Hijacking English class

In the morning I hitched to high school.   The fear that used to knot my stomach when

I had entered this tense milieu in the past was gone.  The bubble of fear and

separation around others now seemed meaningless and  penetrable.  

When I went back to school we were reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the

Cuckoo’s Nest in English class.  It was a  powerful commentary on authority and its

suppression of the spirit and of imagination.  The protagonist of the book, a 

charismatic instigator, breaks the rules and finds himself in direct conflict with the

nurses’ suppressive authoritarian rules.  The students in my class were very moved

by the book. Ironically, my English teacher had employed a “big nurse” style of

teaching, herself.  She wouldn’t let us talk about our feelings, but was didactic and

dry. I couldn’t figure out why she chose this book. 

She asked us who our favorite character was and why. Several students expressed

that with enthusiasm that they liked the protagonist.  She folderd her arms and

asked, “What did you like about him?” 

Someone answered, “I liked the fact that he wouldn’t let others suppress him and”...

At this point she interrupted, chalk poised agaiinst the board, saying, “and what

adjective would you use to describe the protagonists’ character?”  The student, now

thrown from his train of thought, now had to shift to focus upon an adjective.  Again

and again she would interrupt when the discussion became thoughtful, rather than

critical. She was concerned with form, not content.

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I raised my hand and asked;  “When do we get to talk about what happened to the

protagonist?” 

She flushed and said, “You’re question is out of line.” At this point I half expected her

to force-feed me three thorizines.

I retorted. “Well, it’s not irrelevant to me and apparently not to most of the class,” She

stood there dumbly.  Then she said, folding her arms,  “Why don’t YOU teach the

class if you know so much?”  “sure!” I said, and was feeling strange. I said something

to the effect of  “I think that what the book is saying is certainly at least as important

as the form in which it is said.”  I was bored with form.  It was so impersonal.  Dead

silence.  I continued. “How many of you like school?”  Two students sheepishly raised

their hands. “Do you know WHY you don’t like school?...because you aren’t aloud to

THINK.” I was talking about spontaneous thinking, inspirational, artistic, put-it-

together thinking.  I was talking about connecting what you’re told with what you’ve

experienced first hand.  “This book is not just about a guy in a mental institution.  It’s

about how people get creamed for trying to be themselves.    This guy gets screwed

for trying to stay alive.  So do we, if we try at all.”  I felt powerful.  It was a speech I’d

been saying in my head for a long time.

I alluded to other thoughts about how hard it was to stay alive inside. Something

about how adults had warned us about drugs and alcohol, saying  it was because of

peer pressure, but how for me it was the need to escape the adult world’s psychic

and emotional vacuum. No one showed me  what how to direct to do with all my

energy, especially all that sexual energy.  My father treated me like a whore.  I saw

no guidance, felt I could get no information, no road map to live by, except to “stuff

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it”.  What kind of alternative was that?

My teacher didn’t respond and the bell rang as my speech ended.  The next day only

a few students showed up in my English class.  One student grabbed my arm in the

hallway and told me he’d had a nightmare that I did that again and he hid under the

desk.

Gary showed up at my school that day, as if to support me.  I began to think he really

cared.  He took me back to the newspaper office and went back to Yale to finish

school. I don’t remember where I stayed but he apparently talked to Godly and Goldy

left me alone. 

Then one day Gary showed up at Other Voice with a skinny girl with long brown hair

and freckles. He ignored me.  After an entire day of avoiding me he approached me

glibly.  “The deal’s off.” He spoke as if we were business partners. “What do you

mean?”  I quivered.  My nerves were short-circuting, I could hear a  buzz in my ears. 

I was that losing him would mean losing my very tenuous self-confidence.

“I’m going to a commune called the Brotherhood of the Spirit.”  His sudden coldness

chilled me. I would barely talk to Gary again in the ensuing ten years when he and I

would live  in the same community, with him acting as if we’d never met, except 

once  when he asked me to stop telling people about how I’d known him before.  “It

was an important time, it was incredible.”  I said to him.  “No it wasn’t.

 I don’t even remember it.”  he said.  And that was that.

After Gary left, I somehow found a temporary place to stay in Hartford. Another good-

looking college guy offered to let me stay at his pad for awhile.  He seemed straight

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and a little uptight but he wasn’t straight with me.   He lurked around my bed at 2

a.m., like I owed him “rent,”  and I left in the middle of the night in tears. Free love

and taking advantage of people were two different things and some of the hippest

looking guts I met were  pigs.

I crashed at various apartments offered by college boys, but those places inevitably

petered out and I had to scramble, sometimes eating as rarely as once every four

days. In downtown Hartford I was able to trade working a cash-register for food, and

found the city more willing to put me up if I put out. Free love wasn’t free after all.