biolog

Throughout high school, I was afflicted with an especially nasty strain of a common ailment called puberty. That, thankfully, is over with.

Envision the most uncontrollable, unaccountable kid you’ve met and I was his best friend. After this incident the Dean “felt” (it’s truly a wonder how prone these practical people are to feel rather than to think) it best that the two of us never again sit in the same class. And let’s admit it’s never just one incident but a semester’s-long piling up that broke the camels back. Last period on Friday—to a sixteen year old what a full moon is to a werewolf—is when I killed Ms Wentworth’s chest high saguaro cactus with the 3rd–or was if 4th?–edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. But I didn’t heave this hefty and overgrazed pastureland of American thought; I merely redirected its trajectory. That’s a heavy book, after all, to get brained with. I merely antagonized and poked fun at my best friend’s excitable disposition and he swung the tomb in a whirling dervish of frustration. Ahhh yes, the days before special-ed segregation. I parried, the five pound bomb flew from the aggressor’s hands and went crashing into the cactus, snapping off the top quarter of its height.

Death by literature!

Ms. Wentworth’s halo of frizzy hair, which had something topiary about it, shuddered violently at the celery snap of impact. What we all learned about the saguaro that day is that it’s little more than a hollow shell save for an inner spongy material, like a sanguinated watermelon with stickers.

But it was also her child. She read to it when we lost complete interest in the conceits of dead white guys. Watered it fortnightly. Picked lint and erasureheads from its fierce quills. Extending one didactic finger, she corrugated her forehead and warned us that it would surely maim if we bumbled into it (for guys, these so-called warnings are always interpreted as open invitations to inflict suffering on one another). If you subscribe to Freud you might say that on some subconscious level we were all, including Ms Wentworth, aware of the threatening phallic presence the cactus commanded over the class. My friend, a high-powered mutant operating on minimal self-reflection, never paid mind to consequences and repercussions, and so, swung away knowing full-well that I would smack the text from his hands and possibly send it sailing toward her kitschy-cluttered desk, or, more fantastically, the swollen succulent posing stiffly nearby.

From behind her imposing wooden altar, Ms Wentworth, in one giant gasp, sucked all air from the room, looked at me like the murdering bastard I was, and in a single blousy flush, upended her chair, swooped up her circumcised baby, burst into tears and made for the teachers lounge; that furtive Shangri-la, that war room of the gerontocracy, that coven of hidden secrets, of huddled small talk where teachers murmur, plot, rumor-make and eventually regroup. Unaccountably, all blame was placed on me: a freshman suspended and then transferred to a different class full of “behavers,” and away from my best friend. For every other bad thing I got away with, I could hardly argue this unjust.

It was her first year teaching high school, and may have been her last for all I know, because she didn’t return second semester. Too busy maintaining a constant aura of aloofness (I was sixteen after all) to lose any sleep over the prospect, that coy Ms in her title forever shrouds any vengeful husband who may or may not exist.

Things worked out, for me at least. I ended up with a cantankerous English teacher cum painter-poet-singer-songwriter-playwright-thespian who warned me—and here I must paraphrase—that in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, you’ll find passion driving you to almost compulsively reach for perfection in writing, often—in fact, mostly—at the expense of everything else in your life. I’m now learning that the very hard way.