Nice Try

by Josh Gondelman

  Days like those made me feel, if not important, at least useful. I left school every day physically tired but excited to head home and work on writing or do stand-up sets. I never felt like I’d wasted my time, either. Work just felt like a slightly different, but also productive, use of my day. Plus, because I thought of teaching as a job and not a career, I didn’t stress out too badly about my long-term financial stability; only in the few months before I left did I really start thinking about my scant down-the-line prospects for owning a home or (gasp) retiring. Not that my long-term career goal of “comedian and writer” would guarantee a life free of roommates and laundry done at my parents’ house, either.

  As my tenure as a teacher extended, I realized that I did bring something to the table as an educator. The patience I was able to show to sobbing kids relieved the emotional burden on my coteachers, who were already displaying maximum empathy to the groups of little boys who would have gladly spent their mornings hitting each other in the face with toy trains and wooden blocks. And the storytelling and improv games we played exercised different creative muscles than the visual and tactile art projects that the other teachers designed so expertly. Not to mention that the pride (and some fear) in the students’ faces when they put on our Totally Nondenominational but Still Kind of Christmasy holiday play was genuine and exhilarating to witness. Kids who never thought they’d be able to stand onstage looked out into the crowd and sang their hearts out (or, on occasion, just waved nervously to their parents, but that’s not nothing).

  What I thought was laziness was actually an application of my skill set for the benefit of the kids (with a little legitimate laziness mixed in). What was really important, I realized, was staying engaged with the kids all day, meeting them on their level, not assuming what they needed from me, and giving them outlets to play and grow.

  When I quit my job to move to New York, my coteachers had each of our students illustrate a page of a book that they put together for me. When they handed it to me, I cried a little, which was something I wasn’t used to at all.

  The Thanksgiving Dragon

  There are really only two kinds of mistakes: the kind where you did your best and fell short, and the kind where you should have known better but you messed up anyway. The first kind of screwup is more common and easier to let go of, and the second kind is (hopefully) rarer, but it sticks with you.

  Often as a teacher, you end up in situations that you can’t prepare for, and you can’t always fake your way through them. Once I was sitting cross-legged in a circle of probably fifteen three-to-five-year-olds, when I heard our classroom assistant hurrying over from across the room. She leaned down and whispered in my ear. I sighed as I turned to face the kids. My coteachers had left for the day. I was in charge. This was my problem.

  “Nobody’s in trouble,” I began, “but did anyone here accidentally poop on the floor in the middle of the classroom?”

  Not a single child responded.

  “Okay, let me put it this way: Someone pooped on the floor. If it was you, it’s okay. You can tell me, and we can get you cleaned up.”

  Still no one moved. It was as if the kids had conspired to conceal the floor pooper’s identity, like they had spontaneously developed the concept of omertà, the mafia code of silence. More likely, they knew who had done the pooping but refused to rat him or her out because of a feeling of vicarious embarrassment. There but for the grace of god poop I. Whatever the reason, they decided to stonewall me. That’s the thing about children that age: if you need them to tell you something, they clam up, and when you want a moment of quiet, they ramble on indefinitely, like a Bob Dylan song with six verses.

  Issues like this cropped up just about every day during my tenure as a pre-K teacher. At least this one wasn’t completely foreign to me. During my freshman year in college, a mystery student we knew only as the Phantom Shitter defecated in a shower stall once a week, so I had some experience solving this kind of mystery. At last, I was putting my degree to use.

  In my years of teaching, I only really screwed up one time in a way that I regret. There was a student whom I should have been there for, and I let him down. I think about it all the time.

  One morning in early November of my second year of teaching, Sean, a student I liked very much, ran by me on the playground wearing a bright green winter hat with a fake lizard tail on the back, complete with plush yellow spikes and plates. (Author’s note: You are not supposed to have favorite students, but every teacher does. To not have favorites would require a level of patience and detachment you usually find only in Buddhist monks or coma patients.) Sean had a big, round face and always seemed to be in a good mood, like Charlie Brown without the anxiety. I waved to him, and he slowed down, bursts of sand kicking up in front of him.

  “Hey, bud,” I said. “I love the Stegosaurus hat.”

  Sean furrowed his brow, confused. He never seemed unhappy when confronted with an obstacle, just genially perplexed. “It’s not a Stegosaurus,” he replied.

  I didn’t feel bad for assuming it was a dinosaur. Pretty much everything a four-year-old boy expresses interest in is either a dinosaur or an anthropomorphic motor vehicle. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “What is it then?”

  Sean’s big circle face furrowed with resolve, his features scrunching together and convening at his nose.

  “This year,” he said, giving each word as much gravity as possible from someone who is three feet tall with a slight speech impediment and still believes that Santa Claus is real, “for Thanksgiving . . . I’m going to be a dragon.”

  Now I was confused. Thanksgiving celebrations, as far as I knew, rarely called for costumes, and even in the event of some kind of pageant, few if any retellings of the Pilgrims’ arrival in (and forcible takeover of) North America included a large fire-breathing serpent. Where could he possibly have come up with this idea?

  But then I realized: Halloween was only a week before. And when you’re four years old, you probably don’t have a super-clear memory of holidays you’ve celebrated in the past. Sean must have dressed up for Halloween and formed an association in his brain: “holidays = costumes.” It wasn’t that reckless a leap of logic. Plus, what a delightful, whimsical world it would be if every Presidents’ Day, the streets were full of kids dressed as Abraham Lincoln and Optimus Prime.

  “That sounds like a great idea,” I said with a smile. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was a great idea, but it felt too cruel to destroy the exciting future he’d created in his mind. Plus, it was funny to me to imagine a little kid at the dinner table, fully costumed as a dragon while his entire family wore Dockers and button-down shirts. Sean grinned and took off at top speed across the playground.

  Over the next few weeks, I’d check in with Sean on the status of his outfit from time to time. “How’s the costume coming along?” I’d ask. He’d usually just nod and let out a furtive giggle, unable to contain his excitement for (presumably) the anniversary of the Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock and its passengers dressing up in bearskins and going wigwam to wigwam, begging for candy. Again, he wouldn’t have been that far off. The colonists received the treat of a wide swath of the North American continent from sea to shining sea. The trick they played was, in essence, genocide. But, much like with the costume thing, I was not ready to say that out loud and shatter a child’s world.

  The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we had a half day at school, and when the parents came to scoop their kids up after lunch, Sean’s mother took me aside. Her voice was quiet, and her tone betrayed a slight dismay.

  “So, for the past month or so, Sean has been telling us that he’s going to be a dragon for Thanksgiving. We keep telling him that Thanksgiving isn’t a costume holiday, but he’s very excited about it. Do you have any idea why he thinks that?” Her face bore a look of genuine puzzlement, not unlike her son when I asked him about his Stegosaurus [sic] hat.

  “Dr. Hyden, I have no idea,” I lied, right to her face, while looking
her dead in the eyes. Why do they make eye contact seem like such a big deal in the movies? It’s not any harder than lying while gazing off in the distance, and it’s way more effective. In my defense, the costume hadn’t been my idea, and what difference did it make if she knew I’d been hyping Sean up for the past few weeks? It’s not like there was anything I could do about it at that point.

  In the opposite of my defense, I was now even more curious to hear what the Hyden family Thanksgiving dinner was like.

  The following Monday, I returned to work eager for news. Normally after a long weekend, you ask the kids to share how they spent their time off, and you get a mixture of total forgetfulness, long-winded (and often unrelated) anecdotes, and total fabrication. It’s a charming but not especially illuminating conversation. This time, though, I couldn’t wait to hear one specific story.

  Just after drop-off, I approached Sean by the cubby where he hung his coat. “How was your holiday?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said, grinning per usual. He was playing hardball. I’d have to be more direct.

  “Okay,” I replied, “but how did your costume go over?”

  “Ugh,” he sighed, his face falling, “you don’t dress up for Thanksgiving!” It was the first time I’d ever seen him so unhappy, and possibly the first feeling of “how could I have been such a rube?” he’d experienced in his young life. And it was all my fault. I’d hung him out to dry. By sparing his feelings up front and encouraging his imagination, I had led him up an emotional cliff from which the only way down was a free fall.

  As a teacher, sometimes you make a genuine positive difference in a child’s life, and other times, well . . . other times, you shit the floor.

  Some Things That I, a Childcare Professional, Was Professionally Obligated to Say to Kids

  “Yes, it is hard to ride a unicycle.”

  “Please eat your lunch with your mouth.”

  “I can tell you’re not napping because you just told me, ‘I’m napping.’”

  “Maybe your friends will want to play with you if you stop hitting them.”

  “It’s okay. The shark in the book is a nice shark, and he’s not even a real shark.”

  “I guess, since you are already sitting in the urinal, just let me know when you’re done peeing so I can help you down.”

  “Yes, I know you wish your mommy was here to pick you up right now. Trust me. I want that, too.”

  Good Deeds, Unrewarded

  Much like the sex education I got in high school, the lessons on drugs and alcohol I received there scared me off of trying a generally fun thing by instilling me with worst-case-scenario panic. My anxiety-based sobriety meant that, for years, I was almost always the designated driver. And there is no good deed that is rewarded less richly and punished more frequently than designated driving.1

  As a nondrinking car-haver, I did a lot of designated driving for friends and roommates from late high school through the first few years after college. Somebody had to do it, after all, and I was already going to be there. What was I going to do, not drive my roommates home from the party or bar or friend’s house or woods or abandoned summer camp? That would have seemed a little spiteful of me. “Sorry, guys! Gotta drive this empty car home! See you back at the house later tonight! And enjoy the drunk scavenger hunt that gets you there!”

  It’s not fun to be the person buckling his friend into the passenger seat, fearing that, cocky and limber from tequila shots, he might attempt a Tom Cruise–type tuck-and-roll out of the moving vehicle. (Or, even more alarming, a Tom Cruise–type late-night conversion to Scientology.)

  When you agree to drive for the night, you’re admitting that, at some point, your evening will get less enjoyable.2 Unless you are going out to a club and feel comfortable hitting the dance floor sober (I don’t know how that could be possible; maybe you are a trained ballerina or something), the sloppier your friends get, the harder they get to be around. Especially because there comes a time in the night when you’re not just the driver. You’re also the pizza delivery guy, bodyguard, babysitter, therapist, and cleaning crew.

  The worst part is, as your friends’ inhibitions decline, all those tasks become trickier, and even if the scene gets real messy, you’re not allowed to leave. That’s when you become most necessary. You’re the fixer, like Harvey Keitel in that scene from Pulp Fiction in which Quentin Tarantino seems weirdly comfortable using the N-word. So instead of getting to pull an Irish goodbye (a quiet, unannounced exit), you are basically stuck packing an in-progress Irish wake into your car. Everyone’s drunk and there’s a lot of shouting and crying and hugging and punching.

  Just kidding: the worst part is when people puke in your car.

  Because I am a good friend, I designated-drove enough that several people puked in my car. Someone from my college improv team barfed in my back seat on the way back to campus from a show in Boston’s North End. On a trip to visit a professor over the summer after my junior year at Brandeis, a friend vomited out the window of a car I was driving, just as we passed the mini golf course where she’d had her first kiss years earlier.3 She wasn’t even drunk; she was hungover from drinking the previous night. I’ve never seen a more apt metaphor for “you’re not as young as you used to be” before or since. The chaos didn’t end when I graduated, either. Years after I finished college, my long-distance girlfriend came to visit for my twenty-sixth birthday and threw up by her feet as she rode shotgun on the way home from my party.

  Even when friends weren’t actively soiling the already-shabby cloth interior of my used Toyota Corolla, my need to be the one in control made me stress out while everyone else was at their most relaxed. During the doldrums after our senior-year finals but before graduation, two buddies (let’s call them Len and Devin because those names rhyme with their real names) asked me for a ride to Providence, Rhode Island, to see an art exhibition that Alison, a friend of theirs from home, was putting on. A quick day-trip felt like just the right way to break up the “not a girl, not yet a woman” week between the cocoon of college and my entry into the “real world,” where I’d be as fresh and unemployable as a butterfly.

  Before we left campus, Len and Devin split a pot brownie between the two of them.

  A quick thing here: not to sound old, but nowadays, you can get specifically dosed weed edibles at retail outlets or from doctors who stopped wanting to work hard in many US states. They’re potent and professionally made and their active ingredient is spread out uniformly, like the cream in the center of an Oreo cookie. But back in the dark ages of 2007, you had to get marijuana-infused baked goods from, like, just some guy. So when you ate a brownie, each bite could potentially be no drugs or all of the drugs. And there was no way to know which had happened for at least half an hour. The strategy for consuming weed edibles since time immemorial has been: Eat not nearly enough. Wait a few minutes while nothing happens. EAT WAY TOO MUCH.

  Len and Devin climbed into my car, where Len, still convinced the drugs hadn’t really taken hold yet, fell asleep in the back seat so fast I was surprised he managed to buckle his seat belt. This was only a problem because he was supposed to be navigating. Devin was holding it together surprisingly well, by which I mean he stayed conscious for the entire ninety-minute trip.

  I hoped a little rest would help Len push through the “too high” phase of his brownie, but it had just the opposite effect. When we arrived in Providence, he could barely speak. He needed help getting out of the car, and once we pulled him out onto the sidewalk, he stood still, unsteady and nervous, like a baby standing upright for the first time without anything to grab on to. He reached his arms out, grasping. I extended my hand, and Len grabbed it. He held on tight for fear of falling, and together we walked slowly down Thayer Street. If you saw us from afar, you would have assumed we were a sweet, elderly couple.

  We arrived at Alison’s apartment to find her intensely unamused. “What is wrong with him?” she asked.

  “He’s way too hig
h,” we explained.

  “Well, he has to go. You have to take him away.”

  “But we want to see your exhibit,” we protested.

  “No,” she said firmly. “You have to leave.”

  So, fifteen minutes after we’d parked in downtown Providence, it was decreed that Len was too high for the state of Rhode Island, so we turned around and left. Devin and I helped him back to the car, and we plodded back to school through rush-hour traffic without having seen any art. I’d somehow experienced all the responsibility of giving my impaired friends a ride without any of the fun of being at a party. It was the purest, most annoying version of designated driving.

  It’s probably not unrelated that two days later I got drunk for the first time.

  The night before graduation, I bellied up to the kitchen table for a team beer-drinking competition, my apartment against our downstairs neighbors. We’d orchestrated a weeklong “House Olympics” competition, and this was the final event. My roommates asked me to participate so that we’d have even numbers, and in doing so, they appealed to my one instinct stronger than my fear of losing control: my sense of obligation. We were in a safe space, and I was barely drinking more than the legal limit for being on the road. And it was more for the good of the group. It was basically the designated driving of drinking.

  It was on. When the dust settled (we had a very dirty apartment), our side had lost, and I had, predictably, been the one who dragged us down. But I’d made a commitment, so I stayed in my seat until I’d finished all four cans, even though the contest had already been decided. As a novice beer drinker, I struggled to gulp down all forty-eight ounces of Bud Light while it was still cold enough that I didn’t have to taste it.4 As the beer warmed to room temperature, I drank slower and slower. This effect created a vicious cycle whereby it took me so long to finish that I never achieved more than a very slight buzz.