WHAT?

 Ben Pleasants

I guess I had fear of history teachers all the way from the seventh grade till the end of junior high school, which I’m just getting out of; and that’s because of Crazy Moreno who used to tell his classes how his life was changed one day when a milk truck ran over his leg. I only wish it had done a better job.

 

Anyway, across the hall was another teacher we all liked named Mr. Tobias.  We had him one period before Crazy Moreno.  He was a lot younger than the guy who had been run over by a milk truck and a lot nicer – but he couldn’t keep order.  He used to bribe us by bringing in candy and handing it out when we were noisy.   Not just hard candy either, but Turkish toffee which his wife made in big white blobs.  I guess Mr. Tobias figured we couldn’t make much noise while we were eating Turkish toffee.

 

When that didn’t work, he would bring in home movies.   They weren’t very interesting, but they had us thinking, since it was math class.  I guess it worked for a little while, because when we were thinking we didn’t shout or make faces or throw paper airplanes.  But then the movies ran out and the noise started up all over again till Mr. Tobias held up pictures of his family and started begging us to be good saying “You see these kids? and here in the middle is my wife, Sally.  Well, if you all don’t behave and do your work like you’re supposed to, they are all going to go hungry.  Everyone.  Me too.  Because that … man across the hall is going to have me fired.” He meant Crazy Moreno.

 

And then we would walk out of Mr. Tobias’ classroom with the candy wrappers all over the floor and the board erasers up on top of the public address system, patting our sad little math teacher on the back of his new jacket with chalked palms.  Across the hall would be Crazy Moreno, standing like Mad Anthony Wayne, ready to charge over the tops of all the desks and throw us out the second story window along with Mr. Tobias.

 

I guess that’s why we all liked Mr. Tobias so much – because Crazy Moreno treated him the same way he treated us – calling his class a circus, calling Mr. Tobias a clown, until we finally felt genuinely sorry for the man and quieted down, handing in a good twenty per cent of the homework he gave us.

 

But it was in Crazy Moreno’s class, on the other side of the hall, where the real trouble started.  Each day we would file noisily out of Tobias’ class and noiselessly into Moreno’s, paper airplanes, water pistols, and comic books disappearing midway between the two, as we exchanged them for neatly done homework assignments which were dropped silently into a receptacle on the corner of Crazy Moreno’s desk.  Everyone except Tommy Rand handed in their homework, who dropped in blank pages for a while, and then didn’t drop in anything at all.

 

Rand was the master of excuses, and they worked in all his other classes.   A six-footer at thirteen, with stiff-combed straight blond hair and a lazy, gentle nature, Tommy Rand would shock his teachers with such excuses as “I didn’t get the homework done because my mother had a breast removed.”  I know he used that one for three years.  All with different teachers.  His mother must have had eight breasts.   Another one he liked to use was “The garden house started dancing all over the back yard last night, so we called in the F.B.I.” Tommy never used any of those on Crazy Moreno. The only one he ever used on him was true. He said he hadn’t finished his assignment because his grandfather had died the night before.
Moreno asked, “Why aren’t you at the funeral then?”
Rand said the funeral was in the Old Country and Moreno asked him which Old Country to which Tommy replied “It was either Italy or Ireland.  It starts with an I.”

 

As I look back, Crazy Moreno was pretty nice to Tommy Rand in the beginning.  I think he suspected there might be trouble at home, or genetic insanity, so he just said firmly but quietly, when Tommy failed to hand in his history assignment, “Just get it in tomorrow.  I won’t mark it late.”

 

But then tomorrow would come and Rand would have another one missing and the first one wouldn’t be there either and then Rand would come back with “The new freezer blew up and we had to store all the meat with neighbors.”  I don’t know how he thought them up?  Once he said his sister had run away with the Maytag Repairman.  And then he used the one about the party house in his back yard.  Because most teachers just gave up on him, but Crazy Moreno would keep after him everyday about all the homework he’d never handed in.

 

As I said before, he didn’t actually use the one about the party house with Crazy Moreno.  He’d used it in science class and Mr. Stanley, our science teacher, had talked to Crazy Moreno about this strange kid Tommy Rand.  So when Rand was ready to give his excuse for not handing in his homework, Crazy Moreno just said “I know. The party house (sic) went dancing around the yard.  Isn’t that right Rand?”  He got it a little mixed up in his mind as he did with history, but Rand new that very moment he was in for it. That was putting it mildly.

 

We were approaching report card season and Tommy Rand had missed two straight weeks of history assignments, which was inconceivable since Mr. Tobias gave us fifteen minutes during math class to copy David Garber’s paper.  He even helped us with the spelling.  But Tommy Rand said he wasn’t going to do it that way.  He was going to be honest about it and hand in nothing.
And so, on the Party House Day, Moreno stood up in the front of the class with his face the color of school bricks and shouted “Today we are NOT going to talk about the French Revolution and those illogical men born of ideology like Robespierre and Danton.  Those killers and tyrants.  NO.  NOT THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.  Today we are going to talk about Tommy Rand and his dancing Party House.  Today, class, we are going to discuss Mr. Thomas Rand, that magnificent liar and cheat.”

 

Benny Pearson made matters worse by asking “What?”
“What?” was the one word you never used in Mr. Moreno’s class.  Never.  To Crazy Moreno “What?” was an impolite expression.  When Benny Pearson’s brother used it Mr. Moreno hit him so hard on the top of his head, he bit off the tip of his tongue and couldn’t taste until the eighth grade.  But for the moment Crazy Moreno even ignored Benny.

 

(Benny is the center of the story, but you wouldn’t understand about Benny and his brother Randall who was left back and therefore in the same class, unless I told you what happened to Tommy Rand.)

 

The room got very quiet.  David Garber put away his notes on the French Revolution.
“Rand.  I said you were a liar and a cheat,” Crazy Moreno shouted.
Í may be a liar, but I’m not a cheat,” Rand answered dangerously.
“Oh really.  I say you ARE a liar and ARE a cheat and you will never make anything of yourself in this world except a criminal.  Do you hear me Rand?”
Moreno turned a deeper shade of scarlet, which could have been from all the buttons on his vest being buttoned and we thought he might explode into one of his lectures about “America going to heck in a hand basket.”  Mr. Moreno never swore.  He was always the champion of decency and chastity and democracy. But with Tommy Rand there was no democracy. Tommy Rand was breaking the laws of Moreno and for him there would be no mercy.  “With criminals there is no democracy,” he told Rand.  “With criminals there is only justice.”
We all took a breath while the trial of criminal Rand continued.  “I called you a liar and a cheat and a criminal Rand, and I’m going to see that you never make the basketball team.”
“I wasn’t going out for the basketball team, Mr. Moreno.”
“Then I’ll make you go out for it and have you kicked off.  Understand?”
“Suit yourself.”

 

That kind of thing went on for about fifteen minutes as a substitute for our discussion of the French Reign of Terror, as Mr. Moreno swelled out of his vest and suspenders, strutting around the room like Mussolini, calling Tommy Rand everything from a “Defiler of the American Way,” to “the corrupt product of an unfeeling and uneducated society.”  Finally his face started twitching and rippling and he whipped his pointer back and forth like a fly fisher with his hollow line, pointing first to Rand, then to the class, and then to the map of Europe, stabbing several times into the gut of Germany.  He even called Tommy a Nazi.

 

To that Tommy added in desperation “I’m not a Nazi, Mr. Moreno.  And the reason I don’t hand in my homework is because I once had tuberculosis and my doctor told me not to work hard; so naturally when your doctor…”

 

“Doctor” was the last word he said that day.  I remember it clearly.
At exactly that moment Crazy Moreno picked up Tommy Rand, all six feet of him desk and all, and carried him down the row, knocking David Garber out of his seat, hitting Marilyn Blodgett in the chest with a chair leg, crashing through to the back closet like an avalanche, where he threw the desk off like a bear throws off a kitten, and hung Tommy Rand up on a coat hook in the closet, first slapping him across the face, then closing the door.

 

We could hear Rand sobbing all through the lecture on the triumph of Jeffersonian Democracy over French Radicalism, one of Moreno’s favorite subjects after the milk truck.

 

That was when I got the idea history teachers weren’t like other teachers.  I mean if you asked Mr. Stanley about something like ovulation, he’d back off a little before answering, but then, in very clinical terms, so the girls wouldn’t blush and the boys wouldn’t laugh, he’d tell you what you wanted to know.  That was science.  Moreno, when I asked him if slavery was still going on, like with Walt Washington, who lived on the poor side of town, worse than my part, and had no father and had a nice mother who had to wash floors to pay all the bills, Crazy Moreno would answer “If Wallace (sic) Washington would like to try living in Russia, where they lock up women and children in slave labor camps, maybe we’d all be better off.”

 

Anyway, after Tommy Rand got hung up in the closet where Crazy Moreno kept his coat, David Garber personally wrote out all of Rand’s homework for him and Mr. Tobias checked it over carefully before he left math class.

 

The only real trouble was that Marilyn Blodgett’s mother saw the bruise on her daughter’s chest and told the principal she wanted to talk with the teacher all the kids called Crazy Moreno.

 

That provided a temporary calm.

 

For a while Mr. Moreno settled down as well as he could, turning redder and redder, grinding his hands underneath his desks and cracking his knuckles as though he were decapitating chickens, but he never raised his voice.  Like a coffee pot over a low gas flame, he kept at a constant simmer, but he never boiled over.

 

Not until Benny Pearson started up again with “What?”
Benny Pearson was four foot seven and he was the only kid I ever met who could whistle through his ear.  I swear to God.   He would hold his nose, take a deep breath, blow with all his might, and out would come this crazy EEEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEEE.  It was the funniest thing, an ear that could talk back, and whenever he did it we would all yell “Benny Pearson’s whistling through his ear again.”  I guess he never had any trouble with wax, but when his father took him to the doctor, he was told to stop immediately before he blew the few brains he had out his auditory canal. We had a long talk about whistling through your ear in Mr. Stanley’s class and Mr. Stanley said it was biologically impossible till Benny stood up, held his nose, took a deep breath and started whistling EEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEEE, right out his left ear.  “I’ll be damned.  That belongs in Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” said Mr. Stanley.


Benny may have been short, but he wasn’t stupid.  He never whistled through his ear in Mr. Moreno’s class.  The only bad habit he had was letting out with an occasional “What?” and as I said, since Crazy Moreno had hung up Tommy Rand in the closet and had a secret meeting with Marilyn Blodgett’s mother and the principal, he was very patient with all of us, especially Benny.

 

“How would you describe the policy of the Whig Party, Benson?”
“What?”
“What is not a proper response Benson,” he would manage over a tie knot that was always just a little too tight.  “What is the kind of word you use when talking to animals.  Like sit.  Just say ‘Mr. Moreno do you want me?’  That’s all.”
Then Benny would say “Mr. Moreno, do you want me?” and Crazy Moreno would say “Yes Benny.  Take that gum out of your mouth and put it on the end of your nose.  You know I don’t allow gum chewing in my class.”

 

It went on that way all through November, a contest between Crazy Moreno and Little Benny to see who would blow first.  Benny, as we all knew, had a terrible temper, especially when it came to the mentioning of his height.  “Shorty” would send him into fits of uncontrolled rage.

 

Finally one day we were working on Napoleon, and Crazy Moreno, who was a safe five foot ten, started talking about the role of the short man in history.  He gave Benny a little smile and said “Short men have played a dominant role in the history of our world ever since laws protected the weak from the strong and brains became more important than animal strength.” Benny liked that.  He also liked Moreno’s discussion of Julius Caesar, who he compared to Eisenhower as the savior of Rome.  When he started on Attila the Hun, Benny was still with him, having seen a movie at our local theatre about the short conqueror with the pretty slave girl who Benny thought looked a lot like Marilyn Blodgett. Napoleon was the real problem.  Moreno said Napoleon, the great warrior and lover, had no respect for women. Then Moreno said little men rarely had any respect for women.  He told us he didn’t want to go into the reasons, but we were to take his word for it. It was when Moreno got to Adolph Hitler that things moved into high gear.  We were all looking at Benny and putting two fingers under our noses.
“Short men.” Moreno began, “are inclined to make up for their frustrations by attempting gigantic feats: sometimes praiseworthy, but often extremely EVIL.  What do you think about that Benny?”
“What?”
“Benson, we don’t use that word in this class.  Maybe across the hall you can use that word, but in this class we do not use WHAT by itself.  It’s very rude.  I’ve told you that many times.  Now, let’s begin again.  Benny…”
“What,  Mr. Moreno.”  The class grew very quiet.  The hair on Moreno’s neck seemed to stand on end.
“BENSON,” said Crazy Moreno sucking in his belly.  As I said, short people are often inclined to do very RISKY things.  Sometimes EVIL things.  I would like your view on that since you are a very short person.  What do you have to say about that BENSON?”
“My views on WHAT Mr. Moreno?”  The class, already silent, now stopped breathing.  Mr. Moreno, flushed and furious, stood directly over Benny Pearson’s head looking just like a golfer who had dropped his bag of clubs into the waterhole.
“BENSON. Short little BENSON.”
“What.”
“You little shit.” It was the only time I’d ever heard him curse.
“What, What, What, What, What, What, What.”
A button popped off Crazy Moreno’s shirt and landed in Benny Pearson’s hand.  Benny held it in his palm like a live bee.  The room seemed to gather like a storm over his head for a moment and then suddenly the desk was exploding around him.  Wood and metal fell in every direction.  Moments later Benny Pearson was flying toward the window like a four foot seven inch football shouting “WHAT, WHAT, WHAT, WHAT, WHAT, CRAZY MORENO.”  With a crash he came to rest halfway up the venetian blinds , his head sticking out at the class, his legs hung through the broken window on the other side.
His brother, Randall, raced out of the room, bursting into the principal’s office where he yelled “Crazy Moreno just threw my brother though a window.  I swear to God.”


I don’t know how he did it, but Benny, like most short people, came out of this adventure with only a few scratches.  The window was shatterproof and so was Benny.  After that he and Tommy Rand became the best of friends, the shortest and tallest members of the class walking together like pals.
Benny even took Marilyn Blodgett to one of the afternoon dances while the parents of all three got together to have Crazy Moreno removed from his teaching assignment.  They actually succeeded, but I heard he was made Vice Principal of an elementary school upstate.
And Tommy Rand did actually go out for the basketball team, but he didn’t make it.  He would always come late to practice and when the coach would ask him what the problem was, Tommy would start in with stuff like “My neighbor’s flowers caught on fire because of his new lawnmower.”
But anyway, I’m not talking about Tommy Rand.  I could go on for hours about him.  I just wanted to tell you about history teachers.  They all seem very strange to me.  I haven’t told you yet about “Who shot the moose?” or Mrs. Jones, who always kept a candle burning under a portrait of FDR.  They were all very odd, my history, teachers, but the worst of all was Crazy Moreno.

  
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