Schoolville: Chapter Five
“It don’t make no difference to me, baby.
Everybody’s had to fight to be free,
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee.”
–Tom Petty (refugee)
Chapter Five
“Lion Pride” was cutting a very poor figure when Jessica Miller, the English Department Dean, walked in and leaned against the doorframe. In their endless search for dignity, the teachers of Wilson High had decided to give each department head a title. We didn’t have “department heads” at Wilson High, we had “Deans”. But, whatever her title, Jessica Miller was my immediate supervisor.
Jessica was wearing a print dress, which set off her short raven hair. She looked good in short hair. It had the “power look” going for it. Slender and graceful, she looked like a Dean. She crossed her arms as a Dean might when leaning against a wall giving instruction. Self-confident, she radiated some of that in my direction as she smiled at me.
Roughly my age, she had been at Wilson High for at least 25 years. I had observed her teaching in her room the previous spring. Her palace was ostentatiously opulent. Her teacher’s desk was a throwback to the fifties. It was a huge wooden affair, roughly twice the size of my travesty where B.D.’s butt was presently parked. Her student desks were new, modern and spacious. Her room was tastefully carpeted. Although she had thirty-three desks, she still had room for acres of bookshelves, four large tables with chairs for student activities such as cooperative learning or literary circles, four very large storage cabinets, and she still had room left over! Her room had windows, so it could be aired out, and it smelled like a classroom, not a men’s room.
“Well, I see you found your classroom.” Jessica uncrossed her arms and smiled toothily.
For the life of me, I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic or not. I watched her face closely; she didn’t seem to notice the smell. Apparently, it was acceptable to her.
“Yep, such as it is.” I replied sarcastically as I waved a hand at the wreckage around us both.
“Well, you’ll get it in shape.” She smiled at me. “Oh, and by the way, the custodians will get upset if you scratch the floor. They’re mighty proud of their wax job.” Glancing at the linoleum, I could almost imagine a faint gleam on the linoleum squares that weren’t pitted or gouged, if not altogether missing. I wondered if someone had discovered this floor under the shag carpet when it was ripped up, assuming there had ever been shag carpet.
“Well, I do need to move the furniture around and put the room in order.” Perhaps I sounded defensive or angry because I noticed her shoulders tense up.
“I’m just saying don’t scratch the floor.” The smile slid from her face.
“Will the custodians help me pick this stuff up and move it?” I asked.
“No.” She smiled that toothy smile again and relaxed her posture. It was clear that she expected me to accept this information as though it was somehow helpful. Oddly enough, the irony of her stupid remark didn’t strike me as surprisingly as it would have yesterday. This urinal was crumbling right in front of everyone, yet I was the only one who appeared to notice. My body language must not have been up to her expectations.
“Tom, you’re being negative.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just wondering how I’m supposed to move this stuff by myself and not scratch the floor…any suggestions?”
She looked quizzical, as if she didn’t understand my question.
Rubbing the toe of my running shoe over the chipped linoleum, I casually went further than I should have. “It’s just that I was thinking back on that stuff about ‘Lion Pride’ that I keep hearing about, and I was wondering if someone was going to help me get some of that in here while I’m scraping up the floor moving these desks around by myself.”
That was a mistake. Her arms dropped to her sides, and her teeth disappeared. “Tom, don’t you hear how negative you’re sounding?” Her voice acquired a screechy tone.
I couldn’t tell which struck me as most ironic: Standing in a room that looked like it had been looted by the walking dead who simply tore it up and took nothing, or being told not to scratch the pitted and chipped linoleum floor in a moldy room that smelled like the men’s room at Texas Stadium. Perhaps it was the ultimate irony of being chided for sounding negative because I found it unacceptable. Even B.D sat speechlessly on my desk shaking his head.
“You’re right I murmured acquiescently. I guess I need to be more positive.”
“There’s that good old ‘Lion Pride’.” She smiled again.
Needing to bail out on a positive note, she turned to leave. “Well, I guess I’d better go and see about my room.”
“Now we know what ‘Lion Pride’ means,” B.D. smirked after she left.
That famous painting of Don Quixote and Sancho gazing at a windmill came to mind. But, I didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense, so I pushed it out of mind.
Later that day, I was laughing at one of B.D’s jokes as I squeezed moldy water from my sponge when I suddenly heard a woman clear her throat.
“You can’t just put that sofa in the hallway!” It was the vice-principal Sara Getty, with a hard edge on her voice. “It smells, you know!” Rubbing the toe of her shoe over a track mark in the doorway, she scowled at it. “You didn’t scratch this floor, did you?”
I was sick of the smell of Clorox. I pulled my head out of the storage cabinet and looked at her, pretending that I hadn’t heard.
“Oh! Hello, Mrs. Getty.”
She replied by folding her arms across her chest and giving a “HUMMMPH!” I scowled and pretended not to notice.
“Mr. Kyle, you can’t just put that sofa in the hallway!” She repeated herself.
“Oh, I’m sorry, should I’ve had the custodians do that?” In just a few short hours I had already passed beyond caring what anyone thought. Without realizing it, I was already reverting to the coping mechanism of most of the denizens of Wilson High, not all of them students. I pretended I didn’t care.
“Mr. Kyle! The sofa was in here for a reason!” She upped the volume a notch.
“Surely you don’t want the students to have to gag on that stench all year! Like you said, it smells.” I could feel my stomach tightening. I didn’t like the direction this conversation was drifting.
She tightened her jaw. “Where will that sofa go?”
“Perhaps in the dump?” I tried to appear as innocent as possible while making that helpful suggestion. But I saw her shoulders stiffen. In a frosty voice, probably one she used to intimidate students with, she withered me now.
“This school runs by procedures, Mr. Kyle! There are procedures for everything. You can’t just shove a couch into the hall because you don’t like it!”
“Ummm, well, actually I shoved it into the hall because it stinks.” Looking around in my best imitation of confusion, I shrugged. “This…is… a classroom, isn’t it?”
She began to rant in a voice like fingernails scraping along a chalkboard. I recognized the act. I had seen it in one of those teacher movies not too long ago. She did it very well. “Mr. Kyle! We have procedures!”
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know the procedure for getting rid of that god-awful thing?”
She stood speechless with a frustrated look on her face. It was clear to me that her issue, and the only issue open for discussion, was that I had moved the sofa. Whether it was fit for use in a classroom full of kids was clearly not the topic.
B.D. lay back on my desk giggling. “Man, look at those veins on her forehead!”
“…and just what are you doing there?” She demanded suspiciously, like she had discovered me smoking marijuana or something.
“Washing off mold.” I waved my sponge around at the rest of the classroom.
“We don’t have mold anymore! We had all of that removed last year.” She actually stamped her foot when she said that, as if dealing with a third-grader.
“Yeah, I heard.” I think the fact that I giggled as I said this didn’t sit very well with her.
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“It doesn’t smell bad to me. What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, it doesn’t now. I just spent two days washing walls and shelves with Clorox.” I couldn’t resist. “Oh, and I pushed that sofa out.”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Perhaps you might take a seat on it and see what I mean?” I suggested, as if trying to be helpful.
“All right, I just will!” Spinning on her heel, she marched out the door and down the hall in the direction of the sofa. I stood up, listening to the click of her heels on the linoleum floor of the hallway. She obviously thought better of her plan because her heels quit clicking well before she could’ve reached the sofa. She was faking it.
The whole thing was macabre. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, it would have been funny.
B.D. smiled at me. “Doesn’t this remind you of Private Haddon?”
I looked at B.D. and raised my eyebrows. Neither of us had spoken about Haddon in years. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“What do you remember about that incident from your army days?” B.D. smiled.
“Well…” I leaned back against the wall. “Haddon was a particularly good soldier who deserted from my platoon shortly after being awarded a medal for meritorious service.”
“…and why did he desert?” B.D. prompted.
“He deserted because his wife was tired of living in a roach-infested slum, which was all the Army had to offer them. One day she announced that she was leaving and that he was free to accompany her, or stay in the slum with his medal.”
“As I recall, that was the last that we ever saw of Private Haddon.” B.D. replied.
“So what’s your point?” I was fascinated by the meanderings of B.D’s twisted personality.
“Goddamit Grasshopper! Have patience!” B.D. snapped “What did Captain Parker have to say about it? Do you recall?”
As I recall, when Captain Parker learned of why Haddon had deserted, his only comment was, “Well, if the Army wanted him to have a wife, it would have issued him one.”
“That’s right.” B.D. continued. “To Captain Parker, the problem wasn’t the slum. To him, Haddon’s wife was the problem because she refused to lower her expectations.”
“I remember thinking Captain Parker was joking at the time.” I smiled at my own naïveté.
“But it wasn’t a joke, was it…” B.D. raised his eyebrows and glanced over.
“What’s your point B.D?”
He shrugged. “Don’t be like Haddon’s wife…you’d best lower your expectations.”
Mrs. Getty’s returned and her head started talking. I didn’t bother to listen though. I was certain that she hadn’t really sat on the sofa. She knew how bad it smelled. She had made the mistake of admitting as much.
B.D. spoke up. “You know, the sofa isn’t really the issue.”
“Uh yeah…I guess you’re right.”
Looking around, B.D. asked. “Say, where is Horton? Shouldn’t she be speaking up?”
“Are you kidding me? When something is out of her league, Horton runs for the door.”
I noticed that Sara Getty’s head was still talking as B.D. replied.
“How many times have you tried to follow her simplistic advice, only to find her noticeably absent during the crisis that always follows? Personally, I can’t count the times, can you?” B.D. asked this with all of the disgust he could muster.
“Yeah…”
B.D. nodded, and used his “wise man from the east” voice again. “It has always been thus, Grasshopper!”
Then turning his attention back to Sara Getty, he looked back to the door where Sara was still pontificating. “What really chaps her ass is that you actually did something about it. Worse, you did it without asking her permission.”
“Why should that be a problem?” I queried. “I wouldn’t think she’d be upset because I didn’t feel the need to clear every decision through her.”
“Well, apparently you are wrong.” B.D. calmly assessed. “Her tone would seem to suggest that, by moving the sofa out you’ve upset the well-ordered running of the universe, which will inevitably bring about nuclear winter, a new ice age, and ultimately the ruin of her school.”
“Ruin her school?” I looked around at my hole. “So, in her mind, by moving that sofa, I am acting in a threatening manner because…?”
“Because, by doing something without permission, which she would have certainly denied, she no longer has control over all that goes on in her private fiefdom,” B.D. explained.
“So what?” I demanded.
“Listen, stupid, if Sara wants your opinion, she’ll tell you what it is! She worked out the routines around here twenty years ago, and she’s not interested in your radical views on education.”
I suddenly realized that Sara was asking me a question so I looked over at her.
“Did you hear me Mr. Kyle? You’ll have to find a place for it. The custodians are too busy to deal with rubbish.” B.D. laughed at that. “I wonder what the custodians are supposed to do?”
A verdict had been rendered. Just a moment ago it had been valuable furniture that might be used by a student. Now that Sara Getty had to deal with it, it was rubbish, and I had to solve the problem since I was the one who created it.
I nodded without saying anything.
Turning in the doorway to leave, she looked at me again. “You scratched the wax on the floor!” She stood looking at me, clearly expecting me to do something about it.
“HEY!” B.D. sat back up. “Apologize and ask her if you should personally lick the scratches off the floor with your tongue!”
When it became apparent to her that I wasn’t going to respond, she spun on her heel and marched off down the hall with all the dignity befitting her rank frozen on her shoulders.
“Welcome to Wilson High!” B.D. laughed.
“If this is what an English teacher has to do, I wonder what the hell a custodian does?” B.D. mumbled. “So, are you gonna move that sofa?”
“No.” I rose to go pour out the dirty water from my cleaning bucket.
