Summer, 1977. Together with a group of other Pratt students, I sublet a Soho loft. One of the students had two kittens, Sacco and Vanzetti. Soho was much grittier back then. No boutiques, no Balthazar, its cobblestoned industrial streets noisy with trucks and strewn with graffiti.
The professor from whom we sublet left behind cans of purple, pink, and gray latex paint and a few large sheets of paper. I carried these up to the rooftop, where I spread the sheets out, their corners held down by bricks. With a set of lettering stencils, a roll of masking tape, and a very rough plan, I went to work.
Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns were my heroes. The paintings I did that day, surrounded by ventilators and tarpaper, owed everything to them.
Under a breezeless summer sun I worked all day long and into the evening. The forecast was good; not a cloud in the sky. I left the results to dry and went to sleep in my windowless white cube of a room built into the center of the loft.
The next morning I awoke to purple, pink, and gray paw prints everywhere. I raced up to the roof. My paintings were all destroyed.
An hour later Laura phoned with the news. She was three weeks pregnant and said she would not consider an abortion. I reasoned, argued, pleaded. My words echoed off the cube’s white walls.
Later that same day, the lights went out. Except for a few places in the Far Rockaways, the whole city went dark. Four thousand commuters had to be evacuated from the subways. Anarchic mobs ravaged neighborhoods. Thirty seven hundred arrests were made. Con-Ed called the blackout “an act of God.” Father Gabriel Santacruz of Bushwick disagreed. He told his candlelit flock: “Tonight we are without God.”
A week later, at the Burger King across the street from the Planned Parenthood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as my mother and I sipped twin milkshakes together in pained silence (a slab of bright sunlight slicing through the plate glass window, bouncing off our table), Laura had the life scraped from her womb.
Thirty-three years later, my daughter was born.
United States Patent # 2,736,353, INDUCED QUADRATURE FIELD MOTOR. “This invention relates to alternating current motors having the general characteristics of synchronous motors, and has for its primary object the provision of a motor having higher output at lower speed than a conventional alternating-current motor of similar physical size.” Filed Nov. 25, 1953.
V.
What You Knew
Bethel, Connecticut, 1970
AS SOON AS YOU ENTERED THE NEW TEACHER’S CLASSROOM you knew things would be different. Instead of their usual regimental rows, the desks were arranged in a large oval, with the teacher’s metal and Formica desk shoved into a corner like a miscreant. The room’s cinderblock walls were covered with canvas or corkboard and festooned with images of authors, scientists, poets, world reformers, and leaders: Lincoln, Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Socrates. There were reproduced paintings by Picasso, Klee, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Vermeer, poems by Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, “Desiderata” (“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence”) Kipling’s “If” (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”), and other poems and posters:
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
“War is unhealthy for children and other living things.”
“Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”
From a phonograph soft strains of classical music emanated.
The one standard item in the room, the chalkboard, had been transformed into an object of curiosity by the words scrawled in large letters across it:
EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED IS WRONG
Under this in smaller letters the new teacher had written:
The statement on the handout is true.
As you took your seat the teacher made his way around the circle of desks, handing out mimeographed sheets still warm and reeking of chemicals from the spirit duplicator. The sheets were folded in half. Unfolding yours you read:
The statement on the blackboard is false.
From the bottom of the sheet the teacher had you tear off a thin strip of paper, then asked how many sides the strip of paper had.
Several students volunteered: Two!
If I told you I can make one side of that strip of paper you’re holding disappear, the teacher asked, what would you say to that?
Manifestations of dissent. Impossible! No way! It can’t be done!
Having borrowed a strip of paper from Mary Beth Lumpkin, the teacher twisted it and curved it into a loop. With a piece of Scotch tape from the dispenser on his desk he taped the two ends of the loop together.
He handed the result back to Mary Beth.
Please draw a line down the middle of both sides, he instructed her.
Mary Beth Lumpkin drew one line. There was no other side.
Question your assumptions, said the teacher.
THE NEW TEACHER was energetic and intense. He moved around the classroom like a tennis player covering his end of the court. He liked to challenge and provoke, encouraged discussion, honored dissent and debate. He taught you to question authority, abhor clichés, spurn stereotypes, shun received wisdom, resist jargon and sentimentality.
No teacher worked harder. He arrived at the school at dawn and would stay often until dark. When the school administration refused to pay for a textbook he wanted he spent hours at a portable typewriter in his cottage replicating the book’s pages one by one onto ditto masters, complete with illustrations that he reproduced freehand.
He did his best to downplay the distinction between teacher and student, to blur if not erase altogether what he saw as an artificial and unhealthy boundary, to treat his pupils as equals, or anyway not as inferiors, to align himself with them, to make them feel that he was on their side. He insisted that his students call him by his first name and not Mr. ———— (“That’s my father’s name”).
In the middle school cafeteria one day, having forsaken the sanctuary of the teacher’s lunchroom, the new teacher took his food tray and headed toward the table where you and some other students in his special class sat. Seeing him coming your way you decided to play a practical joke on him. As soon as he sat down (having said, “May I join you?”) you all simultaneously picked up your lunch trays and left the table, or pretended to, then you turned around and came back. As you did, without meeting any of your eyes and with a grim look on his face, the teacher stood up and left.
Only then did it dawn on you that you’d hurt the teacher’s feelings. It had never occurred to you before then that you could do that to a teacher.
The joke was your idea. Later that same afternoon,
