Teacher Man: A Memoir (27 page)

The bell rang. Bob climbed off the windowsill and returned pen and paper to Jonathan. He said his father the rabbi would be in to see me on Open School Night next week and he was sorry about the disruption.

The rabbi sat by my desk, heaved up his hands and said, Oy. I thought he was joking but the way he dropped his chin to his chest and shook his head told me this was not a happy rabbi. He said, Bob, how’s he doing? He had a German accent.

Fine, I said.

He’s killing us, breaking our hearts. Did he tell you? He wants to be a farmer.

It’s a healthy life, Mr. Stein.

It’s a scandal. We’re not paying for him to go to college so he can raise pigs and corn. Fingers will be pointed on our street. It’s gonna kill my wife. We told him he wants to go that way he’s gonna pay for himself and that’s final. He says don’t worry. Big government programs have scholarships for kids who want to be farmers and he knows all about that. House full of books and stuff from Washington and some college in Ohio. So we’re losing him, Mr. McCoot. Our son is dead. We can’t have a son living with pigs every day.

I’m sorry, Mr. Stein.

Six years later I met Bob on Lower Broadway. It was a January day but he was attired as usual in short pants and Orson Welles jacket. He said, Hi, Mr. McCourt. Great day, isn’t it?

It’s freezing, Bob.

Oh, that’s OK.

He told me he was already working for a farmer in Ohio, but he couldn’t go through with the pig thing, that would destroy his parents. I told him that was a good and loving decision.

He paused and looked at me. Mr. McCourt, you never liked me, did you?

Never liked you, Bob? Are you joking? It was a joy to have you in my class. Jonathan said you drove the gloom from the room.

Tell him, McCourt, tell him the truth. Tell him how he brightened your days, how you told your friends about him, what an original he was, how you admired his style, his good humor, his honesty, his courage, how you would have given your soul for a son like him. And tell him how beautiful he was and is in every way, how you loved him then and love him now. Tell him.

I did, and he was speechless and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn what people thought on Lower Broadway when they saw us in a long warm embrace, the high school teacher and the large Jewish Future Farmer of America.

Ken was a Korean boy who hated his father. He told the class how he had to take piano lessons even though they had no piano. His father made him practice scales on the kitchen table till they could afford a piano and if his father suspected he wasn’t practicing properly he whacked him across the fingers with a spatula. His six-year-old sister, too. When they got a real piano and she played “Chopsticks” he dragged her off the piano stool, into her room, tore a pile of her clothes from drawers, stuffed them into a pillowcase, dragged her down the hallway so that she could see him throwing her clothes into the incinerator.

That would teach her to practice properly.

When Ken was in elementary school he had to join the Boy Scouts and amass merit badges, more than anyone in his troop. Then, in high school, the father insisted he achieve Eagle Scout because that would look good when Ken applied to Harvard. Ken did not want to spend time trying to be an Eagle Scout but he had no choice. Harvard was on the horizon. Also, he was required by his father to excel in the martial arts, to rise from belt to belt till he reached black.

In everything he obeyed till it came to choice of college. His father told him he was to concentrate on applying to two universities, Harvard and M.I.T. Even back in Korea everyone knew that’s where you go.

Ken said no. He was applying to Stanford in California. He wanted to live on the other side of the continent, as far from his father as possible. His father said no. He would not allow that. Ken said if he didn’t go to Stanford he wasn’t going to college at all. The father moved toward him in the kitchen and threatened him. Ken, martial arts expert, said, Just try it, Dad, and Dad backed off. Dad could have said, All right. Do what you like, but what would his neighbors say? What would they say in his church? Imagine having a son graduating from Stuyvesant High School and refusing to go to college. Dad would be disgraced. His friends were proudly sending their children to Harvard and M.I.T. and if Ken had any regard for the reputation of his family he’d forget Stanford.

He wrote me from Stanford. He liked the sunshine out there. College life was easier than Stuyvesant High School, less pressure, less competition. He had just had a letter from his mother, who said he was to concentrate on his studies and participate in no extracurricular activities, no sports, no clubs, nothing, and unless he had straight As in his courses he was not to come home for Christmas. He said, in the letter, that would suit him fine. He didn’t want to come home for Christmas anyway. He came home only to see his sister.

He appeared at my classroom door a few days before Christmas and told me I had helped him get through the last year of high school. At one time he had a dream of going into a dark alleyway with his father and only one of them would come out. He’d be the one, of course, but out there in Stanford he began to think about his father and what it was like coming from Korea, working day and night selling fruit and vegetables when he knew barely enough English to get through the day, hanging on, desperate for his children to get the education he never had in Korea, that you couldn’t even dream of in Korea, and then, in an English class at Stanford, when Ken was called on by the professor to talk about a favorite poem, what popped up in his memory was “My Papa’s Waltz” and, Jesus, it was too much, he broke down and wept in front of all those people, and the professor was terrific, put his arm around Ken’s shoulder and led him down the hallway to his office till he could recover. He stayed an hour in the professor’s office, talking and crying, the professor saying it was OK, he had a father he thought was a mean son-of-a-bitch Polish Jew, forgetting that that mean son-of-a-bitch survived Auschwitz and made his way to California and raised the professor and two other kids, ran a delicatessen in Santa Barbara, every organ in his body threatening to collapse, undermined in the camp. The professor said their two fathers would have a lot to talk about but that would never happen. The Korean grocer and the Polish-Jewish delicatessen man could never find the words that come so easily in a university. Ken said a huge weight was lifted in the professor’s office. Or you could say all kinds of poison had flowed out of his system. Something like that. Now he was going to buy his father a tie for Christmas and flowers for his mother. Yeah, it was crazy buying her flowers since they sold them in the store, but there was a big difference between the flowers you bought from the Korean corner grocery and the flowers you bought from a real florist. He kept thinking of one remark of the professor’s, that the world should let the Polish-Jewish father and the Korean father sit in the sun with their wives, if they were lucky enough to have them. Ken laughed over how excited the professor became. Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won’t let them because there’s nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep ’em busy or they might start thinking.

I
’m learning. The mick from the lanes of Limerick letting the envy hang out. I’m dealing with first- and second-generation immigrants, like myself, but I’ve also got the middle classes and the upper middle classes and I’m sneering. I don’t want to sneer but old habits die hard. It’s the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it’s too hot, it’s too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower. I’m reading a man named Krishnamurti and what I like about him is that he doesn’t hold himself up as a guru like some of these characters who come storming out of India with tin cups that collect millions. He refuses to be guru or wise man or anything else. He tells you, suggests, that in the long run, baby, you’re on your own. There’s a chilling essay by Thoreau called “Walking,” where he says when you go out the door for a walk you should be so free, so unencumbered, you need never return to the starting place. You just keep walking because you’re free. I had the kids read this essay and they said, Oh, no, they could never do that. Just walk away? You kiddin’? Which is strange because when I talked to them about Kerouac and Ginsberg hitting the road, they thought it was wonderful. All that freedom. Marijuana and women and wine for three thousand miles. When I talk to those kids I’m talking to myself. What we have in common is urgency. Christ, I’m middle-aged and making discoveries the average intelligent American knew at twenty. The mask is mostly off and I can breathe.

The kids are opening up in their writing and classroom discussions and I’m getting a written tour of American family life from East Side town houses to Chinatown tenements. It’s a pageant of the settled and the new and everywhere there are dragons and demons.

Phyllis wrote an account of how her family gathered the night Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, how they shuttled between the living room television and the bedroom where her father lay dying. Back and forth. Concerned with the father, not wanting to miss the moon landing. Phyllis said she was with her father when her mother called to come and see Armstrong set foot on the moon. She ran to the living room, everyone cheering and hugging till she felt this urgency, the old urgency, and ran to the bedroom to find her father dead. She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, and her problem was how to return to the happy people in the living room to tell them Dad was gone.

She cried now, standing in front of the classroom. She could have stepped back to her seat in the front row and I hoped she would because I didn’t know what to do. I went to her. I put my left arm around her. But that wasn’t enough. I pulled her to me, embraced her with both arms, let her sob into my shoulder. Faces around the room were wet with tears till someone called, Right on, Phyllis, and one or two clapped and the whole class clapped and cheered and Phyllis turned to smile at them with her wet face and when I led her to her seat she turned and touched my cheek and I thought, This isn’t earthshaking, this touch on the cheek, but I’ll never forget it: Phyllis, her dead father, Armstrong on the moon.

Listen. Are you listening? You’re not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing.

Every moment of your life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. There’s the principal. You have to make a decision, a greeting decision. Will you nod? Will you smile? Will you say, Good morning, Mr. Baumel? or will you simply say, Hi? You see someone you dislike. Furious writing again in your head. Decision to be made. Turn your ahead away? Stare as you pass? Nod? Hiss a Hi? You see someone you like and you say, Hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.

I’ll do this as a male because women, for me, still remain the great mystery. I could tell you stories. Are you listening? There’s a girl in this school you’ve fallen in love with. You happen to know she’s broken up with someone else so the field is clear. You’d like to go out with her. Oh, the writing now sizzles in your head. You might be one of those cool characters who could saunter up to Helen of Troy and ask her what she’s doing after the siege, that you know a nice lamb-and-ouzo place in the ruins of Ilium. The cool character, the charmer, doesn’t have to prepare much of a script. The rest of us are writing. You call her to see if she’ll go out with you on Saturday night. You’re nervous. Rejection will lead you to the edge of the cliff, the overdose. You tell her, on the phone, you’re in her physics class. She says, doubtfully, Oh, yeah. You ask if she’s busy Saturday night. She’s busy. She has something planned, but you suspect she’s lying. A girl cannot admit she has nothing to do on Saturday night. It would be un-American. She has to put on the act. God, what would the world say? You, writing in your head, ask about the following Saturday night and all the other Saturdays stretching into infinity. You’ll settle for anything, you poor little schmuck, anything as long as you can see her before you start collecting Social Security. She plays her little game, tells you call her again next week and she’ll see. Yeah, she’ll see. She sits home on Saturday night watching TV with her mother and Aunt Edna, who never shuts up. You sit home Saturday night with your mother and father, who never say anything. You go to bed and dream that next week, oh, God, next week, she might say yes and if she does you have it all planned, that cute little Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue with the red and white checked tablecloth and the Chianti bottles holding those dripping white candles.

Dreaming, wishing, planning: it’s all writing, but the difference between you and the man on the street is that you are looking at it, friends, getting it set in your head, realizing the significance of the insignificant, getting it on paper. You might be in the throes of love or grief but you are ruthless in observation. You are your material. You are writers and one thing is certain: no matter what happens on Saturday night, or any other night, you’ll never be bored again. Never. Nothing human is alien to you. Hold your applause and pass up your homework.

Mr. McCourt, you’re lucky. You had that miserable childhood so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the two point three kids you’re always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like fifty percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.

Jonathan, that is the most miserable scenario of American life I’ve heard in a high school classroom. But you’ve supplied the ingredients for the great American novel. You’ve encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

They said I must be joking.

I said, You know the ingredients of the McCourt life. You have your ingredients, too, what you’ll use if you write about your life. List your ingredients in your notebook. Cherish them. This is urgent. Jewish. Middle class.
New York Times
. Classical music on radio. Harvard on the horizon. Chinese. Korean. Italian. Spanish. A foreign-language newspaper on the kitchen table. Ethnic music pouring out of the radio. Parents dream of trips to the Old Country. Grandmother, sitting silent in a corner of the living room, remembers glimpses of cemeteries in Queens. Thousands of headstones and crosses. Begs: Please, please, don’t put me there. Take me to China. Please. So, sit with your grandmother. Let her tell her story. All the grandmothers and grandfathers have stories and if you let them die without taking down their stories you are criminal. Your punishment is banishment from the school cafeteria.

Yeah. Haw, haw.

Parents and grandparents are suspicious of this sudden interest in their lives. Why you asking me so many questions? My life is nobody’s business, and what I did I did.

What did you do?

Nobody’s business. Is it that teacher again? Stickin’ his nose in?

No, Grandma. I just thought you’d want to tell me about your life so I can tell my kids and they can tell their kids and you won’t be forgotten.

You tell that teacher mind his own business. All these Americans the same, always asking questions. We got privacy in this family.

But, Grandma, this teacher is Irish.

Oh, yeah? Well, they’re the worst, always talking and singing about green things or getting shot and hung.

Others come in with stories of how they ask the elders one question about the past and the dam bursts and the old people won’t stop talking, going on till bedtime and beyond, expressing heartache and tears, yearnings for the Old Country, declaring love for America. Family relationships are rearranged. Grandpa isn’t taken for granted by sixteen-year-old Milton anymore.

In World War II Grandpa had adventures you wouldn’t believe. Like he fell in love with the daughter of an SS officer and nearly got killed for it. Grandpa escaped and had to hide in the whaddya-call-it of a cow in a garbage dump.

The hide?

Yeah. The only reason the hide was there was it was already half eaten by rats and he had to fight them off. Three days in the hide fighting off the rats till a Catholic priest saw him and hid him under his church till the Americans came a year later. All these years Grandpa sits in the corner and I never talked to him and he never talked to me. His English still isn’t good but that’s no excuse. Now I have him on my tape recorder and my parents, my parents for Christ’s sakes, are saying, Why bother?

Clarence was black, bright and diffident. He sat in the back of the room with three other black kids and never contributed to a class discussion. He and his friends had secret jokes and that annoyed me, that black cabal. At the same time I thought if I were black that is just where I’d be, in the back in a little ghetto of my own, mocking white teacher behind my hand.

David was black, bright and not a bit diffident. He sat over by the great windows with his white friends who followed him in and out of the classroom. When I asked the class a question his hand would go up and if he gave the wrong answer he’d shake his head in exasperation and say, Oh, spit. They tried to imitate him but no one could say, Oh, spit, like David. No one could create merriment like David. Students changed their programs just to be in a class with him. When he read his stories and essays on Fridays, they howled. Last Monday morning I got out of bed. Or didn’t get out of bed. I only dreamed I was getting out of bed and I couldn’t swear to you now that I was in or out of bed or dreaming about it or could I be dreaming about dreaming about it. This is all Mr. Lipper’s fault because he was going on in the philosophy class about the Chinese thing where a man dreams about being a butterfly or was it a butterfly dreaming about being a man. Or a butterfly. Oh, spit.

Everyone laughed, but not Clarence. His three friends laughed, though they looked a bit sheepish. I asked him if he’d like to read today. He shook his head. I told him this was a writing class where everyone was expected to contribute and if he was reluctant to read himself maybe someone else would read what he had written. His indifference irritated me. I wanted one big happy class of Davids saying, Oh, spit.

That day I had cafeteria patrol. Clarence sat against a wall with a group of black kids. They were laughing at his impersonation of Hitler: a hot dog clasped between lip and nose as a mustache; a bowl on his head; a salute and a Seig Heil with raised arm. The cafeteria Clarence was not the classroom Clarence.

David watched from another table, quiet, unsmiling.

After lunch I asked Clarence if he’d read someday. No, he had nothing to say.

Nothing?

Well, I could never be like David.

You don’t have to be like David.

You wouldn’t like it. The only stories I know are street stories. Things happen on my street.

So, write something about your street.

Can’t. Bad language and all that.

Clarence, tell me one word you know that I haven’t heard. One word, Clarence.

But I thought we were to use proper English.

Use any English you like as long as you get it on paper.

The following Friday he was ready. Other readers stood when they read, but he wanted to sit. He reminded me there would be street language and did I mind?

I said, Nothing human is alien to me, and then told him I couldn’t remember what Russian writer I was quoting.

He said, Oh, and started his account of how the mothers on his street dealt with a drug dealer. They warned him to get off the street but he told them he had to make a living and they should go to hell. Six mothers grabbed him one night and took him to a vacant lot. What they did to him there Clarence couldn’t say but there were rumors. He couldn’t repeat the rumors even if he was allowed and the language would be too raw for Stuyvesant students. All he could say was that one of the mothers called the ambulance so the guy wouldn’t die in the vacant lot. The cops came around, of course, but nobody knew anything and the cops understood. That’s the way it was on Clarence’s street.

Silence. Wow, wild cheers, applause. Clarence sat back in the chair and looked at David, whose clapping was the most enthusiastic of all. David didn’t say, Oh, spit. He knew this was Clarence’s moment.

They wanted to know who was that weird guy at the classroom door. He was chalk white, cadaverous and stoned. He could have called me Frank but Good afternoon, Mr. McCourt, showed respect for the teacher.

I stepped into the hallway for one of our brief occasional conferences where he explained he happened to be in this neighborhood and was thinking about me and wondering how I was doing. Also, he happened to be caught short for the necessities and wondered if I might have any spare change about me. He appreciated past kindnesses and even though he saw little possibility of repayment he would always remember me warmly. It was such a pleasure to visit me here and to see the youth of America, these beautiful children, in such capable and generous hands. He said thanks and he might see me soon at Montero’s Bar in Brooklyn, a few blocks from his apartment. In a few minutes the ten dollars I slipped him would be passed to a Stuyvesant Square drug dealer.