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Black Eye
By
Doug Mort
1978. My first period teacher in continuation high school was a Viet Nam vet, a guy who wore mirrored sunglasses inside the classroom and looked like a cross between Jim Morrison and Jesus Christ. “You know why you’re here?” he’d ask us each morning, for almost every day started with a new student skulking through the door. “Because you’re all geniuses, and geniuses can’t handle the bull crap they feed you at those other public schools, can they?”
Oh how I longed to be a genius!
O’Halloran tried to forge us into a vanguard aimed at a new class revolt. Our daily class assignment involved reading the newspaper and then placing before him the injustices we had culled from the ink. “That is, people, American aristocratic oppression of the underclass!” he’d shout out, which he then went on to explain as governmental policies and groupthink that might prove inauspicious for our collective future. I can only guess that he believed a thoughtful erudition of class structure would help us turn our lives around. But when none of us read or responded, he was not above threats. “Listen up, people! Do you know where all of you will be when we invade another goddamn country! Ever hear of the
Best-Buddy-Next-To-You-Gets-His-Head-Blown-Off Taste Test?” He’d open his mouth, point inside and garble, “Right there, people!
Right there!”
Under better circumstances we might have reported for duty – we might even have let O’Halloran walk point. Instead, save a few non sequitur expletives, we remained speechless, most of us waiting like marionettes to be led over a cliff by something or someone much mightier than our crazy teacher.
Or maybe it was because we had a way of proving to ourselves our worth. For example, one morning Allen Wilkenson and his desk listed starboard then crashed to the floor. Halfway down, Wilkenson was out. The drool he dribbled next to my feet told me and my classmates that the Mexican reds were in town, thus we pondered the possibilities. O’Halloran had his own possibilities, and he was aghast when nobody moved to help Wilkenson, when all we did was laugh (and plot). He said we were leaving our comrade in the jungle without calling for a dust-off. “You’re gonna leave your buddy like that? You’re gonna let him die out there alone?” Then he had an idea: he was going to walk outside, close the door and leave the situation to us. He said he had faith that we would do the right thing.
He gave us ample time. Scott Winger walked to the door and looked out the brick-size window and said O’Halloran was taking a nap on the bench down by the bathrooms. So while Winger stood guard, James Wright and Luther Burgess picked Wilkenson’s pockets and found the dope. Then they took what little money he had before righting him and the desk. Lastly we passed the bag around.
When he came back in the room, O’Halloran was ecstatic. He thrust a fist in the air and shouted, “Right on, people!
Right on!” Now we had impressed him to the point of wanting to talk about graduation, as if all of us were bound to vie for the valedictorian speech. He wanted us to think of a theme song to accompany our procession past the podium. “Something that will shake the naysayer to his feet!” he called out. “A thunderous, modern day reveille for your impending inheritance of the good Mothership Earth!”
Only Wilkenson replied. He gave off something reminiscent of a death rattle; then he sighed in his sleep and began to urinate on himself.
***
I had other problems – chiefly my job and love life at Togo’s. Maybe O’Halloran thought I was a genius, but my boss at Togo’s said I had no common sense. At least once a day he reminded me of my litany of offenses.
“You made a sandwich without bread…You laid down and took a nap in the walk-in…You served a twelve-year-old a beer…you sliced your thumb open and didn’t even notice,
after which, after which, you drenched an old lady’s egg salad in blood! And you haven’t even worked here a month!”
He failed to recognize that a month was an eternity for me, that a minute was a damn lifetime. Nor did he care that my life was the slowest forced march in history, or that I was accompanied by an impending doom that bit at me like a pesky horse fly.
He grew up a few streets over from me. For some reason he thought his own fast food fiefdom and a Porsche bumped him upwards in the socioeconomic strata. However the car wasn’t the result of a market bullish on barbecue beef – it was the merit reward of a coke dealer. In fact, he had sold me the coke that staunched my feelings when I sliced off the tip of my thumb and drenched the old lady’s sandwich. With the exception of Tamara, every employee put their check back into the boss’s pocket. It was as if the boss had concocted his own little circular economy.
Tamara got her coke for free for the same reason that the boss had made her manager at the age of seventeen: she resembled a young Linda Ronstadt starring as a wounded doe. To quench the rage that occasionally surfaced, she was known to hurl beer bottles at the men customers who couldn’t help but gawk at her; once or twice the bread knife had to be coaxed from her hand. Apparently, that’s the way a lot of men like their women. That’s the way me and my boss liked them.
Sometimes Tamara and I sat together in my car at break time. She liked to confide in me, but she too had a problem with articulation. Hence I was a translator of expletives that she strung together like the puka shells she wore around her neck. From what I could gather, the boss wanted her to accompany him to Tahoe when his wife was out of town. The offense against her soul caused her to exit my car and kick a large dent into the passenger door. If I heard her correctly, she said come tomorrow his face would resemble the dent. I considered her mistreatment of my car (already it was a neglected case of bald tires, pinging pistons and terminal rust) a small price to pay for our impending nuptials.
But I had to endure the way the boss watched us from behind the doors of the restaurant. There was cold calculation in those folded arms and hawk-like glare. Worse was this: whenever I told Tamara he was watching, she’d go soft and put her hand to her breast and coo like a dove. “He is?”
That worried me.
And then there were the days when she spent what seemed like hours inside the office with the boss. (I’ve mentioned my problem with time.) To add insult to injury, before they tucked themselves away the boss would call over to me from the open door: “Hey, dumbfuck!” Somehow I knew he was talking about me. Once he had my attention, he’d point inside where she was sequestered, give me a thumb’s up and then flip me off.
And after they were locked inside, he’d turn off the radio that was piped in for the customers and put on Foghat’s twenty-minute version of Muddy Waters’ “I Just Wanna Make Love to You.” My heart wheezed with each note, my skinny legs stammered to stay upright. On a few occasions I wiggled the door handle and put my ear against the door. Then I heard a voice. I’d heard it once before. This time the voice told me to sell my car for venture capital and become a coke dealer. Due to something I had read a while back, I was pretty sure I had once again been singled out for Divine Intervention, and with His help I would somehow parlay a two-hundred dollar car into a business empire.
***
The Big Man Above came to me for the first time six months earlier, when He told me He would make me a rock and roll star. Problem was, after thirty-two music lessons, I had only learned one song – America’s “A Horse With No Name.” It was only two chords, right next to one another, and unless I had ingested something that had other ideas, even I could muster a set of jumping jacks with my fingers. For a while I thought the achievement meant the Big Man hadn’t tricked me after all, that everything would happen in His own sweet time. My guitar teacher, however, was not impressed. Each practice session unfolded in a similar manner.
“Practice this week?” he’d ask.
“Uhhh."
“You haven’t fucking practiced since you started here.” He thought he had to raise his voice to be heard. On top of that, I didn’t see what practice had to do with anything; practice didn’t square with the doctrine.
“I’m waitin’ for inspiration,” I’d tell him.
“Back to that again?”
“Bob Dylan says it’s like vomiting.”
“Uh-huh, you’ve told me.”
“I read it in Rolling Stone.”
“Quite a book, that Rolling Stone.”
“Neil Young says it’s like someone turnin’ on the faucet.”
“Yep, heard that one too. Hey, did he happen to tell you who it is that turns the faucet on?”
I didn’t like his tone. If he’d had a better attitude, I might have told him what I meant by “inspiration” – that is, what I thought I had read.
It started when I was on speed in the school library. I was supposed be doing a report for O’Halloran on something he called “social reproduction,” but instead I stumbled upon an article about predestination. At first the doctrine left me hopeless; but then I remembered the story of a guy who had gone from our neighborhood to a professional baseball contract, and I hoped that Whoever was up there would look favorably upon me as well, that maybe He’d put me on what I began to think of as His “A” List. It was only a week after that that I heard the call for rock stardom. It all made perfect sense and I immediately reported for duty. Now I sat ready at every practice session to accept His Grace: I parked my fret fingers a hair’s breadth above the neck while my pick hand hovered anxiously over the body. I waited and waited. So far it was only “A Horse With No Name,” but I was holding out hope much in the way I would hold out hope for the impending business empire. Everything in His own sweet time, I reminded myself.
In the meantime I asked the guitar teacher if he thought I had the look. That look now included mirrored sunglasses (Jim Morrison), floppy straw hat (Neil Young) and a pair of orange mechanic overalls (Pete Townsend). I particularly liked the threadbare absence of the nametag over the right breast of the overalls. I’d read that Robert Zimmerman had gone to bed one night and woke up the next morning Bob Dylan, and it was only a matter of time until the cloth where the nametag once sat would spell a new life.
I told the guitar teacher that I had worked hard assembling the look from the pages of
Rolling Stone, that the least he could do was rise above his sarcasm.
He didn’t. A few minutes later I had a moment of clarity. The concept of a “teacher” conflicted with the purity of the doctrine. Either I was or I wasn’t, so I asked the guitar teacher for my money back. That didn’t go well, either.
***
My business venture paralleled my hopes for rock stardom. I bought from the boss with hope that word would get to Tamara that things were starting to happen for me. But the boss slipped me a trick bag: the dope was cut with something that stripped away the nose membrane and set the face aflame. Because of it, a kid in my class nearly dislodged my eyeball with one punch. I considered the injury part of my predestined hell, and I did the rest of the drugs as if they were my lot. After each dose I’d curl up and cup my wailing face in my hands and rock it like an abandoned baby. I also spent a lot of time staring at my black eye and red nose in the bathroom mirror at work. The eye in particular held my attention – it was purple and puffy, and I began to think of it as a birthmark; I even learned to love it.
But I also longed for some sympathy from Tamara. Unfortunately, thirty minutes after I had gone into business, she and the boss had disappeared in a conjoined act of perfidy. Three days later, when I was forced to declare bankruptcy, they were still at large.
I was now afoot, and I would be afoot for a long time. Each step reminded me that the Big Bad Boss Man Above had sucker-punched me at an illusory oasis.
The melodrama turned thick and sticky.
***
A lifetime later they returned. The boss, his skin tan from springtime skiing, his chest inflated beyond his ordinary inflation, was waiting for me.
“Hey, looky here, it’s old One-Eyed Jack posin’ as Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer,” he announced when I walked in the door, not just to the other workers, but also to the patrons who were waiting for sandwiches. He laughed and several people joined in. He was standing against the wall next to the backroom for one reason and one reason only: he knew I had to pass by him to get my hat and apron.
Then Tamara came out of the backroom. She had on a new gold necklace and a new ski jacket. When she saw me she made a sad face. She walked over, stood on her toes and tenderly kissed my eye.
The boss didn’t like her gesture. “Get to work, Mendelson—now.”
I squeezed past him, but then he told me to stop. “On second thought, you can’t work with that face, Mendelson – it’s a health issue.”
Tamara looked over from her sandwich station and blew me a goodbye kiss.
Then the boss started up. “You know, Mendelson, it’s like I’ve always said, you’re not right upstairs. And your name:
Meyers Mendelson. It’s as if your parents knew you were a loser before you could even talk.”
“I’m quittin’,” I told him.
“He’s quittin’!” the boss announced.
I said, “That’s right, I’ve been accepted elsewhere.”
“He’s been accepted elsewhere!”
Even though he didn’t ask, I told him where: “The Academy of Music and Songwriters. We’ll see who is sellin’ sandwiches in a year.”
He laughed.
As I walked for the door, he hollered out for me to sing a song of retreat. When I ignored him, he put a hand over his heart and sang “Walk On By” by Dionne Warwick.
The last thing I heard – after all the laughing – was the boss calling for a celebration. Extra meat, he said, was on him.
***
The next day was my last day of school. O’Halloran was late, and those of us students who could still manage to show up were standing or sitting against the wall along the corridor. We smoked and stared at that corridor like it was a dry riverbed, as if we stared long and hard enough it would rise again and send down something other than ourselves.
After awhile I started to strum the only song I would ever learn. I couldn’t do the up-strum though, only the down-strum, so the song sounded like the horse was in a full-fledged trudge, that perhaps its torpor would cause it to drop and die at any moment. One of the students threatened to break the rest of my body if I didn’t shut up. Luckily, O’Halloran arrived and opened the door.
“We will sing ‘We Are the Champions’ at graduation!” he announced right off, for he could no longer trust us with the soundtrack of our passage into adulthood. The day before a student had suggested Lou Reed’s “Heroin.” (The student wanted to time the song so that when he grabbed his diploma he could shout out the song lyrics, “Her-o-in – it’s my life and it’s my wife!”) Another student wanted to sing “White Punks On Dope,” by The Tubes, but when O’Halloran pointed out that the song was about
rich kids, the student slumped back down in his seat and muttered something about betrayal.
“‘We Are The Champions’ it is!” O’Halloran repeated after all of us groaned. According to the song’s lyrics, the band members had done a sentence but committed no crime; it had been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise, but finally people had noticed, and now they were the champions of the world. O’Halloran said the song told our story.
Then he pointed a finger at me. “Mendelson, you play the guitar!” It was one of his pronouncements, not a question.
There were snickers, and then Wilkinson, who was conscious on this particular morning, had to act out his part. “Mendelson plays pocket-pool, is what he plays!”
The class erupted.
O’Halloran ignored them. “Mendelson will lead us!”
Fortunately he meant the graduation and not the moment.
“No problem,” I told him.
I thought O’Halloran was through with me for the day, but after the classes’ perusal of the newspaper, he called on me for a reaction. Had I been able to tell the truth about anything, I would have written a letter.
Dear Mr. O’Halloran, The words in the paper look like ants crawling across a parched earth. With the exception of a piece on predestination, I haven’t been able to read or make sense of anything but drivel for a long, long time. There was a time when some people said I had potential, but something has gone horribly and inexplicably wrong. To top it all off, my face hurts. Can I be excused now? Sincerely, Meyers.
Instead I passed. Wilkenson told O’Halloran he told him so and laughed.
The next morning I wrote a note and taped it to O’Halloran’s classroom door before anyone arrived.
Dear Mr. O’Halloran, I’d love to lend my talents to the graduation, but isn’t it funny how sometimes things that start spontaneously end spontaneously. Power to the people! Meyers.
That afternoon I walked up to Togo’s and stood outside the doors with my guitar strapped around my neck. I was going to try to play something, but then I saw the new kid. He was walking a five-footer across the dining area, on his way to a table of four. He had it deftly balanced on his outstretched arm – “the proper way,” I had been told, to perform the task. It was a feat that I had avoided at all costs. When I saw that the new kid had it down the very first day, it only reminded me that I had made the “B” List.
So I turned around, slung my guitar across my back and wondered if the army would have me.
In Memory of Steven Hoadley
Copyright © 2006 Doug Mort
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