“Motherfucker!” Then the sound of breaking glass.
I hurriedly walked on.
I went into a luncheonette and sat at the counter.
“Yeah?” the luncheonette owner asked me. He was fat and tired looking; his apron looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years.
“A hamburger,” I ordered.
“How you want it?”
“Medium.”
“Okay.” But he didn’t get up from his seat.
After a few minutes, I said: “Are you going to make the hamburger?”
“Waiting for the cook,” he said.
“Where is he?”
But just then a woman came out through the doorway behind the counter. His wife, I guessed. She was smoking a cigarette.
“Burger,” the luncheonette owner said to her. “Medium.”
She took a frozen pattie from under the counter and placed it on the grill.
“Want fries with that?” she asked me.
“Sure.”
“Just move in?” the owner asked me.
“No. Maybe. Thinking about it.”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why are you thinking about it?”
“There might be a teaching job for me here.”
“Teaching, huh? You’re a teacher?”
“Yes.”
“I was never good at school,” he said. “Didn’t have the head.”
“Well, it looks like you’re doing all right.”
“Oh sure. It’s okay.”
His wife placed the burger in front of me. It looked pink and greasy.
“What happened to the parking meters?” I asked them.
“Oh those,” the man said. “Someone stole them.”
“They never replaced them?”
The man shrugged. “Nope. Wouldn’t matter. We don’t have any meter maids or anything, so no one was using them anyway.”
“No meter maids. Why not?”
“Because we don’t have anything. The city’s broke. We share a police force with Cicero.”
“Oh,” I said. Most citizens would be alarmed at having no police force to themselves, I thought, but not me. I found that piece of information comforting.
Oakdale, Illinois. It was seeming more and more like a place I might like to hang my hat.
I sent out a résumé and letter to the Oakdale School District.
I wrote that I’d taken teaching courses back in college but had gone in a more entrepreneurial direction after graduation. I’d run several successful businesses out of my home. Now I’d gotten the urge to give something back. To mold and shape young minds. Oddly enough, I wasn’t being untruthful here. I’d spent most of my life attempting to sell another credit card or slice of pizza; the thought of doing something that would actually benefit someone other than me was genuinely appealing.
I kept the résumé purposely vague. I wrote down “City University,” not specifying what college in the city university system I’d actually attended. I was banking on the fact that beggars can’t be choosers. That an underfunded and overworked school system in desperate need of teachers is not going to have the time or inclination to check facts.
I sent out the letter and résumé in July.
By August 10 I had my answer.
They requested I come in for an interview.
FORTY-SEVEN
I started teaching the day after Labor Day.
Seventh-grade English. They gave me a choice of grades, and I picked the one closest to Anna’s age. If I couldn’t help her at the moment, I thought, I could help kids like her.
It was balmy, but I could already feel hints of fall in the intermittent breeze, like icy currents in an August ocean. I stood outside in shirtsleeves on the steps of George Washington Carver Middle School and shivered.
My first day was the worst.
The bell stopped ringing, and I found fifty-one skeptical students staring up at me.
The class was two-thirds black and one-third black wannabe. Even the white kids wore those low-slung dungarees with the elastic bands of their underwear showing. They practiced the strut that seemed to come naturally to their black peers; they’d stand in the schoolyard before first bell, making up raps.
When I wrote my name across the blackboard, the nub of chalk broke and the entire class laughed. I opened my desk to find another piece of chalk, but there wasn’t any — something I would discover with all my school supplies that first year.
“Mr. Wid” remained on the blackboard.
So that’s what they began to call me. Mr. Wid.
Hey, Mr. Wid, what’s shakin’? Yoh, Wid . . .
I didn’t correct them. It broke the ice that first day, and as time went on I grew almost fond of it, with the exception of a certain piece of graffiti I read on the wall of the boys’ urinal one day.
I’m holding Wid’s head in my hand!
I became fond of them, too — even the graffiti writer, who sheepishly admitted it when he was caught adding to his collection and spent two afternoons in detention for it. His detention supervisor, as it happened, was me. I volunteered for it; I had nowhere to go and no one to go home to. So I supervised detention, I taught an after-school study hall, I helped out the school basketball team.
The graffiti artist was named James. But he liked being called J-Cool, he told me. He came from a one-parent household—just his mama, he said, and I instantly thought about Anna.
I told him if he stopped writing that he was holding Wid’s head in his hand on the bathroom wall, I would start calling him J-Cool.
Deal, he said.
We became friends.
I became kind of popular with everyone. Not just with the kids, but with the faculty, since I was always volunteering for things they themselves would otherwise have had to do.
Being liked, however, had its drawbacks.
When people like you, they invariably ask you questions about yourself. They’re curious about where you came from, what you did before, if you’re married or not, if you have any kids.
Lunch hours became awkward for me. An obstacle course I had to negotiate for forty-five minutes every afternoon, maintaining just enough concentration to avoid tripping up. At first, I’d be talking to someone and would forget what I’d told someone else — Ted Roeger, eighth-grade math teacher, for instance, who’d invited me to play weekend softball with him in his over-forty league. I politely declined. Then there was Susan Fowler, a thirtyish fine arts teacher who seemed unattached and desperate, who always seemed to find an empty chair at my lunch table and turn the conversation to relationships and the difficulties thereof.
Eventually I went home and wrote out my life as Lawrence Widdoes. From childhood to now. Then I practiced it, asking myself questions about myself and answering them.
Where did you grow up?
Staten Island. (Close to home, yes, but I needed to pick a place I would at least know something about. And since I’d passed through there a million times on the way to Aunt Kate’s, I knew enough about Staten Island to avoid looking stupid if a Staten Islander decided to ask me questions about it.)
What did your parents do?
Ralph, my father, was an auto mechanic. Anne, my mother, was a housewife. (Why not? Auto mechanic was as good an occupation as any, and housewife was what most women did back then.)
Did you have brothers or sisters?
No. (Absolutely true.)
What college did you go to?
City University. (That’s, after all, what I’d put on my résumé.)