Calloustown

After School

Later on, in the parking lot waiting for bulldozers, we thought back at how a young girl — no one remembered her name — transferred from either Arizona or North Dakota, suffering from allergies we couldn’t comprehend. This was 1970 or thereabouts. Her parents brought along what appeared to be a certifiably genuine prognosis from an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Ragweed, goldenrod, dandelions, crabgrass, centipede, pine bark: this girl seemed to be pretty much allergic to everything the South had to offer. Back then we were all young, and we thought things like poor thing, et cetera. This was a time before charter schools and school choice and private schools and home schools. Our custodian, Mr. Willie, wasn’t pleased, but there seemed to be no choice but to kill all the shrubbery, cut down trees, gravel over every inch of the school grounds, spray DDT on the ball fields, and remind each other that no roses could ever be delivered on anyone’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, Secretary’s Day, and that all future proms would be corsage- and boutonniere-less. No one argued about it — we wanted to make this little girl and her parents feel welcome in the community.

She graduated. She matriculated to Arizona State or the University of North Dakota, as I recall. I’m not sure why someone on the school board never piped up, “Well, now that that’s over, we need to replant some azaleas out front.” We just remained barren. I still taught only biology and chemistry back then and even kept nothing but plastic and/or ceramic accessories in my classroom aquarium, or the little habitat I sketched out for box turtles that Mr. Lawson constructed with his third-year Advanced Shop students.

It took another decade before — again, this was a child who transferred from northern Minnesota — we found ourselves liable if anyone brought peanuts, walnuts, or pecans onto the school grounds. I remember this particular case only because the tenth grader, Marty Mortensen, had an hourglass-shaped head. I’m saying, it looked like a peanut rested atop his shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if his parents — I think they moved down here because the whole family suffered from that depression that supposedly sets in from short days and long nights — acquired a questionable medical professional to make up Marty’s allergy, as an attempt to thwart likely and subsequent days when they served boiled peanuts in the cafeteria and one of our more observant students yelled out, “Hey, my plate’s filled with little Marty Mortensen heads!” like that. Sometimes children throbbing with hormones don’t think about how words can echo in a fragile peanut head right on up until about the twenty-year reunion when he returns to the Moose Club with an automatic weapon.

So there we were in a school that looked plopped down in the center of a wasteland, forever wanting nuts in our brownies or cookies. Plus the Snickers, Payday, Almond Joy, Reese’s Cups, and Baby Ruths disappeared from the vending machines and we opted for either plain Hershey’s bars or plain M&Ms.

As an aside, how come blind people don’t have that seasonal disorder all the time? I never heard about Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Helen Keller moaning around how they needed more sunlight.

Anyway, it might’ve been 1984 when more than a few children realized they were allergic to cigarette smoke. There went the outdoor smoking area, there went teachers smoking in the lounge. Deep down I understood that everyone should quit anyway. I showed a filmstrip that involved healthy lungs compared to coal/asbestos/glass dust/cigarette-damaged lungs. But goddamn. We got to where we took turns being late to our own classes. One day I’d pretend to need to check oil in my engine block between second and third periods, just to stand outside and smoke while Mrs. Allen looked in on my class. Other days Mrs. Allen feigned forgetting her extendable pointer in the trunk of her car and I told her history class stories that weren’t in the textbook. Our P.E. teacher flat out took showers at the end of every class and smoked in the stall.

I think it took almost six years before we had a child so allergic to dust mites that our whole home ec division got wiped out mid-semester. Soon thereafter we had a couple students show up with medical forms saying they couldn’t be within a hundred feet of anyone wearing perfume or cologne. This included deodorant, pomade (Mr. Willie’s), hairspray, and acne cream. I didn’t bother taking down precise notes to all of this — I had enough to worry about, seeing as kids needed to dissect frogs, the district couldn’t afford ordering the things, and I spent many a Saturday night/Sunday morning gigging — but this seemed to be when our school really started to deteriorate.

A whole knot of tenth graders, out of nowhere, learned that they were allergic to both paint fumes and alumina, one of the central ingredients in glaze. So we quit offering art classes and the two part-time teachers got laid off. On top of this, Mr. Willie couldn’t paint over graffiti. “General upkeep” vanished from our work environment.

I kind of liked one of those art teachers. She let her students paint still lifes and imagine what a walnut would look like resting atop a pear, banana, orange, or mango. Call it passive aggressive, but she always hung her students’ canvases in the hallways.

Mr. Lawson couldn’t take it anymore. He smoked and had a hard time waiting for the three o’clock bell. His students — in the past they’d been best in the state for their cabinetry skills — could now only wish to gain employment at Naked Furniture, what with the “no paint” directive. Lawson, on one particularly bleak winter day when he caught his students firing nail guns at one another, walked over to his miter box, placed his arm down, and cut off his left hand.

Gary Doherty sprang into action, evidently because he’d almost made it up to Webelo in the Boy Scout hierarchy. That kid ran directly to the first-aid station, extracted gauze, a compress, surgical tubing, and those gloves. He staunched Lawson’s bleeding long enough for the EMTs to show up, take the shop teacher down to the emergency room at Gray-wood Emergency Regional Memorial, and not connect his hand back on like they do at regular hospitals filled with doctors who paid attention in med school.

When everything settled down, that’s when we learned that Doherty had a latex product allergy.

From what I heard, his doctors told him he could never use a condom. From what I heard, Doherty succumbed to a number of sexually transmitted diseases by the time he almost finished his associate’s degree in pulpwood management at one of the technical colleges.

And then — perhaps a geneticist or eugenicist could explain this — everyone became allergic to something. Maybe a clinical psychologist, or that absurdist playwright I read back when I thought I wanted to be a big-game veterinarian and came across a book called Rhinoceros, has something to say about how no one wants to be left out. We had students coming in with doctors’ notes saying they couldn’t be around PVC pipes, copper tubing, plaster, Styrofoam cups, everything. A swarm of young girls were afflicted with migraines due to fluorescent lights. The offspring of the Perfume People decided they couldn’t be near hand soap of any type, from GoJo to Ivory. By this time one of the many right-wing governors of ours had made it so anyone could call him- or herself a certified teacher, open up a certified charter home school, and let the kids play video games and read the Old Testament all day in order to make them better soldiers.

The school pretty much emptied by 2010. I had planned to retire in another year. We dropped from a student population of 1,200 back about the time Nixon took off on a helicopter all the way down to one student: Tony Timms. We wondered how come the school district didn’t shut us down. Tony Timms could be bused to another district, we all thought, for a cheaper price than keeping biology, algebra, remedial English, Spanish Uno, and history teachers on the payroll, not to mention the cost of electricity and the Department of Health and Environmental Control sending out inspectors tri-weekly.

It’s because our school board members didn’t believe in busing, and hadn’t since 1970—coincidentally the year when our allergy-prone students’ parents became so protective, holy, and litigious.

I won’t say that it wasn’t great having one student for ninety minutes every other day because of that A/B schedule. Tony Timms had me fourth period, after lunch, but I still clocked in at 7:45, stood around front as if I had bus duty, went to my room and played around with my collection of Bunsen burners. Sometimes I stood in the cafeteria and pretended I needed to break up a food fight on tater tot day. Mostly, though, I sat in my room and wished that over the years I had paid more attention to all the latest student-friendly lab experiments they’d developed that didn’t involve baking soda and vinegar.

Finally, in what seemed like the school’s final days, Tony Timms came into my class without his book or calculator. He didn’t have the slide rule I’d let him borrow either. He said, “Have you talked to my parents yet?”

I looked up to see him standing in the doorway with a plastic Bi-Lo bag over his head.

I said, “No. Was I supposed to? Did I miss a PTA meeting? Do they want to discuss your grade in here? Are they concerned that my trying to teach you how to master a 1964 Pickett No. 120 Trainer-Simplex slide rule is on par with our old home ec teacher years ago teaching her students how to darn socks and cobble shoes?” Perhaps I spent so many hours in silence at the school that, when asked to speak, I released all of my trapped thoughts. I said, “Did they watch that television program aired last night on NBC about the history of inappropriate teacher-student conduct? Is this about my saying I couldn’t offer you a strong recommendation to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the University of North Dakota, or Arizona State because you’ve not recognized the difference between helium and hydrogen on the Periodic Table of Elements?”

Tony Timms lifted the bag. I saw, per usual, his mouth open enough to view his uvula. He said, “Here they are,” and moved closer to the doorjamb.

I turned to find his parents, dressed — oddly, I thought — in what appeared to be the latest swimwear. They wore scuba masks, too, and had those diving cylinders strapped to their backs. I said, “Hey. Y’all please don’t stand next to the Bunsen burners.” I said, “Is this one of those days when parents come in and tell everyone about their jobs?”

Even before real and imagined allergies took their toll on the student population, I dreaded Bring Your Parent to School Days, seeing as most everyone’s parents started up their employment descriptions with, “Well, I used to be a loom fixer over at the mill, but now I’m a…” whittler, small engine repair fiend, jockey lot entrepreneur, birdhouse maker…

Mr. Timms handed me a signed document from his son’s doctor. I read it twice. “He’s allergic to air?” I said. I looked at Tony, my final student. “That’s why you’re such a mouth-breather, because you’re allergic to air?”

Mrs. Timms said, “This air. Not all air. This air. It’s got too much argon. Tony’s allergic to argon, as are we. It’s a congenital condition.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Well, I knew enough to say, “Get the fuck out of my classroom, you idiotic people.” Then I ripped the mouthpieces away from their faces and chased them away. I screamed out, “This is what you get for naming your child after an adjective,” because I’d been thinking about kids named Tony, Misty, Merry, and Randy.

As it ended up, those were my last official words in my teaching career with American students. Later on, standing there with my five or six colleagues, waiting for our brick-and-cement-block school to become dust for the townspeople to breathe in and sneeze out, I imagined what my last words might’ve been had I taken a job at a less sickly and paranoid school district. Would I have said, “I’ve enjoyed every minute” or “There’s forty years I’ll never get back”? Would I have shaken hands with administrators even though I believed them to be a cross between weasels and newts? Would I have felt as though I made a difference in some teenager’s life?

The principal, whose name I never learned and who hadn’t shown up since we dwindled down to ten students, drove up on his new Harley-Davidson. He yelled out, “Good news! I’ve been hearing the rumors, but I didn’t want to let y’all in on it until it was official. They’ve postponed demolition! We’ve been chose by the government to be a Special Ambassador School. We got us forty children showing up tomorrow from a Chinese leper colony.”

He said that even Mr. Lawson would return to teach woodworking, no longer embarrassed to reveal his nub.

I shook my head. “Don’t count me in,” I said. “This has all been sad, confounding, and miserable enough. Do you know what happens right after all these new students die off? I’ll tell you. Amphibians from the sky. Fire everywhere. Winds we’ve never imagined. I don’t believe much in the Bible, but I do believe that Revelation section.”

The principal forgot to put down his kickstand and the motorcycle toppled over. He said, “There will be a need for extra grief counselors, if you’re right. What’s your name? I’m going to see if I can get you promoted to vice principal. If the end of the world’s coming like you say, then we need more vice principals with similar farsighted thoughts.”

As if I’d arranged it beforehand, three claps of thunder sounded. Everyone ran inside except for me. I righted the principal’s Harley, started it, and rode off in search of a high bridge with low guardrails. Speeding down the corrupted road, though, I understood that I didn’t have what it takes to end my own life. Being a scientist of sorts, I needed to view firsthand what happens after lepers.