Frank McCourt - Teacher Man

I danced along the street, walked on air. Birds chirped on the elevated subway platform. People looked at me with smiles and respect. They could see I was a man with a teaching job. I wasn’t such an idiot after all. Oh, Lord. Oh, God. What would my family say? A teacher. The word will go around Limerick. Did you hear about Frankie McCourt? Jaysus, he’s a teacher over there in America. What was he when he left? Nothing. That’s what he was. Poor miserable bugger that looked like something the cat brought in. I’d call June. Tell her I was offered a teaching job already. In a high school. Not as high up as Norman the professor, but still… I stuck a dime into the phone box. It dropped. I put the phone down again. Calling her meant I needed to call her, and I didn’t need to need. I could live without her in the tub and the monkfish and the white wine. The train rumbled in. I wanted to tell people, sitting and standing, I was offered a teaching job. They’d smile up from their newspapers. No, no call to June. Let her stay with Norm, who destroyed monkfish and knew nothing about wine, depraved Norm who couldn’t take June as she was. No, I’d make my way downtown to Port Warehouses, ready to work till my teacher’s license arrived. My teacher’s license. I’d like to wave it from the top of the Empire State Building.

When I called about the teaching job the school said sorry, the kindly chairman had passed away and, sorry, no positions were available and good luck in my search. Everyone said as long as I had the license I’d have no trouble finding a job. Who the hell would want a lousy job like that? Long hours, low pay and what gratitude do you get for dealing with the brats of America? Which is why the country was crying out for teachers.

School after school told me, Sorry, your accent’s gonna be a problem. Kids, you know, like to mimic, and we’d have Irish brogues all over the school. What would parents say when their kids come home sounding like, you know, like Barry Fitzgerald? You unnerstand our position? Assistant principals wondered how I managed to get a license with that brogue. Didn’t the Board of Education have any standards anymore?

I was disheartened. No room for me in the great American Dream. I returned to the waterfront, where I felt more comfortable.

4

Hey, Mr. McCourt, did you ever do real work, not teaching, but, you know, real work?

Are you joking? What do you call teaching? Look around this room and ask yourself if you’d like to get up here and face you every day. You. Teaching is harder than working on docks and warehouses. How many of you have relatives working along the waterfront?

Half the class, mostly Italian, a few Irish.

Before I came to this school I worked on Manhattan, Hoboken and Brooklyn piers, I said. One boy said his father knew me from Hoboken.

I told them, After college I passed the exams for the teacher’s license but I didn’t think I was cut out for the life of a teacher. I knew nothing about American teenagers. Wouldn’t know what to say to you. Dockside work was easier. Trucks backed in. We swung our hooks. Haul, hoist, pull, push. Stack on pallets. Forklift slides in, lifts the load, reverses, stacks the load in the warehouse, and back to the platform. You worked with your body and your brain had a day off. You worked eight to noon, had a foot-long sandwich and a quart of beer for lunch, sweated it off from one to five, headed home, hungry for dinner, ready for a movie and a few beers in a Third Avenue bar.

Once you got the hang of it you moved like a robot. You kept up with the strongest man on the platform and size didn’t matter. You used your knees to save your back. If you forgot, platform men would bark, Chrissakes, you got a rubber spine or sumpin’? You learned to use the hook different ways with different loads: boxes, sacks, crates, furniture, great chunks of greasy machinery. A sack of beans or peppers has a mind of its own. It can change shape one way or another and you have to go with it. You looked at the size, shape and weight of an item and you knew in a second how to lift and swing it. You learned the ways of truckers and their helpers. Independent truckers were easy. They worked for themselves, set their own pace. Corporation truckers prodded you to hurry up, man, lift the damn load, let’s go, I wanna get outa heah. Truckers’ helpers were surly no matter who they worked for. They played little games to test you and throw you off, especially if they thought you were just off the boat. If you worked close to the edge of pier or platform they’d suddenly drop their side of the sack or crate hard enough to pull an arm from its socket and you learned to stay away from the edge of anything. Then they’d laugh and say, Faith an’ begorrah, Paddy, or Top o’ the mornin’ with a fake Irish accent. You’d never complain to a boss about any of this. He’d say, Whassa matter, kid? Can’t you take a little joke? Complaining only made matters worse. The word might get to a trucker or a helper and he might accidentally bump you off the platform or even the pier. A big new man from Mayo took offense when someone put a rat’s tail in his sandwich and when he threatened to kill whoever did it he was accidentally toppled into the Hudson and everyone laughed before they threw him a line and hauled him out dripping with river scum. He learned to laugh and they stopped bothering him. You can’t work the piers with a long face. After a while they stop picking on you and the word goes around that you know how to take your lumps. Eddie Lynch, the platform boss, told me I was a tough little mick and that meant more to me than the day I was promoted to corporal in the United States Army because I knew I wasn’t that tough, just desperate.

I told my classes I was so uncertain about teaching I thought of simply spending my life at Port Warehouses, big fish, small pond. My bosses would be so impressed with my college degree they’d hire me as checker and promote me to an office job where I’d surely rise in the world. I might become boss of all checkers. I knew how it was with warehouse office workers or office workers anywhere. They pushed papers around, yawned, looked out the window at us slaving away on the platform.

I did not tell my classes about Helena, the telephone woman who offered more than doughnuts in the back of the warehouse. I was tempted till Eddie said if you even brushed against her you’d wind up in St. Vincent’s Hospital with a dripping dick.

What I missed about the piers was the way people spoke their minds and didn’t give a shit. Not like the college professors who would tell you, On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no, and you didn’t know what to think. It was important to know what professors thought so you could give it back to them at exam time. In the warehouses everyone insulted everyone else in a joking way till someone stepped over the line and the hooks came out. It was remarkable when that happened. You could see from the way the laughs faded and the smiles got tighter that some bigmouth was getting too close to the bone and you knew the next thing was the hook or the fist.

Work stopped when fights broke out on piers and loading docks. Eddie told me men got tired of lifting and hauling and stacking, same damn thing year in year out, and that’s why they insulted and pushed one another to the edge of a real fight. They had to do something to break the routine and the long silent hours. I told him I didn’t mind working all day and not saying a word and he said, Yeah, but you’re peculiar. You’re only here a year an’ a half. If you did this fifteen years your mouth would be goin’ too. Some of these guys fought in Normandy and the Pacific and what are they now? Donkeys. Donkeys with purple hearts already. Pathetic donkeys in a dead end. They get drunk over on Hudson Street and brag about their medals as if the world gives a shit. They’ll tell you they’re working for the kids, the kids, the kids. A better life for the kids. Jesus! I’m glad I never got married.