Like We Care (23 page)

Well, you know:
whatever
.

She had bigger concerns. She kept waiting for Viceroy—for someone— to pull the plug on this whole thing, having recognized what was at best a Grade-A set of hypocrisies, and at worst a threat to the entire infrastructure of R
²
Rev. What the kids in this piece were on about, what would soon be introduced to a young audience numbering in the millions, was a disavowal of pretty much every industry and behavior that kept the network alive. As the project was fast-tracked through the pipeline, she really wanted to know: Could Viceroy really not see who they were attacking here?

She
wasn’t going to bring it up. Let him nurture his hippie dreams and whatever dirty thoughts he had for her. In the end, she knew that he knew that this piece was just another time-filler fed into the ravenous maw that was a 24-hour cable channel. Programming—no more, no less. This stuff just passed right through the kids on the receiving end, men like Hutch Posner and John Viceroy believed. None of it stuck. None of it mattered. This is how they slept.

“J
oel turned eighteen last week,” Todd told Mr. Kolak.

The teacher was guarded, as he had been ever since the City Council meeting. Except for in class, he didn’t interact with his students anymore, and stayed clear of the Happy Snack. When he opened his front door to find Todd and Joel on his front step, his first instinct was to send them away.

“Happy birthday,” Frank said.

“Thanks.”

“Did you see the show last night?” Todd asked.

Of course he had. In the days leading up to the R
²
Rev debut, the whole town had been buzzing, culminating in a huge viewing party at Jeff Regan’s house. Joel, of course, was the guest of honor. Todd had pleaded with Mr. Kolak to attend, had come to see him as a crucial adviser in what they were trying to accomplish, but Frank had begged off. Principal Dave Keller had suggested that it might be a good idea for the Social Studies teacher to confine his activism to the classroom for awhile.

So he watched the show alone, and found it to be a remarkable piece of propaganda. Everything he knew to be true about the Happy Snack situation was presented accurately, and yet, through manipulative editing and production embellishments, Joel’s modest campaign was pumped up into a shimmering, vibrating
happening
—literally, a true fraud. Frank still admired the stand these kids had taken, still found something almost profound about the enlightenment which his students had stumbled upon and then refused to let go of, but seeing it reduced to leering entertainment processed through the very machinery Joel was taking a stand against made the whole thing ring hollow. He suspected that whatever it was that had been noble about the campaign had just been effectively strangled.

“Yeah, it was pretty good,” he lied, still not wanting to dampen their enthusiasm. “Signed your first autograph yet?”

Joel puffed up as he simultaneously blanched at the very idea. “Yeah, right!”

“You really thought it was good?” Todd asked intently. “You didn’t think they kind of overdid it?”

“It was what it was,” the teacher shrugged, looking past them to the street beyond to see if they were being watched. “It
was
television. What did you expect?”

“It’s just that—”

“Guys, look. I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he said as their eagerness sagged a little. “I’m proud of what you accomplished, I really am. I’m looking at this like the greatest extra credit project ever. You took a stand, you made a difference—no Social Studies teacher could ask for more, and you’ll see that reflected in your quarter grade. But you’ve taken it as far as you can. I think you—everybody—has to move on.”

The boys were not discouraged. When you’re taking a stand, you must not be.

“Can we come in?”

Mr. Kolak sighed and thought, not about the ramifications but about why he was a teacher. There were so many things that he was not, but he
was
a teacher. A good one, he hoped.

He stepped aside, and gestured them in.

The fallout from the City Council debacle had left Frank rattled long after the controversy had faded away.

Dave Keller had called him into his office the next morning, having already been pounced upon by several parents, the superintendent of schools, and the local paper. Was it really true that Frank had stood up before the city and accused the Council of racism? Had he really threatened to call in Jesse Jackson?

“I mean,
Jesus
, Frank. . .”

Frank felt queasy. He hadn’t slept all night. “
I
didn’t bring up Jesse Jackson! Do you think I’m crazy?!”

Keller stared at Frank, not knowing what to do with this situation. He and Frank were friends because they worked the same mine, but Keller barely knew him. Frank kept to himself most times, and when forced to contend with an unhappy parent or a disruptive student in Keller’s presence, it always appeared that the teacher might just crumble from frailty.

Every year, rumors went around among the students that Frank was gay. Inevitably, hurtful pranks resulted.

“Look, I’m probably the only person in this whole town who watches those meetings,” Frank said defensively. “I know all about what’s going on in that neighborhood. I’ve heard the Council all but admit that if they lose that store, the
complexion
of that whole corner of town could go. They say it all the time, only they use code words. I was just trying to get them to—”

“
Frank
,” Keller grimaced. “That is not your place.”

“Those are our students, Dave! The city has been looking the other way while that store polluted them, and nobody was doing anything about it!”

“That’s for the parents to deal with. Not us!”

“The parents!” Frank laughed. “You should have seen. . .”

He stopped.

He had the tape. It was still home in his VCR. All night long he had circled the machine anxiously, half of him wanting to play it to prove that it hadn’t really been as awful as he believed it was, the other half wishing to erase it so as to never have to witness himself falling so short of what he had come to do.

But he had the tape. And, to his credit, Dave Keller rallied behind his teacher once he saw it. What Frank had implied at the town hall meeting was inflammatory, but Keller saw that Frank had barely put his accusation on the table before he was shut down by the Council and the townsfolk in attendance. The vehemence with which they deflected his charge—and the speed with which they declared the meeting over and fled into the night— told Keller that Frank was most likely right. And you couldn’t fire a teacher for that.

Frank’s union wouldn’t allow it. Nor would the fact that Frank was one of the few black teachers in a school that was seeing its racial balance shift with each new semester. Things would probably be tense between Frank and certain parents in the near future, but there would be no repercussions for his botched attempt at social protest. If he knocked it off.

Therefore, calls to Frank from the local news outlets, trying to wring a racial sidebar out of the Happy Snack protests, went unanswered. Without Frank to amplify what he had only hinted at before the Council, that part of the story faded away. The city’s official stance was to remain determined to see to it that the store obeyed the letter of the law,
or else.

Sixth Ward Councilman Jerry Self, running unopposed in the upcoming elections, would see to it.

So nothing would be done about the Happy Snack, but this was not what had been haunting Frank Kolak. He was right—he
knew
it—and they had not only turned it around on him and tried to paint
him
as being the problem, but they had succeeded in shutting him up and turning away any attention to what he had said.
Still
, this was not what was haunting him. He had been beaten up worse than this in his life.

What was troubling him was that he hadn’t seen the lesson being taught. He had been inspired by what he had seen his students set into motion. He had marveled at the ease with which their simple truths had found potency. And he was fool enough to think he could raise a stink of his own. Having never stood out, stood up, in his whole life, he had been tricked by a bunch of teenagers into thinking that he could matter, too.

But what
really
ate at him, what made him almost angry at the two boys who now sat in his kitchen, was that Todd Noland got it right where he hadn’t. Todd knew he needed Joel in order to be heard; Frank Kolak, who could not have had less armor, thought he could do it himself.

Never again. . .

“So. . .” Todd began awkwardly, the tension pressing upon them in this sad little apartment. “Joel turned eighteen.”

“And. . .?” the teacher asked impatiently.

“And we figure that changes everything.”

Frank’s spine tightened. He still found this Todd Noland kid to be as intriguing as he was shrewd, but at heart he was a tricky little bastard.

“Sure. Now you can buy your cigarettes legally. Party on, dude.”

Todd and Joel winced:
Party on, dude?

“Nah, fuck that,” Joel said, then caught himself. “I mean. . .”

Frank sighed tiredly. “You’re an adult now, Joel. You can say ‘fuck’ all you like. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’—just gets better every time, doesn’t it?”

Todd and Joel sat quietly. Mr. Kolak was acting weird.

“But
you
can’t,” the teacher pointed at Todd with a melodramatic flourish. “
You’re
still a kid.”

“Aw, he never says ‘fuck,’” Joel offered.

“Fuck,” Todd said.

Frank threw up his hands with exasperation, wondering if listening devices had been planted to bust him for continuing to play along with whatever the hell these two were up to. He still believed the school would fire him if it could.

He stood up to cut short this new mistake. “Okay, never mind. Out!” he said as he pointed them toward the door.

“Mr. Kolak,
please,
” Todd said earnestly. “We need you on this.”

Where did they get the balls? He spent his whole life thinking the world was trying to show him the door, and here he was, literally showing them the door, and they wouldn’t go.

He crossed his arms and settled back into the corner of his kitchen table. He was not going to let them ramble.

“Quickly.”

Todd coughed nervously, then commenced. “Okay, so Joel’s eighteen now. A lot of seniors are. I looked at the class roster and almost eighty percent are eighteen years old, or will be by April.”

This Todd, he dropped clues. Pay attention.

“April?”

“What good does it do you anymore to be eighteen?” Todd asked, pointing to Joel. “He can buy cigarettes, but he’s been doing that all along. He still can’t drink legally for another three years. He could get himself drafted if there was a war.”

“And, dude, freshmen are jailbait now!” Joel piped in, not quite grasping the legalities but clearly vexed.

Frank rolled his eyes. The priorities of teenagers were appalling. “When you’re eighteen you could, oh I don’t know,
vote
!”

“Yeah,” Todd smiled meaningfully. “That, he can do.”

Pay attention.

“So. . .?”

Joel jumped ahead. Joel was always jumping ahead. “So we think you should run for City Council. If you do, we’ll get everybody behind you and you’ll win. Todd says so.”

It just laid there for a beat or two.

“What?”

Todd picked it up. “You nailed them on that Happy Snack business. This town
knew
that store was giving us booze and cigarettes, and all they cared about was keeping black people out. You nailed that when nobody else could see it, and then they shut you down.”

Frank chuckled nervously. He felt a bad, bad itch.

“That doesn’t mean that I—”

“They were selling us out!” Todd stressed. “We live in this town, too. A lot of us work and pay taxes, just like our parents. Who’s looking out for us?”

“We got nobody!” Joel added.

Frank stared at them. This was a tar baby, that’s what this was.

Evenly, firmly: “I don’t want to be on the City Council.”