Knuckleheads (3 page)

“Sorry to hear that. Have a seat.”

“Yeah, freak thing. Took my kid fishing in Florida two summers ago and we were cruising upriver, going maybe twenty knots, and a
sturgeon
jumped out of the water and smacked into my chest. I almost died.”

A chronic chest injury from a
sturgeon
?

What kind of bullshit is this?

This, Mr. Bassoli, is
my
classroom,
my
home field. My desks that I polish each afternoon with Windex. My laminated posters of parts of speech, of what kinds of infractions constitute plagiarism, of Malcolm X. I called you in, sir, to talk about your son’s inappropriate behavior, not to hear some fish story.

“Nah, for real,” he says, gesturing with his blubbery fingers. “Thing was a monster, like two hundred pounds. Knocked me unconscious. I was lucky as hell I didn’t die. Fell backward into the boat instead of the river. Ronnie had to get us to shore and find the harbormaster to call an ambulance. Damn fish broke three ribs and bruised both lungs. I can hardly walk now. Got, like, a dent in my chest. I got a tattoo though to cover it, of a big leaping sturgeon. Want to see?”

I do. Yeah, very much.

Want to see the dude’s brilliant fish tattoo on his fat hairy chest. I mean, how often do you get to see something like that?

Guy stands up from the desk where he’s been sitting, a tricky maneuver since he’s so bulky, and unzips his jacket. He’s wearing a turtleneck and it takes him a minute to struggle out of it, like he’s trying to pop the meat of an avocado out of its skin using only his thumbs. With the shirt at last over his head, he stands before me with a chest creamy and off-white and dented, a barrel of stomach-flesh jiggling over his belt. The tattoo is phenomenal. An eighteen-inch masterpiece of luminous blue and green and silver, its tail an arrow of muscle, its mouth open and fierce with sharp teeth. It is leaping in the way only animals in the wild can leap, free and glorious, celebrating the miracle of its own sleekness.

Anthony Bassoli stands in my classroom, wheezing, proud and shirtless, for at least a minute. He stretches his arms over his head and the fish appears to leap higher, to lunge for the sky through the watery flesh of his chest.

“That’s amazing,” I say. “That’s the greatest tattoo I’ve ever seen.”

He doesn’t smirk. Not once. Just pulls his turtleneck on and sits back down.

“I can’t hardly walk no more,” he says. “My breathing hurts like somebody rapped me with a two-by-four. Damn right I better get something out of that fish.”

I almost feel sorry for him, think about shaving the left half of my head and getting my own tattoo on my scalp. A dark black baseball with red stripes and orange flames around it, maybe swords or daggers spinning out of its hide, a storm of blood and broken bones dripping from the laces. His son Ronald smirks. Often. In ugly sneering fashion. He’s the worst kid in all my classes. None of the other students like him.

When he strutted into my classroom day one, I knew he’d be trouble. He was his dad’s height and exactly what people mean when they use the word wiry. His hands were big and thick like his father’s, but the rest of him was one straight line of frenetic energy. He couldn’t stay seated. Got up every five minutes to throw a crumpled piece of paper in the trash can, or to make a hocking noise in his throat and spit out the window. Sometimes to sharpen a pencil he never seemed to actually use. I looked up his profile on the computer, found lousy grades throughout his freshman and sophomore years. A bunch of art classes that hinted at an offbeat interest or a different learning style, but D’s and F’s in them too. Attendance issues. Anthony Bassoli listed as his father. No contact information for any other parent.

“Forgive my asking,” I say to Anthony, “but Ronald’s mom?”

He waves his hand in dismissive fashion, like an umpire who’s signaling an obvious ball four. “Nah, not around.”

“Does he have problems outside of school? Does he ever talk to you about what’s on his mind?”

“He talks all the time. He’s a good talker. Works for me at the garage. Cleans the vehicles. The taxis, I mean. I got a fleet. Crusader Cabs. You seen ‘em?”

“Of course.” Everybody knows about Crusader Cabs. An armada of maroon Cadillacs with ornate white crucifixes on the doors. Popular on Sundays. Shuttle people to and from church. Slightly higher rates but never late when bringing you to the airport.

I’m a Jew. I call them all the time. “I didn’t know that was your company.”

“Seven years now. Ronnie’s a good worker. Never gives me any trouble. Saved my life, that kid.”

“Ever see him do his homework?”

“He does his homework.”

Not for my class, he doesn’t. Doesn’t do a damn thing. Just smirks and plays with his long fingers when I give the students an in-class writing assignment. I stare at him to let him know I’m noticing his lack of effort—my best I-see-you-and-you’re-not-cutting-it-young-man glare—but he just smirks more, then crumples the blank piece of paper on his desk and gets up and throws it in the garbage. In the midst of one trip back to his seat during a quiz about images of decay in
All Quiet on the Western Front
, he clamped one of his hands on Deanna Torrence’s shoulder, close to her neck, and whispered into her hair. She smiled uncomfortably and tried to move his hand, and he said something that made her suck her teeth and shake her head like a wet dog. Then he slapped her pen to the floor.

“Ronald,” I said. “Outside, right now.”

The most tangible thing I learned in teacher preparation school was never to give a disruptive kid an audience. That’s what the disruptive kid wants, the chance to show his classmates how much of a badass he is by challenging his teacher. He’ll never back down in front of his peers, so the thing to do is to isolate him, remove him from any situation where he’s on stage, and then disarm him by trying to have a civil conversation. First, you talk about something else to diffuse the tension. Then, after you’ve established the dynamic of a human-to-human discussion, essentially of two people having coffee, that’s when you work your way back to the issue and let the kid know what you want him to do.

This second half of the equation, the disarming part, is nearly as important as the isolating part, and I’m generally pretty good at diffusing tension. I try to pay to attention to what extracurricular activities a kid’s involved in so when I get him out in the hallway, instead of scolding him right away, I can surprise him with
how’s the hockey season going
or
I hear your band’s got a gig at the teen center, is that this weekend,
but with Ronald, who’d been pulling his garbage for weeks, I did the one thing a teacher’s never supposed to do. I launched right into him and escalated the conflict.

“You are flat disrespecting me in my classroom,” I shouted, my face six inches from his, my spit misting the air between us. “Your behavior’s immature and unacceptable. You need to shape the hell up right now, or you need to not be in this class. What’s your choice?”

He was taller than I was, with those long rangy arms and big hands, but I’d kept wrestling all through college, and in amateur tournaments for years after that. My forearms are hammers. “Well,” I continued, “what’s it gonna be? Got anything to say?”

He didn’t. Or probably he did, but he was afraid to say it. He curled his lips into a snarl and his whole face began to twitch, the electricity of his live-wire body heating his mouth and below his eyes so the bottom part of his face looked like the narrow snout of a rat. He clenched and unclenched his right fist and his eyes fluttered and watered and I knew he wanted to hit me. He wanted to take a swing and I hungered for him to try it. I didn’t care about my teaching career. I didn’t care about Sandra at home relying on my income so she could keep studying for her masters. All I cared about was that smirking, snarling teenager and how if he swung, I would elbow him dead in his jaw, leg-whip him to the ground and pound the back of his head until he bled.

Then Ronnie backed down, shook his twitching face, turned and ran off down the hallway. “I’m calling your father tonight,” I yelled after him. “You will not re-enter this classroom until you decide you know how to behave with respect.”

“So, what’s the problem with my kid?” Bassoli says.

The problem’s that he sports the same smirk you did on the pitcher’s mound. The problem’s that on hot afternoons when I’m walking across baseball fields, the left side of my head still throbs. The problem is I lost my lucky bat, turned to wrestling, and years later wanted your son to try and punch me so I could kill him. “The problem,” I say, “is that he’s disruptive in class and unfocused. Is there anything wrong at home? Something bothering him?’

“Not that I know about.”

We’re quiet. Behind Anthony Bassoli, the poster of Malcolm X stares at me. Those sharp square glasses and that enormous long finger pointed like a sword.

“Whatever happened to Jonathan Van Runig?” I say. “I know he never made it with the Yankees.”

Bassoli’s puzzled. Pats a hand against his chest as if he’s having a heart attack, then makes another dismissive fanning motion in the air. “You knew Johnny Giant?”

“I grew up around here. Everybody knew who he was.”

Bassoli stares at me and I think something might be clicking. There’s a spark of anger in his eyes, a twitch of facial fat around his mouth. “He’s upstate now,” he says, his voice thin. “Corrections officer. Busts heads with a nightstick.”

“Ronald scares people,” I say, leaning in so my face is closer to Bassoli’s. “He intimidates other students and he behaves disrespectfully toward me.”

“Ronnie’s a good kid.”

“I’m not saying he isn’t. Just that he needs to control himself in class. Needs to respect the learning environment. Can you talk to him about it?”

“I came here to talk to you.”

His finger jabs at me like Malcolm X’s and he angles forward. Our faces, separated by two desks, do all they can to push to about a foot apart. It’s one thing to think about beating on his son, but this man is a whale. A whale with a fish tattooed on his dented chest. “I took off work,” he says. “Had to pay overtime to my assistant dispatcher.”

“You want to hit me?” I say.

“I hit you already,” he says, tapping a fat thumb against his left temple. “Right here.”

I remember this about the pitch. Even though it flew at me too fast to avoid, everything still slowed. There was the smirk, the giggle, the wind-up and then the release. I was focused on his hand, my eyes like zoom lenses on the ball as it left his fingertips. I could feel my weight shifting, first slightly back, then the gathering and push forward, the whole force of my body mustered to strike.

The standard way people teach hitting is to coach the batter to watch the bat hit the ball, to keep your eyes locked on the pitch until the moment of impact. But it doesn’t really happen like that. The bat and ball intersect too quickly for the human eye to follow. What happens is the ball starts off small when it’s released some fifty-five feet away. It appears to grow bigger until it reaches the point along its arc where it’s most visible to the batter. At that moment, the hitter estimates what trajectory the rest of the ball’s flight will travel and tries to time his swing to intersect with that trajectory, while the ball simultaneously passes that maximum field of vision and appears to diminish in size. Hence, when balls dip or curve with late breaks, they’re extremely difficult to hit.

A batter knows the ball is headed to his face when it never shrinks, when it appears to keep growing until a massive blur slams his skull. That’s what I remember most, the spherical avalanche overwhelming my entire sense of sight just before the smack.

Anthony Bassoli, on the other hand, has been crippled by a fish he never saw coming. “This is stupid,” I say. “All that was twenty years ago.”

“So why are you still taking it out on my son?”

Unlike his pitches, particularly the one aimed at my head, this assessment is not accurate. Ronald Bassoli is a behavior problem. Not just in my classroom either. Other teachers have told me about his drawing pictures of rifles on desks, about his throwing books at the whiteboard and cursing at authority figures that confront him. “I lost my lucky bat that day,” I say. “I never hit consistently after that.”

“Not my kid’s fault.”

“No, it’s not.”

We’re stuck in mud. Two tough dump-trucks with rusted under-carriages and noxious diesel fuel and our front bumpers too close to each other to maneuver, our wheels useless. I watch him and wonder if he’ll admit his kid’s a screw-up. I could end this right now, tell him all right, it’s just a misunderstanding, tomorrow’s a new day. As long as Ronnie comes to class smiling and prepared, and I’ll give him another chance. But I don’t tell Bassoli anything, I just sit there, behind my bulky teacher’s desk with the box of tissues on it, and the stapler and the grade book, and I watch him. I just sit there and wait.

“You had too much mouth,” he says. “That’s why we hated you. All your yapping from the outfield.”

I don’t respond. In teacher school, the technique is called wait time. Give the student enough room to figure out what he wants to say. Don’t interrupt and try to guide the conversation.

“It was respect, you know. We hit you because you were the only guy on your team who could threaten us.”

I hold back and wait some more. It’s difficult. I think of Rupert, how he disappeared into the woods. How two weeks later, at prom, we teased him without rest and he got drunk and we kicked him out of the limo and left him passed out on his front lawn. When his brother tried to drag him into the shower, Rupert punched him and broke his glasses. Kid showed up to his ninth grade English class the next day with a gauze bandage roofing one eye like a pirate.

“Everything I’ve done bad in my life I’ve paid for,” Bassoli says. “My wife left me. A sturgeon beat my lungs to shit. I’m not apologizing for anything.”

Is that what I’m after? An apology? I doubt it. I spent too many years shoving noses into the mat to care whether people are sorry for what they do. “Show me your tattoo,” I say. “I want to see your tattoo again.”