POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III

WHAT HAPPENS IN BELFAST STAYS (not) IN BELFAST

Somewhere back in the 90’s, I had a teacher friend whose hobby was wood carving. He’d discovered I was dealing with practically terminal boredom, and suggested I take up “whittling” as a hobby. I decided to take him up on it. To me, it seemed perhaps he’d just tossed me a lifeline. His motif of choice was Christmas ornaments. Me, I was a little too dark right then for something quite as Jingle Bells as Christmas ornaments, but what should I whittle? Here I had this block of wood in front of me that could end up being… anything. I spent a long time just staring at it, very much I’m sure like Michelangelo stared at his block of marble before giving the world his David.

To me, it had to be something useful. I’m just not a doo-dads kind of guy. But what could I create that would be useful in any way? And to whom? Wait. How about something… psychologically useful. Yeah, how about something psychologically useful to… me? And then I did get an idea, albeit (like most of my ideas) one that was dark and complicated. But so me.

And here’s my finished product, my little own David though I like to call it myown little Tommy. And it’s been sitting on my shelf in the den ever since the 90s. Yeah.

This objet d’art (ha ha) commemorates a sad little childhood memory. Me, approximately age five, I’m guessing. My cousins, four or five years older than me. Meanies. Bullies. They owned two sets of boxing gloves. Too large for me, but they didn’t care. They’d just poke my hands down into them and cinch them on my wrists with twine.

And then there was the other little cousin, about the same age and size as me. They’d do the same to him. Then they’d gather round us and push us together as if we were a couple of bantam roosters in the cock-fighting arena and cheer, “There’s the bell! OK! Let’s go! Start punchin’, guys!  Go for the faces! Go for the tummy!”

And this other little kid, who, I guess was a ringer? I’m pretty sure they’d given him some training. Because he knew what to do. Me? Not so much. I mean, basically I was just standing there with a big fat target on my nose, when WHANG!

And when my eyesight sort of slowly segued back into operation, I was on my back and blinking up at the too bright sky. And oh, all those mean and cruel cackles, hoots, and the catcalls.

So yeah, I guess you could say I’ve had a little experience in ‘the ring,’ metaphorically speaking. A sad experience. A humiliating one. But perhaps one that was instrumental in unconsciously encouraging me to make one of those altering-the-vector-of-your-life’s-path decisions I discussed earlier:

I became a lover, not a fighter.

I’ll give you the example, and then we’ll move on to what happened in Belfast…

OK. So I’m out in the hallway of my college dorm. A bunch of us boys (it was a mens’ dorm after all, no girls allowed ever) were horsing around, playing hall hockey. It was midnight, or a little thereafter. But there was this one kid I didn’t like so much who was seriously bugging me. He’d been rubbing me the wrong way ever since I’d first met him in the fall. (If you’ve ever read The Catcher in the Rye, think Ackley. Enough said?)

A couple of times already, just as ‘dI got the “puck” (think rolled-up-and-taped-ball-of-paper) lined up for a slap-shot with my broom (think “hockey stick”), he’d jab his finger into my rib cage to throw me off. And both times he’d done it so far, he’d giggled, which was super annoying. The first time I’d said, “Knock it off!” He giggled. The second time I’d said, “Cut it OUT!” and he’d practically giggled his head off.

The third time I simply stopped, turned slowly around, laid the hairy eyeball on him for a good fifteen seconds before explaining it to him in a slow, Clint Eastwood-like voice (OK, true, nobody’d ever really heard of Clint Eastwood back in 1966), “I wouldn’t wanna be you if you’re stupid enough to do that one more time. You dig?” So I turned to resume the game and guess what.

Yeah. He did it again. Sounding like some gaggle of flighty eighth-grade girls giggling it up big time at a sleep-over party. I threw the broom down, and turned on him. “What did I just tell you… Bob?” He was unable to answer, the due to the hysterical giggling shaking his bowl-of-Jello sides. I looked him over. Yeah, he was bigger than me. But all of the bad guys in Shane were bigger than Alan Ladd, so…

Now, keep in mind, yes, I was very aware of the fact that I had never even once in my life ever hit anyone, had never even swung on anybody. All the fights I’d gotten into in grade school were like grunting little wrestling matches, so yeah, I was nervous. But so what, I told myself, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there. So I studied his head, looking for the best spot to land my knuckle sandwich. The jaw. Yeah. He looked to me like the type of guy that probably might have what they called a ‘glass jaw.’ I’d hafta swing up though, since he was taller.

I doubled up my right fist. Whipped it in an arc back down behind my butt, from whence I would launch the powerful haymaker swing of all swings that would drop him on his giggling ass. Why was I hesitating? C’mon Tom, you can do this thing! OK, count down time: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!

 I swung for the fences!

And totally missed…

The momentum my haymaker swing had accrued actually hurled me into the cinderblock wall where, like Wile E. Coyote, I slowly slid down onto the hall floor. I was dazed and confused. Bob too was a little dazed and confused. But at least he’d stopped that insane giggling. Duly embarrassed, I pretty much closeted myself in my dorm room for a week or so after that.

That was the first and last time I ever took a swing at anybody.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, my first ever teaching position ever: Belfast Area High School. On the coast of Maine.

I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paid to do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!

On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick, I discovered, to play on the new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of which was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name! Please forgive me for so often making comparisons to literary characters, but at that time in my nervous, incipient-ulcer life, I was Catch-22’s Major Major Major Major! In my first week, I was sure I’d made the mistake of a lifetime, allowing myself to ride the collegiate merry-go-round only to get dumped off at the end of the four-year-ride as an “educator.” I was a wreck. I used to walk the streets at night with the superintendent’s phone number in my pocket (I swear this is true), look longingly at each phone booth I passed, and try to get up the courage to call in sick for the rest of my life. OK, reality check: that wasn’t happening all year long, no. Mostly just in the first few weeks of the culture shock I was going through.

But then something happened. The Phys. Ed. department purchased and installed a speed bag in a corner of the gymnasium. And if anyone needed an outlet that involved hitting something, I was that guy. Of course a couple of things got in the way. (A) I was still The Stage-Fright Kid. If I were going to use said speed bag, it would have to be after school when no one was around to see me. Isn’t that sad? Me, The Performance Anxiety Poster Boy.  Plus (B) some Neanderthal Moron straight out of one of Gary Larson’s future Far Side cartoons took a single, brainless, Paul Bunyan swing and obliterated the bagand me along with it like a pair of flattened tires!

So, during the long, two-week wait for a new bag to be shipped, I asked the Phys Ed Department to please “educate” (if that were conceivably possible) their “students” (using the term charitably here) on the differences between a speed bag and a heavy bag. Which they graciously did. And at last, there it was. The shiny new speed bag hanging there, my own little bottle of tranquilizer tablets. It had been a long wait. But every week night from then on, after all the little Neanderthals had walked or ridden their school buses home to their caves, I would materialize there before it The Bag and then… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam… only at the speed of light, because I was that good. And oh! The relief!

Oh, of course custodians would show up to sweep the gym floor, and kids who were in after-school programs would pass through the gym on their way somewhere or other (and yeah, I could sort of feel some of them stopping behind me to watch for a bit, but that was OK since once I got in my groove, it was like I was cocooned in my own little bubble and the world outside no longer existed).

Ah! Mental health! It’s not overrated you know.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So, a week or so later, me ensconced in my desk before a very large study hall, my classroom door swung open. In the doorway stood the high school principal. My inner reaction was Oh shit! What now? Because I wasn’t quite ready yet for my English class coming up next period; no, I was striving desperately to flesh out some last-minute Hail Mary in that regard. Plus, I really had to wonder (worry-wart-me), had I possibly done something wrong to merit this visit? As a Major Major Major Major, I was always worried about that.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lyford,” he began, “but there are some students down in the gymnasium who were wondering if you’d be so kind as to go down there and give them a little demonstration on the new, err, punching bag.”

“What? Who, me? Um. No, I can’t right now. I have this study hall, you see.”

“Oh, not a problem, Mr. Lyford. I’m happy to sit in here to cover for you for the rest of this period. So…”

A fist had just clamped onto my Poster Boy heart and was giving it a crushing squeeze! “Well, I…”

“It’s a Phys Ed class. The teacher told me that a number of the kids have reported seeing you working out on it, and, well, they’d like it very much if you could give them a few pointers, you know.”

“Oh gosh… I dunno. I doubt I’m good enough to give anyone a demonstration…”

“Oh, sure  you are. They say you’re very good. And it’ll be good for the kids.”

“Oh. Sure. Well, then.” With Irritable Bowel Syndrome threatening to come on, I took off my suit jacket and hesitantly draped it over the back of my chair. It was a very long walk (in my mind) down the halls, down the stairs, and out to the gymnasium on the other end of the building. When I pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym, I was immediately mortified. My principal had said “some kids.” But my God, there had to be four Phys Ed classes waiting for me out there, if not more, all standing around the speed bag in a semi-circle. I nearly fainted. Phobias are powerful things, aren’t they. The human Red Sea parted, allowing me a slim corridor through which to pass. It really felt like most of my inner systems were shutting down. Sweat? I guess to hell I was sweating!

I have no memory of what I might have said to the kids and coaches. I stumbled through some kind of introduction I guess, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense. I do know that I owned up to my nervousness. Whatever I said, eventually it was time came to face the bag. I know that my timing was way off, due to nerves, and I remember botching my routine on my first two or three tries which was so embarrassing, especially when I just missed getting slapped in the nose again by a rebound, as I had on day-one. “OK, I’m really nervous,” I confessed. “No shit!” somebody muttered in the crowd behind me. Yeah. Hecklers. All I needed.

But then my brain kicked in, telling  myself I needed to begin slowly, as slowly as I had when I had my first lesson. So, that’s what I did. Slow-motion… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam, which I’m sure was disappointingly boring to the mob. But… as I gradually increased the speed, I began to feel my muscle memory kicking back in.And as I no longer was facing all those faces in the crowd, only the bag itself, I could concentrate better and with that, I could feel my protective bubble-cocoon forming around me…

And then, I was AOK! Houston, we no longer have a problem! Man, I started loosening up, and then really letting loose! I watched the bag disappear into the blur right before my very eyes! And then, before I knew it, my elbows came into play. And then my forehead was getting its licks in, taking turns with my fists at batting that bag back! Right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right elbow-bam bam bam, left elbow-bam bam bam, forehead-bam bam bam… I mean, what a show-off! You know, sometimes when you discover you’re performing well, you can feel the mood change in your audience, and I was suddenly more confident that all was well behind me.

And then the class bell was ringing, although I barely noticed it. But the kids were heading off to other classes. But there! It was done! Over! Ended! I could breathe.

Well, not quite ended exactly. Because after that day, after… the word got out, a couple or more things began to happen…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Something I need to tell you about Belfast in 1968. It was one tough little town.

For instance there was a movie theater downtown. And there were a couple of levels in that theater, so that it was possible to be showing a movie on one level while having some entirely different type of event happening on the other.

So one of the other types of events was local amateur boxing. Now that would have struck me as perfectly fine. But their definition of amateur boxing seemed to mean NO TRAINING NEEDED. So it was come one, come all. Come as you are. Walk-ins off the street were fine.

Now the way that showed up in the high school scene is that on many a Monday morning (or sometimes even by a Wednesday morning, depending on just how laid up or crippled the “amateur” had become) I’d commonly see boys coming back to school with a black eye, one or two teeth knocked out, a bandaged fist, or an arm in a sling. Seemed pretty sketchy to me, but that’s how it was.

How that showed up in my  high school teacher’s life is that suddenly I started getting shadowed by these big, 200-pound bruiser-types would stop me in the hall, or show up in my classroom after school, to invite me to come on down! They thought it’s be just great to get to spar a few rounds with me, a faculty member. Of course I had zero interest to become one of their outside-of school “friends” or their sparring partner. That was a pretty uncomfortable feeling. I would assure them over and over that I was not a boxer. They’d laugh that off because to them it was so obvious that that’s exactly what I was, and everybody in school knew it.

For a lot of them, they felt they didn’t need any special training because they had their muscled arms, their scarred fists, and their pea-sized brains. What else could they need or want? They didn’t “get” the speed bag concept. They had no clue how to work that speedbag because… We don’ neeed no steenkin’ speed or timing. We just knock your block off. They were the infamous one-punch speed bag mutilators.

After assuring them over and that I was just an English teacher and nothing else, they’d ask, “Well, why don’t you come down to the theater and be my trainer then?” They were utterly confused when I’d tell them, “No, you know what? I’ll be content just staying home, rocking in my old rocking chair on the porch during the evenings, just reading a good book. But I could see it in their eyes. They were imagining, This guy’s a professional, that’s what. He just thinks he’s too good to bother himself with our amateur stuff.

Anyway, the invitations kept coming and coming, pretty much throughout the year that I lived there. Honestly, I found it a little scary.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, I’m going to bring this post to an end with an odd-duck little Belfast anecdote. There are so many of them. This one happened in one of my two Speech classes, the one where nobody was ever willing to make a speech, even a small one.

There was one kid there, Peter by name, who took that refusal to the ultimate level. He just refused to talk in my class at all. You would never even catch him whispering to one of his classmates. It was as if he had taken a monk’s vow of silence. Sometimes I wondered if he was honestly able to speak, if maybe there was something wrong with his vocal chords. But then, I’d see him talking to people outside of class. Imagine my frustration.

I been at my wit’s end trying to think up some really easy assignment that even the shyest, most obstinate kid could get behind. And what I’d come up with was basically a somewhat disguised version of Show and Tell. I asked them to pick some object, nearly any object that was in some way important to them (an object that would help us learn a little bit about the speaker) and then say just a few sentences about it. That’s all. Maybe tell why it’s important. Maybe tell how, or even where, they’d got it. A memento of some vacation trip they’d taken, perhaps. A picture of a friend. Anything!

And here was the kicker: Anybody who did this, anybody who could actually get up in front of the class, show the class an object,and then blurt out three or more sentences about the object will receive a guaranteed automatic A+ . (I was willing to do anything to get the ball rolling in those strange souls. Sometime you just had to prime the pump.)

It worked somewhat well. Some kids did stand at the front of the room. Some kids did manage to mutter something or other. Hey, I was really getting somewhere! I was on a roll. And those students did receive their automatic A+ as promised.

All except Peter.

At first I thought he was actually going to participate. I’d said, “Pete? OK. It looks like your turn. You’re up. Whattya say?” He grinned. He was good at grinning. Grinned big time whenever I acknowledged him, actually. Not so hot at eye contact though. Never once looked me directly in the eye, did Pete. Didn’t look anbody in the eye as far as I knew. But after I called on him, and after honestly a two-minute period of grinning hesitation, he bent over and started rifling through his large duffle bag on the floor  for… something. It was a good sign.

At last he pulled out his object. A portable radio.

“A radio,” I said. “That’s great Pete. I’m guessing most of us can identify with that choice. Good. So, go on up to the front, and then we’ll listen to your presentation, alright?”

It was obvious, despite the big Cheshire cat grin, that he didn’t want to do that. It took quite a bit of coaxing, but (yay!) he did finally walk himself up there to the front. I was pretty excited about the progress.  “Alright, Pete. Go ahead now. We’re all ready.”

It was so weird, the way he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at anybody. His eyes would dart left, then right, up, then down, but never a hint of eye contact. It was sad. Easy to imagine something very negative had happened in his life. And here I was, a totally inexperienced “teacher,” flying by the seat of my pants with all of this.

“Pete?”

No response. Nothing.  He was just standing there, holding the radio. “We’re ready, Pete. You can do this. Just a few comments now, and the A+ is yours.”

By now I pretty much knew he wasn’t going to speak, and that added to the sadness. sad. “Peter? This is your last chance. C’mon. We’re waiting…”

Suddenly Pete lifted the little radio up chest high, examined it for a moment, plucked the little antenna up out of its socket, and turned the it on. Suddenly we could all hear ome disc jockey’s voice, talking it up to his fans. I allowed myself to listen for half a minute, and then said, “Pete? It’s time to say a few words…”

And what did Pete do? He responded by turning up the volume. “Well, OK. Guess that’s just about it, Pete. Last chance. Either you say something, or I‘m gonna have to ask you sit back down. OK?”

Grinning a chilling Jack-o-Lantern’s grin, now he cranked the volume all the way up. I mean really cranked it! That little radio put out a lot more oomph than I’d ever have guessed. And there he simply  stood, a boy with radio in hand.

“OK. That’s it Pete. Have a seat please.”

Nothing

“Sit down, Pete. I mean it.”But he didn’t, he wouldn’t. “Rightnow” Either sit down, or you’ll have to go to the office.” I realized I might as well have been talking to the wall. He wouldn’t budge. I was sitting at the back of the room for this assignment, and at this point I stood up. “OK, you know where the door is.”

As I started walking down the aisle toward the front, Pete sidled off to his right. As I moved to follow him, he started moving up an aisle two aisles over. I strolled over to his current aisle and started moving up it, causing him to execute a long u-turn at the back of the classroom and occupy another one three aisles over.

“Aw, c’mon, Pete. That’s enough, now. Let’s not make it any worse. Out you go on your own, or I’ll hafta call the assistant principal!” That ultimate threat obviously carried no weight whatsoever that I could see. It had now become a surreal game of Catch as Catch Can. With chess moves, him always keeping approximately two aisles away from me! They certainly hadn’t prepared me for anything even close to this in our Classroom Management seminars and classes What was I expected to do?

Enough was enough. My teaching career was only days old and I had never anticipated, or even really imagined (until this moment) having to lay my hands on anyone, but… the other kids thought this was the most entertaining joke ever, and were beginning to cheer and egg him on. It had to end.

I decided to take a short cut. There was an empty desk in the row between Pete and myself, so I muckled onto it and began pushing, to bulldoze it sideways out of the line of desks! Like all of them in that room, it was an ancient wooden thing so old that Abraham Lincoln might have sat in it prior to the Civil War. Pete, still clutching the loud radio, saw what I was up to and frantically started glancing forward and aft for the best possible escape route! Now, just as someone comically yelled, “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” one of the front legs of my desk got hung up on something, sending it toppling forward to crash onto the floor with practically thunderclap!  Pete whirled back around to face me! Then we both found ourselves gawking down at the thing between lying there between us.

Like him, I was shocked at seeing the old desk lying there in two main pieces, split right down the middle from the concussion! But unlike him, I actually knew what had really just happened. Pete on the other hand, with “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” still echoing in his ears, did not. For all he knew, I might have busted the desk in half in a rage with a single, mighty blow from my Heavyweight Champion of the World FIST OF FURY!

The only good thing about that was that I didn’t have to ask Pete anymore to leave my classroom. He just went scampering out that door like a rabbit with its tail on fire.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So now you understand why a lady from Belfast I’d never met looked at me across the teachers’ lounge table and surprised me, surprised all  of us really, with, “So… you’re the boxer.”

It’s as I told you near the beginning of Part II: “It so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.

“I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time…”

And from that insignificant decision, simply to take up learning how to increase my timing via the use of something called a speed bag (a hobby basically no more momentous than, say, taking up baton twirling or coin collecting), I have been remembered through the decades by a high school faculty and student body, as the boxing English teacher.

“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett

Thanks for reading.