STORY GRAMMAR ONE The discovery, the week after spring break ...

ONE The discovery, the week after spring break, of a rapidly decomposing
body, virtually sealed within the ancient walls of Rockland High, spurred
the student body's spirit of inquiry as no mere classroom prompt ever had.
Was it true rats were feeding on the face of the victim and that the body's
discoverers had to skirmish with them to claim it? Was the person nude or
partially nude, as had been gossiped, casting a shadow of perverse
sexuality over the crime? Do we have to come to school while the cafeteria
still smells of that god-awful, mordant reek? The administration refused
to divulge any details, not even the sex or race of the body, until
detectives completed their investigation of the matter. Silence only
provoked the students to wilder and grosser speculations. A senior who
happened to be absent following the hiatus was guilty of the murder in some
accounts and the victim in others. One unreliable kid (he routinely
exaggerated his exploits on the hardwood) claimed to have seen uniformed
men removing the corpse. The kid's attention was fixed on the belly of it,
white as the underside of a whale and shaped like a cobra's head, flaring
monstrously at the sides. His version was dismissed as confusion between
the murder victim and the service tunnel within the bowels of the school
from which the body was recovered. Other witnesses swore the corpse was
removed from the tunnel in a rubber body bag, anonymous, invisible, and
dehumanized.
The uproar over the lurid details of the decomposing corpse at
Rockland High School created such excitement and distractions (police cars,
detectives questioning, news vans circling the school) that many teachers
all but gave up trying to teach anything from after spring break until
graduation. These were mostly 20- to 30-year veterans who possessed vast
stores of busy work: word finds, acrostics, rebuses, coloring books of
famous people (Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross, Will Smith), and dozens of movies
with a strained relevance to the official curriculum. As long as students
were out of the halls, teachers deserved the congratulations of their peers
for a professional job well done. Some teachers' lounge analysts
attributed the particularly stately and modest senior prom that year to
students' day-after-day obsession with the presumed murder. With their
minds turned from scanning magazines for images of the perfect gown or from
visiting the seamstress who made cheap knockoffs in the crowded parlor
workspace of a tired, neighborhood rowhouse, the girls didn't have time to
acquire the usual excesses, the ostrich feathers and tiaras, the
rhinestones pasted to human flesh, gauzy wraparound creations more Ace
bandage than couture, or the diva tents that on the largest girls reminded
one of a decidedly less regal Margaret Dumont, atrocities culminating in a
wretched parody of a red carpet show, complete with white, stretch
Escalades and Hummers, that was a prelude to a surreal ballroom experience
right out of A Night at the Opera but with more lurid colorization.
Interestingly, some of the words accumulating around the grotesque
outrage in the custodian's service tunnel were the same used by one of the
English teachers when explaining the rigors, more or less, of serious
literary criticism. In his extended metaphor, a good reader was a detective
pulling out the pertinent data of the work and making a case for its
meaning in the system of the whole. Mirroring the composition of the
writer was the decomposition of the critic, unpacking the accumulated
matter of the book, cutting it bare and finding how it worked, to discover
the author's obsessions and modus operandi and the central act that set the
whole concatenation of events into motion. Working backwards from the
apparatus of the plot, a keen reader would discover the willful actions of
the artist hiding behind the screen.
A student who may have misunderstood the teacher's discussion of a
"corpus of work" visited the English scholar when he was alone in his
classroom. On the basis of these and other remarks, the student wished to
ask the teacher about his possible connection to a string of gruesome
events that had marred the term at Rockland High, events leading inexorably
to the horror found in the access tunnel. What follows is a lengthy and
one-sided account (a deposition?), neither so static nor circumscribed as a
typical scholarly lecture or so evocative of character and place as a true
narrative. We present it because of what it says and doesn't say about the
tragic school year just completed. Your request puts me in an awkward position, as I am obliged to keep
our relationship professional. Or is the necessary and logical word here
clinical? What descriptor captures the precise flavor of our bond? How
about institutional? I am the warder and you are the waif entrusted to me
in your parents' stead. That's better. Your question fractures the
boundaries laid down for all times between a low-level goon of the state
and a client thereof.
Thou shalt not ask about my personal time: "Please sir, can I have
some more?" When I tell you about my personal life, I put my job in
jeopardy, and that's without having anything noteworthy to disclose. Don't
forget intimate and intimacy mean the same thing to a pencil-pushing mo-
ron. Satisfy yourself that my adult preoccupations are inappropriate for
immature ears. I should have no heart, nor sympathies, nor blood in my
veins, for only then would I be the ideal teacher. Wood eye!
Let me not set aside my dignity and professionalism by incorporating
myself into any sentence about this past year. I would eschew the physical
dimension, existing exclusively in the lesson plans on file with my section
chairperson, may Dante take her. Do you know, I am celebrated for my
amazing lesson plans, which record every wire I pull and every move I make
in the classroom? That is, I would be feted for them if anyone ever read
those things.
Well, okay, the lesson plans I submit don't cover half of what's
going on in my classes. That's because teaching isn't moving information
from one brain to another the way I thought it was back in my halcyon and
transphonic college days. We teach students of a different stripe, today.
The only way those lazy, nasty, spawns of apostasy will learn to read is if
I sell them the book under onerous layers of stagecraft. Inconveniently, my
skill as a clown and vaudevillian cannot be figured in advance in any
lesson plan. Mine is an improvisational art, and I don't braid with the
same string the consciousness of every participant in the class or rip out
my own heart with a stapler because anyone asked me to.
One of my lesson plans, I have to admit, seemed guaranteed to get
school moms phoning and Keystone cops gesticulating. I didn't nearly have
all the ironic credenza graphed out on that one. Keep it in my pants, you
say? I was a balls-out Bobalooey! My November capacola on the Book of
Genesis had King James' English and body English all down the line. I did
more with a handclap or a finger snap than could be written into ten lesson
plans. I was trumpeting about the maker of mankind and the innovator of
language extemporaneously, because that was the only way to sell it.
To be sure, boneheads who won't let the Bible be taught for what it
is, a damn fine archetype of language and crimes, might refer to its hoary
mechanisms in some other way. They might want to say God hangs over the
public classroom, that He manifests His will in various political lost
causes from time to time, or that He is mightier and newsier than us all.
These are improper concerns for my English classroom. I only hope to
convey the idea that in Genesis, God nails down his corpus on how the free-
ranging word requites itself on this mundane plane.
In the beginning the Earth was void and without form and God said,
"Let there be light." To make the light distinguishable from the dark was a
naming problem the God think tank was into big time in them days. Some
angel might wonder, "For this caper, do we need our flashlights?" Or, "Am
I gonna need sunblock?" and, in lieu of practical naming devices to
distinguish one celestial state from the other, be forced to take his
chances. Language is God's discriminating gift to the ages.
Giving the formless void a name is hot but Holy work. I do it in the
classroom every day, an' i's heavy lif'ing, i'n't? How about starting with
the blessed form and abstract of things and then following through
creatively to the everyday reality? We have the words for whale kind, the
form to make whales, that Leviathan there, and we also have the words
describing every creeping thing on Earth, down to the last dang-blasted
rodent and such. Plainly God has the ideas ready, and un-delineated life
comes streaming through that verbal mechanism, which matter he then pinches
off as either manatees or mayflies. I teach English the same way. I
introduce some divine quality, and it is the students' job to make the
concept concrete, writing abstraction into reality through details and
circumstances from their personal experience. Admittedly, dividing the
abstract and the real with a God-like bearing doesn't usually get the class
doing the wave, but I regain the students' flitting interest with the next
scintillating tale, those naked primordials in the garden.
The story