The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  I would squeeze a passing grade from an exam, pepper classroom discussions with witty remarks, write essays in homeroom at the start of the day. I was good on the fly. I wrote the senior address during lunch period on the closing day of the contest and was surprised to find that my terrible personality was not enough to keep it off the graduation program. It was one long running joke about how many steps we’d taken in the halls, how many shuttlecocks we’d stroked in gym class, how many fruit cups we’d eaten in the cafeteria. I fudged the numbers, of course. It got lots of laughs, a good smattering of them over the very idea that I should be speaking at graduation. My sincerity on matters relating to school was in extreme doubt and rightfully so. My speech was not an outright affront but a gentle prodding concerning the monotony, the repetition, and the redundancy of it all.

  Of course, it was nothing personal.

  Even as I grew to hate school itself, I hated very few of my teachers and, at least as far as I could tell, only those who deserved it. Some, you got the impression, had gone into the education business because they simply couldn’t get adults to listen to them. They would take this sense of inadequacy out on the children.

  Others suffered from a critical lack of qualifications in some area, whether this was an absence of knowledge about the subject matter being taught, an incapacity to speak without triggering REM sleep in pupils, or a general distaste for humanity that made you wonder why in the hell this person had ever become an educator or anything else that forced them to interact with others.

  But there were great teachers too. There were oddball widows with inexplicable mannerisms and memories stretching back to the days when you’d have to get under your desk and pray that three feet of plywood would protect you from a Russian nuclear invasion. There were middle-aged guys with sharp minds, sarcastic answers, and white spit-corners on their mouths from talking too much who probably should have been college professors but who-knows-what went wrong, and now here they were babysitting us instead. There were good-natured ladies who didn’t move me too greatly to inspiration but who entertained my disillusionment, smiled at my jokes, graded me for my abilities in spite of my efforts, and made long days seem no longer than they actually were.

  There were even things I liked about school itself, and there were things that, if it had been different, I could have continued to like as I got older.

  I liked classroom discussion. I was a know-it-all little bastard with opinions on everything, and I loved to give them. I liked to hear what other people had to say. I liked to agree with them and disagree with them. I raised my hand frequently and tried to make people laugh whenever possible.

  Once in a while, I actually liked the exams. I know that’s probably not the coolest thing to say. But in practice more than principle, I enjoyed the process. It was like doing a crossword puzzle or watching Jeopardy! Fill in the blank, shade in the dot, circle the letter, whatever. It was like a game, and I liked getting things right, gliding through the answers, feeling certain of my rightness. More than anything, this was fifty minutes without a yammering teacher, without staring front and center, without looking at the clock. Fifty minutes to myself.

  And no matter when it was, I always loved snow days. Not just the kind that got you out of school. I loved the days when it sort of snowed while you were still in school, when we sat distractedly peering out the window, wondering how bad it might get out there. It provided a feeling of collectivity, of togetherness, that I enjoyed. The darkened sky and the downy white blanket on the playground always made me feel like we were all in on something. You could even see the teacher glancing nervously out there, reminding us that this was school and that it was incumbent upon us to pay attention, but all the while with her thoughts clearly on her ice scraper, her drive home, her shovel, and her walkway.

  Snow in school had an eerie half-holiday feel to it, like we were right to pay less attention, as though there was some inbuilt excuse for the usual half-in, half-out way in which most kids endured class time, as if on just this one special occasion, it was OK for us to universally acknowledge the importance of the world outside of this deeply insulated place where things were learned with increasingly more theoretical and less practicable emphasis.

  And the uncertainty was a beautiful contrast to the glacial inexorability of the four-thirty bell. Were they going to let us out early? Would one of the buses break down on the way home? Would Mr. Santiago, the janitor, have to come in and smash the side of the radiator with a wrench?

  This was the kind of anticipation you couldn’t experience watching a snowstorm from the comfort of your kitchen window over a cup of hot cocoa.

  I guess it wasn’t all bad. But the truth is, even in my earliest memories, the things I really treasured about school were those that seemed in direct contradiction to everything for which the institution stood.

  I loved it when the teacher was out and we had a substitute with only a few brief instructions and a noticeably limited knowledge of the subject matter. We were given busywork and made to privately idle away the minutes without being disruptive.

  And I loved lining up single file for fire drills and waiting excitedly outside while precious minutes of class time ticked away. And there was always this hope as you stood out there, knowing most of the way that this was just a practice drill, that a small stream of smoke would show itself, that a crackle would echo from the gymnasium window, that the smell of camping would fill the air, that this would be the real thing, that we wouldn’t be going back inside that day after all, that we would all have to stand back to make way for the fire trucks, that we might get to watch our school be consumed by flames. I’m sorry, but when I was a kid, I thought that it was every kid’s dream to see his school burn down. I never wanted to see anybody get hurt. I just wanted the place to go up, and I wanted to watch it happen.

  To me, the greatest pleasures in school were always those that forced the daily plan off its runners. Anything to defy the dreadful predictability and maddening sameness of it all. Enter Ed Simon.

  Ed Simon was a high school history teacher who changed my life. Mr. Simon railed vainly against the inevitable fate of our generation, empowering us to believe that we should be more than a bunch of jerks in cubicles playing solitaire and counting the seconds until Friday at five.

  I haven’t spoken to Mr. Simon in at least ten years. The last time I saw him, he was walking around the Cherry Hill Mall listening to his Walkman. Even in the age of CDs, itself now passed, he insisted on tapes, which he would liberally trade with inquiring students. He once traded me Muddy Waters’s At Newport 1960 for the Offspring’s Smash. No offense to the Offspring, but clearly I got the better end of that deal.

  Mr. Simon was one of the last of the hippie history teachers, a relic from the culture wars of the 1960s. Not burned-out but certainly singed at the ends. He was a hard-core caffeine addict. He would chain-drink Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and chew his fingernails until you could see the bones of his fingers. His lectures were highly expressive, so he would wave his long, gnarled fingers around wildly while he ranted. One time, his finger started bleeding as he was waving it around, so without skipping a beat, he wrapped a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin around it and continued to use the finger to point at things and say stuff.

  Tall, lanky, somewhat underfed, with dark red hair and a dark red beard, he was intensely knowledgeable about the history of the world, about America’s past, and about the culture that we were creating.

  He was not particularly optimistic about where we were heading, even, we suspected, to the extent that he wanted nothing to do with it. We always pictured Mr. Simon—a confirmed if somewhat involuntary bachelor—living amid meticulously organized stacks of yellowing newspapers and Betamax cartridges.

  He would tell us that our culture was too hung up on materialism, that he made a pretty decent living but did not feel compelled to own fancy clothes or a “status car.” Indeed, Mr. Simon drove a rust-blue Ford Fiesta circa 1980. The driver-side
door was a different color than the rest of the car. He gave me a ride home from school once. The backseats had been ripped out, and the rearview mirror was affixed with duct tape.

  Mr. Simon’s method of teaching spoiled me. We were in high school, but his classroom was exactly how I pictured college would be. Open discourse. Furious debate. Discussion applicable to events happening in our world right then. No multiple-choice testing. All essay writing. No formatting requirements. We were just asked to make a thoughtful argument and to demonstrate a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter. This was the class where I truly learned to express myself in spite of the restrictive nature of formal education.

  Mr. Simon would come into class and say, “Today we’re going to talk about the First Amendment.”

  We would read the language of the amendment. He would explain its intended purposes, its extrapolated purposes, and the difference between loose and strict constructionist interpretations of its meaning. He would hand out a newspaper article about the display of the Ten Commandments at a courthouse. We would read it.

  Then he’d say, “Sam, what do you think about the argument made by Justice Scalia?”

  “Well, for starters,” Sam would reason out, “Scalia applies the First Amendment to a case that really is about the separation of church and state. The idea of displaying the Ten Commandments at a courthouse is not about freedom of expression. It’s about Christian hegemony.”

  Mr. Simon would say, “Of course you’d say that, Sam. You’re an unrepentant liberal. Let’s hear from one of our conservatives. Thompson. Don’t you think that what Sam just said is total crap?”

  Thompson would say, “Well, not total crap. Only partial crap. I agree that this is not an issue of freedom of expression. But I also don’t see how displaying the Ten Commandments violates church and state. Nobody’s saying you have to look at them.”

  “So what’s even the point of having them?” Jennifer would interject. “I mean, if it’s not to enforce a Judeo-Christian value system in a public government space, what’s the point? Decoration?”

  Mr. Simon would step in. “Yeah, Thompson. What’s the point of the Ten Commandments, then?”

  “It’s not about why it’s necessary. It’s about why it’s necessary to prevent it. Who does it really bother?”

  “Stein. Does it bother you?” Mr. Simon would point to Stein.

  “Ummm. I guess so. Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “ ’Cause I don’t need to read stuff about how there’s only one god and how I shouldn’t take his name in vain every time I have to go fight a speeding ticket.”

  “Great point, Stein! Thompson?”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been speeding in the first place.”

  “I love it. Thompson, our law-and-order man.”

  Mr. Simon was brilliant at this. He’d get everybody involved. He knew us well enough, had gotten to understand our varying views of the world. He’d use these things to set us in motion with one another. He’d work us up into a frenzy.

  Then he would stand back, stop calling on people, and simply let the debate unfold. He believed that in order to get to the bottom of something, you couldn’t just be told about it. You had to be forced to think about it and to defend it. You had to be willing to compromise it or protect it. You had to be challenged on your assumptions, and you had to persuade others to be challenged on theirs.

  By the time we left class on any given day, we’d be shouting at one another about federal funding for the arts and how the Second Amendment was archaic and should be repealed. Debates would continue into the lunchroom and even stretch across multiple days.

  I asked Mr. Simon to write one of my college recommendations. Mr. Simon was famous in the little bubble of our school for his college recommendations, which may have been his finest contribution to the world. He knew his students well enough to help launch the best of them with honest evaluation and effusive praise. Toiling in obscurity as a high school teacher with professorial capabilities, he saved his greatest work, his most lucid writing, and his best efforts for the letters dispatched to countless universities on behalf of his favorite students.

  We met in the lunchroom after school and bantered for three hours about music, other students in the class, and my future. This was his interview process for the recommendation.

  “Seriously, Mr. Simon. I really think you should give the Yardbirds a chance. There’s this hypercharged British rave-up quality about them that makes you think of women in short skirts and go-go boots.”

  “I just don’t see the need. I can listen to Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf doing the real thing. A bunch of white British teens playing blues? It just seems unnecessary.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the thing. It’s not the same thing as blues. They may have recorded it with the intention of sounding like old black dudes from America, but because they’re white and British, it’s something completely different and worth hearing in its own right.”

  “Yeah, I’m not so sure.”

  “So if I make you the tape, you won’t take it?”

  “I’ll listen to it. But probably not more than once.”

  “Fine. I’ll just save myself the tape, then.”

  “Right. Probably a good idea. Anyway, back to the recommendation.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re going to be a writer, right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Good. Do it. You should. You’re a good writer, or at least, I like your writing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah. So what do you think of Ms. Reiner?”

  “Ms. Reiner the French teacher?”

  “Yeah. What do you think of her?”

  “She’s pretty cool. I had her last year. She’s nice. Talks about her ex-husband a bit too much in class, but I like her.”

  “Yeah. I like her too. I asked her on a date last year.”

  “Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

  “Not so good. I think I kind of freaked her out. We had coffee once, and now she doesn’t really seem to want to talk to me.”

  “Oh well… who knows?”

  “Yeah. Who knows? What do you think about Ms. Larkin?” Standard letter-of-recommendation stuff.

  Of course, Mr. Simon was well liked by many of his fellow teachers and perceived as an annoyance by administrators. He was an educational renegade who, as the years passed, ran afoul of the curriculum police more and more. While I was there, he was frequently in skirmishes with administrators about the structure of his classes. These turned, soon after, into out-and-out battles. And a few years after I graduated, Mr. Simon finally got tired of fighting and departed from the school in silent frustration. Education was changing. It was becoming more regimented, more saturated in politicization, more structured. Less flexible, less inventive, far less fulfilling. Mr. Simon bailed while he was still in his early fifties.

  In the years following my formal education, as I found myself ever more embittered with school and the things that it entailed, I thought of how I had disappointed Mr. Muscelli, how I had wished to see my school burn down, how I had spoken at graduation instead. And I thought of Mr. Simon. Often.

  And when I had finally reached a breaking point as a paper writer, when I could no longer rationalize that this was a sensible way to use the irretrievable minutes of my life, I thought of him yet more often. I just couldn’t articulate what I was feeling, couldn’t make sense of this self-satisfaction and regret rolled into a single shapeless sentiment. My relationship with school had been a dysfunctional one. And for some reason that I couldn’t quite place my finger on, I had doomed myself to life as a student.

  I decided to reach out to one of the few adults I’d ever really connected with in school. Ed Simon was just the outlaw I needed to consult. So I googled him. Of course, I knew the odds were pretty low that this guy had a Facebook page. Indeed not.

  Instead, I found his obituary.

  Sixty years old, h
e was survived by his mother, a sister, and his stacks of yellowed newspapers. My understanding is that he died alone and was not found for days.

  It was too late to talk to him. He was gone. School being what it had been, I could never think to love it. I could only think to resist it. Mr. Simon had found a way to do both. This was an impulse that I admired, that I wished I’d had, that I wished I could ask him about. It seemed, though, that like my schooling, like my youth, and like Mr. Simon himself, the opportunity to learn this impulse was gone forever.

  14

  Fear of Flying

  I’d never felt as much like a man as I did the day I bought Bree’s engagement ring. Paid for it with cold hard cash. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased. I don’t think Bree had imagined I could afford such a thing, especially without missing any bills or raising any red flags.

  I just worked myself double-time.

  And with greater diligence came more repeat customers, more long-term projects, more advanced studies. Indeed, at this very time, I was working my way through a doctoral program in cognitive and behavioral psychology. The focus of my work was post-traumatic stress disorder. I was taking the course of study for a guy who went by only his initials. We’ll call him RP.

  I spent my days with RP and my nights with Bree. And one night, when she came home from work, she found the entire house dark. The stairs leading up to the bedroom were lined with candles. Neil Young played softly in the bedroom, flowers covered every surface, and a bottle of champagne waited on ice. I stood at the door, wearing my suit, clutching the little velvet box in my pocket, and waiting nervously for her to ascend.

  I had planned to say some very specific things, some very specific poetic things that we would both remember forever. But when she appeared in the doorway, her eyes already welling up with tears, everything got jumbled. I tripped over my own words, and she looked at me with loving confusion. I was blowing it. So I dispensed with the setup.