The Marshall players danced and hugged and flashed the hook ’em horns sign as if it were V-day. They ran to the stands with their bright red shirts sticking out of their grass-stained pants in glorious dishevelment. They bowed to the fans and the fans bowed to them and the Mavettes were everywhere with their twinkling sequins and white cowboy hats slightly askew and their mascara and rouge falling joyfully down their tearstained cheeks. Coach Parker gave massive bear hugs to everyone in sight while the Permian team gathered quietly in the center of the field to pray.
Inside the locker room, Parker accepted congratulation after congratulation. One man lingered to the side, waiting his turn. He finally went up to Parker and quietly told him, his voice sounding as if he was about to cry, “Every Maverick, and every person in Marshall, is proud of you.”
Parker walked back outside, and about two hundred supporters were there to cheer him. A fan came up to him, gave him a long hug, and thanked him for a “wonderful, wonderful win.” Nobody had any intention of leaving, because they wanted to linger in this moment forever.
In the visitor’s locker room, Gaines, his face slacked with sweat and his hair matted, closed the door to parents and fans and drew the players around him. “I lay as much blame on myself as anyone,” he told them, looking ghostly. “I did a lousy job of getting you ready to play and I promise, I’ll do a better job next week.” The loss was Permian’s first non-conference loss in nine years. With a record of one and one, it was also the first time in nine years the team had been at .500.
The sporadic grumbles that can suddenly overrun a town like a summer forest fire had been given another excuse to ignite again. Those starting the grousing would tell you that the problem wasn’t the players. But the coach . . .
After all, who in town could possibly forget the debacle of the 1986 season, Gaines’s first, when the team had gone only seven and two and didn’t even make the playoffs? Many were ready to give up on Gary Gaines right then, ship him and his family back to Monahans where they came from. As booster Bob Rutherford put it, “We’ll just have to get another coach, a coach that can win.” The 1987 season, when Permian had gone to the semifinals of the state playoffs, helped to redeem him, but the Marshall loss would inevitably stir up the sparks of dissent that he wasn’t tough enough and didn’t know how to strike the fear of God into his players as his predecessor so effectively had. He was just too damn nice.
Back in the Permian field house after the flight home, Gaines and the other coaches gathered to watch the film of the game and sort out the paradox of it, the alternation of great plays with sloppiness and mental breakdown—fifteen missed tackles, two fumbles, the inability to punch the ball in inside the twenty-yard line. Over its history, Permian had won an awful lot of games it should have lost. It had almost never lost a game it should have won, but this was one of them.
Was there a fatal flaw? Was there something Gaines couldn’t detect? Or was it somehow his own fault, his own inability to motivate the team? In the lights of the coaches’ office the agony showed, the handsomeness replaced by a weary sallowness, his eyes drawn tight and puffy from lack of sleep. But the exhaustion didn’t matter. The Marshall game was an impetus to work harder than ever before. It was a painful loss, but the season was still only beginning and there were eight games left to determine the team’s fate.
“Five hundred yards of offense and can’t score but thirteen points,” he said wistfully near the stroke of midnight as he and the assistants watched the film in the windowless room, where the gray light filtered from the projector lens like a lonely wisp of moonlight.
The party at the home of one of the players started out as a small affair, but then word about it, like the game of telephone, got out to the drag along Andrews and suddenly the vacant lot next to the house was filled with cars. With the player’s parents away and unaware of what was going on, there was no problem of parental interference.
There was a keg and a couple of cases of beer. A fight erupted for entertainment. A girl who everybody agreed was about the toughest shit-kicker in Odessa knocked another girl to the ground with a few punches and then started slamming her head against a stone floor, leaving blood all over the place. No one seemed quite sure about the reason for the fight, but there wasn’t much attempt to break it up since the girl who got pummeled was generally thought to be a jerk.
The players were upset over the loss to Marshall. But since it wasn’t a league game, they could live with it. They didn’t need to dwell on it over and over the way the coaches did and flagellate themselves with it. They knew in their hearts they were still going to State, and they also knew that when they got to school on Monday no one would think of them as losers.
They would still be gladiators, the ones who were en-vied by everyone else, the ones who knew about the best parties and got the best girls and laughed the loudest and strutted so proudly through the halls of school as if it was their own wonderful, private kingdom.
(7)
SCHOOL DAYS
I
The Majorettes, their black-and-white costumes falling just below the buttocks, twirled and beckoned as the band—fifty-four clarinetists, fifty-one flutists, thirty-six cornetists, twenty-six trombonists, twenty-five percussionists, eighteen saxophonists, fourteen French horn players, nine baritone players, and nine tubaists—belted out “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” The color guard waved its flags to “Barbara Ann.” The master of ceremonies made the introductions with the flare of a circus ringmaster asking the audience to direct its attention please to the center ring. “Ladies and gentlemen, the very best football team in the state of Texas!” From all around came whoops and cheers for the two rows of players at the front in their black jerseys, from the stunningly dressed girls over in the corner with their leather skirts and Vuitton bags and blond hair that rose to a rounded peak and then fell like the fanned plumes of a peacock, from the clean-cut boys in their pleated pants and stone-washed jeans and short haircuts, from the teachers dressed in black, from the parents who brought along toddler sons in black football uniforms and toddler girls in cheerleader outfits, from the rows of Pepettes in their white tea-party gloves. The lights went off for a flashlight show, little rings of light twirling around, once again like something from the circus. There was a skit in which the Panther mascot moved about ripping up paper tombstones symbolizing Permian’s fallen opponents. The sports director of one of the local network affiliates came forward to give the Superstar of the Week award to the Permian defense, and twelve of the boys in black jerseys coyly swaggered forth out of their metal chairs to accept it to more wild applause and whistles. The lights dimmed and the players went to find their Pepettes so they could put their arms around them for the singing of the Permian alma mater. Up in the bleachers the rest of the students locked hands.
All hail to Alma Mater,
We’ll always loyal be,
Where’er the future leads,
Our thoughts will return to thee.
On every field of battle
Will our banner ever wave,
There’ll be a glorious victory for
Permian High always.
The lights went back on. A couple of Pepettes stayed around to take down the black and white streamers and black and white balloons arching across one side of the bleachers to the other like a covered bridge and the beautiful hand-crafted posters ringing the walls. It was time to go to school, at least for some students.
Understandably heady from the experience of the Friday morning pep rally, Don Billingsley’s focus was on the game ahead, not on school. Not all the weekly pep rallies were as rousing as this one had been, but it was always hard to concentrate after them. “I don’t do much on Fridays,” he said as he sauntered off to class in his black jersey with the number 26 on it, and even if he had felt otherwise about it, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do anyway. School was just there for Don, a couple of classes to fill up time that offered virtually no challenge whatever, and he was the fir
st to admit that if he was learning anything his senior year it was a miracle.
His schedule that day included sociology class, in which he watched a video of a Geraldo Rivera television special succinctly titled “Murder” while munching on fresh-baked cookies that he had been given during the pep rally. As his class instruction that day he listened to an interview with the noted criminal theorist Charles Manson and heard relatives of crime victims make such intellectually stimulating comments as “I would like to see him die in the electric chair. He doesn’t deserve to live.”
It included photography, with the class spending the period learning how to feel comfortable in front of a television camera. When it was his turn, Don dutifully rose to the challenge by successfully mouthing the scripted words, “This is Don Billingsley. Headline news next . . . ”
It included English, where the class spent the first ten minutes going over the homework assignment for Monday and the next forty-five minutes doing the homework assignment for Monday.
It included food science, this particular lesson being on Correct Menu Form and the question of what one should place first on the menu when writing it out, shrimp cocktail or Jell-O salad. “This is what I do all day,” said Billingsley as he grappled with the shrimp cocktail versus Jell-O issue, moments before plunging into the far murkier ground of the appropriateness of listing cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich on the same line. “All I do in class is show up. They should make these classes fifteen minutes long. Last year in English I had to work. This year it’s like, teach me something before I go to college.”
Not all classes were like this, but even in accelerated courses the classroom at Permian was hardly a hotbed of intellectual give-and-take. It was not uncommon for teachers at Permian to teach for only a quarter or a third of the period and then basically let students do whatever they wanted as long as they did it quietly. It was also unusual to find teachers who demanded from students their very best, who refused to succumb to the notion that there was no reason to challenge them because they simply didn’t care. When there was a novel approach in the classroom, it was geared for a generation indisputably weaned on the fast foods of television and the VCR, not the written word. To get students to learn history, one teacher played a version of “Jeopardy.” Another teacher in an honors English course, instead of having the students read The Scarlet Letter one year, showed them a video of it.
Many teachers felt that no matter how creative they were in the classroom, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. They talked about a devastating erosion in standards, how the students of today bore no resemblance to the students of even ten or fifteen years ago, how their preoccupations were with anything but school. It was hard for teachers not to feel depressed by the lack of rudimentary knowledge, like in the history class in which students were asked to name the president after John F. Kennedy. Several students meekly raised their hands and proffered the name of Harry Truman. None gave the correct answer of Lyndon Johnson, who also happened to have been a native Texan.
In 1975, the average SAT score on the combined math and verbal sections at Permian was 963. For the senior class of 1988-89, the average combined SAT score was 85 points lower, 878. During the seventies, it had been normal for Permian to have seven seniors qualify as National Merit semi-finalists. In the 1988-89 school year the number dropped to one, which the superintendent of schools, Hugh Hayes, acknowledged was inexcusable for a school the size of Permian with a student body that was rooted in the middle class. (A year later, with the help of $15,000 in consultant’s fees to identify those who might pass the required test, the number went up to five.)
Some teachers ascribed the drop in academic performance to the effects of court-ordered desegregation as well as a rapid increase in the town’s Hispanic population. In eight years Permian had gone from being a virtually all-white school to one where the proportion of minorities in the student body was about 30 percent. In hush-hush tones, some teachers blamed the school’s woes on the “Mexicans,” or on the blacks, even though the school still very much had the look and feel of a white suburban high school, its parking lot filled with new and shiny cars, the majority of its students dressed in striking outfits.
Some teachers blamed the erosion on the effects of the economic downturn in the oil patch, which had dealt Odessa a crippling blow. Some blamed it on the breakdown of the family unit; more and more kids were living with single parents who had to work morning, noon, and night just to make ends meet and didn’t have the time or the inclination to promote the virtue of doing well in school. Some blamed it on parents who seemed much less interested in pushing their kids in the classroom than in football or band or choir. Some blamed it on themselves, acknowledging that the passion they had had for teaching twenty years ago had run dry. Some blamed it on recent educational reforms passed in Texas that instead of making the classroom more stimulating, more creative, had done just the opposite by turning the teacher into a glorified clerk forced to follow an endless series of rules and procedures.
Despite the litany of possible reasons, it was hard not to wonder if the fundamental core of education—the ability of teachers to teach and the ability of kids to learn—had gotten lost. Its problems didn’t make Permian a bad school at all, just a very typically American one.
“It still amazes me when I give a test in grammar and the kids can do it,” said English teacher Elodia Hilliard with more than a touch of sadness in her voice. “It used to be the other way around. I used to be surprised whenever they didn’t know it. Now I’m amazed when they do know it.” When Milliard looked around the classroom she saw students with no direction, and she wondered if they saw any point at all in being well read and intelligent. She listened to parents who, rather than promising to try to motivate their children, made excuses for them—the homework was too hard, or the book they had been assigned had too many cuss words in it. Even when she got them to read, the leap to conceptual, creative thinking seemed as far off as a trip to Jupiter. It almost seemed to her and other teachers as if students were scared of it.
There was a time when she had had unflappable faith in her profession, when she had encouraged the best and brightest to follow in her footsteps and spread the gospel of literature and grammar with evangelical zeal. But not anymore. “I really felt we made a difference,” she said one day in her classroom, devoid of the usual corner shrine to Mojo but instead decorated with lovely posters illustrating the meanings of hyperbole, oxymoron, metonymy, and personification. “Now I’m beginning to wonder. I don’t know. I’m really uncertain.” She bent over backward not to be negative, but she had a view of students she could not suppress. “They like to have cars. They like stereo speakers that are fancy. They like to go skiing. They like to wear good jewelry.” In her mind, students seemed in search of only one thing: “Having fun is what it’s all about.”
Jane Franks, who had been teaching for thirty-one years and eagerly counted off the days until her retirement at the end of the year, felt the same way. Today’s students had become enigmas to her. They weren’t disrespectful. They weren’t obnoxious. They weren’t demanding. It wasn’t that they were good kids, or bad kids, or any kind of kid at all. That would have been much better than what they were now, deadened to themselves and to the world around them.
“These kids don’t take responsibility, or don’t know how,” she said. “Kids used to worry about where they were going to fit into the world. Kids today don’t seem to worry if they are going to fit in society, because they don’t give a hoot.
“Twenty years ago I was working my kids to death, and now I have to remind my seniors to use capital letters and put periods at the end of sentences.
“They don’t seem to care about their grades. They don’t seem to care about each other. They seem to care about having a good time, but don’t know how to define good. I don’t know what young kids are about. I can’t get in their minds. I used to . . . ”
Like others, Jane Franks l
ooked around for people and things to blame. But sitting in the teacher’s lounge one day, her voice soft and weary, she decided the fault might be with herself. A fundamental change had taken place in the classroom. It wasn’t a place to learn anymore, but a way station, and maybe she was responsible for that. “I’m tired. I think I’m tired of being ineffective. I must not be doing it right because I don’t have a sense of satisfaction. I don’t have the close friendships with the kids I used to.
“I used to encourage my good students to be teachers because it was so rewarding. I don’t do that anymore. When I first started teaching I felt, My God, this must be like being a pro ball player, getting paid for something I love. It was where I was supposed to be.”
If school was boring, Don Billingsley nevertheless did his best to get through it. When the food science teacher made the fatal mistake of asking the class if it knew the meaning of the word condiment, Don immediately answered with “lambskin, sheepskin.” All joking aside, Don was becoming something of a food science scholar. He had scored a superb 99 on the fill-in-the-blank worksheet on cakes and frostings, not to mention a 96 on his poultry worksheet. The “preparation and service” worksheet was coming a little more slowly; he had gotten only a 60, but there seemed little doubt that Don would eventually get a handle on it. And, of course, when the occasion arose to write out a menu for a black-tie dinner party in Odessa, he would know exactly what to do.
In English, where one of the blackboard panels had a list of questions about Macbeth and another a reminder to bring a flashlight to the pep rally, Don had uncovered one of the great secrets of the class with the discovery that if he angled his chair in a certain way behind the other students, the teacher could not see him fall asleep. “Do you like to sleep? This is where I sleep,” he said just before he entered the classroom.