Beware the ides of March, I’m tellin’ ya.
When my boyfriend was a young man,
really still a boy, in communist Yugoslavia in the mid-1960s, he spent the
dull hours of never-ending school doodling naked ladies. He was very good at
it. One day, during a history lesson (or “history” lesson, this being
Yugoslavia), he had doodled a naked Marshal Tito (how to say this delicately?) butt-fucking a naked Leonid
Brezhnev, when his teacher noticed him not paying attention and walked to his
desk. What was he drawing? “I thought, oh, my god, this is it. I will be kicked
out,” said my love H, (*Miss O’ will use
H in lieu of a name, because she’s
really trying to spare him public exposure, poor guy. –ed) in his seductive
Montenegrin accent—he hated school, though, so part of him was almost hopeful.
“And my teacher pick it up. He didn’t say nothin’, but he keep lookin’ at it.
Finally, he said, ‘This is good. Can you make me one? But with clothes, uniforms?’”
And that night H went home and drew the picture his teacher had asked for. H’s
dad saw what he was drawing, and H explained why he was doing it. His dad
looked at it. “It’s good,” his dad said, finally, in one of those rare instances
of praise that people of our generation, and before, understand. And H delivered
the drawing to his teacher the next day. “I was thinkin’ lately if this man, if
he’s still alive, still has that picture.” H drew on a cigarette, smiled,
chuckled. It got your Miss O’ thinking about anal.
I kid!
It got me thinking about who I was
at, say, 14 or 15, and since this is a 15th, why not write about
that? It’s Saturday, March 15, 2014, warm going back to cold, and I’m not
exactly dying to get out of my pajamas or to stop drinking coffee. Kind of like
when I was a teen.
Bordering at times on being a
little goody two shoes (which phrase
I just looked up—who knew?) though hardly an angel, I wasn’t a kid who
really “got in trouble” in the regular sense. Your Miss O’ mostly got in
trouble for laughing (H was the same, he told me)—that was third grade, when
two kids who had been left back (for what would become obvious reasons), John
and Linda, realized they could tell Little Lisa jokes and she would fall out of
her desk in convulsions. Moving Little Lisa around on a room-wide tour of
desk-hopping did little to alleviate the problem. Why was a giggler like me forever
being placed in the midst of the “bad” kids? It occurs to me now that my
naturally cheerful and friendly ways were supposed to have a calming effect on
these very tough kids. Linda was a rock-hard bully and possibly
learning-disabled, certainly hyper; John was probably learning-disabled, but so
charming; each also had occasional fits of frightening temper that seemed to
come from nowhere—knowing what I know from teaching, I see that they doubtless
acted out partly to get the attention off their academics, much the way H did
by schoolroom doodling of his feminine ideal, or fucking dictators; and partly because they really
should have been outside running and jumping like mad things; or rather, like
children. I don’t know what I needed to be doing, but I really liked school.
Generally, I was just happy to be here.
Here Comes Trouble
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| Miss O' aged 11, photo by back fence neighbor, Phil Christie, in what is most certainly March. |
I can just about count on one hand
the other incidents of Trouble that I remember:
In second grade, I got in trouble
with Mrs. Angle, who turned 65 that year and had to retire. I’ve written about
her before,
but I called her Mrs. Pills. I rolled my eyes a lot in second grade, began
questioning the purpose of, for example, tracing a butterfly pattern by pressing
paper and pencil against the window; wondering at the practice telling our
dreams after naptime when she only accused Miss O’ of “lying” in elaborate fantasies about going to Egypt with her classmates (well, duh); and marveling at
the old teacher's easy acceptance of wrongly-recited poetry lines from other students, but not
from Miss O’. Mrs. Angle screwed up her tiny blood-red lips at me all year
long, and while I was incapable of loathing, really, she made me feel quiet dread in her presence.
In middle school, I remember
serving one detention after school, for running in the hallway. Mr. Dittman,
who was the Czar of No Running in the Hallways, caught me out. A math teacher
and former Marine with a geometrically precise haircut to match his background,
he’d chase running kids down the hall—running HIMSELF—as if chasing down an
enemy on the battlefield, willing to put even more kids in danger in the
process if needed, because a cause is a
cause, goddammit. The day of my detention—I vaguely remember getting
written up en route to gym, running late because of a stuck locker, maybe—even
the teacher in charge felt sorry for me, as we waited until 4:15 (a full hour),
and I turned to staring out the window to fill the time after homework. Whoever
he was, he let me leave around quarter till—I’m sure he wanted to get home,
too, now that I think of it—but I could see in his face that he knew this was
ridiculous. Still, on a certain level I remember being impressed that no matter
how “good” a kid you were, the rules applied to all of us. If we didn’t all
share in the consequences, how would we learn? I was pretty philosophical even
at 12. (What was cool was discovering, while on the yearbook staff one Saturday in 8th grade, that our sponsors thought Mr. Dittman was kind of insane. We included a cartoon of a monster with his haircut, a paper under his foot with "Detention" on it, and a thought bubble, "There's a lot more where this came from." It was the first time I ever felt "in," if you know what I mean. And affirmed in my own, unarticulated take on that stern teacher. As an adult I wonder what horrors the man lived through, and marvel that he really was a good math teacher, whatever his volatility. I mean, this was MIDDLE SCHOOL, for the love of fucking dictators.)
In high school, I got in real
trouble with a teacher only once, I think: It was sophomore year, and my friend
Mark, during a quiet working moment in Mrs. Ayres’s English class, decided to
clean out his notebook. He threw onto my desk—two desks back—a few notes
wrapped up like those triangle “footballs” (remember playing paper football in
the cafeteria?). Note-passing being that most supreme of evils, even more heinous than
doodles of national leaders of boo-fooing, Mrs. Ayres was up and over to my
desk like a shot. (It was a ridiculously small classroom in a really
overcrowded high school, a makeshift formed from an old storage closet, so it
wasn’t like it was hard to get to me, even though 31 of us were crammed into
it.) (And it was in that same room one day that Dave Gutierrez huffed on his
lighter—everyone smoked then, even school athletes, and they could get a permit
from their parents to smoke in the bus tunnel downstairs, which seriously was
about the creepiest way imaginable to enter a school in the morning—and the
thing was to suck as much butane as you could to the top, click it, and see how
high the flame would go. Once when Mrs. Ayres was writing something on the
small portable chalkboard, her back turned, Dave, who’d been huffing it, as I
say, all period, waiting for his chance, clicked the lighter, shooting a flame
so high it singed the ceiling. It just as quickly stopped, but our collective
gasp caused our teacher to turn around. “What?” she asked. We froze. We said,
“Nothing” together; and as she turned she was sure she smelled something…but
Southern politeness, another word for denial,
(achieved after rapid-fire thoughts of “What was that/ is it more trouble than
it’s worth/ is it worth calling a principal or a fire department/ god no it’s
nearly time for school to be out/ let me assign this homework”) allowed her to
return to the lesson at hand. Dave shook with swallowed laughter until the bell
mercifully rang a few minutes later.) Where was I? Oh, the NOTES. So Mrs. Ayres
took up the notes Mark had passed me and proceeded to read them. Just before
class ended, Mrs. Ayres called me out into the hallway. (I noticed she never
spoke to Mark, because, what, “boys will be boys"?)
The juvenile nature of the notes—a
back and forth from freshman year, satirizing various annoying classmates and
creating outlandish scenarios featuring their demise, or at least
incarceration—caused Mrs. Ayres to lose an enormous amount of respect for me.
“Lisa, frankly I thought you were more mature,” she intoned.
It was all I could do not to burst
into sobs—I think I imagined that I might be arrested—but I made a decision to
see her dignity and raise her a queenly: I stood very tall, met her eye directly,
played the part of older-but-wiser woman
of the world, casually explaining in my finest stage “offhand” voice: “I
am. Now.” And I explained, “We wrote those last year. It’s what kids do,”
adding thoughtfully that Mark doubtless wanted to show me how far we’d come. Or
something like that. She was not terribly moved, but dismounted from her high
horse nonetheless. For all my grandstanding, the look of disappointment on her
face made an impression, and I never passed a note again. Well, not until years
later at faculty meetings when I was a teacher. (That’s right, kids: Miss O’
and Mr. CORBIN were famous for cracking each other up as the principal led us
in our professional monthlies.) I also thought hard about what it means to make
fun, and decided that making fun of peers was, indeed, a really immature way to do it. The irony
of this was that Mark and I were among the kindest kids you’d ever want to
know. But even kind kids like to take a step out of character, especially
freshman year. (Once, that same freshman year, when we had a substitute in
World History I, I took advantage of busy-work to craft a “To the Editor”
diatribe against student swearing in the hallways. I used my best William F.
Buckley style, closing with, “Goddammit,
I shouldn’t have to put up with this shit.” I passed it back to Steve
Moore, who, after nodding approval, finally came to the final line and laughed
so hard I thought the sub would take the paper and have me suspended, but she
seemed glad to see a teenager laughing, a human thing. What did I learn? Getting away with funny stuff is awesome.)
Generation Oh, Well
When I was a teacher, before
someone lamely coined them Gen Y, I called them Generation Oh, Well. I remember coining it in the women’s
faculty restroom one lunchtime, as a veteran social studies teacher lamented
the lack of inquisitiveness of her students. “What do you call kids like this?
Generation Zero?” she asked, rhetorically. And I quipped, “Or Generation Oh,
Well.” She smiled and said, “That’s rather brilliant.” No, I thought, it’s a
cheap shot, but it was sort of prescient—all these young people today, eyes and
thumbs latched onto devices that promise informational access without real
context, and no particular aims to gain that context. Abortion outrage (in the midst of climate catastrophe), for example, among the 30-and-marrieds that I see on Facebook sends me into fits because of their lack of historical sense and context. (That we are even
debating abortion in 2014, for example, shows that no one remembers the history of the coat hanger and the back alley, the 20th century of
fear until Roe v. Wade. Access to abortion was private, I’ve read, until around
the time the women got the vote; surely that is not a coincidence.) This morning
I happened on this wonderful
article by Maria Popova about the late writer Italo Calvino, one of my
favorites. In the close of a letter to a friend whose recent essay was (the
antithetically named) “pro-life,” Calvino (who has spent the letter denouncing
his friend’s anti-woman and anti-choice position, calling him immoral, in fact), writes, from love and kindness:
I am sorry that such a radical divergence of
opinion on these basic ethical questions has interrupted our friendship.
Divergent opinions, in this case,
show the difference between thoughtfulness (Calvino) and reaction (his friend),
and I marvel at the infinite patience and yet firm stance Calvino maintains. He’s
able to become the woman—takes the experience from a point of view not his own, and it's what makes him a writer, after all; and that makes all the difference. Can this happen in a world where kids are
not looking up, looking out?
I am always sorry for anything that
interrupts a friendship, and yet I know, too, that it’s how we grow. Stupid growing.
I Almost Lost to February
What I’m thinking about today, too,
is how much we have to fuck up to become who we are, how many wrong turns, how
much talking must be done to get any goddamn where in this life. Sure, we can
talk all we want about a road not taken, but we took a road, for one reason or
another, and we have to own it. But to own it, we have to talk about it,
wrestle with it, fling it out into the universe and see what it’s like when it
comes back.
H has evenings where all he can do
is brood over the roads not taken, the money not made, and chances he didn’t
take. Miss O’ has depressions. H wants to quit smoking; Miss O’ quit
drinking for an extended Lent. We’ll see how it goes, but in February it all
seemed to be going south. After a month of cold and snow and non-communication,
Miss O’ called H over to talk. Over tea and calm reflection on who we are and
where we’re going, H concluded, finally, “February was a shitty month. Lisa, we
had a shitty month.” H, we had a shitty month. And some months are like that,
we agreed. Love just doesn’t hold that loving feeling without mindfulness, and
so, although H, regrettably, forgets to wear his back brace each day on the job, or
occasionally Miss O’ breaks yet another toe and needs to remember to make a
buddy splint each morning, but might not remember at all—and even if today we
are more in love than before, as if that were possible, Miss O’ and her Mr. H
march into March clear-eyed that we have to, whatever else happens, talk at
least once every day if we are going to hang together.
Our longest talks are about
religion, and the damage religion has done to so much of human thought. We aren't talking about the idea of awe about something larger than ourselves, but about institutions and the imposed strictures on behavior and thought. The
other night he told me this story: H has a Moslem name, and shortly after 9-11,
a tenant in his building (where H is the super) realized this, as for the first
time, though they'd known each other for years. He began treating H with contempt, walking past, glaring, or not looking at all, and H would respond by smiling, saying, “Hello, how
are you?” every single day. One day, the guy pulled a giant silver cross on a
heavy chain out from under his polo shirt and screamed at H, “Here is MY
religion,” and H gently pulled out his own chain, with globe amulet, even as he "wanted to smack the shit out of him," and said, “Here is
mine. Have a good day.” And to himself, "Dumbass. He didn't even know what it was."
 |
| The whole world in his hands. (Or as H puts it, "The whole entire global.") |
This is the man I was meant to
love.
It’s March.
At Trinity Wall Street Church last
weekend, I went to hear a concert of Lamentations sung by their renowned choir,
of which a former student is a member. En route, I encountered a giant
confluence of Hassids. I always find homogeneous groups unnerving, but especially
when they are all of one religion. They don’t seem to see anyone beyond
themselves. They march together, past, into, away from the world, acknowledging only each
other. I see this among Jehovah’s Witnesses outside the big meeting hall on my street
in Queens. I see it among Youth Groups. And I see it among big business types,
for whom Money is their God. It really unsettles me, and so the music helped. I am
not unaware of the irony of stepping into a church to hear it. So I’m always
wrestling with religion—its historical significance, but mostly, the inspired
music notwithstanding, its terrible costs. And really scary fashion sense.
 |
| But…they use cell phones. And the subway. I don't get it. |
Last night, H and I stood on my
little porch—this sweet little boon of outdoor space I have in New York City,
poised though it is over the co-op’s trash alley—staring up at the sky, the
moon behind thin clouds, and marveling at how nice it was out, maybe 40, practically
balmy. “And tomorrow up to 54, I heard,” H says, and I say, “And on Sunday, 27
and snow.” H takes a drag off his cigarette, and says sagely and with a shrug,
“That’s March.” The more I think about March—it’s life, isn’t it? It’s
transition and upheaval, highs, lows, hope, despair: Seasonal shifts, marriage
and divorce, nailing the call-back or closing the show: And it seems that we only
call each other and look to each other at moments of enormous transition—transitions
are the key to everything—good theater, good growth. No news is good news…or
else it’s death. March 15 seems to be a day of big transition, seasonally, historically, and emotionally.
If you don’t know “Fifteen,” the
theme from a cult movie called The World,
the Flesh, and the Devil, sung by the miracle of Harry Belafonte, let me tell
you it’s a honey on a song. “At fifteen,
I saw her/ and thought her/ so beautiful I kissed her/ from a distance/ for my
young love was locked inside…” I
can’t find it on iTunes, which is a shame, but it’s a pretty song about how we
see a love over time, as we change over time, in our youth. I got to humming
it, “The sweetest wine in the world is
the fruit on the vine,” it begins, and closes, finally, “The fruit on the vine is mine.” I don't feel that way a lot, growing older as I am, the vine withering the way it is. Beware the ides of March, I tell myself; but, dammit, plan the garden anyway. What the hell? I'm going after the fruit on the vine. Maybe I'll fuck it up, but I won't say, "Oh, well, fuck it." You, too. Maybe someone will surprise you and ask for more of what you can offer, but wearing clothes this time.
Love from among the doodles,
Miss O’
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