Teacher (14 page)

But Lears isn’t finished yet. He has a little more salt to shake on the wound. He looks out at us and poses a very simple question. He does it deadpan, Charlie Chaplin–style: “Do any of you think that you might have fared better on this experiment than Richard did?”

This is not, it turns out, a rhetorical question. He asks it once, then again. No hand goes up. We all burrow as far as we can go into our private molehills. We scatter dirt over our heads and wait. “Mark?” He’s on me. “How do you think it would have gone with you?” I say nothing. I feel that the room has gotten about twenty degrees hotter. All my efforts go into holding on and giving no clue as to the thermal pressures I’m suffering. He hits a few more of us, with similar results.

But then it’s time for dessert. And after what Lears has put up with on this front, how is he to be blamed? “Thomas?” No noise. “Thomas? What would you have done?” Buller snorts and chews his scabrous paw, but he will not even emit a grunt. The clock jumps and waits, dozes, sleeps, jumps again as Lears asks every one of us how it would go. He asks Dubby and John Vincents and Nora Balakian and Cecilia Doe and Carolyn Cummer. And no one has anything of substance to say. Because, really, we all know that Rick is the best we can offer. Not one of us has the ease and smooth high school élan that he has, and no one combines his level of smarts with his genuine confidence. And he, it turns out, had only partial staying power.

Finally the clock hops for the last time. The bell rings, and we are free.

On the way out, Lears stops Rick to thank him for taking it all so well. “I needed someone with an even temper,” he says. “I’m terrified to imagine what might have happened if I’d chosen Tom Capallano.”

Maybe Lears thought that Cap would have blown up when he saw the trick, having been so roundly humiliated. And what he assumed, of course, is that Cap, herd animal that he was, would have been duped every time. I’m not so sure, even now.

It took about a week, maybe more, for the implications of this seemingly trivial event to dawn on me. For even now, one says, Oh yes, of course that’s how it would go. People are like that, group animals. Groupthink always prevails. We’ve all taken Sociology 101 or encountered some equivalent lesson in this or that magazine article. But the effect of these displaced encounters with the phenomenon is to jade you, to draw the poison out of the stinger.

Really, what went down that day, and probably will anytime you stage an experiment like this, is something to make you stand and gape. Asked to choose between their own eyes, which have made few if any simple mistakes up to now, and the will of the group, many people (nearly all?) will cave in and join. They will push that whole stack of chips, the individual freestanding I, tottering as it might be, to the center and merge it with the rest. It happens so easily. It is hard to believe.

Which of us would have clung to the truth? The answer was clear enough to me. Not a single blessed one—probably not even Sandra, or bulldog Buller, J. Edgar Hoover’s little brother. No one, with the possible exception, I realized, of the unprepossessing little fellow up front. He would have wagged his hand and stroked his mustache and nodded his head and looked at the gunboats, and he would have gone his own way. Just as, faced with the Milgram experiment, he would have turned to the fellow in the lab coat and told him, in the most decorous possible way, that he, Frank Lears, was not going to send a single volt of electricity into another human being. And, further, that the whole idea of trying to teach anyone through electric shock was obscene.

That, I would come to understand, is what he had to offer. He could give you the pleasure and pain of sticking to your way, of seeing things as truly as a human being can, of not going around lying, at least most of the time. And for it, what would you get? Stones maybe, spitballs perhaps, or looks from your coevals that were equivalent. (Socrates, they killed—don’t forget.) But you’d carry with you the sense that you told the truth, didn’t conform to the tribal usages for convenience or gain. Noble enough.

But over at Hormel Stadium, it is Medford 21, Somerville 20 and we are blazing in triumph. Or it is the end of the Revere game, another hard-fought victory. We have come back to the stadium by bus, followed by the cheerleaders. In the locker room, we’re celebrating the win when suddenly there arises a clatter like the waking of the dead.

It was beating, wild beating, on the gray locker-room door. The door squeaked its way open about a foot. In the gap, I saw the face of Marianne Campbell, a cheerleader; she was weeping and laughing at once. The girls, the cheerleaders, were slamming the locker room door and screaming. They wanted to come in, cried for it. Frank Ireland, the screamer, threw his body against the door and tried to force it back. No dice. The girls pushed harder. Chuck Mallory, a backfield coach, flung himself into the fight; still the door barely moved. The screaming got louder.

What was coming if the girls had made it in? An orgy, I half believed: ripping and snarling and tearing and unmeasurable, painful bliss in the Mustangs’ sanctum amidst shower steam-clouds and the stench of sweat and the green muscle concoction, Atomic Balm, that we slathered on our injuries and that made us reek like rotting flowers. The noise outside the locker-room door was the most frightening and exhilarating thing I had heard in my life. I was terrified. I was alive. I wanted the coaches, with their Puritan manly muscle, to fall away from that door and disappear.

The girls are yelling, and our helmets are raised over our heads; they look like gleaming, streamlined skulls, emanating death-beauty; we are winning warriors, we Mustangs. After Revere, after Somerville, I screamed so loud in triumph I felt that I must have shaken the whole world.

Chapter Six

CUTE

One day, well after the debacle with Rick, Frank Lears walked into the room with what, by the standards he had so far set, had to qualify as a bounce in
his
walk. It was early December, a cold, gray day as I recall it, the sort of melancholy weather that Lears seemed to prefer. The sunlight just played an unwelcome contrast on your own brown-leaf mood—what good was it? He stood this time rather than edging himself into the wood and metal confinement chairs, punishment seats.

He told us to pass forward the Durant books. We would not be using them anymore. Dubby O’Day piped up immediately to inform all and sundry, and particularly Lears, that it was fine with him, since he was finished with the Durant book, finished, that is, coloring in the
o
’s. (It couldn’t have been true, could it? Is it possible that the Dub colored in all the
o
’s in only a few months’ time?) So up to the front of the room—there was still a gunmetal gray desk up there—went the books. Fine. No more books. Just free-and-easy discussions, empty nothing. Excellent. Maybe the teacher would disappear next, as in the pseudo–nursery rhyme about no more pencils, no more books, etc. Bliss.

But that was not quite how it was going to be. Lears, without having asked for or received anyone’s permission but his own, had decided to revamp the curriculum in a stroke. He was going to replace the Durant, which even he clearly could no longer bear, with a sequence of books chosen exclusively by himself. These books had a focus; they had a design. In fact they were quite aggressively chosen—a rude whap at all our practices and pieties. But that would not be clear to me for some time.

He let us know that the books would come from the Harvard Coop and that we would have to pay for them ourselves, unless we couldn’t afford to, in which case he’d pick up the tab. Buller intervened quickly to say that he didn’t want the books, didn’t have to have them, wasn’t paying, and would not read them this side of the infernal pit. Lears softened his expression and said, as he would say approximately seven hundred times that year, “Ahhhhh, Thomas,” as though the young man had just succumbed after a long illness.

At Medford High, this bringing in of books from the outer world counted as real innovation, genuine breakthrough thinking. No one before Lears would have conceived it or dared to do it. All books used in classrooms had to be approved by the school board and probably a dozen or so other state and local regulatory agencies. Lears ignored them. He probably saw that the place was so chaos-ridden that he could do pretty much as he chose and that it would take them a year or so to catch up with him. By then, he’d no doubt be on to something else. Whatever the reason, in this, as in all things, Lears went his own way.

He told us the names of the books, though he seemed sure that none of us but Sandra, who was nodding a bit madly as he went through the list, could possibly have heard of them. They were Freud’s
Group Psychology,
Camus’
The Stranger,
Hesse’s
Siddhartha,
and Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I remember hearing him say these names with an easy familiarity, as though there were something nearly predictable about them. But to me, this was not so. I felt irritated by the ease of the catalog, strangely left out of something that should perhaps have been my business.

No time was to be wasted. Our first book was going to be Freud’s
Group Psychology,
and Lears launched directly into an account of what we would find there. And the account was, I had to admit, fairly engrossing. It bore directly on my condition at the time. But something else was going on of no little interest in that same class. Two surprising revelations were unfolding simultaneously, one of an intellectual sort, the other emphatically more carnal. At any given moment, that first day of Freud, it was not easy for me to decide which one to attend to.

I had come late to class that day, so I was compelled to sit on the outside of the circle. I slid my seat up behind two of the girls (I can’t recall for certain which ones—Nora and Carolyn, maybe), who seemed not to know, or more likely not to care, that I was close by. Their subject for the day, addressed in the subtlest whispers, was who was and who was not cute. The conversation was a game, played a little like tennis. One of the girls would serve up a boy’s name, and the other would acquiesce and say that yes indeed, he was cute—that is, attractive, sexy, desirable (1950s euphemisms were still in play, though, so
cute
was the word), and thus the server would pick up a point. If the other girl blanched and cringed or offered an expression proximate to vomiting, then the point was lost. It was clear that they were going to rack up the obvious points first. Cap was up top. Rick followed soon after. But then it was a matter of creativity and surprise, of placing a spinning trick serve past the other girl, making her admit that some boy whom she, and her friends too, probably, had never considered for the accolade was actually deserving.

The male version of this discussion was, as you might imagine, a few degrees cruder. The operative question wasn’t “Is she cute?” but “Does she give?” In other words, Does she put out sexually? One of the more revelatory, or pseudo-revelatory, strolls I took at Medford High was through the halls with Jonathan Zucker. He was a large-lipped, large-eyed boy who claimed first- or at worst secondhand knowledge of the sexual proclivities of the MHS girls. So as we climbed the stairs passing the prim, back-straightened, blond Laura Croft, Jonathan whispered to me, “She gives. She gives like crazy. You just have to be her boyfriend, that’s all. And she has
lots
of boyfriends.”

But these tours were artful, full of surprises. Passing Rhonda Tantaglia—black stockings, fishnet, black bra strap dangling down the shoulder from under her sleeveless blouse—Jonathan would snort, “Nope, she don’t give. [The word
doesn’t
was never used in this oft-iterated sentence.] People spread a lot of rumors about her, but they’re not true.”

FRANK LEARS was discussing authority, and gradually he pushed the girls’ discussion out of my mind. “What I want to talk to you about,” said Lears, “is something called the psychological poverty of groups.” Groups are poor, Lears averred, because those who join them, or who get forced into them without knowing what it is they’re doing, surrender a major part of themselves as the price of admission. Every group, you see, has a leader, or a small circle of leaders, and in order to join the group, you’ve got to recognize the leader and perform a little internal operation. To put it bluntly, you set the leader up as an agent of authority, a miniature internal monarch, a little king or queen, and at the same time you depose the element of yourself that up till now has been calling the shots. What the leader values, you value. Effectively, you stop thinking. You turn that onerous function over to the other guy, and you begin saluting or goose-stepping or falling on your knees before the anointed one or simply conforming in what looks like harmless, standard ways. Your will is no longer quite your own.

Why should anyone this side of sane want that? Why does it feel good to deliver your autonomy, your freedom (for that is what it comes down to), over to someone else?

This question hung for a while in the air, joining a throng of previous Lears questions that had undergone the same fate. The atmosphere of the classroom, could you regard it with the right pair of revealing lenses, was laden with multiple unanswered, and often unregarded or uncomprehended, questions. They swam there, waiting to be attended to, like the poor souls that blow around the edges of purgatory, not quite damned, but far from redemption.

I left this question suspended with the rest and tuned in closely to the girls. Cuteness was still the issue. They were considering the relative merits of Donny Perkins,
a
class clown—we had not one but a circus-size supply of these—who was outgoing, a little round, and infinitely likable, who always wore an expression indicating that some prank had just been played, that it was minor but original, that he had done it, and was proud. He was soft-bodied, had red hair and an amiable face; he looked like a cross between Satan and Burl Ives. Donny used to greet you in the hall by asking his standard question: “Do you putt-it?” To which the answer was, or was supposed to be, “Do you?” Then Donny: “Of course I putt-it. Don’t be silly. And so do you. Everyone knows it.”
Putt-it
meant masturbate—in all probability.

They were having a tough time with Donny. And who could blame them? Did they want to be spirited off to the Sheepfold, the make-out parking spot, by someone who might slip a whoopee cushion under their seat? They did not say as much. All deliberation was carried out with oohs and aahs and negating exhalations and the like. But one got the idea. Donny was a case of post-modern indeterminacy; he was to cute what a few choice, funny lines from
Finnegans Wake
are likely to be to meaning.

Of course, personally I didn’t give much of a damn about how the two Fates would come to regard Donny Perkins. I was waiting, skulking, unwilling to say a word and blow my cover, to see if I myself might be mentioned. Where did I fit in, in this great amorous chain? Around the bottom, I suspected. But one always lives in hope.

LEARS, FOR his part, didn’t hear, or ignored the whispers between the Fates, and went on. Why do we pine for external authority? That was his question. Why do we want to put others in the place of our own minds? Because doing as much immediately makes doubt disappear. Suddenly you know what to do. You know what to value. There are no questions anymore. Thinking hurts, and to stop thinking confers considerable pleasure.

That, I sensed to be true, having avoided all such activity since I could recall. And even though the girls were now past the hockey team, from which they’d selected the redoubtable Tom McQue as the most savory morsel, and were moving on to other matters, I turned their volume down lower and tried to bring in Lears. He was working against tough competition, yet somehow something he was saying was winning out.

“Now, where do you suppose this urge to get rid of thinking comes from? How do we know that not thinking is going to be pleasurable?” Lears looks at Buller and grins a rare cards-up-the-sleeve grin. No one has anything to say, least of all Buller. We sit, mud settling into solid, sound earth, as it was our duty and seeming destiny to do. Dubby puts his head down on his desk and commences a mock nap. John Vincents gets intimate with the dirt clumped between his soccer cleats, which he unaccountably wears to class.

“We’ve all already experienced this sensation,” Lears says. “We had it as children. When you’re a child, before you reach the age of reason, or some approximation thereof”—he adds this in deference to Buller, I suppose, but maybe in deference to us all—“you’re completely protected. Others tend you, watch out for you, put you in a position of dependence.” And, as Lears outlines it, we all want to go back to that state, the condition in which we’re fully protected, where we always know what’s right and wrong, where someone does all our thinking for us.

Early in life, don’t forget, we’re surrounded by giants, great figures, who seem omnipotent and omniscient. All our needs will be taken care of. All will be well. It’s as though we were born in paradise and for the rest of life, memories of that place stay alive. When someone comes along and offers reentry, a shortcut back into the garden, slipping past the angel with his flaming sword, then it’s likely that our eyes are going to glaze over with sugary hope.

And then he began with his questions—ceaseless, annoying questions. But he was getting a little better at it, coming up with some new techniques.

What groups are you yourselves a part of? Go ahead, take a minute, write their names down. Your church, your sports team, your neighborhood friends, school friends, family, camps, clubs, what have you. How about a country? How about the United States of America—is that a group too? Surely there is a leader.

Then think if you will, think if you can, about what kinds of leaders, what kinds of directing fathers and stand-in mothers, these groups offer. And think too of what you lose when you join one of these operations. Think of what, if anything, you might gain.

The girls became quiet. We all—well, maybe Buller excepted—did what he asked. We wrote, the fifteen or so self-selected seniors clumped in an almost-circle (I was the radical electron, the loose particle maybe about to fly away from the atom) in a well-lit room on the top floor of the old Medford High building, while December subtly modulated its grays outside. It was easy. It was list making and didn’t require the labor of composing full sentences.

I made my own list, writing down the names of the track and football teams, my church, St. Raphael’s, along with the names of its priests and Sunday school teachers; I included America in the list, and Richard Nixon, too. Then we all stopped and Lears made us stand up and stretch, take a little rest. Because even this much mind-work was to us the equivalent of a dozen or so wind sprints.

Then Lears began to talk about the qualities of a leader. Some leaders, he said, rule reasonably. They lay out their ideas, they tell you what they value, and then they put you in a position to make a choice. They feel sure that what they have to impart can be of some help and that people will recognize their own advantage in it. But there are other sorts of leaders, too. These leaders play on people’s longing for the old fatherly (or maybe motherly) certainties. They have what’s called charisma, the glow that comes off someone who exudes perfect confidence in what he believes. These people are warm externally. They seem to offer love equally to anyone who is ready to follow them. But inside they are ice. They love no one but themselves. They are indifferent to every other being. A leader of this sort looks completely self-reliant. He needs no one. So everyone tries to get next to him, get a boost from his confidence. He is the one who knows it all, the magus, the prophet, the orator, the dictator, the great helmsman.