Bob and the Rookie*

Bob, the gymnast, sat right in front, a kid with Popeye's powerful forearms and a saint's pale blue eyes. I'd never known a gymnast before. In my previous life as a high school teacher, I'd known cocky shortstops, thick-headed defensive tackles, thoroughbred point guards, and track stars of every shape and size. But I'd never taught in a city high school big enough to sport a gymnastic team.

I was a rookie, growing up as I had in the loving security of a Midwestern small town, where I had only one friend who ever talked back to his father, where I'd never seen my parents fight, if they ever did. I'd seen drunks, but they were all fun-loving kids with their fingers wrapped around shortie Millers. I'd read about bad things, but my Christian home hadn't prepared me for the lives some people live, day in and day out.

One day after school Bob told me that he didn't have a paper finished. He was a nice kid, quiet and unassuming, never bold.

“What’s the deal?” I said. "You need another day or two?"

He looked down at the books he had pinned up against his chest. "Don’t know if I can."

He’d already passed a test or two, but he’d never struck me as a kid who couldn’t do the work.

“When then?” I asked him. “Name a day.”

He eyes searched the rug as if there were some answer down there folded up in a note. When his teeth went down over his bottom lip, I knew there was more to the story. The buff kid who wore his shirtsleeves rolled above his swelling biceps cried.

“I can’t get anything done at home,” he told me. “I just can’t.” He brought his hands up to his eyes. "My parents," he said, "they’re on each all the time, and I just can’t take it.”

In my college English methods class. we hadn't talked much about guys bawling.

“Every night it goes on,” he said, “and if I go away I can’t get my work done. I don’t know what to do.”

I reached for Kleenex for him. Even now, forty years later, I don’t remember any other guy crying like Bob did that days, his eyes red and bruised by the way his hands constantly pushed at them, as if to stanch what he couldn't stop.

"It’s okay," I said. "I understand—I understand.” That was a lie. I didn't know what else to say. "Listen, get that paper in whenever you can, all right? I understand." I put my hand on his shoulder.

When he left, I felt as if I had something to write home about--how the world was an awful place, and how I really didn't understand darkness so well as I did now that I was there, in the city.

A day or two later I met one of the counselors coming up the walk toward the English building, rocking on his toes the way he always did, rolling along that way as if simply a smile weren't enough to show the need for happiness.

“Schaap,” he said, “this kid—Bob Ranzig—you got him, right?—short guy?—muscular?”

"I ought to talk to you about him," I said.

He turned his head away and looked down at the cracks in the sidewalk as if what he had to say wasn't going to be easy. "You're a saint—you know that? All you small-town Midwesterners are sweethearts.” Then he giggled. "He pulled one over on you the other day. He’s pulled that stunt before, and I've been trying to explain he can’t do it anymore. It’s a crutch, and he’s got to learn to live with who he is.”

“A crutch?” I said.

"Don't let him by. You want to help the kid?—don't let him pull that. I don’t care what he's got at home, he’s using that song-and-dance, and he can’t.”

I felt perfectly green.

He put his hand on my shoulder. "You're not the only one who let him by," he said.

That was just about fifty years ago, but I remember where on the sidewalk outside the building we were standing, remember the way that counselor, a friend, teased me. 

I felt naive, but in all those years in the classroom thereafter, I think I probably stayed a rookie, a small-town, Midwesterner.  I don't think I'd care to be who I would be without trust.
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*Published first March 31, 2009