Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  “But Mr. Silverstein—Steve—I’m licensed in secondary English. I’m not licensed in history,” Patrick stammered.

  “Oh, really? Wally said you were.” Walter Kupzcek, vice principal, not a man to let facts stand in the way of expediency. Patrick listened to the static on the line, to Silverstein’s raspy breathing. “Hmmm. Well, Patrrrick,” the principal pulled on his name, “they’ll never check.” Silverstein hung up before Patrick could ask what would happen to him if “they” ever did.

  And so American Humanities was born, bastard child of AmLit10 and AmHist12, reconceived every night at Patrick’s desk, and sometimes in the morning as the No. 1 local screeched into the 103rd Street station, Patrick’s lesson plan book in one sweaty hand, sesame bagel with a schmear in the other.

  It was late February, the meat of the school year; now the heavy lifting began. The first two quarters were always given over to taming and training. He and Abdul had gone toe-to-toe every day into mid-December, until one morning when Abdul decided Mr. L was for real.

  “Where is your essay, Abdul?”

  “I don’ got it. Didn’ do it.”

  “Why not?”

  It was such a stupid question, repeated so often, Abdul finally laughed and slicked down what he liked to think of as his mustache. “You not gonna stop askin’, are you, Lynch?” (Sounded like lunch. He knew they called him that. Are you ready for Lunch? they asked each other before a quiz.)

  Patrick shook his head.

  “Well, a’ight then,” said Abdul.

  The next day Patrick found Abdul’s essay on his desk. It wasn’t pretty. Abdul was chairman of the too-cool-for-school crew. But, as chairman, he was able to do occasional work without damaging his rep, for the act of handing in an assignment was understood by his cronies as the highest form of satire. Let him think you care. Much wittier, in the end, than being empty-handed; anyone could do that.

  Yes, February was good. If you were going to make serious headway with a class, it was between now and spring break. Manhattan was slushy, the new TV shows had lost their novelty; it was still too cold to hang out in the park drinking 40s or smoking blunts with your buddies. Mid-April the big black puffy coats came off and you were competing with some buxom girl’s cleavage, an alpha male’s biceps, a contest that was no contest. But February was fun, February was productive—a veteran teacher could finally smile and not be thought weak; you could get in the face of an unprepared student without provoking all-out war. Usually.

  Patrick made his way back to Amina, Fadwa, Muna, and Hegira, the Afghan girls perched on the ledge at the rear of the classroom, beneath Emily Dickinson, above the splintered boards that once were bookshelves. He still felt that twinge of guilt when they nodded in thanks as he handed them their narratives, their eyes cast down, faces obscured by their head coverings. Thirty-six students, thirty-two desks. Who else would sit back there, shoulder to shoulder, silent, listening, taking notes? Hegira, spokeswoman for their group, still paused every day after the bell rang, waited at the door, focused her large brown eyes on Patrick’s chin and said, “Thank you, teacher, for teaching us today.” The way she said teacher humbled him. The other three nodded and filed out behind her. Hegira’s father, who made it out of Kabul just ahead of the Russian tanks, had a little smoke shop in Crown Heights. She spoke not a word of English three years ago but got an 87 percent on the citywide writing test last spring. Abdul could learn a thing or two from Hegira, were he the kind of boy to pay attention to a girl who covered every square inch of her body.

  There were thirty-six students in period two, but, as with every class, the flavor of the group was established by a handful. In this class, Jamar, Hegira and, of course, Abdul. Also Angela Wong and Maria Lopez. Angela worked nights in her family’s restaurant, waiting tables, folding won tons, and broke boards in karate class after school. Maria was an angel-faced femme fatale. Wicked smart, Maria, but, as they said, at-risk. Patrick couldn’t look into her first-Communion eyes without remembering the note he’d found on his floor a few weeks ago. Did you like what I did in lab? it said in her loopy, girly script. You want some more of that after school? Sitkowitz’s chem lab. Procreation—nuclear fission—could be going on in the back row without his knowledge.

  Then there was Josh Mishkin.

  He was quiet today, slumbering at the little round “editing table” to the right of Hegira’s girls. Joshua requires preferential seating said his Individualized Education Plan—by which they meant front row, center—but back row, right corner was what Josh preferred and was the only spot where he, and the class, could function.

  Mr. Lynch tapped a finger on the table, next to Josh’s head. He learned early this fall not to rouse Josh with a tap on the shoulder. While shouting and upsetting furniture is clearly unacceptable behavior in a classroom setting, Dr. Mishkin, Josh’s mother, wrote in her November 7th missive to Principal Silverstein, it is behavior consistent with the psycho-pharmacological and socio-cultural issues detailed in Joshua’s IEP. She concluded with a snappy, I urge Mr. Lynch to familiarize himself with this document—and a final shot across his bow—as federal law mandates.

  Josh opened one blue eye, then tilted his head up toward his teacher, short pale dreadlocks bobbing over his freckled forehead. How could one sleepy eye convey so much disdain? Then Patrick had to say it: “Josh, where’s your personal narrative?”

  Josh waited until Abdul and Jamar had swiveled to take in the show, then hoisted his lanky torso up. He smoothed down his Bob Marley Lives! T-shirt so the cannabis leaf that outlined Bob’s head like a halo was clearer. “Hey, yo, I forgot it at home again.” He puckered his lips, making visible the surrounding reddish wisps of facial hair. “Sorry.”

  Jamar shook his head; Abdul and his minions chuckled.

  “Bring it in tomorrow if you want credit,” Patrick said, and moved on.

  He felt his throat tighten, his stomach swirl. He had always made it his mission to find something to like in the unlikable student—good penmanship, nice hands. Sometimes you really had to dig.

  His father’s dictums, however corny, were still his guiding lights. “Education is a relationship,” Superintendent Lynch would pronounce, carving the turkey in smooth, even strokes, “an unspoken contract between the teacher and the taught, based on trust.” It was tempting to dismiss these archaic notions—the Upper Midwest wasn’t the Upper West Side, after all—but his father had had plenty to deal with back in Peterson’s Prairie: pregnancies, pot, rural poverty. His son. But Patrick couldn’t recall anyone like Josh or his mother back in Minnesota, nor had he encountered their like in his seven years at Marcus Garvey.

  Patrick had never come this close to hating a student before, and it was that, more than any of Josh’s antics, that ate at him.

  Patrick came back to center stage. “Okay,” he clapped his hands, rubbed them together, “who read the Declaration last night? Who looked up the vocabulary?” The usual hands popped up: Hegira and her girls, Jamar, Angela; Maria raised her hand shoulder height (she looked up half the words, before the lucky recipient of the chem class hand job telephoned), and a few others from the front two rows waved uncertainly. An inauspicious response to Patrick’s latest brainstorm, introducing Jeffersonian democracy by weaving it into their previous unit on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Malcolm X part of the American Dream unit had gone well—Spike’s film version was out in video, X-caps and T-shirts were still everywhere—so most of them had read most of the book. He’d put up a poster of Malcolm as an experiment, to see if he’d wind up with the same Frankenstein scars and bandito mustache as Emily Dickinson. Patrick was out in the hall one morning when he saw Abdul, fine-point in hand, prepare to perform cosmetic surgery on Mr. X. Before he could say a word, Patrick heard Jamar scold softly, “Hey, man. That’s Malcolm.” Patrick watched from behind the door as Abdul paused and capped the pen.

  “Jefferson states that s
ome truths are ‘self-evident.’ What’s he mean? Angela?”

  Angela consulted her notes. “Obvious.”

  “Obviously,” said Abdul, to titters from his people.

  “If it’s so obvious, why the long letter to King George?” Patrick asked.

  “Not obvious to the British,” declaimed Jamar, adjusting the silver-and-black frames that appeared midway through chapter nine of Malcolm’s autobiography.

  Jamar’s pride in appreciating the distinction was justified; it had been a long hard slog through the national, regional, and religious issues of the rebellion. None of it seemed to stick. For most of them, the only meaningful signifier was race. And Mr. Lynch had done himself no favors by drawing comparisons with the Bolshevik revolution and using the term “White Russian.” (Abdul: “How many Russians is Black, Lynch?” Patrick: “None that I can think of, Abdul. It’s a political term.” Jamar, nudging the glasses up his nose: “Pushkin was Black, Mr. L. Don’t forget Pushkin.”)

  Attempting a brief summary of the American military campaign, Patrick had explained: “We were a disaster here in New York City—worse than the Knicks. We were a frozen mess at Valley Forge…but we triumphed sneakily at the Delaware River.” He was halted in his march toward Yorktown by Maria’s fluttering hand, perhaps raising a question, perhaps perfecting the arc of shiny black hair that shaded her almond eyes.

  “Yes, Maria?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. L.” She’d patted a few strands back into the arc. “I don’t mean to be rude or nothin’,” she wrinkled her petite, caramel-colored nose, “but who is we?”

  Being New Yorkers, they got pluribus; the unum, Patrick finally realized, would take time.

  “‘Unalienable,’” Patrick said, “that’s a weird word. Who has that one?” He waited. Seeing no takers, he called on his go-to girl. “Hegira?”

  She looked down at her notes, her face shrouded. She shook her head. “It’s in the wrong form, Mr. Lynch, I think.”

  “Go for it.”

  “My dictionary is no good.” She looked to her fellow ledge girls for support. They stared back solemnly. “Foreign, it says. Strange.”

  Mr. Lynch nodded. “Yes, ‘alien.’ That’s on the right track.”

  “Strangers from another planet,” said Abdul, followed by his famous intergalactic noise, half-hum, half-whistle.

  “Oh snap, d’joo see The X-Files last night?” squealed Julio, Abdul’s right-hand man. He waved his long, praying mantis arms. Julio’s father was Dominican, his mother Haitian. This parentage, coupled with his extravagant gestures and slender prettiness, led to the stairwell graffiti claiming that Julio slept on “both sides of the island.” Being Abdul’s boyhood chum and court jester spared him additional physical abuse.

  “Illegal aliens, next on Fox,” intoned Abdul.

  “My uncle Ramon’s illegal,” said Julio.

  “Yo’ whole family’s illegal,” said Abdul.

  “Yo’ mama’s illegal…”

  “Oooooo…” said Patrick’s American Humanities class, in sudden hope that something more exciting than an explication of Lockean philosophy might develop second period.

  “Enough,” said Mr. Lynch, knowing that Abdul and Julio could easily burn forty minutes with this routine and, according to accounts of Sitkowitz’s class, frequently had.

  Strolling the aisles, a quick survey confirmed that homework completion lacked critical mass. Jefferson was dying. Plan B had been to introduce The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but he’d miscounted in the book room and was six copies short. Plan C—this being a new course, he had no Plan C.

  The jackhammers on Columbus Avenue started up. The ancient radiator, which produced much noise but little heat, began its ping-ping-ping. Maria was evaluating her crimson nails. Abdul was about to punch Julio’s shoulder. Josh was sleeping. Angela—Angela!—was sketching on her desk. She was his canary in the coal mine; if he lost her, it was really over. Patrick looked through the metal meshwork that covered his windows. A red Corvette was gunning up the ramp of the Park ‘n’ Pay across 103rd. A damp, early spring breeze leaked through the baseball-sized hole in the front windowpane. His first year at Science & Tech, Patrick put in a work order to have it fixed. A braver man would’ve sent in another work order, but Bernie, the hollow-eyed, brandy-breathed head custodian, was the only person in the building who scared him.

  Patrick faced his students. He looked over their heads at the clock. Nine twenty-three. It would always be second period. Help me, Emily. Her gaze was unyielding: You let them do this to me. You never said a word. The teacher’s eyes came down on Julio, who, forgetting which class he was in, was slipping his Mets cap on, tilting it backward. Mr. Lynch strode to Julio’s desk, snatched the cap off his head.

  “What the—”

  “No hats in class, Mr. Aguilar.”

  “Yo, Lynch—”

  “But…” Patrick knew without looking that all eyes, save Josh’s, were now on him, “you can have it back—you can wear it in class the rest of the year, Mr. Aguilar—if you can tell me what Thomas Jefferson and this man,” he did a little hop, skip, and jump to the poster of Malcolm, rapped it with his knuckles, “have in common.”

  Julio’s narrow face crumpled in despair. Who knew this would be the day doing homework actually mattered?

  “They’re both men,” offered Abdul. “Can I have Julio’s hat?” Julio glared at him.

  “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to dissolve the bands…” Patrick quoted, waving the cap in front of them as if it were his quill pen.

  “They’re both rebels,” said Angela, her jaw set at the angle he’d seen after school in the gym, when her fist went through a board.

  “A rebel? Jefferson? On his hilltop plantation?” Patrick flipped the cap, caught it by the brim. Jamar raised one hand and thumbed his text with the other. “Jamar?”

  “And for this we pledge our lives, our land, and our sacred honor. Yeah, he owned a plantation and slaves, but if the British found him, he was gone.”

  “And he got all his rich friends to agree,” said Maria, who had forgotten her nails. “Their names are on it same as his.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t see the connection yet.” Patrick tried the cap on for size. Julio squirmed.

  “Malcolm used to work those crowds on 125th, up by the Apollo,” offered Jamar.

  “My dad heard him. He say everybody be screaming. Say brother could really talk some sh—stuff.” This from Abdul, who’d said little during their discussions of the autobiography. A first for him, invoking his father, who, apparently, was moved enough by Malcolm to leave his son with the Nation of Islam name before he left for good.

  “They were both persuasive, okay.” Patrick stalked the room, taking off the cap, running a hand through his retreating hairline. “But to what end? Their philosophies?”

  “The white man’s the devil.”

  “The British are the devil.”

  Mr. Lynch threw his head back. “That’s lame.” He scowled. “That’s weak.”

  “Tyrants,” said Jamar. “The British were tyrants.”

  “Better,” said Patrick. “What to do about it?”

  “Fight back.”

  “How?”

  “Protest.”

  “Arm yourself.”

  “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”

  Julio sprang to his feet, pointing a long finger at the teacher. His eyes were wide. He thrust his shoulders back. “By any means necessary!” he shouted.

  “Bravo, Mr. Aguilar, well done. A+.” Mr. Lynch frisbeed the cap back to Julio, who snatched it out of the air and yanked it on his head to the class’s applause. He gave a deep bow and sat with theatrical flourish.

  Patrick let Julio and the class savor their collective brilliance for a moment. He glanced at his watch: twent
y-five minutes left in the period. This could really go places. Patrick hugged his sides, which were a little damp. He put a fist on each hip. “So—Tom and Malcolm, a couple of homeboys, lookin’ to stir somethin’ up. Let’s take it further. Who were their audiences? To whom were they appealing?” Half a dozen hands went up, several for the first time this year. That vein in Patrick’s jaw pulsed.

  A rat poked his nose and bristled his whiskers through the broken boards beneath the dangling feet of Hegira’s girls.

  “Mickey!” screamed a familiar voice from the editing table in the back-right corner. Sleepy Josh had been driven off by his evil twin, Manic Josh. He stood with his arms outstretched, ready to embrace their visitor. Since construction commenced on Columbus Avenue, the sewer vermin had sought higher ground. It was Patrick who named the first one Mickey, in hopes of defusing the situation, of evoking a kinder, gentler rodent. Until now, the rats had always stayed back by the wall, amidst the boards, often noticed only by the teacher, but Josh had succeeded in spooking this one and he hopped out, sniffing the air, thrashing his hairless tail. The ledge girls, unruffled, peered down through their feet at Mickey, pulling at their skirts slightly, flashing a rare glimpse of ankle. Such creatures, perhaps, had been pets in Kabul, or dinner.

  The rest of Mr. Lynch’s second period American Humanities class was less composed. A number of the girls and more than a few boys scrambled atop their desks, hugging their knees in fear and delight as the rat darted from row to row. Abdul and his crew did the same, in parody, bleating falsetto cries, Julio leading the way, his mouth opened wide, his reedy fingers framing his face in a silent Munch-like scream. Jamar and Angela took in the proceedings with disgust, but their classmates, in the main, were enjoying themselves immensely. Any distraction—fistfight, fire drill—was a welcome change, but this was really good, surefire Topic A in the hallway.

  Josh was gleeful. He leaned against the editing table, shaking his shoulder-length dreadlocks, Bob Marley’s beatific stoned face looking on from his chest. “Mickey,” he clapped his hands, “come to Papa.”