Funday Friday
When I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers was Matt Keller, a burly former lacrosse and football player who taught me freshman and senior English. He also happened to be an alum of both my high school and my college. When I did the math a couple years ago and asked Michele Volansky if she remembered him from WAC, she described him as "sweet guy, kind of a lunkhead". Hmm. Pretty much. Anyway, now that I've brought him up (the subject line of this entry triggered it), I think I'll just share some stories.
I liked the guy because he was entertaining. He didn't exactly try to be "one of the guys", though. He'd joke with us, tell us anecdotes about his own life, ramble about pop culture, but ultimately, he was in charge. He referred to us as "crackheads", and would stroll around the classroom with a length of steel pipe resting against his shoulder like a baseball bat. He would swing it, pretending he was the Highlander: "There can be only one". Once, he even hit a guy. Not with the pipe. One of my more obnoxious peers in my freshman class was egging Mr. Keller on, so he strode up to him with a thick paperback in hand. He held it up to the kid, asking if he knew what it was. Predictably, the student looked up at the book, at which point Keller reached in with his free hand and smacked the kid in the back of the head. "It's a diversion."
I've often said that my experiences at a Catholic all-boys high school had a positive impact on me, largely because I learned to laugh at myself. A lot of that came from Mr. Keller's class. We had a dress code that seemed fairly simple: button-down collared shirt, tie, pants (no jeans), no long hair or facial hair. Well, I was a fourteen-year-old boy, so of course I had no idea how the hell to dress myself. (Most likely, I still do not. You be the judge.) Mr. Keller picked on my fashion choices; for example, I might be wearing a loud Looney Tunes tie with a striped shirt. I didn't take it personally; in fact, I just appreciated that he was paying attention to me. As long as what he was saying was funny, no harm. So I really upped the ante and explored the boundaries of the dress code. One of my favorite wardrobe pieces was a bright orange, short-sleeved shirt with metallic silver buttons. I found it at a thrift store, naturally. On another occasion, I dug up an all-corduroy outfit: olive green pants, navy blue shirt, burnt sienna jacket. I was a strange kid.
The English curriculum in our school wasn't very inventive, although I imagine few are. But Mr. Keller did the best with what the was dealt, and looked forward to reading Romeo and Juliet with special zeal. All year, he threatened the most irritating pupils with the role of Juliet when the time came to read the balcony scene out loud. I avoided that one, of course. However, the day we began reading the play, I was involved in a collision on the softball field in phys. ed. class that resulted in a much shorter classmate suffering a broken knee (that's a story for another time). Naturally, my classmates made sure that Keller heard the story as soon as we got to his class. In doling out the parts for that day, the teacher scanned the room, saying, "I need a Benvolio..." he locked his eyes on me, pointed, and bellowed, "BOOOONNNNEEEECRUSHER!". With that, I had a nickname that stuck with some of my friends for years afterward.
Everyone looked forward to the final bell on Friday afternoons, when the clocks struck 2:20 and you were free for the weekend. But if you had Mr. Keller for that final period preceding, it was even more fun getting there. He instituted "Funday Friday", which would usually be a forum for his stories or "Ask Mr. Keller", in which he would selectively answer questions submitted by the class and written on slips of paper. The message was simple: don't kid yourselves, I want to get out of here just as bad as you do...worse, even.
So what about those stories? The best involved his drunken bachelor exploits. For a while, he lived in Fells Point, and apparently he was able to commit to memory the number of steps it took him to make it to his watering holes of choice, so that he could unconsciously stumble back home in the early morning. Another time, he and his roommates created stadium seating in their home by attaching furniture to the walls for a tiered effect. He also had teenage stepsisters, and would torment them when they had a date coming to pick them up. He would sit silently on the porch with the newspaper and a large dog, and possibly a rifle, I can't remember. At any rate, this would understandably unnerve the young suitor, at which point he would browbeat the poor boy for being impolite.
The tangents in the middle of class were good for some laughs, of course. Mr. Keller was inexplicably a huge fan of "Mad About You", particularly its star, Helen Hunt. He described in great detail a scenario in which Ms. Hunt would appear in the doorway of the classroom, asking him out for coffee, but would then relent upon noticing he had a class. At that point, according to Mr. K, he would proceed to gun every last one of us down in cold blood, reply, "Not any more", and join the actress for said coffee. Trust me, it was funny.
Another time, he explained why he preferred to teach only boys. Teenage boys smell terrible, more often than not, and this was a point he readily acknowledged. But it was one singular smell, and he was used to it. Keller then launched into an extensive snapshot of a hypothetical classroom with eight imaginary teenage girls. He did the math: that was eight different scented shampoos, eight lotions, eight deodorants, eight perfumes, etc. With even a relatively small class of eight girls, he posited, you had 36 potential differing fruity smells, all colliding at once and assailing the senses. It would be enough to drive the heartiest of men insane.
Yet, for all the Funday Fridays and the hysterical sidebars on the other days of the week, Monday mornings would roll back around, and that was probably the least opportune time to catch Mr. Keller. Usually the bell would ring, and he would saunter through the door wearing a growl and a five-o-clock shadow, tell-tale mug of Royal Farms coffee in hand. In a dull, guttural tone, he'd say, "Look. I don't care what you do, just sit quietly at your desks. Read, do some homework, whatever. Just shut up. For the love of God."
Needless to say, you shut up.