Another Shop in the Mall

A large boutique opened in our mall last year, maybe the year before, and Micki recently met with the owner to have her books sold from one of the store's many display booths. We drove over to see the display, and as we entered, I had a familiar feeling. Here, I thought, is a somewhat outmoded delivery system for our endless human need to buy things. My senses swirled, and memories of other malls in other places came flooding back. As I settled on a bench to watch the people go by, I realized just how much of my life has had a mall as its setting.

When I was growing up, the Berkshire Mall on the outskirts of Reading was our closest mall. There were countless storefronts, hundreds of places to sit and loiter, and large spaces filled with massive green plants with waterworks interspersed. Except for the enclosed nature of the mall, it could have just as easily been a busy downtown street bustling with shoppers, wanderers, and family members exhausted and looking for a reprieve from endless spending.

Every mall in America once held the same expectations for those who crossed the thresholds. There were hundreds of stores, ranging from book and shoe shops, toy stores, restaurants, places to purchase apparel, jewelry, furniture, knick-knacks, newspapers, coffee or other beverages, to places to gather to eat or to relax or play arcade games.

The shops were arranged up and down both sides of the mall's broad corridors. In the central area, elevators and escalators took one to the second level to access massive department stores situated within the cyclopean shopping center. There were many such emporiums with names like Pomeroy’s, Wanamaker’s, Sears, and JCPenney. The Berkshire Mall also had a few pharmacies and a Woolworth’s in the old days.

Dotted prolifically throughout the concourse were hundreds of free-standing kiosks selling tchotchkes, doo-dads, thingamies, whatyacallums, and hooza-whatsits. There were food vendors galore, and almost as soon as one entered, the scent of baked, fried, fast food, roasted peanuts, soft pretzels, ice cream, sugary drinks, and other treats wafted over you. Beneath it all hovered the potent aroma of buttery movie theater popcorn.

The panoply of sense-shocking, mind-numbing spectacle was more than a little kid could stand. I, like some desert-marooned wanderer, shambled into the marketplace and was quickly overcome. I loved it. As soon as I had wheels of my own, I spent every moment I could at that mall and then branched out to the other malls in the region. Each larger town in the area had its own unique mall. All participated in the same basic rules of mass-market consumerism, but all were laid out differently. At each, I experienced a wondrous variety of shops and stores in an infinitely renewable variation of wonder and desire to spend my money.

The Lebanon Valley Mall, near Schaefferstown, became a hangout for some of my former classmates. We would regularly gather to see movies, hang out at the music store to rifle through CDs and tapes, pester the bookshop clerks, and eat enough sugary foods to overstimulate the combined nervous system of an entire elementary school. Sometimes, after Christmas or birthday cards had been opened and cash deposited, we ventured to other malls, too.

A few miles away in downtown Lancaster was the Park City Mall, which was more vast than the Berkshire Mall and was shaped like a starfish with a huge central hub capped with what looked like a circus tent. Each arm or spoke was full to the brim with all the shops one could imagine. Near Philadelphia, the King of Prussia Mall rivaled them all for size and magnificence.

Proverbs says that a fool and his money are soon parted. Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that when I was younger and regularly went to all the malls, I was that fool. I could always find something I wanted to purchase. Sometimes—who am I kidding?—most times, it was books and comics. I also splurged on music, movies, food, and t-shirts.

When I moved to Asheboro, being a connoisseur of malls, I visited the Randolph Mall (now called the Asheboro Mall) and probably spent too much time and money there, too. Like other malls, it had portals to Sears, Belk, Dillard's, JCPenney, and a movie theater. It was modest compared to the Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro or the more massive shopping experiences to be had in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, or Chapel Hill, but nevertheless had everything that a mall usually boasts, including its denizens, commonly, not to say derogatorily, called mall rats.

Early on, I learned that there are those humans who thrive exclusively within the gravity of a shopping mall. They are regulars, always there from the moment the doors open until stores close and the security guards kick them into the vast parking lots, shouting, “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

There is a perpetual range of misfits and hooligans, lonely (and skeevy) old-timers, jersey-bedecked jocks, overly made-up and scantily clad cheerleader types. There were the overweight and acne-stricken, the nerd, the dweeb, the geek, and the slob. A short guy with tightly braided long hair in a faux leather jacket—a variant of him exists in every mall—talks to his shabby cronies about how he was once an MMA fighter, leading his small band of poorly washed, greasy-haired stick-at-naughts forever in a pageant around the mall, bothering shop owners and clogging up the food court.

Early on in my residency in Asheboro, I got a part-time job in our mall's bookstore. Unlike most of the shops, this place had its own doors to the world that opened earlier and stayed open later than the mall. I used to wonder if any of these mall people ever went home. I secretly believed that some of the ‘mall rats’ actually lived in the walls, behind panels concealing a closed storefront, or precariously balanced in handmade hammocks way up in the rafters. Instead, they just vanish at 9 p.m. and reappear when the mall opens at 10 the next day.

In 2001, Asheboro had a downtown that some ghost towns would have found to be a little too dead. The mall (and the newly completed Walmart Supercenter) were the main hubs of commerce in our small town. I'm glad to say that is no longer true. The downtown is a bustling, thriving, and lively center for food and commerce, and the mall has since begun to fall into the shadow of its former consumer glory.

Now, walking out of the boutique shop and into the wider mall, we see the remnants of shops that are boarded over with neatly painted vistas or photos of families—ironically—outside enjoying nature. Others display enlarged black-and-white pictures of the town's shopping history. Huge swaths where stores once beckoned to shoppers and loiterers are now just wall space.

A few stores remain in operation as I write this. We have a large sporting goods center, our humble movie theater, a Belk department store, a Chick-fil-A, a jeweler, the boutique shop, a few clothiers, and a men's suit retailer. There are several large shoe stores, a smelly bath lotion place, a phone case shop which I swear is a front for some illegal enterprise, a city utility counter to pay water and power bills, the bookstore I briefly worked at, and the Dragon Egg Chinese takeout.

There are a few stores that open to the outside, attached but not accessible from inside the mall. There is a small, perpetually empty arcade, and a host of benches, tables, and cordoned-off areas for queuing (but for what?) are all that remain of a once vibrant shopping experience.

I am of two minds about this. Once a great fan of malls, I now see the benefit that comes from supporting local businesses. When the downtown began to thrive, the mall faltered. It has never regained itself, which implies that the downtown has put down solid roots. Who could lament that?

We have heard promises that one day soon, the mall will be remodeled into an indoor/outdoor format. Whether strictly true or not, I am ambivalent. As I sat there, I was struck by how much the place feels like an airport that is under construction. Not much is going on, except for the people who show up to fill the empty space.

Small packs of people rove here and there. Oldsters do laps. Groups of straggly teenage girls guffaw when older boys walk by on their way to get a slice before the movie starts. A group holds hands in a circle in the central open area, either praying to bring the mall down in a puff of dust, or to keep it up so they can continue to have a place to perform their rituals without being in the weather.

I see a beleaguered mother pushing a double stroller and corralling two toddlers while hollering into her phone. A very young couple gently clasp hands and then nervously look about to see if anyone is watching. Grandpas sit on the benches, looking paunchy, bilious, and fed up. Grandmas with hair like the atmospheres of gas giants gossip around a table by the Chick-fil-A. A little kid is wailing. A security guard is talking to a man with a mop and bucket. A woman with sunken cheeks and feverish eyes barks at her boyfriend, who has a neck tattoo of a female devil and an unwashed mullet.

All of this happens within the air-conditioned safety of our neighborhood shopping mall. There aren't many stores, but the people still gather, wander, hang out, loiter, and live their lives. Behind it all, that deep aroma of buttery popcorn. Over the low-level speaker system, "Drops of Jupiter" by Train is playing. Of course it is. It's the theme of all malls everywhere.

Once a symbol of capitalism, a pillar of the American community, an institution of unbridled consumerism, a festival of food, pop culture, acquisitiveness, materialism, and gangly teenage independence, the American shopping mall is a pale shade of its former glory. As if the organism is breaking up, the parking lot periphery is now full of standalone shops, dentist offices, retail coffee stores, banks, and a Chipotle well away from the infrastructure that once drew thousands per day. Those stores and the businesses downtown now drag people out and away from the mall.

I see an empty building, dank, dark, conduit hanging from once glowing lights, dry fountains, stained rugs, pigeons roosting in the skylights. It is a dim prophecy of a time when all malls are extinct. It might be better that way, but it makes me sad, nonetheless.

Micki walks up and startles me from my deep reverie. “I'm going to get my nails done,” she says, gesturing to a large purple neon sign near where I'm sitting. I nod. “I'll be at the bookstore,” I say.

It's not much, but it is our mall. For now.

Secret Happy Mondays

For years, I have been the beneficiary of a schedule that requires each employee to work a closing shift one day per week. Each one of us comes in at 1 and works until 9 on an assigned day. We only close late Monday through Thursday nights, and my night is Monday.

This might sound unpleasant, especially considering the negative buzz that Mondays get as the first day back after far too short a weekend. Monday mornings for most people are part of the cultural lexicon of unhappy things working people have to endure. The alarm always goes off too early on Mondays. The urge to have a lovely lie in and skip the rat race is at its strongest. Deeply melodramatic feelings of nostalgia for the last two days off develop their own potent emotional gravity. We pine, we long, we ache for Saturday's independence and Sunday's gloriously unfettered lack of office grind.

Well, not for me the unmitigated ballyhoo. While other people are sobbing into their grits facing the new work week, I've already been to the gym, and am sitting in my recliner, feet up with the dogs watching my shows or reading or tapping out my draft for that week's essay. While other people are combing their inboxes for the email that Jane sent at 5 p.m. on Friday or totting up that week's to-do list, I'm shamelessly adding a few hours to the weekend's leisurely respite from the last work week and pleasurably deferring the next one.

When I moved into my current position, more than a decade ago, I was informed that I would be closing on Mondays. Up to that point, Tuesdays had been my night, which was awkward and unpleasant. It was so odd to start the week off normally and then get to have the morning off the next day. Then, after getting home—it always takes me the damnedest time to wind down after a day at work—I sit there staring straight at the ceiling waiting for my eyes to whack closed. So, I gladly accepted the new Monday shift, seeing that lovely extension of the weekend before me like a weekly snow delay to be coveted and enjoyed. Ever since then, I have jealously protected my priceless closing night from others who would pry it from me.

The other nice thing about closing Mondays is that occasionally one gets a respite from the late close shift when a holiday makes for a long weekend. On those weeks, unlike the poor saps who have to close on the other nights, I just get another day off and the rest of the week breezes by. They, meanwhile, have to dread the disruption of the week by having to stay late on Thursday or something.

“Monday, Monday,” sang the Mamas and the Papas, and they had no idea how right they were. But Monday mornings are not all rose petals and cream. We Bares are pragmatic and sensible folk. Rather than take time off work for a doctor or dentist appointment, I have traditionally scheduled these medically necessary events for Monday mornings since I am already off. Like unhappy blips on the radar screen of life, these sparse but no less pressing interruptions of my Monday joy disrupt and dismay.

When the dentist office called to remind me of my biannual cleaning recently, I noted with chagrin and disappointment that I had scheduled the oral torture session at 1030 on a Monday. It was so situated that I didn’t have much time after the gym before needing to be in the cleaning chair. Under other circumstances, this might seem like a pretty good set up. However, things are a little more complicated for me.

I have a genetic heart condition. This requires me to take a strong antibiotic an hour prior to going to see the dentist. Once I have swallowed the horse pill, my innards begin a complicated process of vacating my system of everything I have ever eaten. This can leave me feeling rather like the local farmland gentry are having a hoedown just beneath the belt buckle. So, having chugged the pill with a gallon of water, I started the dicy process of waiting for the signal for me to fly to the loo. This is not a relaxing scenario for my habitually calm Mondays.

A secondary problem arises when it becomes apparent that the dentist's schedule and mine are not aligned. They are thorough and careful with my teeth, of course, but ultimately, I'm always a little pressed for time to get home, change and head off to start the work day. They schedule my time and I'm always early, just in case they're ready, but they are perpetually behind the eight ball. Add to this the Cossacks doing their Russian kick dance in my lower intestines and things can get a little fraught. This last time, I was so unhappily affected by the antibiotic, that I had to scamper straight home after seeing the scheduling lady. I made it just in time. I felt robbed of my usually calm Monday and perturbed about the potency of the medicine.

Then, of course, I had to switch on the bath and have a wash and dress for work. For the rest of that day, I was worn out and more than a little digestively haggard. I also had a sore jaw from having the mandible propped open like a screen door on a cool Autumn day. When I got home that Monday night, I was shattered, a little unwell and more than a little irritable. I lay down and turned my face to the wall. What, I asked myself, is a man to do?

By the time the next Monday rolled around, it felt like the last time I'd had a relaxing pre-work chill was months ago. This could not be borne. What is the point, I asked myself, if I have a morning off and cannot enjoy it? In the depths of that night, while I tottered around the dark house, I had an unusually hot idea. I resolved to take the whole day for the next dentist appointment, so if my innards started giving me the elbow, I could just go straight home and rest. I rarely take a day off for my own health issues, but it seems that when I need them most is on the days I set my appointments.

We Bares pride ourselves on going to work every day. Not for us the almost constant use of sick leave of our younger peers. Being that I hail from the X Generation, I am bound by the vows of that venerable era to go to work regardless of what ails me. Arm off? See you at 9. Cholera? Remember we have that meeting with Jane about that email! I've worked through severe musculoskeletal pain, wounds, fever, colds, the ague, sore throats, roaring headaches and intestinal dysregulation that would make lesser humans fall to pieces. Well, we Bares are not lesser humans. We set our teeth and muddle through. We are about the best through-muddlers there are. My maternal grandfather once paved an entire back porch while one arm was broken in a sling. If I'm not mistaken, he also had a bad toothache. Sterner stuff about sums it up. 

I have for years looked on with something approaching paternal disappointment when my youthful coworkers take their leave because they had a hangnail or split ends or, gods forbid, they needed a mental health day. To show up, even in less than ideal fitness is, for mine and previous generations, a point of deep pride. However, I think that I will take a page from their play books and start using my sick leave, as necessary. I will never be able to just call off because “I just can't quite manage today”. But, anticipating the dyspepsia associated with having to take those dentist meds, I could plan on being out the whole day on a Tuesday or even a Thursday without feeling like I was a malingerer. 

If I take the whole day off, even if I'm feeling like the wreck of the Hesperus, I can get something done around the house and be close to the bathroom as needed. I have built up enough sick time to allow the whole 82nd Airborne two days each with enough left over to “take the cure” for myself for three more months. Best of all, it saves my beloved Monday mornings. 

Could there be anything more wonderful? Four glorious hours between gym and having to step in the rain locker to scrape off the outer crust and don the uniform for work is enough joy for anyone to be getting along with on a Monday. I sit in my chair  joyously imagining my coworkers grunting and sweating under the cruel lash of workaday strain as I scritch our pups behind the ears and yawn contentedly. My work day won't start for ages, I think, as I stare off into the near distance. Life seems like one grand, sweet song.

Those Monday hours are far too valuable for my mental and physical wellbeing to load them up with doctor appointments or other nonsense jotted on my calendar. Nothing will go to pieces at work if I take a day. Even if it does, I'll find out about it when I get in. Its all worth it to save my blessed Monday mornings!

Never Flinch: A Review

Author’s Note: Any time I review a book, I feel that the author might just come across my work in a preliminary search of “what the critics are saying”. If this is the case and Stephen King reads this article, I always like to make sure he knows that I’d read stereo instructions or biomedical information from a pharmaceutical company if he wrote them. While I might be overly critical of Never Flinch in this essay, as an unpublished writer myself, I’ve got no stones to throw. The following is an exercise in literary criticism more than anything else. 

I like reviewing Stephen King books, as it accomplishes two things. It challenges me to write criticism, and it gives me an excuse to burn through his latest novel. Both reward me, if I'm lucky. Sometimes, though, I read a book that doesn't sit right, or feels a little out of tune. Like anyone who knows the notes, can tell when something is off. Stephen King is a national treasure, and we must revere him as such. Though it hurts my heart to say it, his latest book, Never Flinch, was just very okay. As I progressed through the novel, I had the very serious feeling that our Stephen might be losing a step or two. As one of his Constant Readers, it may be that I've been spoiled by so many years of stellar production. Everything he has written for the last two decades or so has been very good. That wasn’t always the case.

In the mid-nineties, King went through a very hard time personally, and his work reflects this fact. He wrote three books (at least) in that period that were dingers. Desperation, Cell, and The Regulators were books that I came back to after a significant hiatus from reading his works, and I felt as though we had lost a genius prematurely. The Master of Horror turned it around, though, and put out some real walk-off home runs after that. The story of his decline is now well-known and extant.

I’ve read almost everything the week it comes out for years, so I read Never Flinch almost as soon as it hit the newsstands. I had high hopes, and honestly, the book wants to be as good a novel as the books that have come before. It wants to be compelling, and it even starts, as one friend put it, with an intriguing premise. By comparison with his last few books, though, it just feels like a rickety puddle jumper rather than his usual F-18. Understand, these are King characters, King ideas and plot lines, even King storytelling, which far surpass others in his field, but I never felt Never Flinch achieves its potential as I had hoped it would, and that feels like a let down.

The story, like so many of King's novels, involves a host of characters, good and bad, all doing different things in different places. At the foundation of Never Flinch, though, is the familiar and now beloved Holly Gibney. Holly is, as King has admitted, one of his favorite all-time characters, which is saying something, based on the entirety of his pantheon.

Holly first appeared in the book Mr. Mercedes, which I have touched on before. In that book, the timid and traumatized wunderkind helps Detective Bill Hodges find a psycho called Brady Hartsfield who is committing mass killings in Buckeye City, Ohio. Holly continues to grow in the two subsequent books of the trilogy, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, then shows up in The Outsider, If It Bleeds, and most recently in her eponymous title, Holly. Never Flinch is Holly's seventh book, and like King has said, she is compelling and fun to read, and unlike any crime fighter in modern fiction.

The latest book finds Holly as the head of the Finders Keepers private detective agency, with the help of Jerome Robinson, another character from the Bill Hodges novels. When a man falsely convicted of possession of material exploitative of children is stabbed to death in prison, a mysterious note appears threatening the deaths of 12 innocents and one guilty person as a means of regaining justice for the murdered man. The note is signed by Bill Wilson.

Immediately, Detective Izzy Jaynes, now a friend of Holly's, is on the case, but soon the bodies start piling up. The only hint is that the name signed on the note refers to Alcoholics Anonymous, which leads Izzy to call Holly to lend her brilliant mind and unique detection skills to the mystery. 

Then the story goes through mitosis and splits into a secondary plot line where Holly winds up on her own adventure, as a bodyguard for a firebrand feminist polemicist called Kate McKay who is on tour through the heartland of the country. McKay and her assistant are being stalked, threatened and attacked by a different but no less dangerous crazy person. Holly heads off to help McKay, while also helping Izzy to discover who Bill Wilson really is before he can murder again.

Another subplot arrives as Barbara Robinson, now a published poet, is invited to sing one of her poems with a mainstream gospel artist called Sista Bessy in Buckeye City. When McKay's venue in the city is bumped to the day before in deference to Sista Bessy, tensions rise, as once again, the city's park and auditorium complex becomes the focal point of the mad men (or women?) looking to gain vengeance with their nefarious plans.

As usual, King's bad guys are fantastically well drawn. Trig, the murderer using Bill Wilson as a pseudonym, is slowly understanding his descent into madness, even though his carefully maintained professional exterior fools everyone for far too long. His internal dialogue, replete with A.A. aphorisms, adds depth to an otherwise one-dimensional baddie who understands at last that murdering people is equally addictive as drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, the other bad guy, a child of the militant religious anti-abortion ideology, has been promising worse harm to McKay and her assistant, Corrie. As the plot advances, the main park in Buckeye City, Ohio, the fictional “Second Mistake on the Lake” becomes the setting for a double-edged climax, as the unknowing citizens, lining up for a strife-filled charity softball game between the city police and firefighters, are moments from a nightmare calamity spurred on by unbridled madness and hatred.

King definitely manages the cast of characters well and adds some of his storytelling magic to liven up the terror. The book is not supernatural (although Holly has certainly faced those kinds of monsters before), but there is an aspect of spine-tingling to it that makes it enjoyable. Like in most of his strictly crime novels, though, King cannot help but reference both the previous real monsters, or hints at his larger universe.

Another writer friend made the point to me that, in the same way that some famous actors want to be rock stars so badly they can taste it, King wants to be a crime novelist, despite his main superpower being the King of Horror. After reading Never Flinch, it has never been more clear how much King admires Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, maybe Elmore Leonard.

Where the book falters is its lack of real oomph. By the middle of the story, as the two plots are converging, the pressure doesn't seem to be adequate to provide the seething tension typical of his usual crime thrillers. Even the characters seem half-hearted, hesitant, doubtful, ambivalent, unnecessarily reflective. Trig acknowledges to himself in a tepid way that he is a serial killer and the bifurcated religious maniac went from compelling to bland. King has some of the most terrifyingly scary bad guys in modern literature, several of whom, like Chet Ondowski, The Outsider, Holly has faced and defeated. By the time everything's coming together at the end of the novel, the story feels wobbly, half-hearted. It never loses its readability, it just seems to fall flat—which for a King novel is saying something. 

After the main events of the novel reach their understated climax, King does a quick hot wash, rounding off and tying up the remaining loose ends, with a hint for another novel coming. Mostly, though, I felt like Never Flinch didn't know what it wanted to do and it left enough of the story unresolved to feel incomplete, sort of truncated.

After the audio version of the book (which was incredibly well-performed by Jessie Mueller) a self-recorded message from Steve to his Constant Readers gives some background notes to what even he acknowledges was a rough one.

After giving his wife, novelist Tabitha King, a draft of the manuscript, she handed it back and told King, “You can do better”. That gave him a smart lash, he admits. But it didn't help that as he was putting down the framework of the story, he was undergoing hip surgery. The surgery and the recuperation process took it out of him and the book suffers as a result. We cannot blame him, mortal that he is, even though his normal output is usually divine.

It is nevertheless a good read and miles better than the next-in-line crime authors one can find scrawling fiction today. King is still a master, he just didn't quite get all of this one. I hope he will keep swinging for the fences in coming years.

One thing that I feel redeems this book and makes me hopeful for the future is Holly Gibney. Holly has finally come into her own. From the small, terrified, bullied, and brow-beaten woman that Bill Hodges first takes under his wing, Holly has spent the interim novels figuring out who she is. Well, she has now arrived. After facing the “It baby” in The Outsider, battling a lesser “It baby” in If It Bleeds, and finally learning how to be fearless as she fights cannibalistic oldsters killing and eating young people in Holly, she is now at her full power and is more formidable than anyone reading Mr. Mercedes could have dreamed.

This most recent book proves that she is now one of King's most considerable characters, up there with Roland Deschain, Danny Torrence, and Andy Dufresne, full of untapped skill and potential. The way she fearlessly faces a bat-swinging would-be attacker in defense of Kate McKay proves that she is now really ready to face something truly terrifying that only King could think of in his next book featuring Holly. I sure can’t wait for that.

If nothing else, Never Flinch makes a good beach read, especially if you don't want to deal with supernatural monsters but are okay with the natural ones. If there is one thing that King's novels prove time and again, he has a unique perspective and a keen ability to make sure we never forget that the real monsters are really within us. That skill remains undimmed. 

I highly recommend Never Flinch because even his less-than-perfect work is fantastic compared to other writers, and if, like me, you're invested in Holly Gibney, then you have to make sure you've read the entire Holly series.

Adventures in Pedagogy

In 2003, having gone back to school and looking to finish my degree in English so that I could become a teaxher, I was hired on as an assistant in the Exceptional Children's Department in our local school system in a lateral entry position. I still remember where I was when the principal called me: the loading dock of our town hospital, where I was working as a cook. The principal told me that I would be working in a “pull-out” classroom, where students in the elementary school would arrive throughout the day to get help with reading, writing, and math. 

That August, the Friday before schools would open for teachers, I went to the director of food services and handed him a note of resignation. I was so excited. I had dreamed of becoming a teacher since my middle school days, and though I wavered early on, as all kids do, deciding what I truly wanted to do professionally, I nonetheless felt as though I was embarking on the first days of a thirty-year career in education. At twenty-six, I could be excused for being both naive and a little too enthusiastic, having no deeper experience with primary education than my own.

The first few months were thrilling. I was helping kids learn to read, and the teacher I worked with, if a little ‘country’, seemed to know her business, at least about getting kids up to speed with their reading. As Christmas rolled around, though, I started to see cracks in the idealistic view of my new career. Things seemed to be going well one day, and the next, everything was not okay.

Most professional jobs have a period of probation, usually sixty to ninety days, where a new employee can, if necessary, be terminated or at least set back on the right path if they have strayed. The place of work and everyone else are on a sort of probation with the new employee as well, when a new hire begins to see reality about their peers, and my eyes had certainly been opened. In those first few months, it was brought home to me just how woefully inept the teacher in my classroom really was. Not only that, but how devastatingly Sisyphean our work was. Every day, we helped kids learn to read, but it was never enough. They were perpetually behind, and no matter how often we got them up to their expected goals, their regular classrooms had already moved on. 

This was only one piece of a series of realizations that shook me. For the next three school years, I labored, like the students, under the delusion that things would get better. If I just kept at it, put my head down and dug in, I would eventually get beyond the breakers. It was not the case. 

Meanwhile, each semester I was also laboring to get my degree, only to find that going part-time was not nearly enough to complete the required hours anytime soon. The oasis of hope that fueled the dream of becoming a teacher was feeling more like a mirage. While we were raising our small family, I was working part-time at other jobs in the summer and evenings, taking classes part-time, and every day facing the unbelievable and unbearable personal and professional problems of my lead teacher. It was all starting to tell on me, I think.

In year four, the director of our department, a diminutive and domineering woman called Dr. Dinah, moved me to another classroom, much against the principal's protests. It was a sort of promotion for which I was grateful, but the job proved to be a step down into the intolerable. I was now well away from the marital and professional collapse of the other teacher, but I had been moved to self-contained functional skills classroom with children who had severe and profound disabilities. 

I didn't mind this at all. Many were nonverbal, most were very young and unable to do much at all except cry and scream when they were unhappy, but, most of the time they were sweet and wonderful. I immediately loved each one of them and worked hard to help them accomplish their goals. My problems were never the kids so much, but with the adults who made things so difficult. The lead teacher was a nice enough and capable person, but her team, of which I was the newest member, was savage and cutthroat at best. At worst, they were a daily nightmare.

Immediately, I was given the most challenging children, forced to take on “bodyguard” roles for other kids with behavioral issues because I was the only male on staff, put in scenarios where I was expected to do the impossible with very little backup, like escort 6 kids to lunch in the main cafeteria by myself, each one of them going in different directions. For four years, I was made use of in these and other humiliating ways, through three school buildings. It was during these second four years that I was assaulted three different times by three different students.

The last of these incidents was the one that set me over my tolerance, though. The child had severe intellectual delays, but her parent allowed her to scamper through the neighborhood in her birthday suit and sent her to school most days filthy and frothing. Part of each week, I was scheduled to work with this child, and little did I know she would be the forecaster of my future.

Lyca (not her name) needed her diaper changed about three times daily.  On the days that I supervised her, I was expected to be responsible for this duty. My predecessor in the position had been accused by a different parent of indecent liberties with their child several years before and had been summarily fired. Despite being exonerated later, this man's life was essentially ruined, and I was absolutely not going down the same path. 

I starkly refused the diaper changing on these grounds, which were well-known if unspoken in the classroom and the school. I was written up for not following directives, but the write-up was soon taken off my record when the school attorney was asked to review the disciplinary action, and they vindicated my assertion that, if there were female staff in the classroom, they were to do the diaper changes as needed. 

Dr. Dinah and the female teachers that I worked with and especially the head teacher of the class were angry at me for this, and it was made clear to me that I was only getting away with my “disobedience” because I was a male. One of my coworkers was a particularly unpleasant person, and she said this to my face one day. In one of the few times in which I was actually able to muster the courage to say what I was thinking in the moment without losing my temper, I responded, “If I were a woman, then this wouldn’t be a problem for me.”

Two weeks after this intense and exhausting battle, Lyca bit me on the hand while we were waiting for dismissal on a bright Friday in mid-May. I was told to go to the urgent care to be treated (she broke the skin). I got a tetanus shot, and had a raft of blood tests, heavy-duty antibiotics. The next week I was directed by the school to go back to the doctor for more blood tests to rule out that I didn’t have HIV/AIDS or any other bloodborne pathogens. This wasn't to verify that I was okay but to make sure Lyca wasn't infected by me. 

No one, not the principal (different from when I started) or her assistant, or any coworkers, asked me how I was or if my hand was okay. After the battle to not change diapers, I had lost the respect of my fellow educators. Meanwhile, I was physically exhausted, mentally drained, and burning out hard, what I got was more crap assignments.

When I reflect on my time in the school system time, now I feel something akin to bitterness. Admittedly, working as a representative of the county government at my public library has healed many of these feelings, but what never really healed was the sense in which I was merely a tool, to be dropped when no longer needed. For eight years I was called to deal with troubled students, or—again, because I was a male—to restrain children who were acting out and a danger to themselves or others. Students frequently ran out of the school doors and out into the surrounding neighborhoods always had me in pursuit, because my job was reduced to a glorified bkuncer for special needs kids. I worked with a fourth-grader who had such violent and vicious tendencies that on more than three occasions, had I not been there, one of his fellow students would have suffered damage to life or limb or worse. 

Every time I felt overwhelmed, under appreciated, exhausted, I would double down remembering my childhood dream to become a full-fledged English teacher. And yet, the more I tried to help, the more I cooperated, the more I put myself in harm's way to make things better for students and staff, the more I found that my stress levels were becoming uncontrollable. I was angry, resentful and felt bullied by an administration that had no concern for me at all. 

When the results of the bloodwork came back clean (as I knew they would), I received a curt email from the new director of the EC department, who made it clear that had the child been infected (even by the student’s bite), I would have been dismissed. In shock, I told Micki that once summer arrived, I would be looking for another job. Luckily, I found one and also, fortunately, I was hired. 

I made an appointment to speak with the principal in late June in 2011. She could barely take her eyes off of her computer when I went to speak with her. We spoke of this and that, but soon enough got down, as I have heard it said, to brass tacks. “So,” I said, signaling that the small talk was over. “Please don’t say that you’re resigning,” she said. If I remember correctly, I laughed right out loud. “That’s exactly why I’m here.” The womans’ face fell so fast that I was startled by the change. I didn’t know if she would cry, but it certainly seemed to upset her. “May I ask why?” “I’ve found employment with the county.” The rest is history. I wanted to say so much more, but to what avail? Me complaining to her wouldn’t have changed how badly I was treated.

But it wasn’t really history. To this day, I carry within me the stress and trauma of those eight, ever-worsening years, as if each year I went down to a new, deeper level of hell. I came away with a mantra response when people asked me why I left. I never had a problem with the kids, even the worst ones. It was the adults, and especially the administration that was intolerable. I have many good friends from those days and I’m grateful to say that will likely not change.

When Micki told me that she was resigning her position with a local nonprofit to start the process of becoming a middle school teacher, I had a relapse of sorts. All my stress came back in a rush of what was for me real PTSD. The thought of starting work again in the schools gave me actual nightmares that I was going back. I muddled through those feelings, perhaps not very well. 

She handled her experience much better than I did and while teaching, she also went back and got her master's in education. She graduated in December of 2024. I've rarely been more proud.

Our career paths in the school systems (our county has one system for our town and one for the county; she worked for the latter) were very different—she taught social studies and language arts. Even so, she experienced much the same systemic problems. That story is hers to tell, but I will say that, rather than changing my mind about the public education system’s raft of problems, her experiences reinforced my feelings of doubt and disappointment. Despite having her master's degree and previous experience, she never got paid anywhere near what she was owed. She spent an enormous amount of money on her students to help them with school supplies. In her three years, she experienced a clear view of how the public education system has failed not just students but our whole society. 

I’m pleased to say that, as of this writing, she is working in a different field, still in education, but not as a teacher or administrator, and she is, it is obvious, much happier. Again, that’s her story to tell. The only time I was ever happier for her, in terms of her career choices, was on the day that she came home from her last day of school, never to look back with the promise of a better job in front of her.

When I was a kid, I admired my teachers deeply. It is safe to say that they made an incredible difference in my life. One of my middle school teachers is someone I still have fairly regular contact with, thirty years later. I’m the man that I am partially because my teachers gave a damn about me. 

Micki gave more than a damn about her students and I know she made all the difference for some of them. Like me, she said it wasn’t ever the kids that were the problem. It was a structurally flawed administration from the superintendent to the school staff. The disease has traveled far, though. It now comes from the US Capitol and trickles down to the students in the schools near you. 

I have no solution to this, except to say that, as for me and my family, we won’t ever work in the school system again. There are other ways to participate and aid education. And, my heart goes out to those friends and former colleagues who, despite the horrors, continue to go back year after year and face the nightmare. There are good schools, good principals, and good teachers, but the system is failing now, and likely beyond hope.

I wrote this essay because, as a former educator, I’m one of the lucky ones. I got out while there was still time. No parents accused me of harming their children, thus ruining my reputation forever. I have scars. As I said, I’m not one to hold resentments, at least not since I got sober, but in the years since my nightmare ended, I’ve never been able to shake the bad feelings I have for the people who failed me and failed my family as a result. I wasn’t a perfect employee. No one ever is. I had a lot of growing and learning to do, but I was willing to do it. Instead, I got run through the meat grinder. As I put these final words down, I am witnessing a power structure in our local schools become a serious cult of personality rather than an organization for teaching kids. It is more of the same. I’m glad Micki got out when she did! My heart goes out to her friends and colleagues—and our family members—who stay every day and fight the good fight.