Fort Wayne

Drove to Fort Wayne Indiana, kept missing exits, stuck on the free way, very angry, lots of screaming and pounding on the steering wheel, spitting mad, lots of getting my Irish up,
on a mission to find the home I lived in as a child for two years. Attended kindergarten in Fort Wayne.

Found my elementary school in Arlington Park. Didn't know it was my school, but I thought I recognized the windowless chocolate brown one story facade. Pulled into Cruiser into the parking lot blasting the radio, Feeling terrible. Too much drinking and too many smokes for far too long have left me in a state of perpetual illness. Check myself in the rearview mirror. Very messy hair, uncombed, sticking up all over the place, rumpled shirt, wearing the same gray wool trousers for the past week, my belt was undone, criminally untamed goatee.

I walk to the front door. It's open. It's 3 pm. on the road for hours. Doors are locked. I see lights on. I see front desk. I see urchins walking. I ring a bell, I'm in. Not sure what to say, what to do with my hands, so I rub my goatee and act nervous. Two ladies. White and black. Secretaries. But midwest secretaries so their not as surly as the New York ones-I love you Ms. Diaz, but you could guard the gates of Hades-and I tell them I'm a writer from Brooklyn, and that sounds good, explains my appearance, because writers are disheveled people, and it feels good to say to other people I'm a writer. For a Blog. That I started three days ago in a coffee shop in Milwaukee.

I tell them I'm pretty sure I went to kindergarten here 25 years ago, but I need confirmation.
They tell me records don't go that far back. Vanity takes a hit. Nothing gets said. We're dumbfounded. The black secretary asks me if I remember the names of my classmates. She's got short hair and a red sweater on. I tell her I don't remember classmates, but I do remember my teacher was Mrs. Beebe. The white secretary smiles and tells me Ms. Beebe still works here. The white secretary is wearing a blue golf shirt and has a pony tail. She is not pretty, very plain and her teeth are gray. I think about pulling the pony tail and chastise my libido silently.

So the secretary escorts me through the halls of the school, and it's all open-pod classrooms so you can see little kids seating on green carpets, raising hands, not sitting still, construction paper everywhere, pictures on the walls, nothing is geometrical, all the dividers are set up at irregular angles and it's disorienting and vaguely socio-political, like the school designers are trying to encourage resistance to rigidity, as if Euclidean based design stifles free social growth.

But I'm only glancing at the classrooms as we walk because I'm worried about the implications of my gaze. If I stare too long at a classroom will the secretary think I'm exhibiting signs of deviancy? So I try not to look anything for too long, and I try to ask her questions about her job and where' s she from, and she tells me she's only been working at the school for a year. We talk to the librarian, wonderful skinny old lady who's been at the school since 1982, the year it opened, the year I attended, but she doesn't remember me, thank god, and she's been to New York and seems to appreciate it.

We walk into the classroom and by this time my self-consciousness has a firm grip on me. There seems to be an endless quantity of kids in the classroom; it's like the fishes and loaves story of the bible, baskets of kids crawling, coloring, building, scampering. No adults anywhere. No organized aesthetic to the room, other than Random Colorful Crap tacked on every available square inch of wall. I recognize the green carpet and the beige round tables and the chaos.

The kids stare at me, and I think of how ridiculous my yellow cuban shirt with red flowers and brown corduroy jacket must look, like baby poop, and how these kids recognize my delinquency, they see right through my shtick, they know my six years as a teacher were only possible because I worked in the kinds of schools that rarely fire teachers, they know I got away with a track record a mile long, they can sense that I never kept a gradebook the first four years I taught or that I once fired a twelve inch rubber band at Tori Hunter, out of anger, that hit him in the eyeball. They know I think about Asian women.

Then I see Mrs. Beebe and it occurs to me that maybe it was Ms Beebe and she was never married and this job was her life. She looked nothing like I remember but retained all the physical traits that defined her in my memory. The mangled teeth and the recessive chin were there and coke-bottle glasses, but the edges were softer and the frames sleeker. We laughed and talked, but she didn't remember either. Vanity.

In 1982 she wore dresses and stockings and sported an afr0-perm straight out of Tootsie. She was joyless back then. Once, during reading circle, I told the kids Superman was fake because he was really an actor named Christopher Reef. We had naps, snacks, and made butter in jar. Mrs. Beebe traced our silhouette on the wall and then we cut them out of black construction paper and everyone's looked distinctive, but my classmates drew attention to the outline of my nose in profile on the wall and later when I was in high school and watching Cyrano De Bergerac and he sees his shadow on the wall I thought of those silhouettes, and over the years I told the story of the silhouettes and embellished the story with jokes about my teacher developing carpel tunnel syndrome tracing it, and then I worried I had made the story up because it was funny. But on the walls were silhouettes. Just not mine.