Are You Nuts?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Beatrix Xury rushed into my classroom.

Beatrix lived to panic and her life bounced from one red alert to another. Beatrix was tall, thin, and mean. She'd been teaching at Grover Cleveland High School for nearly thirty-five years. She had taught the high-honors math class for ages, and during this time, she had directed the math team to innumerable state championships. Parents adored her. Their children shone brilliantly. Administrators usually started out loving her dearly, but after a few encounters, began hating her passionately. She nagged about anything. She complained about everything from the unbelievably trivial to the incredibly useless. Her incessant yammering could drive a roomful of saints nuts.

Firing her would be impossible. All those lovely math-team headlines? The inertia inherent in any school system bureaucracy? Add those to the fact that she didn't physically abuse any children, and she'd be entrenched in her position until the sun and moon switched orbits. Students had wildly mixed reactions to her. If she liked you, class and the math team were pure heaven. If she disliked you, you got a taste of total hell.

As a fellow faculty member, I'd avoided her for years. As the union building representative in the recent past, I'd tried my best to sidestep the worst of her nuttiness. Being building rep also meant handling grievances for my building. At these, Beatrix excelled. Always go with your strength.

At the end of last year, I had wanted to quit my dual role. Kurt Campbell, our union president and a good friend, had begged me not to. Normally, I'm sensible enough to refuse Kurt's more extreme requests—dealing with loony people is not a favorite pastime of mine. However, at the age of thirty-nine, he'd needed quadruple heart bypass surgery. On a visit to him in the hospital just before school was let out last spring, he'd told me he was going to resign as union president. He said he wanted to leave the organization in good hands and suggested I run for union president. I'm not that nuts. I'd had the sense to say no even with his promise of full support in the special election to be held just after school started in August. After I turned down his suggestion on the presidency, he'd convinced me that certain key positions had to be held by competent people he trusted. How can you refuse a friend who's flat on his back after having major surgery?

At the moment, he was relaxing with his wife and kids in some spa in Arizona owned by his parents. I couldn't wait for him to get back. Which left me several days before school began that August sitting in an unair-conditioned classroom listening to Beatrix Xury. She had pale skin and blue-rinsed, long hair pulled back and tied in a bun. Her lips compressed firmly when she was miffed or concerned. When startled or angry, her face took on the look of someone who had just had a large pickle jammed up her ass.

Beatrix was a special case. At the drop of the most trivial mote of a problem, she would call me. At home. Constantly. Usually after 10
P.M
. Why Beatrix couldn't have a crisis at seven or eight in the evening was beyond me. She'd call about the fact that members of her department wouldn't share their computers. That they didn't invite her to parties. That other teachers had classes with brighter kids or easier electives to teach. That her pet projects never received any budget money. That every other teacher had more office space than she. That the district was infringing on her academic freedom. (This last a neat trick in a math class.) Or if all these didn't work, she used the general complaint of “it's not fair.”

This Monday in August, her opening salvo after she burst into my room was, “You've got to go to the PTA meeting tonight.”

I sighed.

She prattled on, “They're going to pay a nontenured teacher to organize the senior-honors math-team field trip to the national math convention this year. That's not fair. I've done it all these years for nothing. I said I wouldn't do it again unless I was paid. So, they told me they'd find somebody else, but now they're paying somebody.” To a teacher such as Beatrix, with years of seniority in the district along with an attitude problem, allowing a newer teacher even the slightest privilege was one of the greatest sins.

On this issue, I was particularly unsympathetic. First, she'd used the dreaded chant of the nineties—it's not fair. Second, she'd used the other F-word. I hate field trips. I can't imagine going anywhere with any group of fifty people on an uncomfortable bus. Field trips are little more than madness in action. Fill a bus with teenagers and drag them to something an adult has decided is educational, and they will be bored to tears and ready for more kinds of mischief than I would ever choose to imagine. You want to go on a field trip, don't get near me.

“How is this a violation of the union contract?” I asked. (What I wanted to say was, “Listen, you silly twit. That is incredibly stupid, selfish, moronic, and against your own self-interest.” I've discovered that truth can be a highly overrated commodity.)

“They can't be paying someone without going through the union. That's not right.”

I wished it were possible to tell her about the teacher who had been in half an hour earlier, but I'd been sworn to secrecy. A parent had cornered this teacher and said that she was going to call the police and file child-molestation charges against the teacher. No matter that the teacher had never had the child in class, didn't know who the child was, had never met the child, and had never molested any child. I'd set this teacher up with a meeting with the union lawyer. Wishing her good luck as she had left had hardly seemed enough. A tragedy in the making, and now here was Beatrix with this nonsensical trash.

Tact with my colleagues. That's what Scott always reminds me about. But I've said it a million times. I can have incredible amounts of patience with the teenagers I teach, but I expect adults to act like adults, a proposition at least as chancy as that of always speaking the truth.

“How is offering someone money above what the contract pays not right?” I asked.

“Of course it isn't right. How could it be? They can't do that. They've never done it before.”

“How much money is involved?”

“It isn't the amount, it's the principle of the thing.”

Which meant it wasn't going to be a lot. Isn't that the way it always is? People get mad and claim it's a “principle” when most of the time what they mean is that it's a petty nothing that they've chosen to take as an insult. And usually when something big is a real insult, they chicken out about doing something about it.

I had a million things to do this day. I hadn't gotten a chance to get into my classroom earlier, and I had tons of work to do. Since I'd returned home, I'd had meetings each day. I was not in the mood for this crap.

I asked again, “How much?”

“One hundred dollars.”

Beatrix's salary was at least $65,000 a year. For little more than chump change, she would parade herself and her silly complaint before anybody she could corral. The result of her carrying on would not be new freedom and dignity for the oppressed masses of teachers. Unfortunately, many of her colleagues would not conclude she was a total moron. Rather, she would be hailed for fighting for her rights. I didn't care if she exercised her right to be stupid. I just wished she wouldn't do it near me.

What Beatrix didn't know was that I already knew about her problem. The school principal had called as a courtesy last week to inform me of the change and Beatrix's probable upset. I'd met with several union officials about this and a number of other issues last Friday. Years ago, when I first accepted this job, they'd told me what to watch out for, excuses people would give, pitfalls to avoid, and possible options to pursue. Unfortunately, blasting Beatrix into space for a long trip to Jupiter was not possible.

As for Beatrix's immediate problem, I'd discovered that no one had ever asked her to set up the field trip. Each year she'd complained about not being paid, and each year, union officials, her department chair, her colleagues, and probably her pet fish had told her—if she had so much to complain about, then simply cancel the damn trip, but no.

“You've got to file a grievance,” she declared.

“Against whom?”

“The PTA.”

I stifled my first comment. “Are you nuts?” certainly was the appropriate question. What I said, patiently, was, “The PTA is not part of our contract.”

“They can't just start paying people. It's not fair.”

In that humidity-infested room, I said, “Well, Beatrix, you'll have to fill out the paperwork.” I'd discovered that giving in sometimes drives them nuts. Better them going crazy than me.

Now she said, “Why can't the union file the grievance? Why do I have to?”

This was a fairly common tactic among those faculty who loved to cause trouble but didn't want to get off their butts. If they really believed in the cause they were championing, they'd do whatever it took to right the wrong done to them. Too often they simply loved the upset and uproar that gave somebody else headaches. They had a problem, but you had to do all the work.

I said, “You know how it works, Beatrix. The union helps the member on the grievance. We go with them to meetings. We give advice and assist in writing grievances. We represent them, but the member has to take the responsibility.”

“I don't see why you can't do it.”

“I'm not sure I'm capable of making you see why, Beatrix. I don't know what you want from me.”

“Do something! Talk to them. Go to the meeting.”

“This is not something for the union to be involved in. It does not concern the union. When someone offers us more money, it is not a bad thing to say yes. We have no control over what the PTA does. There is no case here. The union doesn't have a leg to stand on.”

“You sound just like an administrator. The union's never done anything for me. They just take my dues every year. They don't really care what happens to me. I'm going to quit the union.”

I blew it big time by responding, “Yes, please do.”

Sometimes when they find out the union can't fix their problem, they threaten to drop their membership. They definitely believe in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately theory of political interaction.

Half my time was spent telling teachers they didn't have a case. They'd insist that I call Kurt, the union-local office, God Almighty, or someone with an equal amount of power as God Almighty in order to try to find any little opening that might allow them to tell their boss to shove it.

I regretted my injudicious comment to Beatrix almost as soon as I made it.

First, she got teary eyed. Then she sputtered a few seconds. Then she stomped to the exit, turned, and declared, “I'm getting my own lawyer.” She punctuated her departure with a slamming of the door.

Sometimes when you didn't tell teachers what they wanted to hear, they threatened to get their own lawyer. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you never heard from them or their lawyer.

I looked around my classroom. From walls and ceilings Beatrix had loosened specks of dust that still drifted down in the sticky air.

The wing of the school that contained my old classroom had burned down. They had shifted the English department to the oldest remaining wing of Grover Cleveland. This was not a good thing. I now had a chalkboard that was old-fashioned black, chipped, and paint-stained. The filth-encrusted windows gave an unimpeded view of the pothole-infested faculty parking lot. They'd unbent far enough to polish the tile floor of my classroom. This was a dubious benefit. No matter how often they scrubbed or how much cleaner they used on the ugly-grayish, dingy-yellow floor, the accumulated dirt never seemed to go away.

I needed to get to work on my classroom. The walls were still bare. None of the books, tests, reading centers, tapes, and other materials for the year had been unpacked. The computer, movable cart, modem, CD-ROM, and television set were still in their boxes. As a birthday gift last year, Scott had upgraded my electronic equipment in our penthouse. These were the perfectly usable leftovers. Despite my legitimate method of obtaining all this, I could already hear Beatrix and her ilk saying “it wasn't fair” that I got a computer and they didn't. Ask me if I cared.

The summer had been unbelievably hectic. My lover, Scott Carpenter, and I had run from interview to interview about his being an openly gay baseball player. The talk shows listed us as the “happy gay couple.” Right now a cozy little hideaway with Scott and me and food and water for six months would have been nice. Scott was still on the road and not due back for several more days. I'd come home to begin the school year. Part of the problem in dealing with Beatrix had been the dissonance I felt between the national attention I'd received for something I thought of as supremely important and the unbelievable unimportance of her complaints.

I was sure I would hear more about my crack to Beatrix, but I wasn't going to get worried about it yet. I had too much to do to waste time brooding on it.

I hunted for my old lesson-plan book where, in the front, I keep the assembled notes from past years about things to do for the opening of school. Most I could remember with my eyes closed, but if I didn't check the list, I always forgot something. I knew that at least I wanted to get the kids' names typed into my computer grade-book program today.

I searched for fifteen minutes, but I couldn't find the lesson-plan book. I looked through all the cabinets, then through every box of materials I'd accumulated over the years. It wasn't serious that it was gone, but it was odd. I always put it in the same “safe” place. Now I was worried that I'd found a new “safe” place and forgotten it. I knew I had it somewhere, it was just a matter of digging until it turned up. But it didn't. After half an hour, I gave up and opened the first box of computer equipment to look for the instruction manual.