Free You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood Page A

they were on their guard.
    â€œDid you know Pinola means condom in Spanish?”
    â€œFuck you it does,” said a voice in the second row.
    â€œGood morning, Mr. Pinola.” Following the filthiest exchange of language ever induced by the taking of attendance, we buckled down to the day’s lesson, an improvised version of my original plan, which now involved a dramatic reading of the comic strips.
    Mr. Bur-GAH was peaking into the classroom as the bell rang and I was struck by his resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams Family. He gave me an astonished thumbs-up as all nineteen students passed from the room in good humor.
    Bruce Pinola said, “You gonna be here tomorrow, Nappy?”

    â€œMr. Nappy to you,” I corrected him.
    â€œWe love this guy, Mr. Bur-GAH.”
    Carbo, the sneaker man, was also enthused. “Tomorrow I’m bein’ Garfield.”
    Word spread. Kids flocked to my classes to be insulted during attendance and vie to play John the Turtle and the Dookie Bird. As I headed down the hallway for lunch, Mr. Bur-GAH slipped his fist under my armpit and steered me into the teachers’ lounge with an affectionate half nelson, a fetid yellow closet of a room crowded with twelve wax-like figures around a Formica table.
    â€œThis is Nappy, the artist.” Mr. Bur-GAH announced. “He kicked ass this morning.”
    One bloodless face looked up with a mouthful of egg salad on white. “They’re tenth graders,” he said. “Let’s see how he does with the seniors this afternoon.”
    â€œJerk-off,” Mr. Bur-GAH mumbled. “Don’t listen to him.” He punctuated his admonition with an index finger in my solar plexus. “Listen, after you get settled in I want to talk to you about this idea I have about a miniseries set in a high school.”
    In the course of my career as an artist in the schools I have been required to teach classes from kindergarten to twelfth grade, to serve school lunches, to supervise after-school detention. I have produced a circus and a musical revue with a former composer for Saturday Night Live, adapted classics as plays to be performed by children who could not read, and invented game shows. I have organized student-teacher conga lines, choreographed
dances with special needs students, conducted radio interviews with household pets, and filmed an 8 mm movie about making Jell-o. My most popular turn by far was the invention of Dr. Memory.
    Frantic one morning for some trick, however bizarre, to amuse the jaded students of a suburban middle school in an affluent suburb north of Providence, I loaded a shoebox with natural flavor extracts off the kitchen spice rack. Vanilla, grapefruit, watermelon, pomegranate, wheat grass, there were twenty-eight of them in all. My act involved wearing a turban (read: beach towel), blindfolding the students and waving a bottle of extract under their noses while asking them where they were being transported in their minds, and then of course making them write about it. The first classes were difficult, the most skeptical students resistant.
    â€œYuch puke! Get that out of my nose.”
    â€œThe girl before me had boogers!”
    â€œIt tickles. You’re making me sneeze.”
    The next day, however, I brought in extra towels and turned the troublemakers into my assistants. I added a boom box to the act, playing one of my wife’s belly dancing tapes. With a little encouragement they were dreaming themselves back to early childhood, to family vacations, and writing about the cities in which their grandparents were born. Every class wanted a visit from Dr. Memory.
    Â 
    In six years as an artist-in-residence, however, I could
not do one stitch of my own work during any semester in which I was working in the schools. My time off was spent recovering my self-image and my inner strength, self-medicating and amassing ever more schtick so as not to be eaten alive in the