Teacher Man: A Memoir (9 page)

Tough guy Ken said, Naw, they never wait for you.

Excuse me, said Donna, putting on a sarcastic air. I’d wait for Ron if he went to jail for robbing a grammar book.

Stealing, I said. The English teacher is instructed by superiors to correct these little errors.

What? said Donna.

Not robbing. The proper word is stealing.

Yeah. OK.

I told myself, Shut up. Stop interrupting them. Who gives a fiddler’s fart about the difference between stealing and robbing. Let them talk.

Ken sneered at Donna. Yeah, sure. I bet you’d wait. All these guys got their asses shot off in France and Korea an’ next thing they’re gettin’ Dear John letters from their girlfriends and their wives. Oh, yeah.

I had to step in. All right, all right. We’re talking about John sentenced to Sing Sing for stealing a grammar book.

Ken sneered again. Yeah, they’re big on grammar in Sing Sing. All these killers sit around Death Row talkin’ grammar alla time.

Ken, I said. It’s not Ron. It’s John.

That’s right, said Donna. It’s John up there and he starts teaching everyone grammar and they all come out of Sing Sing talking like college professors and the government is so grateful to John they give him a job teaching grammar in McKee Vocational and Technical High School.

Ken wanted to respond but the class cheered and clapped and said, Right on, Donna, right on, and drowned him out.

English teachers say if you can teach grammar in a vocational high school you can teach anything anywhere. My classes listened. They participated. They didn’t know I was teaching grammar. Maybe they thought we were just making up stories about John in Sing Sing but when they left the classroom they looked at me in a different way. If teaching could be like this every day I might stay till I’m eighty. Old Silver Locks up there, a bit bent, but don’t underestimate him. Just ask him a question on the structure of the sentence and he’ll straighten his spine and tell you that story of how he brought psychology and grammar together way back in the middle of the twentieth century.

M
ikey Dolan handed me a note from his mother explaining his absence the day before:

Dear Mr. McCort, Mikey’s grandmother who is my mother eighty years of age fell down the stairs from too much coffee and I kept Mikey at home to take care of her and his baby sister so I could go to my job at the coffee shop in the ferry terminal. Please excuse Mikey and he’ll do his best in the future as he likes your class. Sincerely yours, Imelda Dolan. P.S. His grandmother is OK.

When Mikey handed me the note, so blatantly forged under my nose, I said nothing. I had seen him writing it at his desk with his left hand to disguise his own handwriting, which, because of his years in Catholic primary schools, was the best in the class. The nuns didn’t care whether you went to heaven or hell or married a Protestant as long as your handwriting was clear and handsome and if you were weak in that department they’d bend your thumbs back till you screamed for mercy and promised a calligraphy that would open the doors of heaven. Also, if you wrote with the left hand, it was clear proof you were born with a Satanic streak and it was the business of the sisters to bend your thumbs, even here in America, land of the free and home of the brave.

So, there was Mikey, laboring with his left hand to disguise his exquisite Catholic calligraphy. This was not his first time forging a note but I said nothing because most of the parental-excuse notes in my desk drawer were written by the boys and girls of McKee Vocational and Technical High School and if I were to confront each forger I’d be busy twenty-four hours a day. It would also lead to indignation, hurt feelings and strained relations between them and me.

I said to one boy, Did your mother really write this note, Danny?

He was defensive, hostile. Yeah, my mother wrote it.

It’s a nice note, Danny. She writes well.

McKee students were proud of their mothers and only a lout would let that compliment pass without thanks.

He said thanks, and returned to his seat.

I could have asked him if the note was his but I knew better. I liked him and didn’t want him sullen in the third row. He’d tell classmates I suspected him and that might make them sullen, too, because they’d been forging excuse notes since they learned to write and years later they don’t want to be bothered by teachers suddenly getting moral.

An excuse note is just a part of school life. Everyone knows they’re fiction, so what’s the big deal?

Parents getting kids out of the house in the morning have little time for writing notes that they know will wind up in the school garbage anyway. They’re so harried they’ll say, Oh, you need an excuse note for yesterday, honey? Write it yourself and I’ll sign it. They sign it without even looking at it and the sad part is they don’t know what they’re missing. If they could read those notes they’d discover their kids are capable of the finest American prose: fluent, imaginative, clear, dramatic, fantastic, focused, persuasive, useful.

I threw Mikey’s note into a desk drawer along with dozens of others: notes written on every size and color of paper, scrawled, scratched, stained. While my classes took a test that day I began to read notes I had only glanced at before. I made two piles, one for the genuine notes written by mothers, the other for forgeries. The second was the larger pile, with writing that ranged from imaginative to lunatic.

I was having an epiphany. I always wondered what an epiphany would be like and now I knew. I wondered also why I’d never had this particular epiphany before.

Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how they resist any kind of writing assignment in class or at home. They whine and say they’re busy and it’s hard putting two hundred words together on any subject. But when they forge these excuse notes they’re brilliant. Why? I have a drawer full of excuse notes that could be turned into an anthology of Great American Excuses or Great American Lies.

The drawer was filled with samples of American talent never mentioned in song, story or scholarly study. How could I have ignored this treasure trove, these gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity, crawthumping, self-pity, family problems, boilers exploding, ceilings collapsing, fires sweeping whole blocks, babies and pets pissing on homework, unexpected births, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages, robberies? Here was American high school writing at its best — raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying:

The stove caught fire and the wallpaper went up and the fire department kept us out of the house all night.

The toilet was blocked and we had to go down the street to the Kilkenny Bar where my cousin works to use their toilet but that was blocked too from the night before and you can imagine how hard it was for my Ronnie to get ready for school. I hope you’ll excuse him this one time and it won’t happen again. The man at the Kilkenny Bar was very nice on account of how he knows your brother, Mr. McCord.

Arnold doesn’t have his work today because he was getting off the train yesterday and the door closed on his school bag and the train took it away. He yelled to the conductor who said very vulgar things as the train drove away. Something should be done.

His sister’s dog ate his homework and I hope it chokes him.

Her baby brother peed on her story when she was in the bathroom this morning.

A man died in the bathtub upstairs and it overflowed and messed up all Roberta’s homework on the table.

Her big brother got mad at her and threw her essay out the window and it flew away all over Staten Island which is not a good thing because people will read it and get the wrong impression unless they read the ending which explains everything.

He had the composition you told him to write but he was going over it on the ferry and a big wind came and blowed it away.

We were evicted from our apartment and the mean sheriff said if my son kept yelling for his notebook he’d have us all arrested.

I imagined the writers of excuse notes on buses, trains, ferries, in coffee shops, on park benches, trying to discover new and logical excuses, trying to write as they thought their parents would.

They didn’t know that honest excuse notes from parents were usually dull. “Peter was late because the alarm clock did not go off.” A note like that didn’t even merit a place in the trash can.

Toward the end of the term I typed a dozen excuse notes on a stencil and distributed them to my two senior classes. They read, silently and intently.

Yo, Mr. McCourt, what’s this?

Excuse notes.

Whaddya mean, excuse notes? Who wrote them?

You did, or some of you did. I omitted the names to protect the guilty. They’re supposed to be written by parents, but you and I know the real authors. Yes, Mikey?

So, what are we supposed to do with these excuse notes?

We’ll read them aloud. I want you to realize this is the first class in the world ever to study the art of the excuse note, the first class, ever, to practice writing them. You are so lucky to have a teacher like me who has taken your best writing, the excuse note, and turned it into a subject worthy of study.

They’re smiling. They know. We’re in this together. Sinners.

Some of the notes on that sheet were written by people in this class. You know who you are. You used your imagination and didn’t settle for the old alarm-clock story. You’ll be making excuses the rest of your life and you’ll want them to be believable and original. You might even wind up writing excuses for your own children when they’re late or absent or up to some devilment. Try it now. Imagine you have a fifteen-year-old son or daughter who needs an excuse for falling behind in English. Let it rip.

They didn’t look around. They didn’t chew on their pens. They didn’t dawdle. They were eager, desperate to make up excuses for their fifteen-year-old sons and daughters. It was an act of loyalty and love and, you never know, some day they might need these notes.

They produced a rhapsody of excuses, ranging from a family epidemic of diarrhea to a sixteen-wheeler truck crashing into a house, to a severe case of food poisoning blamed on the McKee High School cafeteria.

They said, More, more. Could we do more?

I was taken aback. How do I handle this enthusiasm?

There was another epiphany or a flash of inspiration or illumination or something. I went to the board and wrote: “For Homework Tonight.”

That was a mistake. The word homework carries negative connotations. I erased it and they said, Yeah, yeah.

I told them, You can start it here in class and continue at home or on the other side of the moon. What I’d like you to write is…

I wrote it on the board: “An Excuse Note from Adam to God” or “An Excuse Note from Eve to God.”

The heads went down. Pens raced across paper. They could do this with one hand tied behind their backs. With their eyes closed. Secret smiles around the room. Oh, this is a good one, baby, and we know what’s coming, don’t we? Adam blames Eve. Eve blames Adam. They both blame God or Lucifer. Blame all around except for God, who has the upper hand and kicks them out of Eden so that their descendants wind up in McKee Vocational and Technical High School writing excuse notes for the first man and woman, and maybe God Himself needs an excuse note for some of His big mistakes.

The bell rang, and for the first time in my three and a half years of teaching, I saw high school students so immersed they had to be urged out of the room by friends hungry for lunch.

Yo, Lenny. Come on. Finish it in the cafeteria.

Next day everyone had excuse notes, not only from Adam and Eve but from God and Lucifer, some compassionate, some nasty. On behalf of Eve, Lisa Quinn defended her seduction of Adam on the grounds that she was tired of lying around Paradise doing nothing day in, day out. She was also tired of God sticking His nose into their business and never allowing them a moment of privacy. It was all right for Him. He could go off and hide behind a cloud somewhere and roar from time to time if He saw her or Adam go near his precious apple tree.

There are heated discussions about the relative guilt and sinfulness of Adam and Eve. It is agreed, unanimously, that Lucifer the Snake is a bastard, a son of a bitch and no good. No one is so brave as to say anything negative about God although there are hints and suggestions He could have been a little more understanding of the plight of the First Man and the First Woman.

Mikey Dolan says you could never talk like this in Catholic schools. Jesus (sorry), the nuns would pull you out of your seat by the ears and have your parents in to explain where you got ideas that were pure blasphemy.

Other boys in the class, non-Catholics, brag they’d never put up with that bullshit. They’d knock the nuns on their ass and how come all them Catholic boys were such sissies?

The discussion was drifting and I worried that details might get back to Catholic parents who would object to a mention of nuns being treated roughly. I asked them to think about anyone in the world at present or in history who could use a good excuse note.

I wrote the suggestions on the blackboard:

Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend.

I asked, How about Hitler himself?

Naw, naw, never. No excuses there.

But maybe he had a miserable childhood.

They wouldn’t agree. An excuse note for Hitler might be a great challenge for a writer but the excuse would never come from this class.

On the board: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in
1953
for treason.

How about excuse notes for draft dodgers?

Oh, yeah, Mr. McCourt. These guys have big excuse notes. They don’t wanna fight for their country but that’s not us.

On the board: Judas, Attila the Hun, Lee Harvey Oswald, Al Capone, all the politicians in America.

Yo, Mr. McCourt, could you put teachers up there? Not you but all these pain-in-the-ass teachers that be giving us tests every other day.

Oh, I couldn’t do that. They’re my colleagues.

OK. OK, we can write excuse notes for them explaining why they have to be like that.

Mr. McCourt, the principal is at the door.

My heart sinks.

Into the room the principal escorts the Staten Island Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Martin Wolfson. They don’t acknowledge my existence. They don’t apologize for interrupting the class. They walk up and down the aisles, peering at student papers. They pick them up for a closer look. Superintendent shows one to the principal. Superintendent frowns and purses his lips. Principal purses his lips. Class understands these are significant and important people. To show loyalty and solidarity they refrain from asking for the pass.

On their way out the principal frowns at me and whispers that the superintendent would like to see me next period even if they have to send someone to cover my class. I know. I know. I’ve done something wrong again. The shit will hit the fan and I don’t know why. There will be a negative letter in my file. You do your best. You take the ball on the hop. You try something that has never ever been done in the whole history of the world. You have your kids hopping with enthusiasm over the excuse notes. But now comes the reckoning, teacher man. Down the hallway to the principal’s office.

He is sitting at his desk. The way the superintendent stands still in the middle of the room reminds me of a repentant high school kid.

Ah, Mr…. Mr….

McCourt.

Come in. Come in. Only a minute. I just want to tell you that that lesson, that project, whatever the hell you were doing in there, was top-notch. Top-notch. That, young man, is what we need, that kind of down-to-earth teaching. Those kids were writing on a college level.

He turns to the principal and says, That kid writing an excuse note for Judas. Brilliant. But I have a reservation or two. I’m not sure if the writing of excuse notes for evil or criminal people is justifiable or wise, though on second thoughts, it’s what lawyers do, isn’t it? And from what I’ve seen in your class you might have some promising future attorneys in there. So, I just want to shake your hand and tell you don’t be surprised if there’s a letter in your file attesting to your energetic and imaginative teaching. Thank you and maybe you should divert them to more remote figures in history. An excuse note for Al Capone is a little risky. Thank you again.