Back apparently untouched was a guy named Frank Politian, who had been a Ranger up in the mountains, fighting alongside the Hmong. He was in fine fettle, it seemed, handsome and strong and obscenely fit. But in the middle of Brigham’s parking lot one afternoon, he invited me, for no particular reason, to fight him to the death, bare-handed. A pleasure, but no thanks. It turned out he was issuing this invitation fairly regularly. No one, as far as I know, took him up on it.
As the year went on, kids kept coming back, maimed in one way or another. They were drunk all the time and fighting, often in crazy brawls, where they seemed desperate to lose, take some punishment. They were grossly ashamed of something, it often turned out, but it took a while before we all had any idea what it might be.
As for me, I was getting calls from a marine recruiter; my pal Ryan, fellow lineman, drinking buddy, and brawling friend, had given him my name. It looked to him, the recruiter said, like we could get the whole offensive line there in a unit. We could go in on the buddy plan. Ryan said the recruiter was an amazing guy—he could do thirty pull-ups and he told fabulous stories about Chesty Puller, the most formidable marine in history, and how mangy (the reigning word for tough, crazy, indomitable) all marines were. I promised that I’d stop by to talk. What else did I have to do?
The Peace Hawk and his cadre wouldn’t answer Jonesy. They tried to engage other students. Sandra had a question. Buller had a word or two to drop in. But Jonesy was a middle guard, and what you do as a nose tackle is to keep coming at the center and the guards on either side of them. You keep it up, and in the beginning, the first quarter maybe, they push you all over the place, because you’re always being double- and triple-teamed. But you apply your fist to their helmets and make their heads ring like the inside of Notre Dame when the hunchback pulls the bells, and eventually they lose heart. They see that you wear a helmet cage to protect them, not your own precious face, because in piles you would gladly bite them, tear at their throats if you could.
Jonesy kept badgering the SDSers with the same question. “Is there anyone in your family in Vietnam? Because if there was, I’m not sure you’d go on about the impending victory of the glorious revolution or any of that other horseshit. I’m not sure you’d say that.”
And finally, pushed to the wall, the politburo had to admit that it had no people in Vietnam but that this did not make the war any more just or true or good or what have you. What they should have said, perhaps, was that all people were brothers and sisters, all men and women out of a human family, and that they cared for the fate of the Americans on the ground as much as they did for the Vietnamese. But these words coming from the mouth of the Peace Hawk would have turned to ashes on the floor. For the boss man gave not one damn for anyone but himself and other mental alphas. Jonesy—“Thanks, that’s all I wanted to hear”—climbed off the top of the chair and sat down in it, stretched his legs out, and looked like someone who has just succeeded in sending the corrupt judges off to jail.
How did Lears take all this? Was he angry that his SDS pals had been buzz-sawed by an honorable junkyard dog who would probably end up climbing poles for the electric company, if he didn’t join and head to Asia to help his brothers out? For it was probable, from words that Lears dropped from time to time and that we puzzled over like Gypsies competing to interpret a scattering of tea leaves, that he himself was not in favor of the war.
But it seemed to me he was nearly gleeful—by his standard, that is—the day the commies came. People who usually did not think, who hardly ever talked, were doing both. Buller finally piped up to ask why the hell they didn’t go and join the North Vietnamese if they loved them so much. Sandra asked why the antiwar movement was getting violent. Dubby wanted to know if there was any kind of war they would fight in. Rick asked what they thought of hippies who just turned on and dropped out, got high, listened to music, and ignored the government and the war. A lot of the kids were silent, sure, but they all looked like a current was running through them, as if they were replete with juice, instead of zombie-walking it through the day, asleep in the inner life, as they usually were.
So my guess is that Lears was getting a contact high off the exchange. He wasn’t especially interested in making people think the way he did. He didn’t look for converts. What Lears really wanted, I believe, was simply for people to think. He wanted them to examine their old ways of doing things, and if the result of the examination was that they liked those ways well enough or that they wanted to get more conservative, more government-loyal, more institutionally acclimated, that was all right. So long as they took up a distanced position from their beliefs and had a look.
To do this kind of teaching, you need a vigorous discipline. You’ve got to hold your own thoughts in abeyance. Never show your cards, never lose your temper, do not help people cut to the chase. You care about a process, not the results. So most of the time your students leave you as works in progress, works that may never be completed. You can’t think of yourself as a craftsman who shapes beautiful souls.
For there are teachers, and they can be great ones, who aim to do just that. They’ve considered things from all sides, contemplated all the major questions, and they believe they know what’s what. Plato, Socrates’ greatest student, was one of those teachers. He knew how to craft that beautiful soul—reason ascendant, the passions and the appetites subordinate—so one could live contentedly and do no harm. Everything in moderation for Plato, except his conviction that he knew the transcendental score. On the subject of truth, Plato was immoderate in the extreme. For Socrates, of course, it was very different. Irony was his position—he had no more to offer. Lears did have more. Few of us, especially in our twenties, have the strength to go through life without any investments of the spirit. But at least while he was in class, Lears worked as hard as he could not to dispense any truth. He offered freedom of mind, and loneliness, too.
The Plato-style teacher, the great dispenser of truths, creates disciples. He is surrounded with smaller versions of himself, who vie for his love and spread his word. And, too, he creates apostates, people who fall in love with him and his works, then out of that love with a violent crash. Such people often have vengeance in mind. The Plato-style teacher must be preternaturally strong in spirit, in that he is constantly calling up all the dreams and hopes of his students, stimulating their long-suppressed wishes for perfect authority. He needs to fight against becoming a small-time deity or a demagogue: Often he fails. The ironist needs to fight against resignation that borders on despair when he sees where his students, left to unfold their own minds, can end up.
Yet often, as Coleridge liked to say, extremes meet. The teacher who dispenses truth finds his best pupil not in a disciple but in someone who needs to concoct a potent but very different countertruth. So Aristotle did in response to Plato.
Or the great truthteller finds himself lumped together with other great truthtellers, to be just one color in an extensive palette, from which the student draws to concoct her own eclectic vision. Or the ironist finds people who both adore him and rebel against his never-ending skepticism by creating a great system of their own. The permutations never end.
But this much may be true: If you would be a genuinely great teacher, you may have to pick one path, that of the ironist or that of the truthteller. For those are the ways to push your students into full mental gear. Most of us waffle. Most of us take the easy middle way, not having the discipline to keep the ironist’s game going or the strength to lay our truth out to the insults of the world.
THE NEXT day of school, Lears came into class in a grand mood. He was primed for a splendid discussion. He had jolted us into life with the SDS class, like Victor Frankenstein rousing the lump of inert human stuff lying flat on the slab. But now, everything was different. It was a Monday, and it had snowed over the weekend. Boston snow—great, huge drifts, to make the all too familiar world into another planet, someplace virgin, inhospitable, resistant. Yet it was another planet
that somehow manifested the cold essence of our own. This is what it really comes down to, this unwanting earth, and us, alien, running on top of it, hopping and blinking and trying to find our way.
What did people think of the SDS invasion?
Think? Come on? Give us a break. Let us be. We’d performed once, right? Now it was time for a rest, a long winter’s nap.
The snow had narcotized us, like mind-flattening smack, and we had gone under willingly. All the tumult the visitors had brought with them to Me’ford was hard to bear, and we had shed it, most of us, when we walked out of school that Friday, to think about the poolroom or a date or a quart bottle of beer, maybe three or four.
Buller, of course, was never at a loss. He worked his acne and brayed at Lears that the guys from SDS were losers and fools, with nothing to say. When there was a war, you went to it. (Though one could have bet that Buller was a ready candidate for 4F; his genes were not blended happily into one Darwinian triumph. Flat feet would probably be his ticket out, but there would be more besides.)
Buller always brayed, perpetually cried out like an angry, put-upon beast. But the pity was the rest of us. We had nothing to say. And given that Lears must have dreamed, as I, a teacher, today still do, that one fine class will send people spinning into intellectual life and that they’ll never fade or fail thereafter, never come down, he must have felt flat misery at what was unfolding in front of his kind, always tired looking eyes.
Buller would not stop. And after fifteen minutes of it, Lears came through with an idea. “Let’s go outside,” he laughed. “Let’s go out in the snow.”
The teacher calls for an escape from school! A jailbreak! What could have been happier, more cage-rattling than that?
So we shot off to our lockers, pulled on our coats—all as surreptitiously as possible, so as not to wake the drowsing authorities, the prematurely aged archons of Medford High—and headed out behind the burned-out section of the high school. Lears was in the lead, jabbering away with Sandra, maybe about a concert at the Boston Tea Party, the place you could go to hear the Byrds or the Jefferson Airplane or Big Brother and the Holding Company. By the time he arrived, everyone was standing around with no idea what to do.
But Lears knew exactly what he had brought us out there for. He was well dressed for it, wearing a big black frock coat and a padre’s hat. He held the hat on his head with one unsteady hand, bent over, and with the other hand, the free one, he scooped up some of the dense snow. He stood and packed it together. He clomped his pale hands at each other in a clumsy way while we all looked on, perplexed, as though someone were cooking something that we were going to have to eat soon but that was, as of now, impossible to identify. Lears stared down into his now reddened mitts and—behold—what he had seemed to surprise him nearly as much as it did us. It was a snowball, a singularly malformed one.
He gave a what-the-hell shrug, or the Harvard variant of one, reared back, and—of course, he threw like a girl—heaved it with what force he could muster at Dubby O’Day.
Suddenly everything was clear. Frank Lears had brought us out not for a Thoreauvian walk in the pristine or, magnifying glass in hand, for an inquiry into the variegated and glorious geometries of the snow crystal. No, we were here for nothing other than a snowball fight. I can’t imagine he knew what he was getting into.
We boys were snowball warriors nearly from birth. When I was eight years old and living in Malden, my friends and I would stand up on a little bluff close to my house on Main Street. The traffic flowing by was very heavy—getting across the street as a pedestrian could be an Olympic event. There were cars, buses, and trucks, mostly moving, by what was then one of the more direct routes to or from Boston. From that glorious promontory, we would chuck snowball after snowball. It was especially prestigious to sight a bus driver or a truck driver with his window open and paste him across the cheek.
Sometimes, to our unequivocal pleasure, the driver would pull over and give chase. We’d fly over backyard fences and be a block away before he’d pulled his road-stiffened bulk out the door. We were selective in our assaults, bombing some kinds of vehicles and leaving others untouched, daily creating a treaty amongst ourselves, a Malden concordat, elaborately negotiated each time, as to what constituted fair game and what did not. Trucks bearing the Roadway logo were sacrosanct, because Michael Lundell Hansen loved them with an irrational passion, and Mike, who got his way on nothing else, somehow prevailed in this. Roadway trucks were greeted with a hollered “Yay, Roadway!” B&N Corkum’s vehicles we pounded mercilessly. Buses were a delight, because always, somewhere, there was an open window. Michael Hansen, Paul Rizzo, and I once thwacked a bus driver so hard and so many times that he stopped the loaded bus, got out, and ran for us—a futile gambit usually reserved only for truck drivers. But the driver left a whole busload of commuters stranded in their seats watching him lumber up the hill after us.
Did our parents disapprove? Were we punished for putting lives at risk? On the contrary. Far from prohibiting the sport—“You’ll cause an accident! We’ll get sued!”—they often watched with amusement from their windows. My father would rap the glass with glee when we got off a large-scale fusillade at a bus.
And of course we fought each other for hours in numberless snowball versions of the OK Corral. These sometimes lasted two or three hours, and involved major-size snow fortresses, charges and countercharges, and hand-to-hand combat, where heads were pushed into the snow and kept there.
Snowball was integrally linked with baseball, and by the age of sixteen most American boys—as though they were preparing to heave javelins or boomerangs on the prehistoric savannah—can let a ball fly like a bullet. Then there was Cap, the football quarterback, who also, for this is almost requisite, played shortstop for the baseball team. When he threw a ball, flame licks came from the surface. I had caught a few throws of his at first base. You saw an arcing blur, like a tracer shell coming in, but no ball per se. There followed a sound like a shotgun going off in the palm of your glove.
There was gender rancor to contend with. Here was a chance to whap the girls for saying no, for saying maybe, for saying sure, for being female, for saying things that were way too hard to comprehend, period, for judging us more coldly than anyone in their position—our mothers, I mean—had ever done before. I’m not sure that Lears knew what sort of bottle he’d pulled the cork from.
We went to work, lumping snowballs together, but all our eyes, all the boys’ eyes, anyway, were on Cap. This was his chance for assassination. And truth be told, he had not been treated terribly well by Lears. He had reasons for payback.
But before Cap could load and aim, Buller was into a number of his own. A plow had been by and left lots of snow chunks. Buller immediately grabbed a massive, black-encrusted boulderlike mass in both hands. He heaved it over his head as though he were a caveman going off to brain his foe before battening down to wreck some celebratory havoc on the corpse. Buller’s human features, such as they were, disappeared, and all you could see was a hunch-backed silhouette against the darkened sky. There was something unmistakably primitive about the form. Buller, Pithecanthropus erectus, headed in Lears’ direction.
Everyone watched in breath-held silence as Buller brought the mock boulder crashing down at Lears—the way Diomedes might have done it on the windy plains outside Troy. Lears just managed an ungainly slide to the left, which sent his padre’s hat flying but absolved him of the blow’s full force. He took it off the back and shoulders, not across the head, where Buller presumably wanted the great ugly chunk to fall. So Buller didn’t score the full nose-bleed, off-to-the-nurse, let’s-think-about-the-hospital hit that he probably had in mind.
Lears took the blow gamely, laughed a cosmetic laugh, then went after Buller to try to push him into a snowbank. Things took on the aura of a science-fiction story, time machine–style; the caveman was now being assaulted by the avatar of modern humanity. Lears was not skilled in the art of push-and-shove, but
he was surely game, and Buller, to say the least, had been cruising for it for a long time. Lears spun, got low (the essence of the football assault—get lower than the opposition—maybe he’d been reading Jerry Kramer on the sly), and sent Buller stumblebumming into a drift. Buller fell in a sloppy, limbs-amok way that evoked scenes outside a Somerville bar, the Jumbo maybe, where they served anyone who could reach the counter and where, on a February night, when the street was glassed over with ice, the patrons enacted pachyderm ballet outside. Down Buller went.
The class broke into a huge blast of applause. “Awwright!” Rick screamed. Dubby did an appreciative combination of a war dance and the boogaloo.
But he came up angry, Buller, looking for all the world like a club fighter who’s taken one to the chops and rather liked it and now wants to even things up. He had murder in his face, or more murder than usual.
Mine may have been the first snowball to hit Buller, but there were a lot of others, including shaky salvos from Carolyn and from Nora. (He’s cute, Frank Lears, remember.) Rick, who played third base on the team, sent one at Buller with a little smoke on it—you heard a thud on his greasy green parka, the kind trimmed with fake wolf fur. Then Cap, arm cocked, catches Buller’s eye. And even Buller, who is almost blackly noble at times in his recklessness, clearly does not want a piece of this. One full in the face from Cap—throwing all-out—and you will lose teeth, probably worse. And the chances of his missing are small. Buller backs off.
A general melee begins, with Lears pelting everyone in sight, including, to his peril, Cap. But Cap is knightly, a gentleman, and keeps all his throws at three-quarters speed, if that. The girls especially want to tag him, want any relation they can get with him. But he just responds with fumbly, soft lobs in their direction. He packs the snow so loosely, the balls fall apart a bit en route. Then all the rest of us, Dubby and Rick and John Vincents and I, knowing our better—herd behavior, would Lears call it?—follow suit. We do it the way Cap does, for fun, kindly, with ease. I’m not sure Lears, sharp as he was, ever saw it, caught the dynamic, and knew what was going on.
Teacher Page 19