SPRING CAME on, and as the weather warmed up, the class occasionally went outside to sit on the grass and hold our discussions. We usually repaired to the site of our all-in snowball battle, the place where, in a certain sense, a sense maybe unknown to Lears, the class had been born. There, it was hard to see us from inside the school building. Going outside sometimes resulted in one or two of us nodding off, but Lears didn’t much care; he had most of us most of the time now. He sat cross-legged, medicine man–style, and swung his wrist and laughed, and we answered the questions he asked, because what he thought mattered probably did.
What did we talk about? Anything and everything. The book at hand sometimes, or a fragment from another book that he’d found interesting and had copied up for us. Is it right to let your country, which you love, put you wrongfully to death, even when there is an easy chance to escape? (Socrates thought so, and drank the hemlock.) Should you stay with your family, even when life in it becomes a vivid squalor? (Socrates said that being married to Xanthippe, who yelped at him all the time and brained him with that pot of urine, apparently in full view of his friends, was a good thing, since if he could learn to put up with that, there would be little in day-to-day life that could daunt him.)
We talked about Thoreau and Emerson—a great deal about Thoreau. We talked a lot about civil disobedience and whether or not you should break the laws of your country when you felt it was doing something outrageously wrong. For Thoreau, the issue was American slavery; for us, it was the war in Asia, and a few other matters as well.
Lears gave us background information when we needed it. He told us, for instance, how indebted to Thoreau Martin Luther King and Gandhi had been. King we knew, or presumed we did. But Gandhi we had little idea about. Someone—it might even have been me—said as much, and we were treated to a very good, off-the-cuff account of how Indians had used nonviolence to end the British Raj. Almost always there was a little bibliography. If you’re interested in Gandhi, try Erik Erikson’s book, then a few words about what people thought to be its advantages and defects. We wrote down the names from these glosses, these pocket histories, and for the most part thought no more about it. But years later, I, and others too, probably, would become curious about Thoreau or Gandhi, the soft bell would ring and a feeling of curiosity, mellowed and aged because of Lears’ easy, welcoming style, would well up.
It was a continual invitation to the world that Lears was laying out. Part of his secret was that he did not take it personally, not at all, if you demurred. He was a host who could never be offended. He believed, I think, that the life from which he drew the curtain was a marvel and that we would come around to it sooner or later. And if not, who had we to blame but ourselves? The inner spirit had simply been too weak.
It was during this period that Sandra’s status changed completely. For a long time, when Buller inveighed against women’s lib, some of the guys in the class would do a merry chimp bounce in their seats and stare disparagingly at Sandra. Sometimes when she talked, fits of coughing and mock sneezes broke out. But all this came to an end. Now people sat beside her, solicited her opinion, walked off with her after class. On some days, you could see Sandra and Cap chatting happily away. I imagine she still thought that a lot of us were playpen escapees, but she never showed it. She was serene and kindly and dignified to the end.
IT WAS a first, this outdoors business: No one at Medford High would have imagined doing it. One day, outside, just as we were wrapping up a discussion of Thoreau—who of course was Lears’ intellectual idol, but to endorse whom he would never have said an overt word—Lears gave us a solemn, mischievous look, the sort of expression that shrewd old rabbis are supposed to be expert in delivering. “There’s been some doubt expressed about our going outside.”
Then he told a story. In the faculty cafeteria, with plenty of the other teachers milling around, Lears had been approached by Jingles McDermott, the submaster, the disciplinarian. Jingles, the coin and key jangler, had the sly, bullying style of a hard Irish cop. He had a barroom face, red nose, watery eyes, the hands of someone who labored for a living. He was stepping up to put Lears in his place.
Jingles got rapidly to the point. What would happen, he’d asked Lears, if everyone held class outside? This was familiar stuff to us all. McDermott’s question came out of that grand conceptual bag that also contained lines like “Did you bring gum for everyone?” and “Would you like to share that note with the whole class?” Jingles was trying to treat Lears like a student, like one of us—and in front of their colleagues. At Medford High there were two tribes, us and them. Lears had defied the authorities; clearly he had become one of them, a student, of no use or interest whatever. But in fact Lears was of no particular clan but his own, the tribe of rootless, free-speculating readers and talkers and writers, who owe allegiance first to a pile of books that they’ve loved and then, only secondly, to other things.
McDermott did not know this. Nor did he know that Lears, however diminutive, mild, and mandarinly self-effacing, pretty clearly thought well of himself. So McDermott would not have been prepared when Lears drew an easy breath and did what every high school kid would like to do when confronted with this sort of bullying. He didn’t fight it, didn’t stand on his dignity. He simply ran with it. What if everyone held class outside on sunny days? Suppose that happened? And from there, Lears went on to draw a picture of life at Medford High School—a picture that had people outside on the vast lawn talking away about books and ideas and one thing and another, hanging out, being lazy and getting absorbed, thinking hard from time to time, and reveling in the spring. It was Woodstock and Socrates’ agora fused, and Lears spun it out for us, just as he had for McDermott. What if that happened, he asked us (and the submaster)? How tragic would it be?
This vision of the renovated school took a long time to unfold and it had something like a musical form, ebbing and fading, threading back through major themes and secondary motifs. And in my mind’s eye I could see McDermott wilting, growing too small for his wrinkled, sad clothes; I could hear his nickel-dime pocket symphony getting softer and softer. He would soon have known, as we did, that Lears could produce plenty more of this (he was the most eloquent man I’d met) and that it was time to cut and run. What struck me about the performance—and I believed Lears’ rendition of it, word for word: He was unfailingly, often unflatteringly honest—was how serene and artful it was, as though Jingles had commissioned him to create a small piece of on-site spontaneous art, to paint a picture, which, in effect, Lears had.
Am I wrong to think that Lears was bragging a little as he unfolded his vision of a renewed school? Because, really, what he was describing to Jingles McDermott was the class he had created with us. This was a class that people looked forward to going to, that we talked about all the time, nights and weekends; a place where you could speak freely, from mind and heart, and never be laughed at, in fact be heard by a group as you might never have been heard before, for Lears had by then taught us some of his art of listening. Here we forgot that we were something called “students” and were subordinate to a “teacher,” who flourished a grade book. Lears simply let us grade ourselves. As I recall, there were very few A’s.
We went outside whenever we chose after that. It was very odd: I had been at Medford High for four years, and I had never seen McDermott’s side lose a bout. I’d seen a kid from the South Medford Bears spit in a teacher’s face, but soon enough the police wagon was there and the big boy was trussed and bawling and on the way to jail. After class was over on the day that Lears told us the McDermott story, Cap pulled me aside and said, “You know, Lears can really be an asshole when he wants to be.” In Medford, there were fifty intonations that you could apply to the word
asshole.
Spun right, the word constituted a high form of praise.
Of course, McDermott was a broad target. America was in crisis and people were assuming—or being cast into—intense, allegorical identities: pig, peacenik, hawk, dove. McDermott had turned into an ugly monolith, at least in our eyes. In Asia, the Viet Cong were making fools of his spiritual brethren: Nixon, Westmoreland, McNamara, and the rest. His sort were on the run. In the next few years it would get worse for them. But Lears, for his part, hadn’t treated Jingles as among the lost, even though he probably had it coming. Instead, he’d invited him to a party, an outdoor extravaganza. At the time, McDermott surely couldn’t discern the invitation in Lears’ extended aria, but who knows what he might have seen later on as he turned it all over in his mind?
The next day, when I bumped into him at his locker, Dubby was ecstatic. He went word for word over what Lears had said to Jingles, a particular persecutor of the Dub’s. “He was just like R. P. McMurphy,” Dubby averred, “the way he stuck it to Jingles.” I agreed and joined in the celebration.
But later it occurred to me that this was not entirely true. Lears was like McMurphy in that he obviously hated needless limitation, arbitrary authority. But Lears’ response was not to throw punches, as McMurphy was prone to do. No, it was words instead of body blows that Lears traded in. The power that Lears had by virtue of knowing how to talk and write, commanding irony when he needed it, being able, when pushed, to impale an adversary on the point of a phrase—this power became manifest to me. And I thought back through some of the worst moments of my life, and I began to see how differently a few of them might have turned out if I could only have spoken half well rather than pitched a fit or thrown punches. Even in the face of violence, a sure mind, I began to believe, might bring you through. I, at six feet and two hundred well-muscled pounds, was afraid of Jingles McDermott. Lears, diminutive and rather anxious, was not. In fact, Lears may have feared almost no one at all. For such power and such freedom from being afraid, I longed, and I began to think about how I might go about getting them for myself.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
the book that sent Dubby into that beautiful spin, sent me off to the library.
I can picture myself there on a Monday morning in early spring, skipping school (or my first five periods; I’ll be back in time for Frank Lears’ class), reading as if my life depended on it, as if the books were repositories of a rich oxygen that I needed to consume. I have become, overnight, an obsessed reader, a library cormorant, as Coleridge liked to call himself.
There I sit at the table by the periodicals section in my blue-and-white leather-trimmed football jacket, a small white Mustang embroidered on the front, with my number, 66, on the horse’s midriff. I’m wearing thick glasses, gold-rimmed, semi-hippie–style now, track shoes, and yellow and black love beads, and I’m reading ferociously—reading, if this is possible, with the same slightly cracked ardor that I used to bring to football.
I read in a rage that so much that was palpably my business had been kept from me. It’s like finding that the post office has for years been syphoning away packet after packet of the most engrossing letters—some of them approaching love letters, no less—addressed personally to me. And who has been guilty of this malfeasance? Who are the corrupt officials? The faculty of Medford High are the main conspirators. They are the ones who had come on with
Silas Marner
and
Ivanhoe
and
The Good Earth
and implied that all of literature was simply more of the same. A line by the poet Richard Brautigan summed it all up: My teachers could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. I read it and wept, angry tears sliding over my face and down onto the bucking mustang.
I was probably an absurd sight in that library, with my jock-freak garb and my piles of books on either side. Sometimes I would get so enraged at all I had missed that I would open two books simultaneously and, jerking my head from one to the other, try to read them both at once.
But I could not have cared how absurd I looked. In paradise, and that’s where I was, no one is bothered overmuch by self-consciousness. I read Hemingway and Steinbeck; Burroughs and Kerouac and more Kesey (as Lears advised); I read Whitman, tried to parse Dickinson, puzzled over Faulkner, looked into Salinger, scratched my head over Susan Sontag, mused over Brautigan, finding
Trout Fishing in America
the ultimate in rueful charm. I read Hunter Thompson in
Esquire,
a magazine that shocked me by suggesting, with the subtlest piece of innuendo, that
Playboy
was a magazine for rubes. Up until then, I had thought that to have a key to the Playboy Club in Boston was to be atop the world.
Esquire
compared it to wearing galoshes and to covering one’s fedora with a plastic protector. I read Abbie Hoffman and James Simon Kunin’s
Strawberry Statement,
about the takeover at Columbia University. I read Ginsberg’s “Howl” and memorized a chunk of it, imagining it the greatest prophecy yet to issue on earth. I was having a blast.
For the first time I could remember, I was no longer lonely, for I had found many, many compeers in relative weirdness. A line from Dylan could have been my slogan up until then (had I gone out early, it could have been my epitaph): “If my thought dreams could be seen / They’d probably place my head in a guillotine.” But I got to look in on the thought-dreams of others, and they—the articulate, the celebrated, the published, recognized, and renowned—were often exponentially weirder than I was. Ginsberg? Compared to Ginsberg, running around his house “a sex pest,” as he later called himself, with his prolific boners and kooky homo visions, what were my own extravangances? But Ginsberg and Whitman, who was ready to make love to all creation, bonk everyone and -thing on sight, were willing to flourish all their temperamental weirdness and call it bliss: “The flag of my disposition,” as Whitman had it, “out of hopeful green stuff woven.”