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Introduction
Revenge, Incorporated
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Introduction
Payback in writing
How does one react when one is fired from a teaching position?
Well, one can:
- Do something to enhance the school (as I did at Lincoln-Sudbury: the day after I was told my contract wouldn't be renewed, the drama teacher [who didn't know I'd been terminated] asked me to provide incidental music for the school play. I wrote, arranged, and conducted the music - all in a space of three weeks.)
- Continue the behavior that got one fired in the first place (as I did in dating the student at Muskingum College.)
- Seethe with resentment but do nothing about it (as I did toward the principal at Chelmsford.)
- Boycott all meetings for the rest of the year (as I did at The Rivers School.)
Or:
- Write tales of revenge as a sort of catharsis (as I did as a result of how we were treated at Medford High.)
We were just getting ready to move to Medford (due to horrendous landlords in Arlington) in July of 1979 when we saw an ad for a choral music teacher at Medford High School (which was just up the street from our new domicile.) Dorothy and I hit on the idea of applying for this job together, wherein we would each work half-time and care for our very young children the other half.
We were interviewed by Patrick Melchionda, the Music Department Chairman. We presented ourselves as a two-for-one deal, and this seemed to get us hired. I remember that he offered us $14,000; but Dorothy said that she did not think we could live on that, so he upped it to $16,000. (That overt attempt at miserliness should have alerted us to a malignant substratum, but we were so happy to get the job we didn't notice.)
So we began work there as follows: I went in at 7:30 for homeroom and to teach the academic classes (music theory, etc.) while Dorothy got the girls up and fed at home. Then, at 11:00, she would bring them up to the parking lot, where I would meet them and take the girls. Dorothy would then do the choral rehearsals as well as go to meetings until 4. There was also a rehearsal at night each week, and we would do those together (I functioning as accompanist.)
And so we began. I recall that, just as school started, the legislature passed a law which stipulated that, in homeroom each morning, there must be a flag salute. In addition, the teacher was mandated to say the following: 'Would anyone like to offer a word of prayer?' I had no trouble with the former; but I swore to myself that those latter words would never escape my lips. (I don't know what I would have done had a student called me on this - none did.) Luckily for me, after a few days the prayer part was declared unconstitutional. (The teacher next door was panicked because she didn't have a flag in her room. So she had the students salute the telephone - not a bad choice, given the absolutist power of Ma Bell in those days!)
The first couple of weeks, some disturbing things happened which tainted the entire year.
Dorothy had given me my schedule which she'd gotten at an afternoon meeting. It showed my course blocks, and a cryptic 'C' in an empty space. I took this to mean that I had a free period that block. So I would go to the faculty room and do my course preparation. After a couple of weeks of this, I was called into the office of an older housemaster named Donavan. This man dressed me down like one of his errant freshman charges. Apparently I was supposed to be patrolling the hall outside his office during that 'free' period of mine. Later, when I told Melchionda about this, he remarked drily, 'You're lucky to have gotten away with it as long as you did!' I stared at him in disbelief: this man, who should have been understanding and supportive of his new charge, was operating under the cynical assumption that I was just another employee trying to 'game' the system.
Then at our first rehearsal, we heard something disturbing from the kids. Our predecessor had been a well-beloved director who had cared for the students and developed close relations with them. Yet after two years, inexplicably, Melchionda had fired him. The kids felt betrayed and abandoned. It would take a large part of a semester before they liked and trusted us.
Melchionda was the model of the supportive administrator in the first part of the year - that is, until he saw the kids beginning to like us. Then he turned into the opposite: a raging tyrant. His office was on the other side of the chorus room wall; so he could hear what was going on in our room. It was not unusual, in the middle of a musical demonstration or rehearsal, for him to suddenly and violently come barging into the room and start yelling at me or at the students. The students thought he was crazy, and we were inclined to agree with them.
And that's the way it was for the rest of the year. We would do our best, but we found out that not only were our efforts not appreciated, they were viewed with derision and contempt.
Later we would hear from fellow teachers some other things about Melchionda that were disturbing. He had been caught changing (to something more negative than the original) the copy of an evaluation to be placed in a teacher's files. That little misstep cost the city $10,000 - a year's salary at the time. And we learned that the firing of the year before was not an isolated case - that a succession of choral directors had been subjected to that sort of treatment, usually after one year.
We could already see that we were going to receive 'that sort of treatment' too.
Toward the end of the year, Gordon Duckel, the string teacher, left Medford for greener pastures in Newton. (He would resurface 23 years later next door to my math classroom at Newton South.) A card wishing him well was being passed around for his music colleagues to sign. Gordon, I knew, had a low opinion of Melchionda, since that music chairman had supported the string program only in so far as it helped his own daughter learn to play the violin. So I inscribed on the card:
'Good luck Gordon.
I know you need to move on because you can't stand pat.'
To this day I am not sure whether Melchionda had already signed the card. If not, then he surely would have seen my inscription - something which didn't enhance our status in his eyes, I'm sure!
During the last couple of weeks of the year, Dorothy and I took on a huge project to keep the kids busy: we put on a credible semi-staged performance of 'West Side Story.' I was the accompanist, and I enjoyed playing that rewarding-if-challenging score. Yet after the performance, all Melchionda could say to us was, 'Well, you kept them busy.' A truly awful man.
I would run in to him once more after we left. As I was coming out of the administration building, I saw him starting to come up the walk. I turned and walked past him backwards.
Melchionda's tendency to hire and then, after a year, fire choral music teachers began to seem like a compulsion; but in time it could be seen for what it was: a psychopathology. And I think I found its root cause:
At the beginning of his career, he had worked for a man named Silverman. Apparently this man was more than a mentor to young Patrick - he became a father-figure. Many years later, Melchionda was in charge of his own department, and at some point he hired Silverman's son as a choral music teacher. In time the son left to take another job. And from then on, Melchionda went through the impossible search of trying to replace his 'son': he would hire a person, inevitably judge them inadequate, and fire them.
That this was a pathology was indicated by the fact that he did not hire-and-fire in any other musical field under his jurisdiction. In particular, the band director, who was there for decades, was perfectly adequate, but (to make a joke here) she was no [Richard Franco] Goldman.
A few years after we were there, Melchionda would finally meet his match in a tenacious young woman named Joan Feldmeyer, who refused to go silently. She filed a formal protest, and a public hearing was held. There was testimony from various former directors as well as parents of students whose lives had been disrupted by having a favorite choral teacher fired. In the end, the hearing board ruled in favor of Ms. Feldmeyer keeping her job. As a dénouement, an angry petulant Melchionda stormed out, giving an obscene gesture as he left.
(Our reaction was: who would want to stay in such a dysfunctional adverse environment?)
When something like this situation in Medford happens to a teacher, they may come to doubt their ability to be effective in the classroom. Fortunately, this did not happen to us. Dorothy became a crackerjack choral music teacher in Methuen, developing a prize-winning show choir there and staging a musical each year. In fact, in her long teaching career, Medford would be, through no fault of her own, the only blot on her record.
As for me, I went back to teaching mathematics. I would be fired from two more jobs before the end of my illustrious career.
In reaction to our year at Medford, I wrote two revenge stories. One of them was a transparent attack upon the housemaster Donavan who had treated me so ignobly. But it was mean spirited (in a jocular sort of way) and so not much use beyond the cathartic.
The other story is printed below. It was written a few years later, and so has the benefit of emotional distance. Here the one suggesting revenge is not me, but rather some pompous poseur I meet in a café. It is laden with a lot of good healthy irony. And, in his emphasis on aesthetic solutions to moral problems, it is intended to leave a bad taste in the mouth.
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Revenge, Incorporated
I met the man, whose singular profession is the subject of this piece, in the Pamplona Cafe in Harvard Square early one Saturday afternoon. It was one of those bleak winter days in which "it was snowing, and it was going to snow." That basement cafe has always appealed to me due to its absolute decor -- the thesis and antithesis of black and white mirrored in the dress of the waiters and the very cappuccino they make and serve. The black-and-white tiled floor made one think one was a piece on a gigantic chess board; it also reminded me of a painting done by a friend of a friend in college almost twenty years ago -- of Dostoyevsky's Idiot, with such a floor whose squares receded to infinity. Only the presence of blood-red geraniums on the window sills broke the monotony.
At that time on that day of the week in the winter we were the only two customers -- the same in number as the solemn waiters who served us. Any other time the busy-ness of the place allowed me to maintain a quiet anonymity. That day, however, we -- he and I -- began to talk. Being one who deliberately reveals what social custom-taboo forces others to conceal, I almost immediately launched on a tirade against my job, and the employer who had harassed me and then fired me through a false evaluation. I told the stranger I would love to revenge this outrage and even half-jokingly described some courses of action which, secretly at least, I was none too proud of entertaining. When I presumed to ask him about his work with the hope that things were better with him, he replied as follows:
"You speak of revenge, and ask me what I do for work! Pardon me if I answer in a way that provides a singular coincidence with your concern. You may believe me or not, as you choose; however, what I relate is true and not the afternoon tall-tale of a bored academic.
"My profession, if we could call it that, is Revenge. I form a one-man consulting company whose purpose is to advise those who seek to avenge one who has -- in their eyes at least -- wronged them. Don't be alarmed -- this is not Murder, Incorporated: that sort of thing is foreign to my whole way of thinking, of acting. Frankly, entre nous, retributive murder is outrageous -- not because of the fact that someone is killed, but because it is so -- gross -- not only heavy-handed, but obvious -- and thus, in the end, boring! What is more common than to want to murder someone who has wronged you?! The common, the mundane, the everyday -- all this vulgar nonsense leaves me cold.
"I saw a gap which needed filling: on the one hand, those who wish they could revenge a wrong but never do; on the other hand, those who actually do act, either in the courts or on the streets. The ones who act are the worst, because of the "solution" they choose, which is invariably the same, totally predictable! What is worse than the unmediated reflex-action? At some moment when I had reached a saturation point in disgust, I decided to fill that gap. The reasons, one could say, were purely aesthetic: I wanted to provide people with the means of taking action which is absolutely appropriate, action which is composed for the specific context-situation.
"My first job seems as though it was unrelated to this calling; actually it was a first-approximation. Upon graduation I formed a term-paper company -- the kind that is now outlawed. I had written numerous papers for friends and strangers alike while still in school: besides the fact that I love to research and write for its own sake, I experienced a perfidious sort of enjoyment in doing that sort of work. I saw it, if you will, as a sort of fitting revenge of the students on their professors: the latter were holding up as an ideal the notion of 'Objective Research'; I thus allowed those hapless students the possibility of turning the trick back on those so-called 'teachers,' by handing them something which was at least 'objective' enough not to contain a farthing of their own thoughts! My finest moment was attained when I even ventured once to provide a flunking music theory student with a double-fugue 'in the Bach Style'. For that piece my foolish client received several performances, publication, and commendation as a 'Budding Contrapuntalist'.
"All this, the occasional fun notwithstanding, became quickly boring, to the point where I risked discovery through deliberate contradiction. After awhile the knowledge that one can indeed plagiarize any style, write intelligently on any subject, cannot counter the feeling of the idiocy of it all -- precisely because it is all so -- merely -- possible. Even while I entertained the notion of becoming a professional forger, I intuited that I'd be bored stiff. I knew I had the temperament, the desire-approach, of an artist, a composer -- that I was fit to apply my acumen and knowledge to -- higher things."
He stopped abruptly because the waiter had come to take our order. I ordered Viennese coffee, while he chose the drier cappuccino. When the waiter had scurried away to his machine, my acquaintance resumed his monologue:
"The break which forged my career came in a dramatic and unexpected way -- in the form of a personal tragedy. One day I heard that a man had killed my brother. The circumstances surrounding the murder (is it not always thus?) were vague, shadowy; they were scarcely elucidated at the trial which acquitted the man I swore was my enemy. For days, even weeks, I could do nothing but plot, to swear for myself and my friends revenge. Fortunately my superb taste (don't balk at this word, my friend -- it has its place!) won out in time as my ardor cooled.
I had been reading, quite deliberately, the Old Testament - that excellent Source-Book of Revenge for anyone who is wont to conveniently see himself as the instrument of a retributive god, if not actually as the god itself. Quite naturally I read the story of Cain and Abel. At first I was shocked to discover that God did not kill or otherwise punish Cain for his crime; no -- he in fact protected the inventor of fratricide by 'marking' him. Strange, disturbing stuff (so I thought.) Only later did the real significance of the myth nit me: Cain was spared in order to spend his days living with his crime -- in horrible memory, in his wandering, in its reflection in the knowing eyes of other men.
'You may think, then, that my 'solution' to my problem of revenge against the murderer of my own brother was to, as it were, play God --to adapt a laissez-faire attitude and allow the proverbial 'mills of the gods' to grind 'exceeding fine' enough so that 'in time' my sworn enemy would be crushed under the weight of his own private guilt. Not surprisingly, this 'solution' scarcely appealed to me. I wanted no part of such disguised impotence -- no, I wanted to take, not merely action, but appropriate action. I sought something which smacked of a touch of divine irony...
"The solution I arrived at effectively goes one-better than the one described in the Biblical myth: I decided that if my hell was in the loss of my brother, my enemy's was to be in the finding of his. I will spare you the details of the way in which I put into practice this antithetic response: such actions belong to the field of administration; the initial motivating solution is the important thing, I assure you. Suffice it to say that I located this brother of my enemy -- one who had proved to be an embarrassment to him in the past; I persuaded this fellow to force his attentions upon my adversary. What can one do with one's own flesh-and-blood - turn him away? He couldn't; the fellow, as I had foreseen, brought about my enemy's downfall, his ruin.
"Since that first baptism under fire, I have advised numerous people on this subject of revenge, becoming in the process a bit of an expert. The vast majority of the cases brought to me fall into one of the two categories -- of professional or romantic jealousy. What do you advise a man whose wife has committed adultery - or a man whose employer has irrationally humiliated him? I try to deal with each case according to its own peculiar circumstances, preferring not to recommend a stock solution to every cuckold who darkens my door. Only once have I recommended murder as the perfect revenge --in a case, as a matter of fact, almost directly the opposite of that which concerned my brother: this involved the elimination of someone's mother. Aesthetically, that case was one of my most satisfying.
"But now we have before us, sir, your own peculiar case, which, if I am not mistaken, falls into the category of 'Professional Enmity', n'est ce pas? Most employers, your erstwhile one included, are nothing but administrators. -- lackeys, flunkeys in a petty bureaucracy. Such types are fixed in a relatively inflexible mold, wherein they measure meaning for their lives by the effect of their power over others. It is easy -- almost child's play -- to disorient such people, causing them to suffer the humiliation they so richly deserve. One can, for example, show such a person that one was so wretched, so lowly, before his act, that his action was superfluous, a waste of time: what administrator can shrug off clear evidence of inefficiency? Then, alternatively, one can show the employer that his action had no effect whatever on one: disturbing, to one who must know that every action has an effect, that 'power produces results'. Again, one can 'prove' that it was the employee, not the boss, who precipitated the outrage: frightening to one who must be constantly convinced that he is in control."
The fellow paused discretely as the coffee was set before us carefully by the penguin-suited waiter. He seemed to stare through me (no doubt remembering certain cases he had 'solved'), while I, feeling some embarrassment, looked down at the black marble-grained table and sipped my cafe au lait. Contemplating his own coffee, he murmured: "I have always preferred this form of coffee whenever I could get it, wherein the espresso and the dry steamed milk hold off aloofly from one another to the bitter end." As I said nothing, he resumed, in a quieter tone:
"Such types of revenge-humiliation provide a certain satisfaction, not least because we feel we've beaten someone at their own game, ensnared them in their own web. If such amusement were all we were seeking, then any of these courses of action would suffice to satisfy us -- particularly as compared with your dismal and (let's face it) irrelevant notions of pouring salt in his coffee or leaving nasty notes in your desk to alert your successor! No -- we should be able to look beyond all these types of response -- stupid and amusing alike. Remember that I spoke of the absolutely appropriate response - the antithetic action which addresses in the most direct way both the form and the content of the original outrage."
He paused, regarding me closely. Taking it to mean that I should speak, I haltingly asked him what he would recommend. Remembering the while that this was, as he said, his "profession", I quickly added that I was not seeking free advice, that I would gladly pay...
"It is said that advice is cheap," he replied with a contemptuous shrug. "Actually the reverse is usually true -- one pays dearly for all the rotten advice that is dished out so freely every day! My advice is not cheap, because it provides one who needs it with the unique satisfaction of having the potential to act correctly - not morally, but aesthetically speaking."
I took this to be an invitation, and proceeded to rummage in my wallet, finally producing a ten-spot which I laid near his cup on the table. He didn't take it, but he didn't (as I thought he might) refuse it either. I would have preferred to leave, but could see no way of graciously doing so in that empty cafe. Sadly I realized that a coveted engraved copy of Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet would have to wait until I found my next job. As I put my wallet away, he spoke: "Your particular case is, as the saving goes, 'not completely devoid of interest.' Although in light of other cases I have handled, its features are common enough. What, I always ask, is the form of the outrage? You have been harassed, humiliated, and have, through an employer's deceit, lost your job. You are in hell. Perhaps you wish for your erstwhile employer to lose his job too? Nonsense! Precisely the opposite must become true: that man must be humiliated precisely because he retains his job -- retains it for the rest of his life! This is the first, and main, antithesis; there are others of a subsidiary, causal sort. He lied in his evaluation of your work, eh? Then his evaluators must rigorously tell the truth --the whole truth -- about his performance at all times (the Truth almost always becomes devastating). He interferred with your work and harassed you? Then he must be left completely alone by everyone he works for. He humiliated you in screams and accusations? He should be dealt with in smiling, silent approval. In short, his superiors must see not only that he is perfect for his job, but that it would be folly to promote him to a higher position. Both. I promise you: stuck there, with no possibility of advancement or (because of social and economic pressures) of leaving, the world which is his job will become for that person a private hell far surpassing your very temporary feelings Of piqued outrage!"
I waited openmouthed for other recommendations, but my strange companion appeared to be finished. I asked one more question which he waved away with disdain: "No -- implementation is not my line --that's your business. A mere matter of administration!" Then, almost before I knew it, he had paid his cheque (with my ten-dollar bill) and, without so much as a 'good luck', was gone past the geraniums out the door and up the steps outside.
All this happened five years ago. Recently I have found out, through a knowledge now common, that my erstwhile boss has turned to alcohol as a means of placating what must by now be failed hopes of ever advancing in the company. I suppose this provides me with at least some measure of vicarious triumph concerning a situation in which I had otherwise long ago lost interest.
(1985)
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