“Bitch, I’m a monster, no-good blood-sucker/Fat motherfucker, now look who’s in trouble”
-Rick Ross
This is a story about a dream.
But first, a memory that dream conjured. Ironic that I’m having this particular experience the same day that Julie and my guilty pleasure show, Blood Drive, sort of did the same thing.
I had a dream about my high school art teacher. I’ve mentioned him here before, but I haven’t remembered him this vividly in 20 years. We sort of broke ways suddenly.
So the memory I mentioned. Lately I’ve been thinking, again, about how I’m perceived. This was a problem that plagued me due to what I would find out later was (willfully or not) mobbing by some people I met here, but the basic core of it is that people see me in strange ways and often assume the worst of me. It happens even with people who SHOULD know me better (less than a year ago, I had a colleague– a former mentor– absolutely tee off on me in a huge email chain about a slight that wasn’t a slight but rather a change that hadn’t been entered into a computer system because I was working and needed another hour to quit teaching. And at the very start of this summer I had someone brutally verbally attack me after painting me into a corner and me having the audacity to offer a logical, rational set of options for me to get out of that corner). But this memory is of a time when I was a sophomore in high school, long ago.
Let me paint a picture of fifteen-year-old Phill. I had curly Vanilla Ice hair (it went up like only one segment of Sideshow Bob’s hair– a tall peak that had crazy curls shooting every which way from it). Height-wise, I was fully grown, so I was 6’1″-and-a-half, as I am now. This was the mid-90s, so I dressed what people back then called “urban”– baggy shorts or pants, sports shirts or jerseys, high tops with crazy laces (usually Jordans that were two or three seasons old). When I painted or sculpted, which I did usually in the art room, I would put on one of my Kurt Cobain inspired old flannels, and when in the art room I usually wore a sweatband on my head (to keep my hair at bay) and one on my forearm (so I wouldn’t wipe my face/eyes with my paint or clay covered hands). I had stubble, but I wouldn’t grow my full on goatee for a few more years.
I was, at that time, the nicest kid. I know that probably sounds arrogant, but fuck you, it’s my memory. 🙂 I didn’t start to be radical about my political thinking for another year or so, and I was still just vaguely aware that I was Cherokee. It was a strange time.
I was my art teacher’s right-hand-man. I was taking three art classes a semester (and did up until my senior year– I’ll explain that later). This day– the memory that I was thinking about on my commute today– was a day when we had a sub. The woman who was our sub has also appeared in another post here. She’d be our sub in English class my senior year, and because I still felt the sting of the memory I’m about to share, I sarcastically interrupted her when she said “It’s can never be possessive,” and she tried to yell over me. I then said “what if it belongs to Cousin It from the Adams Family?” She called me something (a “twerp,” I think) and told me if I didn’t like it, I could leave. So… I left. That story is back in the history, if you search for “searing burn to piece-of-shit sub.”
But on this day, my art teacher mentor had left a note for the sub that said “Phill is in second, third and seventh period. He can tell you where everything is, he can handle the kiln, he can guide others through the assignments. After school he and Rod will have Art Club stuff to do, so you can leave him to lock up.” Something like that, anyway. I don’t know that I actually remember the specific wording. I know those were universally my duties when he was away, though.
The sub, who later would be my nemesis but at this point had never met me, asked at the start of class (there was no first period art offering– that room was a study hall) who “Phill” was. I raised my hand, and as she just stared a hole in me, I walked over to her and offered to start the lesson.
She popped off on me. “You can’t be the person he wanted to be my helper.”
This wasn’t a new thing for me, honestly– being judged for being fat and for dressing weird and moving a little funny and all that. But I was super taken aback that it was happening with a teacher. Usually it was my peers (and the older kids) who gave me a hassle. And I took a great deal of flack for being the art teacher’s “pet,” as he was considered pretty friggin’ weird in his own right, playing Zappa records during study hall and doodling cartoons under grades instead of comments.
I assured her that I was, indeed, Phill, and that I knew what the teacher wanted done. Then, probably stupid looking back, I went to the cabinet and started getting supplies out.
And she went INSANE. She yelled at me for like two minutes straight. I think– I wish I could say I’m sure I remember this and it wasn’t just an element of my dream last night twisting my memory– but I think she called me a “monster.” She sent me to the office. The Principal, a different one than she’d end up sitting with me to see years later, was puzzled as to what had happened. He told me to go to my other haunt, the journalism office, and spend my 3 periods of art there. So I did, and when the art teacher came back he was disappointed that nothing happened in class that day. And then someone told him what had happened to me. He frowned and furrowed his brow, but he wouldn’t speak ill of the sub. Which is cool. I didn’t expect him to.
And now, my dream.
As I mentioned, I loved this art teacher. He was like a father figure for me at a time when my real father was gone and my step-father was emotionally terrorizing me. In the dream, I was the age I am now, the person I am now, but my art teacher was just as he was when I was a senior in high school. I was in his classroom, sitting on one of the tables, staring at a painting I was doing (a painting I actually did finish– a black and white painting of the Ultimate Warrior) and talking to him about life.
This day I was remembering did happen. Exactly as it did in the dream– at least at first. Other than me being 40. I was 17 when it actually happened.
It was the day that my art teacher asked me how I was doing, and I said fine. He said to me something I’ll never forget. He said, “Sometimes when people ask you that it isn’t small talk. Don’t be afraid to really answer.”
And so I told him about how I was trying to figure out how to afford college, that I’d had some offers of scholarships but that they weren’t enough, and that the stress of discussing it with my parents had led to them fighting.
Then I told him something I have never told anyone else. I might have told Julie. I don’t know if it ever came up.
The night before this particular discussion, my step-dad, most-of-the-way-to-drunk and all the way to asshole, had shoved my mother and knocked her down. He was walking toward her when I yelled at him to stop. He turned, and he called me a “faggot.” I don’t care, I just remember because it was weird given what ELSE I know about him now. But he turned back toward my mom and started to move.
I told my step-dad to stop moving again. He refused and balled a fist. He was moving away from me.
I blindsided him and hit him so hard he fell down and slid across the floor.
I don’t remember what came next. I didn’t then, either. I had a severe panic attack. I just know that he didn’t touch my mom again and he ran out to the garage where he passed out and slept off his drunkenness in the driver’s seat of the muscle car he never finished restoring. In the morning he didn’t remember being drunk or any of what had happened. As far as I know, we never did talk about it, and we only came to blows one other time, when during his divorce from my mother he slugged me in the face, broke my glasses, then cowered away when I spit blood in his face and told him to come at me again if all he understood was violence. He brought out the absolute worst in me. I have never missed that man.
So I told my teacher that. He listened, solemn. Then he told me about his own experiences with his father which were similar. To his credit, he didn’t tell me it was wrong to attack someone, but I think he knew I knew that. I think he knew it was troubling me that I’d done it, but also he realized I didn’t know what else to do.
He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I thought I might like teaching but that my dream was to go to art school and try to make comics. I was afraid to leave my mom alone with my step-dad, though, and paying for college wasn’t going to be easy anyway.
Then, in a very loving, mentor-ish way, he told me not to go to art school. That I “deserved better.”
And he might have been right. I didn’t ever tell him that in the state I was in, that broke my heart. I think what he meant was that he, himself, had deserved better. He told me a few days later that he’d gone to art school and become a teacher to avoid being sent to Vietnam and that he didn’t think he was very good at either thing.
Months later, I’d have an opportunity to turn a half tuition scholarship to Loyola Marymount into a full ride if I went to an interview and could earn a spot on their debate team along with the things I’d already been offered. I had to go. But back then, airplanes were more expensive than they are now, and as you probably know from reading my blog, I was (am) dirt poor.
So I had to drive to California for the interview. It took all the money I had, and my step-dad cut me and my mom off while we were out there, so I had to stay an extra day because there was no way to check out of the hotel or buy gas. I managed to convince my step-dad’s boss, who I worked for during the summers, to wire me enough money from my step-dad’s account to get back home.
When I got back, I’d been gone for almost two weeks– all the absences I could have without being unable to graduate, which was strange since I didn’t need any credits and was just in school for the love of it (I could have graduated as a junior). I actually went to school before I went home, having driven 48-hours-straight across the desert and the plains.
My art teacher had replaced me as the captain of our academic team. He’d given my art club presidency to someone else. He told me not to worry about coming in during my free periods, that he could handle things.
I don’t think it was the story I shared with him about my step-dad suddenly causing him to react. I’m not sure what it was. Come to think of it, it might have been that I’d been very loud about my support of Bill Clinton in a red state. I hope not, given that my art teacher was a draft dodger who smoked pot.
But he’d replaced me and moved on. And I’ve never known how to explain to father figures that they’ve failed me and hurt me (there were more after him) so I just went on my way.
In my dream, I asked him. I said “so in a few months you’re going to sort of write me out of your life. Why’d you do that?”
And in the dream– this of course didn’t happen in real life because I can’t see the future– he said “Because you’re a monster.”
At that moment, crying, I hugged him.
And I think he said “I’m a monster.” It was muffled and in a dream, but it makes sense.
At this point I can’t remember the rest of the dream very well because I was starting to wake up, but I remember that I turned away and walked out of his classroom to find I was on campus at Miami, in Bachelor Hall, where I started my graduate career and my first-post-PhD job. No one was anywhere, and the room where we used to hold our staff meetings was completely empty. I just stood there, staring at the spot where in real life a curio cabinet full of priceless China sits (weird, right, that the china sits in an English department in the real world but not in my dream) while somewhere off in the distance I could hear REM playing.
I never did find out why he pushed me away. Maybe he felt like I slighted him by leaving for two weeks to try to secure a scholarship? Maybe I DID freak him out by confessing to what I guess was assault when I was known as a gentle kid who had started to radicalize as a senior. Maybe like everyone else at my school he was a Republican and my editorials about Clinton and the value of liberalism had finally worn thin on him. Maybe he heard about me tossing the football coach’s confederate flag in the trash and thought I’d finally taken that missive to “speak my mind” and “be a leader” too far. Maybe in his eyes, I was a monster who defied authority.
Maybe I am a monster.
Maybe we’re so inexorably linked to our physical bodies that people will always find me strange or threatening. People aren’t 350+ pounds. People who do what I do for a living don’t wear shorts and hoodies in the snow, don’t have long sort of scraggly hair. People don’t mix the things I mix. People who are always polite and helpful don’t choose moments to spit dragonfire over political issues.
In some ways, it really hurts me to think that maybe that’s how many people have seen me.
In other ways…
I was born in the year of the fire dragon, with a water sign, into a world where a spider brought fire from across the water so that your mother could craft you, as mine crafted me, out of smoke and rain, ashes and earth.
Maybe the truth is my momma made a dragon and sent him out into the world.