By the time that first lecture was done, Collins wondered what had possessed him to want to become a principal in the first place. He thought about dropping the class and staying comfortably in his present job. He shook his head. When he started something, he wasn’t the sort to back away from it.
He ended up acing Vance’s course. He took the others he needed, one or two a semester, always at night, as he could fit them into the rest of his life. He went through an internship program at an actual junior high school campus. He took the state-required examination for certification. Before long, he got an interview. The committee let him hang for two weeks before they let him know he’d been accepted. Kranz Elementary School had itself a new principal.
When Collins got the news, he threw the biggest party he’d ever given-and ended up with the biggest hangover he’d ever had. The hangover eventually went away. As for the size of the party-well, what the hell? With the raise he’d get from his promotion, he could afford it and then some.
He started his new job in the fall. It was as challenging as he’d hoped it would be. Budgeting for a single school was a much more complicated-and, as Professor Vance had warned so long ago, a much more precise-business than planning for district-wide programs, where you could always shuffle money between dozens of different accounts.
Human relations counted for more at the school-site level, too. Little by little, he learned how to build rapport with the faculty. As principal, he also came into contact with pupils, something he’d never done back in the district office. Dealing with them made the problem of handling a staff look simple. But again, he learned.
He got on with the rest of his life, too. He married a curriculum specialist from the district office where he’d worked before. He took up golf. After a while, he was shooting in the mid eighties. He grew a mustache. After a while, it turned salt-and-pepper.
Satisfying as his principal’s assignment had been, he slowly decided it didn’t give him everything he needed. He hated the idea of being in a rut for the rest of his life. He talked things over with his wife. “Go for it,” she said. “I know it’ll be tough. Even if you don’t make it-and so many people don’t-you’ll be better for the experience. But I think you will. I think you can do it.”
“You’re wonderful,” he said, and kissed her. The very next day, he enrolled in night school again.
The moment he walked into his first class, he saw most of his fellow students were folks a lot like him: solid men and women who’d already built up solid careers but wanted something more. Oh, there were a couple of people in their early thirties, but only a couple. He knew they were the ones he’d have to watch out for, the whiz kids, the ones on the fast track to the top. He was no whiz kid. He was a grinder. That had always worked till now. He had to hope it would keep on working.
“Congratulations,” Dr. de la Vega said as he walked to the front of the classroom and sat down on the table by the podium. “Congratulations just for being here, and for wanting to be the best.” His mild smile turned savage. “Now we’ll see how many of you I can run out of the program over the next twenty weeks.”
He meant it, too. Nothing was watered down here, nothing simplified to let the slower people keep up. If you couldn’t keep up, too bad. Grimly, Collins buckled down to do the work. He ended up with a high B in the course, and felt prouder of it than of most A’s he’d earned.
Every course in the whole program turned out to be like that. Collins learned to live on coffee and four hours of sleep a night. At a physical, his doctor warned him all that coffee could bring on an ulcer. He kept drinking it. Without it, he would have had to quit, and he’d come too far to do that.
As time went on, he became ever more conscious of the responsibility that came with jobs at the top of the hierarchy. He had to look hard at himself to find out whether he truly wanted it. Without false modesty, he decided he did.
Before he was even allowed to take the exams at the end of the program, he had to convince an interview board he was worthy. The exams themselves made the ones he’d taken to qualify for principal look like a pop quiz. When he learned he’d passed, everybody at his school gave him a party. He got his picture in the local paper, along with half a dozen other tired-looking people.
More interviews-now he could pick and choose, because there were always more jobs than people qualified to fill them.
He finally settled on one not far from where he lived, in a top-notch school. “We’re delighted to have you,” the principal there said, shaking his hand.
Once his exams were over, Collins had cut way back on his caffeine intake. Even so, he hardly slept the night before his first day on the new job. “Am I really good enough?” he asked his wife as he picked at breakfast that morning.
“You bet you are,” she said. “Now, go get ‘em.”
For all her encouragement, he needed a deep breath to still the fear inside him as he walked up to the enameled door with the tarnished brass 7 on it. He opened the door. He went inside.
“Good morning, class,” he said, forcing his voice to steadiness.
“Good morning, teacher,” the children chorused.
Teacher. He felt ready to burst with pride. After so long, after so much hard work, at last he’d reached the pinnacle of his profession.
THE BARBECUE, THE MOVIE, AND OTHER UNFORTUNATELY NOT SO RELEVANT MATERIAL
Part of this one comes from driving over forty miles each way back and forth to work for seven years. Part of it comes from having an unusual last name myself. And part of it is just pure silliness. When I sit down to write, I usually have an ending firmly in mind. This time I just had an opening scene and let things roll from there. The results are intended to amuse; if any deep profundity lurks herein, I certainly haven’t found it.
T.G. Kahn looked out the window at the traffic going by on imperial Highway. He wished he were under the warm Los Angeles summer sunshine, instead of sitting here cooped up in an office trying to put a newsletter together.
He sighed. He had gone through some impressive finagling just to get an office he could see out of. Until a few weeks ago, he had worked in an enormous interior room, the kind where you needed to leave a trail of bread crumbs to find your way through the maze of partitions. “Cubicle, sweet cubicle,” one typist’s sampler read, which perfectly summed up the place.
The newsletter he was writing bored even him. He sighed again. “It beats sleeping on a park bench, I suppose,” he said out loud, and mounted another dispirited attack on his word processor.
The phone rang, its chime booming like Big Ben over the soft, incessant Muzak. Kahn’s fingers jerked. A rash of consonants broke out on the screen. He stared at them reproachfully as he picked up the receiver. “T.G. Kahn.”
“Someone here to see you, Mr. Kahn.”
“Thank you, Doris.” His secretary still worked across the corridor in the huge office from which he had recently escaped. “Send him in.”
“Yes, sir,” Doris said, and giggled. Kahn wondered if his ears were playing tricks on him. Doris hadn’t even cracked a smile for the limerick about the crypt at St. Giles, whereupon he had given her up as a hopeless case.
The door to his office came open. So did his mouth. The door closed. His mouth stayed open.
The man who walked into his office was in his late twenties, a few years younger than Kahn, and looked vaguely Semitic. He had a thick Fu Manchu mustache and the strangest hairdo Kahn had ever seen-and, living in Los Angeles, Kahn had seen some lulus. The top of the man’s head was shaved. So was a strip that ran from ear to ear through the bare spot on top, and an inch or so on the forehead. The rest grew long, in greasy braids.