Recovering Teacher

The only hope, or else despair,

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

The Christmas after I broke away from my career teaching English—at the public school from which I’d graduated sixteen years earlier—my husband gave me a license plate frame that read, in plain black letters on a silver frame, Recovering Teacher.

Although I appreciated his part-silly, part-celebratory gift, I put off attaching the frame for a month or so. Something in the phrase bothered me, sounded bitter or regretful, suggested a distance from teaching that wasn’t entirely accurate for me. In the months after screwing the frame in place, I noticed it preoccupied me as I drove. When a car pulled up behind me at a stop, did the driver read the message, I wondered? What if I made a poor lane change, ground from one gear into another, or made a hasty left turn at a yellow light? Did the driver blame me more because of the frame, or did he blame me less?

One afternoon, a man called at me across the YMCA parking lot: “Recovering teacher?”

I kept moving but looked over my shoulder. “That’s right,” I said. I was headed to the gym not just for sweat, but for healing and distraction: I was missing someone who had recently died from “un-recovery,” a person I hadn’t seen in two years.

Neil Webb had been my teacher and my colleague. He was used and eventually discarded by the educational system which exists in a culture permeated by the belief that all teachers should be heroic, obedient, and utterly dedicated to their jobs and students every day of their work-lives, often at the expense of their personal lives. But this “perfect teacher” fantasy does not make allowances for imperfection or dissatisfaction. And asking a teacher to perform in this way mistrusts or ignores the passions and ambivalences that draw some people to the profession in the first place.

I left the frame on for three years. It made me think about what it means to “recover” in other contexts: maybe we’re all recovering from something? I knew that “recovering teacher” might provoke retorts from the average person: But you get summers off! You have that pushy union! And you work with kids all day—what could be more inspiring? My license plate frame registered its own small protest against unrecognized and unacknowledged abuse. I know too well how the duplicity of teacher worship can smother those of us who don’t fit, those who blatantly fail, and the ones who struggle too little or too hard. Some of us seek rituals to regenerate ourselves, not only to keep our careers but literally to stay alive; some fake the job to keep sane; some get worn down and stay anyway. Some literally suffocate.

Neil died alone in a downtown Riverside motel bungalow on an ordinary California Monday. He received no tearful public eulogies, no wooden plaque in the school office, no scholarship funds dedicated in his name. Banished too late from teaching to find the means, or support, to recover, Neil left only the stain of his grief and self-destructiveness for the colleagues and students who loved him, for those who felt a deep isolation in their inability to help him. When news of his death came, each of us huddled alone against the arms of a chair or sofa, whispering to one another on the phone: He’s gone? Mr. Webb? He’s really gone?

From across the street, the Santa Cruz Inn in Riverside, California, still looks like a romantic, historical find, reconstituted long ago by architect G. Stanley Wilson from a two-story 1920s duplex: narrow French-door balconies, mosaic panels, Moorish archways, Spanish tile roofing, a cement courtyard where a pool could have stood. A protected city property, the Inn stands two blocks from the fossilized, now-hollow Fox Theatre where Gone With the Wind held its first public screening. Charming from a distance, the Santa Cruz has a local reputation as a halfway house that receives frequent visits from police.

I suspected, before I knew, that Neil Webb had kept a room at the Santa Cruz. After his death, I drove down the narrow alley alongside the inn for a closer look, then stood in the tight parking lot. I saw the gashed screens peeling back, the scabbed plaster walls, broken windows like chipped teeth, crumbling steps, missing room numbers. Inside, I felt the cloying smell of old smoke and ash, saw the wall of wooden mailboxes, a few stray envelopes, a sticky metal ashtray. When I tapped the broken service bell it merely clicked. A tired Chinese woman appeared and frowned at me. Frowned hard. “Yes, Webb. He drunk,” she said. I looked at her stained fingers. “Not die here. No, not here.”

A week later, I received the official death certificate, which listed the Inn’s street address as Neil’s last residence. The room number identified where his body had been found, “on the carpeted floor near the bed.” On the phone, the detective told me not to misplace any grief, not to be surprised. Certainly, there had been no foul play, it had been the decedent’s own fault—although, he added, “It was real obvious that he suffered, based on the condition of the body.” There had been blood on the carpet, and many ants.

Then the coroner’s report arrived by mail, a thick sheaf of typed pages. “We don’t usually finish these,” a county worker had told me on the phone when I requested the documents. “Unless someone asks.” Specific statistics aside from Neil’s height, age, and weight included the following: 34170, the number on the tag on his right “great toe”; the blood alcohol level of 0.13%; the quarter-inch mustache and three-eighths-inch beard; the five inches of “scalp hair.” Select passages from the rest of the report—though technically detailed and detached—read like a kind of medical blessing, tracing his body from head to toe: There are no fractures of the skull. There are no injuries to the torso. The cranial nerves have normal distributions. The surfaces of the brainstem and cerebellum are unremarkable. The upper airway is not obstructed. The tongue is unremarkable. The bile ducts are unremarkable. The thymus is atrophic. The bone marrow of the ribs and clavicles is unremarkable. The vessels are unremarkable. The calyces and pelves are empty, opening into ureters that maintain a uniform caliber and open into an unremarkable, empty bladder. The esophagus is unremarkable. The small and large intestines and appendix are unremarkable.

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