I know I can sound paranoid about this stuff, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. The pendulum has swung so far in the past few years, I’m amazed I haven’t been run out of town on a rail, like so many of my contemporaries. Guys like me are the old guard; we’re presumed guilty whether we’ve done anything wrong or not, though many of us have sinned, I’m not denying it. It’s like the French Revolution. They had a just cause, but they got a little overzealous with the guillotine. That’s where we are now with all this Me Too business. The-old-guy’s-head-in-a-basket phase.
It was such a different world when I started teaching back in 1974. People forget how different. Kids smoked in the bathrooms; fragrant Marlboro clouds wafted out whenever someone opened the door. The boys had fistfights on a regular basis; their friends would gather in a circle and cheer them on. The gay kids got taunted mercilessly—not that anyone admitted to being gay, but bullies made assumptions—and it wasn’t uncommon to hear racial slurs in the hallway. Girls got rated on a scale of one to ten; boys would call out their numbers as they passed. Teachers rarely intervened when this stuff happened, because it happened all the time. That was just the way it was, kids being kids, the world being the world. Part of growing up was learning how to handle adversity on your own.
When you’re starting out in a career, you take your cues from the people above you. And back in the seventies, the message I got from the older male teachers was pretty clear: the girls were fair game. At my first job in Hillsdale, half the gym teachers were married to their former students. The head of the Math Department, Bart Martinson, was obsessed with a girl in his trig class, a sophomore with an amazing body. He bragged about making her his “assistant.” Every day she had to stand in front of the class and write equations on the board.
“She’s got a perfect ass,” he said. “I want to enjoy the view.”
My friend Lou Gardner and I weren’t the worst, but we weren’t saints, either. We liked to go out drinking on Friday nights, and we always ended up talking about the girls we taught. Who had the best tits, the nicest legs, the sexiest mouth. Who was still a virgin and who was not, who would give the best blowjob, etc. We were young and horny, only a few years out of college, and the Sexual Revolution was in full swing. Our dads were uptight, not us. In 1977, I actually taught Lolita to my Honors English class, and instructed my students to think twice before passing judgment on Humbert, maybe take a moment to see the world from his point of view.
No one complained.
I try not to think too much about those days now—let the past be past. The truth is, we’re all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don’t change over time, you know what?
They just haven’t lived long enough.
Tracy Flick
Bridget was wary at first, and I couldn’t blame her. It’s not every day a veteran teacher gets summoned to the Assistant Principal’s office.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Just doing a little temperature check. See how things are going.”
“Oh.” She pressed her palm against her forehead and held it there for a few seconds before giving a cheerful shrug. “Ninety-eight point six.”
“Excellent.” I nodded as if that was that. “How’s everything else? You have a good summer?”
Her body relaxed and her eyes got big.
“Oh my God, Tracy. It was so good. I can’t even tell you.”
I hadn’t been in close quarters with Bridget since school had started, and I found her presence more unsettling than I’d expected. It wasn’t that she’d been unattractive in the past. She’d just been a little dull, easy to overlook. But now she was glowing. And it wasn’t just the new hairdo or the smoky eyes or the perky nipples. It felt deeper than that, as if she’d undergone a profound inner transformation as well.
“You seem really different,” I said.
“I’m happy,” she declared, as if it were as simple as that. “I should thank my ex for leaving me. That was the wake-up call I needed.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“Tracy?” Bridget was peering at me with a hopeful expression. “Do you ever go out dancing?”
“Me? No. Not for a long time.”
She leaned forward. Her eyes were bright blue, the same color as her blouse, which was sleeveless and a little tight.
Don’t look at her nipples.
“You should come out with me sometime,” she said. “There’s this club in Lakeview that has a nineties night. Great DJ. Nice crowd. I think you’d like it.”
“Sounds fun. But it’s not really my thing.”
“Okay. No worries. Just thought I’d put it out there.”
We traded awkward smiles, the way you do when the small talk has run its course. I let the silence linger for a moment.
“Bridget,” I said. “Is it cold in here?”
At first she didn’t understand, and then she did.
“Oh my God.” Her face had turned an insulted shade of pink. “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“Sorry.” I gave her a sympathetic smile so she’d know it was nothing personal. “I’m just the messenger.”
Jack Weede
I never slept with a student, but there was one time when I cut it pretty close. This happened way back in 1979, my last year at Hillsdale. I was twenty-nine years old, and for the first and only time in my life, I felt like a rock star. I’d always been tall and scrawny, but I’d started lifting weights and had finally grown into my adult body. I’d also cut my hair—I’d been sporting a shaggy, blow-dried look that hadn’t been doing me any favors—and I remember being startled by all the compliments I got from my female students.
Nice haircut, Mr. Weede!
Looking good, Mr. Weede!
Take me to the prom, Mr. Weede!
All this was right out in the open—harmless, good-natured flirting that made me blush and stammer, which I guess was the whole point, and did wonders for my self-esteem. Feeling sexually attractive is a powerful drug, especially if you’re not used to it.
My flirtation with Mindy DeSantos was different: it was furtive and private, and it felt illicit from the start. Technically speaking, she wasn’t one of my students—I’d never taught her in a class, never given her a grade. I was Faculty Advisor for The Sapling, the school literary magazine, and Mindy was the Editor, which meant that we spent a lot of time together after school. When no one else was around, she called me by my first name, though not because I gave her permission. She just started doing it one day, and I didn’t tell her to stop.
If anything, she was my teacher. Mindy was an accomplished singer-songwriter with a lovely voice; she won the schoolwide talent show two years running, and appeared regularly at local open mics. I was a novice guitar player at the time—not much better now, sad to say—and she took it upon herself to help me out. After our editorial meetings, when everyone else had gone home, she took her acoustic guitar out of its case and showed me the chords to Neil Young and Bob Dylan tunes, along with the strumming patterns.