Dead hand

By Jeff Guy

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool

'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

--- Working Class Hero, John Lennon

One night when I was in sixth grade, asleep in my bed, I had a dream. My school teacher (sixth grade was still in elementary then) was standing in front of the chalkboard (it was chalkboards in those days), her back and broad, wide butt to the class when she farted.

She turned her head around to the class, her bushy black hair and eyebrows residing like a dirt top over orange-prep glasses accentuated by her silent, embarrassed laughter and off-kilter eyes. She tried to regroup herself. Like a man tucking his balls back into his pants, she turned back around to the board and started to dip her chalk like a rod to a gaping hole, when again.

A loud fart.

She turned her head back nervously at the class, mortified and no longer in pedagogical flatulence, but every time she turned her face back to the wall, there followed a kamikaze of uncontrollable and increasingly liquid farts.

It’s no surprise that I would have such a dream. The dimensions of her eyebrows and ass were low hanging fruit for a fart joke. But perhaps, on a subconscious level, the levity released by the mind’s eye image of a teacher crapping her pants before a classroom of sixth graders was respite from the sturm und drang I was feeling. Stress and anxiety, emotions I’ve been all too conscious of as an adult, were clearly there even if the words weren’t yet in my vocabulary and the emotional turbulence was so normalized, I barely realized it shouldn’t be happening.

I came in, hot and sweaty, from recess. A girl looked at me. “Jeff, you stink.” I wanted to kill myself.

The truth is I was behaving erratically and I couldn’t manage the control needed to insert my soul back into the bottle. I was getting in a lot of trouble. It was a double classroom, two classrooms, two teachers, two groups of around 20 kids stuck together in one “cohesive” unit. An experiment in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Anyone who’s studied pedagogy knows education is in a constant state of experimentation, data and change.

Neither of the teachers liked me. It’s a cliche now, a bromidic oversaturation of classic rock radio, but at the time, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” with its Dickensian anger, was cutting edge and when I heard the lines, “dark sarcasm in the classroom,” I knew what Roger Waters meant.

I felt like a criminal. I remember the moment my mom told me one of my friends who had terrible problems at home would never amount to anything when he grew up. “What do you think he’s gonna be?” I asked. “A loser,” she said. I never even thought of that word, loser, before, but at that nanosecond of a moment, I knew exactly what one looked like.

What the hell is wrong with me? What is it? Principal’s office today, police interrogation room tomorrow? A record of me in the school administrative file cabinet today? A rap sheet in some district attorney’s office tomorrow?

The truth is my mom and step-dad were getting divorced that year. It only dawned on me a few years ago that there might’ve been a connection. Perhaps tangentially, but some connection nevertheless. There was just noise and sweat and cussing and cutting each other down at home. I wanted them to get divorced. I wanted him to leave and never come back. Then one day after school, my mom told me he moved out. He wasn’t coming back. I sobbed inexorably until I was hyperventilating. I hated myself for ever wanting it to end. It was all my fault. The world was so bottomless and enveloping. It was demons with torches or something.

My teachers? One was long, skinny with an elongated ass. The other - the one who farted in my dream -- was short, squatty with a fat ass. Things were so much better and simpler when they were young back in the good ol’ days of the ‘50s.

“When we were kids, if you smarted off to someone 10 years older -- FIVE years older than you! -- you got slapped in the mouth,” the thin woman barked in class one day, the regret easily traceable in her voice that it was no longer so..

A republicunt to the core, she was a high school Goldwater girl in the ‘64 election, and that tells you everything you need to know about her. Years later, one of my brother’s drinking buddies told me the teacher and her husband were mean to their kids, which didn’t surprise me. “They got a divorce,” she said, taking a drag from her cigarette. That didn’t surprise me either. A regular man couldn’t withstand being hooked to that battle axe.

The fat, farty one -- she went on to teach in a “Christian” school. Religion? Rules. Rigidity. Shaming. Fearmongering. Corporal punishment for kids. Yeah, made sense to me.

Anyhow, my family went to pot. I really believe my mom shut down. School was kind of a shit life. By the time I graduated from high school, I felt spent. Exhausted. Shell shocked.

A bit prior to that, there were these teachers. They were nice to me. It was in Mrs. Ralston’s English class. I wrote this essay about a time I had a panic attack, couldn’t swallow and got terrified of dying. “Jeff, I just want to take this opportunity to tell you, you’re a neat guy and your positive attitude is very admirable, she wrote on my paper. I was like OMG! Someone saved my life tonight That sent me on a wave I guess I never came down from. I mean, hell, I didn’t even know I had a positive attitude.

Mrs. Ralston is appropriate and respectable. A word like “fart” would offend her. Therefore, if we were to meet, I wouldn’t say it in her presence.

I’ve been reading this book about a guy who’s been a Greenpeace sailor for 40 years. He talked about how his parents were pals with Pete Seeger, marched for Civil Rights and his mother campaigned for Presidential candidate Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in 1948 and got grilled about it by HUAC (House of Un-American Activities) 10 years later.

I can read knowledgeably about stuff like HUAC and Martin Luther King, Jr. because when I was in sophomore English we were reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and learning about the parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy era. I had to give this oral report on HUAC. To me, it was a standard report. Nothing significant. But it was the beginning of me, really. I had no idea my whole adult life was going to be about Civil Liberties, equality, freedom of the press, anti-censorship, anti-racism and all that stuff, but that’s where I landed.

The other nice teacher was Mrs. Gibbs. She died a few years ago; I didn’t get to go to the funeral. But I always had a soft spot for Gibbs. A lot of people were dicks in her class and some of my former classmates and I still talk about how she’d get stressed out and take some, not-so-clandestine smoke break. Yeah, that was an open secret. Anyhow, I took journalism from Gibbs, wrote for the school newspaper and that showed me what I wanted to do for a living. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do.

Years after high school when I was working in Oklahoma, Gibbs would see my brother and his then girlfriend, Jenny, at the bar and say affably, “How’s Jeff doing?”

Paradigm shift

My mother, who died in 2019, was my biggest cheerleader in a lot of ways, but she could also guilt and shame me until I felt like a weirdo. Inadequate. I don’t take it personally anymore. It was only after I became an adult that I learned Mom gave me an upgrade from the hellhole she grew up in.

I just knew when I was about to have kids that I would do it differently. There would be no guilt, shaming, fearmongering, no yelling, cussing at them or hitting. If I had to correct them, it would always be about the behavior, not them, personally. I felt if I had to resort to violence -- if I couldn’t teach them by talking rationally to them, I’d be a crappy parent. Whatever problem arose, we’d resolve it. There was nothing we couldn’t accomplish. I gave them both one gift. It was that I would always accept them and let them be who they were.

It was a paradigm shift. I threw out the old playbook that wasn’t working. I can only remember reading one book when my then wife was pregnant with our oldest. I checked out this little, bitty influential book from the library. It came from Rob Reiner’s “I Am Your Child” foundation, but basically I just wrote my own book.

Maintaining a stable home life was everything to me. I always thought I’d really be fucking my kids if their mother and I ever divorced. But it happened. There were fights, but nothing like the acrimony I grew up in. I knew almost instinctively how to be a good parent, but I didn’t know how to properly love a woman. I loved her, but I didn’t cherish her in that way every woman should be cherished. I got married, then sat on my butt and did nothing. I didn’t know that marriage was the beginning of a relationship, not the end. And it’s like I was addicted to drama. Any pain I caused her and my kids, I lament dearly. It will bother me till the day I die, but I accept my punishment. I own all the damage I did.

My ex and I have continued to co-parent and maintain an amicable relationship. There’s never been any animosity. We don’t badmouth each other to our kids. She changed my life and I’ll always care about her, but the romantic stuff is in the past. She’s remarried with a kid from that union. I just wish her peace.

New day awakening

I think we’re at the dawn of a new age. We’re finally learning that the hard ass approach to dealing with people -- children and adults -- has been a disaster. It never worked and it never will.

We’ve devalued people from birth to the grave. “You’re on food stamps...you lost your job...you’re an illegal...you’re gay...you’re on drugs...you were in jail...you’re from the wrong religion...you’re liberal (or conservative)...you come from the wrong family...you were born a boy and you wanna be a girl and use the wrong bathroom.”

But I honestly believe that myopic mode of thinking is on the way out. Twenty or thirty years from now, it’s going to appear natural and obvious that we were wasting time on the ashtray road of history. Young adults not even born yet will wonder how their parents and grandparents could be so short-sighted and cruel.

My favorite story that I ever wrote for the Worthington News -- the one that mattered to me above all others -- was the piece I wrote about a young local woman who was named National Teacher of the Year in 2020. That was my friend, Tabatha. A part of that was personal ambition. I was competing with national media, and her award was announced on CBS This Morning so I knew I couldn’t be first, but I wanted to be best.

Also, I considered a local girl advancing the Benevolent Community on the national stage to be The Story of The Year in these parts. Teaching is God’s work, it’s a higher calling serving a higher purpose in life and there’s nothing better than a good teacher.

Nothing worse than a bad teacher.

But Tabatha (I like her name because it reminds me of Darren and Samantha Stevens’ daughter on Bewitched) is on the vanguard of a new awakening in education and interpersonal relationships.

A preschool teacher, her philosophy of social emotional learning is the future. In her teaching style, empathy, respect, kindness, inter-generational harmony and peaceful conflict resolution are integrated within the curriculum. I know Tabatha didn’t invent it, but she’s promulgating it. I remember suggesting to her that she use her platform to write an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times or Washington Post. Or that she write a book. I wouldn’t be surprised if she does write a book someday. And I could see her writing a textbook for education majors. She’s already started teaching college classes about the teaching arts.

Then there’s my friend, Chase, a high school history/government teacher in a small, rural district. The man is imparting life lessons, be it in the classroom, while coaching football or...in the county clerk’s office. One of Chase’s proudest moments as a teacher came when he got the 18-year-olds in his government class registered to vote. The important thing in his mind was getting them engaged and excited about the process.

Whatever political opinions he may have, his goal is to present all sides of an argument and guide students into making informed opinions of their own.

I’ve always been a history nerd, but I never had a teacher like Chase in high school. I consider his students to be damn lucky. He teaches in a bucolic area where a certain redneck mentality that would never fly in Wichita is normal. But Chase is no stranger to urban environments and he’s opening a window to the larger complexities of the world to kids from very insular backgrounds. I would be surprised if in a few years, a former student of his getting started in life doesn’t say to herself, “He opened my mind.”

What I’m saying here is people like Tabatha and Chase are making the world better. I’m in awe because I can’t do what they do. I’m a writer, not an educator. But maybe the future is all of us doing a bit of teaching and learning from each other. Family is a village and vice versa. I should say

Mindfulness is all the rage now even if we haven’t gotten there yet. We’re motioning through the growing pains of learning to harness our ubiquitous technological connection with the deeper spiritual connective fabric that binds us all as individuals in oneness.

I honestly believe that in this era of our human evolution, we’re on the cusp of a new positivity. That’s the direction the wind is blowing in. But it’s up to us. Are we going to stay hung up on the dead hand of the past or embrace the future?

What if we ended the white middle class bias in education? The factory model in education? The school-to-prison pipeline? Just wiped it out forever? Ended it like the draft?

What if we taught our kids from the beginning that gentleness is normal? What if we used the gift of language to enrich, to build up, rather than tear down? That feelings are okay? That YOU are OKAY? That self-worth is symbiotic with embracing the value in others? That all life has value? That diversity is a beautiful thing? That we’re all different, yet the same?

What if these universal truths are taught to the youngest of children and reinforced throughout their education and careers? What if it becomes second nature? We already know we can hardwire prejudice into young minds when they came into this world with no barriers, whatsoever. We’ve been doing it for generations. What if we went another way?

I know we’ll never arrive at the station. Our solutions (which are right here for the taking) will always be outpaced by our problems. That we’ll always be late to correct. That the solutions today are the problems, tomorrow. That existentialism being what it is, social change will always be met with a step backward in civility. But that doesn’t mean, don’t try. It’s about progress, not perfection. And progress in its pure reality, is measured, not in erecting edifices and weapons and for-profit corporations, but in human growth and relationships.

I thought I was the only one. Then I started getting private messages and texts from people I grew up with, confiding in me. “My dad beat me.” “My mom was an alcoholic.” “My sister’s boyfriend molested me.” But we’re survivors and we’re making the world better, I really believe that.

It’s been so long, but we found the keys to the car and we’re riding the dharma road to peace.

We’ve been down 20,000 roads and lived 10 different lives ever since we were kids and it’s wearing us down. But I’m standing here -- at this moment --

and I -- we -- are coming home.

"I'll Be Your Mirror" -- Velvet Underground & Nico