Free You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood

doomed them to remain in public school forever, they unexpectedly had a chance to work with someone who had an agent. “Who’s going to star in the movie?” one principal wanted to know, while another cornered me in the men’s room: “Do you think you could get a script to Scorsese?”

    After a spirited competition for my services, I was assigned to a vocational technical high school in a decaying industrial city north of Boston where, according to the buzz of the arts administrators, someone like me “could really make a difference.”
    Apparently not to the office secretary, who did not lift her eyes from her keyboard on the morning of my first class but called over her shoulder to the assistant principal, who sneered at my jacket and tie and walked past me without a word. His name was Mr. Burger, pronounced, in the Boston area, Bur-GAH. Five-foot-four inches tall with a nose like a red bell pepper and a shaved head, he wore a black turtleneck with rolled-up sleeves and swung his forearms like nightsticks.
    â€œI picked up some newspapers on the way to school,” I said when I caught him looking at the stack under my arm. In truth I’d planned to kill some time with them in a toilet stall, but a glance at my schedule showed classes back to back. “I thought the students and I might read them together and talk about what constitutes a narrative.”
    â€œDid you say read ?” I had apparently given Mr. Bur-GAH his second good laugh of the day. His first had been my hair, which I wore in what was called an afro in those days, a large frizzy brown bush the shape of a Tootsie Roll lollipop, but mostly he ignored me, scanning the halls as he walked, like a camera over a bank teller’s shoulder. “Just try to keep ’em in the room till the bell rings.”

    He stood in the classroom doorway as nineteen students made their way to their desks as slowly as was humanly possible. “This is Mr. Wood,” he said.
    â€œLooks like Mr. Nappy-head to me,” one student said. “Where you get your hair cut, Nappy?”
    â€œYou mean lawn-mowed,” offered another.
    â€œShould we broil him or fry him, Mr. Bur-GAH?”
    A flicker of mischief lit the vice principal’s eyes and his emerging smile built anticipation like a drum roll. “Have it your way!” He beamed at the spontaneous outpouring of laughter and high-fives. As he turned to leave he handed me a class list and checked his watch with a theatrical flourish, betting on how long I’d last.
    There are students who completely ignore you, who remain collectively deaf to your best intentions and repel your carefully prepared plans. There are students who groan with every request you make, however logical or mundane, and others who gape, as if they had never seen anything remotely like you, as if you were a creature so alien to their experience that you did not register as human.
    This class didn’t look at me at all, but at each other, dead expressions come alive with sadistic possibility. I felt like the watchman in A Night at the Museum as the T. Rex and the Civil War mannequins advanced in a conspiracy to send me screaming down the escalator steps.
    When in doubt take attendance. “Carbo, Peter S.” I said.

    â€œFuck you,” said a kid in the front row. He wore sneakers the size of anti-gravity boots and sat in the position commonly assumed for a pelvic exam.
    â€œKnott, Daniel. Just say Here, please.”
    Mr. Knott pointed to his crotch. “Here, please.”
    â€œMunson, Robert.” No answer.
    â€œHenry Turturo?” No answer. “. . . called Robert Munson’s mother a meat head.”
    A chair flew back. “You said that?”
    The accusation was angrily refuted. “Did fucking not!”
    I checked them off. “Turturo, here. Munson, here.”
    Sneakers liked that. “Pretty good, Nappy.”
    â€œPinola, Bruce?”
    Now