on the way home

it started with the guy who was fighting with his tattoo. it was a newish looking tattoo, glossy and puffy and at first i figured he was on the phone, on some sort of earpiece, telling someone about it. he was staring at it, the design on his upper arm. the right one. but there was no earpiece and he was not chatting. his teeth were gritted and his brow was furrowed. his voice was low and angry. he had the tattooed arm in the grip of his left hand and was talking to the ink the way i have seen some parents in grocery stores grip their children by spindly arms so the can hiss low in their ears. when he began to rock back and forth violently, shaking his head, i figured there would probably be a quieter train coming along soon and i could probably hop off the one with this small internal fight and catch it. his face reddened and purpled and his voice grew angrier and louder and more frantic. he'd grip the arm around the tattoo, stare at it, growl and spit words, the only intelligible ones being words i'd rather not put down here. as i stood up to get off the train, he slammed his head back against the wall of the train behind him, exasperated. he rolled his eyes as though his tattoo just would not listen to reason.

so today i am hoping for a little calm on the going home train. nothing fancy. just nobody yelling and nobody covered in their own urine and nobody in the throes of any sort of withdrawal. after all, it's a school day. i make it to my destination without any hideousness and when the doors open an eighty year old lady and i, both trying to leave the train, are nearly trampled by a horde of teenagers leaving school. now, teenagers move in herds because it makes them feel safe and because, in all fairness, it's fun to have a constant audience that sees your every move as cool. because i spend my days in the classrooms and halls of a high school i am used to having to thread my way through the morass that is a clump of teens. but one girl shoves her way onto the train and puts her hand flat on the head of the eighty year old woman in front of me and slams the woman out of the train.

the woman stumbles and staggers but because of the crush of bodies is unable to fall down. she manages to get herself onto the platform in one piece. and what do i do? well, in my infinite wisdom, armed with the knowledge that i have teacher voice and teacher presence, i turn back into the car and say- are you ready for what i said in my best teacher voice? i say you can't do things like that! that's right. even my own students who know i am a nerd would be disappointed in the lack of power behind that. there is no swearing and no threatening and no sass. in addition, it does not occur to me that some teenagers might just be impervious to teacher voice. or teacher presence. it does not occur to me that there might be a sixteen year old girl out there so bored or angry or ugly in her own mind that she could disregard my elegantly phrased response to her behavior.

but she does. in fact, she goes beyond disregarding it. she reaches her hand up and shoves me hard, back out of the train. and i am very lucky the train doors close immediately and the train rolls away because i am my father's child and have a mouth that is sometimes bigger than i am. which means i stand there on the platform yelling things the sixteen year old girl who pushed me would have responded to with unkindness had she heard any of them. i'm not proud of this. i'm just trying to tell it like it happened.

you're thinking things did not end well if i got shoved off a train and my sassy, more gloriously phrased retort never reached the ears of my foe. but when that old woman went flying off the train i was the only one who made a sound. the twenty teenagers who got on the train with little miss angry stood there, open mouthed, wide eyed. and when she pushed me, the entire train was silent. and you may see silence as complicity, as disinterest. but being a teenager is tough. tougher than anything else we ever do. and, like i said, they move en masse, with a single brain sometimes. and she heard them all silent, unwilling to participate in her ugliness. she heard them turn their backs on what she did. they told her who she was better than i ever could.