Kent Jacobson

Kent Jacobson has been a teacher in mostly off-the-main-road settings: an environmental experiment in Montana, prisons in several states, an inner-city Hispanic ghetto (a program which won a National Humanities Medal in 2015), and a black college in the South during the civil-rights movement. His nonfiction has appeared in Thread, Under the Sun, Brown Alumni Magazine, and Northwest Review, among others. He travels summer weekends from Massachusetts to the beach in southern Rhode Island where he learned how to swim.

Teacher

You’d talk about the midfield lacrosse you played, never about your father – his cold eyes – or your mother. She’d died or she’d left, you weren’t clear about which. You’d get tanked on Jack Daniel’s on college Saturdays after the game, and give guys no hope in the fraternity hall. You’d smirk, and slam a shoulder right into their chest.

“What?” they’d say.

“What?” you’d mock.

But not me. Why didn’t you slam me? It was 1964 and they were off to the civil-rights South or the dead John Kennedy’s Peace Corps, and you weren’t having it, were you? Life was no cloud-cuckoo-land, our fathers said.

I was a public school kid from a little Rhode Island mill-town in search of what, I wasn’t sure. I groped through books and marked every passage, every scrap, and scribbled notes, line after line, page after page, sheet after sheet. Would I find answers here? I read and reread and rethought, and wrote and revised and wrote nothings, and tried to fool myself, tried to fool teachers too.

My favorite professor handed a third paper back: “When will you get serious?”

I thought he’d understood how little I knew, how unaware, how helpless.

“I’m doing the best that I . . . ,” my voice cracking. I turned to the open door before he saw I might cry.

You’d slid through Phillips Andover, you said, read Hobbes and Machiavelli “without any bullshit from Jean-Jacque Rousseau.” I was so fresh and pink. I must have made you ache. You’d be the teacher, or you would try.

Your Triumph TR3, its black paint fading, you were looking for money and your father owned a company. Money? Earn it, he said. Earn the damn stuff any damn way you can, and don’t come knocking. I’m not in.

You drove the Triumph into the middle of nowhere (I longed for that car, its rag top down, a girl, the wind on our faces, longed to drive it just once). You stripped it -- wheels, radio, carburetor, what else? – and abandoned what was left by the side of the road. You were going to call the State Police and report the car gone but they called you before you got to a phone. The wreck they found, did you want it?

The insurance company said it was “totaled” and wrote you a check.

Simple. Nothing to it. You had the Triumph back and cash for what you wanted. I didn’t ask. I didn’t know how. The police? the insurance? You bragged to me with a small grin. I’d appreciate your daring, you thought, and I did, how you’d gotten away with a thing others wouldn’t try, and still, your flat tone said that there was more, that you’d learned a lesson, that you’d seen how the world might work for us – another way, not my earnestness. Was that it? Was that what you wanted to teach me?

A hard world, our fathers said. They understood the way things were.

And twenty-five years later I make films for non-profits, dreamers like the ones you despised – what have I become? -- and I teach hard men in prisons who write secrets they don’t wish to share, secrets they say explain who they are.

I drive to our college reunion and search the nice part of town, and find you in a mansion with wife number two, your children from your first now grown, a memory almost gone. You run your father’s company in tasseled loafers and a J. Press suit, and take a German car to the Club for a racquetball match. They serve the finest filet, you say.

And I climb to a third-floor room to dress for the class dinner, and near the bed under a high window, on the tiniest of delicate tables, sits a dish of caramel chocolates tucked in paper-thin tinfoil. Next to a selection of Waterford snifters. Beside a carafe of brandy. On a doily of off-white lace.