As an aside, how come blind people don’t have that seasonal disorder all the time? I never heard about Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Helen Keller moaning around how they needed more sunlight.
Anyway, it might’ve been 1984 when more than a few children realized they were allergic to cigarette smoke. There went the outdoor smoking area, there went teachers smoking in the lounge. Deep down I understood that everyone should quit anyway. I showed a filmstrip that involved healthy lungs compared to coal/asbestos/glass dust/cigarette-damaged lungs. But goddamn. We got to where we took turns being late to our own classes. One day I’d pretend to need to check oil in my engine block between second and third periods, just to stand outside and smoke while Mrs. Allen looked in on my class. Other days Mrs. Allen feigned forgetting her extendable pointer in the trunk of her car and I told her history class stories that weren’t in the textbook. Our P.E. teacher flat out took showers at the end of every class and smoked in the stall.
I think it took almost six years before we had a child so allergic to dust mites that our whole home ec division got wiped out mid-semester. Soon thereafter we had a couple students show up with medical forms saying they couldn’t be within a hundred feet of anyone wearing perfume or cologne. This included deodorant, pomade (Mr. Willie’s), hairspray, and acne cream. I didn’t bother taking down precise notes to all of this—I had enough to worry about, seeing as kids needed to dissect frogs, the district couldn’t afford ordering the things, and I spent many a Saturday night/Sunday morning gigging—but this seemed to be when our school really started to deteriorate.
A whole knot of tenth graders, out of nowhere, learned that they were allergic to both paint fumes and alumina, one of the central ingredients in glaze. So we quit offering art classes and the two part-time teachers got laid off. On top of this, Mr. Willie couldn’t paint over graffiti. “General upkeep” vanished from our work environment.
I kind of liked one of those art teachers. She let her students paint still lifes and imagine what a walnut would look like resting atop a pear, banana, orange, or mango. Call it passive aggressive, but she always hung her students’ canvases in the hallways.
Mr. Lawson couldn’t take it anymore. He smoked and had a hard time waiting for the three o’clock bell. His students—in the past they’d been best in the state for their cabinetry skills—could now only wish to gain employment at Naked Furniture, what with the “no paint” directive. Lawson, on one particularly bleak winter day when he caught his students firing nail guns at one another, walked over to his miter box, placed his arm down, and cut off his left hand.
Gary Doherty sprang into action, evidently because he’d almost made it up to Webelo in the Boy Scout hierarchy. That kid ran directly to the first-aid station, extracted gauze, a compress, surgical tubing, and those gloves. He staunched Lawson’s bleeding long enough for the EMTs to show up, take the shop teacher down to the emergency room at Gray-wood Emergency Regional Memorial, and not connect his hand back on like they do at regular hospitals filled with doctors who paid attention in med school.
When everything settled down, that’s when we learned that Doherty had a latex product allergy.
From what I heard, his doctors told him he could never use a condom. From what I heard, Doherty succumbed to a number of sexually transmitted diseases by the time he almost finished his associate’s degree in pulpwood management at one of the technical colleges.
And then—perhaps a geneticist or eugenicist could explain this—everyone became allergic to something. Maybe a clinical psychologist, or that absurdist playwright I read back when I thought I wanted to be a big-game veterinarian and came across a book called Rhinoceros, has something to say about how no one wants to be left out. We had students coming in with doctors’ notes saying they couldn’t be around PVC pipes, copper tubing, plaster, Styrofoam cups, everything. A swarm of young girls were afflicted with migraines due to fluorescent lights. The offspring of the Perfume People decided they couldn’t be near hand soap of any type, from GoJo to Ivory. By this time one of the many right-wing governors of ours had made it so anyone could call him- or herself a certified teacher, open up a certified charter home school, and let the kids play video games and read the Old Testament all day in order to make them better soldiers.
The school pretty much emptied by 2010. I had planned to retire in another year. We dropped from a student population of 1,200 back about the time Nixon took off on a helicopter all the way down to one student: Tony Timms. We wondered how come the school district didn’t shut us down. Tony Timms could be bused to another district, we all thought, for a cheaper price than keeping biology, algebra, remedial English, Spanish Uno, and history teachers on the payroll, not to mention the cost of electricity and the Department of Health and Environmental Control sending out inspectors tri-weekly.
It’s because our school board members didn’t believe in busing, and hadn’t since 1970—coincidentally the year when our allergy-prone students’ parents became so protective, holy, and litigious.
I won’t say that it wasn’t great having one student for ninety minutes every other day because of that A/B schedule. Tony Timms had me fourth period, after lunch, but I still clocked in at 7:45, stood around front as if I had bus duty, went to my room and played around with my collection of Bunsen burners. Sometimes I stood in the cafeteria and pretended I needed to break up a food fight on tater tot day. Mostly, though, I sat in my room and wished that over the years I had paid more attention to all the latest student-friendly lab experiments they’d developed that didn’t involve baking soda and vinegar.
Finally, in what seemed like the school’s final days, Tony Timms came into my class without his book or calculator. He didn’t have the slide rule I’d let him borrow either. He said, “Have you talked to my parents yet?”
I looked up to see him standing in the doorway with a plastic Bi-Lo bag over his head.
I said, “No. Was I supposed to? Did I miss a PTA meeting? Do they want to discuss your grade in here? Are they concerned that my trying to teach you how to master a 1964 Pickett No. 120 Trainer-Simplex slide rule is on par with our old home ec teacher years ago teaching her students how to darn socks and cobble shoes?” Perhaps I spent so many hours in silence at the school that, when asked to speak, I released all of my trapped thoughts. I said, “Did they watch that television program aired last night on NBC about the history of inappropriate teacher-student conduct? Is this about my saying I couldn’t offer you a strong recommendation to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the University of North Dakota, or Arizona State because you’ve not recognized the difference between helium and hydrogen on the Periodic Table of Elements?”
Tony Timms lifted the bag. I saw, per usual, his mouth open enough to view his uvula. He said, “Here they are,” and moved closer to the doorjamb.
I turned to find his parents, dressed—oddly, I thought—in what appeared to be the latest swimwear. They wore scuba masks, too, and had those diving cylinders strapped to their backs. I said, “Hey. Y’all please don’t stand next to the Bunsen burners.” I said, “Is this one of those days when parents come in and tell everyone about their jobs?”
Even before real and imagined allergies took their toll on the student population, I dreaded Bring Your Parent to School Days, seeing as most everyone’s parents started up their employment descriptions with, “Well, I used to be a loom fixer over at the mill, but now I’m a…” whittler, small engine repair fiend, jockey lot entrepreneur, birdhouse maker…
Mr. Timms handed me a signed document from his son’s doctor. I read it twice. “He’s allergic to air?” I said. I looked at Tony, my final student. “That’s why you’re such a mouth-breather, because you’re allergic to air?”
Mrs. Timms said, “This air. Not all air. This air. It’s got too much argon. Tony’s allergic to argon, as are we. It’s a congenital condition.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Well, I knew enough to say, “Get the fuck out of my classroom, y
ou idiotic people.” Then I ripped the mouthpieces away from their faces and chased them away. I screamed out, “This is what you get for naming your child after an adjective,” because I’d been thinking about kids named Tony, Misty, Merry, and Randy.
As it ended up, those were my last official words in my teaching career with American students. Later on, standing there with my five or six colleagues, waiting for our brick-and-cement-block school to become dust for the townspeople to breathe in and sneeze out, I imagined what my last words might’ve been had I taken a job at a less sickly and paranoid school district. Would I have said, “I’ve enjoyed every minute” or “There’s forty years I’ll never get back”? Would I have shaken hands with administrators even though I believed them to be a cross between weasels and newts? Would I have felt as though I made a difference in some teenager’s life?
The principal, whose name I never learned and who hadn’t shown up since we dwindled down to ten students, drove up on his new Harley-Davidson. He yelled out, “Good news! I’ve been hearing the rumors, but I didn’t want to let y’all in on it until it was official. They’ve postponed demolition! We’ve been chose by the government to be a Special Ambassador School. We got us forty children showing up tomorrow from a Chinese leper colony.”
He said that even Mr. Lawson would return to teach woodworking, no longer embarrassed to reveal his nub.
I shook my head. “Don’t count me in,” I said. “This has all been sad, confounding, and miserable enough. Do you know what happens right after all these new students die off? I’ll tell you. Amphibians from the sky. Fire everywhere. Winds we’ve never imagined. I don’t believe much in the Bible, but I do believe that Revelation section.”
The principal forgot to put down his kickstand and the motorcycle toppled over. He said, “There will be a need for extra grief counselors, if you’re right. What’s your name? I’m going to see if I can get you promoted to vice principal. If the end of the world’s coming like you say, then we need more vice principals with similar farsighted thoughts.”
As if I’d arranged it beforehand, three claps of thunder sounded. Everyone ran inside except for me. I righted the principal’s Harley, started it, and rode off in search of a high bridge with low guardrails. Speeding down the corrupted road, though, I understood that I didn’t have what it takes to end my own life. Being a scientist of sorts, I needed to view firsthand what happens after lepers.
What Could’ve Been?
Take a left out of the driveway. Take a left at the stop sign. Drive to the first convenience store—which used to be a 7-Eleven, or Pantry, or Quick-Way, but now offers scratch cards and Fuel Perks—and take another left-hand turn. Get in the slow lane.
Drive past the elementary school that looks nothing like the one you attended. A row of brick ranch-style houses. Maybe a set of clapboard mill village houses. At the light—there will be a McDonald’s here—take a right. Pass the Dollar General, or the Dollar Tree, or the Dollar Store. Look to the left and see how the pawnshop sells guns and buys gold, as always. Pass the grocery store that used to house a different chain, that used to house a different chain, that used to house a different chain—Publix, Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Ingles, Winn-Dixie, Community Cash, IGA, Piggly Wiggly. You’ll try to remember the succession.
The same will occur at the Bank of America. Nationsbank, FirstUnion, C&S, that other longtime local savings and loan where you started a checking account in high school.
Drive past a barrage of fast-food restaurants that includes a Burger King, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, Sonic, Chick-fil-A, Zaxby’s, Pizza Inn, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesar’s, KFC, Bojangles, Captain D’s, et cetera. Outback, Chili’s, Ruby Tuesday, Applebee’s, Moe’s Southwestern, TGIF. Subway, another McDonald’s, Firehouse Subs, Taco Bell, another Bojangles, Ryan’s, Red Lobster, IHOP, and so on. Huddle House, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, Shoney’s. This will take about two miles. In between there will be a Walmart, a vacant Kmart, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Big Lots. Exxon, Texaco, BP, Citgo, Shell, Kangaroo, Sunoco—none of which have full service, or mechanics available who can fix a flat or check transmission fluid.
Take another right onto the four-lane road that used to be a two-lane country road forty years earlier, where you and your friends drove around smoking cigarettes, drank Miller Ponies, pulled over with the overhead light on into rusty-gated pasture entrances so someone could fumble with Zigzag rolling papers. Drive past the dilapidated wooden building that housed the little store where your father bought Nehi grape sodas, or NuGrape—it’s the place where the owner got murdered and the police never caught a killer. Or it’s the place that the owner’s children didn’t want to operate, seeing as their father sent them off to college. Or it’s the place where the owner had diabetes so advanced that the doctor said a leg needed amputation, and the owner felt as if he had no better choice—what with all the grocery stores nearby—than to put a shotgun in his mouth behind the ancient tree behind the property. One of your friends used to claim that a man got hanged from the lowest branch of that tree. One of your friends carved his initials, plus the initials of, say, Ann Guy, in that tree. Years later—twenty years later—you figured out that the “A. G.” really stood for a boy who didn’t smoke cigarettes, roll joints, or drink from tiny beer bottles: Alan Gray, or Alvin Gillespie, or Aaron Giles. He was the boy who got accepted to a college where no one from your hometown went, and he made a mark on the world before dying in a tragic manner, not much different from the owner of the store where your father bought bygone classic sodas, which made him smile.
Pass a junk shop that holds as much merchandise outside as inside the cement block building. There’s a sale on drive-in speakers.
You’re not that far away. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for British monarchy. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for famous golf courses of the world. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for Ivy League colleges. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for Native American accoutrements.
You will reach the land where the drive-in movie theater once stood. The screen’s structure remains, though the front of it peels away. Metal posts stand without their speakers, like the headless parking meters at the beginning of Cool Hand Luke, which you probably saw here. You should park your vehicle and walk these grounds—already scoured by men and women with metal detectors, already used for a makeshift flea market that somehow failed, already surveyed for a three cul-de-sac subdivision called Hollywood Hills that will offer nothing but drainage problems for the houses built closest to the screen.
Go to the back row—or at least where you think the back row might’ve been. Forget about the snack bar/projection booth. Weave through high weeds to the back row and think about how the windows fogged up. Think about how you never, through all of the pre-planning, imagined what difficulties a steering wheel might offer, or how the seats might nearly concuss both of you after pulling the levers, or how you tried to maneuver into the backseat as if you’d had experience as a rock climber and high hurdler. Think about the difficulties both of you encountered, brought about by a triple row of brassiere metal eye hooks there on your first real date, or at least the first date remembered. Think about the bad acting, the car chase, the unreal setting, the chainsaw, the shark, the blob, the giant insect, the monster, the seemingly normal neighbor with the unruly, untoward, and despicable urges. Think about tires on gravel and how you hoped the driver continued on, that it wasn’t anybody you knew, that it wasn’t your parents.
Were there swing sets down by the screen, where children played before the movie? Did you think to yourself, “Those poor idiot parents, bringing their children to a place like this on a Saturday night?” Was there some kind of Coming Attractions? Did you say to the person next to you, “I got your ‘coming attractions’” and think it was the wittiest thing ever said?
Stand on that spot.
<
br /> Stand where you think your Opal, Datsun, Ford, Chevy, Buick, Toyota, MG Midget, or parents’ Lincoln or Cadillac might’ve stood. Look at the compromised screen. Go ahead and say, “Fuckin’ A—how did I make it this far?” Say, “Jesus Christ, all that bad living. All those close calls. What could’ve been? What could’ve been? What could’ve been?”
Then there’s the mother or father standing there, thirty minutes after curfew, and the story you have memorized. You have twenty lies, all of which you’ll recycle for the rest of your life, though you didn’t know it then, in the driveway, looking at your hand on the gear shift, thinking about putting it in reverse.
Acknowledgments
I am happy and proud to work with editor Guy Intoci. Thanks for putting up with our quirky dialect down here. Thanks to Steve Gillis and Michelle Dotter at Dzanc. I hope that my students and colleagues at Wofford College know how much I cherish their hard work and relentless esprit de corps. Bless you, Glenda Guion, for moving from one Calloustown to another.
Calloustown Page 22
