When I arrived at the school gate, Dad was already waiting for me in his unwashed clothes, his face carelessly shaven.
“Who is that grim man gaping at me?” he said as I arrived.
“Who?”
I turned to see Mr. White peering at us from the classroom window in a trance, as if we were doing something strange and fascinating, and I suddenly felt like a monkey to Dad’s organ grinder.
“That’s my English teacher. His son died.”
“He looks familiar.”
“He should. You harassed him for about forty minutes one day.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“You came into the class and abused him for no reason. You don’t remember?”
“Honestly- no. But who keeps track of things like that? You say he lost his son, eh?”
“Brett. He was my friend.”
Dad looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“He wasn’t my best friend or anything,” I said. “We were just, you know, hated by the same people.”
“How did he die? Drug overdose?”
“Suicide.”
“Suicide by drug overdose?”
“He jumped off a cliff.”
Dad turned back to Mr. White’s sad face peering out the window. “I think I might go and talk to him.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? The man’s grieving.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly,” Dad agreed, though to a totally different idea from mine, because the next thing I knew he was striding over to the classroom window. The two of them stared at each other through the glass. I could see it all. I could see Dad tap on the window. I could see Mr. White open the window. I could see them talking amiably at first, then seriously, then Mr. White was crying and Dad had his arm through the window, resting it on Mr. White’s shoulder, even though the angle was awkward and unnatural. Then Dad came back over to me, his lips pursed as if whistling, though he wasn’t. He was just pursing his lips.
After this shadowy conference, Mr. White went crazy in class. Of course, after his outburst, no matter how much they made short gasping sounds and said things like “I don’t believe it!,” no one on the staff was really surprised, and they couldn’t even see what I could see all over Mr. White’s sudden eruption: Dad’s influence.
It happened like this: One morning Mr. White came to class with the face of a thumb that had soaked too long in the bath. Then he commenced the lesson by staring wide-eyed and penetratingly, singling out students with his eyes without letting up, then moving on to the next student. No one could match him. You couldn’t sustain eye contact with a pair of peepers like his. All you could do was lower your eyes and wait for him to pass over you, like the Angel of Death. He was leaning against his desk, this hollow man with the X-ray eyes. It was morning and I remember the windows were open; a layer of milky mist wafted in, and the air was so thick with the sea you could almost taste the plankton. There was an oppressive silence, just the sound of the ocean rising up and falling on the shore. The students watched him in breathless suspense.
“It’s funny that you need training to be a doctor or a lawyer but not to be a parent. Any dolt can do it, without so much as a one-day seminar. You, Simon, you could be a father tomorrow if you wanted.”
Everyone laughed, and rightly so. Simon was not someone you could imagine fucking anyone, ever.
“Why are you here? Not just in this class, but in the world? Do you think your parents wondered why they had you? Listen to what people say when they have new babies: ‘It’s the best thing I ever did in my life,’ ‘It’s magical, blahblahblah.’ They’ve done it for their own enchantment, to satiate their own emotional needs. Have you ever noticed that? That you’re a projection of other people’s desires? How does that make you feel?”
No one said anything. It was the right thing to say. Mr. White moved through the desks to the back of the classroom. We didn’t know whether to keep our eyes forward or to turn them toward him or to tear them out.
“What do your parents want of you?” he shouted from the back. We swiveled to face him. “They want you to study. Why? They’re ambitious for you. Why? They look at you as their personal fucking property, that’s why! You and their cars, you and their washing machines, you and their televisions. You belong to them. And not one of you is any more to them than the opportunity to fulfill their failed ambitions! Ha-ha-ha! Your parents don’t love you! Don’t let them get away with saying ‘I love you’! It’s disgusting! It’s a lie! It’s just a cheap justification for manipulating you! ‘I love you’ is another way of saying, ‘You owe me, you little bastard! You represent the meaning of my life because I couldn’t give it to myself, so don’t fuck it up for me!’ No, your parents don’t love you- they need you! And a hell of a lot more than you need them, I can tell you that!”
The students had never heard anything like it. Mr. White stood there breathing noisily, as if through a clogged tube.
“Christ, I’m getting out of here,” he said suddenly, and left the room.
Unsurprisingly, within hours the whole school had feasted on the scandal, only it came all distorted: some said he had attacked his students; other said he tried to whip a whole bunch of them with his belt. And more than a few whispered that unmentionable word that people hate (read, “love”) to mention these days: pedophile!
I wish that was the end of it. I wish I could end on that happy note. Happy? In comparison with what happened next, yes. What took place that same afternoon sits solidly in history as my first official regret, remaining to this day number one. Any good I’d done in my life up to that afternoon was about to be demolished, and any good I’ve done since has been an attempt to make up for what I did.
Here’s what I did: I followed the Towering Inferno all day. I watched her reading in the sun, as Brett described, pulling compulsively at her stockings with her cobalt-blue fingernails. I followed her across the school grounds as she clutched the hand of a girl with a face like a spade. At lunch I stood behind her in the canteen while she ordered a meat pie, and when the woman wasn’t looking she grabbed a handful of squeezable tomato sauce packets and shoved them in her pocket, then sauntered off, having adorably stolen complimentary items.
In the afternoon I trailed Mr. Smart, the biology teacher, as he chased her through the musty halls. When he caught her, she held her head as if it were an heirloom.
“Why weren’t you in class?” he demanded.
“I have my period,” she replied defiantly, with a look that said, “Prove I don’t.” Good one! The broken man cast his eyes to the floor, wishing he were at home with that weird collection of moss he brought in one time.
After school we used to stand around at train stations for hours (try doing that into your twenties- the thrill is gone, believe me). The train guards were always telling us to go home, but there’s really no law against standing on the platform not catching trains. That afternoon I shadowed the Towering Inferno to the far end of the station. She was standing with her usual crowd and I was gaping from behind a pylon thinking my usual obsessive thoughts: wishing she would fall into some danger so I might rescue her, spitting on myself for fetishizing a girl I’d never met, longing to take a personal memento from her as a holy relic, indulging in a sexual fantasy in which we intersect at right angles, and generally planning a systematic exploration of her cathedral-like edifice.
She and her friends kept edging farther down the platform, so to keep my eyes on her I had to step out from my hiding place. One of her friends- Tony, a boy with a slight hunch I knew because he had once taken a pack of cigarettes from me in exchange for the observation that my eyes were set too close together- unzipped his fly and gyrated his crotch in the Towering Inferno’s general direction. She turned away in disgust and found herself trapped in my stare. It caught us both off guard. Then a strange thing happened: she stared back. Her eyes, unblinking and wild, dared me not to look away. The moment stretched its way into infinity, then snapped back to about a nanosecond and rebounded, so all in all it lasted about eight and a half seconds.