Mr. Souffard, My High School History Teacher,
Is Saying He Flunked Two Kids Last Year Because in the Final Written
Exam on the American Revolutionary War They Stopped Writing About History
and Started Writing Nasty Rumors About Him, Thinking He'd Never Read
Their Essays
(So We'd Better Be Careful, He's Warning Us)
(continued)
So, it was all about freedom, power, and glory! And it still is today.
It's a battle, a daily fight, a war between the old powers that be and
the new young and free, the homes of the brave, people like Amy Bendix.
God shed His grace on thee! On September 11, 1777, the Americans were
badly beaten at the battle of Brandywine. Maybe he got her drunk. I
don't know. The whole thing stinks like intoxication. It was tough for
them to recover from this loss, and who knows? Maybe a girl like Amy
Bendix is tough, you know? Maybe she can bounce back. Maybe she's got
so much blue steel and black powder in her soul that she can recoup
from this one, but I doubt it. It's sad to say, but I still doubt it.
And you know why? Well, I'll tell you why. You might think this is kind
of weird, kind of non sequitur, but I'll tell you anyway. See,
while I was scrutinizing my history teacher's black and white mug shot
in that old 1961 yearbook, I realized something. I noticed something
else, I guess I should say. In the picture, the building behind his
blockhead gorilla face looked familiar, like something from a deja vù
experience. And then it hit me. It was the same high school! My school!
It was in black and white and looked a lot nicer, but it was the same
building, only decades later! I couldn't believe it! And I thought,
Man, doesn't anyone ever get out of this town? Doesn't anything ever
change? Doesn't anyone ever want to try for something a little bigger,
try for something a little above the backseat score, above the touchdown,
above the timed quarter mile, the half-time score, the snack bar score?
Well, and maybe not. Maybe life really is nothing but a question of
getting your kicks at the expense of others while you're young, and
when you're not young anymore, when you're tired of trudging up that
hill, tired of getting beat up by the enemy every day and you want to
pack up your wounded and your dead and sail for the motherland, then
maybe you surrender and revert back to what you were when you were younger,
punishing the young and the innocent and the weak along the way, forcing
them to pay the price for your unobtained dreams. But it can't be! It's
got to be different, I'm telling you! That's the definition of war,
right there. You want a definition of revolution? Well, look no further,
Yankee Doodle Dandy, because that's it, right there. I guess what I'm
saying is everybody wants to be a hero, mind the music and the steps,
and let the girls be handy, right? Everybody wants to make a change,
am I right? Isn't that what this whole idiotic class is about? Heroes,
changes, and fighting for the right?
So, we don't need any more people like Benedict Arnold, who agreed
to betray the fort of West Point and more than three thousand American
soldiers for 20,000 English pounds and a high command in the British
army and who, on September 25, 1780, fled from his own house down the
Hudson River and escaped on The Vulture, a British man-of-war. But we
do need more people like Captain Patrick Ferguson, who, when in the
act of using his breech-loading self-named rifle to draw a bead on an
unsuspecting General Washington at Chadd's Ford, saw his potential actions
as disgusting and ungentlemanly and instead ordered the three Royal
Sharp Shooter Corps scouts with him to let Washington wheel and gallop
away on his horse, Nelson, only to find himself tragically gunned down
later by an American sniper perched in the crotch of a tree at the Battle
of King's Mountain on October 7, 1780. Guess they'll nail you if you
don't nail them first, huh? Sure as shootin' though I can tell you we
don't need any more tubby cradle-robbing history teachers that seduce
girls, aw this is so predictable, and despite heavy losses the Americans
pressed forward. But Amy Bendix! Amy, Amy! I could have loved you! I
mean, I did love you! We all did! We watched you groove and shimmy in
your cheerleading outfit on the basketball court at halftime to our
"Hold That Tiger" fight song, mesmerized by your tan legs,
your blue eyes flashing like bayonets in the Boston sun. You tracked
footprints over all our hearts. We watched you in the parking lot after
school, in the hall, in the lunchroom. And we all told ourselves the
same thing, told you the same thing: I love you. We could have loved
you if you had let us, if he had let us. You wanted to get out of this
town as badly as we did, as we do now, here, today, as we sit here and
write about things that don't really matter so much anymore, things
that don't matter now that we're living through the daily things that
do matter. You wanted it, just like we wanted it, just like we say we
want it every day, just like we'll always want it until it really happens
for us. But what made you choose his way? Why'd you do it? Why'd you
abandon the cause? Because now, you realize, you'll never get out. Don't
you see that? Don't you see why this is just ripping me up inside?
But hey, maybe you didn't really want to get out. Yeah, what about
that? I know it sounds kooky, but maybe it's true. Yeah, maybe you're
like one of those suicide victims who slashes her wrists just because
she wants attention, not because she really wants to kill herself, who
carves her wrists open with a box cutter and walks around and around
in circles, making bloody footprints on the white kitchen tile until
somebody comes. Maybe that's what this is all about. And I don't even
like to think about this, but maybe you're here for the same reason
Mr. Souffard is here, for the same reason he'll always be here, for
the same reason you'll both always be here together, from now on, in
this town, forever. Maybe you woke up one morning and thought you could
only be happy by escaping. And so you found an older man to sleep with,
an older man to make you feel older, an older man with a steady job.
Well, it used to be steady anyway. And maybe he woke up one morning
and found himself under a surprise attack of middle age, and the only
thing he could think to do was find a high school cheerleader who would
sleep with him to help him believe he was young again, young and crazy
and back in high school. And he did it not because he consciously wanted
to (he would tell everyone later) but because he hoped that it would
look to everyone else like he was forced into it, like she'd come on
to him. (After all, who would suspect some married, over-forty
history teacher? The guy's an ape. We've established that. He'd undoubtedly
use his own obvious unattractiveness to his advantage on this point.
A brilliant public defense!) He'd make it look like he'd had no choice,
and that now, because he wasn't wholly responsible (certainly not the
aggressor, in any case) and because he was the real victim, the unsuspecting
victim of an immature (but certainly lovable and attractive) young nymphomaniac
who suffered from a Lolita complex and self-destructive delusions of
grandeur (he would tell everyone), he could only do the only decent
thing by everyone involved, which would be to stay in town and make
the best of what had happened, make the best of an unfortunate situation
and come up with what reparations he could, regardless of what kind
of vicious canards and ignominious mud gobs the town, parents, and school
board elected to sling at him. But, Amy, don't you see the irony? Isn't
it weird? You both wanted to get out, but the things you did to try
to get out betrayed you. They were traitors to you and your joint cause.
So, who makes it out? That seems to be the final question, doesn't it?
If not you, who? A) If not you, then who? B) If not me, why not? C)
If not Mr. Souffard, American History, Room #37, "Final Written
Exam on the American Revolutionary War," then who? D) It's certainly
not all of the above. So how do you make it out of this town? That's
really the question, isn't it? That's what Cornwallis must've asked
himself on the morning of October 17, 1781, when, after enduring a night
of apocalyptic shelling from the Americans, he finally surrendered to
General George Washington in Yorktown.
And with that, the war was over.
But in a way, it'll never be over. Not really over. There's a revolutionary
in all of us. And there are revolutions going on all around us, inside
us, turning us around and around in our beds at night, telling us we've
got to execute the trembling little coward inside, kill the puny sniveling
traitor and be the hero soldier boy even though, in reality, it's the
cowards who do most of the killing, who deprive the young of any type
of future.
But you know, revolutions aren't the problem. It's the wars that follow.
And the wounded and the dead. The problem is knowing — during those
many revolutions, during the nightmare turning and turning that threatens
to hurl your insignificant little carcass out into the wide empty universe
— when you should hold on and when you should just let go, let
other people go, let it all go. The trick is knowing when what you're
fighting for, your cause, the one you swore you'd die for, actually
starts to hurt more people than it helps. I suppose the moral is if
you have to push for a cause, make sure it's the right one.
If it's yours, it's probably not.
