No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

First Day of School

As a kid I never liked school, I was just good at it. Teachers helped me at every stage — Mrs. Jayne in first grade, Mrs. Hardin in fifth grade, Mr. Ellington in seventh. Mrs. Walke and Mrs. Slone looked after me in high school. During college I entered the province of men — Marc Glasser, Bill Layne, Joe Sartor. My goal as a teacher was to emulate the best ones. I hoped every student would eventually remember me as the teacher who’d made a difference, the one who took an interest, listened, and cared.

In the meantime, I couldn’t decide what to wear to the first day of class. Blue jeans and boots, of course, and a short-sleeve shirt because the humidity was like breathing through a wet wasp nest. I finally settled on my most conservative shirt — blue paisley with red trim. It was the kind of shirt I’d never have worn as a student because people might think I was a sissy. In my new role I wanted to set an example that was contrary to mountain dress for men.

I drove the Malibu proudly, enjoying the attention its rumbling engine commanded as I deliberately cruised the length of campus, giving a little extra gas in front of the administration building. Many people believe that the education problems in eastern Kentucky are due to the quality of instruction at Morehead State University. Over the years, MSU went from being a beacon in the wilderness to a dim light shining primarily on itself. The mission statement of serving the region is impossible to meet as long as the university kowtows to coal companies for financial contributions.

The students were my people, from my hills, at my school but I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I parked at Mrs. Jayne’s house and gathered breath deep into my lungs. I can do this, I said to myself.

I walked briskly to campus, sweating through my shirt, stumbling twice over minuscule imperfections in the pavement. My assigned office was in a small house that had been a private medical office. Instead of framed diplomas on the wall, I hung a map of eastern Kentucky counties. I opened my notes and reviewed my lecture to each of the four writing classes: Creative Nonfiction, Advanced Undergraduate Fiction, Graduate Fiction Writing, and Intro to Creative Writing. I had taught these courses elsewhere, but it was my first experience teaching four classes in one day.

Just before nine o’clock, I left my office and drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, watching students stroll to class. The majority were quiet and clean-cut and I wondered what became of the contemporary version of myself — long hair, ragged clothes — and how I would recognize the ones I came to help. Hip-hop music spilled from low-rider pickups driven by boys with their hats on backward. Many cars had tinted windows embellished with gothic script. “Only God can judge me,” read one, a line from a Tupac Shakur song, the perfect phrase to embody hostile rebellion in the Bible Belt. Kentucky has 120 counties, more than any other state, and license plates display the drivers home county. Those cars playing the loudest were from deepest in the hills, and I knew that some of the drivers had never seen a black person except on television.

I dumped my coffee and headed for class, entering the stream of people. I stopped in front of the English building and reminded myself that I was a teacher now, not a student. The bushes rattled behind me. “Hey, Chris,” someone said. Out stepped Harley, a boy I’d grown up with in Haldeman, now in his late thirties. His breath smelled of whiskey. I’d not seen him in over a decade.

“Damn, Harley, you like to scared me to death.”

“The law went by a minute ago is all.”

“Are they hunting you?”

“I forgot if they are or not. I just always hide.”

“Well,” I said. “They ain’t around right now.”

“I got half a joint in my pocket if you want to come up in the woods and burn one with me.”

“I can’t, Harley. I start a new job today.”

“They say you’re a schoolteacher now.”

“I just fell into it.”

“They’re hard up, my opinion.”

“You working?”

“Hell no,” he said. “I get the crazy check.”

“You ain’t crazy, Harley.”

“I know it, but the State don’t. And don’t you go telling them nothing, either.”

“You’d best get up in them woods,” I said. “Come on, we’ll cut through the building.”

“Son, we ain’t allowed in the college.”

“I am, Harley.”

I led him into the English building, through a hall thronged with students to the rear exit. He put his head down as if in custody, walking in a slow way to make sure he didn’t make a mistake. We went outside and he pointed to the tree line at the top of the hill.

“That’s my spot,” he said. “You come up later and we’ll burn one. I got beer up there, too.”

“What are you doing in town this early?”

“College girls, Chris, college girls. They are good to look at in the sun.”

“Do you ever talk to them?”

“No. They’d not talk to me. They’re too stuck up.”

“Maybe you are.”

“You shit and fall back in it, Chris. If I’m stuck up, what are you?”

“I’m just a Haldeman boy, same as you.”

“That’s all I’ll ever be, but you’re a schoolteacher. By God, they ain’t no better thing to be unless it’s a doctor, and then you got to dig around in folks’ guts all day. What are you teaching anyhow?”

“You know, writing and stuff.”

“They say your books are good, Chris. I’ve read at them without much luck.”

“Watch the law, Harley.”

“I don’t need to,” he said. “I got you watching out for me like old times.”

He patted his pocket containing the half joint, wiggled his eyebrows, and trudged up the hill. After a few steps he turned back.

“Hey, Chris,” he said. “How do you teach writing?”

“That’s a good question, Harley. What do you think?”

“Well, if it was me, I’d say to just let them write what was on their mind.”

“That’s what I’ll tell them.”

“You sure you can’t slip up here for a minute?”

“Thanks, but no.”

I watched him climb the hill. Like most people from Haldeman, Harley made it through eighth grade but not high school. He left the sidewalk for the woods and I saw flashes of his shirt moving through the trees as he headed for his spot, the highest point overlooking campus. I knew that he would get stoned, drink a beer, and take a nap. He would awaken thirsty, his head cloudy. He’d smoke a cigarette and check his pockets for money, hoping for enough to buy a bottle of Ale-8 and a Slim Jim at a gas station. Then he’d walk the road until someone picked him up and drove him somewhere. I knew all this because I’d once lived the same way.

A particular quirk of mountain people is to go home as often as possible. Appalachian workers in Ohio factories commonly drive all night after Friday’s shift to reach the hills by Saturday morning. This trait has given rise to a joke about hillbillies being chained in Heaven to prevent them going home on the weekends. College students were no exception, and Morehead is known as a “suitcase school,” meaning that the vast majority of students went home on Friday.

I walked into my first class late. The students sat in rigid rows of school desks. I announced the name of the class and asked if everyone was in the right room. No one spoke or nodded. I told them to call me by my first name. A few blinked in surprise. At MSU, most professors insist upon being called “Doctor.” I gave each student a copy of my course description, read it aloud, and asked for questions. There were none. A long silence ensued during which I looked out the window at maintenance workers busily primping the president’s home. When I returned my attention to the students, everyone looked at me, then away. I dismissed class. They left swiftly without a word.

I walked downstairs and sat in the dimly lit theater where the plays I wrote as a student had been produced. The first one was a futuristic retelling of Oedipus Rex with a punk rock soundtrack. All the actors wore sunglasses. To gain entry to a gang, Eddie slept with a hooker who turned out to be his mother, and set fire to a wino who was later revealed as his father. Instead of blinding himself at the climax, Eddie removed his sunglasses. This last part I considered a stroke of genius. The music included “The Blank Generation” by Richard Hell, who was not only a Kentuckian but had been born in the same hospital as me. For a few years we had lived half a mile apart in Lexington. After graduation my plan was to leave Kentucky forever. Now I was back at MSU and Richard Hell was fifty years old.

I checked the time and went upstairs to teach another class in much the same fashion as the first. Afterward I walked to the old courthouse and ate a sack lunch. A torpor settled over me like a quilt of sand. It was as though I were inhabiting the past and the future simultaneously, encased in a swaddling that forbade access to the present. I couldn’t be a teacher until shedding the memory of being a student.

My graduate fiction writing class met in the same room where I’d been interviewed, with comfortable chairs surrounding tables pushed together. The students included a transfer student from China with extremely limited skills in English. Another was a nontraditional undergraduate who was older than me and tried incessantly to establish common points of reference through geography, event, and people’s last names. Another man wanted to tell me what he found objectionable with my books. One young man admitted that he was trying to raise his GPA by taking an easy course. Two women were high school teachers who would get a pay raise after completing the class. We talked briefly about the kind of writing we were interested in pursuing, a gamut that included horror, science fiction, romance, and “Little House on the Prairie type books.” After class the nontraditional student lingered.

“Ever hear of Andrew Offutt?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Is he kin?”

“He’s my father.”

“I heard he was at a party with some guy with only one arm. Your daddy yelled out he was going tear that guys other arm off.”

I nodded and the guy left.

I’d become accustomed to Andy Offutt stories all my life. Everyone in the county told them. In fact, my father told this same story often, each time with a rising pride that I never fully comprehended. The one-armed guy had been an MSU administrator, now retired.

The late-afternoon class was Intro to Creative Writing, filled with sophomores and juniors. One student set the tone by claiming that expecting him to turn in assignments interfered with his artistic freedom. He then stomped out, slamming the door. Everyone waited for my reaction.

“Well,” I said, “I think we just found a real writer. He knows as well as I do that it’s impossible to teach writing. I can help you all learn to revise, but you have to write your own first draft. Any questions?”

A young man slouching in the back row raised his hand and spoke. “You care what we write about?”

“Nope. No rules.”

“Good, I don’t like rules.”

“Me, neither,” I said. “And neither did the guy who left.”

People laughed and I told them about painting the curbs in front of the very building we were in. A young woman named Sandra said she understood “no rules,” but she didn’t always know what to write about.

“That’s a good question,” I said. “This morning a friend of mine suggested that I tell you all to write whatever’s on your mind.”

I told them about Harley and their attention became downright perky when I mentioned that he had some dope.

“Write what you care about,” I said. “Write what hurts you. If there’s someone whose approval you want, write about that person.”

“What if that’s all the same person?”

“Then you’re lucky,” I said. “You have a lifetime’s worth of material.”

I ended class shortly after that. The student from the back row ducked back into the room. He wore a flannel shirt over a gangsta-rap T-shirt. His body was marked by tattoos and piercings. Portable stereo headphones dangled around his neck. I asked his name.

“Eugene from Martin County.”

I shook his hand and he frowned.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“No teacher ever did that before.”

“I’ll have to speak to them about that.”

“Do you like to read?” he said.

“Sure do,” I said. “You?”

“Yes and no. Not what they make you read, but what I like.”

“I know what you mean. What do you like to read?”

“Short stories.”

“Me, too. Is there any writer you like?”

“I’ve read James Still, Gurney Norman, and Chris Holbrook.”

“Good. You started with the Kentucky writers and now you can expand from there. Why don’t you let me bring you a couple of books next class?”

“Buddy, you got a deal.”

He nodded and left. I realized that if I were nineteen today, I’d be tattooed like a comic book, with more metal hanging off me than a tackle box. Any play I wrote would have a hip-hop score. I watched Eugene leave, feeling as if I’d found the student I came home to teach.