Fiction
Moratorium (excerpt)
Many of his students gathered around him, some of them his favorites, some not, but they were all around him now, their forlorn faces long and heavy with sadness, and he was sad, too. His effects were in tattered boxes, stacked on the floor near the door and on his desk. He looked through the tall windows to the famous courtyard outside, to the Freshman Tree that sprawled eagerly here and there, searching for some sunlight, some attention from the god Sol. They were throwing him a going away party in the way that only students knew how; home-made cookies, sodas, bags of chips, and their favorite songs on his radio that they thought he loved as much as them, but he really didn’t. He was going to miss this place. He would miss the stale smell of the classroom, over one hundred years old, the air conditioner that had constantly failed during the hottest of the humid summer months, his posters, maps of the world, and the hundreds of articles of minutiae he had collected, some on his own, but most from the eager-eyed students who had so much wanted to be a part of his collective memory. The paint-chipped walls that held his own coffee breath, the worn grooves of his desk chair in the tile floor, and the white board, his canvas, all looked back at him like Sebastian’s toys from Blade Runner. It was on or near the last day of school.
“Do you think you will ever come back, Mr. Simnel?” one of the young girls asked. At this point, he almost without any doubts knew he wouldn’t “I don’t know, Alex. Not for awhile at least.” Many of the girls were now crying, something that he had always hated because seeing his students, the young people he had dedicated so much of his life to, seeing them sad always made him well up with tears. It was a knee-jerk reaction he had no way of overcoming. He once had to punish two of his girls for some act of subordination, a momentary lapse of restraint followed by average teen angst. As he handed down their sentences (school on Saturday, no iPods) they began to cry vociferously, and he had to turn his head to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief. It was no use. They had seen the tears, but it somehow endeared him to them all the more, and they would constantly protect him from the hateful gossip stirred up by another troubled student. His grandfather had said it was because his bladder was near his eyes. They once removed a tack from his desk chair that was surely placed out of some vengeful spite. Now he too fought the true tears as best he could, sipped his lukewarm soda, and tried not to make eye contact with any of the kids. He was a bit angry how he had arrived at this point in his professional career. The long hours of study, classes from five to ten at night, the hour long commute at five a.m. now seemed as futile as his excuses for leaving. He was going into real estate, going to take care of his mother, leaving to teach overseas because it might be his only time to ever do so. They were specious reasons at best and he knew it. He could not bear to stay, though. He had had enough. His exit, so suddenly and unexpected was catharsis for him, a result of the failure of a failing institution to secure him, keep him from his own daemons that plagued, gnawed and vomited out his soul like a poorly chewed piece of meat. His internal flame that had burned so brightly for this new experience was now nothing more than a smoldering wick left standing in a cooling puddle of wax. He was finished, tapped out, and nothing could bring him back to the zealousness he possessed when he first arrived, to even one year ago. When he asked his superior for a sit down in her office, she did not think for a second that it was to receive a letter of resignation. How could she have? Just a few days before he had received an award naming him teacher of the year, voted by the students, printed cheaply and off-centered on standard computer paper, and presented to him at the end-of-the year assembly in the football stadium replete with over two thousand bored high school students. A few students had applauded, mostly his own. He was their “go-to” guy, a baseball coach, student government advisor, department chair, lackey, reified object. He watched the principal’s eyes as she conned crafted phrases like “onus of the commute”, “a need to focus on domestic concerns” and “new challenges.” She finished reading the missive, looked up through her slightly tinted spectacles in utter disbelief. “I don’t understand, Lambert. This comes as a great shock.” He stared back, not offering a response. “I’m going to hold on to this letter until you feel one hundred percent sure this is what you want.” He thought of Charles Bukowski then, and the line he had so often repeated when asked about what he wanted…The eternal question…What about all of the things I don’t want? It was a glorious response to a tiresome prompt. He knew that he did not want this anymore, the heartache, the stress, the neglect for helpless young people facing immediate futures and the mindless administrators that cared only about test numbers, not what they needed most which was life skills that would make them better citizens, better humans. He knew he didn’t want disloyalty, subterfuge, politics. He knew he didn’t want this fucking job. He looked again into her inchoate lenses. No child left behind. He left the office that day feeling a lightness of being he had not felt in some time. Yes he was relieved to be free again, but it was something more, something intangible that caused him to smile, and smile inwardly so that he felt like yelling at the top of his lungs in Braveheart-like triumph. He didn’t, but he did decide to have a beer with a few of his fellow teachers after school. “So you just handed her the note, and that was that?” his colleague and friend, Cody asked. He was young but had the silver hair of a ghost. “Well, I explained myself a bit. Gave her my off-the-record reason.” “Off-the-record? What do you mean?” His pale hands gripped a Guinness draught. His beer was cold and light tasting. “Well, remember when that shit was going down with Jenn Savedra last year?” “Of course. It was probably a year to the day. What ever happened with that, anyway?”
“Today happened,” and he could feel the ice in his veins. Off the record…he had told his superior, that letter is just to make things official. It is a letter that would one, satisfy her superiors as to the reasons why he decided to leave the school, and two, her career.
Jenn Savedra was a young English teacher that had arrived at the school two years earlier, with a hint of scandal and innuendo. She was not attractive, but her youngness seemed a means of entitlement by which she thought she could justify her endeavors to act and dress like the young teenage girls she instructed in her classroom. Nonetheless, she arrived with much fanfare as a friend of a newly-tenured principal, and was granted a position as department chair under which Mr. Simnel, or Lambert Simnel as he is called outside of the classroom, was to work. Things proceeded normally enough at first. They had regular department meetings, although often times the other teachers had suddenly and without reason chosen to cancel, so they were alone, he uncomfortable, and she closing the personal space gap a little too acutely. He thought nothing of it at the time. He was a private and professional man, partly because he lived nearly fifty miles from the campus, and partly because he was captain and didn’t want the sailors to take over the ship. He put on airs of indifference near her, acting coolly while at the same time sensing that there was something awkward about the furtive glances she gave him, her subtle grazes on his shoulder with her breasts as she passed. He always felt in control though, and nothing had escalated beyond a slight discomfort on his part toward the situation. That is to say, until the final day of instruction, the year previous to his offered resignation. He was in the midst of administering a final for his English as a Second Language course, as the phone in his classroom scathingly belched its electronic tone. His immigrant students looked up from their exams in mild reproof for their professor, and went once again back to conjugating irregular verbs and locating the conjunctive adverbs in compound sentences. It was a call from a classroom directly above his, from a fellow teacher, one from the same department. To say that what transpired in the brief moments after that was something of a shock would be mild. His teacher’s aide looked on as his face grew ashen, then almost white. “Hey Lambert, this is Cynthia. Do you have a second?” “Well, I’m in the middle of exams. Can it wait?” “I’m afraid not. I have something to tell you that may creep you out a little.” “Creep me out. What do you mean creep me out?” “Well, Jenn has been saying things about you. Personal things. Things that she shouldn’t be talking about, not only to other teachers, but to students.” “What? What do you mean personal things?” And then the bombs drop, one after another, in perfect succession, like quarters falling out of a slot machine. He became angry, incensed. How could this, this bitch, and yes he did say bitch, say such utter claptrap about him. He heard claims of a year-long romance linking them together, dates to fancy restaurants in Los Angeles followed by devious sexual acts in cheap motels, and yes she had gone into detail on more than one occasion. He nearly blew his stack when he heard the words abortion and miscarriage. She had gone so far as to tell countless others about a time in San Diego when he and several other colleagues, including Jenn, had traveled for a symposium on some form of pedagogy or another. Apparently, while visiting a friend that lived in Del Mar (he had skipped the conferences that day to go to the track) he was at the same time performing mischievous acts of sexual derision, including but not limited to sodomy and salad tossing. The capper was her telling of his girlfriend phoning the hotel while en flagrante delicto, and he (Lambert) didn’t give a shit because he was balls deep in her pussy. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He wasn’t balls deep in her pussy. He was at the track scoring nine to one in the seventh race. It went on and on. He could have handled it himself. Could have marched down to her classroom and let her have it, right then and there, in front of her students, recriminate her on the spot, yell, scream, rant. He did not. He instead, took a few deep breaths, phoned his superior, and requested a meeting as soon as possible. “You need to cease and desist with these comments, Lambert,” was what he was told nearly a week later, after he had confided in his administrator as to the slanderous items he had fallen victim to, and both he and Jenn were summoned to have a chat with the brass. All the while she sat there denying everything, straight faced, never once looking at him, but answering directly, without hesitation. She was a fucking sociopath. A month later she was fired for slagging off with an eighteen year old student and his girlfriend. Several teachers had come forward after that, attesting to the fact that yes, she had said those things, and yes she had even provided the lurid details, many of which they were able to produce with near perfect recall. How they though Lambert was at first, a disgusting pig for letting her have an abortion and making her go to the clinic and pay for it herself. They had changed their minds now, but at what cost? He had become some Vic Damone. His reputation, career and faith in the institution he had so loved were now in peril of being completely destroyed, irreparable beyond human capacity. He remembered a story his father had told him. It was a story about the war. Most of his stories were about the war, but this one had stuck with him for some reason, especially now. He taught the next year full of venom, disdain and self-doubt. He never once received an apology from the school, the administration or anybody else. It was as if the entire event had never taken place. He was so filled with hate boiling inside, a cauldron of raw umbrage. He kept it inside for the entire nine months, never once bringing it up himself. He got his chance though at the end of that year. “So off the record here is the reason why I am really leaving…” and when he was finished, the once massive and tsar-like administrator was reduced to a hunched sack of yogurt in her chair. She had been reduced incrementally, after each fusillade. Yes, he could have sued for sexual harassment. Yes, it happens to men, too. Yes, you were in dereliction of your duties after I had confided these things to you, and so on, and so forth. She could barely gulp for air as he confidently strode from her office, a slight slam of the door, just enough to rattle the trophy case and make all of the secretaries peek up from their office pools, coffee funds or whatever else they were taking the taxpayer’s money for. He strode down the aisle one last time, him handing it to them. He did not need this place, the kids, the hallowed walls. He would give them back fuck-all for what they had done. They would see. They would see.II
His fellow teachers often made fun of him, not from what they knew or inferred about his personality, but for what they assumed was his life and nothing else to it. It was a fact that he lived nearly an hour away from the school via the freeway. This was purposeful, and not an accident of job necessity. He had chosen to commute, to be at arms length on the weekends, to not have to worry about a chance meeting with a parent or parents of a student while having a pint at the local pub. His distance allowed him freedom, an independence from restraint.
One of his coworkers, Han Walters, a big barrel-chested, hirsute man, often pondered aloud about the squalor living conditions of one Lambert Simnel. Han was indeed big and hairy, but the true irony was in his name, for although he held the moniker of the space pirate from Star Wars, he in fact more closely resembled the hairy Wookie counterpart, Chubacca. From early on Han was known as Chuey. None had been to the house, including Han, but he liked to hypothesize anyway. “So you all know Lambert here lives in a one room house, right?” Chuey had posed to a group of teachers one day in the English Department lounge. The room was split pea green and smelled like mimeograph liquid. Some of the texts stored in the chamber predated even the oldest employee of the school, Mr. Killbeck, the 91-year old assistant football coach. He was not so much an active member of the coaching staff as a figurehead, but a good one at that. He held the respect of the kids, which is what mattered most. “Yeah, Lambert? Only one room?” another asked. “Yeah, it’s a one-room apartment with no windows.” “How can a person live in a house with no windows. You’re bullshitting Chuey. He’s bullshitting, right Lambert?” He shrugged, and took a bite of his sandwich. “No really. It’s a one-room, no-window and no carpet apartment. It has bare, hardwood floors. The only fixtures in the place are a large bookshelf covering one wall, a lamp, and a reading chair…” “Fuck-off, Chuey! Lambert has a normal house.” “…and he doesn’t even have a bed. He just finishes what he’s reading, turns off the light and sleeps in the chair. He wakes up in the morning and goes directly to work. Here, I even have a picture.” He held up a rough sketch in pencil of Lambert’s supposed domicile. It was true, there was Lambert sitting in a large, leather chair in the middle of a one-room apartment. The bookshelf extended from one corner of a wall, to the other. Sitting on the floor was a solitary lamp. Lambert was pictured sleeping on his chair with an opened copy of Under the Volcano at his feet. The small group of teachers roared with laughter at their private joke about Lambert. He didn’t much care. He kind of liked the attention. Now Lambert sat in his actual house, with actual furniture (albeit not much more than the ragged chair and lamp Chuey had so delightfully illustrated). There were windows, although few, and affording no breathtaking vistas, and were quite dirty. He did have one nice window that faced the ocean not even one mile away that received tremendous fresh ocean breezes in the summer and spring months. The book at his feet was not Malcolm Lowry, but a European soccer magazine highlighting the upcoming World cup matches in Germany. His effects were there, too, once again reminding him of the pain and loss of the recent events that had so changed his life. He wondered now if it were really the unjustified abandonment he experienced from his administrators (or rather one), or something else.