East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (9 page)

Gimpy raised his hand and said in a sugary voice to Miss Mason, “Miss Mason, I got to go to your clothes closet. I got to pick up,” and here his words had become slower and slower, “a double breasted—” now the class erupted in a howl of laughter drowning out Gimpy’s other words.

Miss Mason looked uncomprehendingly at him. “Sit down,” she said to him but Gimpy disregarded her, his words going on and on, lost under the roar of prolonged laughter. “Sit down!” she shouted at him but her words could not be heard. She stared wide-eyed at the class and shouted, “Will you be quiet!”

Uproar. Her words had melted into the tumult. Gimpy, in a shout that was a blast that everyone could hear said, “I slid it into your closet earlier, Miss Mason.” The class again exploded in laughter.

Her face averted from the class, Miss Mason now began to cry. She was vulnerable and we knew it. There were two classes she couldn’t control, ours and one other, that one also contained some older, rougher boys. With her other classes she managed to exercise control, the students were younger, more fearful of authority.

In this class the older boys exercised authority. There was bedlam when they wanted it, there were leering suggestive words and phrases as they, acting innocent, spoke them to her. There was temporary peace when they became bored with it all and allowed her to run her class. To them she was a small step above a substitute teacher whom they devoured, ate alive.

I stopped laughing. Maybe at first it had been funny, I couldn’t help it if I had laughed, but it wasn’t funny anymore. But I said nothing, nobody said anything to stop what was going on. The laughter subsided slowly, came to a slow silence. Miss Mason was drying her tears with her handkerchief, here eyes were red. Gimpy was leaning to one side of his seat whispering something to his neighbor.

Someone else said in a loud voice, “Mr. Coolidge likes to put his things in the closet all the time.” The class began to roar once more. Someone hooted wildly. Miss Mason sat stunned, her mouth open, her tears running down her cheeks.

No music was taught in that class that day. Fortunately, Mr. Burger was nowhere in the vicinity of that part of the building.

I looked at Goldie seated near me. He shrugged, what could he do? I looked at Yussie, he shook his head and shrugged. I leaned over to my neighbor and said, “It’s enough. Enough. She’s crying.”

The period finally ended, we left the classroom, Miss Mason was sitting at her desk, her eyes closed, her head rocking slightly from side to side, her crumpled handkerchief balled in one hand.

Now we would be going to Mr. Coolidge’s algebra class and that would be an entirely different thing. Early spring, spring fever, whatever it was that caused this craziness, all that would have to be set aside in Coolidge’s class. There would be no fooling around, no shouted out words. There would be order, strict order. As we entered his classroom, one of the students from the preceding class told us that it looked like the stock market was down, way down, Coolidge was on the war path.

That was our barometer with Mr. Coolidge, the stock market. Someone, sometime ago, had spread the rumor which had become wildfire, that when Mr. Coolidge was mad it was because the stock market was down. And when he was glad, stocks were up. Rumor or not, true or false, it had become a hard fact with us, we believed in it although we didn’t really know what stocks were, or the stock market, what did you do there? All we knew was that you bought or sold something, but what did you buy? What did you sell? And if you bought, who did you buy from? And who did you sell to? All we knew was that Wall Street had crashed in 1929, and what did that mean?

“Stocks are sure down,” I heard Gimpy whisper to another older student as they entered the classroom. “He gave the other class hell and it’s going to be hell for us today. We better watch out.”

Mr. Coolidge was at his desk looking down at some books spread on the green blotter. A younger student, someone whom I recognized as belonging to Miss Mason’s class that followed ours, approached Mr. Coolidge and handed him a folded note. Mr. Coolidge read it, glared up at us several times, finished reading the note, nodded to the messenger who left the room.

Standing erect now, his body tense, his face rigid and red, we could feel his anger as he stared stonily at us, pointed with a steel finger to five of us, I wasn’t one of them, ordered them to the blackboard, told each one of the selected students, Gimpy among them, “Do the homework problems,” and gave each one of them a specific lesson number. Gimpy’s was the second problem. “Move!” he said to them in a murderous voice. “Fast!” All of them scurried to the blackboard, books in hand. Gimpy quickly waddled to the blackboard, stepping only on the ball of his left foot, his heel set rigidly and permanently high above a normal position. Looking out at the rest of us, his anger boiling in his words, Mr. Coolidge said, “You’ll all stay right here, very quiet, all of you, while I go out for a few minutes. Not-a-peep-out-of-any-of-you!” he shouted slowly, hesitating before each word to give it emphasis. “If I hear anything, anything! You’ll wish you’d never been born! You’ll be quiet now, you’ll be quiet while I’m gone, you’ll be quiet when I come back.” He turned abruptly and left the room slamming the door shut.

There was silence in the room. We glanced at each other but didn’t say a word. Now and then, at the blackboard, chalk squeaked across the slate. Gimpy was busy at the blackboard writing the answer to his problem. All of us knew that he had copied the homework from somebody else, someone he had intimidated earlier that morning before school started.

He passed exams by cheating, having small written notes passed secretly on to him by allies during the tests. Gimpy was totally unaware of algebra, it was a foreign language to him, everything, the words, the concepts, had never entered his head.

When he was finished with his work at the blackboard, he glanced around furtively, saw nobody at the door and he whispered out, “Is it okay? Is it right?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, were the soft hissed replies. Shut up, someone whispered fiercely, Coolidge could come back any second now, you want to get us in trouble?

I stared down at my lesson book, reading a problem and its solution. Mr. Coolidge entered the room, everybody stiffened. Glaring murderously at us, he shut the door with a slam and walked slowly to his desk. The students at the blackboard turned away from facing us and were looking at their work. There was a heavy silence.

“Who do you think you are?” Mr. Coolidge said in an angry whisper. “Just who? You think,” now his voice rose until it was a shout, “you can do anything to anybody? To a teacher? You think so, huh?” In a quick movement he picked up a book from his desk and hurled it at us, all of us ducked down in our seats as far as we could. The book flew over our heads, hit the wall in back of us and fell to the floor as Mr. Coolidge was shouting, “I’ll teach you to be human beings if I’ve got to break every bone in your bodies!” He turned to Gimpy, pointed his finger at him and said, “You! You got something to say?” Gimpy, looked at us for a moment, his look begging for help. He shook his head. “I hear you’ve got a lot to say,” Mr. Coolidge was shouting, his voice hoarse, spit shooting out in small mists from his mouth. “A lot! Plenty! Too much!” Sneering at Gimpy who shrunk away until he was stopped by the blackboard, Mr. Coolidge slowly approached him and said, “You got no words? It’s a shame, isn’t it?” He glanced at Gimpy’s work on the board and said, “Explain that problem to me.” His voice was still furious, though now somewhat contained. “Talk!” he commanded. “Now! You know how, I hear!”

Gimpy began to read what he had chalked on the blackboard. When he was finished he glanced momentarily at Mr. Coolidge who said, “Oh, that’s fine. Great. Now tell me how you arrived at the concept. What’s the rule?”

Gimpy looked dumbfounded, he said in a voice a little above a whisper, “Rule? What rule?”

Now Mr. Coolidge shouted out, “A rule! Yes, a rule! Do you know what it means?” But now all restraints were off, he picked up a piece of chalk, and full of anger, threw it at Gimpy, hit him in the leg. Gimpy said ouch! and began to rub his leg, Mr. Coolidge scooped up more chalk, hurled it at us, he ran to his desk and heaved his other books at us. He picked up his heavy square glass inkwell, hurled it, the ink spilled out dark trails in the air. All of the students ducked, the inkwell hit Yussie in the upper arm, he yelled out, clutched his arm as the inkwell fell to the floor.

Yussie looked at his arm in amazement, it had begun to bleed, i could see the blood slowly seeping between his fingers, his shirt had been cut by the glass missile and I yelled out, “He’s bleeding! He’s bleeding!” Everything stopped, sound, movement, everything. Mr. Coolidge saw the blood oozing between Yussie’s fingers, stared uncomprehendingly at his wounded student while i ran to Yussie’s side and said, “Come on, i’ll take you to the toilet to wash it off there.” Mr. Coolidge nodded dumbly. Goldie came up behind me and had pried Yussie’s hand from the wound. The shirt at the wound was ripped, now bloody from the gash in Yussie’s arm. Goldie looked at the dumbfounded Mr. Coolidge and said to the teacher, “His shirt’s ripped too.”

“Go,” Mr. Coolidge whispered.

We went to the toilet, the three of us, where we washed the wound, swabbed it with pads made of folded toilet paper. It was hurting, Yussie’s face was grimacing in pain as he said, “What’ll I tell my mother? My shirt’s ripped.”

“Forget it, Yussie,” I said to him as I placed a wad of dry toilet paper on the wound. “Just hold it. Like that. Yeah,” I said. I looked at Goldie, shook my head and said, “I got to get him someplace, a drugstore. Doc Stern, that’s the drugstore near where I live, I’ll take him there. Doc’ll fix him up.”

“Go on,” Goldie said. “You go. I’ll tell Coolidge what you’re doing.”

“No,” Yussie said as he pressed the paper wad to his arm. “I’ll go back with you.” He had been crying but he had surreptitiously wiped away his tears so that we wouldn’t see him like that. Now his face was dry.

We returned to the classroom. Mr. Coolidge sat at his desk, staring down blankly at the green blotter. The flung books had been picked up and now lay on one side on the top of his desk, the inkwell, empty, was in its usual place. The class was silent, hunched over desks, working at a problem of some sort.

I said to Mr. Coolidge, “It’s still bleeding. I better take him to my drugstore, it’s not far from here, just a couple of blocks.” Coolidge, silent, nodded, and I said, “Then I think he ought to go home.” Coolidge shut his eyes and nodded.

We left the school building using the staircase that was near an exit door. We were out in the street, walking swiftly. Goldie asked Yussie, “How’s it coming along?”

“It hurts,” Yussie said. “It hurts! I didn’t do anything!”

“Yeah,” Goldie said. “It should’ve been Gimpy and some of those others.” He shrugged. “It should’ve been them.”

“But it was me,” Yussie said bitterly.

The drugstore was on the corner of the street. I could see one of its display windows with its two large urn-like glass vases of a design peculiar to drugstores. Inside the glass vases, was a colored liquid, each vase a different color. A large cardboard sign advertís-ing Ex-Lax was in the window with small dummy cardboard boxes of the product stacked neatly throughout.

We entered the drugstore, it was empty of customers. Doc was working behind the prescription counter, he looked up across its wide wooden partition, saw us, and he came out to meet us. “Doc,” I said to him, “I got a friend who hurt himself.”

“So I see,” Doc said. He picked up a chair at the side of the store and said to Yussie, “Sit down, let me take a look at it. A-ha!” he said as Yussie removed his hand from the wad of paper.

Doc acted as neighborhood doctor. Except for prescriptions, which he was forbidden to write, he could only fill them, he advised us about our ills, telling us what patent medicine to use for our colds, our stomach aches, our cramps, for the thousand and one things we came down with. He talked to the women in soft, discrete, secretive tones, he listened attentively to them. He was also excellent in removing cinders from eyes, something quite usual. He did everything but write prescriptions, fill and pull teeth, set broken bones and operate on people. Because there was no money, everybody I knew only used doctors and dentists in the most dire circumstances.

Yussie had removed his shirt, Doc ran behind the counter, returned with bandage, tape, a bottle of antiseptic. He knelt down beside Yussie asked, “How’d you get it, hah?”

As Doc swabbed gently, removed the blood, cleaned the wound, Yussie, wincing, was saying, “I ran into something.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Doc said, nodding slightly. “That’s what they all say.” He swabbed antiseptic into the wound, Yussie stiffened with the pain and Doc said, “Yeah. It hurts. I can’t help it, but that’s what I got to do.” He applied a bandage to the wound and he said to me, “Leo, how is your family?”

“They’re okay,” I said. Doc nodded, finished his bandaging. He arose groaning against the tightness in his knees and said to Yussie, “You don’t have to go to the dispensary or see a doctor. It’ll heal okay. I don’t think it’ll need stitches.” As Yussie was painfully putting on his shirt, Doc said, “Keep it clean. Leave the bandage on, don’t take it off until it’s healed.” Yussie, fully dressed now, nodded.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

“Eh,” Doc said. “What else am I here for? Give my regards to your family.” To Yussie he said, “No more fights, you hear? You don’t think you fooled me with that monkey business you ran into something.”