Yo Got His Feelings Hurt

By Richard “Terry” Terrill

Do you enjoy books which read like movies? If so, you will be amazed by the four interconnected stories actually lived by the novelist as an inner city teacher who overcame racism in a most unique way while also becoming a nationally collected visionary artist whose communication with the dead , experiences as a detective chasing perhaps the first 20th Century female serial killer,and One-Mind telepathic experiences are vividly presented in a hilariously serious manner as clearly as in a movie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483412467

Book preview

57

Jermaine was a high school student of mine in the mid-to-late 80’s. He was a member of one of the English classes I taught and also a valued part of my varsity baseball team. More than twenty years after his graduation, during what I thought would be my final semester as an adjunct professor at Baltimore City Community College, I recognized him in a classroom two doors down from where I was teaching Introduction to Literature. After I got his attention he walked out into the hallway. We shook hands white, then black, then black again with the hug. There wasn’t much time that evening before classes were scheduled to begin, so we arranged to meet earlier the next Tuesday. When we next met, I began the conversation by telling him, I didn’t recognize you at first with all that Man in your face. Jermaine had the same short bush at forty that he had had at seventeen. His eyes, no longer able to be characterized as Chinese eyes since he had stopped using reefer more than ten years earlier, contained the usual slant though that decades of inner city living invariably place there, the reverse cornea transplant of the streets. While the conversation was appropriately concerned with where Who was now, Jermaine suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and said, Yeh, Mr. Ter – el. You know, whole lot of students came to school because of you. They wouldn’t even have come, let alone get by, except for you. I shifted my gaze down. I hadn’t ever been told that, never knew. More than twenty years after I had last seen Jermaine he tells me people had come to school because of me. It was all of two days later before I heard the same thing again, this time from a woman, also like Jermaine, in her 40’s.

I was visiting her home for the second time to teach her temporarily home-bound son. It was my final position in the Baltimore City Public Schools system, teaching in the Home and Hospital program. Mandated under federal law – all students sixteen and under must have access to an education no matter what their circumstances – the Home and Hospital program serves students absent from school because of temporarily lacking the ability to ambulate, chronic illnesses such as asthma which require weekly visits from a teacher, being confined in a hospital in Baltimore City for six weeks or longer, or for some other reason not being able to participate in a normal classroom setting.

Ms. P had not been present when I had arrived a week earlier to teach her son. She had had a neighbor serve as the required adult presence for that first ninety minute period I spent at her home, but when she had seen my name on the signup sheet, she took off two hours from work to be there the next time I came. Since her clean, bright row house was south of Northern Parkway, I asked her if she was originally from the area, even asking if she had gone to Tubman, the high school where I had taught in the neighborhood.

Mr. Ter – el I sure did. I didn’t have you though.

I told her I thought I had recognized her, and then asked, What year did you graduate?

’87.

Oh. So you were there the year we closed.

Yes, Mr. Ter – el. I was never in your class but I wanted to be.

Wow, thank you.

I’ll never forget the talent show that year. It was right after everyone found out Tubman was closing for real. We was all going to have to go to Lake. Well, they were. Ms. P smiled. You and your group. You had fellows and girls with tambourines. They had us trippin’. Y’all were the … some whacked out name …

The Tack Tones.

Yeh, Mr. Ter – el. She sat down next to her son, who was using the time to text. Tack Tones because Y’all was tacky, right? You did the one rap about them going to Lake. But I remember earlier…there was one before… the one by yourself …

Yo Got His Feelings Hurt.

She smacked the table loud enough for her son to say, Dag mom.

That was it, she said. Someone had recorded it live. People typed, had the words typed up. Mr. Ter – el, I was glad when I saw your name, you would be teaching Tyree. I know you’ll help him. He needs help for the English exam. Mr. Ter – el, I sure wish I’d had you. You made school be something. Children came to school just because of you.

I looked at her, at her son starting to text again. Just two days earlier the same thing, almost the exact same words. Kids came to school because of me.

I find myself now thinking of the father in Robert Hayden’s poem about winter Sundays. What I am writing seems to me like the father who, in addition to creating a fire in the blue black cold also now becomes the writer as well as the subject of the poem; not only does he perform love’s austere and lonely offices, he is now aware, unlike in the original, that he is beloved for the deeds he does. Wouldn’t his acknowledgement of his performance remove the unspoken from the wintry chilling airs? Likewise, by being the writer as well as the subject of this memoir, will I not become overly self-serving, a contradiction of Tubman’s motto to be rather than to seem? I will, however, put all that aside and keep in mind deeper intentions – a tale of how teacher and students in the inner city can succeed, how what we had at Tubman not only can but must be stoked back to life.

Chapter 2

When I sat down on the bench outside of the recently designated People’s Park in Berkeley, California, on a warm early summer day in 1969, I was preoccupied with trying to determine what, if any, significance could be assigned to various people and beliefs which would appear seemingly without preamble, carried to me perhaps by the faraway wind from that proverbial Parisian butterfly’s wings. It was a time when I questioned just what value there was to be found in friendship and in reading and the speculation to which it all could lead. I was realizing some things that did not sit well with me: People and ideas which I had held in the highest esteem were causing me the greatest suffering and confusion. A friendship which I had believed would be life-affirming and would lead my friend and me out of a world which was claiming, Moloch-like, everyone we believed knew better than to be seduced by all the so-called mature expectations of bourgeois young adulthood had dissolved into rancorous chaos. The philosophy which had initially saved me from nihilism, Zen Buddhism, was now something of which I wished I had never heard a single word. So, friendship’s end and Zen Buddhism: these were the reasons which had caused me to stick out my thumb in Pittsburgh in late May of 1969 and head for my West Coast buddy Joe Louis Von Oblin’s apartment in Los Gatos, California, in order to be close to the Zen Center in Mill Va lley.

The last ride I had gotten that day had brought me to Berkeley. Beside me on the bench facing the park, which had been completely surrounded by what appeared to be a permanent chain-link fence as high as a basketball rim, was a plastic light blue kite. It wasn’t like the bow-string paper kites I had flown as a kid, ones only a step up from those made from newspaper by an earlier generation. This kite was complicated and more than likely costly. It had been given to me by a long-haired person I assumed to be a student when I had gotten near the park. The kite came complete with a type of string winder which I could not have imagined owning as a child, but whether it would be able to help the kite to fly to the heights I had enabled my flexible flyers to reach remained unanswered. While I was wondering whether or not I would be able to easily hitch-hike with the kite, a young woman sat down beside me. She was certainly oriental, and as I would soon discover, Hong Kong Chinese.

I hadn’t seen her approach the bench, so I had no clue as to why she might have chosen to sit there. If I could have watched as she came nearer, I might have been able to more accurately guess whether she had chosen the seat because of its convenience or because I was sitting there. I was twenty-three years old, thin, and had an admittedly cultivated look of romantic exhaustion, a look which I had quickly discovered was apparently quite favored by other young men around the world-famous campus. My hair was auburn, wavy, and shoulder-length. I more than once imagined it was the way James Dean would have looked had he been hanging around the new decade West Coast places to be seen. It certainly wasn’t a disadvantage to be a good-looking kid. I don’t know how much my appearance had influenced the most recent woman I had met on my journey to the Far West, but I doubt I would have had a motel room and bus ticket paid for me, along with an invitation to run away with her that very day she had picked me up outside Grand Junction, Colorado, if I hadn’t had a look that pleased. She could be thought of as an exception – except that similar things had happened to me quite a few times before. I was remembering her, ten years my senior, asking me if I would write as I boarded the Greyhound at the desert’s edge, when suddenly the young woman beside me said, Pardon me?

I turned to the girl near me on the bench. She had larger eyes than most oriental girls I had ever seen, and her face was not unpleasantly really, really round. I had never been so close to an oriental girl before, never spoken to one except the one time I had ordered carryout from a Chinese restaurant. The only oriental people I knew of in my Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, hometown lived in the only four houses on a street with their own name, I guess, Leung Drive, just over the left-field homerun fence at Penn Hills Junior High School. As I stared at her, wondering how her shiny black hair would look in pigtails, she spoke again.

Pardon me. I want ask you something.

As I moved to completely face her, I accidentally bumped the kite off the bench. It remained there on the ground as I replied.

Yes?

She handed me a copy of the most recent Berkeley Barb. It wasn’t as large as a regular newspaper, but the printing looked professional: dark and sharp and shiny. I took the paper from her, shook it completely open, and read the large, bold head line: Ronnie. Groovy Butch Stud. Endowed. Beneath was a picture of then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, as an artist’s model, probably a movie promotion still. It showed him sitting Thinker-like wearing only a white Tarzan loincloth. That was it. I smiled, realizing how committed the Berkeley students were, how the students at the state college I had recently attended would never have had the nerve or imagination to do such a thing. As I again straightened the front page, the young woman beside me reached over with two of her fingers marking places in a Chinese-English dictionary and said, I want ask you. What is the meaning? I find it saying the man is up-to-date with swagger, which is elegantly fashionable. But it says his butch is very short haircut, then tough man or woman-man. He can be used for reproduction with his good equipment, property, or income. She then sighed and said, English! You say ‘walked’ ‘I walked.’ The ‘‘ed’’ for what? We would just say ‘I walk’ for today or ‘I walk yesterday’ for what you call past tense. She sighed again. English!"

I moved closer to her and put my arm up on the highest bench slat behind her and left it there. I said, You are Chinese?

She frowned slightly then adjusted her black skirt, straightened her already straight-enough back, and offered a smile more bright, broad and delightfully toothsome than I had ever seen."

Yes.

Are you a student here?

She adjusted again. Yes. Somewhat… But what about the meaning? I don’t understand.

Well, I smiled,what the students are saying is … is that … they’re saying the man who is the governor of California, Ronald Reagan … You know that?

No.

Uh, ok. Well, they are making fun of him. They don’t like him because he’s the one who closed this park. They are saying he is a man who will give himself to other men to … uh …

To do the sexual?

Yes. Right. ‘To do the sexual’.

They can do that? Say that about him?

Yes. It’s free speech. How long have you been here? In America, I mean. You know about the protests? This park?

I come early this new year from Hong Kong to learn the English for the translation.

Ok. I removed my arm from behind her. There’s a need for that? For people to learn English who know Hong Kong Chinese?

It’s for the business. I know many what you say Chinese language. Hong Kong is Cantonese. But I am also speaking Mandarin, Haka, Toyson …

When I looked at her again she told me, China languages are more like Europe. There they have English, French, Italy. There is not really a language ‘Chinese.’ She suddenly put her little dictionary in a brown satchel and said, Ok. Thank you. I go Columbia tomorrow.

Columbia? You speak Spanish too?

She looked directly at me and said, I go Columbia in U S A Maryland. For working this summer at business there.

Uh. Ok. I know where Columbia is. It’s a new town south of Baltimore, Maryland, between there and Washington, D.C. By the way I’m Richard. What’s your name?

I am called Maudie. Maudie Lee.

Where will you be working?

She reached in her satchel again and handed me a business card that said A.E. Imports. There was the Columbia address and phone number beneath the words.

Thanks. You want to know my address or phone number, I don’t know them either, I laughed. I’m deciding whether to take a job in Baltimore teaching high school English. Uh, do you have time to go get something to eat?

She thought for a few seconds then said, You are the English teacher?

Yes.

She nodded slightly to herself it seemed and said, Ok. She looked on the ground beside me. What about kite there?

Oh that. Somebody gave it to me when I got here. I’ll leave it for someone else. Hey, Maudie. Do you remember my name?

She smiled and said, Lee-cha.

Right. Lee-cha.

We walked away from the park, sounding, as Maudie would say later, like a chicken talking to a duck, chattering about things that just right now I can’t remember.

Chapter 3

After leaving California I took the job in Baltimore. At that time it was formality rather than a process of elimination which drove the interview and hiring process. I asked to be assigned to an inner city high school, and wasn’t I surprised when I entered my assigned building the first day when students were to report: Harriet Tubman High School was a public, all-female high school, one semi-famous for being the oldest of its kind which still maintained its original single-sex iden tity.

It might be expected that therein would be found the tale: young white male teacher and his gender-charged experiences with black female students. I would be hard put to contrive stories solely around that theme. The young ladies of Tubman High were certainly normal in their feelings and desires, but they had purposefully chosen a single-sex school. It had been only a few years since the school had been racially desegregated, and Tubman’s students lived and acted as a collective, unspoken body dedicated to maintaining the reputation the school had long held city-wide: a business-oriented school with traditions which the girls wanted to continue. Although Tubman was now considered a zoned school rather than one to which admission was