That I should find myself writing so bitterly about teachers from whom I learned little good and to whom I would not willingly give another thought, I suppose disproves whatever attitude of either forgiveness or detachment I might have decided to adopt when I took up the subject of my education. In trying to but lightly touch on what pained me as a boy; my disappointment in school and in so many there who might have made it better than it was, I avoided not only the worst of it, as I intended, but also, inadvertently, what was best. In this, I was less than honest. I regret it. I owe something better, both to what was good there, and to anyone still in circumstances not unlike the ones from which I still believe myself lucky in having escaped. I would not even now make too much of my story, knowing so many that might be better suited to the point I would make, but yet I would try, using just what I can not help but remember because I now think, I might tell it to a better purpose if I tell it as true as I can.I thought to include one man more, a history teacher, among my examples of the worst I ever knew, among the real monsters. I don't say he didn't deserve to be on that list. He was a comic type, just to look at him; thick chested and thick headed and every brief inch the little, round emperor on his Elba, as he paced the hallways of our junior high school. He had, when he wanted, a voice to match that self importance, but he used it without discrimination and with such a consistently sweaty enthusiasm as to make his bellicosity ridiculous even to boys of twelve and thirteen. The man had no emphasis; everything he said was equally, ponderously, loudly important. The loss of a hall-pass and the betrayal of Washington by Benedict Arnold were addressed with exactly the same gravity. It was, in it's way, genuinely funny, that unchecked pomposity. Children can appreciate a clown, as such, even one with power over them, and nothing is ever again quite so funny as the eccentricities of one's teachers. With this bristling martinet, one had only to catch the sound of him shouting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, as if being tortured by imaginary communist Viet Cong, perhaps one manly tear let fall through his beard, to know there was something fundamentally false, something put-on in his loud patriotism and his desperate shouting. He was also rather stupid. This perhaps was the secret he sought to conceal with all that bravado. Wasn't much of a secret though. He wasn't a graceful man, in either word or action, and to be kind, the best that might be said of him was that he seemed more self-consciously clumsy rather than intentionally cruel. I don't know that even the thugs and rednecks that flocked to his Sportsmen's Club -- besides the chance it gave them to play with guns -- didn't do so on the very good chance that he might shoot off a thumb, and so long as it was his thumb, and not theirs, where was the harm then in a bit of sport? Unlike the gym coaches who had the power and impunity to do genuine physical harm, and did, the worst this little man could usually do was shout, or as he once did to my older brother, slam a boy of thirteen into the lockers. (My brother, by the way, no bigger than I would be at his age, but far tougher even then, pushed the fat bastard right back, off his feet, and onto his ass. Nothing came of that unreported humiliation. They were quite alone in the hallway at the time. My brother walked away, and said nothing. The fat man said not another word to my brother the rest of that year.) Now, I don't know that I was ever in the man's classroom -- I had the other idiot for civics -- except on those rare occasions when for whatever reason he was left in charge of someone else's class of which I happened to be unlucky enough to find myself that day. I also knew him from a rare visit to "detention," a duty he seemed uniquely to relish, as I remember it. Like anyone else with any sense who could, I otherwise gave the little sportsman the wide berth he seemed to think he commanded.
The thing about monsters, though, is that they lurk.
There was a deep basement stairwell at the back of my school, scene of many a fumbling, adolescent assignation of a late, after-school evening in my time. Nice children either did not know of it or simply never went down there. So long as no one saw smoke rising from the dark, it was a good place to not be seen. I kissed a boy there. He wasn't my first kiss, or my first boy, for that matter, though he was, I thought at the time, quite special. He let me kiss him. There was a power in that I would be hard pressed now to describe, but in those blessedly far off days, for a boy to let himself be kissed by a boy was a far more telling and dangerous admission of culpability than it would have been to simply let some faggot blow you. The evening it happened, we had just come out from the rehearsal of a play I was in and for which this boy was doing something less obviously suspect; painting sets or hanging lights or some such. True, I'd pulled the kid down the stairs after me, into that dark spot I knew, and while he may well have expected something less shocking to happen there than what did, for whatever reason, I pushed him against the cold bricks and I kissed him, and, as I say, he let me. It hardly reflects my present personal politics or my hard-won sense of self, but I must say, I will always be grateful for that kiss.
I do not know that we were observed. I think not. Nothing else happened, just that one sustained and sustaining kiss, after which we parted. Eventually, he rather nervously ran off, taking the stairs two at a time and disappearing back into the auditorium, or off home, somewhere. I lingered a moment, after. Not only had the fellow not punched me for trying something different, he'd let me, you see. Though I would never have been so reckless as to admit as much even to him, I knew that he had, in fact, kissed me back. It is not saying too much to say I was therefore feeling... triumphant. (Years later, at our tenth high school reunion, I would kiss him a second time, in the men's room, after he unexpectedly caught me by the sinks and insisted on a rather tearful and tipsy heart-to-heart about how much he wished we'd stayed in better touch. It wasn't kind, but finally I kissed him for the second time, and again, he kissed me back, before his wife drove him home and I flew back to my husband in California. Poor thing, the wife I mean.)
When I did finally float up out of the stairwell after I'd kissed that boy the first time, there stood a teacher, and not just anyone, but the bully in the beard, the great white hunter himself. I'm proud to say, I did not panic. I gave a remarkably good imitation, I thought, of a man suddenly struck by an inexplicable peripheral blindness, and squinting furiously in the waning light, I made for the lighted door. Even as I passed him, I appeared to take no notice of the bear in the shadows.
What had he seen? What did he suspect?
As I mentioned, I was not usually in this man's class, so I managed to avoid him successfully for some time. Meanwhile, the usual school bullies had to be avoided as well. The boy I'd kissed did not so much avoid me as return to the safety of his more usual, churchy crowd. I had other friends of course, and other opportunities, and by the end of a week, I imagine, I thought the whole incident past. Rehearsals for the play went forward, so I probably just concentrated on that.
One afternoon, with time to kill before the cast and crew gathered, I sat on the steps of the school, reading a book. I did not go home and come back for rehearsals. I was bused to school, and couldn't expect either of my working parents to take me back and forth. I was content to read and wait. A shadow fell across the page and a surprisingly quiet, but unmistakably adult voice asked me what I was reading. What must I have been thinking, at that moment? He may have asked a second time before I showed him the cover of the book. It was a little paperback I'd bought at a yard-sale, a biography by Hesketh Pearson of Oscar Wilde. Looking at the book rather than at me, the man said,
"People like that, you know," and his voice went quite low, as if sharing a secret with me, "usually they kill themselves."
That was all he said to me, then, or so far as I remember, ever. If I happened to catch his eye later, or he mine, though I tried never thereafter to look at him, he would just scowl and turn away.
The real trouble with monsters is they teach lessons we ought never to have to learn.
I was thirteen the first time I thought seriously about killing myself. I was alone in the house. I took a kitchen knife into the bathroom and locked the door. I put the blade against the base of my right palm, just at the edge of my wrist, and I made a small, deep cut. The blood surprised me. When I pulled the knife away, blood shot out in a thin, fast spray that missed the sink entirely. A thin line ran down the mirror and when I turned my hand away, blood splashed the good guest towels that no one in the family ever actually used. I panicked then. I'd ruined the towel. I thought what an awful thing it would be for my mother to find, that nice white towel, ruined, so I held my wrist under the tap and then wrapped it in my shirt. I carefully laundered first the towel, and then, when the bleeding stopped, my shirt. I put a bandage on my wrist. I said, "I fell."
I still have a small white scar, just at the base of my right palm.
What was said to me that day on the stairs didn't drive me to do what I did. That nasty, foolish little man wasn't responsible. He was not my only bully. He wasn't even the worst of them. Certainly, he lacked the persistence of some of the others. For instance, there were the boys much later, in high school, who stuffed me in a trash can and rolled me down the hall. There were those other boys who drove me off the road and into a fence on Bessemer Street, the very night I road my bike into town to attend my first Passover Seder at the home of my first non-Christian friends. Pitiable, petty little figure, that teacher seems, compared to these, doesn't he? I don't know that I was thinking about that teacher, or even remembered at that moment what he'd said to me about "people like that," the day I took the knife from the block hanging on the kitchen wall. He wasn't responsible. That seems the kindest thing I can think now to say for him, or perhaps the most damning. I know I never forgot what he said to me.
The real trouble with most bad teachers is that that is all they are.
The trouble with monsters? They're memorable, aren't they?
I won't leave it at that. It isn't the monsters I choose to remember. It is the friends that saved me I remember best. After trying to write this more than once, I realized that was why I was not satisfied with what I'd written. I'd left the best out of it.
In that same school there was a sanctuary, for the odd and other, for the unlike and the less popular, for the queers and the kids who might not otherwise find safety anywhere, even at home. In a shabby old classroom on, I believe the second floor, there was a place where the blackboard was covered with clippings and posters, the walls hung with tatty bunches of raffia, the tables stained with paint and smeared with clay. Behind a hopelessly cluttered desk at the front, her feet propped on a drawer, a teacher, one of the ones who saved me, held court. Another art teacher that I knew less well and who taught in a similar space just the other side the blackboard, Mr. Grazetti, might wander in now and then for a cup of coffee and a chat. Various other relatively friendly adults came and went. One who came in and stayed awhile almost every day, the band director, Tony Naples, was a particular friend, to my favorite teacher and ultimately, to me. The atmosphere in that room tended to be noisy and not a little anarchic. So long as no one actually set fire to the place or spilled into the hall and called attention to the chaos, no one in charge seemed to much mind. Art, I came to understand there, was sometimes a rather messy business; not always pretty or perfectly made, seldom respectful of rules, and not a matter just of paints and brushes and careful study so much as a place to which one might return and never find the same experience twice. It was in that room that I learned what I might do without pleasing anyone, at first, but myself and how, should I try to do whatever it was well, consistently, and honestly, I might make something interesting. It was in that room that I first learned that something I might do might actually have value, might matter to other people -- that I might. In that room, I learned there would be nothing more satisfying in life, save love, than that. I learned there that admiration might be genuine, and criticism helpful. I learned that I need not court every adult for their approval and admiration, but win it honestly, by doing and thinking and talking honestly, and that I might actually interest other people and be taken seriously, be listened to, without condescension and despite my inexperience of things. That one room was where I finally found someone who would willingly teach me not only how to look at the things around me in a new way, but to think about things for myself.
I will always be grateful to my teacher, my first "Mz.", Carole Starz, for all she taught me in that room and outside it, but mostly just sitting on the edge of that disastrous desk of hers, about art, and expression, about conversation and passion and politics and culture, high and low, and about authenticity, integrity, wit. She explained and exemplified tolerance to me too -- still a quite new idea to me in that place, at that time. And she was just good company, some of the first I'd ever really known, and she kept it too.
Not long after I'd stuck a knife into my wrist, I had yet another day I could not quite imagine surviving. I don't remember just what had happened. I do remember having been cornered that day in the hall by yet another of my monsters, the bald bully in tight, white shorts who made every gym class hell for anyone who wasn't quite his kind of all-American-boy. I'd made some remark, or looked the wrong way, or done something that failed to conceal my disrespect, and so this adenoidal ape pinioned me to the wall with one hairy paw while he shook the other threateningly in my face. Let loose when the bell went, I thought first that I should just run, just go and be done with it. What, after all was the worst they could do to me? Not let me come back? How bad could that be? All I really wanted at that moment was to be elsewhere, anywhere, nowhere.
That day, I didn't run. I don't remember thinking about it, or even walking up the stairs, but I do remember walking into the art room. There, at her desk was my favorite teacher, and there on a chair next to her, chatting, was the one gay man I thought I knew, the only one at least that I hadn't felt I had to sleep with to get near. Sweet Tony Naples, the dear man to whom I and my best friend, dressed in old band uniforms and marching with toilet plungers, would prove a regular annoyance, interrupting his band practice to bring him amusing notes from his friends in the art room. Shy, quiet Mr. Naples may not have known why, but that day I went straight to him, and sat on his lap. I curled into him and sunk my head against his chest. Not one word did he say, and neither did I. He let me. I didn't explain myself. I didn't ask permission or consider the consequences, for either of us, I simply went, instinctively, to my own.
I didn't stay long. I may have made some joke, by way of an excuse, when I got up, then I probably just ran off. I don't wonder he found the whole thing passing strange, even a little disturbing. What Mz. Starz might have made of the business I've never asked.
I knew, however, strange as it was to me then, that these two people would still like me, just as I was, odd as I was, and oh, how I loved them.
I always will.
What mattered then, what matters now, is that there was someone, that there was some place safe, for that boy I was to go. I wasn't in the band. I never had a class with Tony Naples. He was none the less, one of my best teachers, from whom I learned what it is to be decent in the highest sense, to be kind, to be present. He was, with Carole Starz, one of the teachers who saved me. That day, every day, in a real way, they saved my life. That I survived, that I got out of that place alive and came away to find other people like myself, better places, sanity, love, it is not too much to say that in some measure I owe to those two people and to the place they made for me when I thought there was no place for me, anywhere.
So if I owe my monsters nothing but now but a pity I can't quite feel, mixed as it seems it will always be with no little bitterness, how much do I owe to that room and the good teachers I found there?
It is was just from such teachers I learned. They taught me perhaps more than they knew or intended. How do I thank them for that?
"We are, to be sure, a miracle every way." I must remember that.
No comments:
Post a Comment