30. Fights With Teachers

Mostly teachers liked me. I worked hard, did what I was asked, and on a good day could say something or write something that must have made them feel like some of what they were working so hard to get across was sinking in. A few teachers, like my sixth grade teacher Mr. Diana, nearly idolized me. “Twenty-nine more Chris Newsomes would make teaching a complete pleasure,” he wrote on my report card one quarter.

Which is why the fights I got in with teachers stuck out so much. The first time was in fourth grade, when a substitute teacher named Mr. Merriman accused me of stealing someone else’s art folder. Mr. Merriman was a young guy, maybe early twenties, much younger than our regular teacher Mrs. Wortmann. When he came in that morning, he introduced himself by saying he was totally new to being a teacher and didn’t even have a job yet and that was why he was working as a substitute. He told us he knew all about how classes treated substitutes, he wasn’t that far from doing it himself, and he would make a deal with us: if we did the work that Mrs. Wortmann had left and didn’t give him a hard time, he’d make sure we had some free time at the end of the day. He said it was only fair.

I thought this was pretty cool, both that he’d admit he was new to teaching and that he’d make this kind of deal. I always finished my work early, and Mrs. Wortmann wouldn’t even let me read a book until everyone was done.

Art period was right after lunch, and this was where the trouble started. Each of us had a legal-sized manila folder we used to store our artwork. We kept these in a closet in the back of the classroom, brought them home at the end of the week, and returned them empty on Monday. This day was a Monday.

Mr. Merriman told us all to get our art folders and get ready to go to art class. I went to the closet and grabbed my folder and got on line. “Is everyone all set?” Mr. Merriman asked, before beginning our march down to the art room.

“No,” a girl named Perri Knoblauch said. “Someone took my folder. It’s not here.”

“I’m sure no one took it,” Mr. Merriman said. “Let’s take a closer look.”

He and Perri inspected the closet. But there was no folder there. Perri walked back out in the classroom, looking about to cry about some stupid art folder. She looked us all up and down in the line—we were being very well-behaved, standing there in line hardly talking, we hadn’t forgotten Mr. Merriman’s deal—when her eyes landed on me. “He has it,” she said to Mr. Merriman. “That’s what my folder looks like.”

Mr. Merriman walked over to me. “This girl says you have her folder.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s mine.”

“Can you prove it? Is your name on it?”

I couldn’t remember if I’d put my name on the folder, so I looked at it front and back. There was no name.

“Maybe you should just give it back to her,” Mr. Merriman said.

“It’s mine, not hers,” I said. “I picked it up from exactly where I left it. Her name’s not on it either.”

“Don’t let him steal my folder,” Perri said, again looking about to cry.

Let me describe Perri Knoblauch. She looked like a doll. Blonde hair, blue eyes, always dressed in pretty dresses and black shoes. She wasn’t one of the smart kids, but she looked like she should be.

Let me describe me, at least right at that moment. At lunch recess we’d been playing some football game we made up, where we chased each other and then piled on. My shirt was out of my pants, and the knees of my khaki pants were grass-stained. My fingernails were caked with dirt.

“I think you should give Perri back her folder,” Mr. Merriman said.

“No. It’s mine. Why are you believing her? She’s the one trying to steal my folder.”

“I seriously doubt it,” Mr. Merriman said, in an angry voice he didn’t look like he would have been capable of. “And for that, you can sit here while everyone else goes to art. But first, take the pass and go down to the bathroom and clean up. Your hands are filthy.”

I felt wronged, sitting by myself in the dark classroom, but also humiliated and hurt. I was never punished like this. Teachers liked me. I knew Mr. Merriman had judged me on my dirty fingernails, my messy clothes. He had decided I looked like someone who would steal. I thought how if he knew me even a little, he would have realized I wasn’t a thief. But he didn’t know me, and so it was everything was up for grabs, which was a scary thing.

The next time I got in a fight with a teacher it was in 6th grade. Mrs. Gunn was an older teacher, heavy and white-haired. She taught Math, and did it in a very strict and by rote way. One of the things she liked to have us do was to write out multiplication tables. Each day we had to write out one multiplication table and hand it in along with our regular homework. It was boring—I already knew my math tables by heart, right up through 12—and one day I forgot to do it. “Mr. Newsome,” Mrs. Gunn said, the next day, “you didn’t hand in a multiplication table yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking it was no big thing. “Sorry. I have one for today.”

“Not good enough,” Mrs. Gunn said. “I’m marking your assignment yesterday as failed.”
I made a disbelieving face. “Why?”

“Because you didn’t do the assignment.”

“But I do the assignment every day. I always do the assignment.”

“And yesterday you didn’t, and you should suffer the consequences.”

“You know I already know my multiplication tables. I just forgot once to write them out. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. But everyone has to follow the rules,” Mrs. Gunn said.

“And I do. I always do. Other people don’t do their homework all the time. I miss one assignment and—“

“Enough,” Mrs. Gunn intoned. “Please leave this classroom right now. Wait outside until we’re done.”

“But all I said—“

”Goodbye,” she thundered.

So there I was, by myself again, this time in the hallway right outside the classroom. I didn’t know where else to go. In the middle of my next class, which was Music, Mr. Diana showed up and motioned me out to the hall. “So what happened with you and Mrs.Gunn?”

There was a shake in my voice when I spoke. I was still upset. “I don’t know. I don’t why she got so mad at me. All I did was miss an assignment.”

“She’s definitely mad. I think I can calm her down. But I’d suggest you do whatever she tells you to do from now on.”

“But I always do, and then this one time…”

“That’s probably the problem,” Mr. Diana interrupted. “If you of all people stop doing your assignments, it makes us wonder who will do them.”

If my first fight was because the teacher didn’t know me at all, and the second because the teacher knew me too well, the third one, the one that got me suspended, had something to do with knowing myself and not especially liking what I knew. It was in high school. I was sitting at a library table with a group of guys, Bob Wagner, Alex Greer, a few others. They weren’t my regular group of friends but I hung out with them sometimes. The library was supposed to be a quiet study period, but these guys had this game where they each in turn would shout a word into the silence. The word they always shouted was “Corn.” I’d once asked Bob Wagner why they’d chosen this word, but he shrugged and said he couldn’t remember.

Usually, there’d just be one or two “Corn” shouts in a given period. The librarian, a woman named Mrs. McGinnis, was part-time and not much into discipline, so she just ignored the shouts and everyone was happy. But on this day these guys were feeling especially frisky and a kid named Paul Miroff went for a third try.

The thing about the good “Corn” shouters, like Bob Wagner, was they could actually disguise their voices. And they used not only a different voice but a different inflection: sometimes a long, drawn-out “Coooooorn,” sometimes (more often) a barked “Corn” that was over so fast it made you wonder whether you’d really heard it.

Paul Miroff was not such a master. His “Corn” was loud, but in his normal voice and inflection. Maybe it was how flagrant this “Corn” was that made Mrs. McGinnis stride over to our table, or maybe she felt some unwritten code had been violated by the third shout.
“All of you,” she said. “Stand up.”

We all stood up.

“Get in a line.”

We did what she asked. It felt like we were in a police line-up. Everyone else in the library was staring.

“Which one of you just shouted?”

Nobody said anything. And as the silence continued, I smiled. Partially it was out of nervousness. But mostly it was just how stupid this all was. Being confronted by the librarian for shouting a meaningless word. These guys really were idiots.

Mrs. McGinnis noticed my smile. “You. Were you the one who shouted?”

Of course I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have had the nerve, to begin with. I was a watcher, not a participant, by personality, by reputation. If I’d just offered a simple denial, Mrs. McGinnis would have moved on to one of the other guys. And I’m sure everyone, the other guys and all the staring faces in the library, expected me to make this simple denial.

“What difference does it make?” I asked.

It came out before I’d even known I was saying it.

“What did you say?” Mrs. McGinnis asked, in surprise and amazement.

“What difference does it make? It was just a joke. It was funny. It didn’t hurt anybody.”

Mrs. McGinnis became upset. She started talking in a heated voice about how the library was a safe place to do work and it was disrespectful to other people to distract them wasn’t that hurt enough? What if they had to get something done and they couldn’t finish it because of me? What about then?

At this point I realized that whatever point I was trying to make had already been made or not made. In my heart, I sort of agreed with what Mrs. McGinnis was saying.

So I raised my hands in what I thought was a placating gesture: okay, all right, I see what you’re saying. Let’s move on.

A seething anger now filled Mrs. McGinnis face. “You just bought yourself some detention, mister. I’m getting Mr. Peck down here.”

Over the next 10 minutes, the phrase “What did I do?” must have come out of my mouth at least 10 times. It seemed that Mrs. McGinnis was convinced that my placating gesture had been insulting, that I was fake-bowing to her. She continued to be all-out-of-proportion emotional as she discussed the incident, and Mr. Peck, the principal, looked uncomfortable listening to her insist I be given detention and that my parents be called and how she wasn’t going to stand for this kind of disrespect any longer at this school. Something had to be done, starting now.

“Why don’t you come with me to the office,” Mr. Peck said. “Mrs. McGinnis, you should be confident the situation will be handled appropriately.”

“I’m going to have to call your parents,” Mr. Peck said, when we were alone. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any other choice.”

I waited in the office, unable to meet the eyes of the secretaries, trying to figure out why what had just happened had happened. I knew I wasn’t blameless, but it had all seemed to go out of control so quickly.

My mother and father both arrived a half hour later. It was odd to see them together: I rarely did. I’d been expecting my mother, this was one the days she didn’t got into work in the city, but my father must have been getting a late start on his sales calls for the day and still been at home. They nodded to me and were immediately escorted into Mr. Peck’s office, where they stayed about 15 minutes. They came out with grim looks on their faces and my father motioned me to follow. We went outside, to the parking lot and his car.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and the car had that great sunny day cocoon of warmth I usually loved. I sat in the backseat and my father drove away. I waited for him to start, tried to figure out how I would explain my version of the events.

Finally he said, “You’ll stay home tomorrow. It won’t technically be a suspension. It won’t appear on your record. But Mr. Peck doesn’t want to see you in school tomorrow.”

His voice was tight. I waited for the follow-up questions, for which I still didn’t have good answers.

“Mr. Peck explained what happened,” he continued. “And all I can say is…why in the world would you possibly do something so stupid? What was on your mind?”

My father’s tone was one of true astonishment. Then he started laughing. And my mother and I started laughing, too.

I began to try to explain, but he waved me off. He asked my mother if she felt like going to lunch, and she said yes, she had nothing going on that afternoon. We went to a place my father knew in Mahwah, a restaurant built into what used to be a railroad car. At his suggestion, we all ordered the French Dip. We talked about how they could make a railroad car into a restaurant and then we talked about how trains used to be so much more popular than there were today. I told them about the song “City of New Orleans,” which I’d heard someone singing on TV, and they were interested in hearing about it, which pleased me, and then they talked about the subways back where they’d grown up in the Bronx, “the Old El,” they called it. “Don’t act now like you liked taking the train,” my mother teased my father. “You used to hate it whenever you had to go into Manhattan.”  We were all trying a little too hard to be people we weren’t anymore, and I think we all knew it, but we were all having fun, too.