I got back at Dominic with an army insult. Hey, Dominic, you're such a fat slob, when was the last time you saw your dick and how do you know it's really there?
He swung around and knocked me off the platform with the flat of his fist and when I hit the street I lost control and jumped back on the platform, clawing at him with my hook. He had the smile now, the one that says, You poor miserable shit, you're gonna die, and when I lunged at him he pushed my face away with the palm of his hand and knocked me to the street again. The palm of the hand is the most insulting thing in a fight. A punch with a closed fist is a straightforward honorable thing. It's what boxers do. But the palm in the face says you're beneath contempt and you'd rather have two black eyes than sink beneath contempt. The black eyes will clear up, but the other thing is there forever.
Then he added insult to insult. When I grabbed the edge of the platform to pull myself back up he stepped on my hand and spat on my head and that sent me into such a white rage I swung my hook and caught him in the back of the leg and pulled till he yelled, You little shit. I see blood on my leg you're dead.
There was no sign of blood. The hook was deflected by the thick leather of his work boots, but I was ready to keep swiping for flesh till Eddie rushed down the steps and pulled me away. Gimme that hook. You are one crazy mick. Get on the bad side of Dominic and you're shit in the street.
He told me get inside, change my clothes, leave by another door, go home, get the hell outa here.
Will I be fired?
No, you won't, goddammit. We can't fire everyone who has a fight here, but you'll lose half a day's pay we'll have to slip to Dominic.
But why should I lose money to Dominic? He started it.
Dominic brings us business and you're passing through. You'll be graduating from college and he'll still be driving in loads. You're lucky to be alive, kid, so take your lumps and go home. Think about it.
On my way out I looked back to see if Helena was there and she was, with that little come-hither smile, but Eddie was there, too, and I knew there was no hope of going to the dark place with her with Eddie glaring.
Some day when it was my turn on the forklift I'd get revenge on Fat Dominic. I'd hit the pedal and jam the fat one against a wall and listen to him scream. That was my dream.
But it never happened and that's because everything changed between him and me the day he backed in his rig and called to Eddie from the cab, Hey, Eddie, who you got unloadin' today?
Durkin.
Nah. Don't gimme Durkin. Gimme bigmouth mick with the hook.
Dominic, are you crazy? Let it go.
Nah. Just gimme bigmouth.
Eddie asked me if I could handle it. If I didn't want to I didn't have to. He said, Dominic's not the boss around here. I said I could handle any fat slob and Eddie told me cut it out. Chrissakes, watch your mouth. We're not gonna bail you out again. Get to work and watch the mouth.
Dominic was up on the platform, unsmiling. He said this was a real job, cases of Irish whiskey, and there might be a dropped case along the way. One or two bottles might be broken, but the rest were for us and he was sure we could handle it. There was a fast little smile and I felt too embarrassed to smile back. How could a man smile after he used the palm of his hand on me instead of his fist?
Christ, you're one gloomy mick, he said.
I was going to call him a wop, but I didn't want the palm of his hand again.
He talked in a cheerful way as if nothing had ever happened between us. That puzzled me because whenever I had a quarrel or fight with someone I turned away from them for a long time. We loaded pallets with the cases and he told me in a normal way his first wife was Irish but she died of TB.
Can you imagine that? T damn B. Lousy cook, my first wife, like the rest of the Irish. Don't get offended, kid. Don't gimme the look. But, boy, could she sing. Opera stuff, too. Now I'm married to an Italian. Don't have a note in her head but, boy, can she cook.
He stared at me. She feeds me. That's why I'm a fat slob can't see his knees.
I smiled and he called to Eddie, Hey, asshole. You owe me ten. I made the little mick smile.
We finished unloading and stacked the pallets inside and it was time to drop a case of whiskey for breakage and sit on bags of peppers in the fumigation room with truckers and warehousemen and make sure nothing from that case was wasted.
Eddie was the kind of man you'd like to have for a father. He explained things to me when we sat on the platform bench between loads. When he explained things to me I was puzzled I didn't know these things already. I was supposed to be the college boy but he knew more and I had more respect for him than I had for any professor.
His own life was a dead end. He took care of his father who came out of World War I shellshocked. Eddie could have put him in a veterans' hospital but he said they were hellholes. While Eddie worked a woman came in every day and fed his father and cleaned him. In the evening Eddie wheeled him to the park, then home to watch the news on television, and that was Eddie's life. He didn't complain. He just said it was always his dream to have children but it wasn't in the cards. His father was gone in the head but his body was sound. He'd live forever and Eddie would never have the place to himself.
He chain-smoked on the platform and ate huge meatball sandwiches washed down with pints of chocolate malted. The cigarette cough got him one day when he was yelling at Fat Dominic to straighten out that damn rig and back it in, You drive like a Hoboken hoor, and when the cough came it tangled with the laugh and he couldn't catch his breath and collapsed on the platform with a cigarette still in his mouth, Fat Dominic in the cab of his rig yelling insults at him till he saw Eddie turning whiter than white and gasping for air. By the time Fat Dominic had heaved out of the cab and up the platform, Eddie was gone and instead of coming over to him and talking the way they talk to the dead in the movies Fat Dominic backed away and waddled down the steps to his truck weeping like a great fat whale and driving away forgetting he had a load to deliver.
I stayed with Eddie till the ambulance took him away. Helena came from the office and told me I looked terrible and sympathized with me as if Eddie were my father. I told her I was ashamed of myself because no sooner was Eddie out of sight than I thought I might apply for his job. I said, I could do it, couldn't I? I was a college graduate. She told me the boss would hire me in a minute. He'd be proud to say Port Warehouses had the only college-graduate checker and platform boss on the waterfront. She said sit there at Eddie's desk to get used to it and write a note to the boss saying I was interested in the job.
Eddie's clipboard was on the desk. It still held the manifest from Fat Dominic. A red pencil hung by a string from the clip. A coffee mug half filled with black coffee sat on the desk. The coffee mug said EDDIE on the side. I thought I'd have to get a mug like that with FRANK printed on it. Helena would know where to buy it. It gave me a feeling of comfort to think she might be there to help. She said, What are you waiting for? Write the note. I looked at Eddie's coffee mug again. I looked out at the platform where he had fallen and died and I could not write the note. Helena said this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I'd make a hundred dollars a week, f'Gawd's sakes, up from the lousy seventy-seven I made now.
No, I could never take Eddie's place on that platform, didn't have his generosity of belly and heart. Helena said, OK, OK, you're right. What's the use of a college education you just gonna stand on the platform checking off sacks of peppers? Any dropout can do that, no offense to Eddie. You wanna be another Eddie? Spend your life checking Fat Dominic? You just go be a teacher, honey. You'll get more respect.
Was it the coffee mug and the little push from Helena that got me off the waterfront and into the classroom or was it my conscience telling me, Face it, stop hiding and teach, man?
When I told stories about the docks they looked at me in a different way. One boy said it was funny to think you had a teacher up there that worked like real people and didn't come from college just talki
ng about books and all. He used to think he'd like to work on the piers, too, because of all the money you make on overtime and little deals here and there with the dropped broken goods but his father said he'd break his ass, ha ha, and you didn't talk back to your father in an Italian family. His father said, If this Irishman can get to be a teacher, so can you, Ronnie, so can you. So forget the docks. You might make money but what good is that when you can't straighten your back?
5
Long after my teaching days I scribble numbers on pieces of paper, and I'm impressed by what they mean. In New York I taught in five different high schools and one college: McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Staten Island; the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan; Seward Park High School in Manhattan; Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; night classes at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan; New York Community College in Brooklyn. I taught by day, by night, and in summer school. My arithmetic tells me that about twelve thousand boys and girls, men and women, sat at desks and listened to me lecture, chant, encourage, ramble, sing, declaim, recite, preach, dry up. I think of the twelve thousand and wonder what I did for them. Then I think of what they did for me.
The arithmetic tells me I conducted at least thirty-three thousand classes.
Thirty-three thousand classes in thirty years: days, nights, summers.
In universities you can lecture from your old crumbling notes. In public high schools you'd never get away with it. American teenagers are experts in the tricks of teachers, and if you try to hoodwink them they'll bring you down.
So, yo, teacher man, what else happened in Ireland?
I can't talk about that now. We have to cover the vocabulary chapter in the textbook. Open to page seventy-two.
Aw, man, you tell the other classes stories. Can't you tell us just one little thing?
OK, one little thing. When I was a boy in Limerick I never thought I'd grow up to be a teacher in New York. We were poor.
Oh, yeah. We heard you didn't have no refrigerator.
Right, and we had no toilet paper.
What? No toilet paper? Everybody has toilet paper. Even in China where everybody's starving they have toilet paper. Even in Africa.
They think I'm exaggerating and they don't like it. There's a limit to hard-luck stories.
You tryin' to tell us you'd go an' pull up your pants and not wipe yourself?
Nancy Castigliano raises her hand. Excuse me, Mr. McCourt. It's nearly lunchtime, and I don't wanna hear no more about people having no toilet paper.
OK, Nancy, we'll move on.
Facing dozens of teenagers every day brings you down to earth. At eight a.m. they don't care how you feel. You think of the day ahead: five classes, up to one hundred and seventy-five American adolescents; moody, hungry, in love, anxious, horny, energetic, challenging. No escape. There they are and there you are with your headache, your indigestion, echoes of your quarrel with your spouse, lover, landlord, your pain-in-the-ass son who wants to be Elvis, who appreciates nothing you do for him. You couldn't sleep last night. You still have that bag filled with the papers of the one hundred and seventy-five students, their so-called compositions, careless scrawls. Oh, mister, did you read my paper? Not that they care. Writing compositions is not how they intend to spend the rest of their lives. That's something you do only in this boring class. They're looking at you. You cannot hide. They're waiting. What are we doing today, teacher? The paragraph? Oh, yeah. Hey, everybody, we gonna study the paragraph, the structure, topic sentence an' all. Can't wait to tell my mom tonight. She's always asking how was school today. Paragraphs, Mom. Teacher has a thing about paragraphs. Mom'll say, Very nice, and go back to her soap opera.
They straggle in from auto mechanics shop, the real world, where they break down and reassemble everything from Volkswagens to Cadillacs, and here's this teacher going on about the parts of a paragraph. Jesus, man. You don't need paragraphs in an auto shop.
If you bark or snap, you lose them. That's what they get from parents and the schools in general, the bark and the snap. If they strike back with the silent treatment, you're finished in the classroom. Their faces change and they have a way of deadening their eyes. Tell them open their notebooks. They stare. They take their time. Yeah, they'll open their notebooks. Yes, sir, here we go opening our notebooks nice and easy so nothing falls out. Tell them copy what's on the board. They stare. Oh, yeah, they tell one another. He wants us to copy what's on the board. Look at that. Man wrote something on the board and wants us to copy it. They shake their heads in slow motion. You ask, Are there any questions? and all around the room there is the innocent look. You stand and wait. They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them, thirty-four New York teenagers, the future mechanics and craftsmen of America.
You're just another teacher, man, so what are you gonna do? Stare down the whole class? Fail the whole class? Get with it, baby. They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don't care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them.
Watch your step, teacher. Don't make yourself a problem. They'll cut you down.
Rain changes the mood of the school, mutes everything. The first class comes in silently. One or two say good morning. They shake drops from their jackets. They're in a dream state. They sit and wait. No one talks. No requests for the pass. No complaints, no challenges, no back talk. Rain is magic. Rain is king. Go with it, teacher man. Take your time. Lower your voice. Don't even think about teaching English. Forget about taking attendance. This is the mood of a house after a funeral. No harsh headlines today, no cruel news from Vietnam. Outside the room a footfall, a laugh from a teacher. Rain clatters against windows. Sit at your desk and let the hour slip by. A girl raises her hand. She says, Aw, Mr. McCourt, you ever in love? You're new but you know already when they ask questions like that they're thinking of themselves. You say, Yes.
Did she give you up or did you give her up?
Both.
Oh, yeah? You mean you were in love more than once?
Yes.
Wow.
A boy raises his hand. He says, Why can't teachers treat us like human beings?
You don't know. Well, man, if you don't know, tell them, I don't know. Tell them about school in Ireland. You went to school in a state of terror. You hated it and dreamed of being fourteen and getting a job. You never thought about your own school days like this before, never talked about it. You wish this rain would never stop. They're in their seats. No one had to tell them hang up their jackets. They're looking at you as if they had just discovered you.
It should rain every day.
Or there are spring days when heavy clothing is discarded and each class is a vista of breasts and biceps. Little zephyrs wafting through the windows caress the cheeks of teachers and students, send smiles from desk to desk, from row to row till the room is all adazzle. Pigeon coo and sparrow chirp tell us be of good cheer, summer is a-comin' in. Those shameless pigeons, indifferent to the teen throb in my room, copulate on the windowsill and that is more seductive than the best lesson by the greatest teacher in the world.
On days like this I feel I could teach the toughest of the tough, the brightest of the bright. I could hug and cocker the saddest of the sad.
On days like this there is background music with hints of zephyr, breast, biceps, smile and summer.
And if my students ever wrote like that I'd send them to Simplicity School.
Twice a year at McKee we had Open School Day and Open School Night, when parents visited the school to see how their children were faring. Teachers sat in classrooms talking to parents or listening to their complaints. Most visiting parents were mothers because that was the job of the woman. If the mother found her son or daughter was misbehaving or not performing well then it would be up to the father to take steps. Of course the father would take steps only with the son. The daughter was a matter fo
r the mother. It wouldn't be right for a father to knock his daughter around the kitchen or tell her she was grounded for a month. Certain problems belonged to the mother. Also, they had to decide on how much information to give the father. If the son was doing poorly and she had a violent husband she might soften her story so that her boy would not wind up on the floor with blood streaming from his nose.
Sometimes a whole family might come to visit the teacher and the room would be packed with fathers and mothers and small children running up and down the aisles. The women talked to one another in a friendly way, but the men sat quietly at desks that could barely accommodate their size.
No one ever told me how to handle parents on Open School Day. My first time at McKee, I had a student monitor, Norma, who gave out numbers so that parents would know who was next.
First, I had to deal with the problem of my accent, especially with the women. As soon as I opened my mouth they'd say, Oh, my God, what a cute brogue. Then they'd tell me how their grandparents came from the Old Country, how they came here with nothing and now owned their own gas station out in New Dorp. They wanted to know how long I was in this country and how I got into teaching. They said it was wunnerful I was a teacher because most of our people were cops and priests and they'd whisper there were too many Jews in the school. They'd send their kids to Catholic schools except that Catholic schools were not known for vocational or technical training. It was all history and prayers, which was all right for the next world, but their kids had to think about this world. No disrespect intended. Finally, they'd ask how was he doing, their little Harry?
I had to be careful if the dad was sitting there. If I made negative comments about Harry the dad might go home and punch him and word would get out to my other students that I was not to be trusted. I was learning that teachers and kids have to stick together in the face of parents, supervisors and the world in general.
I said positive things about all my students. They were attentive, punctual, considerate, eager to learn and every one of them had a bright future and the parents should be proud. Dad and Mom would look at each other and smile and say, See? or they'd be puzzled and say, You talkin' about our kid? Our Harry?