EL6.2
Alex Egervary
Character: “wayward guitar prodigy with a softee [sic] core”
Setting: “poor school district middle school in Louisiana with no air conditioning in early May”
I Wrote A Song Last Night
It is sweltering in an institutional twenty by twenty cell fifteen minutes outside Baton Rouge. The cell is not, strictly speaking, a cell; but rather a classroom on the second and top floor of Andrew Jackson Middle School. Jackson MS is hulking, rectangular, and clothed in such garish red brick that it still surprises me every time I turn off Westminster Street to get to the parking lot. The structure was built in 1978 in a vaguely modernist style. It is built on a gentle incline, and at the south end where the ground falls away, the basement is revealed. It is naked concrete, and at least three feet thinner on all sides than the upper two floors. When you pull into the lot, as I did almost an hour ago, you can’t really see the basement, giving the school the appearance of floating maybe eight feet above the muddy ground or seven feet, eleven and one-half inches above the sparse grass that makes a half-hearted effort to push its way out of the swampy plain every spring.
It is spring right now, as a matter of fact. According to the blotter partly concealed on my desk by a sheaf of to-be-graded essays, the date is May 8, which seems inconceivable, given that my short-sleeved shirt is already sticking to my back, that there is a sheen of perspiration on my face just from the exertion of lifting myself from my seat, and that I can hear a severe heat advisory issuing from the black plastic grille of the small weather radio lying on my desk. Every classroom in Jackson is equipped with one of these weather radios. There are also the normal classroom accoutrements: teacher’s desk, teacher’s chair, rows and columns (five each) of students’ desks, each one tattooed with whatever seems witty during long study halls when you’re fifteen, bookshelves stacked with lit anthologies dating from the mid-80s and jacketless paperbacks I picked up for 25¢ at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, a television that is surprisingly shiny and new with the logo of an obscure Asian electronics manufacturer stamped in silver below its screen, a battered loudspeaker bolted to the wall directly above a chalkboard with ghostly, half-erased letters barely visible behind a thick layer of chalk dust, and twenty-five pairs of eyes staring up at me as I stand there, sweating slowly and futilely into the humid air of the classroom, running the back of my right hand over my forehead to wipe the sweat from my eyes and push my hair back out of my face. I sigh, inaudibly.
“I wrote a song last night,” I begin to my captive audience of twenty five. This class is an English class, and I am an English teacher. I went to school in the Northwest and still have not adapted to the unrelenting heat and humidity of the Southeast. I majored in lit and spent most of the time playing guitar. I had a band and we would play wherever we could: in church activity rooms, rec halls, basements, block parties, empty warehouses. We had a small, but I like to think integral, part in the whole Northwest “scene.” (Those are heavy and ironic quotes. If we were talking right now, I would be ironically making the universally recognized “quotation mark” gesture in which I repeatedly curl and uncurl the first two fingers of each hand, while the other fingers are clenched in a fix. Most likely, I would also raise one eyebrow (ironically, still), and give you a look that says something like “Of course, I totally disregard the idea of a ‘scene’ as demeaning to not only our band, but the other bands nominally associated with said ‘scene,’ anyone who has or will ever listen to either us or those other nominally associate bands, and finally the two of us carrying out this conversation.” Just to be clear.) We put out two well-received-but-very-obscure albums on a tiny record label run out of this guy’s basment, and we all graduated, and somehow I ended up here, in Louisiana, sweating profusely in front of twenty-five staring ninth graders. I’m just not built for this kind of climate. It wears on me. I’m nearing the end of my first year of teaching here – my first year of teaching anywhere, technically – and I can’t help but think that it will necessarily be my last. I feel like I’ve been in the Peace Corps, shuttling medical supplies to war-torn and AIDS-infested villages in Africa, but I haven’t. What have I done? I’ve graded several hundred papers. I’ve written maybe a dozen songs that I really like and maybe three dozen that I really dislike. I’ve flirted more than I should have with this cute girl in tenth grade. I’ve gone to confession at Our Lady of the Sorrows across the street from my co-op to atone for said flirting. I’ve alienated most of the other teachers, who I think are all lifers here. I’m not. I think.
“I wrote a song last night,” is what I said to start the class, but I sort of trailed off, which is something I’ve been told I have a tendency to do. I shake my head and start again. “I’ve graded about half of your papers, and I have to say that the results are not very encouraging.” Not that either party really cares – this is a remedial writing class. They are, to be brutally honest, poor writers with little hope of improving. And I am, to be brutally honest, a poor teacher with little hope of improving. I launch into a brief explanation of the faults of the papers I’ve graded thus far. I’m not much of a lecturer, but the kids aren’t much of listeners, so I hit the big points quickly and sort of trail off after a minute or two. I find myself just looking at the class a lot. Wondering what brought them here. Why this isn’t what happened to me. I grew up in Pennsylvania, which was not that different from here, only colder. This kid in the fourth row looks like my best friend from high school, and this other kid who sits in the front row looks like my brother. A girl who sits over by the windows reminds me of my girlfriend from freshman year of college, only with longer hair. These three guys who sit in the back of the class remind me of my friends from the band. Except one is black, and all three have this angry but worn expression on their faces that I don’t remember from my school years but see everywhere now. It’s then that realize that I know everyone in this class. Not that I know them, because of course I know them, I’ve been grading their papers for months now and I’m good with names and faces. That’s not what I mean, I mean that I knew them. The cheerleaders who sit by the door were cheerleaders at my high school. The captain from my high school cross country team is sitting behind them, next to Valerie Keane, the first girl I kissed, back in sixth grade but grown up now. The tall kid in the second row is the TA who failed me in a history survey class sophomore year. The girl sitting next to him is Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, and the boy sitting next to her is Holden Caulfield.
I realize that I’ve just been staring for some time. I try to subtly look at the big off-white clock protected by a cage of steel mesh out of the corner of my eye, but I can’t quite make it out. I wipe my hands on my khakis and sigh again. I scan the rows of students, but they look at me just as inscrutably as they did before I went off into this fugue or whatever. I know I’m blushing explosively right now, so I try to continue with what I was talking about before, but I can’t remember. I sit down in my desk chair and look around the room trying to get back on track.
I remember. “I wrote a song last night!” I say again. “It was sort of about the way the school looks when you drive up into the parking lot?” I say, letting my voice go up a little at the end of the sentence to give someone an opportunity to stop me, but no one takes it. “You know how the first floor is, like, three feet wider than the basement, all the way around? So you can’t really tell there’s another floor there on a day like today, when the haze comes down so low.” I know I’m really losing it today, because I can hear the kids from my band snickering in the back of the class, but I don’t feel like I can really stop what I’m doing. “So the song uses that as the big metaphor, you know? Like it starts with that image and then sort of goes off on a tangent for the verses, and comes back for the chorus.” It’s not one of my better songs, but it’s been two weeks since I could get anything together, so I feel pretty good about myself. One of the kids from my band asks me if I can play some of the song, which makes sense because I’m writing it for our band. I tell him that I didn’t bring my guitar but I’ll play it next time we practice. Molly and the girl I dated freshman year both giggle and Holden kind of stares at me like I’m crazy. I ask my brother if he’s written any songs lately – he plays the piano and sometimes writes these moody, melodramatic piano ballads that I get a laugh out of. My brother looks like he’s going to cry, so I ask my history TA instead, because I really hate him. He glares at me, and I laugh. My best friend and cross country captain are whispering to each other and looking at me darkly out of the corner of their eyes. Valerie and the cheerleaders have a look on their faces that is simultaneously concerned and nauseated, like they’re looking at an earthworm that crawled out of the ground when it rained last night, and is now slowly dying in the hot sun of midday. That hot sun is sending a powerful glare through the windows that I can feel in this synaesthetic way, not just blinding me and burning phantom shadows into the back of my eye, but also setting off a ringing in my eardrums and giving me a bitter taste in my mouth, coppery like a penny or blood. If I weren’t sitting down, I would have fallen down, so I’m lucky there. I blink my eyes rapidly, watching the fuzzy sunspots slowly fade from my vision. I blink rapidly again, this time watching my contact lenses swim around on top of my eye, making the classroom blurry momentarily, then sharp again. I open my mouth to breathe and I can feel how dry it is, so I reach out for the mug of water sitting on top of the papers-to-grade, imprinting a heavy circle of condensation into the stack. There is so much condensation that the mug sticks to the top sheet of paper, and I have to shake the mug to free it. I drink from it and sigh a third time. I put the mug down on top of the stack of papers again and look out at the class. They’re all looking at me, some kind of scared, some almost laughing. My ex-girlfriend looks like she’s going to cry, so I smile at her, which oddly enough only seems to make it worse. I run my left hand over my forehead to wipe the sweat from my eyes and push my hair back out of my face, and I think to myself, It really looks like it’s going to be a nice day.