Death of a Teacher: Part 2

This is a series, so if you haven't read Death of a Teacher: Part 1, read it first.  Otherwise you may think of my friend as a womanizer.  He did like woman, which is why I included this part of his life in the chapter; but he was also a very complex man.  

I hope think look into his life captures who he really was.  As a teacher and as a human.

Death of a Teacher: Part 2

In the parking lot, my job was to call the names of students as I saw their parent’s cars approach, radio those names into the grand room, and move the cars along through the pick up line.  Mr. Asaad’s primary job, as far as I could tell, was to flirt with student’s mothers; however, he sometimes used his trafficking skills – the skills he garnered working as a cop in Phoenix - to allocate the cars into two separate pickup lines that would wrap around the parking lot, making the pick up go twice as fast as in years prior.  With minimal effort and master skill, he kept traffic moving, save for the times an admiring mother would stop and bat eyes at him, giving him batches of cupcakes and cookies that they “just happened to have” in the car, still neatly wrapped in plastic.

            That was our beat.  And like two cops assigned to a squad car together, we got to know each other by sheer proximity.

            Each day, with nothing to do besides chat between the strands of cars piddling by, Mr. Asaad and I learned more and more about one another: each other’s families, each other’s hobbies, each other’s favorite brands of vodka, etcetera.  There were never silences between conversations since Mr. Asaad was the perpetual banterer, never pausing to catch his breath nor think about the words that came out of his mouth.

            We usually talked about anthropological topics, since both of us spent a chunk of our educational careers teaching in foreign countries.  For instance, he told me how in Barbados teacher’s still use corporal punishment.  I in turn explained to him that Taiwanese public schools do not have janitors; the students clean the facilities daily.  By years end, I learned a fair amount about the educational field in Barbados, and he in turn learned a fair amount about Taiwan, and we both learned how vastly different Barbados and Taiwanese student’s are from their American counterparts.  The work ethic is unfortunately not comparable. 

            We also wratched jawed about Mr. Asaad’s past in the United States army.

            One day, we were standing out in the parking lot, drowning in the heat.  It took me a matter of minutes to sweat through my underwear, and I glanced back at Mr. Asaad, dressed in a black button down short sleeve shirt and thick black slacks, the antithesis of temperature appropriate clothing.  He was barely perspiring, and compared to me, where a sixth great lake was forming at my feet from all the sweat run off, he looked like he was standing in his own little air conditioned atmosphere.

            “Aren’t you hot in that?”  I asked, wiping the perspiration from my brow with my tie.

            “No way man.  I love this.”  He lifted his arms and face to the sun, soaking it all in.  “This is Barbados weather.  I wish it were like this all year round.”

            “Why did you move here, to the States?”  I asked.

            “I knew I wanted to live here, get out of Barbados, not for the weather, but for the opportunity.  A lot of people in Barbados can’t move up.  There stuck in whatever socio-economic class they’re in.  So I jumped ship to America and joined the army.  I fought in the Middle East during desert storm, and after that was over I moved to New York.”

            I nodded, “That makes sense.  I bet you saw some crazy stuff in Iraq.” 

            “Man, some of the things I’ve seen, these kids they don’t even want to know.  These kids think they have it rough?  Take them on one trip to Iraq and they be second guessing their second guesses.”

           

            Mr. Asaad had an effervescent way of speaking that was like the way Bobby Fischer handled a chessboard: with charm and ease that comes from years of practice.  Mr. Asaad would lasso words and phrases together, making a limerick, a rhyme, or a pun out of nearly everything he said.  I heard him say the most poetic yet inappropriate things to students; things that would undoubtedly get my ass fired, but he was somehow able to pull off.

            “You needs to grab a hold of life before life grabs a hold of you boy!” 

            “What’s your major malfunction son?  You got rocks in your brain or rocks in your stomach?  Either way, something slowing you down.”

            “You better shape up or ship out, because I’m comin’ after you.”

            “You got something to say you better say it now cause’ your mouth will be swollen shut when I’m done wit’ you.”

            “Shut it down!”

            “If you don’t pull it together you leave me no choice but to slap the black off you.”

            One afternoon on a day when Jacory, a pencil thin kid who had the mouth of Chris Rock, was obnoxiously foolhardy in all his classes, Mr. Asaad forced him stand outside on the hot asphalt, baking in the Charlotte heat until his Mom picked him up.  I have heard of prisoners in jail receiving similar punishments. 

            “Boy, you don’t stop being silly you leave me no choice but to slap you silly.” he told the young man.  Just as Mr. Asaad was saying this, Jacory’s Mom rolled into the pick up line.  She undoubtedly heard everything Mr. Asaad had just said.  And since she was obviously in earshot, I assumed a lawsuit was in KIPP Charlotte’s future.  Jacory, however, got in his mother’s SUV, and Jacory’s mother drove off, smiling and waving to Mr. Asaad as if Mr. Asaad had done her a favor by doing something she would have done herself.

            “Mr. Asaad.” I said, “I’m pretty sure his Mom heard that.”

            “Oh it don’t matter.  I know that boy’s Mom.  She said that I could slap him upside the head if he don’t get his act together.”

            I didn’t question it.  Mr. Asaad did know kids Moms, sometimes a little too well.  There were moments I thought he had only volunteered to work the parking lot beat for the chance to coquet.  As certain single parents drove up, he would motion for them to pull off into the grass, and then he would saunter up to their cars, lean in on the open window, tilt his glasses on the rim of his nose, and say in a slow soft voice, “How you doin’ today?”  Since a lot of the kid’s parents were single mothers, they seemed flattered, especially since Mr. Asaad was very fit and rather handsome for a fifty-year-old. 

            Once, a fifth grader’s Mom was coming to coming to school for an afternoon parent teacher conference.  She drove past us and parked her car.  As she opened the driver’s side door and stepped out, the struts screeched, and the car lifted two inches from it’s former resting place.  This woman was a healthy 250 pounds.  Mr. Asaad stared at her, even cocked his head down and to the side, making it obvious he was staring at her ass.  Then he looked over at me and said, “You see that there,” pointing at the Mom, “that’s my ideal woman in bed.  Totally my kind of woman.”

            I was bemused.  I didn’t want to prolong this conversation, since making sexual references about our student’s parents seemed precipitously unprofessional to me.  But I had to add, “She would crush you.”

            His response was, “Oh yeah she would.”  He smiled as he said it, then eyeballed her leg fat juggle as she wobbled into school.