Of Teachers and Toothpicks

My first week at West Side High in nearly twenty years, but also a bit of a blow to my ego and self-confidence. I don't know that I've felt this way since short and mean Craig Stratton called me a homo in the locker room during P.E. Everyone froze, as naked boys are wont to do when someone near them is accused of the ultimate breech in locker room behavior, and I was eyed suspiciously for weeks. Eventually, when no one observed me doing whatever it was a homo did--I don't think anyone had the vaguest idea--I was silently cleared of all charges and allowed to resume my pre- and post- P.E. routine without further incident.

Meeting with my fellow teachers the first day was a bit like that awkward moment after the heaviest of accusations had been leveled against me. Those that had known me then had no doubt been informed that I was returning as one of them. Stan Eck looked me up and down, as did Gloria Fletcher, who studied me over the long point of her nose, as if I were some kind of hideously large and hairy insect, the same way she'd looked at me since I was 18 and came to her British Lit class drunk on my birthday.

Eck, the now-aged girls cross country coach, had been my home room teacher. He'd been at West Side for years and had managed to acquire almost no reputation whatsoever. None of the students complained about him. In fact I knew no one who ever took a class from him. I'm not even sure I know what it is he teaches. Then, as now, his classroom was located on the humanities floor, nestled between Cissy June's (who taught composition and something called "Western Lit," which meant the books of Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey and Max Brand) and Dwight Mallory, our French instructor. The only thing we knew about Stan Eck then--and that I know about him now--was that he coached girls cross country and always kept a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth. He was ruddy-complected, had straw-colored hair and eyebrows so blond they were almost invisible on his forehead. Stan didn't quite know what to do with me and he certainly never liked me; I was neither a girl nor a runner. Plus there was that embarrassing incident three years after I graduated when I'd returned home for the summer and took the only job I could find, at my step father's taxi cab company, which also doubled as one of the town's three porn emporiums.

The cab office had been a small, cramped place, occupied only by a squat little entertainment center that had been patched and taped together, on top of which sat a television that showed only the grainiest and green-tinted of pictures. A decrepit and urine-scented couch hugged a wall, and it was here that the cabbies sat and waited for calls to come in. Southeast Idaho is not a cab driver's Mecca and during my graveyard shift it was not uncommon for one or two drivers to spend the majority of their shifts watching re-runs of Hazel or American Gladiators. My desk overlooked the room, topped by an inherited IBM, a map of the town and the radio transmitter with which I dispatched and coordinated the drivers.

The porn shop was was next door to the office but the wall between them had been cut to allow a door and a sliding glass window, both of which were located directly behind the desk. Our porn emporium, unlike the other emporiums, did not sell merchandise, but relied solely on video rentals. It was a minimalist's dream, a single room without shelves or aisles and there were no embarrassing products on display (that Summer the hot-selling title was John Wayne Bobbitt's foray into the world of adult cinema, quite the feat considering his wife had tried to assure that such a thing could never happen. Regardless, John Wayne Bobbitt...Uncut was a runaway hit). Instead, the store was occupied by three small podiums--kept a safe distance from one another to allow some sense of privacy-- each topped by a large photo album which contained the front panels of the boxes the videos had come in. Many of the box covers were also available in poster format and occasionally we'd hang one up to advertise new releases. The videos were kept in a storage closet on the cab office side of the window and occasionally, when the cabbies were gone, or asleep on the couch or so engrossed in the life-lesson Hazel was imparting to the Baxters that they didn't even notice my presence, I'd slip back into the closet and get a chuckle from the various titles on display. To this day Shaving Ryan's Privates can make me laugh and blush.

There was very little contact between the patrons and myself. They would shuffle in, accompanied by the jingle of the bell at the door and peruse the pages of an album. I quickly learned that men in porn stores behave the same as men standing at urinals, observing the two unspoken rules of etiquette: never stand too close and never, ever, raise your eyes. The men who visited the store often wore sunglasses or hats, and kept their faces down and they always kept at least one podium between themselves and another customer, the only exception being if both end podiums were occupied in which case the hats were pulled lower and the faces were aimed almost directly at the floor. Each page of the album was labeled with a number and when the gentleman had made his decision, he simply approached the window and told me the number, preventing anyone else in the store from seeing or hearing which video the man had selected. There was nothing seedy about the place and we prided ourselves on our cleanliness and open, safe atmosphere, things neither of the other two emporiums could match.

That Sunday morning, while two drivers lounged in the office watching TV the bell chimed, I peeked out the window and saw Stan Eck saunter to the podium at the furthest end of the room, that ever-present toothpick protruding from the corner of his mouth, it's end flattened and glistening. He did not look up at me and there was nothing in his demeanor to suggest this was his first time in the shop. I'd had to explain the photo albums to countless newbies, but Stan knew exactly what they were, and appeared to have a clear sense of where to look for what he sought. He flipped through the pages, paused every now and then, chomped his toothpick, shuffled a few pages forward or back, made his selection and finally, with that recognizable swagger of his, approached my window.

I'm sure I'd never made much of an impression on Stan for the three years I sat in his homeroom, sitting next to Sheldon Young, who, at times, seemed to entrance the entire classroom with his dancing biceps, and Breydon Rose, our long-haired, pale-faced, Gothic Lord Byron. Both attracted the girls for completely different reasons. I, on the other hand, sat quietly at my desk observing everything that happened, making only the occasional and wry of comments. I doubt anyone even noticed me until the day Stan choked on his toothpick and leapt from the room for water and air. I'm not quite sure how it happened, or how I summoned the courage to do it, but I found myself at his desk doing a spot-on impersonation of him with his darting toothpick, bulging eyes and panicked cough. The room had erupted in laughter but I'll never know if it was the impersonation or the fact that it was me, the quiet guy, doing it. It was my first taste of the intoxicating power of being able to make people laugh, or playing maestro to a room full of people. I loved it, and once I got a response, I revved it up a notch or two, and failed to notice Stan when he stepped back into the room. His face was still red--it had always been red!--a toothpick was wedged into the notch of his mouth--whether it was a new one or the salvaged remnant of the one that had almost killed him I'll never know--and his barely visible eyebrows were folded into two tight little slashes on his forehead. His eyes actually appeared red, but again, I don't know if that was the near-death experience or his embarrassment.

He said nothing. Instead, he waited for me to shuffle back to my desk, then resumed his seat. I kept waiting for his ire, even long after the incident was past, but forever afterward he regarded me with caution, like something dangerous about to strike. It was only years later, my last day of homeroom that Stan mentioned the incident. As we were filing from the room after the bell, he stepped in front of me and nodded.

"Funny Man," he said. "You're graduating tonight. What's next?"

It was the first time Stan Eck had spoken directly to me. One on one. "I hope to be a teacher," I told him.

He nodded and thought for a moment. "A teacher," he mused, dancing the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to other. He reached into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved button-up shirt. Clenched between his thumb and first finger he held a toothpick. "Careful," he said, slipping it carefully behind my ear. "They can kill you." Then he turned and moved back to his desk. Behind me, Sheldon Young tittered and slapped the man on the back.

Three years later at the emporium, I decided to play with Stan Eck once again. As he sauntered to my window, observing the silent rule of not looking up, he barked the number of his selection and waited while I fetched it. After searching the shelves of videos in the closet, I located his movie and returned.

"Here you go," I told him. "That'll be five dollars."

He reached into wallet, pulled out the money and still didn't look up. His toothpick was danced from side to side.

I couldn't remember if Stan was a good Mormon or not, so I had to play my other card.

"Mr. Eck?" I said, spreading a thick grin across my face.

The toothpick stopped moving.

"It's me. I was in your home room a couple of years ago." Slowly he looked up. "I did that impersonation of you? Are you still at the high school?"

His eyes narrowed to slits as I bagged the movie.

"Barely Legal Asian Girls Volume Three," I mused as I passed the bag to him. "Sounds like a good one. Hey, are you still coaching girls cross country?"

The toothpick fell from his mouth.

Quickly, surprising even myself, I plucked the wet stick off the small ledge and handed it back to him. "Careful. They can kill you."

He took it without a word and was out the door, the bell jangling behind him.

And now, fourteen years later I was standing in the cafeteria with Stan Eck's eyes on me again. But it wasn't just Stan that was unnerving. It was the whole place; it felt the same as the last time I’d stood there: the people, the room itself, the long echoes of the school halls. And the smell. The first thing anyone who ventures back into an academic setting notices is the smell. When I’d ridden my bicycle through the parking lot outside the school I’d been breathing the scent of sage up on the foothills and the freshly cut grass at Battle Park directly across the street. Entering the cafeteria was like getting hit in the face with a daycare or a hospital. Or a high school. It was a sort of chalk dust meets industrial cleaner meets canned corn odor with an underlying scent of a thousand different colognes and perfumes.

I winced and looked around the room with its sterile white linoleum floors and bare white walls, pockmarked by a hundred years of kids dragging their pencils or spoons and forks across their surfaces. The tables had been set up (or perhaps they’d never been taken down) and were slowly filling with the rest of the pack.

There is a hierarchy to group sitting no matter where you go. Doctors sit with doctors in hospital cafeterias and nurses and janitors and reception staff know better than to intrude upon them. At NASA astronauts sit with other rocket junkies and wary are the ordinary physicists or control room personnel who attempt to violate their space. High school teachers are no different. Stan was at the jock table near the back of the room, exactly where the jock students sat. I recognized only two of his table mates: Rick King, the red-faced basketball coach who’d led our school to eight state championships and Craig Hurley, a bear of a man with a monster mustache who coached junior varsity football and after five years still had not pulled them out of bottom place. There were several other men, all fit and tanned and somewhat ridiculous looking in their coaching shorts and golf shirts, trim mustaches and receding hairlines. It was clear Stan was not one of them but desperately wanted to be. After all, he coached girls. And cross country. And in Idaho, neither count for much.

The female coaches were seated near their male counterparts also at the back of the room. A more unhappy lot I could not have found. In general they were overly muscular, small in stature and could not have pieced together a single smile between the five of them. Only one, a lithe, blond woman with perky hair and actual make-up stood out.

The math and science teachers had joined forces at the front of the room. The outer edge of the room closest to the door was comprised of several tables of nondescript frumpy women who I could only assume were the office staff, secretaries and registrars. The English department, my group, were sitting on the far side opposite the doors. The administration had set up camp dead center. Ringing them were two powerful and opposing camps, the student counselors and the old timers, those few but powerful faculty who had been at the school since before dirt had been invented and who trusted no one to its care. They were fiercely devoted to one another and eschewed their own departments in favor of the greater good of tradition and the way things used to be. Spread throughout the room were surprisingly large pockets of family members, sons and daughters who joined the team with mom and dad. I recognized Ryan Fletcher, who'd graduated two years after me and now coached wrestling, sitting next to his mother. I saw the Pattons, a whole family of art teachers, with dad, Dave, who'd taught me, his wife, Stella and daughter Amy. The Coltens were a coaching dynasty who taught history and health as a mere formality in order to have access to the practice fields.

On and on it went. Student teachers--looking nervous and more like students than teachers--huddled, vulnerable, like hairless, pink marsupials next to their leads or paired up with other newbies. Janitors, fresh from the impromptu smoking lounge they'd christened across the street, milled together, a faint cloud of smoke enveloping them and blocking out the toxic lemon scent of industrial floor wax. The lunch room women stood near the principal and his team, who were overseeing the trays of bagels and donuts and weak juice the district office had been kind enough to provide. They watched over the dispensing of the food with strict and nervous eyes. Everyone had a place to go, role to fill.

Normally things would have been more upbeat with everyone exchanging summer vacation stories--Rhoda Bruce would tell Jay Keller, the theater instructor, about her trip to New York and how she didn't think the Grease revival was as good as she'd hoped, besides, "it's full of language," she'd hiss. Bishop Bell, the LDS Seminary teacher, would want to talk about his numerous fly fishing trips to Montana. Nancy Satterfield would whisper to Tammy Christiansen about Ryan Fletcher's ongoing relationship with the District Superintendant's daughter, which was the real reason he'd gotten the coaching job and had kept it after his DUI last Spring. The gossip and stories would've moved faster than a piglet in a sausage factory, only this year, the principal was new and no one quite knew what to expect. I'd met her once, during my last interview, which gave me a leg up over the rest of them, who kept their eyes trained on her as she smiled and waved and ushered everyone in and to their seats.

And then we got down to business. Laurie Murphy insisted she'd spare us all the lectures about how we were a team, how we'd come together to achieve our goals, how saying "No Child Left Behind" meant something different than actually doing something about it. She spared us the painful introduction to her life, to her ideas of teaching and what she expected of us. There were no odes to days gone by and brightly-lit sunny dreams of days to come. No, Laurie Murphy wasn't about any of that and by gum, she'd show us all.

Much to the surprise of everyone in the room, Laurie Murphy showed us what kind each principal she'd be and what kind of team we'd be, by making us do the Hokey Poky.

It was that simple. A group of fifty or so adults crammed into a small, ancient cafeteria, each putting our right and left feet in, taking them out and shaking them all about; we did the Hokey Poky and that was what it was all about.

That should've been the most dangerous part of the morning meeting, but somehow or another we found ourselves in front of a Karaoke machine, sipping juice and taking turns sings "The Gambler," "I Will Survive" and "Tub Thumping."

A more animated group of jaded educators I've never seen. Most people filed out of the cafeteria with smiles, shaking their heads and laughing, but of course there were those who didn't approve and were shocked at Laurie Murphy's complete disregard for propriety. But the big surprise was Eck, who stopped me as I was leaving and handed me a toothpick.

"Careful," he said, glancing over my shoulder at our new principal. "They'll kill you."