Chapter 9
I can’t put it off any longer: I haven’t been revealing the full scope of the desperation that hurtled me off the tracks in Boston. I came to my land and to Brassard’s farm in more abject retreat and internal imbalance than I’ve been willing to admit.
Back in Boston, I got into serious trouble for unprofessional conduct at Larson Middle School. I fucked up. I’m sure this was why I had a hard time finding a teaching job in Vermont.
I made inappropriate physical contact with one of my students.
This is the first time I have actually written those words, and they scream off the page in accusation.
There’s context to what I did—and ultimately, the context is more important than the act. Context: I didn’t feel “pique” against Matt. I was damaged by our ending, and I was heartbroken, not just about losing him and losing the marriage I thought I’d been constructing pretty well, but about life and, in fact, about losing the idea of marriage itself. I won’t pollute this recounting with the sordid details of what Matt did or said, but life was more about loss and betrayal than I had ever imagined. It wasn’t just that Matt didn’t love me; it was more that nobody loved anybody. Grim.
As I’ve said, back at Larson I was part of a group of teachers who had some progressive approaches to education. We encouraged the kids to be more expressive, more honest about their anger and frustration, about their family life.
We knew that the biggest impediment to their future success wasn’t school, but the society they lived in, the families they lived in. Too many came from single-mom households. Too many had witnessed violence, divorce, drug use by parents or siblings, crimes committed on them by others. Some had committed crimes themselves and lived with whatever psychic residue that leaves. Some came to school hungry, and not just for food. They came starved for a reasonable degree of love and trust—the emotional security we generally assume should be built into kids’ homes.
I’m not saying there weren’t kids who were happy, lived in complete families, and led wholesome, sufficient lives—there were. This was not a deeply troubled, crime-ridden, impoverished inner-city school district of the kind that’s so popular in all those redemptive, feel-good teacher movies. But as one eighth-grader told me, there were so many kids with “issues” that it was almost a social stigma not to have a few.
We kept our antennae up for problems that might warrant intervention, and we maintained frequent contact with the guidance office and social services agencies. And when it seemed the best course, we also put our own shoulders to the wheel.
We knew that better teacher-student ratios equals better grades and fewer behavioral problems, and we knew that our school couldn’t afford more teachers. So we changed the numerators: More teacher hours per kid equals better everything. We spent a lot of time with our students, individually, often after class. We believed we could make a difference. And I’m sure we did.
Larson was a big brick pile built around 1940, a central building three stories tall with two-story wings projecting into an asphalt playground. It occupied its own block in a residential neighborhood of three-story apartment buildings, some fairly well kept up and some getting rough around the edges.
I loved that place. It had an agreeably worn quality, pleasingly rounded and sculpted by the river of young lives gently eroding its halls and classrooms over the decades. What it lacked in modern amenities, it made up for with an old-fashioned charm. In front, concrete entry columns flanked three sets of big double doors, capped by an arch with William J. Larson Middle School proudly carved into it. The wooden staircases creaked, and they were still framed with the kind of banisters that kids could slide down despite the age-old prohibitions against doing so. The building’s aura was that of an elderly, kindly aunt.
Every classroom had high ceilings and tall windows along one side. Teacher’s desk up front beneath a big clock that ticked loudly, blackboard behind. The students’ desks were two-person Masonite-topped tables with separate chairs, circa 1990. Video setup on a rolling trolley. The computer lab in the library had some recent, decent equipment, but otherwise the old ambience was alive and well. It smelled of chalk dust, hair gel, adolescent body odor and deodorant, the stink of photocopy toner mingling with the whiff of sloppy joes from the cafeteria.
As my colleagues did, I often stayed on after the school day to tutor, console, confront, or interrogate one kid or another.
So there I was in that last year, and I’d been divorcing Matt for most of it, and here comes yet another kid: Omar, about fifteen, in eighth grade and with a life that was a disaster. I first asked him to stay after class to discuss a quiz on which he’d answered “Bite me” for every question.
We met so I could explore the reason for the answers he’d given. I told him, “This says to me that either you don’t know—which I don’t get, because you and I both know you’re smart. Or it says you don’t care, when I know you’re actually interested in some of this material. Or it says you have contempt for school, or for me, but you seem to have an okay time here and I thought you and I got along pretty well. So what’s up?”
After some digging, I learned that his father had recently gone “crazy” on drugs and gotten arrested and that his mother couldn’t stop crying. His older brother, seventeen, just took off and they didn’t know where he was, and his little sister had started sucking her thumb again, at the age of eleven.
We were sitting in my big, bright
