Teacher Man: A Memoir (17 page)

Excuse me. I’m trying to be sarcastic.

He stops just inside the door. Yeah?

I play with a piece of chalk to show how cool I am. I struggle to decide between Where are you going? and Just where do you think you’re going? The first sentence could sound like a simple question with a hint of teacher authority. The think in the second suggests challenge and could cause trouble. Either way, it’s the tone of voice that matters. I back off a little.

Excuse me. Do you have a pass? You need a pass from the office after an absence.

This is the teacher talking. He represents authority: the office down the hall that issues passes for everything; the principal; the superintendent; the mayor; the president; God. This is not the role I want. I’m here to teach English, not to ask for passes.

Brandt says, Who’s gonna stop me? He sounds almost friendly, genuinely curious, but what comes from the class is a gasp.

Oh, shit, says Ralphie Boyce.

High school teachers are urged by their superiors to discourage profanity in the classroom. Such language is disrespectful and could lead to a breakdown in law and order. I want to admonish Ralphie but can’t because the words leaping around my own head are Oh, shit.

Brandt stands with his back to the door that has swung shut behind him. He seems patient.

And what is this sudden warmth I feel for this lumbering future plumber from Delancey Street, Manhattan? Is it the patient way he waits, almost gentle in his look? He seems so reasonable and thoughtful. So, why don’t I drop my tough teacher act and tell him, Oh, all right. Sit down, Brandt. Forget the pass now and try to remember it next time. But I’ve pushed too far to turn back. His classmates are witnesses and something has to happen.

I toss the chalk into the air and catch it. Brandt watching. I step toward him. This is not my day to die, but class is waiting, and it’s time to answer his question, Who’s gonna stop me?

I toss the chalk, perhaps for the last time ever, and tell him, I am.

He nods as if to say, That’s reasonable. You’re the teacher, man.

The warm feeling is back and I have the urge to pat his shoulder, tell him forget the whole thing, just sit down, Brandt.

I toss the chalk again and miss it. It’s on the floor. It is imperative that that chalk be retrieved. I bend to pick it up and there, inviting me, is Brandt’s foot, offering itself. I grab it and pull. Brandt falls backward, bangs his head on the brass doorknob, slides to the floor, rests quietly as if contemplating the next move. Again there’s a gasp from the class, Wow.

He rubs the back of his head. Is he preparing himself to deliver a quick punch, chop, kick?

Shit, Mr. McCourt, I didn’t know you was karate.

It appears I am the winner, and the next move is mine. OK, Benny, you can sit down.

May.

What?

All the teachers say, You may sit down. Boom Boom is correcting my grammar. Am I in a madhouse?

OK. You may sit down.

So you don’t want a pass or nothin’?

No. It’s all right.

So we was fightin’ for nothin’?

On the way to his seat Boom Boom steps on the chalk and looks at me. Was that deliberate? Should I make an issue of it? No. A voice in my head tells me, Get on with the lesson. Stop acting like a teenager. This kid could break you in two. Teacher man, get back to the lesson on foreign words in English.

Brandt acts as if nothing had ever happened between us and I feel such a wave of shame I want to apologize to the whole class and to him in particular. I berate myself for the cheapness of what I’ve done. Now they admire what they think are my karate ways. I open my mouth and babble.

Imagine what the English language would be like if you removed French words. You wouldn’t be able to order your chauffeur to bring around your limousine anymore. You’d have to say underwear instead of lingerie. You couldn’t go to a restaurant. No more cuisine, no more gourmet, no sauce, menu, chef, perfume. You’d have to find a new word for brassiere.

Whisper, whisper. Giggle, giggle. Ooh, Mr. McCourt, what you said.

That’s how to get their minds off the incident. I seem to be winning on all fronts till I look over at Brandt. His eyes seem to say, OK, Mr. McCourt. I guess you needed to look good, so it’s OK with me.

He was bright enough to pass the New York State Regents’ exam in English. He could have written a passable, and passing, English essay, but he chose to fail. He ignored the suggested list of topics, headed his essay, “Chirp,” and wrote, three hundred and fifty times, “Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp…”

I meet Boom Boom on Delancey Street after graduation and ask him what was all that about the chirp?

I dunno. I get crazy feelings and I don’t care what happens. I was in that classroom and everything seemed so stupid, that monitor teacher up there warning us not to look at anyone else’s paper, and there was this bird on the windowsill chirping away and I said, OK, shit, what the hell, so I put down what he was saying. When I was fourteen my dad sent me to take martial arts. The Japanese guy just let me sit on a bench outside for an hour and when I said, Yo, mister, what about the lesson? he told me go home. Home? I mean he was getting paid for the hour. He said, Go home. I said, Should I come back next week? and he said nothing. I came back next week and he said, What you want? I told him again I wanted to learn martial arts. He told me go clean the toilet. I wondered what that had to do with martial arts but I said nothing. I cleaned the toilet. He told me sit on the bench, take off my shoes and socks and look at my feet. Don’t take my eyes off my feet. You ever look at your feet? I have one foot that’s bigger than the other. He came out and said, Put your shoes on, no socks, and go home. It was getting easy to do what he told me. I stopped being pissed off. Sometimes I’d sit on that bench and do nothing and just go home and still pay him. I told my dad but he only made a face. It was six weeks before the Japanese guy brought me into the room for my first lesson. He made me stand with my face stuck against a wall while he kept coming at me for about fifteen minutes with some kind of sword and screaming at me. At the end of that session he said I was accepted into his school except that I had to clean the toilet before I went home that day in case I had any big ideas about myself. So I knew what was going on that day when you pulled my leg. I knew you had to save your ass and that was OK with me because I didn’t need that world and you’re an OK teacher and I didn’t give a shit what those kids in the class thought. If you have to act like a big-ass teacher you should go home and clean the toilet.

This is the situation in the public schools of America: The farther you travel from the classroom the greater your financial and professional rewards. Get the license, teach for two or three years. Take courses in administration, supervision, guidance, and with your new certificates you can move to an office with air-conditioning, private toilets, long lunches, secretaries. You won’t have to struggle with large groups of pain-in-the-arse kids. Hide out in your office, and you won’t even have to see the little buggers.

But here I was thirty-eight years old, lacking ambition to climb in the school system, adrift in the American dream, facing the midlife crisis, failed teacher of high school English, but hindered by superiors, principals and their assistants, or so I thought.

I had the angst and didn’t know what ailed me. Alberta said, Why don’t you get your Ph.D. and rise in the world?

I said, I will.

New York University said yes, they would accept me for the doctoral program, but my wife said, Why don’t you go to London or Dublin?

Are you trying to get rid of me?

She smiled.

When I was sixteen I visited Dublin with a friend on a day trip and I stood with my back to a gray stone wall to watch a parade. The gray wall belonged to Trinity College and I didn’t know that was looked on as foreign territory, English and Protestant. Farther down the street iron railings and a great gate kept out the likes of me. There were statues outside of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. Oh, I said, there he is, right up there, the man who wrote “The Deserted Village,” which I had to memorize in school.

My friend from Limerick, who knew more about the world than I did, said, Take a good look at Oliver and the rest of it because your type will never step inside those gates. The archbishop said any Catholic who goes to Trinity is automatically excommunicated.

Anytime I visited Dublin after that I was drawn to Trinity. I stood by the gate admiring the elegant way the students tossed their flapping Trinity scarves over their shoulders. I admired the accents that sounded English. I coveted the beautiful Protestant girls who would never cast me a glance. They would marry their own kind, their own class of people, all Protestants with horses, and if the likes of me ever married one of them he’d be booted out of the Catholic Church with no hope of redemption.

American tourists in their bright clothes strolled in and out of the college and I wished I had the courage to walk in myself but the man at the gate might ask me what I was doing there and I wouldn’t know what to say.

Six years later I returned to Ireland in my American army uniform, which I thought would bring respect. It did, till I opened my mouth. I tried to put on an American accent to go with the uniform. It didn’t work. At first, waitresses would rush to lead me to a table, but when I spoke they said, Arrah, Jaysus, you’re not a Yank at all, at all. You’re just Irish like everyone else. Where you from? I tried to pass myself off as a GI from Alabama, but one woman in Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street said, If you’re from Alabama, I’m the queen of Romania. I stammered and admitted I was from Limerick and she gave up all claim to the throne of Romania. She said it was against the rules of Bewley’s to be chatting up the customers, but I looked like the type that might take a drink. I bragged about how I drank beer and schnapps all over Bavaria and she said if that was the case I could buy her a sherry at McDaid’s pub up the street.

I didn’t think she was attractive, but it was very flattering that a waitress at Bewley’s would want to have a drink with me.

I went to McDaid’s Bar to wait for her. The drinkers stared at me and nudged one another over my American uniform and I felt uncomfortable. The barman stared, too, and when I asked for a pint, he said, Is it a general we have here, or what?

I didn’t understand the sarcasm and when I said, No, I’m a corporal, there was a wave of laughter along the bar and I felt like the greatest fool in the world.

I was confused. I was born in America. I grew up in Ireland. I returned to America. I’m wearing the American uniform. I feel Irish. They should know I’m Irish. They should not be mocking me.

When the waitress from Bewley’s arrived and sat with me against the wall and asked for a sherry there was more staring and nudging. The barman winked and said something about “another victim.” He came from behind the bar and asked if I’d like another pint. Of course I’d like another pint. All the attention I was getting made my face feel hot and I knew from looking in the great mirror my eyes were fire-engine red.

The waitress said if the barman was bringing me another pint he might as well bring her another sherry after her exhausting day at Bewley’s. She told me her name was Mary. She said if I was inclined to look down my nose at her because she was only a waitress I could stop right there. After all, what was I but a culchie from the country all togged out in my American uniform, putting on airs. The sherry seemed to make her talkative and the more she talked the more snickering there was in the seats along the wall. She said her job at Bewley’s was temporary. She was waiting for the solicitors to settle her grandmother’s will and when it was decided she’d open a little shop on Grafton Street and sell delicate garments to a better class of people.

I knew nothing about delicate garments, but I wondered about her in such a shop. She was fat, eyes buried in the folds of her face, and she had chins that hung and swung. Her body bulged everywhere. I didn’t want to be with her and didn’t know what to do. I could see people were laughing at me and I blurted, out of desperation, that I had to go.

What? she said.

I have to…I have to look at Trinity College. The inside of it. I have to go through the gate. My third pint of stout was talking.

That’s a Protestant place, she said.

I don’t care. I have to go through the gate.

Did you hear that? she said to the whole bar. He wants to go inside Trinity.

Aw, Jaysus, said one man, and another said, Mother o’ God.

All right, General, said the barman. Go on. Go to Trinity and look inside, but make sure you go to confession on Saturday.

Did you hear that? said Mary. Confession on Saturday, but don’t worry, darlin.’ I’ll hear your confession anytime. Come on, finish your pint and we’ll go to Trinity.

Oh, God. She wants to go with me. Plump quivering Mary wants to walk down Grafton Street with me in my American army uniform. People will say, Look at the Yank. Is that the best he can do, picking up a great tub of lard like that when Dublin has the loveliest girls in the world?

I told her she shouldn’t bother, but she insisted and the barman said I’d have more than one reason for confession on Saturday because, Your wan there shows no mercy.

Why didn’t I show my independence? Was I to walk through the gates of Trinity the first time in my life with this babbling fat body on my arm?

I was and I did.

All the way down Grafton Street she jabbered at anyone who even looked at us, What’s up with you? Didn’t you ever see a Yank before? till one woman in a shawl said back to her, We did but we never saw one sink so low in the world he had to walk with the likes of you. Mary screamed if she didn’t have more important business to attend to she’d tear the eyes from the shawlie’s head.

I felt nervous about going through the Trinity gate. The man in uniform would surely ask what I was doing there, but he paid no attention, even when Mary said, Lovely evenin,’ darlin’.

There I was, at last, standing on the cobblestones, inside the gate, not daring another step. Oliver Goldsmith walked here. Jonathan Swift walked here. All the rich Protestants down the centuries walked here. Here I was, inside the gates, and that was enough.