|
|
|
Friday, February 15, 2002
FIRST
PERSON
A Wiseacre Student, Now a
Star, Was a Handful Then
By DAVID MCGRATH,
Special to the Chicago
Tribune
CHICAGO--While
Chicago beams over the meteorite success of Bernie Mac, its
hometown comedian-actor ("The Original Kings of Comedy,"
"Ocean's Eleven") and sitcom sensation ("The Bernie Mac
Show"), I watch on the screen the tall, beefy and obscenely
uproarious man take possession of the camera with arachnidan
eyes and the seductively bullying stage presence of the
man-child I knew 30 years ago as Bernard McCullough.
As I listen to his mishmash
of South Side dialect and convoluted usage, I wonder how much
of it is comically purposeful, ironically fortunate or
vindictively calculated as rebellion against my efforts as his
freshman English teacher in 1972 at Chicago Vocational High
School on the Southeast Side. Were it the last, I could hardly
blame him; for Bernie Mac became a success in this world in
spite of and, possibly, because of this first-year teacher's
inexperience, naivete and inability to manage the class in
Room 180 in which Bernard McCullough launched a coup to become
"king" of eighth-period English.
Fifteen years old and coming
from a poor family with 10 children, McCullough had a
psychologically understandable craving for individual
attention, which he implemented in every way possible in my
classroom of 28 students. Twenty-two years old, I was a recent
college graduate with a teaching degree in English, a white
suburban neophyte with lofty ideals and expectations, and zero
experience in both teaching and classroom control.
Bernard sat in the rear seat
of the second row in Room 180 in the cavernous school's
Anthony Wing. Seating was alphabetical, but it couldn't have
worked out better for McCullough, who used the last position
as command center in a constant tug of war between him and me
for the class' attention.
From 2:02 to 2:42 p.m. each
afternoon, he kept up a nonstop barrage of jokes, jibes and
extemporaneous replies, loud enough to crack up the poor pupil
in front of him, and often the entire class, but out of range
of my hearing. Someone would laugh, and I'd look up or turn
from the board, but McCullough was always quicker on the draw,
his bug eyes staring back innocently or looking up at the
ceiling in a nonchalance that drew even more guffaws.
As a new instructor, I made
the fatal mistake of considering the chatter and horseplay
unworthy of my consideration, so I initially ignored it. A lot
of rookies do the same thing, thinking that peer pressure and
the importance of the learning at hand would eventually cause
the distraction to go away. As all America knows, Bernie Mac
did not go away.
Had I
somehow known of his future celebrity, I would have written
down some of the things he said and did for posterity. If a
student came in late, Bernie Mac called attention to his shoes
or his pants. One word would do it--"Floods," he would mumble
like a ventriloquist--and the class would crack up, the
student would be embarrassed, and I'd lose a couple of minutes
of instructional time. If a student were called on for
recitation, he or she would immediately become the object of
Mac's scrutiny for the former's speech, hairstyle or very
smell. I would tense and the class would salivate, if a
particularly portly female or a nerdish male would take the
floor. Bernie must have felt our anticipation, for sometimes
he said nothing, just let his clownish stare--an affectation
of shock--explode the atmosphere.
He was tall and skinny at
age 15--a stick version of his current self--so that
physically he was all eyes: taunting, bedeviling, lightning
eyes. It got so that no one even wanted to raise a hand to
volunteer an answer about the sentence's predicate or the
meaning of a literary term. And then my bright idea to put the
instigator himself on the spot would invariably backfire.
"Well, then, let's see what
you know about it, Mr. McCullough," I'd challenge.
"Huh?"
"Your interpretation?"
"Come again, Mr. Teacher,
sir? In English, please."
General laughter.
"Quiet, everyone."
Buzzing and commotion.
"Do you remember what
'couplet' means?"
"Huh?"
"Couplet," I said louder,
thinking I had the advantage for once.
"Oh, yeah. Couplet. That's a
little bitty cup, ain't it?"
Bedlam.
I tried changing his seat.
Sent a failure notice. Changed his neighbors' seats. Called
his home. Flunked him for the first quarter. Sent him to the
disciplinarian. Kept him after class.
* * * One day,
in a department-wide experiment encouraged by our English
chairman, I traded eighth-period classes with another teacher
who had more confidence and facility in dealing with the
students. Returning through the hallway after I had proctored
his class, I saw the teacher zigzagging through hallway
traffic to confront me.
"I
nearly hauled off on one of your students, McGrath."
"I'm sorry. Who?"
"Tall, dark-skinned guy,
sits in the back. He taped a note on the back of my sports
jacket. You better do something with him."
He turned on his heel,
handing me the half sheet of notebook paper with the green ink
inscription: Kik me if I is Ugly.
You couldn't actually do
anything with Bernie Mac. You could watch him, glare at him.
Or pray he'd get sick. I couldn't quit--I had a wife with a
baby on the way and needed this job. I hoped things would get
better as the year went along. I do know I learned to write on
the board while facing the class.
The only recourse I had was
with my grade book. It's not that Bernie Mac did not do his
schoolwork, but his entertainment needs had priority over
writing lesson retention, so his written work suffered
accordingly. I still remember his two- and three-page stories
(voluminous by freshman standards) in his very large and
sprawling orbital script. He'd fill line after line with
earnest reportage of his life and his family, never pausing
with a comma or stopping with a period. He could have earned
A's for his papers' content but always rated an F for the
sentence structure and the punctuation. Always an F for the
mechanics--a shortcoming I judged to be a consequence of his
attention deficit (though ADD had yet to be coined), when it
really may have been, instead, a manifestation of his
all-consuming need for unrestrained self-expression. He was
bursting back then, and there was no stopping him.
When he missed class, I was
secretly relieved. One or two of the other male students would
try to fill the "inanity" gap, but I dealt with them quickly
and efficiently, since disciplining them was child's play
after contending with McCullough all week. He was gone, and
I'd have a quiet, productive session. I wouldn't even report
the cut to the attendance office, in hopes of encouraging his
further absences.
He missed
other classes, too, as multiple FAs (F on account of absence)
in his other classes testified. I put an F in red ink in his
"course book" on grading day and would see with some lukewarm
relief that I wasn't the only one whose life he was making
miserable. He failed nearly everything, to my best
recollection, and did not return to CVS after his first year.
I concluded that he must have turned 16 and dropped out
entirely, for I never saw him again. Never heard from him
again, until I ran into a teaching colleague last year.
"What do you think of Bernie
McCullough now?"
"What?"
"Bernie Mac. You know who he
is, don't you?"
* * * Since the
revelation, I've watched his breakout film, "The Kings of
Comedy," and have seen highlights of his TV show. I observe
the talent, the energy, the ambition, the almost desperate
need for undivided attention. I listen to his fractured usage
and pronunciation, watch him imitate the strut of Phil
Jackson, coach of the Lakers. And then I hear his anger,
affected, of course, or supposedly so, in his disparagement of
the New Age hands-off parenting practices.
And I turn him off because I
am ashamed. Not of him or his show. He is tremendous. With his
onstage rhythmic deprecations, cathartic tirades and astute
impressions, he is an artist who has thrived in spite of me.
I'm ashamed because I failed him. Not by giving him an F, but
by not knowing or soon enough learning how to nurture his
gifts. I think how if he had come to my class when I had three
or four years of experience, I could have channeled his force
into wonderful avenues of creativity and leadership. And then
I think how maybe I did after all--channeled it straight out
of the classroom, out of the school, out of the establishment,
putting it on the stage where not 28, but 28 million can be
led to laugh at themselves and forget the reality for a while.
Bernie Mac. Bernard
McCullough. An Einstein in McGrath's eighth-period English.
* * * David
McGrath is a free-lance writer for the Chicago Tribune, a
Tribune company.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles
Times |
.gif)
|
|
|
