Don’t tell me go to bed, goddammit. You might be a college student but I’m still your grandmother, isn’t that right, Bob?
I’m not Bob.
You’re not? Well, who are you?
I’m Frank.
Oh, the Irishman. Well, Bob’s a nice fellow. He’s gonna be an officer. What are you gonna be?
A teacher.
A teacher? Oh, well, you won’t be drivin’ no Cadillac, and she pulls herself up the stairs to bed.
Now, surely, with Zoe snoring away in her room Mike will visit my bed but, no, she’s too nervous. What if Zoe woke suddenly and discovered us? I’d be out on the road hailing the bus to Providence. It’s a torment when Mike comes to kiss good night and even in the dark I know she’s in her pink baby doll pajamas. She won’t stay, oh, no, Grandma might hear and I tell her I wouldn’t care if God Himself were in the next room. No, no, she says, and leaves, and I wonder what kind of world is this where people will walk away from a chance of a wild fling in the bed.
At dawn Zoe runs the vacuum cleaner upstairs and downstairs and complains, This goddam house looks like Hogan’s Alley. The house is spotless because she has nothing else to do but clean it and she barks about Hogan’s Alley to put me in my place because she knows I know it was a dangerous Irish slum in New York. She complains the vacuum cleaner doesn’t pick up the way it used to though it’s easy to see there’s nothing to pick up. She complains that Alberta sleeps too late and is she supposed to make three separate breakfasts, her own, mine, Alberta’s?
Her neighbor, Abbie, drops in and they drink coffee and complain about kids, dirt, television, that goddam ugly Louis Armstrong who can’t sing, dirt, the price of food and clothes, kids, the goddam Portuguese taking over everything in Fall River and surrounding towns, bad enough when the Irish ran everything, at least they could speak English long as they were sober. They complain about hairdressers who charge a fortune and can’t tell a decent hairdo from a donkey’s ass.
Oh, Zoe, says Abbie, your language.
Well, I mean it, goddammit.
If my mother were here she’d be puzzled. She’d wonder why these women complain. Lord above, she’d say, they have everything. They’re warm and clean and well fed and they complain about everything. My mother and the women in the slums of Limerick had nothing and rarely complained. They said it was the will of God.
Zoe has everything but complains with the music of the vacuum cleaner and that may be her way of prayer, goddammit.
In Tiverton Mike is Alberta. Zoe complains she doesn’t know why a girl would want to use a goddam name like Mike when she has her own name, Agnes Alberta.
We walk around Tiverton and I imagine again what it would be like to be a teacher here, married to Alberta. We’d have a sparkling kitchen where every morning I’d have my coffee and an egg and read the Providence Journal. We’d have a big bathroom with plenty of hot water and thick towels with powerful naps and I might loll there in the tub and gaze on the Narragansett River through little curtains billowing gently in the morning sun. We’d have a car for trips to Horseneck Beach and Block Island, and we’d visit Alberta’s mother’s relations in Nantucket. As the years passed my hair would recede, my belly protrude. Friday nights we’d attend local high school basketball games and I’d meet someone who might sponsor me for the country club. If they admitted me I’d have to take up golf and that would surely be the end of me, the first step toward the grave.
A visit to Tiverton is enough to drive me back to New York.
35
In the summer of 1957 I complete my degree courses at NYU and in the autumn pass the Board of Education exams for teaching high school English.
An afternoon newspaper, the World-Telegram and Sun, has a School Page where teachers can find jobs. Most of the vacancies are for vocational high schools and friends have already warned me, Don’t go near those vocational high schools. The kids are killers. They’ll chew you up and spit you out. Look at that movie The Blackboard Jungle, where a teacher says vocational schools are the garbage cans of the school system and the teachers are there to sit on the lids. See that movie and you’ll run in the other direction.
There is a vacancy for an English teacher at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the Bronx but the chairman of the Academic Department tells me I look too young and the kids would give me a hard time. He says his father was from Donegal, his mother from Kilkenny, and he’d like to help me. We should take care of our own but his hands are tied and the way he shrugs and extends his open palms contradicts what he said entirely. Still, he heaves himself from his chair and walks me to the front door with his arm across my shoulders, tells me I should try Samuel Gompers again, maybe in a year or two I’d fill out and lose that innocent look, and he’d keep me in mind though I needn’t bother to come back if I grew a beard. He can’t stand beards and he wants no goddam beatniks in his department. Meanwhile, he says, I might try the Catholic high schools where the pay wasn’t that good but I’d be with my own kind of people and a nice Irish kid should stick with his own.
The Academic Chairman at Grady Vocational High School in Brooklyn says, yeah, he’d like to help me out but, You know, with that brogue you’d have trouble with the kids, they might think you talk funny and teaching is hard enough when you speak properly and doubly hard with a brogue. He wants to know how I passed the speech part of the teachers’ license examination and when I tell him I was issued a substitute license on condition I take remedial speech he says, Yeah, maybe you could come back when you don’t sound like Paddy-off-the-boat, ha ha ha. He tells me in the meantime I should stick with my own people, he’s Irish himself, well, three-quarters Irish and you never know with other people.
When I meet Andy Peters for a beer I tell him I can’t get a teaching job till I fill out and look older and talk like an American and he says, Shit. Forget the teaching. Go into business. Specialize in something. Hubcaps. Corner the market. Get a job in a garage and learn all you can about hubcaps. People come into the garage and hubcaps are mentioned and everyone turns to you. A hubcap crisis, you know? where a hubcap falls off, flies through the air and decapitates a model housewife and all the TV stations call you for your expert opinion. Then you go out on your own. McCourt’s Hubcap Emporium. Foreign and Domestic Hubcaps New and Old. Antique Hubcaps for the Discerning Collector.
Is he serious?
Maybe not about hubcaps. He says, Look at what they do in the academic world. You corner a half-acre of human knowledge, Chaucer’s phallic imagery in “The Wife of Bath,” or Swift’s devotion to shit, and you build a fence around it. Decorate the fence with footnotes and bibliographies. Post a sign, Keep Off, Trespassers Will Lose Their Tenure. I’m engaged myself in a noble search for a Mongolian philosopher. I thought of cornering the market on an Irish philosopher but all I could find was Berkeley and they’ve got their claws into him already. One Irish philosopher, for Christ’s sakes. One. Don’t you people ever ponder? So I’m stuck with the Mongolians or the Chinese and I’ll probably have to learn Mongolian or Chinese or whatever the hell they speak there and when I find him he’ll be my very own. When was the last time you heard a Mongolian philosopher mentioned at those East Side cocktail parties you like so much? I’ll get my Ph.D., write a few articles on my Mongolian in obscure scholarly journals. I’ll deliver learned lectures to drunken Orientalists at MLA conventions and wait for the job offers to pour in from the Ivy League and its cousins. I’ll get a tweed jacket, a pipe and a pompous manner, and faculty wives will be throwing themselves at me, begging me to recite, in English, erotic Mongolian verses smuggled into the country up the ass of a yak or a panda at the Bronx Zoo. And I’ll tell you another thing, piece advice in case you go to graduate school. When you take a course always find out what the professor wrote his doctoral dissertation on and give it back to him. If the guy specializes in Tennyson’s water images then pour it all over him. If the guy specializes in George Berkeley give him the sound of one hand clapping while a tree
falls in the forest. How do you think I got through these fucking philosophy courses at NYU? If the guy’s a Catholic I give him Aquinas. Jewish? I give him Maimonides. Agnostic? You never know what to tell an agnostic. You never know where you stand with them though you can always try old Nietzsche. You can bend that old fucker any way you like.
Andy tells me Bird was the greatest American who ever lived, right up there with Abraham Lincoln and Max Kiss, the guy who invented Ex-Lax. Bird should be given the Nobel Prize and a seat in the House of Lords.
Who’s Bird?
For Christ’s sakes, McCourt. I worry about you. You tell me you love jazz and you don’t know from Bird. Charlie Parker, man. Mozart. You listenin’ to me? You dig? Mozart, for Christ’s sakes. That’s Charlie Parker.
What does Charlie Parker have to do with teaching jobs or hubcaps or Maimonides or anything else?
You see, McCourt, that’s your problem, always looking for relevance, a sucker for logic. That’s why the Irish don’t have philosophers. Lotta goddam barroom theologians and shithouse lawyers. Loosen up, man. Thursday night I finish early and we’ll take a trip to Fifty-second Street for a little music. Okay?
We go from club to club till we come to one place where a black woman in a white dress croaks into a microphone and holds on to it as if she were on a swaying ship. Andy whispers, That’s Billie and it’s a disgrace they’re letting her make an ass of herself up there.
He marches to the stage and tries to take her hand to help her down but she curses him and swings at him till she stumbles and falls off the stage. Another man leaves his bar stool and leads her out the door and I know from the clear sounds between her croaks that was Billie Holiday, the voice I heard on the Armed Forces Network when I was a boy in Limerick, a pure voice telling me, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.”
Andy says, That’s what happens.
What do you mean, that’s what happens?
I mean that’s what happens, that’s all. Jesus, do I have to write a book?
How is it you know Billie Holiday?
I have loved Billie Holiday since I was a child. I come to Fifty-second Street to catch glimpses of her. I would hold her coat. I would scour her toilet bowl. I would run her bathwater. I would kiss the ground she walks on. I told her I got a dishonorable discharge for not fucking a French sheep and she thought it should be made into a song. I don’t know what God intends to do with me in the next life but I’m not going unless I can sit between Billie and Bird for eternity.
In the middle of March 1958, there’s another notice in the paper, Vacancy for English teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Staten Island. The assistant principal, Miss Seested, examines my license and takes me to see the principal, Moses Sorola, who doesn’t move from his chair behind the desk where he squints at me through a cloud of smoke drifting from his nose and from the cigarette in his hand. He says this is an emergency situation. The teacher I’d be replacing, Miss Mudd, has made an abrupt decision to retire in the middle of the term. He says teachers like that are inconsiderate and make life hard for a principal. He doesn’t have a full English program for me, that I’d have to teach three classes in Social Studies every day, two in English.
But I don’t know anything about Social Studies.
He puffs and squints and says, Don’t worry about it, and takes me to the office of the Academic Chairman, Acting, who says I’d be teaching three classes of Economic Citizenship and here’s the textbook, Your World and You. Mr. Sorola smiles through the smoke and says, Your World and You. That should cover just about everything.
I tell him I know nothing about economics or citizenship and he says, Just stay a few pages ahead of the kids. Everything you tell them will be news. Tell them this is 1958, tell them their names, tell them they live on Staten Island, and they’ll be surprised and grateful for the information. By the end of the year even your name will be news to them. Forget your college literature courses. This is not high IQ plateau.
He takes me to see Miss Mudd, the teacher I’m replacing. When he opens the classroom door boys and girls are leaning out the windows calling to others across the school yard. Miss Mudd sits at her desk, reading travel brochures, ignoring the paper airplane that zooms over her head.
Miss Mudd has retired.
Mr. Sorola leaves the room and she says, That’s right, young man. I can’t wait to get outa here. What’s this? Wednesday? Friday’s my last day and you’re welcome to this looney bin. Thirty-two years I’ve been at this and who cares? The kids? Parents? Who, young man, gives a shit, forgive my French? We teach their brats and they pay us like dishwashers. What was the year? Nineteen and twenty-six. Calvin Coolidge was in. I came in. I worked right through him and the Depression man, Hoover, and Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower. Look out that window. You got a good view of New York Harbor from here and Monday morning if these kids aren’t driving you crazy you’ll see a big ship sailing by and that’ll be me on the deck waving, son, waving and smiling, because there’s two things I never want to see again in my life, with God’s help, Staten Island and kids. Monsters, monsters. Look at ’em. You’d be better off working with chimpanzees in the Bronx Zoo. What’s this? Nineteen and fifty-eight. How did I ever last? You’d need to be Joe Louis. So, good luck, son. You’re gonna need it.
36
Before I leave Mr. Sorola says I should return next day to observe Miss Mudd with her five classes. I’d learn something about procedure. He says half of teaching is procedure and I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know what to make of the smile through the cigarette smoke and I wonder if he’s joking. He pushes my typed program across the desk, three classes of EC, Economic Citizenship, two classes of E4, sophomore English in the fourth term. The top of the program card says, Official Class, PRA, and at the bottom, Building Assignment, School Cafeteria, fifth period. I don’t ask Mr. Sorola what these mean for fear he might think I’m ignorant and change his mind about hiring me.
As I make my way down the hill to the ferry a boy’s voice calls, Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, are you Mr. McCourt?
I am.
Mr. Sorola would like to see you again.
I follow the student up the hill and I know why Mr. Sorola wants to see me again. He has changed his mind. He’s found someone with experience, someone with a grasp of procedure, someone who knows what an official class is. If I don’t get this job I’ll have to start my search again.
Mr. Sorola waits at the front door of the school. He lets his cigarette dangle from his mouth and puts his hand on my shoulder. He says, I have good news for you. The job is opening sooner than we expected. Miss Mudd must have been impressed by you because she decided to leave today. In fact she’s gone, out the back door, and it’s barely noon. So we’re wondering if you can take over tomorrow and then you won’t have to wait till Monday.
But I . . .
Yeah, I know. You’re not ready. That’s okay. We’ll give you some stuff to keep the kids busy till you get the hang of it and I’ll look in from time to time to keep them in line.
He tells me this is my golden opportunity to jump right in and start my teaching career, I’m young, I’ll like the kids, they’ll like me, McKee High School has a hell of a faculty all ready to help and support.
Of course I say yes, I’ll be in tomorrow. It isn’t the teaching job of my dreams but it will have to do since I can’t get anything else. I sit on the Staten Island Ferry thinking of teacher recruiters from suburban high schools at NYU, how they told me I seemed intelligent and enthusiastic but really my accent would be a problem. Oh, they had to admit it was charming, reminded them of that nice Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way but but but. They said they had high standards of speech in their schools and it wouldn’t be possible to make an exception in my case since the brogue was infectious and what would parents say if their kids came home sounding like Barry Fitzgerald or Maureen O’Hara?
I wanted to work in one of their suburban schools, Long Islan
d, Westchester, where the boys and girls were bright, cheerful, smiling, attentive, their pens poised as I discoursed on Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, the Cavalier Poets, the Metaphysicals. I’d be admired and once the boys and girls had passed my classes their parents would surely invite me to dinner at the finest houses. Young mothers would come to see me about their children and who could tell what might happen when husbands were absent, the men in gray flannel suits, and I trolled the suburbs for lonely wives.
I’ll have to forget the suburbs. I have here on my lap the book that will help me through my first day of teaching, Your World and You, and I flip the pages through a short history of the United States from an economic point of view, chapters on American government, the banking system, how to read the stock market pages, how to open a savings account, how to keep household accounts, how to get loans and mortgages.
At the end of each chapter there are questions of fact and questions for discussion. What caused the stock market crash of 1929? How can this be avoided in future? If you wanted to save money and gain interest would you a) keep it in a glass jar b) invest in the Japanese stock market c) keep it under your mattress d) put it in a savings bank account.
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