Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  When Lears was done, Thurston added a few words about Malcolm’s greatness and, as the clock hopped its last significant hop of the day and the bell rang, rose, thanked Lears and the class for listening, and walked out. He seemed to be blown away—proud and astonished at once—that white people (and the class was all white) would take something like this so seriously. But of course we probably wouldn’t have, at least on our own. Lears had shown us what it was to disarm someone’s aggression and then, rather than gloating at your little rhetorical win, listen—genuinely listen—to what he had to say.

  But there was a more striking aspect of the way that Lears had behaved. It was not only his receptivity; nor was it what he had said per se, though his knowledge about Malcolm X was impressive. It was something about his overall demeanor. He acted—there is no better way to put this—like himself. When he talked, he stroked his little mustache and consulted the gunboats and swung his wrist in the baseball card–tossing way. His voice was mellifluous, a tinge ironic, and highly, highly cultivated.

  He didn’t, in other words, do what every other white guy that I knew generally did when he was in the presence of blacks. He didn’t retool himself, get louder or more macho, or try to find a black timbre for his voice. He wasn’t on the verge of offering to slap five; he wasn’t bobbing his head in a Motown rhythm. He simply acted like what he was: a singular, complex, unapologetically intellectual, non- and anti-macho man with a Harvard degree. This blacking up in the presence of actual blacks is a phenomenon one sees to this day as white guys vie with each other to act as black, to talk and move as black, as the blacks around them.

  The moment in Lears’ class might even have had some broadly cultural resonance, I suppose. Because when a lot of the Ivy League–educated left-wing guys had their first up-close meetings with the Black Panthers and their ilk, what the Ivy League guys did was to swoon. They fell in love. They were mesmerized by the leather jackets, by the rifles, by the parade-ground drills, by the salutes, and by the rhetoric that took no prisoners. And these intelligent, often brave war resisters began wanting one thing above all else: to be accepted by the black men as true, hard-core fellow revolutionaries. They wanted to be tough, uncompromising dudes. Real men, not pussies.

  And weren’t the Panthers, with their close-order drills and their uniforms and their discipline and their group solidarity, just a little bit like the football teams that the swooning SDSers had so despised in high school? I don’t know, but I’d be willing to bet a little that our friend the Peace Hawk, who so hated militarism in its every form, could go a little gaga in the face of hard-ass black machismo.

  But the Panthers weren’t to be swooned over; they were to be engaged and talked to, one person to another, as Lears did with Thurston and would do with anyone who came along whose mind wasn’t completely under lock and key. Surely there was no part of Lears, no matter how sequestered or far-flung, that desired to wear a uniform, join a club, or perform the equivalent, physical or mental, of an Alabama Quick-Cal or two.

  As I left class that day, I was curious—a feeling that at the time I had little experience with. What did this Malcolm character mean by saying that whites were devils and that blacks ought to form their own nation, get rid of us once and for all? I was annoyed by it, by the general denunciation. But the outrageousness of the whole thing made me sit up and take notice.

  On the way out the door, Lears stopped me. “You know,” he said, “I think you might want to look at Malcolm X’s autobiography. I think that you would get a lot out of that book.”

  This took me by surprise, this business about myself. Because though Lears was consistently benevolent, there was a kind of gently programmatic quality to his attitude. For quite some time it wasn’t clear that he really went a long way in distinguishing us one from another. Who we were and who we might become was our business. He’d give us the necessary goad, send us flying, or dragging, out of the gate, but where we headed was our own concern. But clearly he had some notion of who I was and what I might need. And it touched me greatly, this observation. It reminded me of my father saying that there was something coming up on Carson that I was bound to like. That someone viewed me as more than a shirt and shoes, a walking destination for TV shows and Wonder Bread—this was a singular thing.

  But, really, I didn’t read books (though by this time I didn’t mind hearing them read aloud and discussed in class). And although I had been curious for an instant about Malcolm—he seemed like a badass character from a movie, and something more than that, too—it was all quickly tamped down beneath thoughts of the pool hall and track practice and listening to the pop Top Twenty on WMEX. Race and books and politics and Thurston White: What did all this have to do with me?

  MORE THAN a little, it would turn out. For as to politics, well, a sentiment of Saul Bellow’s Charlie Citrine applied well enough then to me: I never know what I think until I hear what I say. About a week after Thurston’s visit—and maybe in some oblique way because of it, and because of the visit of the Peace Hawk and because of Lears and all that was stirring in me there in that class without my fully knowing it—I heard what I said, and found out what I thought about the war in Asia.

  My father and I were alone, watching television, the eleven o’clock news, prelude to Johnny’s monologue. War and war protests were on the box. We were silent through the combat footage, where kids in black-rimmed glasses not unlike my father’s and carrying weapons often nearly as heavy as they were returned fire from a ditch. Then came the other kids. The Harvard types made their way onto the shadowy screen, black and white and grainy, with their posters and NVA flags and their chants (“Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!”) and their headbands and their camp followers, with peasant dresses and lolling, liberated breasts.

  My father went apoplectic. He fell into a fury. His face turned bloodred. He snorted from out of the great misshapen nose. They were spoiled brats. Lazy! Morons! He cried out: “Get back home. Get home and do what you’re told.” Then a blast that might have sent 58 Clewley Road up and into orbit, and that got the landlords discharging the small-scale cannonade on their ceiling. “Do what YOU ARE TOLD!”

  That last, Do what you are told, was a standing disciplinary slogan in our house. We heard it often. It was a mainstay, along with “Snap It Up!”, “Chuck It In!”, “Get a Move On!” (And, of course, “Relax!”) What it meant was that the house in which we lived was not a democracy, nothing close. It was a monarchy, with one king, who would rule forever, who was never wrong and never to be gainsaid. It was as though, suddenly, he was talking to the protesters and to me at once (and maybe to Frank Lears, too, about whose subversive ways he had now heard enough, thank you). Do what you are told!

  Do what you’re told! Even now, rarely, rarely, I say it to my own children, and when I do, I feel a shiver through my body, as though I’m momentarily possessed, as though I’ve been grabbed by a demon that was not my father per se but a devilish rage for order that possessed him also, though given my advantages, given what has so far been an absurdly lucky life, its visitations to me are far less frequent. Who dares to say that there are no such things as ghosts?

  Suddenly, for no reason that I could understand, my eyes were hot with tears, and I hollered at him, “How would you like it if Philip and I went over there, to Vietnam, and came back dead? Would you like that?”

  My father looked at me like someone had hit him across the head with a two-by-four. For a moment he was speechless, the mental screen gone completely blank. Not, for Wright Edmundson, a common event.

  I do not believe that he had ever considered this an actual possibility. His kids killed in Vietnam, sent off, as it were, to a far-flung province of TV land and delivered home in a flag-draped box not much bigger than the modest beds in which he every night gave them their good-night kiss but from which they would not be empowered to wake the next morning.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “It could happen!” I screame
d. “Why couldn’t it happen?”

  “Because,” he said. “You’re being ridiculous, that’s all.”

  But of course it was not ridiculous. I had applied to college, which would at the time have given me a student deferment, but as my guidance counselor had informed me, my prospects for getting into a good school were less than bright, and I had applied only to good schools. What I did not want to think about—nor, by all evidence, did my father—was that in a few months I would be out of high school, eligible for the draft, and would have the chance to put my football prowess to work in a place where the business about being first off the deck and being lean and mean and agile and all the rest was both about the best advice you could have and absurdly, blackly laughable.

  My father went silent—my father, who never, prior to this moment, had left an argument with me without being in a position to declare complete and utter victory. Wright, who believed in razing the last residue of the charred defeated ramparts of his opponent and then sowing the ground with salt, walked away from this one. He left it in the air. For once, my father had nothing to say.

  Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe that what I had done was to propel my father to an encounter with the underground and buried river of furious, inarticulable love that he possessed for both his sons, a swarming flood of emotion in a far-inward place that he himself could not travel to through his own volition but which was no less real for that. Being entirely unfamiliar with the terrain, with everything looking so strange, he had no choice but to stare in amazement and be silent. And so he was.

  A great victory of thought and inspiration on my part? I was against the war because it might kill me and my brother—and for nothing—before I had the chance to start a real life.

  I was being small-minded enough, I suppose. But, raised in America, one often acquires the sense that life, at least life at a certain remove—and it can be a very short remove at that—is not entirely real. Life beyond Medford was something that you watched on TV, that you’d never be pulled into until—Jonesy talking here—it came along and bit a full-size chunk from your ass.

  Before the chunk, and maybe before it ate me live and whole, I was awake at least to the possibilities. In Medford, you could readily believe in the prospect of one of the South Medford Bears stomping the life out of you—that’s right at hand. But the Cong and the NVA, who are even less graciously disposed, well, they come on after Gunsmoke and before Johnny.

  My cry was small-minded, selfish—say what you will. But without many forces bearing on me, without Lears and all he had brought, I probably would not have mustered the wherewithal to cry out at all. I would have stood straight and walked into the army or marines and done the drill with no thought, with no critical power applied, just as I’d been taught to do things in football, where the head, the helmet, is reduced to a simple weapon, aimed by others, the coaches and the manly code. Being able to scream in horror about my own doom and my brother’s was a sloppy, slobbering blow against the code. (Do what you’re told!) Later, maybe, I’d be able to slow things down, ask myself a few better, Frank Lears–style questions, think things over on my own.

  Chapter Ten

  SOCRATES ROCKS

  The Doober and I succumbed to the course, succumbed to Frank Lears, at about the same time. Though I have to admit, Dubby’s secular salvation was a shade more flamboyant than mine. I think I saw the stirrings in the Doober well before anyone else did, maybe before he himself knew what was going on.

  It started one day—it was probably in late March, spring coming on—when Frank Lears turned up in class with a record. This had become fairly common practice. He’d gotten hold of a beaten up old phonograph and installed it in the back of the room, and every Friday, and any other day when Lears was inclined, we got some music. I remember hearing Billie Holiday, Mozart, the Incredible String Band, the Velvet Underground. He also showed us art books, and read us a poem from time to time. Usually, the music was something I—and probably most everyone but Rick—hadn’t heard before. But today he had the Rolling Stones (we all knew the Stones), and he was playing a song called “Connection,” in which Mick—no surprise—laments his inability to make one. “Connection, I just can’t make no connection. / But all I want to do is get back to you.”

  Lears played it once, then he played it again. He cranked the thing up and let us get a full blast of the messy, hardscrabble sound. We all held our breath for him. We half expected a gang of submasters and sports coach–types to come bursting in, axes flourished, like Eliot Ness’s men in The Untouchables, ready to send their thick blades through the contraband, which in this case wasn’t hard liquor but American blues, as created by the likes of Robert Johnson, Satan’s star guitar pupil, it was said, then remade in grimy, fish-’n’-chips-and-urine-stinking London, and sent back to us, here on the well-lit top floor of the Medford High School building.

  When Mick and the boys started laying down their high-hearted, piss-anywhere noise, Dubby suspended his major self-appointed task, the coloring in of the o’s in Freud’s Group Psychology. (The Doober was by now a couple of books behind in the coloring project, the creation of a pointless connect-the-dots puzzle on each page of his book, and fretted no end about his inability to keep up, to meet his responsibilities, to pass the highly fraught subject of o-coloring.) But the music got him. He looked like a scholarly monastic who’s been sitting at his high-backed chair illuminating one of the lives of the saints when suddenly he hears the sound of a lute, perhaps (he thinks) a lute with a perfumed damsel bending o’er, pouring through his open casement.

  When the song was over, Lears began asking questions. He asked us what connection we thought the Stones had in mind. Why Lears was asking questions about rock music, we had no clue. But we liked him now. He was our man. So we did our best to answer.

  Was it about wanting to connect with someone you loved, hoped would love you, etc., etc.? (Carolyn)

  Was it about feeling connected to the world? A part of all that is, ever was, and shall be? (Sandra)

  But then the Doober raises his hand. Raises his hand! This is about the fourth time all year that he has done so, the other incidents being associated with bathroom trips and wisecracks that, for the purposes of contrast, seemed best prefaced with a piece of official protocol. (Lears, on reading a passage of poetry: “Some people have described these lines as breathtaking.” The Doober, face fire-engine red, cheeks popping, eyes rolled back, rigor mortis attacking his legs, sends a diffident hand into the air. Recognition from Lears. “Can I, can, can I, can I breathe now?” “Yes, Donald, breathe away.” A bellowslike suspiration, followed by mock postcoital collapse. “Thank you, Mr. Lears. Sir.”)

  This time the Doober wonders aloud if maybe Mick isn’t trying to make a telephone connection, maybe to someone he’s left behind while he’s on tour.

  Lears, obviously, is not pleased. So far there’s been lots of half smiling on Lears’ part, getting progressively less amiable, as though we were kids who, given a fascinating new toy, at first couldn’t figure out how to play with it and then, frustrated, began working to dismantle the thing. Now all he can spare for the Doober is a very light frown.

  But Lears has it all wrong. This is a breakthrough. The Doober, the doughnut repository, the human beer-recycling op, the near– bridge jumper, the math dope, the self-professed failure in this life and beyond, has anted up and tried to answer a question. His answer is nowhere, at least as far as Lears is concerned. But the Doober has tried, by his lights, to answer seriously a question posed in a class. Lears, who should, in the provinces of his own mind if nowhere else, be walking up a dense roll of carpet, gunboats sinking deep into the crimson plush, to get the teacher-of-the-century award on the basis of this moment alone, or at the very least commending the D with a “Not half-bad,” doesn’t appear to notice.

  Instead, he keeps after us. He won’t let it drop. “What kind of connection?” “What’s going on here?” “What do people think?” Finally, in a
voice that actually displays a hint of petulance rather than the varying and not easily parsed blend of affection and irony that’s standard with him, he says, “Did any of you ever think of a drug connection? He’s interested in scoring some drugs, isn’t he?” We all nod our heads in brief homage to the more highly developed hipness of our teacher. Dubby grins like a junior-level fiend who’s quickly climbing the career ladder. He’s recently discovered pot.

  But why was Lears badgering us on this, of all things? Lears, as I say, brought in music, and as time went by, he began to bring in more and more rock and roll, including some stuff we all had heard. And he questioned us pretty hard about it. What do you suppose this Pepperland is about? Why can’t Mick get satisfied? What is the Jefferson Airplane keening about? Why are the Grateful Dead so blissed-out?

  He must have been trying to get us to listen to and think about the music we only heard. For me, rock was background music, aural ambience that I surrounded myself with as I sat in my room avoiding my homework, and dreaming. I used it the way the eighteenth century used Bach, as aural tapestry, though my tapestry was loud tie-dyed, not velvet brocade, intricately patterned.

  But in fact, once Lears began asking questions, I could see that rock, or at least some of it, unfolded a vision. The vision was often foul (the Stones specialized in this one), but sometimes it bodied forth a world that conformed to the best human wishes (or to the entirely self-vaunting wish of the guy with the long, strong guitar in his hands). When I was sitting in my room stumbling through my favorite tunes, I was singing songs of innocence and of experience, regaling myself—and any unfortunate who happened to pass—with tales about utopia and disaster, and much else as well: I simply didn’t know it, had no clue. I was a little like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the character who speaks prose all the time, without knowing as much.