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" 'OK, you guys,' he said the first day. 'I know you're in here so you don't have to take English Literature.' There was this guilty murmur you could hear among us, and the class kind of looked the other way. 'Let me tell you,' he said, 'the only way that anyone in this class gets an A on their report card is to show me the check from a piece of writing that you have written and sold this semester.' A chorus of groans and whines and howls . . . 'Oh, Mister GARTNER that's not fair, we're poor little high-school kids, how could you possibly expect-that's not FAIR, Mister Gartner!' which he silenced with a word that sounded like, 'GROWL.'
" 'There's nothing wrong with a grade of B. B is Above Average. You can be Ab
ove Average without selling what you write, can't you? But A is Superior. Don't you agree that if you sell something that you have written it would be superior and you would be worth an A?' "
I picked the second-to-last cookie from my plate. "Am I telling you more than you want to know?" I asked her. "Honest, now."
"I'll say when to stop," she said. "Unless I ask you to stop, go on, OK?"
"Well. I was highly grade-oriented, in those days."
She smiled, remembering report-cards.
"I wrote a lot and sent articles and stories to newspapers
and magazines and just before the end of the semester sent a story to the Sunday supplement of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. It was a story about a club of amateur astronomers. They Know the Man in the Moon.
"Imagine the shock! I come home from school, bring in the trash can from the street, feed the dog, and Mom hands me a letter from the Press-Telegram! Instant ice in all veins! I tremble it open, gulp through the words, start again and read from the beginning. They bought my story! Check enclosed for twenty-five dollars!
"Can not sleep, can not wait for school to open in the morning. Finally it opens, finally sixth period, I whomp it dramatically on his desk, WHOMP! 'There's your check, Mister Gartner!'
"His face ... his face lit up and he shook my hand so I couldn't move it for an hour. Announced to the class Dick Bach sold an article, to make me feel about a quarter-inch high. Got my A in Creative Writing, no further effort required. And I figured that was the end of the story."
I thought about that day . . . twenty years ago or yesterday? What happens to time, in our minds?
"But it wasn't," she said.
"It wasn't what?"
"It wasn't the end of the story."
"Nope. John Gartner showed us what it was to be a writer. He was working on a novel about teachers. Cry of September. Wonder if he finished it before he died. ..." Again, a queer tightening in my throat; I thought it best to press on and finish this story and change the subject.
"He'd bring in a chapter every week from his book, read it aloud and ask us how we'd write it better. It was his first novel for grown-ups. It had a lovestory in it, and his face
would get bright red, reading parts of it, he'd laugh and shake his head in the middle of a sentence he thought was a little too true and tender for a football-coach to be sharing with his writing class. He had a terrible time writing women. Whenever he got too far from sports and the outdoors, we could hear it in his writing; telling about women was creaking along thin ice. So we'd criticize gleefully; we'd say, 'Mister Gartner, the lady doesn't seem quite as real to us as Rock Taylor does. Is there some way you can show her to us instead of tell her to us?'
"And he'd bellow with laughter and pat his handkerchief over his forehead and he'd agree, he'd agree. Because always Big John drove it into us, he'd pound his fist on the table: 'Don't TELL me, SHOW me! INCIDENT! and EXAMPLE!' "
"You loved him a lot, didn't you?"
I smashed away another tear. "Ah ... he was a good teacher, little wookie."
"If you loved him, what's wrong with saying that you loved him?"
"I never thought of it that way. I did love him. I do love him."
And then before I knew what I was doing, I was kneeling in front of her, arms around her legs, head down in her lap, sobbing for a teacher whose death I had heard fifth-hand without a blink, years before.
She stroked the back of my head. "It's all right," she said softly, "it's all right. He must be so proud of you, and your writing. He must love you, too."
What a strange feeling, I thought. This is what it's like to cry! It had been so long since I had done more than clench my jaw and bring down steel against sorrow. The last time I
had cried? I couldn't remember. The day my mother died, a month before I became an aviation cadet, off to earn my wings in Air Force pilot training. From the day I joined the military, intensive practice in emotional control: Mr. Bach, henceforth you will salute all moths and flies. Why will you salute all moths and flies? You will salute all moths and flies because they have their wings and you do not. There is a moth on yonder window. Mister Bach, Laiuff: FACE! Fo-wurd: HAR! And: HALT! Face moth: FACE! Hand: SALUTE! Wipe that smile off your mouth, Mister. Now step on that smile, kill that smile, KILL IT! Now pick it up and carry it outside and bury it. You think this program's a joke? Who's in control of your emotions, Mister Bach!"
That was the center of my training, that's what mattered: who's in control?
Who's in control? I am! I the rational, I the logical, screening and weighing and judging and picking the way to act, the way to be. Never did I-the-rational consider I-the-emotional, that despised minority, never allowed him to take the wheel.
