Frank McCourt - 'Tis

At dawn I sit in a coffee shop on Hudson Street with longshoremen, truck drivers, warehousemen, checkers. Why shouldn’t I live like them? They work their eight hours a day, read the Daily News, follow baseball, have a few beers, go home to their wives, raise their kids. They’re paid better than teachers and they don’t have to worry about Your World and You and sex-crazed teenagers who don’t want to be in your class. In twenty years workingmen can retire and sit in the Florida sun, waiting for lunch and dinner. I could call McKee Vocational and Technical High School and tell them, Forget it, I want an easier life. I could tell Mr. Sorola they’re looking for a checker at the Baker and Williams Warehouse, a job I could easily get with my college degree, and all I’d have to do the rest of my life is stand on the platform with manifests on a clipboard checking what comes and what goes.

Then I think of what Mike Small would say if I told her, No, I didn’t go to McKee High School today. I took a job as checker with Baker and Williams. She’d have a tantrum. She’d say, All that work in college to be a goddam checker down at the docks? She might throw me out of the house and return to the arms of Bob the football player and I’d be alone in the world, forced to go to Irish dances and take home girls reserving their bodies for the wedding night.

I’m ashamed of myself that I’m going to my first day of teaching in this condition, hung over from the White Horse Tavern, jumping out of my skin from seven cups of coffee this morning, my eyes like two piss holes in the snow, two days of black hair sprouting on my face, my tongue furry from lack of a toothbrush, my heart banging in my chest from fatigue and fear of dozens of American adolescents. I’m sorry I ever left Limerick. I could be back there with a pensionable job in the post office, postman respected by one and all, married to a nice girl named Maura, raising two children, confessing my sins every Saturday, in a state of grace every Sunday, a pillar of the community, a credit to my mother, dying in the bosom of Mother Church, mourned by a large circle of friends and relations.

There’s a longshoreman at a table in the diner telling his friend how his son is graduating from St. John’s University in June, how he worked his ass off all these years to send the kid to college and he’s the luckiest man in the world because his son appreciates what he’s doing for him. Graduation Day he’ll give himself a pat on the back for surviving a war and sending a son to college, a son who wants to be a teacher. His mother is so proud of him because she always wanted to be a teacher herself but never had the chance and this is the next best thing. Graduation Day they’ll be the proudest parents in the world and that’s what it’s all about, right?

If this longshoreman and Horace down at Port Warehouses knew what I was thinking they’d have no patience with me. They’d tell me how lucky I am to have a college degree and a chance to teach.

The school secretary tells me see Miss Seested who tells me see Mr. Sorola who tells me see the chairman of the Academic Department who says I have to check in with the school secretary to get my time card and why were they sending me to him in the first place?

The school secretary says, Oh, back already? and shows me how to dip my time card into the time clock, how to place it in my slot on the In side and how to move it to the Out side. She says that if I have to leave the building for any reason whatsoever, even during my lunch period, I’m to sign out and back in with her because you never know when you might be needed, never know when there might be an emergency and you can’t have teachers wandering in and out, back and forth at will. She tells me see Miss Seested who looks surprised. Oh, you’re back, she says, and gives me a red Delaney book, the attendance book for my classes. She says, Of course you know how to use this, and I pretend I do for fear of being thought stupid. She sends me back to the school secretary for my homeroom attendance book and I have to lie to the secretary, too, and tell her I know how to use it. She says if I have any problems ask the kids. They know more than the teachers.

I’m trembling from the hangover and the coffee and the fear of what lies ahead of me, five classes, a homeroom, a Building Assignment, and I wish I were on the ferry to Manhattan where I could sit at a desk in a bank and make decisions about loans.

Students jostle me in the hallway. They push and scuffle and laugh. Don’t they know I’m a teacher? Can’t they see under my arm two attendance books and Your World and You ? The schoolmasters in Limerick would never tolerate this carry-on. They’d march up and down the halls with sticks and if you didn’t walk properly you’d get that stick across the backs of your legs so you would.

And what am I supposed to do with this class, the first in my whole teaching career, students of Economic Citizenship, pelting each other with chalk, erasers, bologna sandwiches? When I walk in and place my books on the teacher’s desk they’ll surely stop throwing things. But they don’t. They ignore me and I don’t know what to do till the words come out of my mouth, the first words I ever utter as a teacher, Stop throwing sandwiches. They look at me as if to say, Who’s this guy?

The bell signals the start of the class and the students slide into their seats. They whisper to each other, they look at me, laugh, whisper again and I’m sorry I ever set foot on Staten Island. They turn to look at the blackboard along the side of the room where someone has printed in a large scrawl, Miss Mudd Is Gone. The Old Bag Reetired, and when they see me looking at it they whisper and laugh again. I open my copy of Your World and You as if to start a lesson till a girl raises her hand.

Yes?

Teacher, ain’tcha gonna take the attendance?

Oh, yes, I am.

That’s my job, teacher.

When she sways up the aisle to my desk the boys make woo woo sounds and, Whaddya doin’ the rest of my life, Daniela? She comes behind my desk, faces the class, and when she leans over to open the Delaney book it’s easy to see her blouse is too small and that starts the woo woo all over again.

She smiles because she knows what the psychology books told us at NYU, that a fifteen-year-old girl is years ahead of a boy that age and if they want to shower her with woo woos it means nothing. She whispers to me she’s already going out with a senior, a football player up at Curtis High School, where all the kids are smart, not a bunch of auto mechanic grease monkeys like the ones in this class. The boys know this, too, and that’s why they pretend to clutch their hearts and faint when she calls out their names from the Delaney cards. She takes her time with the attendance book and I’m a fool standing off to the side, waiting. I know she’s teasing the boys and I wonder if she’s toying with me, too, showing her control of the class with a well-filled blouse and keeping me from whatever I might want to do with Economic Citizenship. When she calls the name of someone who was absent yesterday she demands a parent’s note and if the absentee doesn’t have it she reprimands him and writes N on the card. She reminds the class that five Ns could get you an F on your report card and turns to me, Isn’t that right, teacher?

I don’t know what to say. I nod. I blush.

Another girl calls out, Hey, teach, you cute, and I blush harder than ever. The boys roar and slap the desks with their open palms and the girls smile at each other. They say, You crazy, Yvonne, to the one who called me cute, and she tells them, But he is, he’s really cute, and I wonder if the redness will ever leave my face, if I’ll ever be able to stand here and talk about Economic Citizenship, if I’ll be forever at the mercy of Daniela and Yvonne.