Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  True enough, but hardly news. He scanned down to the money shot:

  Even on the Upper West Side, in one of the city’s premier “mini-schools,” a young teacher was removed from his duties for attempting to keep order in his classroom. Ironically, the chancellor himself was in the classroom moments before a tragic accident occurred involving a student who physically threatened the teacher.

  Patrick turned to his barmates. Look, Marty, everybody, something perverse in him wanted to say, I’m famous. Infamous, whatever. Made my mark, passed the Gunther-test. The TV erupted, the drinkers glanced up: Segui scoring from first on a single and a two-base error; Vizcaino thrown out over-sliding third; extra innings. Cheers, groans. Dolores ordered another vodka stinger in celebration.

  Made his mark. Patrick stroked the hair above the knuckle on his left middle finger. He could hear Miss Sturmblad, his high school guitar teacher, chiding him to get that middle finger flush on the string: This is Appalachian folk, Pat, not the Delta blues. He closed his eyes and saw Josh’s finger stuck in the door latch, pointing skyward. Student Gives Teacher the Finger. He shivered the image away, took a gulp of Guinness.

  What did it say when your only defender was the Post? How many lunch periods had he spent laughing with George about the headlines C and X held in front of them? Congressmen and hookers, the mayor in drag. And the Times, which he read religiously and quoted frequently to his students as an example of all journalism could be, had recused itself, perhaps because Leonard Mishkin, noted Sovietologist and Josh’s dad, had written editorials in the mid-’80s on perestroika and glasnost. The Paper of Record made only an oblique reference to “the incident,” opining that even “the physical presence of the chancellor” couldn’t guarantee “the safety of our students.”

  Patrick slapped the Post closed. It was the anonymity of Marty’s, of course, that was its sole charm. No one he knew would ever venture into it; that had brought him here in the first place. None of the regulars seemed to recognize him from that crazed picture in the paper. He thought he saw a glint of recognition in Marty’s eyes with that first, What’ll it be, but that was just bartender craft, making everyone feel like a regular.

  Ironically, the Post photo was so unlike Patrick that almost no one recognized him from it. “A simple mug shot would’ve sufficed,” Susan teased when she saw it, then put her hand over her mouth and muttered, “Sorry,” when she caught his reaction.

  He could picture the moment, a snapshot in his head. Yo, Mr. Lynch, ovah hee-ah, bellowed Javier, a skinny kid working part-time as the Garvey Gazette’s ace photographer and full-time on an underfed mustache. Patrick had looked up from the hole he was digging on that warm October afternoon with the only expression possible: disgust. No one had asked his opinion on the Urban Garden Day, a day he’d planned for a review of independent and subordinate clauses. This outing was another one of Sitkowitz’s babies—anything to get away from actual teaching. The man showed so many “science” films (Krakatoa, East of Java was a favorite, though he taught nothing about volcanoes and Krakatoa was, still, west of Java) that George Holbrook called him Mr. DeMille.

  Dorie Rosenfeld, all five feet of her, was on the far side of this fifty-by-thirty plot of stone, weeds, and glass, trying to stop Abdul from committing unnatural acts on Julio with the business end of a hoe. She looked over for backup just in time to catch Patrick’s disgust immortalized. Dorie rolled her eyes and yelled, “You can do better, Mr. Lynch.” Javier nodded behind his camera. Everyone was looking now. They loved it when teachers broke character with each other, joking or arguing like kids. They’d never forget the day Sitkowitz got so agitated at Mr. Holbrook he dropped a test tube filled with silver nitrate, creating a permanent stain the shape of Italy on the floor of his lab.

  When Javier strolled over with his camera, Patrick was showing Angela and Maria how to use your heel to force a shovel into solid earth. And having a rough go of it. This soil, surrounded by ten-foot fencing topped by razor wire, was tougher than Minnesotan soil. He kept striking something hard, a bottle or can tossed down from one of the aged high-rises surrounding the lot. Maria, who’d declined the shovel in deference to her long magenta nails, was peering over Angela’s shoulder, stifling a laugh that came out a sneeze. Which made Angela Wong, culturally unable to disrespect a teacher, giggle.

  “You’re the farm boy, Lynch,” shouted Dorie. “Show us how it’s done.”

  Doris Rosenfeld of Queens couldn’t have guessed at the nerve she’d struck. She knew Patrick was pissed at being out of his classroom, that he’d grumbled all week in the teacher’s lounge about it. But though she was Patrick’s best faculty friend, his comrade in the trenches, she didn’t know much about his life before teaching. And her knowledge about the Midwest was strictly literary; she imagined Patrick’s upbringing as a quirky but benign mix of Main Street and Lake Woebegone Days. She couldn’t know the saga of the Lynches losing the family homestead in the Depression, of his Guinness-drinking grandfather eking out a living at Anderson’s Hardware, his father’s escape via football scholarship to the U of M, how his son would grow up a townie, alienated from the land, having his face washed with snow after school by real farm boys. It would’ve been too much to expect her to know all that, to know that he’d been almost as much an outsider in his own small town as in Manhattan.

  It was true, nevertheless. And somehow this history, overlaid with having his teaching plans confounded once again, his two best students choking back laughter at his inability to make a dent in this island’s soil (no wonder the natives sold it so cheap), and the entire ninth grade witnessing his frustration, was too much.

  Patrick stopped digging. Sweat dripped from his chin and onto the denim work shirt he’d worn, with jeans, for the occasion. He looked up: at Dorie, who was smiling, gathering that bushy frizz off her shoulders; at Sitkowitz, glancing up from the clipboard that held no lesson plan; at Abdul and Julio, who’d stopped throwing dirt to enjoy his humiliation. Patrick was naked—out of his element and out of uniform—stripped of his essential Mr. Lynch-ness. He gripped the shovel tighter, felt himself flush. It was a first-year feeling, back to the Experiment in Cooperative Learning: I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m doing it in public.

  Patrick had, as Abdul would’ve delicately put it, Lost His Shit.

  He screwed up his mouth, bulged his eyes. He took a step toward Javier, raised the shovel chest-high, and thrust it at the camera like a draftee in bayonet practice. Click. The photo that would appear on page six of the Garvey Gazette and on page 3 of the Post (Javier’s first credit!): Charles Manson goes gardening.

  It wasn’t the first time Patrick had gone postal in front of students. Controlled madness—both in the angry and crazy sense—was an indispensable arrow in his teaching quiver. He’d learned early on that once kids thought they’d figured you out, that all your moves were predictable, you were dead in the water. So he scheduled a yearly mini-fit in mid-to-late February. Throw it earlier and you lost credibility, any later and nobody cared. You had to find that sweet spot—February 23rd, say—where the class had bonded with you, wanted your good opinion of them, but before hormonal drift made you a springtime sideshow. The script went something like:

  Mr. Lynch

  (red-faced, veins popping)

  I cannot BELIEVE that I gave this class an entire WEEK’S notice before the grammar exam and no one (pauses)—NO ONE—came in for extra help. (Clomps to teacher’s desk, snatches pile of tests) And LOOK at these grades. (Brandishes tests at class: Does this refresh your memory?) THREE people passed this test (Looks away from Angela, Maria, Jamar, who are embarrassed). You think this is FUNNY? (Looks at Julio, who grins, foolishly) YOU think this is FUNNY? (Makes Julio look him in the eye: Do I have to call your abuela again?) I don’t know WHAT to say to this class anymore. (Pauses. Eyes mist.) I’m…I’m…speechless. (Sighs heavily, throws tests in trash, stalks out the door.)

 
; Then Patrick would stroll down the hallway, straighten his tie, smooth back his hair, get a sip from the water fountain. If he’d timed it right, a mixture of fear and embarrassment would greet him when he returned to the classroom, once again his calm, professorial self. And he’d have a new advantage the rest of the year: nobody could be certain when he’d go off again and nobody wanted to see it. One year he re-entered his classroom to scattered applause and knew he’d waited too long for this particular performance.

  But he never got to give that speech this year; the shovel episode made it impossible. The shovel episode and Josh. For just as Patrick had looked over his students and colleagues and determined that this situation could be rescued, it took a turn for the worse. Patrick was about to re-claim his Lynch-ness, lift the shovel high and proclaim, Once more unto the breach or God for Harry! England and St. George! in the soaring tenor of Sir Laurence Olivier. His students, unfamiliar with the body of Sir Laurence’s work (or Shakespeare’s), would roll their eyes—Mr. Lynch’s so wack—his colleagues would laugh and say, There goes Lynch again, and he’d be where he wanted to be, the only place to be: out in front of the parade. This, however, was the moment Josh dug up, of all things, a horseshoe. Leave it to Josh to discover the urban garden’s earlier purpose, as a police livery during Teddy Roosevelt’s reign as commissioner.

  “Yo,” shrieked Josh, tossing those pale dreads, “I’m the win-nah.” As soon as he had everyone’s eyes on him, he hurled the rusty horseshoe over his shoulder, clearing the razor wire and smashing a second story window. The moment was transformed: Sitkowitz dropped his clipboard and declared the Urban Garden Day completed; Dorie supervised the gathering of the tools and hustled the kids back to Garvey; George, always full of charm and cash, made nice with the building super and left compensation for the shattered window, keeping the cops out of it.

  Josh had saved Patrick, it seemed at first, erased Mr. Lynch’s breakdown moment and replaced it with his own. When the photo appeared in the next Garvey Gazette, everyone seemed to remember that instant as Patrick had meant to re-frame it: sheer goofiness. Grinning kids stopped him in the hallway, begging him to autograph the picture. Dorie clipped it out, tacked it to the faculty lounge bulletin board and added the caption Can You Dig It?, beneath which George added Would you buy a used shovel from this man? Someone else—C, probably—scrawled the ominous Lynch, digging himself deeper.

  This last caption was prophetic. When he saw Josh’s mom clomping out of Silverstein’s office the following week, the displeasure on her formidable square face told Patrick all he wished not to know. Dr. Mishkin hurried by him in the hallway, the padded shoulders of her black pantsuit brushing his arm. Silverstein waved him into his office.

  The principal sat on a corner of his desk, tapping a pen against his knee. For once, he cut to the chase. “I know this garden thing wasn’t your trip.” Silverstein shrugged it away. He hated outings of all kinds. Hard to justify to parents, things always went wrong. No argument there: on Patrick’s first field trip in New York, to MOMA, two of his students got into a scuffle in front of the Impressionists and an errant punch came inches from busting a black hole in Starry Night. “And what happened with Josh Mishkin certainly wasn’t your fault.” He thumbed the pen, clickety-clickety-click. “But—word to the wise—that mom’s got you in her sights.” He shook his head. “Don’t know why. Maybe it’s just your class is the toughest.” Silverstein forced a smile. “That’s how it goes sometimes.” Patrick nodded, accepting the implicit compliment. “But, as you know, we don’t get many…families like the Mishkins. Between you and me, a real shmerts in the tokhes.” Another smile, like a gas pain. “Still, we’d hate to lose them to Collegiate.”

  Patrick’s Yiddish was rusty, but he got the gist. Dr. Mishkin had come to put the horseshoe mishap to rest. Certainly she would have paid for the window—gladly paid—under normal circumstances. But, clearly, the trip had gotten out of hand (see photo) and set her son, predictably (see his Ed Plan), off. Silverstein finessed it, offering to pay for the window out of the Principal’s Fund (Don’t ask, advised George, where that comes from) and sending Dr. Mishkin away with the promise of a future meeting involving all the major players in her son’s school career. The principal, as ever, told him more than was necessary, but the bottom line would’ve fit on a car bumper: Don’t Piss That Woman Off.

  And thus was set the template, the leitmotif, for the year: a student who wouldn’t be educated and a mother who couldn’t be pleased. Josh became the pebble in Patrick’s shoe that he felt with every step. He could never discipline him like any other student; too much was at risk. The more he waltzed around him, the more respect he lost with second period. Patrick never felt on top of his game with that class, with any of his classes, really, knowing they’d witnessed him at his most unhinged. Or what he’d once thought was his most unhinged. He could see it in their faces, a look he hadn’t seen since his first years: You’re never in control, Mr. Lynch, not really. Josh had frozen that moment in the garden more surely than Javier’s snapshot.

  And that made him angry. Not pretend angry, not performance angry, real angry. Childish-adolescent angry. The persona, the rep he’d spent tough years building, day-by-day, period-by-period—poof—gone. That Patrick’s moment of insanity wasn’t Josh’s fault, that blaming him revealed a latent immaturity in Patrick’s character, just made him angrier. Don’tcha just wanna smack a kid sometimes? his big sister Erin once asked their dad at the dinner table. Don’tcha, Daddy? Well, honey, Dr. Lynch laughed, I feel that way sometimes. But, he said, spreading Parkay over Wonder Bread, you can’t do that. Can’t lose your temper with kids. When you let yourself get angry at a student, even if you’re right, you’ve lost. You’re a grown-up playing their game, and you can’t win.

  Patrick could feel it still, his fingers tightening around that shovel, his knuckles getting whiter. And he could feel his fingertips cupping the frayed edge of his classroom door, flicking—flinging?—it back toward the frame. Word choice, he told his students, over and over, it all comes down to word choice. Especially the verb.

  The bar exploded. Izzy slipped from his stool, stood, and clapped. Delores spilled her vodka stinger. The replay: Carrasco throws a fastball down the middle; Bonilla hits a walk-off grand slam. Mets win. Patrick snorted to himself. An ending only Gunther would have scripted.

  “Another Guinness?” asked Marty, lifting those ginger eyebrows. Patrick shook him off regretfully, like Carrasco leery of throwing that full count change-up to Bonilla. Marty slapped a bar rag down and smiled. “No? I’m buyin’.”

  Patrick looked over Marty’s shoulder and saw himself, his angry, shameful, unshaven self, shaking his head in the mirror.

  “Hold on,” Susan had said in the doorway that morning. “I’ll get your khakis and blue button-down. I just washed ’em.” And she was down the hall to their bedroom.

  “No. Thanks,” he called to her. “I’ll be late.”

  She turned back to him. “For what, honey?” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “For what will you be late?”

  “Thanks,” he heard himself say. Then again, louder, so Marty could hear him over the post-game buzz. “Thanks.”

  Marty swung around. Patrick pointed at his empty glass and nodded. Marty nodded back.

  The Rubber Room

  He was in his classroom, second period. The clock read 9:23. Angela Wong stood at her desk, reciting the “Preamble to the Constitution.” Abdul and Maria were in the back-left corner, making out. Julio was pirouetting down the center aisle in a tutu and Mets cap. Josh was atop the crumbling bookshelves, channeling Tupac, digits gang-splayed, thrusting the stump of his middle right finger at the teacher. And from the back wall, Emily Dickinson, Josh’s booty girl, chimed in. Because I could not stop for death, she chanted, flexing the Frankenstein scar on her cheek. For death! For death! Yo! shouted Josh, dreads twirling. At the editing table, dark-suited Malcolm X dea
lt seven-card stud to white-suited Mark Twain and the Afghan girls. “Deuces wild. Two raise limit.” He snapped a hole card in front of Hegira. She lifted a corner. “Don’t cheat the Black man,” he growled at her.

  And then the bell rang. And rang and rang and rang and rang. Patrick twisted on the couch, hit his head on the wooden corner. The ringing continued. He groped for the phone on the end table, knocked it over, heard it hit some empties. “Shit,” he heard himself say. He found the phone cord among the beer cans, reeled in the receiver. “Hallo?” he managed. He sounded drunk.

  A long pause. Vocal music, opera, maybe, in the background. “Hello…may I speak to Patrick Lynch?” a nasal tenor asked.

  “This is him­–he,” Patrick mumbled.

  “Patrick, this is Jerry Roselli.”

  “Yeah?” Who the hell was Jerry Roselli? Patrick waited for the man to launch into his spiel about the life insurance he needed or the marketing survey that would only take three minutes of his time.

  “From Garvey. Your building rep.”

  He almost said C aloud, but he wasn’t that drunk. “Oh, sure. Hey, Jerry.” Patrick sat up, wiped the drool from his mouth. “Uh, what’s up?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m, I’m fine.”

  “Jesus, you sound drunk.”

  “No, I was just…resting.” He sounded very drunk.

  “Not that I blame you. The Mishkin boy, what a putz. Hang on a second.” The aria in the background softened. Patrick fumbled for his remote. He’d fallen asleep during Law, now Sam Waterston was bringing Order. Or was it the other way around? “We all must be held accountable for our actions,” Sam lectured the jury, far too loudly. Patrick muted him.