1979 His hand was a continent unto itself. It came sailing toward me with such velocity that I nearly forgot what to do. “I’m Kevin Williams.”
“How do you do? Nice to meet you. Jack Chavoor.”
The hand engulfed my hand, made my hand seem puny or childlike when in fact my hand could reach and octave and a half on the piano, and it could palm a basketball unless the ball was overinflated.
“Have a seat, Jack.”
His movements were precise and deliberate, and his attire was in sync, was part of the plan, and got him where he was or made him believe it did. He still had the outline, the dimensions, outsized neck, shoulders, and chest of an athlete, a football player. But he had made the transition and wasn’t going back. He couldn’t go back; he was well past 40. His hands were manicured, lotioned and bejeweled.
“Thanks very much.”
“Glad you want to be on the West Fresno Middle School team. Now you’re applying for which position?”
I scolded myself for assuming he was a former football player just because he was black and massively built. Then I asked myself why it would be bad. Then I scanned the wall behind him for a picture of his glory days, but didn’t see anything.
“Language Arts.”
“Oh, yes.”
His aftershave encircled him like an invisible shield. He was overdressed for a principal. His suit was crisp and pressed perfectly; he had gold cufflinks and a black onyx ring on his pinkie finger. I was at an age where I was beginning to want an onyx pinkie ring. I had it in my head that wearing such a ring would make me more Armenian somehow, like an Armenian who buys and sells things, who started out at Flea Markets but eventually expanded his business to the point where he had a business card with the words “International” and “LTD” on it somewhere.
“I have my resume here.”
“Cal State Northridge?”
His office was under lit and tired. The windows were smudgy and cracked; his desk was metal and small. We could have been in the office of a trailer park manager.
“Uh-huh.”
“This looks fine. How did you hear about the position?”
“The ad in the paper.”
“Yes. This is the 8th grade Language Arts position.”
“Yes.”
“This would be your first teaching assignment?”
“Yes, sir.”
He massaged one side of his head and then the other. His hand seemed bigger than his face. He sighed and said “uh-huh” to himself.
“You’re good with kids?”
“Yes, sir. I worked for the YMCA, the Salvation Army…”
“Salvation Army?”
“Yes. They have a summer camp for underprivileged kids. Inner city kids, and I was a counselor.”
“Uh-huh. You played football?”
“High school.”
“Huh. Coach?”
“Well just a flag team. We won the playoff championship though.”
“Ah huh. Well, I think I can use you here, Mr. Chavoor.”
Couldn’t be this easy, I was thinking. He touched his moustache as if it was in need of adjustment. I wasn’t sure I was a teacher, but I had finished the courses and I was in love with a remarkable and beautiful woman and I needed a job to complete the picture. I wasn’t going to sell vacuum cleaners or sweep out filthy radio stations or toss 50 pound cement bags out of a train car in the San Joaquin Valley in the middle of August with the temperature above 115 inside the car. I wasn’t sure that teaching was my destiny but on the other hand I wasn’t sure what my destiny actually was or whether people ever really found theirs, even if they were sure they had because maybe they just talked themselves into it.
I had heard someone somewhere along the line say something like, “Some people live to work; others work to live.” Whoever that person was said it in such a manner it sounded like working to live was superior to living to work. But I didn’t think so. To me they were equal and you were one or the other, or you were a person who vacillated between the two, or maybe even transitioned from one to the other. There were people who didn’t grouse about their job because they were their jobs. Their whole identity was locked up in their job. I didn’t find anything wrong with that; it’s just that I knew that a job—to me—was something that felt like it was keeping me away from my destiny instead of being the conduit to it.
What’s a job, anyway? You hand over your time, mind, creativity, energy, youth, strength, health, stability and you get money and you buy stuff. Now some of the stuff is essential, but a lot of it isn’t. Still though, I wanted in, and I was willing to pay the price of admission. I wanted a house and a car and kids and vacations and a real Christmas tree with a toy train going around it and dinner out and barbecues and a fireplace at home.
I knew though that I would be working to live and not vice versa. My time not working would be my real life; my time at work would be like being in a play, a show, like a challenge to impersonate the sound, the words, the facial expressions, the customs and routines of a teacher. At the same time though, it would be me and I would be as real as possible with the kids. I knew I liked kids and that I could connect with them; I just wasn’t sure I knew all there was to know as an English major. I came to it on my own terms, picking and choosing, but calling yourself an English teacher, well it seemed to me that the best of them would be the ones that had breadth and depth in their subject matter.
“That’s sounds great,” I said, smiling my best smile.
“Can you do the job though? These kids out here are tough. ‘S a little different on the Westside. You have to be firm with them.”
“Yes sir, I sure can do that.”
Sell yourself Grace had said. The notion was creepy to me but I was in a play and so was Mr. Williams. He was saying stuff or would say stuff or had said stuff and I was doing exactly the same thing. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean it but just that it was one of the things that you say in a given situation. He had his costume on and so did I. He didn’t go around all duded up when he was at home; he wore jeans and a t-shirt like everyone else home from work. I didn’t wear a wool suit in the middle of summer for the joy of it; I didn’t want to wear a wool suit or a tie, ever. Why couldn’t we just be who we were? Then came that two-tone hand, the size of Asia, arcing like it was leaping over a wall.
“Well then, congratulations. Welcome aboard.”
“Thanks. Thanks very much.”
“Now, we start next week.”
“Right.”
“You’ll need a room key and I’ll show you your room.”
“That’s great.”
There was a pause. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to fill the void. He shifted in his chair.
“We have an after school program, a tutoring program. Would you be willing to participate?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And uh, we need someone to do the school newspaper and yearbook.”
Never say no. That’s what I heard. Newspapers and yearbooks had to be perfect and delivered on time and I was lousy at both of those things. He had the wrong guy. But I was 25 years old, eating baked potatoes and popcorn for dinner and Dad was paying the rent. I wasn’t going to say no. I couldn’t take the chance that there was something better somewhere else; I had a bird in the hand.
“I can do that.”
“That’s fine. Now, the Readers’ Club, that’s 7th and 8th grade, both, they need a faculty sponsor. They meet every other week.”
“Uh.”
I wasn’t sure how I was going do to all of this but I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t game. Maybe I would ease out of some of it one semester at a time. Of course when they saw the yearbook and the paper they’d probably scramble to find someone else. Doing the readers’ club wouldn’t be so bad, although I was pretty sure I would be tired at the end of the day which would make the tutoring hard to do, especially when I saw other teachers pulling out of the parking lot to head home to their real lives.
Everybody starts somewhere. Everybody has a first job story to tell. You have to pay your dues, I guess. It would turn out to be a pretty big tab though.
“On Wednesdays.”
“Ok.”
He had an index finger on his temple. He was looking down, looking at his desk blotter if he was looking at anything at all. I felt bad for him, trying to fill so many slots with one person, and I felt bad for misrepresenting myself; there was no way I could do all the things he was asking me to do. I was a rookie and as such, just teaching the five classes successfully was going to be a challenge. Still though as far as I knew, I was one “I don’t think so” away from not getting hired.
“And there’s intramural sports. You can coach, right?”
“Well, I…”
“You can’t?”
“Oh, yeah, of course I can coach.”
“Football right?”
“Yeah.”
“Basketball? Baseball?”
“Uh, I was never very good at…”
“It’s ok. I’ll just put you down for football.”
“Ok.”
He had no pen, no paper. I assumed it was a mental notation. I was trying to think of what to say when he stood up, stood towering over me, sizing me up for a second. I stood up and made ready to shake hands, but he headed for the door instead. He showed me the classroom where my teaching career would begin. It was drearier than his office. The walls were stripped bare and there were no books or materials anywhere. There were chips and chunks missing from the walls. There were water stains on the ceiling. There were names and proclamations carved in the desks.
I had a sinking, depressed feeling and I knew I was at the place where—if I were in college and it was a job, let’s say, selling shoes—I would just bail, just go to Foster Freeze and buy a root beer float and go home and put on “John Wesley Harding” and tell myself that there were more important things than money and a job.
But this was different. This time I was going to see this whole thing all the way through.
“Are there textbooks?”
“We have them on order. They’ll be here in a few weeks, hopefully.”
“Oh, uh, ok.”
I suppose I was unable to disguise my horror at the notion of having no materials, nothing to work with for 3 or more weeks because he was nodding his head in a way that suggested he was sympathetic to the dilemma.
“You can just pull something out of your files.”
“Oh.”
Of course there was one small glitch in that plan: I had no files. He knew I was a rookie, so why did he think I had files? What would I do with the kids after I introduced myself and took roll? I started pondering my day 1 lesson plan while we walked back to his office, where he gestured for me to sit down again.
“Now one more thing,” he said, leaning back in his desk chair.
“Yes?”
“You have to show them you’re in charge.”
“Of course.”
“You gotta put the clamps on ‘em from the start.”
“Right.”
“And when you have to deal with them, you deal with them.”
“Ok.”
“You see, you’re the foot soldier, I’m the general. You’re the hand pistol, I’m the cannon. See what I’m saying?”
“Uh-huh.”
I didn’t know much and I had said yes to just about everything but now, hearing the principal say, in effect, “The kids are bad, don’t drop them off on my porch,” I began to have some doubts.
“You don’t use a cannon when a pistol will do. And you don’t call on the general when you’re a foot soldier, you just keep on soldiering.”
“Oh, yes sir,” I said, fighting off the urge to salute him.
“All right, then. Just so we understand each other.”
“We do.”
“We gonna draw up a contract for you to sign. Come in tomorrow about this time.”
“Ok.”
“And remember you’re signing a contract. A legal, binding contract.”
“Uh-huh.”
He stood up and we shook hands, nodding and smiling at each other. I had landed my very first serious job. I drove home in the ’71 Dodge Colt station wagon with no air conditioning with a kind of faux jubilance, a feeling I could not muster on the first day of school.
“I’m Mr. Chavoor, I’m your Language Arts teacher,” I said, but my tone and pace suggested I didn’t know who or what I was at all.
A few decades later I would tell my student teachers to act, think and move like they owned the place, like the kids were in your house, and to be happy, gracious and watchful. I wish I could have had that advice that day.
I was nervous; my hand trembled a bit while I handed out their first assignment. They didn’t know the rules, no one had set the tone, there was no description of what we were going to do for the year and there was no seating chart assignment, but I handed them a paper, an “ice-breaker” activity with only four questions I had typed the night before and run off twenty minutes before class. They gave me a little over a minute of their attention. Even when you have something, a lesson plan may not go well, but when you have nothing or next to nothing, the kids are way too real to sit there politely and make the best of it. By the third minute of my teaching career I had lost first period entirely. They were up moving around, laughing, chatting, pushing and shoving, chasing each other. I implored them to return but they declined.
“Don’t worry,” one of the louder boys said, “I’ll go get help. I’ll go get the principal.” And before could call him back, he and his friend pimp-walked right out of the room and of course, didn’t return.
I was shell shocked. I had no plan B, and no one in the department offered any hints or suggestions before school started. I was a wreck for three days. The adrenaline poured into my body making me shaky and skittish. I couldn’t concentrate, had no plan and no materials. My heart was up and beating somewhere behind my Adam’s apple. I couldn’t remember things. Couldn’t remember where I had just placed a pen or piece of chalk. Couldn’t think what I was going to say next or what I had just told them. My ears didn’t just ring, they were blaring from the start of the day to the finish to the ride home and until I fell asleep and I wasn’t sleeping much. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t even enjoy music. When I flipped through the records and put on Bob Dylan’s “Bringing it all Back Home” and the opening track, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” didn’t do anything for me, I knew I had to quit.
Wednesday at three o’clock I was sitting in Mr. Williams’ office. He looked at me and waited for me to speak.
“I’m quitting.”
“What for?”
“I’m not doing well.”
“That’s not unusual. It’s your first year.”
“I can’t do it. There’s no books, no materials. The kids are wild.”
“The materials are coming.”
“I quit. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t quit.”
“I can’t sleep. Can’t eat.”
“You signed a contract. That’s binding. That’s a very serious matter.”
“Well I’m breaking the contract.”
“You can’t. You can’t just break a contract. You signed it.”
“I…I’m not…I quit.”
“You won’t get your money.”
“Three days? You can keep the money.”
He was lying; I actually did get three days’ worth of a check a month later. The drive home was a strange mix of relief, shame and panic. What kind of good progressive Christian was I if I couldn’t reach them and then quit on them? Was I even a teacher at all? What other kind of job was out there for me? The ten dollar 8-track player was squeaking and “Passion Play” was coming to an end, “Here’s the everlasting rub: neither am I good nor bad.” But that couldn’t be right, I thought. It was bad to quit and it was good to quit, too.
I wrote a two page letter to Dad, explaining the conditions at the work place and how it was damaging my physical health which made it impossible to stay and that quitting was my only option. I told him that I would continue seeking employment as a teacher.
The next time he saw me he assured me that I had done the right thing, and that no job is worth the sacrifice of your health. I still felt very bad for some time though. I started to feel better when I saw that the Language Arts position was frequently in the Want Ads of the Fresno Bee. Overall though, I still felt bad; I was the foot soldier who went AWOL.
I never imagined myself in that position and I never faced it again. I did get a job and stuck to it and got money for houses and cars and Christmas trees and barbecues and it has truly been a wonderful life and it is true that I do work to live but I feel I have reached some kids over the years in a profound and meaningful way and for that I am willing to believe that being a teacher was part of my destiny, part of a larger plan. I may not have been born to be a teacher but at least I did some good while I was there.