He is sitting on the oak lip of his desk sporadically taking swigs from a cup of coffee and he is smiling his rubicund pumpkin smile, he is inquiring, he is pushing the fourteen year old extremely shielded periphery of our perspective, he is asking question that vex us; his lips spilling out suppositions, inquires, elongating our visor of our consciousness, coercing us, whether we like it or not, to see the world in a different way.
He uses the word impugn. He addresses each of his students with a succinct poise and timeless demeanor. He laughs. He makes a joke that almost embarrasses the classroom and be the first one to cackle, his laughter spreading like incendiary flicker of an applauding conflagration, abetting flames of laugher beneath the forehead of every students visage. He is kind. He invited students over every year to his house on Moss Avenue to his Christmas party and his Cinco De Mayo party, that latter at which he takes pictures of students wearing a giant Mexican hat and makes double, passing them out shortly before final exams.
He drives a green Porsche. There is always a copy of the New York Times on his desk. He makes it a priority to attend the Symphony. He is a patron of the arts and finer things of life. At the end of the year he brings in caviar and escargot into he classroom for the students to try.
Once a year he takes the senior class out to Stephanie's, the 5-star caliber dining experience in town.
He goes to New York to catch Broadway shows. He goes to Europe once a year. For Valedictorians who have excelled and make six-figures a year phone him addressing him by the appellation of his first name
He is affable. He pushes. He is elucidating the dichotomy of the year. How the first semester will be chiefly debate and the next will be mythology. How we will also have selected stories to read from the (name of high school literature) book. How
He collects Antiques. He travels down to Acapulco every Christmas. He has friends who are artistic.
He has the local pubic radio station embedded in his will.
His face scrunches like a pensive squash when he is thinking. He passes out vocab books. Which we can write in if we pay five dollars at the end of the semester.
He begins to question things. He quotes Plato. He talks about the unexamined life not being worth living
He has almost owlesque glasses and a cidery scrap of flaring red hair that appears ginger due to the paucity of light in his classroom.
He is questioning belief. He asks why when you look at the picture of an off-kiltered plus sign planted above a steeple do you consider it holy. He asks why when you hear certain words do you deem them profane. He asks why, when irony is implicit, you subconsciously choose to fall down in rivulets of laughter. Why certain entertainers espousing characteristics in a staticky square in our living rooms evoke such passion and cult-like devotion.
He is encouraging us to question the rudiments of everything we have ever known.
He speaks in complete sentences. He makes you want to go home and loaf for hours on your bed with a heap of Penguin classics.
He collects antiques' and fine art. He uses the words critical thinking.The lights in Mr. Rents’ classroom are inexplicably turned off, casting a slight tint across the classroom, like he is teaching in a Cambridge issued silhouette of Shakespeare. His desk is cluttered with Newspapers and books. There is a copy of the JS Star and a copy of the Book section of the New York Times. It looks less like a classroom and more like an alchemical lair. On one of the bulletin board is an assignment from a remedial junior English class from last year where they had to write their own obituary on the cutout of a tombstone. The main bulletin board located in the back of his classroom is wallpaper, aesthetically adorned with black and white almost lewd and salacious ads culled from magazines.
He straddles the lip of a cluttered desk, his gait best described as a jovial waddle, a freshly sober Falstaffian grace.
There is a file cabinet next to the window and a stereo with cd and tapes slathered on top.
“What if we cut up the American flag and used it all as toilet paper?” He has a rubicund almost pumpkin like visage. One can taste coffee on the tip of his breath. I am lost in the subtle rhetoric and incredulous surf of his voice. I look at the back of his classroom at the montage of lascivious fashion ads excised from various magazines. One Versace ad features an exceedingly ribbed-cut lad with crisp-short hair and a lower case a boobless waif reeling him in by the copper orb of his jeans, her eyelids purportedly darting in the penumbras of his revel in the plurality of being alone and not being attached to anyone and still having positive female friends and still being happy at being all alone.
At B lunch we talk about our day so far, teal colored trays dissecting scooped clods of mass produced vittles.
Every time a girl walks past Pat feels compelled to make stringent movement with his eyes and says the words dude.
Tim is carrying around his trigonometry book.
Patrick says Mr. Reents is like really cool.
“Mr. Reents is the bomb.” Patrick adds.
Tim is carrying around his trigonometry book.
“A couple of years ago a retarded kid accused him of doing some crazy shit and Mr. Reents was suspended without pay and the student body had a walkout and protested and finally he was re-instated.”
I tilt my head and say no way. Patrick says way.
“And then he counter-sued the district and that is why he is so loaded. He lives on a big palace on Moss avenue that looks like a museum with all sorts of crazy art and shit.
Patrick says that Mr. Reents always takes kids to Europe every year.
‘You won’t have to worry about trying to win one of those contests where they always fuck you over," Patrick says.
“What,”
“That Columbus shit you are always trying to win. You might as well just to Europe with Mr. Reents.
Pat says besides, the really reason every goes to Europe in high school is just so they can glug-glug glug, miming that he is chugging from an invisible bottle of bourbon.
He’s like really cool.
It is like we are somehow part of a ship. Blue sacarphogous of the locker opening and closing. Occasionally couples wait for each other between the nasal drill of the bell and
“I really enjoyed you speech. It was very inspiring.”
Mr Reents smiles.
“I’m looking forward to having you in Debate David. A lot of future Valedictorians always take Debate their freshman year.”
Our first assignment after lunch for the second half of bifurcated fourth hour is to interview the person behind us and then resent him/her to the class. Her name is Sharonda. She tells me she has a boy friend Jarvis who goes to the purported rival high school Central. She graduated from Trywyn. She wants to be a nurse someday.
“Oh, and I want to have a baby my junior year.”
“You want to have a baby when you are a Junior?”
“Yeah.”
“Why, I mean, won’t that like get in the way of your future.”
She says no.
“I mean, college, don’t you like want to go to college, don’t you want to make something of yourself after high school?”
Sharonda looks back at me and says no.
I look back reading my notes.
“Okay, we have Sharonda Williams, fourteen, graduate of Trywyn, Boyfriend at Central, wants to be a nurse someday.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget I really want to have a baby when I’m a junior. It’s important to me.”
I am stunned. When the teacher in the front of the classroom calls on me I introduce the class to the female who sits behind me.
"Oh, and she wants to get pregnant her junior year."
I am stunned. When the teacher in the front of the classroom calls on me I introduce the class to the female who sits behind me.
"Oh, and she wants to get pregnant her junior year."
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