Rock And Roll High School

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When we learned that Joey Ramone was going to be our substitute teacher for the remainder of the semester, we all thought it was going to be like ‘Rock and Roll High School.’ When he walked into the classroom, he looked exactly as he had on the cover of The Ramones’ self-titled record, like he hadn’t aged a single day, only his trademark shades were clear prescription lenses, and he was wearing an olive green cardigan, both of which made him look much, much older. Still, we took in the sight of him in awed silence, a silence that awed us, a big silence that made us all just want to shut the fuck up. That silence felt like it lasted an eternity, charged with the potential the future could hold with Joey Ramone as our teacher. I thought he might let out a triumphant roar, jump onto the table, and tell all the girls to get naked. Instead he went to the board and took a piece of chalk, and with this piece of chalk he wrote on the board: Mr. Ramone. Every screech of that chalk against the board made me cringe inside. The “Mr.” prefixing “Ramone” turned my stomach.

—Hey there, uh, I’m Mr. Ramone, he said in a Brooklyn accent, I’m, uh, I’m here to teach you guys since your teacher Mr. Cummings had a, like, a nervous breakdown and all. I’m told we are going to be finishing Lord of the Flies today, which is one of my favourites.

I raised my hand.

—Um, yeah? said Joey Ramone, craning his neck to look at me.

—Nevermind, I said.

—Oh. Okay, said Mr. Ramone, so, uh, who can tell me what they think the naval officer at the end represents?

* * *

After class I ripped darts with Thom and Doug.

—So much for ‘Rock and Roll High School,’ Doug muttered, fumbling with a cigarette.

—I can’t believe we still had to talk about that stupid fucking book, said Thom, it was so gay, and only like two people died in the whole thing, and there were no girls in it which was super gay and probably sexist also.

I shook my head.

—Nah, man. He’s planning something, I can feel it. Just wait until tomorrow.

Thom and Doug exchanged glances and Doug shrugged.

Thom was a cynic because his mom was an alcoholic, but I didn’t expect that from Doug, and it shook my confidence for at least a second before I bounced back, like I am known to do, with righteous ferocity. I didn’t care what my friends thought, ‘Rock and Roll High School’ was more that just a dream, it was a fucking inevitability. It was the result of historic forces that had been in conflict since time immemorial, far greater and geekier than the three of us had any ability to understand.

My friends and I biked later through the suburban streets, past rows of identical houses lined with no trees. They were pussy pink and looked dead. The houses were the dead faces of deader families; they were “enervating” to look at. “Enervating” was a word I saw in an assigned book and looked up. If I had a band, we’d be called The Enervators, and we’d play loud music that would scare your parents. I thought about how Mr. Ramone was about to set fire to all of that, what the houses represented, to crush the establishment and paint all the houses black. It would all start tomorrow.

* * *

Tomorrow came and went. So did the next day. And the next. It was a week, four days, before I finally gave up hope that Mr. Ramone was going to blow the lid off this whole establishment and rain down fun and anarchy upon us. I thought that Mr. Ramone was going to freak out on all of the conformists for being conformists, and trash all of the poseurs for being poseurs. I thought he was going to teach us how to disobey authority, and call Sally Werther a whore because she wouldn’t talk to me, but all he did was teach us The Scarlet Letter. And to make matters worse, there wasn’t a lick of sun that whole time, just one gray mass that reflected my downcast attitude and lack of hope, like hey, even the weather agreed with me, and that was real poetry, not the gay shit we read in Mr. Ramone’s class.

I came home late one afternoon after ripping darts and tagging stop signs with my Sharpie to find dinner on the table. I smelled like smoke, which I liked because I knew it upset my parents, even if they wouldn’t say anything about it. I lurched into my chair and frowned at what I found in front of me: deconstructed shepherd’s pie (my mom knew I didn’t like it when my food touched).

—I flipping hate shepherd’s pie, I said. I couldn’t say fuck in front of my mom.

Nobody responded to my comment.

—I ran into your teacher today at the supermarket, said my mom, Mr. Ramone—he seems very nice!

—Mr. Ramone is a flipping lame-wad, I said.

—Honey, said my mom, you shouldn’t hate your punk rock hero just because he got co-opted by the system. I’m sure that Mr. Ramone is a wonderful teacher.

—He’s a sucky-lousy teacher! I yelled. I knocked my plate to the ground where it cracked in half, mashed potatoes smeared on the carpet in the shape of a star.

—Honey… said my mom.

—Don’t honey me! I yelled, I’m going to my room!

I went to my room. That wasn’t the real Joey Ramone. Joey Ramone was a rebel. Johnny Ramone may have voted for Ronald Reagan, but Joey Ramone voted for Jimmy Carter! The real Joey Ramone was dead. Dead and buried somewhere in Brooklyn, his soul in Hades, sticking it to the god of the dead.

* * *

Against my better judgment, I continued going to school.

On the way to school every day the dead faces of the dead houses started to grow and grow and it felt at last like they were the reason it had been so overcast, that their shadows had finally blocked out the sun, and the establishment had won. But I was sad to admit that there was a part of me that still held out, still had hope. It was my sunny disposition, my righteous furiosity, my ability to bounce back (for which I was known for).

It was a Friday and the day was particularly gray. My bike skidded to a halt in the gravel outside the school. I slunk down the hallway, slightly late for class, lurching like Frankenstein, toward my classroom. As I did so, I kept hoping and hoping and hoping that the curtains would be drawn and music would be playing loud and good, and he would be on a chair on top of a desk, beer in one hand, and a middle finger to the establishment in the other.

When I walked in, he was there, taking attendance like normal, like the fucking sellout fraud he was. I slumped into my seat. Doug made gay kissy noises at me to bother me. Thom threw me a look and pulled his finger across his wrist. I looked at Mr. Ramone. He monotonously read out more names. Sometimes I forgot that he was alive. Sometimes I wished he wasn’t. I watched his mouth move as he said names, as he sucked on a mint, as he wet his dry lips and adjusted the sleeves of his cardigan. I watched the skin of his face look stretched over the bones of his skull, and his hair, barely greasy, looked dry and limp. It was supposed to be the Year of the Joey, the Joey Liberation, and the year we raised the punk rock flag like those soldiers at Iwo Jima, but Mr. Ramone wouldn’t budge, his records were now used to score commercials, a slave to the establishment, dying inside each day. Maybe he was as much a prisoner of himself as we were of him.

When class ended, I went to my locker, fiddled with the lock, took out the photo I had of Sid and Nancy and tore it in half. Who knows, maybe Sid Vicious would be teaching me geography next year and he’d be a square too. Might as well get ahead on it all. My world was upside down. The rebel was the man, the rebellion was the institution. Punk rock didn’t mean anything at all.

* * *

Then one day, I learned that Mr. Ramone was leaving. Mr. Cummings had recovered from his nervous breakdown and was returning from sick leave. Apparently, he had come to an uneasy agreement with his split personalities, and they agreed on some kind of truce while they all worked on their sense of self.

Doug and Thom looked thrilled by the news of Mr. Ramone’s leaving, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. We had all had enough. Yet still, even with the truth standing in front of me, I still wanted him to stay. Thom looked at me weird, took a drag. Didn’t you tell us you fucking hated him?

—I don’t know I mumbled.

Doug raised an eyebrow.

—You don’t still think—

Thom shook his head.

—This guy isn’t a revolutionary, okay? He’s just a crappy teacher.

I couldn’t move on, I just couldn’t. I bit my lip.

When we walked into class that day, Mr. Ramone was leaning against his desk. He greeted us with a nod. I looked at the bored faces of my classmates. Suddenly I knew that my hopes for something better were truly lost, dead and gone, and yet I wasn’t as hopeless, useless, or dead inside as I thought I might be. Without so much as a word from him, I knew exactly how to put up with this new, awful reality: I would hold him in contempt. Not the contempt of hate, but the contempt of love, the contempt of knowing that of course he would come up short, that life would always come up short, always fail to live up to expectation, but that even the absence of good can make its mark.

I pointed one rageful finger directly at Mr. Ramone, making him turn his head, and yelled: NO PIZZA FOR YOU, JOEY! I grabbed the garbage can by his desk and whipped it against the wall, letting the garbage fall where it lay.

—Huh, said Mr. Ramone after a brief pause, you should, like, go to the principal’s office.

At the end of the day I caught Mr. Ramone in the parking lot.

—That’s it?! I yelled after him, you’re just going to up and leave us all and that’s it?!

—Well, yeah, he said, puzzled, that’s my contract.

—Fuck you, man, like, what the fuck! I yelled, with particular emphasis on the swears, everybody thinks you’re dead for like twenty years, and then you just show up one day to teach ninth grade English completely ageless, and you’re a total fucking lame-wad! What gives? And don’t you try to tell me some lame excuse like ‘what’s more punk rock than that?’ because that’s a fucking cop out and you know it—that’s not gonna be the lesson in this one.

Mr. Ramone frowned down at me.

—There is no lesson, kid, said Mr. Ramone, except for Of Mice and Men, which you guys are starting on Monday.

—You know what you are? You’re a sellout. You’re a hopeless sellout. I wish you were still dead, because my hero would have never grown up to be such a sellout.

—You have a lot of growing up to do before you realize that other people don’t exist solely to fulfill your own emotional needs, said Mr. Ramone.

He started to walk away.

I felt tears well up in the corners of my eyes.

—Fuck you, man, I hissed.

Mr. Ramone suddenly stopped and pivoted back to face me.

—You know what, kid? Fuck you, he said, you’re, like, a really unlikeable person, do you know that? You’re so god damn hung up about everything, can’t you give it a rest? Maybe Sally Werthers would talk to you if you didn’t constantly see yourself as being on this petty crusade against every kind of authority. It’s exhausting.

Everything inside me went out like a deflated balloon. I felt less sure of myself, less clear on what it was that I’d wanted out of this interaction. It all left me. Not just the pride and the righteousness but the anger and impotent frustration too. I could see myself there, nothing more than a stupid kid, waiting for the real Joey Ramone to come back and tell me I was special, because even though I wasn’t, he’d pretend that I was. For what it’s worth, Sally Werthers did eventually talk to me. A few months later I’d ask her on a date and she’d say yes and we went to the movies. Eventually I invited her to see an underground show. One of the guys in the band was a friend of a friend. She let me put my arm around her shoulder. I guess that’s neither here nor there. I had missed the end of class that day because I’d been in the principal’s office, but I later learned from Doug and Thom that it had been sort of nice, that Mr. Ramone thanked them all and said he’d really enjoyed these weeks of teaching everybody. There in the parking lot, looking into Mr. Ramone’s face, I wondered if I had even ever been angry with him at all.

Mr. Ramone peered at the sky, where the sun had emerged from behind the clouds, and when he peered back his glasses had already begun to correctively darken. Joey Ramone’s eyes gradually disappeared behind a dense black fog, and I could suddenly see myself, reflected in his glasses. He frowned down at me one last time and gave an almost pathetically dismissive wave.

—Give my regards to your mom, she’s a very sweet lady, said Joey Ramone, and he turned and walked toward his car.