Dog Notes (Who am I and why am I here)...

When I enter the Debate classroom the next day Mr Reents is wearing a CLINTON button on his polo shirt.

“I’ve decided to vote for Bill Clinton,” He says, taking a swig of his coffee before commenting that it is the first time he’s voted for a democrat in a long time.

It is the seventh week of classes. Grades were released earlier in the day.


“Did you get straight A’s David?” Mr reents inquires.

 

Out of a little less than three hundred only one freshman received straight A’s and she is in only half enriched classes.

I received an A in Mr Reents class. I received an A in Mme Suhr en francais and an overwhelming A with multiple pluses after it in Coach M’s class.  I received an A in PE and a note from Coach Simmons that I set some sort of record running laps around the circumference of the extremely buffed-it-is-almost-glossed gymnasium floor, even though there’s no hallway placard, nothing to herald my accomplishment.

In Mrs. Peabody’s class I received a C that is closer to a C minus.

 

In cool Joe Thomas class I receive a C plus.

I have never received lower than a B in my life.

 

My avg is a B plus. Only one student receive  and A in Mr Thomas’ class.

 

No one received and A in Mrs. Quiet-you-Peabody’s class.

Students are pissed.

 

Really smart students are pissed.



"This is the first year I remember that only one student got all A's."  Mr. Reents says in a way that insinuates that we are really bright students on a way that insinuates something is wrong.

                                                                           ***

Cool Joe Thomas reads the grades out loud. The highest was the blonde headed girl with the baby shampoo.

 

She got a B.

 

Everyone else is in the low B mid C range.

 

“You guys are supposed to be the brightest kids in the school. I expect belter than you.”

 

I want to raise my hand and tell him that he has not given a lecture or taught one day this semester. I want to say that I know more about his anecdotes and about his on his real estate business he is always blathering about than I do about the periodic table of elements.

It seems to me years later why doesn’t a kid just simply raise his hand and say, look, you have fifty minutes to elucidate this stuff on a chalk board.

 

Cool Joe Thomas instructs us what to read the next fifty pages for he remainder of the class period. On the side Cool Joe Thomas and his wife have some sort of realty business.

”The houses in this area aren’t what they used to. In the 80’s when everyone was out of work we kept buying foreclosed houses and then flipping them.”

 

It seems like cool Joe Thomas just doesn’t want us to succeed. So he can flip our homes someday.

 

                                                                       ***

I come in early Tuesday and go down to the pool, threading laps simulating like I am running. Coach comes in and smiles.

“What I love about your dedication is that even when you are injured you still aim to workout twice a day.”  He asks how my leg is holding up. He inquires how my weekend was. I tell him about going out running on Columbus day and how I couldn’t move two blocks. I tell him that I am still icing the hell out of my leg every night. I tell him that I hurt all the time.

 

“You really don’t need to run Conference. If you just want to read it one more week and then get ready for regional.”

 

Coach says that he still has me in the top five independents in the region to advance to sectional.

 

I want to tell coach that its really no problem. That I can suck it up and run like I did in Mattoon.

“Honestly I know you weren’t 100 percent healed in Mattoon and I’m really proud how you run and just put everything out there. Take this week off.  Rehab in the pool before and after school. Ice it three times a day. We’ll have you all sewed up and ready to compete in the regional in one weeks time."


Again, I thank Coach.

"Hey, why don't I pick you up before the conference race. I can drive you down to Manual and we can talk before the team comes in."

I tell coach thank you. I'm having a man to man with one of the coolest human beings I have ever met the night after I hang out and somehow ask out Renae.

"Pick you up at 7:30?" Coach alludes.

I tell him yes. I tell him I will be waiting.

                                                                         ***
 
 

Tuesday night is the Vice president debates. The phrase “just a heartbeat from the presidency” is prostituted and overused.

Quayle sounds completely inane.  Gore sounds like a Librarian telling a patron to hush in a vapid monotone. The most interesting candidate is Stockdale who pulls a geriatric tandem with Perot and who is interesting because je appears drunk and proffers almost metaphysical queries as zingers coercing millions of Americans to go to bed that autumnal night lost in the philosophical conundrum of who am I, why am I here.

Quayle and Gore keep on lambasting each other, throwing sand about issues of character. Sadly (perhaps only too much so) there is no comparisons about Quayle being no John F. Kennedy. 

At the end it was ugly making one question who am I.

Why am I here.
                                                                                ***

It is torture sitting in Madame Suhrs class and staring at the full size map of the country I failed to visit twice.

We learn the word Arrondisement.  We learn how the Louvre is the largest art museum on the planets and how Parisians were completely indifferent towards glass Pyramid

French culture seemingly exudes with an unparalleled appreciation for art.

She shows us picture of the giant mathematic  sign blossoming in the center of the Champs-Elysses like a petrified lotus in premature bloom.

Somehow every time I blink I see Karen Christmas in the classroom only she is being escorted down the arteries of antiquity in Paris last spring. It is Paris and the world is alive. I can see her outside the Eiffel tower. I see her.

I want to tell her that still, some morning when I am ferrying papers up and down avenues of West Peoria and even with my limp, I see a glazed reflection of myself in the mirror of frosted over windshield, light ricocheting form the yawn of a nearby street lamp. I want to tell her how sometimes, for a terse atomic sneeze of eternity, I find myself in Paris next to Karen Christmas, walking along the banks of the Seine.

 

I want to tell her about the lagoon in Glen Oak park last summer and how I encircled the perimeters thinking about Dawn Michelle, thinking about how I was lost in the confusion of everything. I want to tell her how I think about Paris when I listen to Depeche mode. A song called Somebody, the  start of which sounds like it was recorded using a megaphoned-stethoscope hooked up to a cosmic EKG in a Parisian café, the clattering of silverware and diminutive espresso cups  achingly acquiescing with svelte piano chords, a long, a ballad in the julienned echo of the word, a yearning for the terse stint we find ourselves a part of this cosmos, this carafe of human flesh, the terse echoes we choose to drape ourselves with the cape of another, the poignant allegro of hurt that somehow being a mammal and walking upright entails, how the song sends in a reverberating coo, an aortic keen, a lyrical wormhole to another time place, the ocular dual embryonic shadows of the yin yan button wheeling themselves out of each other in dyslexic bifurcation, stating all over again in the vacant uterus called life.

Starting all alone.

 

                                                                                   ***



  

The next day Sandy Farkash, dean of students is seated at the back of Cool Joe Thomas classroom. Cool Joe Thomas is standing in front. He has his teacher’s edition open.  The  dual blackboard in the front of the classroom is flooded with notes. He asks everyone to turn in your books

 

Farkash is talking notes, he is grading cool Joe Thomas’ performance.

We open the books somewhere around page 320. It is the first time we have cracked open the hinges of the book in class this semester.

 

Cool Joe Thomas begins his lecture by stating that we will start off from

 

I first I think it is a joke. He hasn’t taught once the entire semester.  It seems that the only reason he delegated this moment is because he is being evaluated by Sandy Farkash,.

 

He is talking about Gregor Mandel.  Cool Joe Thomas is talking about hybrid and cross-pollination.  He shows us a chart making an allusion to a class he purportedly taught last week.  We are freshman. None of us have ever seen this material before.  He walks around the classroom.

“Time for our daily evaluation of notes.”

 

This is bullshit. I am irate. I am fuming behind the dormant Bunsen Burner. Although Angelina Lighthouse is dating a football jock I look at her with a crooked-smile and a nonplused expression sewed into my face.

 

He looks at notes and begins to make lopsided V’s with a red-ink pen in a grade book. I am sick of this bullshit. The entire class with the exception of two students got C’s the first week. He stops by, looks at my notes.

 

“Von Behren whose chikcenscratch is this?”

 

I am summoning the courage. I want to stand up. I want to call Cool Joe Thomas out for being a hypocrite. I want to tell him that all semester all he has ever done is told us what to

 

Joe Thomas continues to address his class as people. I want to call him a Marxist. I want to tell him that he is fucking with our future at a school where the drop out rate for my class alone will be close to 30 percent.

 

AS he put my notebook down he looks to Farkash.

 

“You guys want to get higher grades but when you go home you take dog notes.”

 

Dog notes.

I want to throw cool Joe Thomas a fucking Milk bone. I want to neuter him with the truth.

 

Instead I turn my head down.

 

I can hardly walk.

 

I take dog notes.

When I am going out of the classroom Angelina Lighthouse turns to me and says woof. Before I laugh I see that she is holding the hand of the bi-racial football player she is dating.

I walk to my locker looking for Patrick without saying a word.


                                                                ***

 

Mme Suhr says the word Paris so that is sounds like pay-wee. Language is mellifluous and swings through the top of her poached lips.

I want to tell her about the two times I endeavored to win the trip to Paris. I want to tell her about the first time I saw the advertisement in the Journal Star when I was in seventh grade and how the next day my District Manager arrive dad asked me if I would like to represent the district. I remember mom writing my speech and my father videotaping me in front of Chuck Ames and being overwhelmed by the older titans who arrived at the Cater Inn that snowy day in January. I remember feeling disappointed and how Mr. Grebe from my Church who was also a District Manager and had his own paperboy who I was competing against. How after he dropped me off that January day I monopolized the afternoon looking at the snow banks outside my house feeling that I had lost something I had never truly attained, even though the contest would later be canceled due to the Gulf War.

I want to tell her how I feel in love with HOME ALONE because the family was headed straight to Paris.

About the essay my sister wrote for her class about her brother having the unbidden opportunity to go to France.  About My father having his students make a GOOD LUCK DAVE  poster on an overturned science fair slab of cardboard.

I want to tell Madame about receiving the phone call from Tom Otten the next year and being invited to participate in the contest of a dream again. I want to tell her about spending hours late at night listening to Shepherds Moon over and over again, rehearsing the dynamics to my speech like an orchestral conductor and a podium. I want to tell her about how that was the year in which everyone was praying for me. How that was the year I nailed my speech.

I want to tell Madame how Columbus day has come and gone and how there was no advertisement in the paper as was the case with previous years.

I want to tell her that I’m not even sure the trip is to Paris this year.

 

I want to tell her how I’m not even sure there is going to be a trip this year at all.