself too badly, in part because I knew all the mythological references, based on an agreeably semi-pornographic illustrated book of Greek myths, which I’d also read when I was eight—my classical phase, you might call it. From time to time I would put the poor Latinist who taught us out of her misery by revealing, for about the ninth time, who Jupiter and Juno were.
But on this particular day the Latin matron, with her broom-straight backbone, detected something that made her frozen blood warm a little. It was maybe a rustling and a thrustling of papers under someone’s desk, a muffled, clandestine sound of some kind. But then maybe she had been preparing for this Latin class shoot-out for a while.
She flung herself toward the miscreant’s desk and at the same time shouted to all of us to keep quiet and not to move. We were to keep our hands in plain sight, on our desks. Cowboy TV junkie that I was, it sounded like a stickup to me. I raised both hands in the air. With her bony hand, she snatched something from off the desk, or perhaps from between the legs, of poor Betty Anders. It was a book, a paperback book. Was it possible that Betty was reading something in class, the way that she had read Peyton Place beneath her desk in ninth grade and been caught by Miss Tuttle? Miss Tuttle had crowed in rage at the “filth.” (We were then studying Hamlet, that fount of purity; when it came to the business about “country matters,” the territories between Ophelia’s thighs, and other such things, we simply skipped past.)
The book Betty was perusing turned out to be not a porn classic but an English translation of Virgil—a trot, as they were called. As she snatched the offending volume, our Latin teacher, tall and white-haired and straight as a chessboard bishop, called out that all of us should now surrender our cheat sheets.
Around the room she trolled, looking for erring souls. And she made quite a haul. From between the knees and behind the propped-up books and under the notebooks of nearly every student in the class she pulled a translation of the famous poem. Some were books; others, on the desks of the more industrious, were translations copied out in careful longhand. Almost everyone in that small class was apprehended as a scapegrace. Among the few righteous ones were the Blind Girl and me—me not because I was so silver-sheened honest but because I simply didn’t give a sufficient damn to figure out that this was the way to thrive and that, sitting in a middle row, in a very back seat, two seats deeper than my nearest neighbor on either side, I had never noticed the malfeasance. As to the Blind Girl, she was clearly innocent. Anyway, I felt a certain kinship with the Blind Girl. So what Dubby told me rang a somber bell; eventually it evoked the feeling of mortal kinship, the still sad music of humanity, as I’d later hear it called.
Anyway, here is the Doober’s tale. On one end of the New Corridor, the pine-paneled and brightly lit passageway where I’d ducked into the guidance counselor’s office, there is Dubby. He is late, per usual, for a dose of geometry (or geometwy, depending on your meanness quotient) from the teacher he’s taken to calling the Waskally Wabbit—that is, Mr. Repucci.
Enter from the other side of the corridor the Blind Girl. According to Dubby—a footnote here—the Blind Girl was not born blind. One day she simply popped on the bathroom light and took a full look in the mirror and was struck by what appeared and, lo, could see nothing. Is this too mean to write? Too cruel? It is simply the common coin of high school, the last place where Darwinian laws apply without amendment. Think back to the worst thing you ever did or said in those precincts before moralizing too fervently.
The Blind Girl looked like the figure in Edvard Munch’s much-reproduced painting The Scream. Her eyes were hollowed caves; her cheeks were indented. It was as though she’d fed on the winds. Her mouth stood open in a look of sorry expectancy: The worst might arrive at any minute. She had a ravaging case of acne. As she walked, she moaned quietly to herself, sometimes in ghostly melodies. She was a haunted being passing you by, a pained soul come back, Ancient Mariner–like, to tell you how it was with her and could readily be with you. But high school being what it was, no one much noticed or cared.
The Doober sees the Blind Girl, with her red-bottomed cane tapping her way down the New Corridor, where it is so bright that one almost feels it is stage-lit. But Dubby himself is in medieval darkness, waiting in the wings, for the areas that adjoin the corridor on either end are windowless. They’re full of classrooms with thick, dungeonlike doors, which are now—Dubby is late for class—slapped shut.
Suddenly, behind the Blind Girl’s subdued tap-tap, there rises up another pattern of sound, something aggressive and strong, summoning up the image of a well-engineered train, maybe, smacking its way down the track, very metallic, very sure. And soon there is a shape coming up fast behind the Blind Girl, who moves at an unvaryingly deliberate pace, making mystical-seeming half-circles over the floor with her cane.
He’s gorgeous: Sicilian hair, blacker than Presley’s dyed do ever was, slicked back in a phenomenally beautiful duck’s ass, which he strokes compulsively. He wears skintight pants that ride about two inches above his black knifepoint shoes. He’s decked in a jack shirt, a button-up that doesn’t tuck in, with two buttons low down over the belt to hold it in place. It’s trimmed with velvet, or velvet substitute, and purchased at (or boosted from) Medford’s preeminent men’s shop, Frank’s, a place where I myself can afford nothing but the socks when they are on sale (three pairs for $2.50), though I often go to look in wonder at the shark-wear splendors on display.
Paulie Costello, for that is who Dubby sees, has the composed face of a Renaissance sculpture, calm, indifferent, masterly, without any sense of burden or strain. He walks, generally, as if he were on his way to a liaison with a Venetian countess, to whom he need bring no offering of flowers or verse, nothing but his own immaculate and stunning form.
Though Paulie is only a sophomore, he is
a significant figure at Stag’s pool hall. He plays at table one, the best lit freshly velveted table close up to the cash register. There, he participates in a seemingly never ending game of “action” with Hank the Hat, skinny, ball-pounding, in tiny porkpie hat and spaghetti-strap T-shirt, and with a leopard tattooed on his thin but sinewy left arm—where the leopard’s claws meet Hank’s flesh are flecks of inky blood. There too is likely to be Steve “Porky” Parrotta, bull-like, looking like a longshoreman, with a crusty, forty-year-old’s face, though he’s only seventeen, whose uncle was a prizefighter, whose grandpa was a pool hustler, and whose father is in meat-packing and is so prosperous that he can give his boy a full-size pool table down in his basement.
Stag’s was a male sanctum. One night Louis “Little Rudy” Valentino came running up Main Street, breathless with astounding news. Rudy had all the inflections of a street thug—dis, dat, dese, dose—but his voice was so sweet that if you were only listening, not looking at him (he was thick-featured and wary), you swore you were encountering an angel who had somehow been shuffled early and unjustly into a boys’ reformatory, where he learned his rough cadences.
“Mahhk! Mahhk!” Rudy was coming on at a run.
“Mahhk, you’re not gonna believe this. There’s girls in the poolroom [poo’room].”
The news was traveling out in every direction, like vibrations from the midst of a spider’s web, and before long, guys from all over, from Brigham’s and Papa Gino’s and from down by the bridge, where they’d been emptying bottles of Bud, were flying downstairs into the sanctum. Stag, a fifty-year-old man with dense, white, well-tended hair, sat completely composed behind the desk, where he stored the balls and where the stud players kept their personal cues in a rack, as though all were fine and the world was not, effectively, cracking in the middle.
Stag had something of an urbane-thug style. One day, when I decided to forgo using a bridge and to climb up onto one of Stag’s tables to sink a quick eight ball—it was an easy shot once you were in position, a tit shot, as they were called at Stag’s; I can still hear the voice of poolroom denizen Oscar Venell screaming at top volume about an eight-ball shot that would have bolixed Minnesota Fats, “C’mon, get it over with, Mark. It’s tit. Just a piece of tit”—and Stag saw me draped over his property, in danger of toppling it, or at least warping the precious slate, he purred into his microphone, “Mr. Edmundson, are you shitting me there on table six?”
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.
Teacher Page 7
