Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Bradford. Surely he wouldn’t mind doing me a little favor.

I knocked on his door and he opened it with his usual grimness. Yes?

Bradford, I have a bit of a crisis upstairs.

Why are you wrapped up in that electric blanket?

That’s what I came to talk to you about. They cut off my electricity and I have no heat but this blanket and I wondered if I dropped a long extension cord out my window you might take it and plug it in and I’d have electricity till I can pay my bill which I promise you will be very soon.

I could tell he didn’t want to do it but he gave a little nod and pulled in my extension cord when I dropped it. I knocked on the floor three times hoping he’d understand that I was saying thank you but there was no response and whenever I saw him on the stairs he barely acknowledged me and I knew he was brooding on the extension cord. The Electrical Shop teacher at McKee told me an arrangement like this would cost a few measly pennies a day and couldn’t understand why anyone would resent it. He said I could offer the cheap bastard a few dollars for the great inconvenience of having a cord plugged into an outlet but people like that were so miserable anyway it wasn’t the money. It was the way they had of not being able to say no so that that no turned into acid in their guts and destroyed their lives.

I thought the Electrical Shop teacher was exaggerating till I noticed Bradford was becoming more and more hostile. He used to smile a little or nod or grunt something. Now he passes me without a word and I’m worried because I still don’t have the money for the bills and I don’t know how long our arrangement will last. It makes me so nervous I always turn on the radio to make sure I can take a bath and have the blanket warming up.

My cord stayed in his outlet for two months and then on a bitter night at the end of April there was an act of treachery. I turned on the radio, laid my electric blanket on a chair to warm up, put towel, cap and gloves on the blanket so that they’d be warm too, filled the tub, soaped myself and lay back listening to the Symphonie fantastique of Hector Berlioz and in the middle of the second movement when I’m ready to float out of the tub with the excitement everything stops, the radio is off, the light is out and I know the blanket will grow cold on the back of the chair.

And I knew what he did, this Bradford, pulled the cord on a man in a tub of hot water in a cold-water flat. I knew I could never have done that to him or anyone else. I might do it to someone with central heating but never to a fellow cold-water-flat tenant, never.

I leaned over the side of the tub and knocked on the floor hoping he might have made a mistake, that he’d have the decency to plug me back in, but no, not a sound from him and no radio, no light. The water was still warm so I could lie there awhile thinking about the villainy of the human race, how a man with a degree from Yale could deliberately take hold of an electric cord and yank it from the outlet leaving me to freeze to death upstairs. One act of treachery like that is enough to make you give up hope and think of revenge.

No, it wasn’t revenge I wanted. It was electricity and I’d have to find another way to bring Bradford to his senses. There was a spoon and there was a long piece of string and if I tied string to spoon I could open the window and dangle spoon so that it tapped against Bradford’s window and he might understand that I was up there at the other end of the string, tapping, tapping for the gift of electricity. He might be annoyed and ignore my spoon but I remembered how he once told me that a dripping faucet was enough to keep him awake all night and if necessary I’d tap on his window with my spoon till he could stand it no longer. He could have climbed the stairs and banged on my door and told me to stop but I knew he could never be that direct and I knew I had him cornered. I felt sorry for him and the way his mother screamed for six months with bone cancer and I’d try to make all this up to him someday but this was a crisis and I needed my radio, my light, my electric blanket or I’d have to call Alberta for a night’s lodgings and if she asked me why I could never tell her about Bradford plugging me in all these weeks. She’d get into a state of righteous indignation, the New England kind, and tell me I should be paying my bills and not tapping on people’s windows with spoons on bitter nights, especially the windows of people whose mothers had died screaming of bone cancer. Then I’d tell her there was no connection between my spoon and Bradford’s dead mother and that would lead to more disagreement and a fight and I’d have to storm out, back to my flat in the cold and the dark.

It was a Friday night, his night off from the bank, and I knew he couldn’t escape by going to work. I imagined him downstairs with the cord in his hand trying to decide what to do with the spoon at his window. He could have gone out but where would he go? Who would want to have a beer with him in a bar and listen to how his mother died screaming? On top of that he’d probably tell the world someone upstairs was tormenting him with a spoon and anyone in a bar with a beer would move away from him.

I tapped on and off for a few hours and and suddenly there was light and music from the radio. Symphonie fantastique was long over and that irritated me but I turned the dial up on the electric blanket, put on cap and gloves and got back into bed with Anna Karenina which I couldn’t read because of the darkness in my head over Bradford and his poor mother in Colorado. If my mother were dying of bone cancer in Limerick and someone upstairs tormented me with a spoon at my window I’d go up and kill him. I felt so guilty now I thought of knocking on Bradford’s door and telling him, I’m sorry over the spoon and your poor mother and you can pull the plug, but I was so warm and cozy in the bed I fell asleep.

The following week I met him loading his things into a van. I asked if I could help and all he said was, Prick. He moved out but he left me plugged in and I had weeks of electricity till I blew the cord with an electric heater and had to go to Beneficial Finance Company for a loan to pay my electricity bills so that I wouldn’t freeze to death.

39

The old-timers in the teachers’ cafeteria say the classroom is a battleground, that teachers are warriors bringing the light to these damn kids who don’t want to learn, who just want to sit on their asses and talk about movies and cars and sex and what they’re gonna do Saturday night. That’s the way it is in this country. We’ve got free education and no one wants it. Not like Europe where there’s respect for teachers. Parents of kids in this school don’t care because they never went to high school themselves. They were too busy struggling with the Depression and fighting wars, World War II and Korea. Then you have all these bureaucrats who never liked teaching in the first place, all these goddam principals and assistant principals and chairmen who got out of the classroom as fast as their little legs could carry them and now spend their lives harassing the classroom teacher.

Bob Bogard is at the time clock. Ah, Mr. McCourt, would you like to go for some soup?

Soup?

He has a little smile and I know he means something else. Yes, Mr. McCourt. Soup.

We walk down the street and turn into the Meurot Bar.

Soup, Mr. McCourt. Would you like a beer?

We settle on our bar stools and drink beer after beer. It’s Friday and other teachers drift in and the talk is kids, kids, kids and the school, and I learn that in every school there are two worlds, the world of the classroom teacher and the world of the administrator and supervisor, that these worlds are forever at sword’s point, that when anything goes wrong the teacher is the scapegoat.