I Am Max Lamm (4 page)

‘
It’s called the Doppler effect
.’

Correct. Lamm heard those words spoken aloud, and he jolted. The park’s most terrifying sound yet. Terrifying not for a reason concerning elementary physics, nor the manhunt for a murderer, but because that simple explanatory sentence – ‘
It’s called the Doppler effect
’ – was spoken, unmistakably, by a man who had died ten years ago.

The suicidal absurdity of regarding anything but this moment! Of considering anything but the danger! Yet the words in Lamm’s ears
–
‘
It’s called the Doppler effect
’ – were too recognizable; that blunt voice belonged to his favourite high school teacher, Mr Lewski.

Mr Lewski, who never woke up the last day of semester in November 1995.

Your dead tenth-grade teacher returns to life, the night that yours disintegrates! At 5.03 a.m. in a wet bush while you’re hunted like a fox. Hyde Park is Mr Lewski’s posthumous classroom. His students the squirrels, his blackboard a blackberry bush.

There!

Beneath the gargantuan weeping willow, pixelated by the moonlight’s sheen – or Lamm’s hallucinatory optic nerve? – was Lewski. Lewski’s ghost. Or in your mind’s eye, the mirage of a ghost? Whatever it was, it
was
Mr Lewski: the deceased intellectual battering ram of a tenth-grade teacher. There, standing in the impoverished grass shaded by the willow’s mournful dreadlocks, was Mr Lewski who had been gone ten years!

The teacher’s ghost shimmered in his prickly white beard, horn-rimmed glasses, scuffed loafers and the too-big herringbone suit he wore stiff on the dais at speech nights and stiff inside a wooden box in November 1995, dead at sixty-three from a carcinoma the same week that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated (until Rabbi Gringlass interceded at the funeral home to ensure that Lewski was instead buried in
tachrichim
, the Jewish burial shrouds of white linen and nothing else). Mr Lewski with the bombshell daughter Romy, the one-in-a-hundred natural blonde faux-
shiksa
, whose beach-bunny looks – for a Jewish girl the genetic lightning strike of golden hair and Russ Meyer tits that, people said, could only be the result of a mix-up in the maternity ward – fuelled fantasies for most of the boys (and a few girls) at Mount Scopus College. Frustratingly, Romy Lewski was the teacher’s daughter and hence as off-limits as Svetlana Stalin was to her own father’s underlings, unless the horny
apparachniks
wanted twenty years breaking boulders out on the womanless Siberian wastes.

Silent, stupefied Lamm! Do you wait for your teacher’s spectre to say something?
Or say it yourself?
Was Lamm’s terror – this phantom’s horrific realness imperceptible from reality – what the schizophrenic homeless bum endures daily? In New York, Lamm often observed a few vagrants near the shelter at St Mark’s Place, enthroned on park benches amid their kingdom of pigeons and ghosts. Each man a stinking tortured anonymity, mumbling to himself beneath an avalanching beard and dreadlock crown.

Yet, whether truly a supernatural visitation in Hyde Park or the hallucinatory depths to Lamm’s encroaching madness, it
was
Mr Lewski! The quietly heroic teacher who lectured enthrallingly even ten minutes before the final bell on a Friday afternoon, who led classroom discussion of the high school English standards –
Of Mice and Men
,
Gatsby
,
The Outsiders
,
The Crucible
– in allegiance to his unshakable assumption that: (a) his students were booklovers, critics,
thinkers
whether they knew it or not; (b) a love of language lurked untapped within every kid even if they hated to read; and (c) his students were innately receptive to a stimulating classroom debate, and weren’t itching for the bell so they could rush to McDonald’s or the shopping mall or the TV set.

Uncompromising at comprehension, unforgettable for never forgetting
anything
, peerless in the way he pushed his favourite texts – in science labs the passages from Newton’s
Opticks
or Darwin’s journals as examples of inferential genius, or in English class the excerpts from Steinbeck, Isaac Beshavis Singer, Auden, Patrick White – the way a mother stuffs her toddler with mashed banana.
That
was Mr Lewski. Who, after thirty-three years of teaching
Of Mice and Men
, knew George and Lennie’s two-handers by heart, yet with inexhaustible enthusiasm punctured any fifteen-year-old’s apathy to that masterful novella about two itinerant farmhands doomed not by the Depression’s dustbowl, but their defiance of it.

Before the night Mr Leswki appeared – materialized? – in Hyde Park, Lamm last saw him during the final school week of 1995. Nauseous from chemotherapy, a frayed bush hat shielding his hairless head from the merciless Australian sun, too weak to walk without his daughters propping his arms, Lewski took a final stroll through the schoolyard. Waving hello, shaking hands, smiling like he’d won a marathon, quizzing a few kids about the books he’d taught; nothing to alarm the students who, if they knew the facts, would get teary on the spot. He noticed Lamm out on the football oval. ‘Hiya Max!’ Lewski yelled hoarsely.
It’s okay. We’ll talk another time. Don’t bother yourself to come over
. So Lamm didn’t; he waved hello and kept up the sweaty wordless rhythm of kick-to-kick.

At assembly that Thursday, Principal Rubin announced that Mr Lewski had passed away. There would be a
minyan
in the school synagogue at seven o’clock. Lewski’s final act as a teacher was banning mobile phones from his classroom. In 1995 the mobile phone – back then a big plastic brick – was slowly commencing its nefarious ransacking of the literary tradition. Presciently, Mr Lewski recognized the threat of the Motorola’s abbreviated text-talk, as destructive to the language he loved – the language of Shakespeare and Milton, Auden and Hemingway – as the damned metastatic carcinoma was to his own body, eating him inside out.

Mr Lewski discovered his illness too late, but he was early to predict the mobile phone’s gangrenous infection of comprehension, of the English language, that disintegrates living words into dry, monosyllabic bones. ‘This ultraabbreviated form of communication,’ Mr Lewski announced to his students, ‘will cause the decay of written discourse, of concise expression, of critical
thinking
.’ A decade later, sixteen-year-olds from Delhi to Delaware unashamedly write ‘you’ as ‘U’, ‘for’ as ‘4’, substitute ‘2’ for ‘to’, click a smiley-faced icon for a description of joy or a sad-faced icon for a pang of disappointment, haven’t read a document more profound than their mobile payment plan and generally achieve literary comprehension similar to that acquired by chimpanzees in psychology labs who learn sign language from infancy.

Mr Lewski made the pre-emptive strike. In his classroom, years before any other classroom at Mount Scopus College or indeed any classroom in Melbourne, mobile phones were banned. Gallantly he assaulted the hypnotic hegemony of Gameboys, GameGears, Walkmen and Nokias. He won his battle.

‘John Steinbeck is forthright about Lennie’s disability’ Mr Lewski proclaimed in class one Wednesday morning in 1994, and again as a ghost in Hyde Park on the opening night of Lamm’s worst catastrophe.

‘Lennie Small is Steinbeck’s portrayal of the type of person that we used to call
simple.
Now they’re not simple, they’re complicated and you call them intellectually disabled. But to Steinbeck, Lennie’s simple. He’s a six-year-old in a giant’s body. Okay, we know what was wrong with Lennie. But what was
right
with him?’

‘He didn’t mean to kill Curley’s wife.’

Gasps. Eyebrows shot upwards. The students shocked. Because this was a voice seldom heard in English class: Martin Weinberg, the bad egg of Mount Scopus. A wiryhaired hulk of sixteen who, if he wasn’t suspended for smoking pot in the lane behind the gym, or starting fights in the schoolyard, or skipping school at the racetrack with his disreputable
schnorer
of a father Lou (a tax lawyer who, the other parents agreed, worked for criminals and would end up in an acid bath or wearing concrete boots at the bottom of Port Phillip Bay) was usually vandalizing school desks with a drawing compass and chewing beef jerky; the beef jerky being a
treif
no-no that drove Gringlass the school rabbi nuts.

Martin Weinberg – destined to ignominiously perpetuate the Jewish gangster lineage of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman, et al – frequently sat next to Lamm in English class. Weinberg the notorious troublemaker who broke the PE teacher’s nose with a cricket ball, then claimed it was an accident. Weinberg who, a week earlier, scandalously chose for his poetry recital
that
notorious poem by Philip Larkin while the other students memorized safe choices like Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ sonnet, or Auden’s
Funeral Blues
that they’d heard in the funeral scene of a romantic comedy, or a rabbiapproved lamentation from King Solomon’s
Ecclesiastes
, or a confusing classic recommended by their parents – Keats, Yeats, the Beats – certain to earn polite applause and at least a B+. Not Martin Weinberg, who typed ‘fuck poetry’ into a primitive search engine and, pleased that a result appeared, was immediately entranced by the blunt intuitive force of Larkin’s verse.

Who better to have written those three searing stanzas, so bludgeoningly precise in their misanthropy, misogyny, misery – the whole life-affirming shebang of that critically endangered species, the Chauvinist of Letters – but a lifelong provincial librarian like Philip Larkin? For thirty years a writer surrounded by the men he cherished – Hardy, Eliot, Lawrence – rotting unborrowed on the shelves, while parents requested the same sickly-sweet sedatives for their children (Enid Blyton and
The Babysitters Club
most often on loan). Larkin hunched at the library desk in his tweed jacket and corduroy slacks, observing eighteen-year-old girls (not yet women), fresh from the university dormitories, reading
The Times
for free and giggling at Harold Wilson’s bad teeth. Girls cloaking their spindly white legs, their pale fulsome breasts that Larkin so loved, in dowdy long skirts and shapeless brown cardigans that maintained the impotent dreariness of the University of Hull while, at bigger colleges elsewhere in Britain, sexual intercourse began in 1963.

In English class, Martin Weinberg recited Philip Larkin’s poem that, were his teacher anyone at Mount Scopus College but Mr Lewski, would have got him suspended for the third time that semester:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
. . .

Speechless, the students stared at each other.
Hear that? Weinberg said fuck!
Fuck, the reigning king of four-letter words (shit being the populist princess kissing toddlers in the streets; cunt the queen mother who won’t leave her palatial bedroom). Fuck. A word forbidden, of course, by Principal Rubin. Swear in the classroom, you clean the schoolyard after school. Nevertheless, Mr Lewski – an island of passion for making the students
think for themselves –
did the unthinkable.

‘Martin, a very interesting choice. Let’s hear it again.’

Recite the whole dirty poem
again
! Larkin’s naughty rhymes and all, and fuck Principal Rubin’s after-school detention for saying a word for the copulatory act that had, after all, long been embraced by the lewd literary lineage from Joyce, Henry Miller, Hemingway up to fucking P Roth and fugging N Mailer. Obediently, Martin Weinberg re-read Larkin’s paean to parentlessness. His twenty-nine classmates listened intently, nodding, for these sixteen-year-olds were, after all, in the midst of their own hormonal upheavals against parental hypocrisy and pimpleless skin.
They fuck you up
,
your mum and dad.
Do they ever.

Two months later, Mr Lewski opens his dog-eared
Of Mice and Men.
Fire burning in the centre of his circular spectacles.

‘What I want to know is, what was
right
with Lennie?’

‘He didn’t mean to kill Curley’s wife.’

Martin Weinberg answers a question in English class!
That
was Mr Lewski. The other students couldn’t have been more surprised had Weinberg produced a prayer book from his jeans, along with the cigarettes, flick-knife and knuckledusters, then faced Jerusalem and
davvened
fluently as the Yeshivah boys in their black suits. Astonishing that under Mr Lewski’s guidance, Mount Scopus College’s worst-behaved kid had an opinion about literature. Not the odds at the dog track, nor the way to beat somebody with a rubber hose, but literature! And not the type you get wrapped in black plastic off the newsagent’s top shelf.

‘Lennie wanted to fit in at the ranch,’ Weinberg mumbled, stabbing his desk with a dry ballpoint. ‘He couldn’t change himself. Lennie was dumb but innocent.’

The other kids will know you’ve read the book. Fuck them.

‘Lennie didn’t
mean
to kill Curly’s wife. But the other men didn’t care. They didn’t care that Lennie was, like, a big ignorant kid. If George hadn’t done it, they would’ve shot Lennie themselves.’

The school’s bad egg analyses a novel as near perfect as a novel gets; even the heroic teacher is surprised. The reach of the well-written word reminds Lewski:
this is why you’re here.
To these sixteen-year-olds, Mr Lewski is the last upright pillar in civilization’s crumbling Acropolis of paper and ink, of meanings, of ideas beyond the brown-as-shit obvious. The last pillar standing in the grand decaying temple of words, of what words do, of imaginative genius spanning the Greek tragedies, the Mahabharata, the Talmud up to the volumes of Dickens in the bargain bin at your local bookstore. The invaluable temple of literature, buckling beneath all the Gameboys and mobile phones and pocket TVs amassing on its roof like a billion plastic diamonds raining from heaven.

‘Thank you, Martin, yours is a voice that we want to hear more of. Now, who can suggest why Steinbeck’s drifters play dumb when they arrive at the ranch? What mistake has Lennie
already
made at the book’s beginning?’