Archives for July 2013

Chapter 3

 

At home, he turned on the fan, turned on the radio, lit a cigarette and began to read about their monsters. They had trouble forming sentences and when they did get a complete thought down it seemed vacuous.  “… my monsters wait for me to forget that they are watching, and then they snatch at me.” He looked at the name, it was Andrea. He couldn’t connect it to a face. Then he called Zoe.

“Please say that you are going to come and take me out of here,” was the first thing that she said.

He answered, “I’m on the way.”

In his car, she straddled his lap and shrouded him under her hair. He swelled up for her and kissed her neck and her lips and her chin. She bit his ear and then curled up against the door and said, “Take us somewhere that we can be alone and naked.”

He said, “Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” she said quickly.

Back in his apartment, on the sofa bed that was always open, after he’d been inside of her with his tongue and fingers and cock, she whispered, “Do you know how to tie me up?”

He grinned, “I’ll learn.”

She guided him as he took one of his belts and wrapped it around her thighs and another that he buckled tightly across her nipples. He yanked on them as he slid in between her bondaged cheeks and stuck himself right into her ass. He moved slowly and she clung to him as best as the belts would let her.

 

They bathed and then they showered and then he read papers and essays while she sketched him over and over. She wanted that wave of light brown hair and the soft angles and hollows of his cheeks and the long eyelashes that sometimes gave him the look of a harlot. His hard round little ass and the thick thighs and scarred knees called to her eyes. She sketched all of him and showed him what she saw. While he read, he preened for her.

When he needed to go to sleep she said, “I grew up on your poetry. My sister and Laureen read it to me all the time.”  Ron was stunned.  He looked at her as if she had spoken a language that was made up of ideas that were foreign to him. He understood the words individually but he couldn’t grasp what they meant when put together and directed at him.

“Didn’t you used to show Laureen your poetry and give her copies of what you’d written?”

Ron still didn’t seem to understand. He nodded his head. He searched her face with his eyes waiting for the joke, waiting to hear that she was teasing him, waiting for a Julian T. Willy comment like maybe he should find a job as a plumber, or a Warren Lashly scrawl across a page of free verse with the word “SHIT.” written in accusing, heavy red ink, but she was serious.

“I think I fell in love with Ron Tuck the poet before I ever met you,” she said secretively. “Would you read some of it for me? I’ve never heard you read and I’ve imagined how some of them would sound.”

Cautiously, he said, “Which ones?”

She opened the back of her portfolio. Ron watched, his eyes caressing the thick, thick blonde hair and marveling at the way her glasses accented the slender bones of her face. His mind was spinning like a tilt-a-wheel that was lifting up into the night sky of an amusement park on a soft summer night. Voices inside of him were exhaling shouts of excited glee.

He’d been back at Rahway just a few nights ago. Laureen had asked him to come over and to help move a couch. It was old and stained with cat piss. He got it to the curve of the stairs where it was wedged when Zoe had come in the front door. Laureen was having trouble putting enough pressure on the end to force it through and Ron was using most his bulk to pull, but what it needed was a harder push. Zoe had jumped right in to help. Before he even knew who she was, he had put his hands on her waist and lifted her up over the couch to help Laureen. He remembered the way that her hips felt just then and the way that she had smiled at him. Zoe was very strong and her additional force had made the task easy. The three of them had coffee and then Ron said that he was going to The Cove to listen to Morris Nanton play piano. Laureen said that she didn’t want to go, but to Ron’s shock, Zoe had been eager to go with him.

She selected a very old poem that he’d written about his cat, Leni. She looked at the page as Ron recited it for her. Her eyes were wide with appreciation. Then she said, “I always say this as kind of a children’s poem and I wanted to illustrate it.”

Ron wasn’t sleepy anymore. He was in love.

 

 

Chapter 2

 

The bursts of energy that pulsed through the halls on the opening day of school kick started the old buildings like jumper cables that were fed by a nuclear power plant. Everywhere, young girls were laughing in nervous, giggly groups. The nuns were radiantly smiling and hugging their returning charges. Ron felt eyes on him at every moment. There was no sense in trying to blend in. How could be blend in? He was the only male in the school. The bell sent people scattering like careening bits of mercury. Ron stood in back of his podium. His hands were sweating. His collar was tight. He wanted a cigarette. The girls sitting in front of him duly rose at the sound of Sister Irene’s voice. “Ladies, welcome back to school. Your teachers and I have been anxiously awaiting your return. Let us pray for the health of our families, for the souls of those who have walked these halls before us and for our continued dedication to the shaping of our lives and the lives around us. Let us pray. We ask our Heavenly Father and the Blessed Virgin for guidance” Everyone blessed themselves. Ron remembered how to do it. He felt his jaw twitch as he looked down and mumbled his way through the Lord’s Prayer, and then a Hail Mary, and then a Glory Be. He heard the quizzical cacophony as some of his students prayed in rattling Spanish. Then Sister Irene’s voice said, “When you have completed your homeroom paperwork, please send attendance sheets to the main office. For today and today only, we will delay that start of classes until we have received all of the homeroom sheets.”

His first class was 9th grade reading. There were twenty-eight students in the class and twenty-nine chairs. Ron Tuck smiled his dimpled grin as they entered the room. They looked down shyly when they saw him smile at them and some of them squirmed in their chairs like they had to go to the bathroom. The faces were white and brown and black and combinations of all of those. It did not take Ron long to discover that in this Reading class, that was using a 9th grade literature book, only about one half of the students knew enough English to carry on a conversation. Mostly, they just spoke Spanish. He looked down at the copious notes that he had prepared on the first there stories and realized that they were absolutely of no use to him. Then his brain began to whirl with a high speed that was as strange as it was exhilarating. “Ok, who here can understand every word that I’m saying?” More than half the hands shot straight up proudly waving in the air. “Great,” said Ron smiling and making fleeting eye contact with each and every one of them. “Now how many of you would be able to understand the same words if they were written in a book in English?”  About half of the hands sadly lowered. The girls, looking around to see who was still among the chosen, gave a couple of eye rolls at those who still had their hands up in the air but were lying. Ron had it in his head now. “Those of you with your hands up, please stand along the back of the classroom.”

A tall girl with very dark hair that was swept back into a shoulder length tangle had a look of intensity on her face that drew Ron to her.

“You are?”

“Elena.”

“Do you speak Spanish, Elena?”

Everyone in the class laughed and Elena’s dark eyes were dancing and she laughed with them. “We all speak Spanish, Mr. Tuck.”

Ron looked at her evenly. “I don’t. Am I the only one here that doesn’t speak Spanish?”

Six or seven hands went into the air. Ron saw that those girls did not have Hispanic features.  “So Elena, what do you think we should do to help everybody?

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Elena.

Ron looked at them and said. “We are going to break some rules today. First of all I want you to sit with your friends and not in the alphabetical order that I’ve put you in.” He intoned. “That wasn’t real bright of me was it?” The girls laughed cause of the way that he said it, and because of the dramatic look of self loathing that comically swept across his face when he said it, and because all of the teachers in the school always put them in alphabetical order. “Here are the new rules. You sit with your friends and if you have more than one friend you sit with the one that speaks the least amount of English. If you haven’t any friends that don’t speak English, you tell me and I will assign you to someone.”

 

“Do we have to sit with someone who doesn’t speak English,” said a freckled girl with red hair and glasses. “I mean suppose we don’t want to?”

Ron felt an instant tension in the room. Spanish words from the back that he couldn’t understand and the sharp turn of heads. Ron walked towards the girl smiling, and then with a wink of his eye and a flash of his grin that he settled just on her, he said very softly, “I need you to help me. Wouldn’t you like to help me?” He saw the girl begin to grin and heard some laughter in the room.

One of the Spanish girls who had a silver streak running through her dark hair said, “I’ll bet she would help you do anything.”

Mocking laughter bounced off the walls of the class. The red haired girl blushed furiously. Ron went back to the podium. “Here’s the thing. It’s not good to be dumb. Nobody wants to be thought of as dumb. Knowing language is a way to not appear to be dumb. Language is a way that can help you get what you want. That’s my job, to help you get what you want.”

He said it so earnestly and looked right into the eyes when he said it. They couldn’t help but believe him.

The class was over just as Ron was getting comfortable with his students. “I need more time,” he said to himself as he watched them file out. But then there was another group who was filing in and it started all over and Ron learned that what he’d just done could be done more smoothly the second time.

The reactions weren’t exactly the same, but the gist of it was, and by lunchtime he had discovered the power of his smile with them. It was a tool. It was an ally. He could buy time with it. He could change the mood of everyone in the room with it. Ron thought that maybe it was too much power to have but he liked it and if he didn’t misuse it, what was the harm?

His schedule said that he had lunch now. He looked up at the clock. Lunch? It was 10:40 in the morning and he had lunch?

As he walked up the wide worn wooden staircase, several girls hurried passed him. None of them failed to look at him. Ron thought that he would have to start ignoring the looks.

Making his way to the room marked faculty lunchroom, Ron had no idea of what to expect. All he really hoped for was an ashtray and a place to get some coffee. Both were available. The Mr. Coffee pot was half-filled and Ron selected one of the freshly washed mugs that were turned upside down on a linen napkin that was spread over a small countertop. The nuns did not use this room; they went back to the convent or stayed in their classrooms during lunch. This was for lay faculty.  Ron grinned thinking he was one of the lays.

A round table that comfortably seated six or could squeeze in eight was covered with a clean plastic tablecloth. Ron took his coffee and slid in next to a washed out bleached blonde who sat curled over her coffee over her coffee cup puffing vigorously on a cigarette. She said, “I’m Doris, we met briefly yesterday before the penguins carried you off.”

Nodding, Ron said, “Hi how ya doin?”

“I’m wondering if they’ve used deodorant since June.”

Ron didn’t know what to answer to that and so he said nothing and lit a cigarette. Doris waited until two more teachers came into the room before she repeated her quip about body odor.

“You just have to desensitize your nose again Doris,” said Marsha, a husky brunette with dark plastic rimmed glasses.

“The first place I’m headed when I get out of here is the shower,” said Doris.

Ron wished that she would go now. Then he saw Marsha looking over at him and his coffee. She said coldly without introducing herself, “The coffee club is 3 dollars a week and you are responsible to bring and wash your own cup. Ron nodded and then saw that Marsha was still staring at his coffee mug. He looked down at it too and then back up into her fleshy face.

“Did I use yours?”

“You used somebody’s”

“That was a mistake,” he said quickly getting up and pouring the remainder of the cup into the sink and rinsing out the mug. It was a cursory sloshing of water that did not by either Doris or Marsha’s standards constitute a wash, but he was oblivious to them and set the mug, still dripping back on the once fresh linen. Then he walked out the door.

“Where did she get him? said Marsha.

“With what they pay here, what do you expect?” answered Doris.

Ron’s next class was senior English and this was a different story altogether. The twenty two girls who came into the room wore uniforms that were tight through their hips and across their breasts. They were last year’s uniforms and the girls hated them except that they could hike the skirts up and take them in so that their breasts seemed to be bursting to get out and bounce and sway and be free. They looked at Ron differently too. They had all seen him before class; they had made sure of that. This was the guy that the frosh girls, some of whom were their younger sisters and cousins, were talking about, were looking dreamy and goo-goo eyed about. But these girls were different. They drove. They had real boyfriends. Some worried monthly about becoming pregnant. Some had learned that there were less dangerous ways to keep their boyfriends happy and satisfied. They were organized.

When he stood in front of them and began calling the roll, their looks were so obvious and powerful that Ron retreated back behind his podium, anything to give himself a little distance between them and him. This was senior English and that meant English literature. After they’d each filled out their cards and gotten their books and said their names, Ron looked at them for a long moment and then said, “Page 6, Beowulf. Here’s the question. What’s a monster?” He looked up at them from the text. They looked down. He could play too and he knew how to look into a girl’s face just long enough to have the tingle of his eyes and smile begin to work on her. Then he looked up and said again, “What makes someone or something a monster?”

“Ask my stepfather, said Andrea who wasn’t buying his act. She’d stop him right in his tracks with the first thing that she said. But Ron seemed oblivious to the overtones of her comment.

He continued, “Is a monster born a monster? Do you know monsters? Are any of you monsters?” Then he began to pace as if he was in deep thought. He walked up and down the aisles, checking to make sure that they all had the books that the students were required to purchase every year, new or used. Most of the girls had used ones that came with at least one year’s worth of notes and, if you were lucky, a copy of most of the tests. But there was nothing written in any of the margins that was going to help them. Ron said, “Tonight start reading Beowulf, but for now, he strode quickly to side table where the stack of paper that he’d been given yesterday was waiting. “Write to me about what you know about monsters.”

“You mean like King Kong or Godzilla?”

“Or the Creature from the Black Lagoon,” said Ron, with a reference that none of them got. I’ll tell you story,” said Ron. “When I was a kid growing up down on Broadway,” he started lining up his street credits, “we thought that there were monsters that lived in the empty storage bins in the basement. And we used to dare each other to go down there without turning on the lights. Do you think that there were real monsters down there or were

Chapter 1

He was asleep in a small apartment where the window fan created a breeze. She sketched, eyes flicking between the paper and him. Zoë’s hair was a spectacular, straw colored mess.  She drew with long, lean lines and remembered his fingers. Some of him leaked out of her. She stared at the curve of his hip and wanted him to turn so that she could draw his balls and penis.

Zoë’s thighs were sore.  He had squeezed and pawed and humped her. She wanted him to wake up and do it again. She wondered about how she might need him.

Ron’s breath was dreamy and Zoë wanted it.  The soft light of a feel good moon illuminated her. He had told her that he would start teaching at Our Lady of the Forlorn later in the week.

 

That morning, everyone met in the convent. At 10:15, they called Ron. “I must’ve written the date wrong,” he mumbled. “I’ll be there right away.”

He showered and dressed without looking at her. Then he said, “Please wait here until I come back home.” She smiled with the thought that she might not have to put clothes on at all today. She could look into everything that he owned, and when he came back home she would fuck him.

There were figurines and a red feather mixed with crumbs and ashes on a wooden desk that was covered with a paisley cloth. Some records were scratched and scattered in and out of jackets. An after-smell of tobacco and pot mingled with the ripeness in the sheets. Piles of books, some with papers wedged between their pages, were stacked on the floor.  Unkempt plants that tangled and flowered reached out to watermarks on the wall and to a tin ceiling that was painted over.

 

He drove through Newark’s metal and concrete mix with a flood of hometown familiarity and in a panicky sweat. He was going somewhere that he’d been before. This was so very strange. He’d been sent to this school in 7th grade after being caught with a knife, now he was coming back to teach in the high school and he was late. He knew that wouldn’t go over all that well with the nuns.

Parking in one of the playground spots that were reserved for faculty, he looked over at the door of the church where he’d been marched with the rest of his classmates to pray during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He gazed at the towering oaks that lined the street and whose roots buckled the pavement. Looking up into the long comforting embrace of leaf lined branches, he tripped over the edge of an upturned sidewalk slab that sent him sprawling. His hands slapped down hard onto the stone and he snarled, “Fuck!” as he lay like some overly zealous penitent just as Father Joyce, who was carrying Communion wafers for the sick, came out of the church’s heavy door. Ron looked up in disheveled dismay as the veteran priest shook his head and walked around him. The fall had torn loose the sole of his shoe causing it to make a double slapping sound as he tried to walk.

“Great!” he said to himself, “I’m going to walk in and announce my presence with the authority of a clown. Maybe I can find a rubber ball to wear on my nose.”

 

The great room had a low ceiling, passageways that led off like spider legs. Crucifixes and portraits of saints with a variety of lighted halos hung on the walls over cut flowers. The incensed aroma was cool in contradiction to the temperature. The nuns were in their summer linen whites. One or two still wore the full headpiece that included the face frame and bib, but most had moved to the revealing below the knee hemline and abbreviated cap that the older nuns sneeringly referred to as “stewardess’ outfits.”  They sat in the room with the empty cups of coffee that had been provided for those who had been on time. About twenty-five of them seated and everyone one of their heads turned to watch Ron limp into the room with his slapping heel.

He entered with a stumbling burst that reset one’s equilibrium. Sister Irene Emanuel looked at him over the top of her glasses and thought that he looked healthy in an annoying kind of way. Then she realized that he also smelled of smoke.

Sister Vincent Salvatore, seeing a man enter the room, could not help but get to her feet and move to bring him coffee. Irene Emanuel noted the gesture… “Mr. Tuck, thank you for coming” she said in her unmistakable tone. Then, knowing that it would be expected that she make some note of his tardiness added, “Not a particularly auspicious beginning for you.”

Automatically, Ron said “Good morning. No, not at all, Sister.” The tone in his voice put the room at ease. It was masculine but contrite and respectful, or at least it seemed so. He took a seat and was handed a folder. He took it with his scraped and bleeding hand. The nun that passed it to him looked at the traces of blood that had smeared onto the freshly copied white paper with a look of repulsion that she normally reserved for vomit.

The rest of the day was a blur except for when he saw his classroom. It was wooden; there was a podium; it had long and wide windows; there was a flag and a cross. He was attracted by the smell of chalk and the feel of slate. After the windows went up on their clicking chains, the city birds called in from branches and porches. He lit a cigarette before he thought about it, tossing the match out the window.

Sister Juliana Marie looked up from her student’s new baby and saw him standing in the window smoking. A scowl of disapproval crumpled her face. This lout was standing in his classroom smoking cigarettes. What was next? Was he going to strip down to his underwear to escape the heat? She rose and silently walked down to the principal’s office fingering the beads that belted her habit.

Ron stood under the Lincoln portrait that he’d hung next to a crucifix in the room. Even though it was 90 degrees and he was dressed in a sports jacket and tie and the heat was plastering the cotton shirt to his back, he felt that he was where he belonged and where he wanted to be. He raised his eyes to the Lincoln and the crucifix and said to neither in particular, “Please don’t let me screw these kids up.”

By mid afternoon, Ron noticed that the school had emptied. He’d been copying the names of the 117 students that would be in his classes. He’d thought about what he needed to accomplish on day one. He wanted to read the stories for a 3rd time before he began them tomorrow. He wanted a cigarette. He wanted to stop being Mr. Tuck for the day.

One by one, the nuns with whom he’d be teaching had come to the door to introduce themselves. Ron inhaled the fresh clean smell of their linen. He appreciated the quiet invitations that they offered. How could he have forgotten that he’d need paper? They would show him where the books were stored. Neatly stacked towers of white pages and blue covers, red covers, and sleek silver gilded pages that Ron wandered through; fingertips sliding across the books, mind trying to imagine who would open them.

 

He drove back to Elizabeth in silent reverie.  Zoe was sitting naked in the middle of a floor that was filled with charcoal sketches. Fleeting portraits of him as he slept that featured just a line or two of detail. Still life drawings of his plants woven into self portraits of her face and the massive tangle of thick blonde hair that was smudged with charcoal and fastened with rubber bands.

She crawled to the door when she saw him and nuzzled his feet and calves. She didn’t say words. She uttered soft sounds that pled for attention. He felt and saw her crawl around him and wanted nothing in the world more than to have her for his own.