Teacher by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fictioin
ISBN: 9780307428059
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

THE WALRUS

But in my life things got not better but worse over the course of that winter. I sniffed at the orphan state prescribed by Lears and by Socrates—or, more optimistically, the liberated condition, in which one becomes, as Goethe put it, a free artist of oneself—and got nervous; terrified, really. I was left with the psychological poverty of being outside the group, outside the pack. Football was over and life seemed to be, too. So rather than going over to Frank Lears—who, unlike Mace Johnson and the Fat Father and all the other fathers abroad, didn’t really want me, or who wanted me, and the rest of us, only to become ourselves, whatever that might mean—I found myself another guiding light, a new prophet, and a new, more literal kind of high than anything produced on the football field.

To put it a little less obliquely, I started getting drunk as often as I could, and I put myself under the tutelage of a new mentor, an anti-Lears in most ways. I became a disciple of the amateur but inspired philosopher we nicknamed the Walrus.

I got drunk for the first time at the end of the football season. I went down to Playstead Park, an enormous preserve with a soccer field, a baseball diamond, tennis courts (vandalized), and swings (same) to commiserate with some of the other players and a few hangers-on after Malden, the Greater Boston League champions, ruined us on Thanksgiving Day. When ordering time came, rather than holding back as I usually did, I jingled four quarters and called for two quarts of Schlitz. They returned soon in a car piled with illegal booze, and there, standing on crusty, frozen ground, I chugged them down in a fraction of an hour. I had them both open at once, the quarts, slugging from one bottle then from the other.

I took to liquor like a duck to the pond. Heidi ho! I had to yell. Sounded like a hillbilly. Heidi ho!

Whatever invisible weight had been draped like lead bags on my shoulders was instantly lifted. This, I remember thinking, is what it feels like to be young.

And wasn’t I young the rest of the time? Apparently not. For now I was ripsnortingly alive, feeling as though I’d just thrown a perfect cross-body block and were ambling, free and easy, back to the huddle, the pack. I walked on air; I breathed an intoxicating ether. Nothing hurt—nothing. I thought I could dance, sing. I did both. I thought that my utter failure—no, it was not failure, because I had never even brought myself to the testing point—with girls must be a matter of pronounced shyness. If only I could drop the mask of foolish propriety, cast off my inhibiting skin like the slough it was. Drop the mask and let the sweetness stream in, in and out. I was a mortal god, standing in cruciform in Playstead Park, Medford, Massachusetts, flourishing a quart bottle in each outstretched hand, mass-produced nectar of the masses, Schlitz lager.

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