Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Next morning Mam called and said, He went pure mad, so he did.

What did he do?

You brought him home drunk as a lord.

He wasn’t drunk. He had a few beers.

He had more than that and I was here by myself with Malachy gone into Manhattan. A bottle of whiskey he had, your father, that he brought from the ship and I had to call the cops and he’s gone now, bag and baggage, and sailed away today on the Queen Mary because I called Cunard and they told me, oh, yes, they had him on board and they’d be watching closely for any signs of the lunacy he came with.

What did he do?

She wouldn’t tell me and she didn’t have to because it was easy to guess. He probably tried to get into bed with her and that was not part of her dream. She hinted and suggested that if I hadn’t spent hours with him in saloons he would have behaved himself and wouldn’t be on the Queen Mary now heading out into the Atlantic. I told her his drinking wasn’t my fault but she was sharp with me. Last night was the last straw, she said, and you were part of it.

47

For teachers Fridays are bright. You leave the school with a bag filled with papers to read and correct, books to read. This weekend you will surely catch up with all those uncorrected, unmarked papers. You don’t want to let them pile up in the closets like Miss Mudd so that decades hence a young teacher will pounce on them to keep his classes busy. You will take the papers home, pour a glass of wine, stack Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins and Hector Berlioz on the phonograph and try to read a hundred and fifty student compositions. You know that some don’t care what you do with their work as long as you give them a decent grade so that they can pass and get on with real life in their shops. Others fancy themselves as writers and want their papers back corrected and graded high. The class Romeos would like you to comment on their papers and read them aloud so that they can bask in the admiring glances of the girls. The ones who don’t care are sometimes interested in the same girls and verbal threats are passed from desk to desk because the ones who don’t care are weak in written expression. If a boy is a good writer you have to be careful about praising him too much because of the danger of accidents on the stairs. The ones who don’t care hate goody-goodies.

You intend to go straight home with your bag but you then discover Friday afternoon is the time for beer and teacher enlightenment. An occasional teacher might say he has to go home to his wife till he finds Bob Bogard standing by the time clock to remind us of first things first, that the Meurot Bar is a few steps away, next door in fact, and what harm would there be in one beer, one? Bob is not married and may not understand the dangers for a man who might go beyond the one beer, a man who might have to face the wrath of a wife who has cooked a fine Friday fish and now sits in the kitchen watching the grease congeal.

We stand at the Meurot Bar and order our beers. There is teacher small talk. When there’s a mention of good-looking women on our staff or even nubile students we roll our eyes. What we wouldn’t do if we were high school kids nowadays. We talk tough at the mention of troublesome boys. One more word out of that goddam kid and he’s gonna beg for a transfer. We unite in our hostility to authority, all the people who emerge from their offices to supervise and observe us and tell us what to do and how to do it, people who spent as little time as possible in the classroom themselves and don’t know their ass from their elbow about teaching.

A young teacher might drop in, just graduated from college, newly licensed. The drone of university professors and the chatter from college cafeterias is still in his ears and if he wants to discuss Camus and Sartre and how existence precedes essence or vice versa he’ll be talking to himself in the mirror of the Meurot Bar.

None of us had followed the Great American Path, elementary school, high school, college, and into teaching at twenty-two. Bob Bogard fought in the war in Germany and was probably wounded. He won’t tell you. Claude Campbell served in the navy, graduated from college in Tennessee, published a novel when he was twenty-seven, teaches English, has six children with his second wife, took a master’s degree at Brooklyn College with a thesis, Ideational Trends in the American Novel, fixes everything in his house, wiring, plumbing, carpentry. I look at him and think of Goldsmith’s lines on the village schoolmaster, “And all around the wonder grew/That one small head could carry all he knew.” And Claude hasn’t even reached the age of Christ at his crucifixion, thirty-three.

When Stanley Garber drops in for a Coke he tells us he often feels he made a mistake by not going into college teaching where you amble through life thinking you shit cream puffs and suffering if you have to teach more than three hours a week. He says he could have written a bullshit Ph.D. dissertation on the bilabial fricative in the middle period of Thomas Chatterton who died when he was seventeen because that’s the kind of crap that goes on in colleges while the rest of us hold the front lines with kids who won’t get their heads out from between their thighs and supervisors content to keep their heads up their asses.

There will be trouble tonight in Brooklyn. I’m supposed to have dinner with Alberta at an Arabic restaurant, the Near East, bring your own wine, but it’s six going on seven and if I call now she’ll complain she’s been waiting for hours, that I’m just an Irish drunk like my father and she doesn’t care if I stay on Staten Island the rest of my life, good-bye.

So I won’t call. Better not to. No use having two rows, one on the phone now, another when I get home. It’s easier to sit at the bar where’s there’s a glow and important matters are discussed.

We agree that teachers are sniped at from three fronts, parents, kids, supervisors, and you either have to be diplomatic or tell them all kiss your ass. Teachers are the only professionals who have to respond to bells every forty-five minutes and come out fighting. All right, class, sit down. Yes, you, sit down. Open your notebooks, that’s right, your notebooks, am I speaking a foreign language, kid? Don’t call you kid? Okay, I won’t call you kid. Just sit down. Report card grades are just around the corner and I can put you on the welfare rolls. All right, bring in your father, bring in your mother, bring in your whole damn tribe. You don’t have a pen, Pete? Okay, here’s a pen. Good-bye, pen. No, Phyllis, you can’t have the pass. I don’t care if you’re having a hundred periods, Phyllis, because what you really want to do is meet Eddie and disappear into the basement where your future could be determined by one smooth panty drop and one swift upward stroke from Eddie’s impatient member, the start of a little nine-month adventure that will end with you squawking Eddie better marry you, the shotgun aimed at his lower frontal region and his dreams dead. So I’m saving you, Phyllis, you and Eddie and no, you don’t have to thank me.

This is talk along the bar that will never be heard in the classroom unless a teacher loses his wits entirely. You know you can never deny the lavatory pass to a menstrual Phyllis for fear of being dragged before the highest court in the land where the black robes, all men, will excoriate you for insulting Phyllis and the future mothers of America.

There is talk along the bar about certain efficient teachers and we agree we don’t like them and the way their classes are so organized they hum from bell to bell. In these classes there are monitors for every activity, every part of the lesson. There is the monitor who goes immediately to the board to write the number and title of the day’s lesson, Lesson #32, Strategies in Dealing with the Dangling Participle. Efficient teachers are known for their strategies, the darling new word at the Board of Education.