The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

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  For Sam

  “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

  —Horace Mann

  “In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated, and in prosperity a man forgets himself; in hardship he is forced to reflect on himself, even though he be unwilling.”

  —Alfred the Great

  “I like to fight, I like to fuck, I like pie.”

  —Merwin’s ninth-grade “Getting To

  Know You” questionnaire

  Prologue

  Chantay

  CHANTAY MARTIN SAT on top of her desk, her back to me. A tight Old Navy T-shirt covered in rhinestones was riding up her thin brown back, exposing a baby-blue thong.

  I leaned over and whispered firmly in her ear, “We had a deal, and you aren’t holding up your end of it.”

  She yelled back, “What deal, mister?” in the kind of teenage voice that adults dread: belligerent, manic, almost painful at close range. She was chewing a wad of purple gum with such force and speed that she seemed to have a piston implanted in her jaw.

  It was ten minutes before the three o’clock dismissal bell on a scorching hot September afternoon on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A single oscillating fan strained to cool the classroom. Its white plastic head dutifully panned back and forth on Chantay, thirty other high school freshmen, and me, their anxious new teacher.

  “Our deal was that you do your work and I won’t call you out in public. ‘No more drama,’ remember?” I said in a desperate whisper, quoting a Mary J. Blige song—a pathetic attempt to find a sliver of common ground between a forty-three-year-old gay white guy from Chelsea and a teenage black girl from the projects of Bed-Stuy.

  I was only five days into my new career as a ninth-grade history teacher, and precious little in the way of learning was getting done.

  Chantay continued holding court with a group of her “gurlz,” their chatter getting louder by the minute. The geography work sheets they were supposed to be completing were left untouched in a pile. At least the other groups of students had bothered to humor me by passing the papers out before ignoring them.

  I shot Chantay a fierce look. She returned it with a light smile, as if she were on a talk show and had given the host an amusing answer. Our deal was clearly off, and I was angry, so I resorted to some old-school yelling: “Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work. Now!” I punched out the last word in what I thought was a strict teacher voice.

  Crack! On the other side of the room, someone had hurled a calculator at the blackboard. My head snapped toward the trouble; it wasn’t the only problem. A group of boys were shoving one another near a new laptop. Two girls swayed in sweet unison and mouthed lyrics while sharing the earphones of a strictly forbidden iPod. Another girl was splayed over her desk, lazily reading Thug Luv 2 as if she were on a cruise

  I heard Chantay’s distinctive cackle again and turned back to her. She was now standing on top of her desk, towering above me like a pro wrestler on the ropes about to pounce. Her head was surrounded by a constellation of world currencies that hung from an economics mobile I had painstakingly constructed over the summer. I started to feel queasy and light-headed. No. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  “Chantay, sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences,” I barked. All eyes were now darting back and forth between us like those of spectators at a tennis match.

  She laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it. What the hell was she doing? She looked me right in the eye and screamed:

  “SUCK MY FUCKIN’ DICK, MISTER.”

  Stunned, I stood frozen in front of the class as it erupted. I didn’t know a roomful of humans were capable of making that much noise. It sounded like a Hollywood laugh track times a hundred, a torrent of guffaws, lung-emptying laughs, and howls. Exhausted from laughter, the rabble paused and then:

  “Oh no she di’n’t!”

  “Man, he can’t even control the girls.”

  Jesús, Chantay’s badass boyfriend, glanced at her and grinned like an impresario, proud of the talent he had cultivated.

  I’d always admired a filthy mouth, especially on a woman, and for a second I thought, Touché, Miss Martin. If you have a dick, it is certainly bigger than mine. Well played. Very original. Then I suddenly remembered that I was not in a bar talking smack with my friends. This was a classroom. I was her teacher. She was my student.

  I yanked in a quick breath and frantically searched for a powerful, professional response. If I were to go apeshit, it would show that she’d really got to me. If I underreacted, I would appear passive and invite more trouble. But nothing came to me, nothing at all. I stood there paralyzed and afraid. My now-trembling legs were hidden inside my brand-new pair of Dockers. I was so unfamiliar with the feeling of fear that I barely recognized it.

  In one fell swoop, Chantay fingered me not only as gay, but as her bitch, her power emanating from a penis she didn’t have.

  And, sadly, because it was a girl who’d staged this, it was viewed as an even greater humiliation for me. So much for the girls being the “easy ones” to control. Even the way she blocked the scene was strategic, with her towering on top of her desk while I circled helplessly below. The final touch was that she didn’t even know my name. It wasn’t worth remembering, just “mister” would suffice.

  I should have simply walked out of the building, hailed a cab, and gone to the unemployment office. I had sunk the eight ball on the first break. Game over.

  How had things gotten so bad, so quickly?

  Chapter 1

  The Good Ol’ Days

  JUST FOUR MONTHS earlier, eight sets of gilded, art deco doors suddenly crashed open and a sea of guests, the titans of Wall Street, flooded the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I smoothed the lapels on my tuxedo, adjusted my headset, and took a deep breath. My staff and I had been working on this fund-raising event for almost a year, and still the inevitable last-minute crises came crackling over my earpiece:

  “We’re missing a floral arrangement on table 71. Someone contact Preston Tuttle immediately.”

  “Late seating change for the Teschner table. Lady Foster will now be seated between Mr. Teschner and Judge Sullivan. I repeat: Lady Foster goes to seat number one. Stat!”

  “The tipsy associates at table 207 in the balcony have asked for a third bottle of wine and they haven’t even sat down yet. Comply?”

  “Negative.”

  “Bill Cunningham from the Times just arrived in the Jade Pavilion. He looks really grumpy. Where should I steer him?”

  The final chimes sounded, the lights went down, and twelve hundred guests were seated in a collective whoosh. Blessedly, my worst fear—that people who had donated fifty thousand dollars for a table would find themselves without seats—didn’t materialize; the two-day-long seating meeting had paid off. Ancient banquet waiters hobbled around the packed tables and indifferently slung paillards of chicken, limp asparagus, and over
salted risotto at the guests.

  The evening’s honoree, an extraordinarily generous hedge fund manager and near billionaire in his early forties, mounted the stage and announced from the podium that he was making a $1 million gift. He had already raised another million from his colleagues in the industry. All told, the event raised $4 million, a record for our organization. Project Advance finds the most promising minority kids from disadvantaged New York neighborhoods and prepares them to excel alongside the children of the ruling class at New York private schools and New England boarding schools. Before they are placed in their schools, the kids must complete a grueling fourteen-month academic boot camp over two summers and a school year. While their classmates are outside enjoying baseball, the beach, and coco ices, they are stuck inside every night with four hours of homework including Latin, Great Expectations, and algebra. Once they are in private school, the program offers them tremendous support and opportunities like internships at J.P. Morgan and MOMA, study abroad trips to Mongolia and Ghana, physics tutors, and a high-end SAT prep course.

  By the end of their college careers, they have thoroughly Ivy pedigrees and are ready to change the world. The program has truly stellar results: More of its students earn degrees from Harvard than from any other university. But the individual stories of its alumni are even more compelling: The daughter of a poor immigrant from Chinatown won a Rhodes scholarship while at Harvard; a girl whose grandmother worked in the kitchen of the private girls’ school she attended earned a full ride to Yale; and a Dominican kid who somehow managed to survive time in the city’s homeless shelters became salutatorian at Princeton—and delivered his commencement address in Latin. The program’s alumni roster boasts hundreds of lawyers and judges, surgeons and scientists, principals and professors. But they weren’t just well-credentialed professionals, they remembered where they were from and they had an urgent desire to give back.

  It had been a good run, a very good run, but I was feeling ready to move on to a new career. For five years I’d been the development director, responsible for raising the money for the program. It was gratifying to watch the kids soar at these private schools, at college, and beyond, but I also wanted to leave my administrative job, roll up my sleeves, and work directly with kids. I adored the organization and its mission, but I had a nagging feeling that the program, as worthy as it was, just wasn’t reaching enough kids or the ones who needed the most help. Project Advance took only two hundred kids a year, but there were 1.1 million students in the New York City schools, more than the total population of San Francisco or Detroit. Wasn’t there a way to help more of them get a decent education?

  I’d started hatching a plan for a new career exactly two years before. In June of 2004, I was standing in the exact same spot at precisely the same time as the guests bolted out of the ballroom to their waiting town cars. I poured a glass of Bordeaux from an unfinished bottle at the chairman’s table and caught up with one of the program’s brightest stars, Sharon. Both brilliant and charismatic, she had just spent the dinner dazzling the chairman’s guests with the ease of a debutante. With Project Advance’s help, she had gone from a hardscrabble upbringing in the South Bronx to earn a full scholarship to Choate. She had thrived on its leafy campus, earned its top prize at graduation, and was now a sophomore at Harvard.

  After regaling me with stories from Harvard Yard, she scanned the room. “This program made all the difference in my life. I’m grateful, but I also feel guilty. I just wish kids in public school could have the kinds of teachers and opportunities I had at Choate.” She looked down and sighed. “But I guess the world doesn’t work that way.”

  “You know, I’ve actually thought about teaching in the public schools. It’s been a secret aspiration of mine for a long time,” I confided in her. I had been mulling the idea for years but had told only my innermost circle.

  “Really? In a public school?” Her face lit up. “You should do it. You’re a natural. The kids will love you. How many times did all of you on staff repeat that quote to us: ‘Education is the great equalizer’? You should go and teach. Try to level the playing field, at least a little.” I felt a surge of adrenaline as she spoke.

  For years I had been flirting with the idea of a second career in teaching. Right out of college, I had passed up an offer to teach at a Catholic high school in the Bronx, and I often wondered if I had missed my calling. Hearing those words of encouragement from Sharon, someone whose life had been so transformed by education, was the turning point.

  Later that night in our Chelsea apartment, as I struggled to extract the cuff links from my ruffled tuxedo shirt, I told my boyfriend, Sam, that I had finally made up my mind to teach. I had met Sam, the unquestioned love of my life, in 1999 at tryouts for New York’s gay volleyball league. His rocket-fast serve, dark good looks, and unfettered sense of creativity hooked me. On our first date we discovered we were both Geminis, as well as former bed wetters and English teachers in China. Seven years into the relationship, people still mistook us for a new couple in the infatuation stage.

  Sam was his entirely supportive and loving self. “Of course you should do it. Yes, do it! Those kids need great teachers like you.” He blessed my decision with a kiss.

  But could our comfy bourgeois lives handle a huge cut in my salary? An independent filmmaker with little steady income, Sam had always joked that I was his “nonprofit sugar daddy.” And at that point, Sam was desperately trying to raise money for his first feature-length project. That weekend we did the math, and we figured with a lot of sacrifices, we could make it work. No more cabs or cleaning lady; dump my shrink; bye-bye, dry cleaning. It wouldn’t kill us to learn to use a bit of Fantastik, a capful of Woolite. Sam would add cater-waitering to his repertoire. I could work in the summers.

  Next, I researched all the part-time master’s programs in teaching in the city. I went to open houses, pored through course catalogs, and plotted out a plan that would have me in a classroom full-time in two years. I knew there were programs like Teach For America where I could start teaching sooner if I went to school at night while I taught during the day, but that seemed overwhelming and I didn’t want to rush it.

  About a month after the gala, I revealed my master plan to my family. My parents had traveled from upstate New York to visit my younger sister, Nora, in New Jersey. As we sat around her dining room table after supper, chatting and picking at what remained of a carrot cake, I shared the news. Predictably, Nora, a teacher in a state penitentiary, and my brother-in-law, Dan, a middle school science teacher, were thrilled. My older sister, Lynn, a therapist for the indigent, specializing in counseling wife beaters, addicts, and homeless people, cheered, “Another whore for the poor; welcome to the ranks.”

  We were Catholics to the core. Almost everyone in my extended family had been born in St. Mary’s Catholic hospital, had endured parochial education all the way through college, and was destined to be buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. My sisters and I, however, renounced Catholicism’s righteousness and conservatism as adults. Nora became a Unitarian, Lynn joined a Catholic church so radical that she was excommunicated, and I ended up an atheist. But try as we might, we couldn’t really escape it, couldn’t scrub the do-gooder scent off of ourselves, and we each ended up in some version of a helping profession.

  I knew my father would be on board with my decision, too. He not only treasured education but was always a champion of the underserved. When we were kids, he would come home after his night shift at the Xerox plant and, despite our wailing, recite Dylan Thomas poetry, quote Saint Thomas Aquinas, and re-create dramatic passages of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, making us play the roles of different barbarians at the gates of the Eternal City.

  They all congratulated me with raised glasses and wished me luck. All eyes were now on my mother. I knew she would be a much tougher sell. You might imagine that such a ferocious Catholic, a woman who attended Mass daily, who volunteered endlessly at different charities, would w
elcome my turn to service. Weren’t we the family that had spent some Thanksgiving nights at a homeless shelter in a church basement? You would think that she would be most proud of her daughters, who were in the trenches, doing “God’s work.” But no. It was an open secret that my mother’s first loves were glamour and celebrity. Jesus was a close third.

  She even infused glamour into her part-time job, a poodle grooming business she operated out of our basement. Every pooch, from tiny toy poodles to huge standard ones, would prance out of our basement with painted toenails, a spritz of Jean Naté perfume, and a crowning topknot adorned with a red bow.

  When she went to the Most Precious Blood Church hospice “to help people die,” in her words, she did her overnight bedside vigils in full makeup and wearing her good jewelry. She carried a sack of reading material that included Architectural Digest, W, the New York Post dog-eared to Page Six, and the National Enquirer to see her through the long volunteer shift. Deep down, she always loved the fact that in my career as a fund-raiser, I rubbed shoulders with the upper crust of New York.

  Over the years, when I was home for the holidays I would hear little snippets of her conversations with friends on the phone, in which she would exaggerate my proximity to celebrity: “Beverly Sills shared her secret stash of Girl Scout cookies with Eddie at their meeting last week. I think they were the Lemon Cremes.” “Did you know the dining room in the mayor’s mansion has a custom-colored lighting system? Eddie told me.” “Of course he knows Phil Donahue. Marlo, too!”

  That night, thanks to a hefty infusion of her favorite Ernest and Julio Gallo rotgut red wine, her reaction to my announcement about being a public school teacher was even more unfiltered than usual.

  “You are going to do what?” The alarm in her voice was clear and growing. “You’re telling me you are going to take an eighty-thousand-dollar pay cut to teach in a public school? You have a wonderful job and you are already helping those smart, poor kids. Jesus, isn’t that enough?”