He scanned the classroom full of curious sophomores, all of them with roughly the same look on their faces—there goes another summer.
“Pakalo?” It was Hawaiian for Do you understand?
Mr. Hand let his students take a good long look at him. In high school, where such crucial matters as confidence and social status can shift daily, there is one thing a student can depend on. Most people in high school look like their names. Mr. Hand was a perfect example. He had a porous, oblong face, just like a thumbprint. His stiff black hair rose up off his forehead like that of a late-night television evangelist. Even at eight in the morning, his yellow Van Heusen shirt was soaked at the armpits.
And he was not Hawaiian.
The strange saga of Mr. Hand had been passed down to Stacy Hamilton by Brad. Arnold Hand, Ridgemont’s U.S. history instructor, was one of those teachers. His was a special brand of eccentricity, the kind preserved only through California state seniority laws. Arnold Hand had been at Ridgemont High for years, waging his highly theatrical battle against what he saw as the greatest threat to the youth of this land—truancy.
According to Stacy’s brother, you had to respect a teacher like Mr. Hand. Hand was one of the last teacher teachers, as Brad had put it. Most of the other members of the Ridgemont faculty subscribed to the latest vogue in grading, the “contract” method. Under the contract system a student agreed to a certain amount of work at the beginning of the year, and then actually signed a legal form binding him to the task. The contract teacher argued that he or she was giving the student a lesson in Real Life, but in fact it was easier on the teacher. Grades were given according to the amount of contract work done, and such matters as attendance didn’t matter to the contract teacher.
Mr. Hand wanted no part of the contract system. The only thing worse than a lazy student, he said, was a lazy teacher. Even the hardcore truant cases had to agree. The last thing they wanted to see was somebody up there looking for loopholes just like them. For them, Mr. Hand was one of the few surviving teachers at Ridgemont who still gave a shit about things like weekly quizzes or attendance slips—who gave a shit, period. That’s what Brad had told Stacy.
Mr. Hand’s other favorite activity was hailing the virtues of the three bell system. At Ridgemont, the short first bell meant a student had three minutes to prepare for the end of the class. The long second bell dismissed the class. Then there were exactly seven minutes—and Mr. Hand claimed that he personally fought the Education Center for those seven minutes—before the third and last attendance bell. If you did not have the ability to obey the three bell system, Hand would say, then it was Aloha Time for you. You simply would not function in life.
“And functioning in life,” Hand said grandly on that first morning, “is the hidden postulate of education.”
At age fifty-eight, Mr. Hand had no intention of leaving Ridgemont. Why, in the last ten years he had just begun to hit his stride. He had found one man, that one man who embodied all the proper authority and power to exist “in the jungle.” It didn’t bother Mr. Hand that his role model happened to be none other than Steve McGarrett, the humorless chief detective of “Hawaii Five-O.”
First-year U.S. history students, sensing something slightly odd about the man, would inch up to Hand a few days into the semester. “Mr. Hand,” they would ask timidly, “how come you act like that guy on ‘Hawaii Five-O’?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It was, of course, much too obvious for his considerable pride to admit. But Mr. Hand pursued his students as tirelessly as McGarrett pursued his weekly criminals, with cast-iron emotions and a paucity of words. Substitute truancy for drug traffic, missed tests for robbery, U.S. History for Hawaii, and you had a class with Mr. Hand. Little by little, Mr. Hand’s protean personality had been taken over by McGarrett. He became possessed by “Five-O.” He even got out of his Oldsmobile sedan in the mornings at full stand, whipping his head both ways, like McGarrett.
“History,” Hand had barked on that first morning, “U.S. or otherwise, has proven one thing to us. Man does not do anything that is not for his own good. It is for your own good that you attend my class. And if you can’t make it . . . I can make you.”
An impatient knock began at the front door of the bungalow, but Mr. Hand ignored it.
“There will be tests in this class,” he said immediately. “We have a twenty-question quiz every Friday. It will cover all the material we’ve dealt with during the week. There will be no make-up exams. You can see it’s important that you have your Land of Truth and Liberty textbook by Wednesday at the latest.”
The knock continued.
“Your grade in this class is the average of all your quizzes, plus the midterm and final, which counts for one-third.”
The door knocker now sounded a lazy calypso beat. No one dared mention it.
“Also. There will be no eating in this class. I want you to get used to doing your business on your time. That’s one demand I make. You do your business on your time, and I do my business on my time. I don’t like staying after class with you on detention. That’s my time. Just like you wouldn’t want me to come to your house some evening and discuss U.S. history with you on your time. Pakalo?”
Hand finally turned, as if he had just noticed the sound at the door, and began to approach the green metal barrier between him and his mystery truant. Hand opened the door only an inch.
“Yes?”
“Yeah,” said the student, a surfer. “I’m registered for this class.”
“Really?” Hand appeared enthralled.
“Yeah,” said the student, holding his all-important red add card up to the crack in the door. “This is U.S. History, right? I saw the globe in the window.”
Jeff Spicoli, a Ridgemont legend since third grade, lounged against the door frame. His long dirty-blond hair was parted exactly in the middle. He spoke thickly, like molasses pouring from a jar. Most every school morning Spicoli awoke before dawn, smoked three bowls of marijuana from a small steel bong, put on his wet suit, and surfed before school. He was never at school on Fridays, and on Mondays only when he could handle it. He leaned a little into the room, red eyes glistening. His long hair was still wet, dampening the back of his white peasant shirt.
“May I come in?”
“Oh, please,” replied Hand. “I get so lonely when that third attendance bell rings and I don’t see all my kids here.”
The surfer laughed—he was the only one—and handed over his red add card. “Sorry I’m late. This new schedule is totally confusing.”
Hand read the card aloud with utter fascination in his voice. “Mr. Spicoli?”
“Yes, sir. That’s the name they gave me.”
Mr. Hand slowly tore the red add card into little pieces, effectively destroying the very existence of Jeffrey Spicoli, fifteen, in the Redondo school system. Mr. Hand sprinkled the little pieces over his wastebasket.
Spicoli stood there, frozen in the process of removing his backpack. “You just ripped up my card,” he said with disbelief. “What’s your problem?”
Mr. Hand moved to within several inches of Spicoli’s face. “No problem,” he said breezily. “I think you know where the front office is.”
It took a moment for the words to work then way out of Jeff Spicoli’s mouth.