After the one in November I began covering the windows of my first-floor classroom with the printed-out lyrics to “Maggie’s Farm” in the hopes the next school shooter, whenever he comes, skips me, us, because he can’t see in from the hallway or outdoor courtyard.
I wasn’t sure I’d keep doing it, but as long as they’ve been up nobody’s killed anyone in my class. This isn’t how logic works, I understand, I get it, but also, I don’t care. Logic has its place in school, yeah, but illogical incorrect horribly unaccountable and unredeemable and unexplainable things happen every minute of every day, so every day I’ll keep my windows pasted over and my front door locked and a crowbar and knife behind the dictionary on the bookcase.
I teach fifth grade history. It’s my first job. With a dress code and government forms, at least. We’re doing a unit on World War One living conditions, in the trenches, at home, on the various fronts. I work in a public school in a part of San Diego called Allied Gardens. I’ll be thirty-two next week.
“Mr. L, when you say ‘trench,’ do you mean just like a big hole?” A variation on this question came a few times yesterday. Someone will ask it tomorrow.
“Technically,” I start, but then I think, let’s make this a project. I set the desks in groups of four, cover each cluster with butcher paper and in the center place a basket of markers. The task, I write in big clear block letters on the board, involves two parts. Draw what you think the trenches looked like. And on the back, sketch and label all the things you’d want in your group’s trench.
In a few years the state will take art away, recess, music, chorus, gym, everything. But right now I’ve got more colored pencils and crayons and markers than I know what to do with. The school buys them, parents bring them in, whoever. They’re on the shelf above the dictionary.
I imagine myself at 10, 11, and start a version of the project in one of the black and white composition notebooks. What I end with is a picture of ditch, a long, hollowed-out space, maybe waist deep, in various browns, of a place I remember was a few hundred feet into the woods behind Bugbee Elementary in West Hartford, Connecticut. Near the bike path, near the ropes course. My brother and I and his friends used it as a hideout in Kick the Can games. Later, when paintball was a thing, we’d lie flat, cover ourselves in branches, and wait. In high school, when he was in Vermont, Los Angeles, wherever, falling apart, and I was still at home, my friends and I would spend weekend nights in the ditches, crouching, smoking from a Coke can and sharing a bottle of whatever.
Sometimes we’d show up to school Monday in the same pants, a ring of dirt around the knees, dull mud splotches by the cargo pockets. We’d see each other in the hallway, at lunch, recess, in a science lab, and smile. It was something we could share, silently.
Next week red-haired Tim will share that his great-great grandfather fought in a trench, in France. He won’t have any pictures, but he’ll describe and we’ll imagine. Then we’ll finish All Quiet on the Western Front by Christmas break and after we’ll discuss how soldiers back from the war, some of them at least, didn’t talk much about it.
There’s not much in Allied Gardens besides this school and a strip mall. So that’s where I go after work some days. My apartment, a stucco studio, but it’s got a backyard, is only a few miles from school. The landlord lives in Palm Desert and charges $850. Giant aloe and jade plants ring the patio, sturdy in sunbaked pots.
I like bars. This particular one, Pat’s, is next to an auto parts shop and a pet store and a taco shop, Juanita’s, and a laundromat, and a place that sells guns and ammunition. I don’t drink, but still, something about the wooden booths, the jukebox, the black plastic square ashtrays on each table – you can’t smoke in here per California rules but if you light up Pat never says anything.
My life, out here all these years later: work, Pat’s, home, a bike ride, the patio enclosed by plants. It’s a closely contained life, walled in, all quiet, protected.
It’s a new thing, this not drinking. I’m doing well. Two years. The disease, the addiction, as it tends to do, tracks back to my brother, my dad, his dad, my uncle, his son, some cousins in Virginia, a great grandfather I never met, allied forces, Vietnam, Korea.
They want to know their targets, I read. Or maybe I was told that from a college friend in Washington; a woman I met at a geography conference in Los Angeles? Or a dad on TV, grieving, could have said it. Was it in a press release from the teacher’s union? The shooter is more likely to target people he knows. What strikes me about that sentence is the definitiveness with which these words are stated: “the” and “he.”
It doesn’t have to be “Maggie’s Farm.” “Desolation Row” works fine, so does “Walkin’ Down the Line” or “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Any of them really. I’m paranoid, probably, but if he’s walking down the line, armed, vengeful, young and angry, we’re not going to be in his path.
I didn’t go to school to teach fifth grade history. But even if I had they wouldn’t teach you this, how to find a poem, or a lyric, an excerpt from a story or book, something of suitable length. There’s no curriculum on how to hit Control C Control V and set the font to 24. “Hero Blues,” “I Shall Be Free,” “Tombstone Blues,” whichever. Here’s my lesson: do all that, copy and paste, get yourself enough papers to totally black out the windows. Now get some tape.
Kurt Cobain wrote that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. He died April 5, 1994, and his suicide was announced on MTV three days later, Friday April 8. Tom Anderson’s twin brother and I were sitting in his living room watching MTV and eating popcorn when we heard. We had skipped middle school that day. All these years later and I remember the pattern of the upholstered chair I was sitting in. I remember a large statue of an eagle on the mantle above the television. This was our JFK. Before Columbine became our JFK, before 9/11 became our 9/11, before Virginia Tech and Parkland and that one in Norway and all the other ones and the ones still to come.
We were talking about calming activities, my therapist and I. She sensed I had a problem slowing down. She knew about the Bob Dylan lyrics on the classroom windows but said we’d get to that later. “In the vast scheme of problems,” she thought it wasn’t so alarming.
“What could you do,” she asked, “when you’re worked up to kind of take things back a few degrees?” She took a sip of diet soda and bit her thumbnail
“I could, I mean, I think I –”
“Have you thought any more about meditation?” She cut me off. She was that kind of therapist. Drinking soda, biting nails, interrupting. It’s fine, I need her, and not just because the court says so.
“Well I don’t know, I mean, sometimes doing the dishes – like, washing a sink full of dishes can –”
She leaned forward and didn’t let me finish. A wisp of hair blew toward the corner of her eye. Innocuous music seeped in from the room sharing a wall. “Perfect,” she said. “Dishes. What else?”
I remember my mom ironing her skirts in the morning when I was little, how I’d sit on the blue and gray carpet and watch as she worked, quiet, steam puffing, a spray of mist, the heavy iron back and forth on the board, shifting the fabric, repositioning. “It always seemed so peaceful,” I said.
And look at me now, drinking iced tea and ironing 10 grocery bags full of my therapist’s silk scarves in exchange for five free sessions.
Real trenches, I show them in a slide show, were complex, sophisticated, fashioned out of necessity but structurally beautiful. “How did they wash their clothes?” a girl asks, and I pretend I don’t hear and instead explain the shift toward the end of the war from non-electric methods of communication like carrier pigeon to more modern techniques such as telephone, Morse code, and electric signal lamps.
“What about bathrooms?” another boy asks. “Like, they were already in a hole, so what did they do? Did they dig a hole in the hole? They couldn’t – they would come out of the hole, right?”
And that’s it, I think: kids want to know what to do in an immediate situation. A conflict. How to respond now. The need to pee. A wrinkled shirt. How to get a message to someone. A window with a clear view to the outside. A boy with a gun prowling the halls, or maybe he’s next door at the ammo shop, or he’s already waiting inside the room, waiting to get to his locker, waiting until everyone’s in a school assembly.
Matt Liebowitz studied creative writing at Boston University and Skidmore College, where he worked with Steven Millhauser. His stories have been published in Fiction Southeast, 236, Crack the Spine, All the Sins, Santa Ana River Review, and elsewhere. Matt teaches English, creative writing, and journalism in Western Massachusetts.