Most of this is True

by Lloyd B. Abrams

My shrink told me that I was too fucking angry all the time. Those were his exact words: “too fucking angry.” He said he didn’t want to sugarcoat it. Also, that I should stop coming to see him every other Monday at four. He said it ruined the rest of his week.

I wasn’t always a joke writer.

I worked in an urban public high school. On the first day of classes one September, I asked my ninth-grade algebra students to guesstimate what year they thought that the man whom our antiquated high school was named after, had died. Then I simplified and repeated the question, adding that our school opened in 1930..

“Here’s another hint,” I said. “Public schools and buildings are named after dead people …. dead people,” I emphasized. “People who have died … before 1930.”

Flora raised her hand, and at the same time shouted, “Ooh, ooh, I know, I know … 1983!”

Simone, one of the few in class who, as it turned out, had a modicum of intelligence, looked back at her, laughed and said, “You are such an idiot.”

Before I could gently correct her, Flora jumped up and yelled, “You fuckin bitch! Whyn’tya go suck my dick!” Yup … a teenage girl shouting, “Whyn’tya go suck my dick!”

As Simone also stood up, the class became silent and still, like hyenas gathering for the pursuit. They were simultaneously eager and anxious to see what was going to happen next.

I knew that this sort of classroom confrontation could lead to a vicious fight, possibly a clear-the-classrooms mob scene, maybe even a stabbing after school. Or, at the very least, my having to write a dean’s referral, something I hardly ever did.

So I stood up straighter, cleared my voice, paused, and finally announced, “There will be no talk of sucking dick in my class.”

The students burst out laughing. Even I couldn’t keep a straight face. The tension in the room had broken. And, best of all, the class then belonged to me.

At that moment, I realized that I had reached the pinnacle of my pedagogical success.

As for Simone? She was destined to be the school’s valedictorian, destined to rise out of the inner-city riffraff.

While the majority of my students that year were immature, hormone-laden and nutty ninth graders, Simone had poise and charm. She was bright and precocious, maybe too precocious for her own good. Because my major job was programming the school, I later made sure that this delightful, shining star would be in one of my two classes, two years running.

But in November of her senior year, I noticed Simone in the school lobby with a protruding belly – an obviously pregnant belly, the ghetto belly of doom, and like it was no big thang. Some weeks later, when we processing paperwork, I saw that Simone had transferred out of our school.

She had shown so much promise. And I was devastated.

So, yeah … I have the fucking right to be angry.

– Tilden High School, in Brooklyn, opened in 1930. Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat, was the governor of New York and ran for President of the United States in 1876. Though he won the popular vote, he lost the hotly contested electoral vote. He died in 1886.

– This story, originally written in 2014, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

February, 2014 .. Rev 10 / May 1, 2020

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May 1, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams