T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Then a day came — drizzling, cold, the wet skin of dead leaves on the pavement and nothing happening anywhere in the world, absolutely nothing — when I was in the local record store turning over albums to study the bright glare of the product and skim the liner notes, killing time till the movie started in the mall. Something with a monumental bass line was playing over the speakers, something slow, delicious, full of hooks and grooves and that steamroller bass, and when I looked up vacantly to appreciate it, I found I was looking into the face of a guy I recalled vaguely from high school.

I saw in a glance he’d adopted the same look I had — the greasy suede jacket, bell-bottoms and Dingo boots, his hair gone long over the collar in back, the shadowy beginnings of a mustache — and that was all it took. “Aren’t you — Cole?” I said. “Cole, right?” And there he was, wrapping my hand in a cryptic soul shake, pronouncing my name without hesitation. We stood there catching up while people drifted by us and the bass pounded through the speakers. Where had he been? Korea, in the Army. Living with his own little mama-san, smoking opium every night till he couldn’t feel the floor under his futon. And I was a teacher now, huh? What a gas. And should he start calling me professor or what?

We must have talked for half an hour or so, the conversation ranging from people we knew in common to bands, drugs and girls we’d hungered for in school, until he said, “So what you doing tonight? Later, I mean?”

I was ashamed to tell him I was planning on taking in a movie alone, so I just shrugged. “I don’t know. Go home, I guess, and listen to records.”

“Where you living?”

Another shrug, as if to show it was nothing, a temporary arrangement till I could get on my feet, find my own place and begin my real life, the one I’d been apprenticing for all these years: “My parents’.”

Cole said nothing. Just gave me a numb look. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment, “I hear you. But listen, you want to go out, drive around, smoke a number? You smoke, right?”

I did. Or I had. But I had no connection, no stash of my own, no privacy. “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.”

“I might know where there’s a party,” he said, letting his cold blue eyes sweep the store as if the party might materialize in the far corner. “Or a bar,” he said, coming back to me, “I know this bar—”

I WAS LATE for homeroom in the morning. It mattered in some obscure way, in the long run, that is, because funding was linked to attendance and there had to be somebody there to check off the names each morning, but the school was in such an advanced state of chaos I don’t know if anyone even noticed. Not the first time, anyway. But homeroom was the least of my worries — it was mercifully brief and no one was expected to do anything other than merely exist for the space of ten minutes. It was the rest of the slate that was the trial, one swollen class after another shuffling into the room, hating school, hating culture, hating me, and I hated them in turn because they were brainless and uniform and they didn’t understand me at all. I was just like them, couldn’t they see that? I was no oppressor, no tool of the ruling class, but an authentic rebel, twenty-one years old and struggling mightily to grow a mustache because Ringo Starr had one and George Harrison and Eric Clapton and just about anybody else staring out at you from the front cover of a record album. But none of that mattered. I was the teacher, they were the students. Those were our roles, and they were as fixed and mutually exclusive as they’d been in my day, in my parents’ day, in George Washington’s day for all I knew.

From the minute the bell rang the rebellion began to simmer. Two or three times a period it would break out in riot and I would find myself confronting some wired rangy semi-lunatic who’d been left back twice and at sixteen already had his own mustache grown in as thick as fur, and there went the boundaries in a hard wash of threat and violence. Usually I’d manage to get the offender out in the hall, away from the eyes of the mob, and if the occasion called for it I would throw him against the wall, tear his shirt and use the precise language of the streets to let him know in excruciating detail just who was the one with the most at stake here. A minute later we’d return to the room, the victor and the vanquished, and the rest of them would feel something akin to awe for about ten minutes, and then it would all unwind again.

Stress. That’s what I’m talking about. One of the other new teachers — he looked to be thirty or so, without taste or style, a drudge who’d been through half a dozen schools already — used to get so worked up he’d have to dash into the lavatory and vomit between classes, and there was no conquering that smell, not even with a fistful of breath mints. The students knew it, and they came at him like hyenas piling on a corpse. He lasted a month, maybe less. This wasn’t pedagogy — it was survival. Still, everybody got paid and they were free to go home when the bell rang at the end of the day, and some of them — some of us — even got to avoid the real combat zone, the one they showed in living color each night on the evening news.

WHEN I GOT HOME that afternoon, Cole was waiting for me. He was parked out front of my house in his mother’s VW Bug, a cigarette clamped between his teeth as he beat at the dashboard with a pair of drumsticks, the radio cranked up high. I could make out the seething churn of his shoulders and the rhythmic bob of his head through the oval window set in the back of the Bug, the sticks flashing white, the car rocking on its springs, and when I killed the engine of my own car — a 1955 Pontiac that had once been blue, but was piebald now with whitish patches of blistered paint — I could hear the music even through the safety glass of the rolled-up window. “Magic Carpet Ride,” that was the song, with its insistent bass and nagging vocal, a tune you couldn’t escape on AM radio, and there were worse, plenty worse.

My first impulse was to get out of the car and slide in beside him — here was adventure, liberation, a second consecutive night on the town — but then I thought better of it. I was dressed in my school clothes — dress pants I wouldn’t wish on a corpse, button-down shirt and tie, a brown corduroy sport coat — and my hair was slicked down so tightly to my scalp it looked as if it had been painted on, a style I’d adopted to disguise the length and shagginess of it toward the end of appeasing the purse-mouthed principal and preserving my job. And life. But I couldn’t let Cole see me like this — what would he think? I studied the back of the Bug a moment, waiting for his eyes to leap to the rearview mirror, but he was absorbed, oblivious, stoned no doubt — and I wanted to be stoned too, share the sacrament, shake it out — but not like this, not in these clothes. What I finally did was ease out of the car, slip down the block and cut through the neighbors’ to our backyard, where the bulk of the house screened me from view.

I came up the cellar stairs from the garage, my father sunk into the recliner in the living room with the TV going — the news grim and grimmer — and my mother rattling things around in the kitchen. “You going to eat tonight?” she asked, just to say something. I ate every night — I couldn’t afford not to. She had a cigarette at her lips, a drink in her hand — scotch and water. There were dishes set out on the table, a pot of something going on the stove. “I’m making chili con carne.”

I had a minute, just a minute, no more, because I was afraid Cole would wake up to the fact that he was waiting for nothing and then it would be the room upstairs, the hypnosis of the records, the four walls and the sloping ceiling and a gulf of boredom so deep you could have sailed a fleet into it. “No,” I said, “I think I might go out.”