Teacher Man: A Memoir (21 page)

Teachers’ pajamas are always cotton. What would a teacher be doing in silk pajamas? And, no, they never sleep naked. If you suggest nudity students look shocked. Man, can you imagine some teachers in this school naked? That always triggers a big laugh and I wonder if they’re sitting there imagining me naked.

What is the last thing teachers think about before sleeping?

Before they drift off, all those teachers, snug and warm in their cotton pajamas, think only of what they might teach tomorrow. Teachers are good, proper, professional, conscientious, and they’d never throw a leg over the other one in the bed. Below the belly button the teacher is dead.

In
1974
, my third year at Stuyvesant High School, I am invited to be the new Creative Writing instructor. Roger Goodman says, You can do it.

I know nothing about writing or the teaching of it. Roger says don’t worry. Across this country there are hundreds of teachers and professors teaching writing and most have never published a word.

And look at you, says Bill Ince, Roger’s successor. You’ve had pieces published here and there. I tell him a few pieces in
The Village Voice, Newsday
and a defunct magazine in Dublin hardly qualifies me to teach writing. It will be common knowledge soon that in the matter of teaching writing I don’t know my arse from my elbow. But I remember a remark of my mother’s: God help us, but sometimes you have to chance your arm.

I can never bring myself to say I teach creative writing or poetry or literature, especially since I am always learning myself. Instead I say I conduct a course, or I run a class.

I have the usual five classes a day, three “regular” English, two Creative Writing. I have a homeroom of thirty-seven students, with the clerical work that entails. Each term I am given a different Building Assignment: patrolling hallways and stairwells; checking boys’ lavatories for smoking; substituting for absent teachers; watching for drug traffic; discouraging high jinks of any kind; supervising student cafeterias; supervising the school lobby to ensure that everyone, coming or going, has an official pass. Where three thousand bright teenagers are gathered under one roof you can’t be too careful. They are always up to something. It’s their job.

They moaned when I announced we were going to read
A Tale of Two Cities
. Why couldn’t they read
The Lord of the Rings, Dune,
science fiction in general? Why couldn’t they…?

Enough. I ranted at them about the French Revolution, the desperation of people drained by tyranny and poverty. I was one with the downtrodden French and having a grand time with my righteous indignation. To the barricades,
mes enfants
.

They gave me the look, the one that says, Here we go again. Another teacher with a bug up his ass.

Not that you care, I jeered. Even now there are billions of people who don’t slide out of their warm white sheets every morning to relieve themselves in warm white bathrooms. There are billions who know nothing about hot and cold running water, bars of perfumed soap, shampoo, conditioner, great luxurious towels with naps thick as your skulls.

Their faces said, Oh, let the man talk. You can’t win when teachers are like that. Nothing you can do about it. Talk back and he gets out the old red pen and makes the little red mark that drops your grade. Then your dad says, What’s this? and you have to explain teacher has a bug up his ass about the poor or something. Your dad doesn’t believe you and you’re grounded for a million years. So, best thing is to keep your mouth shut. With parents and teachers you can’t go wrong with the shut mouth. Just listen to him.

You’ll go home today to your comfortable apartments and houses, head for the refrigerator, open the door, survey contents, find nothing that will please you, ask Mom if you can send out for pizza even though you’ll have dinner in an hour. She says, Sure, honey, because you have a hard life going to school every day and putting up with teachers who want you to read Dickens and why shouldn’t you have a little reward.

Even during the rant I knew they were seeing me as another great predictable two-faced pain in the arse. Did they know I was enjoying it? Teacher as demagogue. It wasn’t their fault if they were bourgeois and comfortable and wasn’t I carrying on that old Irish tradition of begrudgery? So, back off, Mac.

In the front, under my nose, Sylvia raises her hand. She’s black, petite and stylish.

Mr. McCourt.

Yes.

Mr. McCourt.

What?

You’re losing it, Mr. McCourt. Chill. Relax. Where’s that big old Irish smile?

I was about to bark that the sufferings of the French poor that triggered the revolution were not a smiling matter, but the class drowned me out with laughter and applause for Sylvia.

Yeah, Sylvia. You go, girl.

She smiled up at me. Oh, those great brown eyes. I felt weak and foolish. I slid to my chair and let them joke the rest of the period about how they’d mend their ways. They’d be worthy of Charles Dickens. They’d start by giving up the afternoon pizza. The money they saved they’d send to descendants of the poor people in the French Revolution. Or they’d give it to the homeless on First Avenue, especially the man who was insulted if you offered him less than five dollars.

When the class ended Ben Chan lingered in the room. Mr. McCourt, could I talk to you?

He knew what I was saying about poverty. The kids in this class didn’t understand anything. But it wasn’t their fault and I shouldn’t get mad. He was twelve when he came to this country four years ago. He knew no English but he studied hard and learned enough English and mathematics to pass the Stuyvesant High School entrance exam. He was happy to be here and his whole family was so proud of him. People back in China were proud of him. He competed against fourteen thousand kids to get into this school. His father worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, in a restaurant in Chinatown. His mother worked in a downtown sweatshop. Every night she cooked dinner for the whole family, five children, her husband, herself. Then she helped them get their clothes ready for the next day. Every month she had younger ones try on the clothes of the older kids to see if they’d fit. She said when everyone was grown and none of the clothes fit anymore, she’d keep them for the next family from China or she’d send them right over there. Americans could never understand the excitement in a Chinese family when something came from America. His mother made sure the children sat at the kitchen table and did their homework. He could never call his parents silly names like Mom or Dad. That would be so disrespectful. They learned English words every day so that they could talk to teachers and keep up with the children. Ben said everyone in his family respected everyone else and they’d never laugh at a teacher talking about the poor people of France because it could just as easily be China or even Chinatown right here in New York.

I told him the story of his family was impressive and moving and wouldn’t it be a tribute to his mother if he were to write it and read it to the class?

Oh, no, he could never do that. Never.

Why not? Surely the kids in this class would learn something and appreciate what they have.

He said, no, he could never write or talk to anyone else about his family because his father and mother would be ashamed.

Ben, I feel honored you told me about your family.

Oh, I just wanted to tell you something I wouldn’t tell anyone else in case you were feeling bad after that class.

Thanks, Ben.

Thank you, Mr. McCourt, and don’t worry about Sylvia. She really likes you.

Next day Sylvia stayed after class. Mr. McCourt, about yesterday. I didn’t mean to be mean.

I know, Sylvia. You were trying to help.

The class didn’t mean to be mean, either. They just hear grownups and teachers yelling at them all the time. But I knew what you were talking about. I have to go through all kinds of stuff when I go down my street every day in Brooklyn.

What stuff?

Well, it’s like this. I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant. You know Bed-Stuy?

Yes. Black neighborhood.

So there is nobody on my street ever gonna go to college. Whoops.

What’s the matter?

I said gonna. If my mom heard me say gonna she’d make me write “going to” a hundred times. Then she’d make me say it another hundred times. So, what I’m saying is, when I walk to my house there are kids out there jeering at me. Oh, here she come. Here come whitey. Hey, Doc, you scrape yourself an’ you find that honky skin? They call me Doc because I wanna, want to, be a doctor. ’Course I feel sorry for the poor French, but we have our own troubles in Bed-Stuy.

What kind of doctor will you be?

Pediatrician or psychiatrist. I want to get to the kids before the streets get to them and tell them they’re no good because I see kids in my neighborhood afraid to show how smart they are and the next thing is they’re acting stupid in vacant lots and burned-out buildings. You know there’s a lotta, lot of, smart kids in poor neighborhoods.

Mr. McCourt, will you tell us one of those Irish stories tomorrow?

For you, Doctor Sylvia, I would recite an epic. This stuck in my memory like a rock, forever. When I was fourteen, growing up in Ireland, I had a job delivering telegrams. One day I delivered a telegram to a place called the Good Shepherd Convent, a community of nuns and lay women who made lace and ran a laundry. There were stories in Limerick that the lay women in the laundry were bad women known for leading men astray. Telegram boys were not allowed to use the front door, so I went to a side door. The telegram I was delivering required an answer, so the nun answering the door told me step inside, that far and no farther, and wait. She put down on her chair a piece of lace she was working on and when she disappeared down the hallway I peered at the design, a little lace cherub hovering over a shamrock. I don’t know where I found the courage to speak, but when she returned I told her, That’s a lovely piece of lace, sister.

That’s right, boy, and remember this: The hands that fashioned this lace never touched flesh of man.

The nun glared at me as if she hated me. Priests were always preaching love on Sundays, but this nun probably missed the sermon, and I told myself if I ever had a telegram again for the Good Shepherd Convent, I’d slip it under the door and run.

Sylvia said, That nun. Why was she so mean? What was her problem? What’s wrong with touching flesh of man? Jesus was a man. She’s like that mean priest in James Joyce going on about hell. You believe all that stuff, Mr. McCourt?

I don’t know what I believe except that I wasn’t put on this earth to be Catholic or Irish or vegetarian or anything. That’s all I know, Sylvia.

When I discussed
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
with my classes I discovered they were ignorant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Blank looks around the room. I wrote on the blackboard: Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. If you don’t know them, how can you enjoy yourselves?

So, like, Mr. McCourt, what does this have to do with creative writing?

Everything. You don’t have to be poor and Catholic and Irish to be miserable, but it gives you something to write about and an excuse for drinking. Wait. I take that back. Delete the part about the drinking.

When my marriage collapsed I was forty-nine, Maggie eight. I was broke and slept in a series of friends’ apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Teaching forced me to forget my troubles. I could cry into my beer at the Gas House or the Lion’s Head Bar, but in the classroom I had to get on with business.

In a while I would borrow money from the Teachers’ Pension Fund to rent and furnish an apartment. Till then, Yonk Kling invited me to stay in the apartment he rented on Hicks Street near Atlantic Avenue.

Yonk was an artist and restorer in his sixties. He came from the Bronx, where his father was a politically radical doctor. Any revolutionary or anarchist passing through New York was welcome to a dinner and a bed at Dr. Kling’s. Yonk went through World War II working in Graves Registration. After a battle he searched the area for bodies or parts of bodies. He told me he never wanted to fight but this was worse, and he often felt like asking for a transfer to the infantry where you just shot your man and moved on. You didn’t have to finger the dog tags of the dead or look in their wallets at pictures of wives and kids.

Yonk still had nightmares and his best cure or defense was a generous shot of brandy, something he always kept in his bedroom. I could gauge the frequency of the nightmares by the level in the bottle.

He painted in his room. He moved from bed to chair to easel and everything was part of everything else. When he woke he would lie in bed, smoke a cigarette, study the canvas he’d worked on the day before. He brought his mug of coffee from the kitchen to the bedroom, where he sat on a chair and continued looking at the canvas. He would dab at the work from time to time to correct or erase something. He never finished his coffee. There were half-filled mugs all over the apartment. When the coffee turned cold it curdled and developed a ring halfway down the cup.

There was one scene he painted over and over on canvases of various sizes: a group of women in bright pastel head scarves and long flowing silky dresses stood on a beach looking out to sea. I asked him if someone had drowned or were they waiting for something? He shook his head. He didn’t know. How could he? He had just put those women there and he wasn’t going to interfere with them. That’s what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn’t see or read for yourself. Not Van Gogh. Look at Van Gogh. There’s the bridge, the sunflower, the room, the face, the shoes. Come to your own conclusion. Van Gogh ain’t telling you.

He had two other subjects: racehorses and dancing Hasidim. He showed horses coming round the bend. That’s where the horse’s body is most fluid, he said. Anyone can paint a horse out of the gate or heading for the finish line. That’s just straight horse from nostril to tail, but coming round the bend, man, they’re tilting and straining and sideswiping, adjusting to the bend, finding a slot for the stretch.