by Brian Doyle
Anyways, it drives the teachers crazy. Every time Dink goes to answer a question or gets out of his desk to get a book or something, we all start “dee dee dee dee,” etc. Actually I probably should say, it drove everybody crazy because I won’t be there for it this fall because I’m not going back.
And if I’m not there, it’s not happening. Right?
Let them whistle and sing “dee dee dee dee,” etc., without me.
People think you get kicked out of school for one thing. Well, you do, sort of, but it’s also a kind of build-up.
It starts with “the look.”
When they give you “the look,” you know things are going to start to happen to you.
We had this new guy come to teach at Tech at the beginning of the second semester in February. He was supposed to be some hotshot English teacher who was going to open up our minds with some kind of a magic can opener or something and change our lives forever.
Right away we started off “on the wrong foot.” I think it was because I wouldn’t say “have a nice day” to him when the class was over. We had him first period in the morning, from ten after nine to twenty-five after ten. At the end of the class all the sucks from Hong Kong and Cambodia and Vietnam and Somalia and Bangladesh and Ottawa would all say “have a nice day, sir” on the way by his desk whether they meant it or not. I wonder if, way back in evolution, students in school were related to sheep. I must ask Dink about that.
Honest to God, I think that if the first couple of students walked by Boyle’s desk and said “have a nice day” and then walked right off a cliff into an abyss of boiling oil, the rest of the students behind them would do the same thing.
I sat at the back, near the windows so I could see the sky during class. I was usually last to get out of the room when the period was over. After all the goodbyes and the bowing and scraping and the have-a-nice-daying. I really stuck out like a sore thumb when I walked by and didn’t even look at him.
I would walk by and not even look at him. I think a teacher who hates you because you won’t look at him should be fired.
I could often smell him though.
He smelt like stale beer.
For about a month he was really nice to me, always looking right at me when he was explaining stuff or always coming back to my seat to see if he could help me with my work or handing me these great marks which I didn’t deserve.
It was the day we all did the Jeopardy! business because Dink walked in late right in the middle of one of Boyle’s readings. (He read to us every day in this big deep voice he was really proud of. And he didn’t like it unless you were looking really fascinated by his performance. Spellbinding!)
So in walks Dink and I start the Jeopardy! song and everybody joins in and it’s really funny and everybody’s laughing. Everybody but Boyle. Boyle’s bald head is red as a boiled lobster and his beer gut heaving in and out. Suddenly everybody gets it and shuts up.
From then on, I’m getting “the look.” It’s kind of a blank stare, not friendly, not mad, not anything.
Then my marks start going down.
For about two weeks, my marks gradually get lower and every day his eyes follow me out of the room with “the look.” Then one day he stops me as I’m leaving the class behind the line of sheep going by his desk and asks me if I thought we were starting off “on the wrong foot.”
“What’s that mean?” I say to him.
See what I mean, how your mouth can get you in a whole lot of trouble? He knows that I know what that means. And he knows that I know that he knows that I know what it means!
“It comes,” he says, very quietly, calm in his voice, eyes right in mine, face almost blank, “originally from a military context. Marching, to be specific. You see, you are not marching along with the rest of us. Left, right, left, right. You are marching to some other beat, a different rhythm, a different drumming for some reason. Off on the wrong foot.”
“I thought you said ‘we,’” I say to him.
“We?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “You thought we were starting off on the wrong foot.”
“I meant you.”
“But you said, ‘we.’”
“Now I’m saying, ‘you’!”
We stare at each other for a long time. Boyle wins the staring match. It’s almost impossible to outstare a teacher. They must study staring at teachers’ training school or somewhere. Boyle probably got an A in staring.
People start coming in for the next class.
I leave.
We are enemies now.
For the whole semester we have a kind of a truce. I don’t look at him, he doesn’t look at me. My marks stay around the same. Then, just before exams start, I get suspended. Here’s how.
I’m standing in the hall talking to my favorite girlfriend, Connie Pan, at lunch time. Along comes Boyle on hall duty.
I’m leaning on the wall with my hands in my pockets. I’m having a real nice time with Connie Pan. We’re talking about what kind of presents boys give to girls in her country. It’s pretty obvious I’m hinting at maybe I’ll give her a present. I tell her that in Canada, if a boy maybe likes a girl, he might, say, just maybe, give her, let’s say, just for example, a flower, maybe. A rose maybe. Then she’s asking me in this pretty accent what, maybe, present a girl gives a boy in Canada?
I’m leaning on the wall and I’ve got one knee bent and my foot flat against the wall behind me. I never stand this way. Why am I standing this way? Maybe because I’m talking to Connie Pan. Then I do something else that I never do. I smile at Boyle as he’s coming down the hall on lunch hour hall duty. Why am I smiling at Boyle? Who knows. I do crazy things when I’m around girls. Specially girls like Connie Pan.
Suddenly Boyle is right in my face. He looks like he’s got a hangover. He smells like cigarettes and beer.
It’s like on “Jeopardy!” The answers are away back there, tiny, on the board. Suddenly, one of them is filling the whole screen. Right in your face.
And just like on “Jeopardy!”, he gives me the answer first.
“You do this at home all the time.”
Then, I give him the question.
“Do what at home?”
“Stand there with your feet all over the walls.”
I take my foot down.
“Do you do that at home?” he asks.
I look at Connie Pan. She’s looking at the floor. Her little black ponytail is sticking straight back. She looks so delicate and pretty compared to Boyle. Like a flower beside a rhinoceros.
“Do you do that at home?” he repeats.
Suddenly I’m full of hate. I want to smash Boyle’s face. I want to kill him. He’s putting me down in front of Connie Pan. My father would never do a thing like that. I feel like I felt when I was lighting my one and only wooden match way back when I was nine.
There was no getting out of it. You have to go ahead and light it.
“All the time,” I say.
“Let’s try this again,” he says. “Do you put your feet on the walls at home?”
“Regularly,” I say.
“Let’s go down and see the man downstairs,” he says, and puts his hand out and grabs my arm.
I throw his hand off. I’m just as tall as Boyle. Our noses are almost touching. We look like that famous photograph of the soldier and the Mohawk Warrior that was in all the newspapers during the Oka crisis!
Then I say the two magic words that get you suspended from school every time.
One of them is a word that is used in every language on earth by everybody, according to Dink the Thinker.
The other word is “you.”
IV
Today’s the day I go to Westboro Beach with Connie Pan. I’m really only sort of with Connie Pan, because there’s going to be about twenty other people going too. Connie Pan has a part-time job organizing E.S.L. kids from Ottawa Tech to do stuff in the summer. E.S.L. stands for English as a second language. It’s a job but she doesn�
��t get paid. She dreams up things to do for the new kids from other countries and then she tries to get kids from Canada to go too. Last week she took them all bowling. The week before they went to the War Museum. Today she’s taking them to Westboro Beach.
The hard part about her job is getting the Canadian kids to go, too.
The time she took them up to Champlain’s Statue, I was the only Canadian kid there.
Dink the Thinker says that the only reason I go is to be around where Connie Pan is.
As usual, Dink the Thinker is right.
Mr. Fryday will relieve me early today because it’s Sunday, and Chinatown is really busy on Sunday, and Mr. Fryday likes to work in his wagon and say hello to everybody and give free orders of chips to his buddies, especially the people who own the shops near where he always parks our wagon.
I’m in a pretty good mood, thinking about going to Westboro Beach, meeting Connie Pan there, having a few cool swims, helping them get organized to play E.S.L. volleyball, without a net, on the sand there.
But, all of a sudden, I’m not in a pretty good mood anymore because here comes Dumper Stubbs, double parking his filthy truck with the big steel bumper beside my nice clean wagon. Dumper’s going to empty my trash can, and change my grease. He empties the trash every day. He changes the grease every Sunday.
My wagon has two fryers. One of the fryers is for blanching the chips, the other is for cooking. Mr. Fryday changes the grease once a week in all of his wagons. That’s one of the reasons his chips are so good. The other reason is that he doesn’t use new potatoes. He uses old potatoes. New potatoes won’t get brown in the cooking fryer for some reason. Then, the customers look at them as if there’s something wrong with them, they’re too white, then they make a face and probably never come back.
Dumper picks up the trash. He carries the can so that the people who are out this Sunday all dressed up have to dodge and jump out of the way. But wait! Dumper’s nostrils are opening and shutting. There’s something on the sidewalk! He drops the trash can right where everybody’s walking and bangs into a lady who is wearing a veil and carrying a lot of parcels. Dumper pounces on something and picks it up off the sidewalk. It’s a cent! One cent! Dumper found a cent! Dumper nearly knocked over a bunch of innocent people but he got the cent before they did! Nice going Dumper!
Dumper dumps the trash into the back of his truck. Now he’s going to change my grease. Mr. Fryday uses vegetable oil. The vegetable oil is healthier than lard. Mr. Fryday always leaves an empty vegetable oil can near the window so his customers can see it. On the side of the can it says “Cholesterol Free.”
Dumper comes around with a large empty grease can and pushes past some customers with it and climbs into the wagon. Some of the customers leave, because Dumper is so ugly. He squats down to hook up the hose to the spigot at the bottom of the blancher. The oil in the blancher is 225 degrees Fahrenheit. Dumper doesn’t even use gloves to touch the pipe which is very hot. Dumper doesn’t seem to have any feelings. His big rear end takes up most of the room in the wagon.
His big, low ears are filthy.
When the blancher is empty, he takes the pail of used grease and carries it out to his truck. He hoists up the can and dumps it into his big grease barrel in the back of his truck. Grease slops onto the street.
Then he comes back to empty the cooker which is full of week-old grease at 340 degrees Fahrenheit. While he’s waiting for it to drain, guess what he does? He spits on my clean floor!
“Hey, Dumper, watch it,” I say. “I spent hours this morning scrubbing this floor.” Dumper looks at me with his little, close-together eyes. There’s not much room in the chipwagon and his breath is going to knock me over.
“What do ya expect me to do? Swallow it?” says Dumper, pointing at the big gob sticking on the floor. Then he lets out a big laugh. What a sense of humor!
“And look, you’re spilling grease all over the place!” I tell him.
“So?” says Dumper, taking off the dripping hose and waving it around and hoisting the slopping grease can out to his truck.
Most of the people in Chinatown are crossing Somerset Street to the other side. They don’t even want to be on the same block as Dumper. There’s grease on his shoes, on his pants, on his shirt. There’s grease on the floor of the wagon, on the windows, across the counter, on the step, on the sidewalk, on the front of the wagon, on the road, and running down the side of the truck. The grease barrel in the back of the truck is almost full. You can tell it’s almost full because when he dumps the can, a geyser of grease reaches up out of the barrel and then flops like a wet bedsheet onto Somerset Street.
“Dumper!” I shout, “I’m going to suggest to Mr. Fryday that you’re bad for business and that you’re a filthy pig!” My mouth again.
“You watch your mouth, sonny!” says Dumper Stubbs, pulling up his pants even higher than they are, “that mouth of yours is goin’ to sink you in too deep one of these days!”
Dumper gives me my three new cans of vegetable oil, gets in his truck and pulls away. The grease barrel in the back is slopping grease all over the place. The smoke from his exhaust pipe is blue. His muffler sounds like twenty chain saws.
Dumper is an environmental disaster.
I put on my gloves and remove the hose and close the hot spigots at the bottom of my two fryers. I carefully pour one and a half cans of vegetable oil in each fryer. Then I turn both fryers back on and set the temperatures.
I figure that each fryer in my wagon holds about a kitchen sinkful of cooking grease. Dumper picks up two kitchen sinkfuls of grease from my wagon each week. Mr. Fryday runs ten chipwagons in Ottawa. Each wagon has at least two fryers. In fact, a couple of the bigger wagons have three fryers. And Mr. Fryday is thinking of buying another wagon to add to his collection. I think he said it would be called “Bach’s” chips. So, Dumper Stubbs picks up at least more than twenty kitchen sinkfuls of cooking grease a week on his rounds. It fills a huge barrel.
That’s a lot of used grease!
I get out my rags and my all-purpose cleaner squirt bottle and clean the grease off the windows and the counter that Dumper sprayed around. Then I get out my squeeze mop and some more cleaning fluid and clean up the floor and the cooker and clean off the bottoms of my shoes.
The customers are starting to come back and I put on Beethoven’s First Symphony, the Third Movement, to get Dumper out of my brain.
Soon after things are back to normal and the wagon is sparkling clean again and the music is right and the Sunday in Chinatown is just right and the customers are back to normal, along comes Mr. Fryday and, as usual, he’s in a pretty good mood. He’s been telling me lately about a song he’s been working on to be used on TV and on the radio to advertise his chipwagons. The song is all about Mr. Fryday and how everyday is “Fryday” (get it?) in the chipwagon business. Mr. Fryday is all excited about it. I can tell by the way he’s humming parts of it and trying to make it fit with Beethoven’s First Symphony, Third Movement. And I know that he wants me to ask him how the song is going, and when is it going to be on TV and on the radio and all that stuff.
“It’s going fine,” says Mr. Fryday, after I ask him how it’s going.
“Do you want to hear some verses I just wrote?” he asks. I’m just about to say, yes, I would like to hear the verse he just wrote, when he tears right into it, drumming the rhythm for it with his fat fingers on the counter:
Fryday is my day
Every day’s a fry day
When you do it my way
It’s a peachy pie day!
Fryday’s my high day
Not to reason why day
The limit is the sky day
A come-over-and-say-hi! day
Fryday is my day
It’s a do-or-die day
So all you gotta do is buy
Some French Fries
All you gotta do is...
What I’m tellin’ you is...
Come and have a REAL
FRENCH
FRY!
Drumming away with his fat fingers on the counter, his rings tapping and flashing in the Somerset Street sunlight in Chinatown.
Trying to make his song fit with Beethoven’s First Symphony, Third Movement.
Mr. Fryday will work the rest of today in the wagon until around five or six o’clock, it depends on the customers, and then he’ll close up the wagon, turn off the fryers, cover them, and drive the wagon very carefully home to his place and park it in his yard for the night. The other nine wagons are run by nine other men who work for Mr. Fryday. At night, each man drives his wagon home and parks it in his yard or in his laneway until the next day.
Will Mr. Fryday, while he’s driving home, tap the steering wheel with the rings on his fingers, practicing his potato chip song that he’s so proud of?
Maybe. Maybe he will.
And in a couple of years, when I get my license, maybe I’ll be driving the wagon home to my place. Maybe.
I slip out of the wagon and say goodbye to Mr. Fryday. He doesn’t answer. Beethoven’s First Symphony is on very loud and I can’t see if the noodles are jumping and shaking on the shelves of the Mekong Grocery.
And now the customers are all crowded around Mr. Fryday and now the chips are selling like hot cakes.
I run home to where I live at 179 Rochester Street, Apt. D.
My mom, Ellen O’Reilly Sweetgrass, is part Irish and part a whole lot of other things. She’s the Multicultural Counselor at the Community Resource Center. She has a whole lot of education and is very smart. She’s also funny.
