Third-period History of Western Civilization was taught by the pear-shaped, flattopped Dewey Stoddard, Cassidy’s former JV basketball coach, who had since been promoted to offensive and defensive line coach on the football team.
Dressed in enormous red canvas coaching shorts, a white cotton polo shirt with a flying eagle over the pocket, tube socks, and black ripple-soled coaching shoes, Dewey in a classroom was as incongruous as a brown bear at Tiffany’s. His teaching style was a thing of his own invention. Leaning back against his desk, licking his thumb, and leafing languidly through the textbook, he would read more or less random passages while a buzzing fan blew warmish air back and forth across the heat-stunned students. He would occasionally attempt to interpret certain historical events with a modern sensibility, particularly as they might pertain to, say, football. The fan would have drowned out a lot of teachers, but Dewey’s practice field voice boomed off the walls of the stuffy classroom.
This morning it was already warm although only ten o’clock. Air-conditioning was a blessing found only in movie theaters, drugstores, and a few homes of the well-off. There weren’t even any official electric fans in the building either, but a few teachers like Dewey purchased them and brought them to school on their own. The school board wasn’t even embarrassed.
Cassidy still had very little posterior cushioning, so the hard desk seats were uncomfortable even under the best of conditions. On steamy spring mornings like this, his cotton underwear and thin pants would fuse itchily to his skin, and when he squirmed, the oak veneer seat would grind into his meager tuber ischiadicum. Every now and again he would lean forward and, as surreptitiously as he could, peel the irritating fabric away from his inflamed coccyx and try to remain in that awkward vulture-leaning position long enough for the fabric to dry out a little.
But worse than cheek itch were these lectures.
“All right, people, let’s take a look at this fella, the Emperor Charlemagne,” said Dewey, holding up his open text to the appropriate chapter in case anyone might think he was just making this up. He pronounced it, believe it or not, “Empra Charlie Mange.”
Dewey was a big fan of conquerors, whom he considered to be the progenitors of modern football coaches, and as far as Dewey was concerned, much of the ebb and flow of Western civilization could be explained in gridiron terms. Cassidy had come to believe that Dewey was an undiscovered comedic genius, and when he came out with a good one, Cassidy would roll his eyes at Ed Demski in the next row.
“Now, if you Charlie Mange, you look around your territory and you get to frettin’ about what you see,” said Dewey. “You got your defenses and all, but you look out across your borders, and whatcha got?”
Dewey’s unique style of pedagogy was to personalize the subject matter by figuratively placing the student right in a historical epoch in order to make the past “come alive.” This he learned at a Division III land grant institution near Dothan, Alabama.
“Why, you’re a Christian and all you got is pagan opponents. You got your Saxons, you got your Goths. Heck, you got your Slavs and your Basques, too. You throw in a few Moors and Huns and, why, next thing you know you completely surrounded by heathens! And you about to get sacked in y’own backfield!”
Cassidy knew where this was headed. He tore a corner off a sheet of notebook paper, folded it in half, and wrote, “Charlie Mange is going up the middle. Probably off-tackle,” and slipped it to Ed Demski, who had been going to a speech therapist twice a week and hardly stuttered at all anymore. He glanced at the note, turned beet red, put his chin in his hand, and started studying the Map of the Ancient World hanging on the side wall.
“So he says to hisself, ‘Hey, I got a army. I got horses and catapults and whatnot. I bet I could whip them others!’ Mr. Dinsky, is there somethin’ a’matter with you, son?”
Demski swallowed hard, looked up briefly at Dewey, and shook his head, his bulbous eyes glistening.
“No, sir,” he croaked.
Ed managed to keep himself more or less under control by looking anywhere but directly at Dewey. A Mexican standoff of several seconds’ duration took place as Dewey glared at him and Ed kept his eyes carefully trained on the big rotating Breeze King fan. Dewey was about to return to A.D. 768 when Ed let loose a loud, involuntary snort, quickly covering his mouth and turning his head aside. The class tittered.
“Listen up, Mr. Dinsky. You had better straighten up and fly right, son. Is there somethin’ you find amusin’ about the Empra Charlie Mange?”
Cassidy coughed. Demski shook his head, choking and red faced.
“Well, then, I . . .”
“I think I s-swallowed a gnat!” Demski croaked. For some reason, he had always pronounced it “guh-nat.” It brought the house down.
“Well, hellfire, son, go get a drink a’ water or somethin’! Don’t let a little inseck innarrup everbody else’s education here!”
“Yes, sir!” Demski blurted, absconding in a flash, even taking his books with him. Damn, Cassidy wondered, how did that happen?
Cassidy sighed. Now that Ed had escaped, this class was going to be worse than church. He looked around for other victims, but the only potential target was in the desk behind Ed’s, Maria DaRosa. Cassidy had known her since they were tiny and knew she was nowhere near as easy as Demski. What’s more, she was perfectly capable of cracking Cassidy up, in which case he’d be the one in trouble.
She smiled sweetly at him. “Let’s go, big boy,” she mouthed silently. Cassidy crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue prominently into his left cheek: no response.
“Jesus H.,” said Dewey, glaring at the door closing behind Demski. “All right, people, settle down. It was just a little gnat. No need to fly off the handle. Now, let’s get back to . . . What is it, Mr. Cassidy?”
“Coach Stoddard, if I swallow a guh-nat, can I leave, too?”
Pandemonium ruled for thirty seconds while Dewey glowered. Fortunately, Cassidy had a certain amount of limited immunity, being a member of one of the two “revenue” sports.
Besides, Dewey was a little amused himself, though he dared not show it. Instead, he focused his red-faced football death ray on him until Cassidy looked properly contrite and the rest of the class finally quieted. In his peripheral vision Cassidy noticed with satisfaction that he had finally gotten to Maria DaRosa.
“Mr. Cassidy, you cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Do you read me, son?”
“Yes, sir,” said Cassidy meekly. Maria winked at him.
“All right, then. Now, Charlie Mange, people. Pay attention . . .”
Unfortunately, his ad-libbed introductory summation had exhausted his knowledge and unique take on the subject matter, so Dewey returned to his primary teaching technique of reading from the textbook.
“Charlie Mange, also known as Charles the Great, was borned in either . . .”
The business with Cassidy, Ed, and Maria had been going on for some time but had really picked up the year before in Miss Ameison’s Spanish class when a standard-issue funny face from Cassidy caught Demski by surprise and brought the rather mild wrath of the dainty Miss Ameison descending upon his asymmetrical noggin. That was too easy, Cassidy thought.
The next day the class was silently taking the weekly multiple-choice vocabulary test, and Cassidy was concentrating mightily: was pollo apple or chicken?
He heard a fake cough and looked over at the unsmiling Demski, who had removed his jacket and was working intently on his test in a three-sizes-too-small T-shirt with a graphic of a huge baseball with crossed bats and the bold legend JUNIOR MAJOR LEAGUER. In a ring around the baseball were circular mug shots of a number of the biggest stars of the American and National Leagues: Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Peewee Reese.
Cassidy lost it and was promptly banished from the class. As he was being escorted to the door with a note for the principal, written by the actually quite pissed-off Miss Ameison, he had to admire how calmly and methodically Ed had simply slipped his jacket back on, leaving most of the class—as well as Miss Ameison—thoroughly confused about the source of the ruckus.
Not everyone had missed it. Maria DaRosa gave Demski a thumbs-up. It was shortly after that that she and Cassidy started occasionally going out “as friends.”
After Dewey’s class, a grinning Demski was waiting by the water fountain.
“Hey, thanks for giving me the royal shaft, ya big spaz,” Demski said, mock-frogging him on the deltoid.
“You kidding me?” said Cassidy. “You had it made in the shade, buddy. You got to skip most of Charlie Mange and . . . Say, how did you come up with that ‘gnat’ thing, anyway?”
They started making their way down the crowded hall toward Mr. Kamrad’s class.
“I d-didn’t come up with anything, man. I actually swallowed a guh-nat.”