Teacher (16 page)

But the class did not end in spiritual angst for me. When the clock made its last leap, the minute hand hurdling over the final numeral between us and freedom, and we all got up to trundle to the door, I caught the tail end of the two girls’ conversation.

Directly in front of me, in unmistakable tones, one turned in the direction of the other and said, “Isn’t Mr. Lears cute?”

“Yeah, he is, he really is.”

Lears cute? Lears desirable? How could this be? He was a composite of many things the girls had agreed, in invisible congresses, it seemed, to find repulsive. He was a “brain,” and no girl at Medford High could get herself worked up over a brain. A brain was—well, what else?—someone who was all head and no body, no spirit, no heart, no equipment, just gray matter and maybe a pair of glasses stuck on to keep the world in focus. A brain cute?

But I didn’t dismiss it out of hand. I didn’t laugh it off. Because the girls had rebelled once before on the matter of who was and wasn’t attractive. I could date the event, the great seismic shift in American erotics, with some precision. It was the day after the Beatles appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
for the first time, in February 1964. I was in sixth grade then, and I remember how the girls had returned to school that Monday in a state of primal rhapsody. They sang “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” at top volume from the girls’ bathroom. You heard it blasting through the vents that connected the two lavatories, ours and theirs, as though through a badly made speaker system. You heard it in the corridors and out at recess. What had a few days before been starched tight little girls, who went to mass at Sacred Heart and whose most daring style of in-school transgression was to stand suddenly and turn a soft ballet pirouette beside their desks, were now tiny, leaping maenads, who talked about how much they’d like to get their hands on John or George or Paul or (even) Ringo and punctuated their expostulations about the four with shrieks and yelps. When the erotic provocateur Charlie Musselman—the kid who had brought pornographic postcards to sixth grade, cards given to him
by his father—
asked Janet Gianelli where exactly she’d like to be with Paul (her particular favorite), she screamed, “Where else? In a bed!”

This sort of thing happened all across America, all at once. Suddenly Elvis and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., were old hat. They were too weighty, too ponderous, too slow and cool. They were selfish, closed-down, too male. Their place was taken in the national dream life by tiny mop-headed boy-girls, whose presence was so collectively light that a sharp breeze, you felt, might have picked them all up and sent them floating off the stage, up and away. They’d grin and wave bye-bye. It had taken place in one revolutionary night, under the aegis of the knuckle-popping funeral home director Ed Sullivan.

As time went on, the macho clan won back a little territory: America could hardly do without grizzled pioneers and slouching, brave GIs. But the inroads the Beatles made never disappeared. They repealed large codes of fraud and woe, as the poet puts it. A new world of erotics came into being, where women expected to see something of themselves mirrored back in the men they loved, something not opaque and solid but freewheeling, mercurial, complicated, felt. This world came spinning into existence in a trice and was never wholly eclipsed or destroyed. And in it there was room for Franklin Lears, who was clearly in the Beatles anti-macho mode. And if there was room for Lears, for the brain, who knows what other opportunities this brave and still reasonably new world might offer, even—after a certain amount of personal shape-shifting thrown in—for me?

Chapter Seven

THE WALRUS

But in my life things got not better but worse over the course of that winter. I sniffed at the orphan state prescribed by Lears and by Socrates—or, more optimistically, the liberated condition, in which one becomes, as Goethe put it, a free artist of oneself—and got nervous; terrified, really. I was left with the psychological poverty of being outside the group, outside the pack. Football was over and life seemed to be, too. So rather than going over to Frank Lears—who, unlike Mace Johnson and the Fat Father and all the other fathers abroad, didn’t really want me, or who wanted me, and the rest of us, only to become ourselves, whatever that might mean—I found myself another guiding light, a new prophet, and a new, more literal kind of high than anything produced on the football field.

To put it a little less obliquely, I started getting drunk as often as I could, and I put myself under the tutelage of a new mentor, an anti-Lears in most ways. I became a disciple of the amateur but inspired philosopher we nicknamed the Walrus.

I got drunk for the first time at the end of the football season. I went down to Playstead Park, an enormous preserve with a soccer field, a baseball diamond, tennis courts (vandalized), and swings (same) to commiserate with some of the other players and a few hangers-on after Malden, the Greater Boston League champions, ruined us on Thanksgiving Day. When ordering time came, rather than holding back as I usually did, I jingled four quarters and called for two quarts of Schlitz. They returned soon in a car piled with illegal booze, and there, standing on crusty, frozen ground, I chugged them down in a fraction of an hour. I had them both open at once, the quarts, slugging from one bottle then from the other.

I took to liquor like a duck to the pond. Heidi ho! I had to yell. Sounded like a hillbilly. Heidi ho!

Whatever invisible weight had been draped like lead bags on my shoulders was instantly lifted. This, I remember thinking, is what it feels like to be young.

And wasn’t I young the rest of the time? Apparently not. For now I was ripsnortingly alive, feeling as though I’d just thrown a perfect cross-body block and were ambling, free and easy, back to the huddle, the pack. I walked on air; I breathed an intoxicating ether. Nothing hurt—nothing. I thought I could dance, sing. I did both. I thought that my utter failure—no, it was not failure, because I had never even brought myself to the testing point—with girls must be a matter of pronounced shyness. If only I could drop the mask of foolish propriety, cast off my inhibiting skin like the slough it was. Drop the mask and let the sweetness stream in, in and out. I was a mortal god, standing in cruciform in Playstead Park, Medford, Massachusetts, flourishing a quart bottle in each outstretched hand, mass-produced nectar of the masses, Schlitz lager. Heidi ho!

All the grief I felt at having been separated from the closest thing to a tribe I’d yet known (“best years of your lives, boys!”) was suddenly dispelled. I was not separate anymore. I was part of everything. I belonged, here, among these people, and on this earth. Whatever it is that holds one aloof and apart lifted from me, licked clean away by the warm tongue of the booze. Good-bye to all that self-inflicted pain and a toast to the glorious drunken nights to come.

But they were not all conducive to sweet Keatsian flights, those nights, not all about winking bubbles and sweet draughts of Hippocrene and fading blissfully away. Booze is tricky stuff, a mystery drug. It lifts the curtain of inhibition and defense, quiets the sometimes raving inner figure of authority that Lears had told us all about—at least it did for me that first night—but every time there is something different behind the curtain. So sometimes I went around exultant, spreading gurgly joy. But other times the curtain lifted and strange things slouched forward.

Outside a burger joint one night, some unwise kid gave our car-load the finger when we cut his car off in the parking lot. Ryan, another football lineman turned hockey team enforcer, and I tore out of our car, ripped the other car’s doors open and grabbed two astonished guys from out of the backseat. There were two girls up front. We went to work.

Every other weekend I’d find myself in a brawl of some sort, drunk and mean. I didn’t care so much if I lost, just as long as I could get down into the mud and onto the concrete and give and take in a chaos of self-forgetting punches and kicks.

For I had tasted the sweetest mix that there was. I had administered slamming straight-on hits, helmet first. And I could not easily say good-bye to the feelings that came with them. I took pleasure in the bruises, in the sore Sunday morning face, nearly as much as I did in victory’s smashed-up knuckles. I liked being hit nearly as much as delivering blows, though (luckily) not quite.

Listening to Lears talking about groups and their hypnotic function, I began to see, dimly enough, that I was in sorrow because I was in exile from my pack. There was little I could do about it, though. Where else could I go? Where else find the feeling that I had lost when football ended if not in the guys’ drunken pack and in the brawl?

I did not go too far in thinking about these questions, or about the answers Lears might offer to them, in part because I was in the position of what you might call a contrast gainer. Dubby, the Doober, was genuinely in bad straits. Dubby was—no great surprise here—failing math, and he was doing it with gusto. Mr. Repucci had taken to making an object lesson of him, including him prominently when he preached his sermons to the class about how, without proper application, they would amount to nothing. “Now, take Donawd here. He is a smart enough boy and not a badwooking boy. But he fails to do his homework, and so he wiww fail geomtwy ober and ober again.” Donald did the imitation with glee, trying to force his face into the correct rodent-sniffing-for-the-last-cheese-crumb squinch.

Dubby’s mother was making regular visits to the school now, in fear that Donny would fail and fail forever, and she was falling into league with Mr. Repucci. Always hard-edged, she was beginning to take Leo’s version of the Doober as gospel. The two of them were teaming up, becoming a sort of unholy Gothic parentage for the Dub. Donny’s mother was a nurse. She’d seen death and disease in all guises and it had not softened her heart for those who labored under something as comparatively slight as math-induced sorrow. She’d seen how powerful the forces of fate were, and somewhat in my father’s mode, she’d gotten herself on their side. She could preach at length on how if I didn’t stop lifting weights and bulking up for football, packing on muscular pounds, my asthma would blossom and I’d die panting at the age of twenty-three. She said this with some gusto, as though she’d entered into long-term alliance with the asthma.

Dubby’s literal disease (the math thing was supposedly all in his head and in his deplorable spirit) over which Mrs. O’Day presided and whose strength she touted when she could was diabetes. Dubby often traveled with his syringe and his transparent life-giving juice and delighted in flourishing his works at unexpected times, tying off and shooting up. So standing in line, waiting to buy a submarine sandwich, as “heroes” are called in Boston, I turned around to see Dubby, with a gesture he’d learned from watching some junkie-featuring TV show, dramatically tying his arm off with a rubber tube, cinching it with his teeth, then setting up the needle, squirting a little of its contents into the air, and taking a violent jab at his arm. Then he sank into an apparent puddle of bliss, “Ahhhhh” and grinning toward heaven. I had to talk the sub-maker out of calling the cops.

Anyway, Dubby’s mother actually loved him lavishly, wanted him to possess the world, and so headed off her disappointments by loudly telling the world (and herself) why this would not, could not, be. She could get rhapsodic on the impending mortal effects of the Doober’s disease.

Dubby’s father, Jack, was the counterweight to the formidable Mrs. O’Day. Jack O’Day was a salesman for the Hershey company; he hawked chocolates from town to town, and evidently with success. Dubby’s house on Rondel Ave was a model of Medford bourgeois decorum. They had twin living rooms, and even a second bathroom. They were what the residents of Southie, Boston’s Irish ghetto, disparagingly referred to as two-toilet Irish.

When Mrs. O’Day was rampant, Jack would invite Donny and his sister, nicknamed Sweetie, to mount invisible horses and ride away with him. They collectively mounted up and created giddyap noises and hoof-pops with their tongues and teeth, and thence were gone.

Jack was the kids’ advocate in all things. One day he was driving me to Cape Cod, to visit with the Doober, when he went into an aria on the tribulations of Dubby O’Day. “This boy,” he intoned, “has not led a normal life. He’s been deprived of the pleasure that other children have as a birthright. Imagine never having tasted a piece of candy. Imagine not being able to eat your own birthday cake. Imagine that you can never, never eat the way that other people do.” And as he said this, a tear coursed down the good man’s cheek. He became eloquent about the joys of sweets, in the way that he would have had to do to be the successful chocolate salesman he was. But rather than an inducement to buy, this lyric was on the order of a funeral oration about the death of Dubby’s youth from insufficient sugar intake.

I had all I could do not to spit the truth out like a peach pit. For Dubby ate everything in sight, then sought more. He ate cookies and pies and cakes—and not just a slice here and there but, the better to chuck the finger at fate, he ate them in apocalyptic quantities. He’d die, he believed, with icing on his face.

Not only did Dubby eat in profusion, he also became a devoted drinker of beer, his brand being Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, and his standard order being two six-packs, usually with a half-pint of bourbon to sip on between cans. He could drink two beers, sometimes three, in ten minutes’ time, by “shooting” them. That is, he would use a can opener to put a tiny hole down toward the bottom of the can, place a finger over it, put the hole to his mouth, then pop the top. The beer flowed like a small geyser down his throat. In this way you can drink a Falstaffian amount of liquor in record time.

Dubby was a fine dispatcher of booze, but he did not hold it well. It was like being hit with Circe’s wand; it turned him into a low, snorting creature in seconds. Liquor sent him on ferocious eating binges, in which he’d declare the need for, say, a dozen cheese-burgers, the small kind, purchased at White Castle. I remember him there one Saturday night, coming around the corner on hands and knees, crawling and barking, a bag of burgers hanging from his mouth, looking like a Saint Bernard. He refreshed himself with nine, ten, eleven, and then threw up in a huge blast all over the concrete apron of the establishment.

When he had cleaned himself off, he demanded the final cheeseburger, on the premise that Dubby always completed the feats he had planned for himself, something like Hercules with his labors. Art Mondello and I, part sadistically, part not wishing to witness another eruption of vomit, withheld the burger, whereupon Dubby hit the concrete again and roared, “Dear Jesus, help me, I just gotta eat one more cheeseburger!”

Artie and I suddenly became solicitous. We told Dubby that given his medical history, further cheeseburger eating would not be in his interest. Then one of us—Artie, I’m 90 percent sure—heaved the remaining burger to the edge of the parking lot. Dubby, always well monied from his poolroom exploits, snorted at us and returned to the cheeseburger window.

Closed! Cat howls, mock weeping, professions of undying love to the troll who commands the window. Then vicious threats. No dice. Dubby, undaunted, hustles across the parking lot. There, amidst glass and cans and general detritus, he recovers one more cheeseburger, dusts it off, and consumes it. Artie and I shrug. We have done our best to protect Dubby from himself.

Dubby needed saving more than once, and as I’ve suggested, I could always look at his tall form and handsome onion-shaped head to persuade myself that I was in pretty fine condition, at least by contrast. Artie and I frequently took the occasion to remind the Doob of all we had done for him. Whenever we needed him to drive us somewhere exotic—that is to say, outside of Medford—or to spot us five dollars for a game of action at the poolroom or to do one or another errand, we simply reminded him that we had saved his life.

We had done it on an extremely drunken night, when we were all three urinating off a small walkway bridge over the Mystic River. Artie and I were weaving and laughing and telling jokes. Dubby was in Hamlet-like dudgeon, in part because it had been a miserable week in math. “What’s going to become of me?” he said suddenly. “I’m a complete failure. A complete fuckup.” At which point, Artie turned to me and, behind Dubby’s down-pointed aiming head, mouthed the words
my poor mother.

“My poor mother,” said the D. “My poor, poor, poor mother. Can you believe what she has to put up with? Look at me. I’m worthless. I’m a piece of human shit.” He started intoning some lines from
Hamlet
—he’d played the lead in ninth grade—about his too sullied flesh melting away.

Then the next thing I knew, Dubby was no longer on our side of the bridge but the other. Then he was no longer standing facing us but dropped down to about ankle level, hanging over some very dark and February-cold New England water. Here, where the molasses had come in from Jamaica and the rum had gone out, Dubby was about to take what might have been a mortal dunk.

“Why not,” he cried. “My life is ruined anyway.”

Artie and I dropped down together and grabbed Dubby by the wrists and began to haul him up. He struggled against us. “Come on, it’s no big deal. Just a little swim.” Dubby was a fabulous swimmer, but the water was ice, and within he was more alcohol than blood.

As soon as we got him yanked over the pole, the argument began with Artie, who was to become a highly successful lawyer, announcing that we had saved the Doober’s life and that henceforth he was our slave-robot as well as friend and the Doober insisting that it had all been a play, with his lines from
Hamlet
about the sullied flesh being part of the act. He said we were getting way too cranked up about nothing. We said he was a suicidal psychopath and owed us his life, or in any event owed us a share of his remaining beer—Dubby always bought more than we did. Having made no oath to the gods to consume a certain set amount that evening, Dubby relinquished the cans and we let him alone, for a while.