Category Archives: Stories

Stories

Santiago, 1997

I will be in Chile. Dad will also be in Chile.

I will be in Chile because the scholarship allowing me to attend NYU carries with it membership to a scholar’s group that takes international trips over the winter break. Said trips involve sightseeing, community service, and a modicum of free time to do whatever it is college students do while abroad. I don’t know what that is, exactly. I can barely relax back home, let alone in a strange country thousands of miles away.

Why will Dad will be in Chile? I’m not sure. He is a “systems analyst” now. That’s what it says on his business cards. He has many different ones, and it seems each one is from a different company—NASDAQ, USAID, and a dozen other obscure outfits—with its own variation on his name. Eugene Callan. Gene Callan. Eugene A. Callan. Gene M. Callan…

Whatever his work is, it takes him across the globe. He spends a good chunk of my high school years in either Russia (right around coup time) or Hong Kong (right before it was given back to China). He’s also done time in many former Soviet republics in central Asia (The Icky-Stans, he calls them), Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and South America. He does not explain to me what he does in these countries, and I don’t ask. It’s not because I am uninterested. It’s because I don’t expect a straight answer.

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Stories

Shop Room, 1992

My shop teacher is Ratman. Not his given name, of course, except in the sense that junior high kids have given that name to him, behind his back, for a small eternity.

Strictly speaking, Ratman doesn’t teach “shop.” In keeping with the educational nomenclature of the times, Shop is now called Tech. But it’s still shop. His classroom is a dank garage, where the temperature drops 10 degrees from the rest of the school, and the walls are lined with aluminum shelves holding old, busted tools covered in a thick layer of sawdust and metal shavings.

Shop class requires repeated use of drill presses and bandsaws and other things that can kill you if used incorrectly. Ratman constantly warns about the danger surrounding his students at the top of his lungs, in a window-rattling howl that suggests he is not so much warning against harm as he is actively attempting to cause it.

He was dubbed Ratman due to a confluence of unfortunate physical characteristics. First, he is tiny. Four feet tall, if that. He is just tall enough to not be a midget. He also has a long, pointy, rodent-like nose, and a pair of beady eyes made even smaller by a pair of coke-bottle glasses. He owns a shrill, piercing voice that can cut through steel. He also has one leg that is shorter than the other. His pace is evened out by a shoe with a block of wood. It hits the ground with vicious CLUNK as he patrols his classroom.

shop classroomA man of such description should have thought twice about choosing teaching as his vocation. He especially should have run screaming from teaching at the junior high school level. That he didn’t is either a reflection of a serious lack of perception or a byproduct of his unique personality. I’m inclined to side with the latter interpretation, because Ratman is a complete bastard. It’s hard to say if he was a bastard to begin with or if he was made a bastard by years of teaching bastard high school kids. The why’s don’t really matter to me, because regardless of the reason, he is a bastard and I must deal with him.

Much like a religious cult’s compound, Ratman’s class possesses an air rife with the constant threat of recrimination. Ratman is fond if descending on you with no warning and shrieking “WHATTA YOU DOIN?” directly into your ear. This seems counterproductive to his stated aim of teaching safe workroom practices, but his philosophy is “Do as I scream, not as I do.”

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Stories

Bathroom, 1993

Mr. Rossi teaches Regents Global History, and he is a loser. That sounds harsh and unfair, and it is, but it is also true.

If you see Mr. Rossi, you recognize in a few second, There stands a loser. There are no shortage of losers at my school, and in my more honest moments I count myself among their ranks. But kid losers can’t compare to grown-up losers. As a kid, you figure being grown up removes several layers of loserdom from your surface. Adults can drive, live in their own places, do what they want. Those adults who can’t shed this skin are especially deserving of our contempt and laughter, and none get more of both than Mr. Rossi.

All losers search for at least one person they can stand atop and say, “At least I’m not that guy.” Mr. Rossi is that guy.

Mr. Rossi is shorter than most of his students. He is pudgy, which is somehow worse than being straight-up fat, and he accentuates his pudginess by insisting on wearing horizontally striped polo shirts to school. His hairline is beginning to recede. Midyear, he attempts to grow a mustache, and the thing comes in patchy and sad. He looks like a far less adventurous Mario.

Mr. Rossi still lives with his mom. Someone with more self awareness would have made sure the teenagers under his watch never found this out, but Mr. Rossi just told us, like the fact wasn’t a cudgel kids would use against him. He lives with his mom in a crappy part of Newburgh, a rough town. Once, a stray bullet whisked through his living room and missed hitting him by inches. He told us this too. Had this happened to someone else, it would have been terrifying, or bestowed upon him some stripe of badass-ery. But since it happened to Mr. Rossi, it’s hilarious.

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