So after a not-so-successful attempt at instilling the beginning of a love of poetry in the hearts of my little motorcycle EXILES with the poem “The Family” by Jacques Prevert (yeah, Jack the Pervert from my previous BUMMER II episode), I had to reach deep down into the dark recesses of my Poetry Arsenal. And the lethal weapon I pulled out (heh) was as ticklish as nitroglycerin: Bukowski!
A movie based on Charles Bukowsi’s life was aptly titled Barfly. Apparently, that’s pretty much what he was. Mickey Rourke played Hank, “Hank” being Charles’ popular nickname. Most of the film takes place in sleazy barrooms and hotel rooms with his sleazy girlfriend, Wanda (Faye Dunaway). Guess why. Right.
Hank lived his adult life as a functioning alcoholic.
Despite that life, he was a prolific and surprisingly successful writer. According to Wikipedia, “Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. One of these works he titled Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window,” (a title that hints at a darkness within the man). Songwriter Leonard Cohen once said of him, “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”
The Wikipedia article further says, “Bukowski’s work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City… In 1986 Time magazine called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.’ Regarding his enduring popular appeal, Adan Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski’s appeal … [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp fiction hero.’” So Bukowski, sleazy drunk that he was much of the time, enjoyed a global popularity, as the number of biographical texts dissecting the man will attest.
The first of his poems I selected for my EXILES (others were soon to follow) is “Me Against the World,” a seemingly appropriate motto for my boys. I’d discovered it serendipitously. One afternoon, browsing the Poetry Section of a Borders’ Book Store, I happened to pluck a random book from a display, flip it open to the middle like cutting a deck of cards and… Jesus,there it was. And it had already had me in its death grip after only the first six or seven lines. It felt as if I were to look into a mirror, I’d discover that I’d just suffered a metaphorical black eye! That was honestly a day I can’t forget.
Now I need to point out that this book was an anthology in the annual Best of American Poetry series, so “Me Against the World” wasn’t one of those elegant, cerebral pieces I apparently was expecting that day. I bought the book immediately. I’d become a Hank Bukowski fan immediately. I was taking my first step on a counterculturally sentimenal journey of a thousand Bukowski poems.
Back in the classroom, I opted to dramatically read the poem aloud first, before passing out the lyrics sheet. I wanted to grab their rapt attention the same way the poem had initially muckled onto mine in Borders. I began with the opening, “when I was a kid one of the questions asked was, would you rather eat a bucket of shit or drink a bucket of piss? I thought that was easy. ‘that’s easy,’ I said, ‘I’ll take the piss.’ ‘maybe we’ll make you do both,’ they told me.”
Now if you happen to be new to Bukowski, you are probably finding yourself as much in a state of shock as I was at first. Even nearly every one of those Exiles’ jaws had just landed in in their laps, not because the language came as a shock, but because the language had occurred spoken out loud by a high school English teacher in a public school classroom. It was an unusual moment indeed. But please, dear reader, please hold on and bear with me. You will be rewarded, I swear.
Back to the poem:
ME AGAINST THE WORLD
by Charles Bukowsky
when I was a kidone of the questions asked
was,would you rather eat a bucket of shitor
drink a bucket of piss?I thought that was easy.
“that’s easy,” I said, “I’ll take thepiss.”
“maybe we’ll make you do both,”they told me.
I was the new kid in theneighborhood.
“oh yeah?” I said.“yeah!” they said.there were
four of them“yeah,” I said, “you and whosearmy?”
“we won’t need no army,”the biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into hisstomach.then all
five of us weredown onthe ground fighting.
they got in each other’s waybut there were
still too many ofthem.I broke free and started
running.“sissy! sissy!” they yelled.“going
home to mama?”I kept running.
they were right.I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto theporch and
into thehousewhere my father was beating
up my mother.she was screaming.things were
broken on the floor.I charged my father
and started swinging.I reached up but
he was too tall,all I could hit were hislegs.
then there was a flash of red andpurple
and greenand I was on the floor.
“you little prick!” my father said,“you
stay out of this!”“don’t you hit my boy!”
my motherscreamed.but I felt good
becausemy fatherwas no longer hitting
mymother.to make sure, I got up and
chargedhim again, swinging.there was
another flash of colorsand I was
on the flooragain.when I got up again
my father wassitting in one chairand
my motherwas sitting inanother chair
andthey both just sat therelooking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on thebed.
I listened to make sure there
weren’t any more sounds of
beating and screamingout there.
there weren’t. then I didn’t know
what todo.it wasn’t any good outside
and it wasn’t any goodinside.so I
just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
across a window.I found a match,
walked over,lit it, and burned
the spider todeath.
then I felt better.
much better.
This gut-wrenching piece of creative writing still affects me, to this day. And believe me, did we ever have a great discussion, or what!? A discussion on the significance of this one, on them, and on me; a discussion on poetry, on creative writing. God, I was clam-happy at the end of that class period. Stories were triggered and told. I felt myself really starting to bond with these yahoos. And once again, I was left with the distinct feeling I’d won implicit “permission” to try one more poem. As long as it was written by this dude, good ol’ Hank Bukowski. Or somebody very much like him. You know. No Daffodils, no clouds. But I had a number of them waiting in the wings.
Stay tuned for a few more of my fave Bukowski hits coming up in my next episode, “Bummer IV.”
One of the all-time, proudest little moments of my high school English teaching career was the day I faced-off against a sophomore, all-boy classroom of the junior Exiles Motorcycle Club and announced that we were about to begin the required poetry unit. I’d been dreading the day since they and I first got the chance to look each other over back in September. I was a hell of a lot more intimidated by them than they were of me. Each wore the signature jean jacket with the sleeves torn off, leaving it pretty much a vest, with “EXILES” stenciled in an arc across the shoulder blades.. Despite the lack of the black leather jacket, which I’m guessing was above their pay grade, in my head I was quietly hearing the lyrics of a rousing 1950s song:
He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back He had a hopped-up ‘cicle that took off like a gun That fool was the terror of Highway 101
Well, he never washed his face and he never combed his hair He had axle grease imbedded underneath his fingernails On the muscle of his arm was a red tattoo A picture of a heart saying “Mother, I love you”
He had a pretty girlfriend by the name of Mary Lou But he treated her just like he treated all the rest And everybody pitied her and everybody knew He loved that doggone motorcycle best…
from “Black Denim Trousers” –songwriters: Jerry Leiber / Mike Stoller
I was really nervous. However, by then I’d had a few weeks to better get to know the little badass wannabes as the unique and colorful individuals that in reality they were. And I’d been able to use that time to sweat over preparing possible strategies for this High Noon showdown. I’d come up with only one clever, albeit somewhat iffy, plan. It was a gamble. And if I lost, damn, I’d have to kiss my beloved poetry goodbye. Still, it was pretty clever. In the long run, it had been my jukebox brain that handed me the possible key: music! Because as Google tells us today (Google didn’t exist back then), “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast…” Yes, and one day, somewhere between September and November, the ghost of Harry Chapin had stepped forward to potentially save this English major’s ass.
Now, these dudes dwelled on believing (actually knowing) that they were the ones in charge, regardless of who was being paid to be. And in that they could often be very (gulp!) convincing. So when I unsteadily announced, “OK guys. Starting today we’re diving into poetry for a few weeks…” I wasn’t entirely surprised by the volley of snide laughter that interrupted me mid-sentence, though it left me standing on shaky ground.
After the merriment died down, one of the guys (apparently the leader and spokesperson of this little band) mansplained to me (and yes, I realize that the term “mansplain” wasn’t even coined back there in the 70s but, in retrospect, that’s what it was) that no, we wouldn’t be taking part in any… poetry unit. Whereupon I felt obliged as “their teacher” to mansplain back to them that, yeah, I understood how they felt and all yet, still, it was mandated by the curriculum and all so there was really nothing we could do about it. Another volley of laughter!
(OK. Now before I go on, let me mansplain to you, dear reader, the actual reality at play here. Honestly? The administration couldn’t have actually cared less about what went on in my classroom with those particular yahoos, as long as it didn’t bring down any bad publicity on the school district. In other words, the principal himself knew that even he wouldn’t try teaching theappreciation of poetry to this crowd so… if I‘d wanted to (and as long as no one set fire to the classroom, got killed, and we didn’t get found out), I probably could’ve kept them busy all year doing book reports on Playboy. But the truth is, I love poetry, always have, and what I was feeling was the dire need to do something (anything) to save my own my sanity in that particular classroom! Poetry would do that for me, if I could only pull it off.
“No, guys, I’m serious. We don’t have any choice.”
“OK, fine. Go ahead then. You do it. Just wake us back up when it’s over. Or not. See, we don’t care what you do up there at the front of the room, do we, guys. We won’t pay any attention. But hey, whatever floats your boat, man. Have fun.”
I purposely let our give and take play out for a minute or two longer. I wanted to allow their egos to be wallowing in their little victory over The Man, confident they had easily crushed my frilly little poetry plans like a cigarette butt beneath their collective steel-toed boot. I wanted them in a festive, patting-themselves-on-the-back mood similar to the Trojans, drinking it up to excess as they lay beneath the deadly shadow of the infamous Trojan horse. Hopefully all the better to unload my supposed, and-hopefully-not-a-dud “ace” up my sleeve, heh heh. So I hoped anyway. I dunno, perhaps I’m a student of the art of war.
But finally I laid the ace down on the table before them. “OK, men. Looks like you got me. However, if you’re not too chicken to…gamble, I have a little proposition for you.”
“Gamble? You wanna gamble with us? Sorry, homeboy. I mean come on, dude. Poetry? Get real.” Another volley of laughter.
“C’mon on. Hear me out. I mean, if I’m gonna lose my job thanks to you yahoos, the least you can do is listen.”
“Whatever.”
“So. Tell you what. How about this? You let me try one single poem on you. Alright, it’s actually a song. But the lyrics? Lyrics are poetry. So…”
“What kind of music? Lawrence Welk? No, don’t think so.”
“I can’t stand Lawrence Welk either, so no. Feel better?”
“No. Not really.”
“But here’s the deal. All you hafta do is give me one shot. But the stipulation is… a half-hourshot, a full half hour, because I do want you to wait till I’m finished with it, right? No interruptions. At the end of which I call for a vote. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. Totally up to you guys. And I guarantee I will abide by your decision. Guarantee it. And so think about this. A) By doing this I can, in all good conscience, report back to the principal that yeah, I did poetry with you guys. I just don’t need to mention it was just one poem, eh? So you’re saving my bacon,” I lied, “and I won’t forget that. And… well, this is just between you and me, OK? And B) You get to trade away what might’ve turned out to be a three- or four-week unit of the dreaded poetry for you (yeah, sure, I know, just hearing me do it all by myself at the front of the room, but still…) all for a lousy, stinkin’ thirty freakin’ minutes of it. What a deal, right?”
“Yeah, you say guaranteed and all, but what if it turns out afterwards you’re lyin’?”
“Well, the way I look at it is, you’re the fierce biker gang here, right? I’m the Ichabod Crane.”
“The… what?“
“I mean, if I stiff you on this, you guys’ll probably kill me, so…”
“Oh yeah. There is that.”
“’Course I’m one pretty rugged fella…” Another volley. “But remember, I want your attention throughout this. And considering what you’re likely to gain in the deal, I think that’s a fair trade, don’t you?”
The little man in charge looked over his shoulder. “Guys?” There were a number of silent, cautious, almost imperceptible nods. He swung back around. “All right. We’ll give you a shot. But I’m warning…”
“Thank you. For your vote of confidence.”
“We ain’t voted yet.”
“Fair enough. OK. So here’s how it’s gonna work.”
“What’s it called? This so-called song?”
“Bummer.” They all grinned a little. “Yeah, you were imagining “Clouds” or “Daffodils, right?.” But… here’s how this is gonna work. I’ve printed up copies of the words,” I said, holding up a stapled, two-page, two-sided, single-spaced document.
“Jeez. What’s that? A friggin’ book? It’s long enough! I thought you said a poem.”
“It’s long. Yeah. But I believe you agreed to the stipulation that you hafta pay attention…
“Oh, believe me. I’m paying attention all right.”
“Sarcasm is cool. OK. But this song, “Bummer,” has a fairly long instrumental introduction. Sorry about that. It’s kinda gonna sound like some cop show theme, Starsky and Hutch maybe. I’m gonna let that play for a couple of minutes to set the tone. And meanwhile, I’ll be coming around passing out these lyrics to you. I’m asking you to follow along carefully, word for word, OK?”
And when, a moment later, I dropped the needle into the vinyl groove, I heard somebody mutter “Christ!’
(Bythe way, dear reader, do us both a favor and click on this YouTube link to listen along while you read the lyrics. I’m betting you’ll be impressed by both the content and the very creative arrangement. Hopefully, you’ll feel like one of the Exiles, if you do.) https://youtu.be/mL3eXX-na64
And here are the lyrics:
Bummer
by Harry Chapin from Portrait Gallery
His mama was a midnight woman His daddy was a drifter drummer One night they put it together Nine months later came the little black bummer
He was a laid back lump in the cradle Chewing paint chips that fell from the ceiling Whenever he cried he got a fist in his face So he learned not to show his feelings
He was a pig-tail puller in grammar school Left back twice by the seventh grade Sniffing glue in Junior High And the first one in school to get laid
He was a weed-speed pusher at fifteen He was mainlining skag a year later He’d started pimping when they put him in jail He changed from a junkie to a hater
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
They threw him back on the street, he robbed an A & P He didn’t blink at the buddy that he shafted And just about the time they would have caught him too He had the damn good fortune to get drafted
He was A-one bait for Vietnam You see, they needed more bodies in a hurry He was a cinch to train ‘cause all they had to do Was to figure how to funnel his fury
They put him in a tank near the DMZ To catch the gooks slipping over the border They said his mission was to Search and Destroy And for once he followed and order
One sweat-soaked day in the Yung-Po Valley With the ground still steaming from the rain There was a bloody little battle that didn’t mean nothing Except to the few that remained
You see a couple hundred slants had trapped the other five tanks And had started to pick off the crews When he came on the scene and it really did seem This is why he’d paid those dues
It was something like a butcher going berserk Or a sane man acting like a fool Or the bravest thing that a man had ever done Or a madman blowing his cool
Well he came on through like a knife through butter Or a scythe sweeping through the grass Or to say it like the man would have said it himself: “Just a big black bastard kicking ass!”
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
When it was over and the smoke had cleared There were a lot of VC bodies in the mud And when the medics came over for the very first time They found him smiling as he lay in his blood
They picked up the pieces and they stitched him back together He pulled through though they thought he was a goner And it forced them to give him what they said they would Six purple hearts and the Medal of Honor
Of course he slouched as the Chief White Honkey said: “Service beyond the call of duty” But the first soft thought was passing through his mind “My medal is a Mother of a beauty!”
He got a couple of jobs with the ribbon on his chest And though he tried he really couldn’t do ’em There was only a couple of things that he was really trained for And he found himself drifting back to ’em
Just about the time he was ready to break The VA stopped sending him his checks Just a matter of time ’cause there was no doubt About what he was going to do next
It ended up one night in a grocery store Gun in hand and nine cops at the door And when his last battle was over He lay crumpled and broken on the floor
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
Well he’d breathed his last, but ten minutes past Before they dared to enter the place And when they flipped his riddled body over they found His second smile frozen on his face
They found his gun where he’d thrown it There was something else clenched in his fist They pried his fingers open— found the Medal of Honor And the Sergeant said: “Where in the hell he get this?”
There was a stew about burying him in Arlington So they shipped him in box to Fayette And they kind of stashed him in a grave in the county plot The kind we remember to forget
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
I’ve gotta say, it was fun watching their changing expressions as they pored over the handout, following along, and it was especially a real hoot when Mr. Chapin sang the line, “Sniffing glue in Junior High and the first one in school to get laid.” One kid’s head popped right up looking at me wide-eyed, and he almost gasped in wonder, “Can you say that? In school, I mean?” to which I responded, “I dunno. Probably not.” (Keep in mind this was the early 70s after all, years fifty some ago.) But it also gave me a rush of inner joy to witness my kids, already budding outliers in their world, become emotionally affected, probably the very first time, by something at once both so crude and artistic. It felt kinda like one of those To Sir, With Love moments, you know?
Anyway, that was the day I began to fall in love with this little badass biker class.
So once upon a time I found myself on a jumbo jet headed for something called Basic Training. I say found myself, not because I was just waking up from amnesia. And not because I’d been drafted, either. Nothing as exotic as that. And in case you’re wondering, I was stone cold sober. Oh, I could’ve listed off the steps that had placed me on that plane. It’s just that the Big Decisions in my life never seemed entirely real… until, that is, I’d end up landing on both feet in some rock-hard consequence that I might not be too happy with. That’s just the way most of my life was— always sort of discovering myself somewhere or other, involved in doing something I really hadn’t particularly chosen and didn’t necessarily want. Strange, huh. I was born without foresight.
Something other than me seemed to be the force that determined what I was to become, and when. Consequently, I’ve felt a strong kinship with Juliet’s Romeo when he cried out in anguish, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (act 3, scene 1). Remember, he’d just accidentally executed Juliet’s favorite cousin Tybalt, something he hadn’t planned on doing at all. In fact, it was the last thing on earth he’d wanted to do. But nonetheless, there he was, stuck with the consequences. That was so me of him. Well, I’ve never killed anybody. Still, I see myself suffering from something close to acute Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
My parents were loving parents. I know they loved me and my siblings dearly. We were blessed. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. See, they made the decisions. All the decisions period. And I guess I didn’t always like that so much. For some reason I’d been born downright contentious and I had a dark side. (I wasn’t all bad. Half of me was good… I swear). But as the black sheep of the family, I never saw much fun in practicing responsible-decision-making. There was just something off about me. Dad tried his darndest to teach me responsibility, but all of his lessons just seemed to drip off me like water off a duck’s feathers. My mind was always elsewhere. I dunno, was it my DNA? I often wondered. I really did.
For instance when Disney’s Pinocchio hit our local theater again, I know I identified with Pinocchio. The movie left me feeling guilty for some reason, and chewing on some probing questions about who and what I was, even at age ten…
ON FIRST WATCHING PINOCCHIO
Did the virgin-pure, see-no-evil hearts
of any of those other little boys in the
fllickery moviedark leap up (like mine?)
at all those all-night carnival-barker
come-ons amid the sparkleworks of
Pleasure Island?
Those free Big Rock Candy Mountain
Cigars, say?
That stained-glass church window just
begging you to pitch a brick through it?
The punch-somebody-in-the-face-&-
get-away-with-it “Rough House”?
And the mugs of free draft beer served at
The Pleasure Island Pool Hall Emporium?
Did the NO MORE CURFEWS concept set
their y-chromosomes a-resonating like
little tuning forks? Did Disney’s Pinocchio
arouse the snakes & snails and
puppy-dog tails in
those guys too?
Or (good lord!)
was I the only
donkey boy
in the
crowd?
Anyway, I know I never liked my parents’ lessons and rules, but it was made clear to me from the beginning that I didn’t have to like them. It just was what it was. I always fought against them, but pretty much all my rebellions were firmly and promptly squashed. Dad was military after all, served as an NCO who, a few years prior, saw extreme combat in World War II. So… obedience, and all.
But Ma’s rules were crazy. Her being a fundamental evangelist, she was always on guard and ready to exorcise the devil in me. Would you believe she once made me swear not to get a girl pregnant, simply because some high school girl right up the street had gotten in the family way? And would you believe I was in third grade at the time; knew ZILCH about how to, or how not to, do that particular thing but swore up and down and crossed my heart anyway that I would never do it? Poor Ma. She also made me pledge that I would never fall in love with a Catholic girl. And then one day, my sophomore biology lab partner (a year older than me) said she’d like to meet me at the hometown basketball game that night. With a fluttery heart, you bet I showed up. We sat with our backs against the wall in the top tier of the bleachers and… before I knew what was going on, I found myself lip-locked in a make-out embrace! I know! I came back home from the game later that evening just in time to hear the tail-end of my older brother squealing on me, “…and she’s Catholic too, Ma!” Yep. That was every bit as shameful as when Jerry Seinfeld’s “parents” found out their son had been spotted making out in the movie theater during Schindler’s List! But what the hell. Later in life, yeah, I married myself a good Catholic girl.
So anyway, I ended up just floating down river of my life through the puberty years and beyond like some youthful Long John Silver on The Good Ship Lollipop. I lived only for the moment, totally oblivious to any real decisions and future planning that I needed to be making. They’d take care of themselves when the time came, right? They always had. Somehow. The only gnawing problem was, as time went by, I began feeling this ominous, not-so-far-off-and-getting-nearer metaphoric roar of Niagara Falls up ahead, that drop-off where I’d someday find myself deep-sixed down in Adultsville and on my own..
Back through fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, our teachers would subject us to The Annual Career Planning Unit. Each year the student must select a career that he/she might possibly to pursue for consideration in her/his possible future. The assignment: a three or four week project wherein an encyclopedia entry on the selected career might be painstakingly copied down verbatim (no computers, no Google back then), a worker in the selected field might be contacted for a personal Q&A interview, informative pamphlets might be sent away for, etc. I was excited about this project. If you’d asked me back then I’d say, “I can tell you exactly what I’m going to be when I grow up.” It was gonna be the same thing I’d always wanted to be since giving up being a singing cowboy movie star like Roy Rogers: a bona fide United States Air Force jet pilot ace. So yeah, I hit the old library encyclopedia, sent for some packets, talked to the flyboy down at the local recruiting office, and presented my report to the class as glowingly as the infamous Ralphie of The Christmas Story movie ever delivered his eloquent plea for his Red Ryder BB rifle. But…right off the bat, I had luckily stumbled upon the two most critical keys to becoming America’s next flying ace: simply a minimum height requirement (I wasn’t there yet, but it was still early), and a vision score of 20/20. Bingo! I already had 20/20 vision! Simply grow a few more inches and I’d be in like flint! So there. I was practically flying my Sabre jet already.
By the time I got to high school I had only another inch to grow, so things were looking up. I loved talking about my future in the wild blue yonder. Actually I talked about it too much because as my junior year rolled around, I was abruptly sat down at the dinner table to have the talk with Ma and Dad. (No, not that talk. I never got that talk, actually.) It was a rather grim family meeting. The topic was that my future beyond high school was not up to me. (What?)It was up to them. ( I said, What?!)And it didn’t involve the service. It involved college. (Wait a minute. As Cool Hand Luke was once informed, What we had there was a failure to communicate.) I didn’t want to go to college, I informed them. It was gonna be the Air Force for me. No, I was informed, it was going to be college for me. “We’ve thought about this, your mom and me, and what we’ve decided is… well… you’re going to be the first one in our family ever to graduate with a college degree.”
I was dumbfounded! “Oh. You’ve thought about it, have you? How nice! Funny, I can’t remember me thinking about it. Now why’s that? Oh yeah, now I ‘member: it’s ‘cause: That’s. Not. What. I.Want. Let somebody else do it!” It was for my own good, I was told. No, I argued, it was for my own bad. It would be a waste of my time. Because maybe they didn’t realize it, but (and oh boy, here came my two aces in the hole!) I had just that year met my height requirement (barely) and plus, I already had 20/20 vision.
“What, you think that’s all it takes to be a pilot. I’ll tell you what it takes. It takes a good solid math background for one thing. And your grades in trigonometry aren’t too stellar right now, are they. Listen, I had to take calculus.” Hell, I didn’t even know what calculus was. Whatever it was, it sounded awful. But anyway, long story short— ever hear that song, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”? I was destined to lose. It couldn’t have gone any other way. Why? Because my whole little lifetime, I’d been brainwashed into knowing that I was under their thumb. Stockholm Syndrome. Losing was all I knew.
Growing up, Dad was “my agent.” He was always getting me jobs I didn’t want. I remember one beautiful, sunny, summer afternoon. I was just sitting on our front steps staring blissfully up at the clouds, chewing on a stalk of grass. Suddenly, dad’s pick-up stormed into the driveway. He rolled his window down and called out, “Get in.”
I was confused. “What’s going on?”
“You’re gonna be mowing lawns at the local cemeteries this summer.” Hey, I didn’t even like having to mow our lawn, let alone somebody else’s, but cemetery plots? Alas, within minutes I found myself a fresh-fish kidnap-ee among a rag-tag brigade of whiskered old scarecrows trundling behind lawn mowers. Another summer he got me two wretched custodial jobs which I thought way too demeaning for the likes of me, as the last thing I wanted to be known as was a friggin’ toilet-cleaning, garbage-hauling “janitor.” But the topper was that evening he came home from work grinning and told me I was now an employee at the local ESSO station. “What!? Hey, I… no offense but see, I don’t know the first thing about working at a gas station! I’m…not even qualified.” That seemed to tickle his funny bone as he assured me that the proprietor had personally assured him that, not to worry, he’d turn me into a grease monkey in no time flat. “A grease monkey?”
OK. But before I go on here, allow me to pause and come clean about something. Me wanting to be a flyboy ace? That was stupid. An irresponsible childish fantasy, just as stupid as my once wanting to be a singing cowboy movie star. Very likely I would have washed out of flight school in the first day but of course, I couldn’t see that then. A) I was oh so immature, B) a drama queen, C) a spoiled little brat, and D) a wuss to boot. Ma and Dad were right much more often that I was wrong. It’s true. I was the problem. I’m embarrassed right now traveling back there in my mind and witnessing, in retrospect, my childish behavior. All my whining and complaining would’ve fit right into some black and white 1950s sit-com like Father Knows Best or My Three Sons. Shame on me. OK? OK. There. I feel better now. Young Tom, drama queen extraordinaire.
That being said, my immaturity didn’t do me any favors in my actual young adulthood. Sure, I ended up enjoying a 34-year career in education, but how did that happen? Answer: by default. I’ve said that a thousand times. By default. (I’m smiling to myself now because that just reminded me of a comical quote from Homer Simpson: “Dee Fault Dee Fault!! My two favorite words in the English language!”)
And the fact that I became a teacher by default points right back to that very time I was having the spat with my parents about Air Force vs. College.
When I‘d finally caved on the issue (I always caved), and when it was obvious to all three of us that I’d really caved, Ma and Dad were excited. Me? I was left feeling sad, powerless, bruised, and happily wallowing in self-pity. So when the prodding started as to what I might want for a career and where I might like to apply for school… my martyr’s answer: “I don’t care. Why don’t you pick.” And when they started really pushing it, I’d get passively aggressively sarcastic. “Oh I dunno. Brain surgeon? Maybe a rocket scientist? I figure with my grades, I might as well go to Harvard. Or if I can’t get in there, then Yale is a shoo-in.” Then my Guidance Counselor got into the act of course. Pick a card. Any card. So I ended up picking the Joker, the least expensive card in the deck, which just so happened to be a state teachers’ college. Maine residents like myself were gifted with a seriously much reduced cost of tuition at state colleges. Did it matter to me that it was a teachers’ college? Not in the least. Because who cared? What difference did it make? Bring it on. Oh, pity-party me… So the die was cast by default.
So, off to college I went. And you ask, How was college? Great. I loved being off on my own, away from the parents. I loved living in a dorm. I loved making new friends. Hell, along the way I accidentally fell in love with the courses I was taking, not that I meant to. And of course as time went on I also fell in love with learning to drink and being quite utterly irresponsible. Goes with the territory. But when it was over, boy didn’t it ever used to piss me off when I’d catch Ma proudly telling her friends, “Oh, you know I’ll never forget that exact moment when Tommy announced that he had a calling to be a teacher!” Jeez, Ma. Gimme a friggin’ break.
The first two years passed in those ivy-covered halls. And then, on the second week of my junior year, something life-altering happened. During an educational class on Classroom Management, the professor herded us across the street to the local junior high school (think middle school) where we got to sit in the back of a classroom to watch a real live teacher in action. Two things happened to me. A) I was utterly knocked out by the (wow!) unbelievable mastery in action of that teacher, and B) I was (oh shit!) hit over the head with an epiphany that, once again, I’d ‘found’ myself somewhere. Only this time found myself strapped like a saw mill log on a conveyor belt that was barreling me toward the Big Buzz Saw straight ahead : an actual teaching job! An actual life-long career of teaching, oh my! I was suddenly terrified.
You’ll no doubt find it strange that I’d just lived through two whole years taking classes in a four-years teachers’ college and hadn’t realized, what… the obvious? I know. I get it. So do I, I still find it strange, not to mention embarrassing. I dunno, maybe I have ADHD or something. But the truth is, never in my wildest imagination had I consciously comprehended the cold, hard reality of what the academic motions I was robotically going through actually meant. In my mind, I was still in high school and going to nowheresville. Don’t forget, pity-party me had left high school in a real dark zombie funk, and I’d entered that college feeling like nothing more than a wooden pawn in somebody else’s chess game. And then following that, I’d become way too distracted by the joys and opportunities of campus life to even focus on the fact that my non-decisions carried actual responsibilities.
See? Romeo’s Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
But long story short, sure enough, I became a teacher. Didn’t like it much that first year. Felt I wasn’t cut out for it. So instead of hanging in for a second year, I joined the Army National Guard instead. Why? Because my best friend had just done that. But then BASIC Training sucked so bad, I took the path of least resistance again and sort of allowed myself to fall back into a second teaching job. Which turned out to be a great thing because… well, I fell in love with teaching there. And then I worked very hard at becoming good at it. So many great memories from the various classrooms…
You know, I’ve heard a lot of people repeat the old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The ironic thing is…they say it like it’s a bad thing.
