The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  “Man up, mister, and get on the Kingda Ka with us,” Chantay urged.

  “Come on, mister,” said Talia, carrying a giant soda in one hand, with a bowl of Dippin’ Dots in another and a big pretzel hooked on her pinky.

  “You always tellin’ us to push ourselves; well, go over there with us and push yourself a little,” Valentina added.

  They got the better of my pride, and I found myself waiting in line for the ride in a ridiculous faux-jungle setting. In a maze of metal dividers, dire signs warned us every ten feet of the dangers of the ride to anyone pregnant, short, or with a heart condition, which caused a flurry of jokes about who was knocked up. Over and over, we watched as the teeming carloads of kids dropped straight down forty-five stories. After an hour, we finally loaded in. My buddy Porter, who had also been roped in by the kids, sat next to me. As the ride climbed, the air was still and the kids were silent. The car paused at the apex for a second. Suddenly, it plunged. The downward force was so great I couldn’t even close my eyes. A thin line of drool was pulled out of my mouth and spread across my cheek. My body tightened so fiercely that I inadvertently butt-dialed Sam on my cell phone and he got a two-minute message of nothing but teen screams. I remember nothing but white, blank terror. As I staggered toward the exit, the ride attendants were hawking grainy pictures of us all on the ride in mid-fall.

  “Nobody back at school gonna believe you had the nuts to go on this ride, mister; you better buy that picture,” Chantay advised.

  “I’ll buy it if you try to clear up your bad case of potty mouth,” I replied.

  “Deal,” she said in between speedy chews of a wad of gum.

  She was right. On the bus ride home, I watched with a jumble of pride and embarrassment as the kids passed the picture around and praised me for my valor. Valentina, looking peaked and unusually subdued, just rolled her eyes and passed the photo on.

  After the field trip, Valentina disappeared for more than a week without explanation. On the day she finally returned to school, Katy, Valentina’s adviser, walked into our ninth-grade faculty meeting late, looking ashen and with her mouth slightly agape.

  “Everything okay, Katy?” Dorothy asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this. Valentina just pulled me aside at dismissal and said ‘Hey Miss Hancock, you wanna know something that you don’t wanna know?’ By now, I thought I had heard it all from that kid so I said, ‘Sure, lay it on me.’ Valentina got a weird grimace on her face and said, ‘Well, you know that Kingda Ka is the world’s fastest roller coaster. I went on it twice. On the bus ride home, I started bleeding mad bad and had to go to the hospital. Well, that sure took care of it. Now, there’s no more baby. That’s that.’”

  “My God. Really? Did anyone know she was pregnant?” asked Dorothy. A series of soft gasps went up and then uneasy silence. The meeting went on; I sat there numbly turning the details of the story around and around: Of course she knew she was pregnant. Wasn’t that what she was trying to tell me in her crazy essay on ancient Greece? In the roller-coaster line, she saw those signs warning about pregnancy. The girls had even made jokes about it. I was sure she had done it intentionally. Yes, she was young, poor, neglected, but anyone knows better than that. Didn’t she know what a risk to her health it was? And, I was no right-to-lifer, but didn’t she have any conscience? No remorse for aborting her pregnancy on a roller coaster? And then to act so damn glib about it. Monster!

  But that night, as I feverishly recounted it all to Sam over dinner, my snap judgments started to crumble. What must it have been like for her to spend her young life dealing with so much? Of course she was in no position to raise a child. She was in an impossible situation and had no one to help her. Her solution was easy, immediate, and free. Having the baby was the last thing she needed. I began to think of her as a victim who acted resourcefully in a desperate situation. Faced with real adversity and a lot less going for her, she was probably coping better than I was.

  And then, looking in the mirror brushing my teeth before bed, I was hit by the biggest mindfuck of all: Maybe it never really happened; maybe it was another fake claim, like the sexual harassment complaint and the learning disability, made up to get attention. I was angry all over again. In a jag of self-pity, I longed for my earlier life, where it was so much easier to understand, to feel, and to think about everything.

  The following week as I circulated around my classroom, I saw Valentina writing on the cover of a folder in thick blue marker. Well programmed to stay out of her orbit, I waited for her to walk across the room and sharpen her pencil and then drew close enough to read what she had written. It was an affirmation as intriguing and opaque as she was: “Haters can go kill theyselves. I’m in my rocket ship and I ain’t coming down.”

  As always, her words were original, surprising, and spot-on. I paused, leaned against my bookshelf, and for a quick instant borrowed her vivid escape fantasy. I pictured myself in a silver spaceship orbiting the earth, alone, silent, and at peace. Since I couldn’t thank her for that gift, I just thought, Amen, sister, amen.

  Chapter 10

  Old School

  THE SCHOOL YEAR was wearing hard on the faculty and kids alike, and spring break in April couldn’t come any sooner.

  My family had adamantly requested our presence at Easter dinner in my hometown of Rochester, New York. An atheist Jew and a lapsed Catholic, Sam and I were normally a hard sell for the holiday, but the invitation was multipronged and forceful. First, my mother lobbed a call into our answering machine with a throaty chorus of “In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it.”

  My sister Lynn, who still lived in Rochester, followed it up with a bald: “You better get up here while there is still a city to visit.”

  It was true, Rochester was a city in distress. The neighborhood where I grew up, adjacent to a now-closed Xerox factory, was once a safe and stable working-class enclave. Now it was fast descending into a Rust Belt dystopia. My parents had their car stolen several times, gang activity was rampant, and the childhood home of my best friend growing up was now a crack den. In 1982, my family was scared about my going to Fordham University in the Bronx; now, twenty-five years later, I was afraid for them.

  Sam and I conceded and made the weekend trip, which we could barely afford. After the Easter feast, we all sat in my parents’ elegant crimson living room, surrounded by my mother’s treasures, half of them seemingly from churches, the other half from bordellos: candelabras, incense burners, an oversize Buddha she had adorned with an Easter bonnet, a pair of gilded Spanish crucifixes, and a tiny Japanese netsuke of a woman playing with herself in a bathtub. As children, our friends were bewildered or intrigued (and we, in turn, embarrassed or proud) by the mad, eclectic thrift-store montage. In their living rooms, by contrast, Ethan Allen ruled the roost.

  The conversation eventually turned to my unhappy new profession. Nora was sympathetic: “I know it’s been brutal for you. The first year is bad for just about everybody, but you seem to have landed in a really tough spot.”

  “But you’re in the home stretch now. The end of the year will be here in no time,” Lynn said. She, too, knew what I was up against, having spent time as a counselor in a very tough public middle school before becoming a therapist to the underserved.

  My mother added, “They sound like a bunch of little creeps to me. Where are their parents in all this? Remind me, why are you doing this again?”

  My father gave her the stink-eye, fearing more talk of teachers as losers. Then he added his two cents: “Kids have no respect these days, no regard for authority. Imagine if you ever said those things to your teachers at St. Anselm’s. Those priests were great role models and teachers, and you showed them the respect they deserved.”

  The beat-down teacher in me wanted to buy my father’s version of the good ol’ days, but being back home and just down the block from my old high school had me thinking back to my own ninth-grade year. “Come on, Dad, some of them were hardly ro
le models, and they sure weren’t all good teachers. Think about Father Tenner—and he was the goddamn principal.”

  As I cleared the table, my sisters laughed at the mention of his name and infamous story. While loading the dishwasher, I paused to look out the kitchen window into the darkness. I was taken back to 1978, and the opening-day Mass of my Catholic high school, St. Anselm’s.

  “Men, honor needs to be restored to this school. I have been brought back to St. Anselm’s all the way from Texas to lead it on the path to honor, to take it back from softness, from weakness. Remember, every action you take is a reflection on you, your school, and your church. We are all soldiers in Christ,” Father Tenner boomed.

  If there were a giant American flag behind him, you could be forgiven for thinking he was General Patton. He was well over six feet tall, barrel-chested, with a shock of white hair. Depending on the topic of conversation and his blood-alcohol level, his face alternated between sheet-white and beet-red.

  “Men, let us now bow our heads and pray to almighty God.” He looked toward the ceiling briefly and then let his head fall loose to his chest. The heads of six hundred pimply, awkward, and over-gelled boys dutifully dropped in unison and droned out some prayer. Even though it was my first day of high school, I had already figured out that when Father Tenner said pray, you damn well had better pray.

  During my nine years in a coed grammar school, the nuns like dear Sister Concepta had fattened us on charity, grace, and kumbaya, and I was the most gorged goose of all. This kind of macho religiosity from Father Tenner was bewildering. Jesus was a he-man? Since when?

  As I was scurrying out of school later that day, Father Tenner cornered me.

  “Boland, right?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Dave Boland, class of fifty-three, is that your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dave Boland, who intercepted that pass against Boys Town and put this school’s football team on the map?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? Your father was a great athlete and brought honor to this school. From the looks of you, I am not sure we can expect the same,” he said, scanning my ninety-pound frame.

  “No, Father, I don’t play football, if that is what you’re asking.” He dismissed me with a toss of his head.

  The next day, I was horrified to walk into my algebra class and see Father Tenner scribbling with a pencil at the lectern. It was bad enough being under the same roof as the man, but now he was going to try to teach me math, my lifelong weakness? “Oh well, it’s Bum, Bum, Boland!” he shouted.

  It was worse than my worst nightmare. He was like no other teacher I’d ever had. He would bellow and charge and flip over the desks of the defiant and the stupid. He punched, shoved, and screamed while ranting about coefficients and polynomials. Like some scheme from the Cultural Revolution, we were assigned seats according to our GPAs. For almost the entire year, I was in the last row near the side blackboard. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d arrived with dunce caps for us.

  Word problems, normally the only kind of problem I could solve, were converted into baffling sports analogies. He would say, “If tailback Joe is running a safety at 15 miles per hour and Tom is running toward the end zone at 18 miles an hour, who will arrive first?” or “Not isolating the variable is like not isolating the opponent’s best wide receiver.”

  Father Tenner’s favorite trick was to pretend to give you a congratulatory handshake for answering a question. If the answer was wrong, he turned his extended hand into a fist and punched you fast in the chest. I am not sure which was worse, the violence or the psychological warfare of thinking you actually got something right. Math through terror, however, seemed popular with almost every other student. Thirty boys, blissing on your misery, cheered him on as you sat there smarting. They lapped it up, and I sat there in blank horror. Parents praised the priest “who knew how to deal with boys.”

  Father Tenner’s plan to revitalize the school was taken from the Triumph of the Will playbook. Naturally, degenerate artists and intellectuals were relegated to the margins. On the same night our drama club made do with a potluck of our mothers’ casseroles onstage, the football team was treated to a sit-down steak banquet for its routing of our upscale rival, McQueen Jesuit. There were other rallies, parades, and award ceremonies where strapping lads were praised for their gridiron prowess.

  In public and private, I loathed Father Tenner, yet when you least expected it, he would pull you aside and say something funny or even a bit kind. “I know you’re terrible at math, Bum Bum Boland, but at least I see you’re trying. People stupider than you have done this.”

  After a ten-month blur of failed quizzes, Ds, and probationary notices, the year came to a close. I took the state algebra exam and waited for what I was sure would be a notice of summer school.

  A week after school ended, on the first warm night of summer, my father and I sat on the couch watching the eleven o’clock news. The perky announcer glanced up and said the kind of thing most students only dream of hearing about their school: “Shame struck St. Anselm’s Academy tonight.”

  My father stared straight ahead, desperate not to make eye contact with me. And then the tape rolled. In all its choppy and hazy glory, it showed the school’s maroon-and-white station wagon. It slowly pulled up to a buxom woman in purple hot pants and a halter top. She leaned into the car.

  The voice-over gravely announced, “Principal John Tenner of the St. Anselm’s Academy was arrested last evening for soliciting a police decoy posing as a prostitute.” I felt my cheeks get warm.

  The camera focused on his face. He leaned out the window and slurred, “Hey, baby. I’ve got twenty bucks, can you…” BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP went the TV. The last frames showed two officers leading Father Tenner, handcuffed, hunched over at the waist and trying to cover his beet-red face, into a paddy wagon. He was never to be heard from again. The whole thing felt so surreal and, at the same time, ominous. Had that really just happened?

  My grades arrived by mail the next day; I dodged the summer school bullet with a whopping 67 on the state exam.

  I snapped out of my reverie and rejoined my family’s conversation about old-school Catholic education.

  Sam, who had been educated by hippies at a crunchy private school on a former farm in Oregon, was horrified by what he heard. “I don’t get it. How can anyone learn under those conditions?”

  Lynn said, “Well, Eddie, to your credit, you are creating a classroom that is the opposite of Father Tenner’s. You are trying to be really inclusive and caring.”

  I agreed, but the more I thought about it, I also had to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth. “You know, guys, I don’t like to admit this, but truth be told, way more learning happened in Tenner’s class than is happening in mine today. For the most part, the man did get results. Most of the guys loved him.”

  “But at what cost?” said Lynn.

  “I won’t teach by fear, the way he did. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

  Sam added, “But it’s not just one or the other. There has to be some kind of middle ground between mob rule and that junta at St. Anselm’s.”

  “If only I could strike that balance. I’m just not sure where to find it,” I said.

  Nora had the last word: “I’ve been teaching for a long time now, and my only answer is that there are no easy answers. I wish I had more for you, but I really don’t.”

  Sam and I filed up to bed and set the alarm for an early flight back to New York. Fortified with a weekend of family love and lessons from the past, I steeled myself for the return to Union Street.

  Chapter 11

  Lil’ Mickey, a Disciple of Soul

  SMACK! POP! WHACK! POW!

  The sounds were right out of a brawl on a Saturday-morning cartoon, but this was all too live, all too real. In this uneven matchup, Dannisha easily had a hundred pounds and four inches on her opponent, Lil’ Mickey. She landed her punches well, jabbing
with her left, slapping with her right. His face rippled like jelly, and the crowd of fellow ninth graders went wild. In a final coup de grâce, Dannisha reached behind her without looking, grabbed a small cardboard box of largely untouched art supplies, and started to pummel Lil’ Mickey on the head with it. With every swing, colored paper and markers flew out of the box like a burst piñata.

  Mickey Vega had been a terror from the minute he set foot in school. Skinny and skittish, he was incapable of sitting still or staying quiet. He had light copper skin and a left eye that wandered furiously. He roamed the halls at will, boldly sporting everything contraband—an iPod, Cheez-Its, a chunky outdated cell phone, a Yankees cap, and the gang colors of the Bloods. Despite looking and acting just like Kameron and the other bad boys, Mickey didn’t enjoy the same popularity. His classmates couldn’t stand him. Even they sensed that his antics weren’t just fun and games, but that something inside his brain was truly haywire.

  Mickey harassed a different girl every day of the week, but on that fateful afternoon, he’d chosen to bother the heretofore silent and supersized Dannisha with one of his favorite routines. In true “gangsta” style, his baggy jeans seemed to float magically somewhere between his rear end and his knees, with his Old Navy boxers in full view. While she was trying to read, he slid his skinny behind down her desktop and got his crack too near her face. He had pulled this trick before with some pretty tough girls, and it was usually met with mere annoyance. They’d swat him away like a fly. No one would have suspected that Dannisha would be the one to put him in his place. But without a word, she picked him up by his scrawny waist and immediately sent him to the floor like a toy a child had grown tired of. Bam!