Sometimes I’m astonished that I teach--I hated school that much, at least after a certain age and before a certain age. Let’s say between seven and sixteen, school was, in my memory, kaleidoscopically weird, by turns endlessly dull, estranging, scary, and a place where the body always threatened to betray. I went to public schools in Brooklyn from nineteen sixty-two to nineteen seventy-four, and as much as the balance sheet for me is decidedly in the red, I’m haunted by both extremes of my experience in those brick fortresses that held tight for twelve years.

Shall I start with the sublime, begin with the beguine, since this memory is of a dance? It’s a very early memory, so it’s got a soft, conflated quality, a slightly confused--pleasantly so--air. One part of the memory involves a rehearsal, in the steelyard of P.S. (public school) 216 for a Maypole dance. For some reason, I always hear “Puff the Magic Dragon” when this memory replays. The date is right, the album out in nineteen sixty-three, when I would have been in first grade. Perhaps they played the song as we danced around the Maypole. Or maybe that spring is just full of “Puff.” Inextricable and inextinguishable, I can hear the kids singing it around the Maypole like part of the diegetic soundtrack? The second, more vivid memory is of hundreds of New York school kids dancing around Maypoles in Central Park. We must have been bused in from all over the city. Memory grass was never greener. Blah blah blah, you might think. But, oh, what a shiver when I think of swinging in and out and under, a tangle of wide white ribbons, my little body part of such fanfare, all of us in white shirts and blouses, as the sun turned us into light. A sea of little boomers in white about to be launched like little time capsules through years of tumult we couldn’t quite understand until we could. And then we’d regret the unfairness of being a little too young. Call it 1957-Syndrome. We can’t remember J.F.K., Cuban Missile, Gulf of Tonkin, maybe not Watts, maybe not Martin Luther King for some. But school is full of mnemonic signposts. The president is shot dead. A dance around the Maypole. Puff.

Of all the horrible memories I have of school: getting beaten up, sitting zombie-like while one history teacher spent a year talking about the New York Rangers, making sure I wasn’t being followed home, trying to make believe that my endomorphic body was a horrible mistake that a sudden death would blessedly relieve me of, forgetting homework assignments as a kind of passive aggressive way of showing that I was passive aggressively being passive aggressive, mooning after girls who looked at me as though I were the moon, a mere reflected surface. . . the memory that manages to claim a nasty place of its own in the waxworks of my Bad Memory Carnival takes place in a bathroom, a loo, a toilet. No, straight john.

I was a bit of a--oh, stop it, David. I was the poster child for Mama’s boy. Safe only at home, and even there more so in some rooms than others. And to add to this, and my aforementioned physical charms, my family, crowded as we were into the top half of a Brooklyn row house, were rather quaint about toilet usage. We were fierce about privacy. The lock on the bathroom door was to our family what moats were to medieval fortresses. To defecate was to be indisposed, as though the Prince of Wales, and not homely-baroque-us were engaged. Even now, I fear I’ll be punished for using Anglo Saxon words that range too close to the experience. You’ll note their absence here.

Bathrooms in public schools when I was growing up, specifically bathrooms of the junior high school variety, were hellish. Urinating was one thing; if you were lucky, you could get out with a swat, a punch or a kick or two, some smoke blown into your face--puff, puff--as long as no one was in there who wanted to specifically kill you. But, you see, the toilets had no doors. And frequently had no toilet paper, in what must be counted, I think one of the most perverse educational experiments in the history of grouping children together under one roof. Let’s see what it’s like if one of them has an emergency. It might be useful to the army. It is, of course, impossible to say this without the voice of John Cleese or Eric Idle creeping in. I carried a packet of Tums with me every day to Junior High, just so I could avoid the possibility of having an emergency run to the john. What would I do if I got caught unlucky? Keep in mind, making me imagine this set-up was, a) in itself cruel and unusual punishment, and b) exemplary training for a lifetime of anxiety-prone worse case scenario development. In short, neurosis training. You would be open. Exposed. A sitting target. They could see everything. I could just see myself sitting there while the Smoking Club of Gravesend gathered round for a little afternoon chat. Allo’ mate, keeping up those A’s in Vocal Music are you now! Carry, there! Puff. In addition to that, what if there were, as expected, no toilet paper? You certainly couldn’t carry toilet paper around. Or, I suppose, you could have carried some, and just beaten up every day as you walked through the halls with a roll of Charmin under your arm, or a giant wad of paper stuffed into your slacks, but I preferred, as was my wont, to extend and delay the inevitable, to press my heart, mind, and body into years of anxiety by just pressing down a few TUMs whenever my stomach made the slightest rumble, any 1.75 reading on the tummy scale and down they went.

Came the day, you might have guessed, when TUMs would not suffice. This was near the end of ninth grade, my last year at David A. Boody Junior High . . .Yes, yes. There was a class trip that day and my bowels were going at it like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in the early rounds. TUMs, the referee, was swatted aside, each round eliding into another like an endless match. I was in trouble, in pain, breaking into a sweat. Had to go. No toilet paper. I’ll be brief, since I’m still partly that squeamish Brooklyn boy: I ripped up my underwear and cleaned myself up pretty well. But for a moment, I was in that kind of trance where one is utterly flummoxed. I hadn’t a clue of what to do with my dirty body. And I think I’ll forever hold that against SCHOOL. Had a reasonably good trip if I recall, felt strange to be without any underwear. Maybe a little sexy?Pretty to think so, but I can only give you strange. I’m sure I felt I had dodged a bullet.

My body has been in school for many years, but for twelve crucial years my body was in public school. It’s astonishing to me that the impulse to create a sublime moment for a five year old, to fill his body with white light and song, could degrade so horrendously in just a few years. But then again, I wasn’t quite as cute at fourteen. Puff. Puff.