Depth charges.

It used to be great news to hear
about a teacher's sudden misfortune
that led to their absence
and the feeble attempt at
compensation made by the Powers That Were.
The Board of Ed could always
manage to find someone
to take attendance and maintain
basic order in the classroom
but little else; no real scholastic progress
could be expected.
We knew that they knew
that our real teachers knew
that those poorly photocopied worksheets
were as much of a joke
as the substitute teacher's
pending degree in, say, basket-weaving
or philosophy.

But when we got a Sub who truly stood out
it sometimes made the forty-minute period
more interesting than the pointless movie
being played in the background, left
in the teacher's desk arbitrarily
in case of just such an emergency.

There was this one clown who fit the bill
at the junior high school I attended.
I forget what his name was, something vaguely Italian
but I remember just what he looked like--
a short, stocky man who came across
as too rough around the edges to work
in a school, but too innocent to work
on the dock or in the shipyard where he probably belonged.
His greasy gray hair was always just barely combed
as if he'd slept in a car for three weeks straight
and his flannel shirts were always managing
to untuck themselves from his jeans by the afternoon
but what really stood out about this poor man
was his footwear: he always wore a decrepit pair
of black rubber winter boots that a grandma would wear.
It was for this very reason that he was dubbed 'Snowboots'
by those of us who knew of his existence, and it
was all fun and games until it came to a head.
One day, months after the silently awarded nickname
had come into play, one of my more outspoken classmates
decided to ask Snowboots why he was wearing snowboots.
"There's still snow on the ground where I live," was
his response, which would've seemed reasonable
if it wasn't for the season.
"In May?" the kid asked as he smirked
and rolled his eyes towards us.
He'd won, he'd belittled Snowboots
and asked what we were all dying to know
but somehow it wasn't as enjoyable
as some of us had hoped.
Now, looking back, maybe Mr. Boots was even
telling the truth.
I've seen stranger things in these ten years since
than snow on the ground in May.

Mr. LaMoth was another such individual.
He looked like God's cruel joke
of a Disney-style talking burnt match
who was cut from the final version of
'Beauty and the Beast'.
The poof of wild gray hair atop his lanky
tanned body perfectly crowned
the expressive face carved deep
with crow's feet and made further ridiculous
by the Coke-bottle glasses that
doubled the size of his eyes.
Talking to him, one walked away no wiser.
His sixty-some-odd years of existence
had made him no smarter a man
than the bottle he'd obviously clung to had
and it led to some amusing legends.
Some said he claimed to be an ex-CIA assassin
others said he had to register when he moved
into a neighborhood, and when he disappeared
from our high school mysteriously the common rumor
was that he'd been dismissed for kicking a student
(the same one who questioned Snowboots' footgear, naturally)
who pushed him over the edge with relentless taunting.
Despite the fact that all myths start with some truth
and that he was an odd duck loaded with bad puns
and an obvious unhealthy affection for high school girls
who told my class he had a "pornographic memory"
on more than one occasion
I just think he was a lonely old man
who had no sellable skills
that could get him those hundred-dollars-a-day.
He was humanized in my eyes
when I learned that he lived on Homeland Ave.
in Cornwall, the same road where my girlfriend
at the time lived. His big red-and-white surfboard
of a car from the late Sixties, early Seventies
somehow made such sense. What else would he drive?
If someone asked me to recall one time
when LaMoth almost did his job effectively
without seeming like a total freak
I'd tell them about the time he subbed
for my History class and had us watch 'Casablanca'
for the few days in a row that he had us.
He tried explaining the backstory
of the Visci government and how they were
only a front put on by the Nazis.
That was the first and last thing
that the man ever said in my presence that made sense.
When that plane took off at the end of the film
I knew why his eyes were glued to that TV screen
as he sat in the chair at the front of that dark classroom
with his back to facing us.
I knew because I felt the same way.

But here I am now
long since out of school
with nothing more to show for myself
than these half-complete men
who used to serve as an example
of what not to become.
And all three of us probably have
those same fifty-seven college credits
though in varying useless gen.-ed. subjects.
It's enough to make me believe
that Someone wrote this script
long before I even started to act it out.
I'll try to break a leg, Old Man;
just don't be surprised
if I use your name in vain afterwards.



Currently reading:
"To Have and Have Not" by Ernest Hemingway.