Frank McCourt - 'Tis

When I meet Andy Peters for a beer I tell him I can’t get a teaching job till I fill out and look older and talk like an American and he says, Shit. Forget the teaching. Go into business. Specialize in something. Hubcaps. Corner the market. Get a job in a garage and learn all you can about hubcaps. People come into the garage and hubcaps are mentioned and everyone turns to you. A hubcap crisis, you know? where a hubcap falls off, flies through the air and decapitates a model housewife and all the TV stations call you for your expert opinion. Then you go out on your own. McCourt’s Hubcap Emporium. Foreign and Domestic Hubcaps New and Old. Antique Hubcaps for the Discerning Collector.

Is he serious?

Maybe not about hubcaps. He says, Look at what they do in the academic world. You corner a half-acre of human knowledge, Chaucer’s phallic imagery in “The Wife of Bath,” or Swift’s devotion to shit, and you build a fence around it. Decorate the fence with footnotes and bibliographies. Post a sign, Keep Off, Trespassers Will Lose Their Tenure. I’m engaged myself in a noble search for a Mongolian philosopher. I thought of cornering the market on an Irish philosopher but all I could find was Berkeley and they’ve got their claws into him already. One Irish philosopher, for Christ’s sakes. One. Don’t you people ever ponder? So I’m stuck with the Mongolians or the Chinese and I’ll probably have to learn Mongolian or Chinese or whatever the hell they speak there and when I find him he’ll be my very own. When was the last time you heard a Mongolian philosopher mentioned at those East Side cocktail parties you like so much? I’ll get my Ph.D., write a few articles on my Mongolian in obscure scholarly journals. I’ll deliver learned lectures to drunken Orientalists at MLA conventions and wait for the job offers to pour in from the Ivy League and its cousins. I’ll get a tweed jacket, a pipe and a pompous manner, and faculty wives will be throwing themselves at me, begging me to recite, in English, erotic Mongolian verses smuggled into the country up the ass of a yak or a panda at the Bronx Zoo. And I’ll tell you another thing, piece advice in case you go to graduate school. When you take a course always find out what the professor wrote his doctoral dissertation on and give it back to him. If the guy specializes in Tennyson’s water images then pour it all over him. If the guy specializes in George Berkeley give him the sound of one hand clapping while a tree falls in the forest. How do you think I got through these fucking philosophy courses at NYU? If the guy’s a Catholic I give him Aquinas. Jewish? I give him Maimonides. Agnostic? You never know what to tell an agnostic. You never know where you stand with them though you can always try old Nietzsche. You can bend that old fucker any way you like.

Andy tells me Bird was the greatest American who ever lived, right up there with Abraham Lincoln and Max Kiss, the guy who invented Ex-Lax. Bird should be given the Nobel Prize and a seat in the House of Lords.

Who’s Bird?

For Christ’s sakes, McCourt. I worry about you. You tell me you love jazz and you don’t know from Bird. Charlie Parker, man. Mozart. You listenin’ to me? You dig? Mozart, for Christ’s sakes. That’s Charlie Parker.

What does Charlie Parker have to do with teaching jobs or hubcaps or Maimonides or anything else?

You see, McCourt, that’s your problem, always looking for relevance, a sucker for logic. That’s why the Irish don’t have philosophers. Lotta goddam barroom theologians and shithouse lawyers. Loosen up, man. Thursday night I finish early and we’ll take a trip to Fifty-second Street for a little music. Okay?

We go from club to club till we come to one place where a black woman in a white dress croaks into a microphone and holds on to it as if she were on a swaying ship. Andy whispers, That’s Billie and it’s a disgrace they’re letting her make an ass of herself up there.

He marches to the stage and tries to take her hand to help her down but she curses him and swings at him till she stumbles and falls off the stage. Another man leaves his bar stool and leads her out the door and I know from the clear sounds between her croaks that was Billie Holiday, the voice I heard on the Armed Forces Network when I was a boy in Limerick, a pure voice telling me, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.”

Andy says, That’s what happens.

What do you mean, that’s what happens?

I mean that’s what happens, that’s all. Jesus, do I have to write a book?

How is it you know Billie Holiday?

I have loved Billie Holiday since I was a child. I come to Fifty-second Street to catch glimpses of her. I would hold her coat. I would scour her toilet bowl. I would run her bathwater. I would kiss the ground she walks on. I told her I got a dishonorable discharge for not fucking a French sheep and she thought it should be made into a song. I don’t know what God intends to do with me in the next life but I’m not going unless I can sit between Billie and Bird for eternity.

In the middle of March 1958, there’s another notice in the paper, Vacancy for English teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Staten Island. The assistant principal, Miss Seested, examines my license and takes me to see the principal, Moses Sorola, who doesn’t move from his chair behind the desk where he squints at me through a cloud of smoke drifting from his nose and from the cigarette in his hand. He says this is an emergency situation. The teacher I’d be replacing, Miss Mudd, has made an abrupt decision to retire in the middle of the term. He says teachers like that are inconsiderate and make life hard for a principal. He doesn’t have a full English program for me, that I’d have to teach three classes in Social Studies every day, two in English.

But I don’t know anything about Social Studies.

He puffs and squints and says, Don’t worry about it, and takes me to the office of the Academic Chairman, Acting, who says I’d be teaching three classes of Economic Citizenship and here’s the textbook, Your World and You. Mr. Sorola smiles through the smoke and says, Your World and You. That should cover just about everything.

I tell him I know nothing about economics or citizenship and he says, Just stay a few pages ahead of the kids. Everything you tell them will be news. Tell them this is 1958, tell them their names, tell them they live on Staten Island, and they’ll be surprised and grateful for the information. By the end of the year even your name will be news to them. Forget your college literature courses. This is not high IQ plateau.

He takes me to see Miss Mudd, the teacher I’m replacing. When he opens the classroom door boys and girls are leaning out the windows calling to others across the school yard. Miss Mudd sits at her desk, reading travel brochures, ignoring the paper airplane that zooms over her head.

Miss Mudd has retired.

Mr. Sorola leaves the room and she says, That’s right, young man. I can’t wait to get outa here. What’s this? Wednesday? Friday’s my last day and you’re welcome to this looney bin. Thirty-two years I’ve been at this and who cares? The kids? Parents? Who, young man, gives a shit, forgive my French? We teach their brats and they pay us like dishwashers. What was the year? Nineteen and twenty-six. Calvin Coolidge was in. I came in. I worked right through him and the Depression man, Hoover, and Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower. Look out that window. You got a good view of New York Harbor from here and Monday morning if these kids aren’t driving you crazy you’ll see a big ship sailing by and that’ll be me on the deck waving, son, waving and smiling, because there’s two things I never want to see again in my life, with God’s help, Staten Island and kids. Monsters, monsters. Look at ’em. You’d be better off working with chimpanzees in the Bronx Zoo. What’s this? Nineteen and fifty-eight. How did I ever last? You’d need to be Joe Louis. So, good luck, son. You’re gonna need it.