by Thom Jones
It was only with the women in the administrative office that Harold could let his hair down and be himself. He could tell they found him attractive, and before long, as a joke, he had everyone in the office saying “a-boot” in the Canadian style rather than “about.” He wondered if they had Peter Jennings fantasies about him.
Sex was something for the next lifetime. It was tough learning the new job, but since he lived alone in a tiny apartment and required little sleep, Hammermeister was able to throw himself into his work, body and soul. He longed to get out of this rough-and-tumble high school and into the cozy air-conditioned district office building with the two-hour lunches, plush carpets, and countless refinements and amenities as soon as possible. He saw himself there. And sex was for then. He was a dervish, and he was whirling this year. Things were poppin’. There was suddenly so much to do. He had forgotten almost entirely about the janitors.
Then one day the activity director received a shipment of folding chairs for a district-wide choir recital slated for the gymnasium, and of the thirteen custodians in the school, only four were on hand after school to unload the chairs and get the gym whipped into shape. The activity director was highly agitated, and not realizing how little real clout the man actually had, Hammermeister became hysterical as well. When Harold saw the head custodian, he demanded to know where all of the other janitors were.
Mike was either in his fool-in-paradise mood—or “high.” He stood before Harold and scratched his head for a moment. Well, three custodians were out sick and no subs were available. There were the two who worked graveyard: somebody or other had driven off to pick up a prescription, yet another had not acknowledged the “all call,” and finally, still another, the very one who worked the gym area, did not report to work until five. Hammermeister listened to this, all the while his headache picking up steam and mutating into a kind of epileptoid craziness. Still, he managed to maintain his composure, and said, “I want that man in at two like all the swing-shift people, have you got that?”
Later that afternoon this very janitor, Duffy, walked into Hammermeister’s office and caught him writing notes on his thesis. “Can’t you knock?” Hammermeister asked. Duffy, who was red with anger, made a perfunctory apology. Hammermeister saw Lulu stir in her glass box. Duffy’s eyes followed her movement.
“Shit, man, a bug! Weird! Goddammit!”
“It’s a spider, Mr. Duffy. Tarantula. Now what can I do for you?” Tap, tap, tap.
Duffy nervously stroked his mustache and short beard. He looked at the spider and then back at Hammermeister. “Mike told me you changed my hours.”
“That’s right, Duffy. Did he tell you why?” Tap, tap.
“He said something about unloading chairs for the concert. Only four guys were here or something.”
“Yes, exactly. The next time this kind of thing happens there will be five, minimum.” Tap.
Duffy took a deep breath and shook his neck to loosen up a bit. “Can I say something, Harold? I want to say this: I’ve been here for ten years and this is the first time that anything like this has come up. It almost never happens. If I have to come in at two, there’s nothing I can clean. The gym and the upper gym are in use, the locker rooms are in use—there’s nothing I can do.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.” Tap, tap, tap.
“Plus—after the game, like tonight. Tonight there’s football. The team won’t be out of the locker rooms until a quarter to eleven—everything will be muddy, a total mess, and I’m supposed to have gone home fifteen minutes previous—”
“On game nights come in at four. How’s that?”
“Look…Harold. The reason I took that gym job was so I could baby-sit until my wife gets home from the auto plant. She gets home at four-thirty. If you change my hours, I’m going to have to hire a baby-sitter—”
Hammermeister rocked back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “I am familiar with your union contract, and I can change your hours to suit the needs of the school. Is that clear?”
“All right, we can play it that way. I tried nice, but we can take this motherfucker to the union, and we can sit in hearing rooms…by the hour! I know you got lots of homework. It’s going to be fun. You can really make progress on that thesis of yours. Or maybe you can read a little Joseph Conrad. It would do you good, Harold. Give you a little insight, Harold, into the ways of the world. I’m filing.”
“You pay union dues, and I encourage you to use the union,” Hammermeister said evenly. He swiveled his chair away in a little half-twist and busied himself with a file folder, dismissing the custodian with a wave of the hand. He wasn’t going to let the man scream or give him the satisfaction of making eye contact. Anger—for a lot of people, it was a hobby. They liked it. Why play their silly-ass game?
Duffy slammed the door so hard a draft of air lifted Hammermeister’s thin, fluffy, light brown hair, which was combed forward to cover a receding hairline. He zipped open his drawer, popped two Excedrin, two Advil, swallowed a double glug of Pepto-Bismol, and then hunched over his desk and restyled his hair using a comb and hand mirror.
A few days later Hammermeister got a note from the district custodial coordinator stating that because of activities scheduling, Duffy’s shift would revert back to the original 5:00 P.M. to 1:30 A.M. semi-graveyard shift. Hammermeister got on the phone and talked to the man, one Bob Graham, who told him Sean Duffy was one of the better custodians in the district and that he was not going to stand still for any aggravation. Furthermore, Graham characterized Duffy as one of the nicest, most easygoing people he knew. Right! White was black, and black was white! What perfect logic!
Whenever Harold needed time to “think,” or to let his various headache medicines kick in, he would take a stroll over in the area of the gym and look at Duffy’s work. It was hard to fault, but Hammermeister was quick to jot down “dings” with a retractable ballpoint—especially if he found them two or three days in a row. He would leave notes to Duffy. Pin them on the custodians’ bulletin board for all of the classified staff to see. “To S. Duffy from H. Hammermeister: Black mark on benches, boys locker room. Why?”
When basketball season started, Hammermeister grabbed Duffy by the arm and pointed out a spilled Pepsi under the bleachers. It was the first thing you saw when you walked into the gym, and he told Duffy to go get a mop and clean it up. It was an eyesore. “Hurry up, there, chop-chop!” Hammermeister said, with heat in his voice.
Later that night, at halftime, when Duffy was giving the basketball court a quick sweep, the drill team came out, and Hammermeister made a theatrical throat-slashing gesture for Duffy to get off the court. Duffy waited at the opposite end of the gym, his face blazing scarlet with bilious fury, and after the drill team finished its routine, Hammermeister noted with satisfaction Duffy’s embarrassment as he finished the job. Duffy was an aneurysm waiting to blow.
Well, there were the teachers, too, who were slackers—a good number of them. Hammermeister made note. They were easy to spot. They liked to show films or assign book reports and theme papers blocking out days at a time in the library. They followed the same curriculum year in and year out. Playing one clique off the other, Hammermeister ascertained who the lazy ones were and, if they were not coaches, he gave them heat, too.
Woodland, down in the portables, for instance. He dressed like some kind of Salvation Army bum. Beard right off a pack of Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops. When Hammermeister caught Woodland smoking one day after school, he reminded the man that he was a master teacher and wondered out loud what his future goals were.
“I used to be gung ho and all thangs, but now I’m getting short. Have you got a problem with that, Hammermeister?”
“I’m not saying you need to wear a suit and tie. But you have to remember you are still on the job and you are a role model, Woodland. You are a senior teacher. Where’s your self-respect, man? You want to be a good teacher, then work at it. You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”
W. E. B. Du Bois was far from an ideal school, and the more he got to know it and was dragged down by the inertia of it, the more Hammermeister was inclined to jab these slackers or to outright get in their faces. But he had to watch himself and keep it under control, at least for this first crucial year. He really belonged in the district office, and he would be there when he whipped this place into shape. He had done well at the detention facility in Canada; he would do well here. Working in a low-morale school where so many of his colleagues were just going through the motions made Hammermeister shine like a red, white, and blue comet streaking through a night sky of blackest India ink—so, in a way, it was all to the good. Blackboard Jungle 1999 was coming along, and in the meantime, the dervish continued to whirl.
Once the buses arrived and students started filing in, there was heavy action. Metal detectors going off. Fights picked up where they had left off the previous afternoon. Open drug transactions. Before you knew it, they were calling Hammermeister to put out one brushfire after another and another and another—all day long. Although he thrived on adrenaline, the pace of events at Du Bois was getting to be relentless. Harold was racking up some more big numbers on the Hans Seyle Stress Scale. Points that took you beyond the limits of human endurance! His stomach had become a volcano from all of the aspirin he was swallowing, and his tongue was black with bismuth from the cherry-flavored Pepto-Bismol tablets that he constantly chewed.
The high school was overcrowded, and after the first few weeks of timidity, the students mostly threw their good intentions (“I be goin’ to Princ’sun!”) out the window. The joint became as bad as it had been advertised: The Lord of the Flies. The chaos at Du Bois made it seem far more dangerous to Harold than his well-regulated penal institution back in Canada, where Hammermeister had fond memories of courteous and compliant murderers, rapists, and stick-up artists. These American kids were savages. And those candy machines—all of that refined sugar was just adding fuel to the fire. It was in Harold’s thesis, the magnum opus; you could read all about it there, or you could wait for the movie. Heh heh heh. Harold didn’t know if he would have all that much say-so in the casting, but he needed to throw a glamorous woman into the picture—a kind of gal Friday. Something along the lines of a…Whitney Houston, say. Janet Jackson would be a stretch but…maybe Gloria Estefan. Or you could get a tough bird. Oprah Winfrey? He wondered if Whoopi was lined up with commitments.
Sean Duffy was giving the head custodian a hard time about Hammermeister, the custodians’ new boss. Who was this asshole? Who did the motherfucker think he was? “Just because he’s a vice-principal, does he think he’s running the place? And Dr. White is letting him get away with it. That’s what really riles me!” Duffy said. “White’s going to retire, and he just doesn’t give a shit anymore.”
Mike knew that Duffy was hitting the juice pretty hard, but he could never quite catch him with liquor on his breath. Not that he really cared to—not as long as the man did his work. Was Duffy drinking vodka or something odorless? He always looked fairly fresh on Mondays, but as the week wore on, Duffy would get red-faced, with bloodshot eyes. Increasingly, he would launch long tirades against Hammermeister—tirades that went beyond normal fury. Tirades inspired by alcohol.
One night after the swing-shift custodians left and the school was all but vacant, Centrick Cline started complaining to Duffy about Hammermeister. Hammermeister didn’t like his nose ring and earrings, was a racist motherfucker—“Hey, man, why didn’t they hire Alec Baldwin for the job? This geek motherfucker said he comes by at three A.M. and he better not catch me in the weight room. I clean the weight room,” Centrick Cline said, “an’ I ain’t ’posed to be in the weight room?”
Duffy’s own latent anger flared. They stood together and pissed about Hammermeister for forty-five minutes. Then Duffy took a customary inspection of his area, making sure he had not left a beer can on a desk somewhere before turning out the lights. When this was done, it was close to one A.M. and Duffy slugged down two quick cans of Hamms, lit a Gitane cigarette, and furtively entered Hammermeister’s office. He stood before the tarantula cage a moment and then lifted the lid. He took another puff on the Gitane and blew it on the spider.
The hairy spider shocked Duffy somewhat by setting itself down. But rather than confirming his worst fear by jumping, it froze. Duffy removed a long pencil from Hammermeister’s desk and nervously positioned it over the spider’s thorax. Closer and closer until suddenly Duffy thrust down at it, and the large body of the spider exploded like an egg, spurting yellow matter all over the room. When Duffy let go of the pencil the spider sprang straight up in the air and landed on his shoulder. He batted the spider down and scrambled out into the commons area, grabbed his coat, and fled the building.
Hammermeister came in Friday morning, and the first thing he noticed when he stepped into his office was that the lid of the tarantula cage was ajar. He hastily closed the door thinking that the spider had escaped, since he didn’t want it to bolt out into the main office. Somehow he knew something like this was going to happen. He had a funny premonition.
Lulu lay dead on the seat of his executive chair, impaled with a number one Dixon. The Gitane butt was there, but Hammermeister was struck dumb with grief and all he noticed as he looked about the room was the gruesome egg-yolk splattered essence of Lulu on his seat, the walls, and the ceiling. When he finally composed himself, he stepped out of his office and told the secretaries that the spider had been stabbed (already he had a pretty good idea which students did it), and that it had crawled up to his chair to die. This peculiar detail had Hammermeister on the verge of tears. He wrung his hands to no purpose. His face fell as if he were the comic Stan Laurel confronted with some absurd calamity. Hammermeister’s favorite secretary, Cynthia—the nicest-looking woman in the building—put both of her hands on his shoulders and said, “Are you okay, friend?” Hammermeister said that he was and woodenly made his way back into the office. Not fast enough for Rider to miss the tail end of the scene, however. Harold had a four-star migraine, but his gut lining was shredded from too much aspirin. He slammed down three Tylenol #4s and chased them with a Diet Coke. As he wiped the spider splatter from his chair with paper towels, the enormity of this personal loss caused his thighs to wobble. Harold gently lifted Lulu’s corpse from the chair, neatly wrapped it in his handkerchief, and deposited the body in his top desk drawer. He sat at his desk with his head in his hands, wincing, waiting for the codeine to kick in, waiting possibly to just blow, perish, succumb to…internal spontaneous combustion! None of these things happened, and Hammermeister didn’t get any worse. But he didn’t get any better. He was alarmed to find that he stayed just the same for some time. At the foot of his chair he noticed a peculi
ar butt. It was a manufactured cigarette, but the tobacco in it appeared to be almost black. He picked it up and examined it. No doubt it belonged to the assassin. He shoved it into an envelope for evidence and placed it in his top desk drawer, locking it.
The secretaries were so moved by Hammermeister’s “nervous breakdown” that on the weekend they went to a pet shop and bought a replacement spider for fifty-five dollars. They pasted a little note on the cage that said, “Hey there, big boy, Lulu’s back in town!”
On the following Friday Lulu number two was found murdered in the same fashion as number one had been: impaled with a number one Dixon. In evidence was another cigarette butt. A vile-smelling thing filled with blackish tobacco. This one was not a Gitane, but it was unfiltered and it was foreign. Harold noticed such butts in an ashtray in Centrick Cline’s janitor’s closet. And what a place that was. There were militant anti-white slogans pasted on the wall, posters of Malcolm X and Huey Newton, and an accumulation of what seemed to be voodoo paraphernalia. Cline was not known to be a smoker. Yet most of the staff who smoked had keys to this closet and would sneak cigarettes there. Throughout the remainder of the day, Harold made hourly checks to see if any of the teachers had smoked such a cigarette during their prep periods. There were none to be found. But then there were none in the morning after the janitors’ shift either.
Because of the pace and the pressing events of the school, Hammermeister found himself playing catch-up. This alarmed him, since he was no procrastinator and was devoting every waking hour to his job. On a number of occasions the senior vice-principal came down hard on him, implying that his Ph.D. would have to wait until summer; there was a school to run. Hammermeister’s objective “breath of fresh air”—the Canadian jet stream—was getting stale. Harold heard the talk and could only hope another burst of energy was available, and with it some new inspiration. When he was state superintendent of education, when the book was made into the movie and he was pulling in fifty-thousand-dollar speaking-engagement fees, Rider would still be on his fat, Ahm a soul man, sweet potato pie ass, forever mired deep in the middle of Detroit’s blackboard jungle. In the meantime, not only was the staff all over him, but the students were becoming impossible to control. Harold was now somehow frightened by them—frightened terribly, and they could tell. Without Lulu next to him exuding encouragement, Harold grew scared and was overreacting. When he started nailing students with suspensions over petty grievances, Dr. White hit the ceiling.