After observing the lesson that I had presented on subject-verb agreement, Mr. Cook, the chairman of the English department, who always smelled of tomato soup, came up to me after my lesson ended and said, “You were so good, I could’ve fucked you on the blackboard.”
I was stunned, because Cook had been such a mealymouth prior to this outburst. Plus, I had never seen this type of vertical coitus, not even in movies. He’d need a stool in order to reach me since I was at least three inches taller than him, and I was no gymnast.
I was torn. On the one hand, I was revulsed. On the other hand, I was a self-supporting, single woman with no trust fund waiting for me, and the chairman of the English department liked my lesson. My mind raced.
I thought of reporting him, but I knew that would go nowhere. Mr. Francini, the principal, was only interested in catching students smoking dope in the bathrooms. And I really needed this job, so I made up my mind to try and take it as a compliment. “Thank you. I think.” But my answer only inspired more praise.
“The way you got the kids to understand how a singular subject took a singular predicate was so arousing,” Cook said, “I almost had to throw some ice cubes down my pants.”
Too bad he wasn’t around the day I got my class to understand the difference between “who” and “whom,” I thought. Now that was a day for a good fuck on the blackboard!
After he finally left, my colleague Krystie came to fetch me for lunch. But first, I went to the ladies’ room and washed my face and hands so thoroughly that I could have performed a surgical procedure.
Krystie, a gym teacher, was being harassed herself, by Mr. Johnson, a so-called history teacher. The joke was that he told the kids that eggs Benedict was named after Benedict Arnold. He and his wife, another history teacher, were notorious alcoholics, and at every senior prom, they would get up onstage and slur their way through “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Any time he got the chance, Johnson would slither up to Krystie and ask her how big her boobs were, and every time, she would cry, which only seemed to turn Johnson on more. She started wearing looser and looser blouses and appeared to be growing a mustache since she stopped using a depilatory on her upper lip. But nothing stopped his lascivious leering.
I had also become pals with Bridget, a history teacher who had emigrated from Munich after World War II. Since she was built like a double-decker bus and had a German accent, nobody messed with her. She sounded like an SS commandant rounding up the locals, although in fact her parents had been in the underground.
I was still feeling slightly guilty for not snitching on Cook, who had given me a glowing report. I was a “review whore,” and I was not proud of it. So I didn’t mention the blackboard incident to Bridget or Krystie.
When President Nixon decided to send more ground troops into Vietnam, there was a short window where these men in the school were petrified that even teachers and married men might be drafted. Johnson stopped asking Krystie what size bra she wore, and for a while she seemed more relaxed and even started wearing normal-size clothes again and resumed using Nair under her nose. Even Cook, who despite his out-of-control libido was over the hill regarding the draft, seemed momentarily chastened.
But when the nightly news turned to other topics, such as the Manson murders, the teachers’ creepy behavior resumed.
“The way you got the kids to understand how a singular subject took a singular predicate was so arousing,” Cook said, “I almost had to throw some ice cubes down my pants.”
Bridget decided it was time to do something about it.
“We will meet secretly,” she said, “like ze Resistance.”
Too young to have fought the Nazis during the “big one,” Bridget was possessed by the idea of exacting revenge, even if it was going to be against a pervy history teacher and not Joseph Goebbels.
But Krystie was afraid of confrontation. She might have been a gym teacher, but her forte was folk dancing. Still, she let the three of us rendezvous after school at her house.
Krystie secretly lived with her boyfriend, Jack, and asked forgiveness for her “sinful” behavior at church every Sunday. She also kept Johnson’s behavior a secret from Jack, fearing that he would confront the jerk and reveal that they were living together. Jack, a construction worker, was off on a job, so we could meet without him knowing. (Bridget was single, and not necessarily by choice.)
We sat in Krystie’s kitchen, and Bridget gave us her commands. “O.K., ladies, let’s do this.”
The first exercise involved a move that Bridget had seen in a 1967 movie called The Karate Killers, starring Joan Crawford and Telly Savalas.
Krystie immediately put the kibosh on that. “I’m not going to attack someone physically, even if Joan Crawford did,” she said, and I agreed.
“Going ze Gandhi route is a mistake,” Bridget countered. “These are ze monsters of ze world and must be brought down wiz violence.”
“Why don’t we go to the police?” Krystie asked.
“Because looking at your tits is not a crime,” Bridget said. “And anyway, most of ze cops would think he was a ‘real man’ and you were a crybaby.”
“Why don’t we put matches in his shoes while he’s sleeping in the teachers lounge?” I suggested. Bridget thought that was too kind.
Krystie said, “Why not just burn him with a cigarette and run out of the room?” Bridget was impressed that Krystie seemed to be coming to her senses, but she had to agree with me that it was too risky.
Glue on the men’s-room toilet seats?, I suggested. Stuff up the toilets with tampons? Bridget didn’t think much of those ideas, since they would figure out who did it, especially the tampon tactic.
Meanwhile, Cook decided to “observe” my lesson again, this time on adverbs. That day, I wore a black maxi dress with a high neckline and some old pearls, to signal that I was a prude, and I put my hair in a bun, to look as matronly as possible. But when the lesson was over, he was again ecstatic.
“That was brilliant the way you explained that you don’t ‘feel badly’ any more than you ‘feel sadly.’ Just brilliant,” he said. “I think I feel ‘madly, not sadly’ in love with you. Whaddya think about a drink after work one day?”
I clutched my pearls and backed away, almost crashing into the blackboard.
“Look, Mr. Cook … ”
“Oh, please call me Lloyd.”
“O.K., um, Lloyd, see, um, I, um … ”
“You’re not married. What’s the big deal?”
“I’m involved with someone,” I lied.
“So am I. But let’s just say that my wife has shut down shop and she has given me permission to shop elsewhere, if you get my drift.”
“Well, I don’t go out with married men,” I said, but I was thinking, certainly not with little creeps like you.
Cook, who loved a challenge, made a move.
“These are lovely pearls. An heirloom?”
Now he was touching me. I wished that Bridget were there to tell me what to do, but I knew I had to handle this myself.
“No, Lloyd. I got them at Loehmann’s.”
“Feisty when you’re turned on, aren’t you?”
Clearly, he was not going to stop, no matter what I said or did.
Too young to have fought the Nazis during the “big one,” Bridget was possessed by the idea of exacting revenge, even if it was going to be against a pervy history teacher and not Joseph Goebbels.
“I’m feeling woozy, Lloyd. Low blood sugar,” I said. “I think I’ll go to the teachers lounge and lie down. So, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Well, all right,” he said. “But look at the woody you made me get.”
I stammered something about needing to go to the nurse and ran to Bridget’s classroom. She was banging chalk erasers together, and probably imagining Johnson’s face on one eraser and Himmler’s on the other.
“I was just wondering,” I said, choking on chalk dust, “what would you do if someone actually touched you and accused you of giving him a hard-on?”
Bridget stopped. “Who did that to you?” she asked.
“Oh, not to me. No. No. No. Somebody I know.”
“Well, I would tell him to go fuck himself, punch him in the gut, and then I’d report him to the police.”
“But I thought you said the police wouldn’t do anything.”
“They would if he was injured.”
Now I was confused. If I injured Cook in any way, I, not he, would be arrested. At that moment, Krystie appeared. She was hyperventilating.
“Johnson just came into my class and said he wanted to see how big my boobs were,” she said, on the verge of hysterics. “But this time, he closed the door and pulled my blouse up! I ran out of the room.”
Bridget went into action.
“These fascists vill learn their lesson and they vill learn it now.”
Krystie could see that Bridget meant business, and that frightened her. But she also felt empowered now that Bridget had made up her mind for her.
“All right. I’m ready,” Krystie said.
“Are you sure?,” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve had enough.”
“What about you?” asked Bridget.
“What about me?”
I had never told anyone about Cook, but Bridget sensed that it was happening to me, too, even if she didn’t know who the perpetrator was.
“Did someone bother you too?,” Krystie asked. “I thought I was the only one.”
Bridget reached into her desk drawer, pulled something out, and stuck it in her pocket. Was it a knife? Was she planning to stab him?
The three of us marched into Johnson’s empty classroom, where he was staring into space. When he saw us at his door, he jumped up.
Bridget marched up to him, pulled out a tape measure, and said, “Excuse me. Could I measure your prick?”
Johnson stepped back. “What the hell is this?”
“I said, could I measure your prick? I’m wondering how big it is.”
“You girls need to get out of here.”
“Ve are not leaving until you let us measure your prick.”
I started laughing.
“I’m calling Mr. Francini. You won’t get away with this.”
“Take off your pants,” Bridget said.
Now Krystie was laughing hysterically, too, as Bridget got closer to him with her tape measure.
“You hold him down while I pull his pants down, and then you can measure it,” Krystie said.
Johnson started pleading with them to leave him alone.
“Listen, I get it. I was an animal. I won’t do it again,” he said as Bridget grabbed him and tied his hands behind his back.
Krystie pulled his pants down around his ankles. “Sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’!” she demanded. “Come on, sing it, you alcoholic asshole!”
“I’m sorry! I said I was sorry!,” Johnson said, practically in tears.
“Sing it!” said Krystie.
Suddenly a series of bells went off. It was a fire drill.
“Let me out! There might be a fire!,” Johnson said.
“Oh, too bad,” said Bridget. “I guess no song, then. You’d better not tell anyone about this, or next time, your dick won’t be so lucky.” She untied him, and we all left to go on the drill.
I felt sure that Johnson would not be sizing up Krystie’s boobs again. But what about Cook? I decided I had had enough—compliments on my subject-verb agreement lessons, though enjoyable, be damned.
I decided to invite him to a lesson. He was more than delighted. No tomato soup for him that day. He splashed some kind of cologne on and took a seat in the back.
“Here’s a good and a grammatically correct way to get a bully to leave you alone,” I told the class. “Just say, ‘Between you and me, together we can do great things.’ Notice the use of ‘between you and me’ and not ‘between you and I,’ because a preposition takes the objective case.”
Cook was so excited he started sweating—and it was December.
Then a student named Michael asked, “What happens if that doesn’t work? What if the bully just keeps on being a jerk even if your grammar was correct?”
I was thrilled with this question. “Why don’t we ask Mr. Cook how he would handle it?”
I decided I had had enough—compliments on my subject-verb agreement lessons, though enjoyable, be damned.
Cook wiped his face and said something like “Oh, no. I’m not good at this.”
But Michael persisted. “Please, sir, tell us what you would do.”
I jumped in. “Would you call your mommy? Would you run away crying? Would you punch the bully in the face? What would you do?” My voice was calm but insistent.
Cook was not used to multiple-choice questions from underlings and seemed at a loss for words.
“What should you do when someone stalks you or touches you inappropriately or tries to coerce you into doing something you don’t want to do? Well, Mr. Cook?”
“Me? Well, shucks, I wouldn’t have a clue about that.”
“Short of violence, are there any other suggestions?,” I asked the class.
“How about humiliating him in public?,” Michael asked.
“Now, that is a good idea,” I said. “But what if the bully is in a superior position? Like your boss? What then?”
A girl in the class, Rebecca, raised her hand.
“You should report him to his superiors or maybe even the police.”
Cook got up and started to inch his way toward the exit.
“Mr. Cook, are you not enjoying the class?,” I asked.
“Oh, it’s excellent, but I have to attend to some important business,” he said.
“Please, stay a little longer. We’re just getting started.”
“Oh, no,” Cook said, wiping his sweaty face. “As enjoyable as this is, I must be going.”
“Come back next week,” I said. “I’ll be covering dangling participles. You’ll love it.”
Joy Behar is a comedian and a co-host of The View. This is the first chapter to be published of her memoir in progress, which will be published by Regalo Press