“When they pet her, and to pet her was to find oneself back home. 'She's like a Time Machine’…”
“If there had been a way to tell the young teacher without defeating him, he would have.”
As you can tell, I have many favorites. I read this through twice Adam, and I am glad I did. The intricate nuisances of the story deserved a second read. Which only served to highlight your excellent story telling. As I read through the second time, I set this story within the realm of Dead Poet’s Society. Being at boarding school, the relations formed between students, similar to summer camp but hopefully with the accumulation of knowledge. And in turn, bonds formed between teachers and students.
Without Puccini, Steiner has no chance.
“He brought Puccini to classes, breaking a rule only the most eccentric and senior faculty broke. He sat, petting her in his lap absently. If he was teaching the students at all now, it was through the involuntary lift of a fingertip or eyebrow as he listened.
(⭐️) Otherwise, he seemed to protect what he loved from the students.”
“Something like a low fog— a cold smoke, ominous and soporific—drifted about the lawns and floors of the Wexler campus. The students and faculty kicked through it mindlessly on their way to classes.”
“The evening of the admonition…”
As if his character flaws weren’t enough, this was the beginning of his downfall as a teacher.
“…the lifeless acoustics must have felt like singing in a shoe box.”
Admittedly, I felt sorry for him. He had talent, and he was inept when it came to social skills, and his inability to have personality enough to engage his students. But mess with the only being that he had a relationship with?! Loved?
Thank goodness nothing happened to Puccini (love the name) or your story would have turned into a murder mystery. You once said that sometimes your stories read like a movie script, this, was one of those. It would be a great movie with a bit more Steiner background at the beginning. Maybe a school reunion at the end, while Pucc was still alive.
“Solomio!” I would have loved to have seen the expression on Steiner’s face , maybe a slight turning up of one corner of his mouth.
“…he made up a bit about a small bowl of water at the base of the flagpole. He’d say he left it in a dish he’d borrowed from the dining center. To be honest, he couldn’t have told you why.”But it was certainly obvious.
Somehow I just lost a 15-minute response to this note. It's been that kind of day. A complete back story on the piece, a thank you, my auditions for Dead Poet's Society and more... I'm calling it quits for comments tonight.
Let's try again on your comment, Lor. That was frustrating. I think I clicked on "More Comments" right before I posted, thinking it would just open them up on the same page and poof! Disappeared like a rabbit.
We are too busy making up words in English that come and go. I believe a word that describes the feeling of losing what you spent 15 minutes writing deserves its own word. And there should be a second word for losing an entire file. As I type this, I am in a state of dread that the Gods of Substack will abruptly take this comment away from me, too. "Please, Substack Gods, no! I'll post video and sunsets in the future, I promise!"
When I was in 7th grade, I had a music teacher.
There's nothing unusual about that. And the moment that teacher turned his back, the class got wilder than a psych ward on amphetamines. Kids were scaling the blinds behind the guy. There is also nothing new about music teachers bringing out the worst in the junior high young.
Well.
I liked to be funny. My entire relationship with the pre-adolescent world was based on my ability to make people laugh. Even people who did not like me had to laugh. That is a victory that also deserves its own word. I wielded my powers cruelly, even with adults. And when my music teacher turned his back, well, hello singing from the chandeliers. You see, of course, where this is going.
Maybe you don't see.
I was given what seemed like a very unusual detention. "Please come over to the high school to the music department room." My teacher taught both the junior high students and the high schoolers.
The room was not empty when I found my way, instruction by instruction, to the music room. I'm not sure if I'd ever even been in the high school. I remember vividly there were students in the room. And there was a music stand with sheet music on it.
"Sing."
They laughed.
I wept.
It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.
As I've gotten older, I started to think less about the humiliation, and more about the teacher. What kind of junior high school teacher seeks to humiliate a student like that. I deserved something, but I didn't deserve that. Copying Beethoven's 5th from one sheet of lined paper to the next might have been appropriate... but a staged humiliation. Dark.
This was a public school for the record.
in my boarding school where I was a day student there was a teacher who was completely ostracized. I wasn't that close to it, but I remember they had names for him and the way he walked around the campus like he wanted out, like he thought this was one part of the world where he'd have the upper hand, and then it turned out it was like all the other parts of the world.
I don't like institutions.
I don't write about this often, but I distrust people in groups larger than three or four, make that two. I don't like what happens in groups. I don't like the need to surrender something precious and integral to be part of them.
This story didn't start out writing to be critical of my own world, but the feelings were waiting for me apparently, and I rolled with it. I think when you write that is your job.
There is much to love and deeply admire about elite private education. I benefited deeply from it. In particular, I benefited from the cascading sea of red ink that spilled over every bare corner of my essays. I hear their voice still. They call out to me from behind every comma.
Thank you, Mr. Adams. You were a Goodyear. There were many, many Goodyears, in fact.
So that's how I somehow ended up where I did with this one: cruelty individual and institutional and impotence in the face of it for both the weak and the strong. Joe Cole put it well in another comment here.
*
I did audition for Dead Poet's Society. I was called back three times to read my way up the hierarchy of movie role decision makers. I did not, as you can put together, get the part. I remember that the script was very strong. I had been a student at an all boy's school. I'm sure that was good for at least one call back up the casting ladder. I don't remember if Robin Williams was attached to it. I do remember not getting it. I remember the disappointment of my agents.
I'm surprised sometimes as I work through this 100 Stories experiment how dark my imagination is. I wouldn't say I resist it. Most of the time, I'm not a misanthrope. (Mr. Adams, did I spell that correctly?) Maybe it's that the conflicts I choose are locked and loaded, and if you're not writing about something locked and loaded, you're wasting your reader's time. This one was dark. I wonder if it was too dark about my education. When I sum it up, though, the criticisms seem fair, even spot on. Unfortunate, but fair.
As a final thought: the institution of public high school education is no better, and I express no preference for the darkness in those hallways and music rooms either.
Maybe I am a misanthrope, Mr. Adams.
But not about your comments. They make me believe in people and in myself. Thank you, Lor.
Well, you left a few tracks of a tear, a smile or five, but mostly, you left me wishing I could single handedly, lift this beautiful piece of writing and send it out on a stiff breeze amplified by a Raven with a mega phone; “Hello all you fools out there, what kind of boring mindless attempt at writing are you reading write now, (or just flipping through Notes) when there is a brilliant story waiting to be read!
🐦⬛Over here you fools🐦⬛
⬇️⬇️⬇️
100 Stories
by Adam Nathan
This response is right up there with the best of your stories. I hope you post it as an incredible backstory.
I wish I had the Substack power to shine a spotlight. A big bright one, but alas, I am only a lowly reader with a smiley dog face that only a small handful of people would trust on this venue.
Thanks for resurrecting words from a comment that somehow was sucked into the Twilight Zone of Substack. If Rod Serling ( I was friends with his niece in high school , she looked just like him ,only shorter) was writing about your ‘lost pages’ I think he would have said his usual, maybe with a few add twists.
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”
I can’t thank you enough for taking the time ( a lot of time) to write this just for me, and you.
I've sat with this story for a bit. It is wonderfully engaging and leaves a mark. I love the decisions you make here.
I love the way that you leverage the tension that exists here to drive the plot. You could have taken this many different directions, but you opt to stay there...in the discomfort of both Jeffrey and Steiner, and the result is just deliciously vivid and unsettling. Neither of them leaves satisfied--both nurturing their own impotence in the face of the confrontation.
The way Steiner hates himself for not being sufficiently villainous with Jeffrey. That the modest humiliation he inflicts doesn't make him feel better--on the contrary, it only magnifies his lack of power in the face of his tormentors, enraging him further.
Your decision to resist a payoff for Steiner (or for Jeffrey for that matter) and just allow them both to sit in that tension is what makes this story so good. It's perfectly anticlimactic. A tough note to hit, but you nail it.
There's so much else I'd love to just sit down and chat about--passages or themes that I found compelling--the looming sense of a physical interplay between the masculinity of Jeffrey and the thinness of Steiner.
The way that objects of hatred take on a life of their own "They (the chants) became a ritual for something the crueler students could sense but not name."
Withdrawing in resentment in the face of unrequited love--in Steiner's case, the music. "Otherwise, he seemed to protect what he loved from the students."
The way that we loathe the other side of the moon--the yin to our yang. "He was taller than Jeffrey, but skinny, probably had one of those hollowed-out chests. He could have been a student. Jeffrey felt a wave of wanting to shove him."
Really loved it. Thanks for writing it. I love words that made the page, and perhaps more critically, those that were omitted for the reader's imagination.
And I've sat with your comment for a bit. Mostly because it deserves more than a cursory answer. Let me get the thank you out of the way. Thank you. Thoughtful, lengthy comments that aren't excoriating me are a huge validation of my writing.
You were the first to hang the word impotence on this, but that is exactly what is lurking here. They are institutionally thrust at each other, one by profession, the other by parental circumstance. A massive back-story on Jeffrey was discarded in one huge hack, but the bottom line is there is a certain feeling of being trapped when you can see adulthood right there, but aren't free to chase after it. These two were thrown in a bag together. They each think they are powerful, but they are each less than the institution that they are part of. Steiner ends up beaten, again, undoubtedly, and Jeffrey ends up a liar. Lying is a special breed of impotence.
So they faced off in a faculty room and on a rear porch. Steiner wishes he was more villainous, as you point out, and Jeffrey too villainous. In a world without the coercion of institutions, they would simply float apart from each other.
I don't know that it is anti-climactic like you're saying so much as the climax is institutional. They are both smaller than their environment, both trying to rise above it in some ways, both trapped together. The climax is a willful oblivion for Jeffrey, reimagining a kindness for the dog and Steiner limping off somewhere for the same beating. Neither art nor tenderness can heal him.
I touched on the masculinity issue because it is an instinct that is actually bigger than institutions. "I'm gonna punch you in the face, you fuck," is hard to stop no matter how many penitentiaries we throw up. I liked the reality of that standoff. Most males, at least, have stood in that crucible of am I going after you or not, consequences be damned.
Your last point. The reader's imagination is the spice drawer for these stories. Everyone's read is slightly different. Almost always I can see exactly why they read something a certain way even when I didn't intend it the way they heard it. The more I interact with readers—smart readers, invested readers—the more I see, yes, you are the spice drawer.
Thanks for the extended comments. I think the length of this one scared a lot of people away, but my sense is that it had more impact than a lot of what I write. I like to think it's because I'm becoming a better writer, but the subject matter is pretty hot, too.
Do not do that to Dave or bring him a little bowl of water?
Thank you for reading up to the bowl of water. 🙏 (did you have a favorite part? I don’t ask this enough. Like if you were going to remember anything what would it be?
I'm glad you asked! The entire scene in Steiner's office had me in a fit of snorts and shallow breathing. The almost-slow motion papers fluttering to the ground, Jeffrey's knocking knees, the clang of the fireplace tongs, the punishment progression from humming to singing to singing aloud the prank... it's all so bizarre and painful and absurdly lovable. Especially Pucc minding his own business throughout with his vacuum cleaner collar. ;) Like Dead Poet's Society meets Heathers!
Wait! I just finished writing my comment, saying I could envision the story set within Dead Poet’s Society. Well, wait a minute, I thought of it last night around 11.00pm!
“An animal as adored as he was shunned.”
“When they pet her, and to pet her was to find oneself back home. 'She's like a Time Machine’…”
“If there had been a way to tell the young teacher without defeating him, he would have.”
As you can tell, I have many favorites. I read this through twice Adam, and I am glad I did. The intricate nuisances of the story deserved a second read. Which only served to highlight your excellent story telling. As I read through the second time, I set this story within the realm of Dead Poet’s Society. Being at boarding school, the relations formed between students, similar to summer camp but hopefully with the accumulation of knowledge. And in turn, bonds formed between teachers and students.
Without Puccini, Steiner has no chance.
“He brought Puccini to classes, breaking a rule only the most eccentric and senior faculty broke. He sat, petting her in his lap absently. If he was teaching the students at all now, it was through the involuntary lift of a fingertip or eyebrow as he listened.
(⭐️) Otherwise, he seemed to protect what he loved from the students.”
“Something like a low fog— a cold smoke, ominous and soporific—drifted about the lawns and floors of the Wexler campus. The students and faculty kicked through it mindlessly on their way to classes.”
“The evening of the admonition…”
As if his character flaws weren’t enough, this was the beginning of his downfall as a teacher.
“…the lifeless acoustics must have felt like singing in a shoe box.”
Admittedly, I felt sorry for him. He had talent, and he was inept when it came to social skills, and his inability to have personality enough to engage his students. But mess with the only being that he had a relationship with?! Loved?
Thank goodness nothing happened to Puccini (love the name) or your story would have turned into a murder mystery. You once said that sometimes your stories read like a movie script, this, was one of those. It would be a great movie with a bit more Steiner background at the beginning. Maybe a school reunion at the end, while Pucc was still alive.
“Solomio!” I would have loved to have seen the expression on Steiner’s face , maybe a slight turning up of one corner of his mouth.
“…he made up a bit about a small bowl of water at the base of the flagpole. He’d say he left it in a dish he’d borrowed from the dining center. To be honest, he couldn’t have told you why.”But it was certainly obvious.
Somehow I just lost a 15-minute response to this note. It's been that kind of day. A complete back story on the piece, a thank you, my auditions for Dead Poet's Society and more... I'm calling it quits for comments tonight.
It is more than enough that you loved my comment, and I loved this story. Unless you really did audition for DPS , then you do need to tell me more!
Let's try again on your comment, Lor. That was frustrating. I think I clicked on "More Comments" right before I posted, thinking it would just open them up on the same page and poof! Disappeared like a rabbit.
We are too busy making up words in English that come and go. I believe a word that describes the feeling of losing what you spent 15 minutes writing deserves its own word. And there should be a second word for losing an entire file. As I type this, I am in a state of dread that the Gods of Substack will abruptly take this comment away from me, too. "Please, Substack Gods, no! I'll post video and sunsets in the future, I promise!"
When I was in 7th grade, I had a music teacher.
There's nothing unusual about that. And the moment that teacher turned his back, the class got wilder than a psych ward on amphetamines. Kids were scaling the blinds behind the guy. There is also nothing new about music teachers bringing out the worst in the junior high young.
Well.
I liked to be funny. My entire relationship with the pre-adolescent world was based on my ability to make people laugh. Even people who did not like me had to laugh. That is a victory that also deserves its own word. I wielded my powers cruelly, even with adults. And when my music teacher turned his back, well, hello singing from the chandeliers. You see, of course, where this is going.
Maybe you don't see.
I was given what seemed like a very unusual detention. "Please come over to the high school to the music department room." My teacher taught both the junior high students and the high schoolers.
The room was not empty when I found my way, instruction by instruction, to the music room. I'm not sure if I'd ever even been in the high school. I remember vividly there were students in the room. And there was a music stand with sheet music on it.
"Sing."
They laughed.
I wept.
It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.
As I've gotten older, I started to think less about the humiliation, and more about the teacher. What kind of junior high school teacher seeks to humiliate a student like that. I deserved something, but I didn't deserve that. Copying Beethoven's 5th from one sheet of lined paper to the next might have been appropriate... but a staged humiliation. Dark.
This was a public school for the record.
in my boarding school where I was a day student there was a teacher who was completely ostracized. I wasn't that close to it, but I remember they had names for him and the way he walked around the campus like he wanted out, like he thought this was one part of the world where he'd have the upper hand, and then it turned out it was like all the other parts of the world.
I don't like institutions.
I don't write about this often, but I distrust people in groups larger than three or four, make that two. I don't like what happens in groups. I don't like the need to surrender something precious and integral to be part of them.
This story didn't start out writing to be critical of my own world, but the feelings were waiting for me apparently, and I rolled with it. I think when you write that is your job.
There is much to love and deeply admire about elite private education. I benefited deeply from it. In particular, I benefited from the cascading sea of red ink that spilled over every bare corner of my essays. I hear their voice still. They call out to me from behind every comma.
Thank you, Mr. Adams. You were a Goodyear. There were many, many Goodyears, in fact.
So that's how I somehow ended up where I did with this one: cruelty individual and institutional and impotence in the face of it for both the weak and the strong. Joe Cole put it well in another comment here.
*
I did audition for Dead Poet's Society. I was called back three times to read my way up the hierarchy of movie role decision makers. I did not, as you can put together, get the part. I remember that the script was very strong. I had been a student at an all boy's school. I'm sure that was good for at least one call back up the casting ladder. I don't remember if Robin Williams was attached to it. I do remember not getting it. I remember the disappointment of my agents.
I'm surprised sometimes as I work through this 100 Stories experiment how dark my imagination is. I wouldn't say I resist it. Most of the time, I'm not a misanthrope. (Mr. Adams, did I spell that correctly?) Maybe it's that the conflicts I choose are locked and loaded, and if you're not writing about something locked and loaded, you're wasting your reader's time. This one was dark. I wonder if it was too dark about my education. When I sum it up, though, the criticisms seem fair, even spot on. Unfortunate, but fair.
As a final thought: the institution of public high school education is no better, and I express no preference for the darkness in those hallways and music rooms either.
Maybe I am a misanthrope, Mr. Adams.
But not about your comments. They make me believe in people and in myself. Thank you, Lor.
Well, you left a few tracks of a tear, a smile or five, but mostly, you left me wishing I could single handedly, lift this beautiful piece of writing and send it out on a stiff breeze amplified by a Raven with a mega phone; “Hello all you fools out there, what kind of boring mindless attempt at writing are you reading write now, (or just flipping through Notes) when there is a brilliant story waiting to be read!
🐦⬛Over here you fools🐦⬛
⬇️⬇️⬇️
100 Stories
by Adam Nathan
This response is right up there with the best of your stories. I hope you post it as an incredible backstory.
I wish I had the Substack power to shine a spotlight. A big bright one, but alas, I am only a lowly reader with a smiley dog face that only a small handful of people would trust on this venue.
Thanks for resurrecting words from a comment that somehow was sucked into the Twilight Zone of Substack. If Rod Serling ( I was friends with his niece in high school , she looked just like him ,only shorter) was writing about your ‘lost pages’ I think he would have said his usual, maybe with a few add twists.
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”
I can’t thank you enough for taking the time ( a lot of time) to write this just for me, and you.
Proper response when I catch my breath. Wonderful note, Lor.
I've sat with this story for a bit. It is wonderfully engaging and leaves a mark. I love the decisions you make here.
I love the way that you leverage the tension that exists here to drive the plot. You could have taken this many different directions, but you opt to stay there...in the discomfort of both Jeffrey and Steiner, and the result is just deliciously vivid and unsettling. Neither of them leaves satisfied--both nurturing their own impotence in the face of the confrontation.
The way Steiner hates himself for not being sufficiently villainous with Jeffrey. That the modest humiliation he inflicts doesn't make him feel better--on the contrary, it only magnifies his lack of power in the face of his tormentors, enraging him further.
Your decision to resist a payoff for Steiner (or for Jeffrey for that matter) and just allow them both to sit in that tension is what makes this story so good. It's perfectly anticlimactic. A tough note to hit, but you nail it.
There's so much else I'd love to just sit down and chat about--passages or themes that I found compelling--the looming sense of a physical interplay between the masculinity of Jeffrey and the thinness of Steiner.
The way that objects of hatred take on a life of their own "They (the chants) became a ritual for something the crueler students could sense but not name."
Withdrawing in resentment in the face of unrequited love--in Steiner's case, the music. "Otherwise, he seemed to protect what he loved from the students."
The way that we loathe the other side of the moon--the yin to our yang. "He was taller than Jeffrey, but skinny, probably had one of those hollowed-out chests. He could have been a student. Jeffrey felt a wave of wanting to shove him."
Really loved it. Thanks for writing it. I love words that made the page, and perhaps more critically, those that were omitted for the reader's imagination.
And I've sat with your comment for a bit. Mostly because it deserves more than a cursory answer. Let me get the thank you out of the way. Thank you. Thoughtful, lengthy comments that aren't excoriating me are a huge validation of my writing.
You were the first to hang the word impotence on this, but that is exactly what is lurking here. They are institutionally thrust at each other, one by profession, the other by parental circumstance. A massive back-story on Jeffrey was discarded in one huge hack, but the bottom line is there is a certain feeling of being trapped when you can see adulthood right there, but aren't free to chase after it. These two were thrown in a bag together. They each think they are powerful, but they are each less than the institution that they are part of. Steiner ends up beaten, again, undoubtedly, and Jeffrey ends up a liar. Lying is a special breed of impotence.
So they faced off in a faculty room and on a rear porch. Steiner wishes he was more villainous, as you point out, and Jeffrey too villainous. In a world without the coercion of institutions, they would simply float apart from each other.
I don't know that it is anti-climactic like you're saying so much as the climax is institutional. They are both smaller than their environment, both trying to rise above it in some ways, both trapped together. The climax is a willful oblivion for Jeffrey, reimagining a kindness for the dog and Steiner limping off somewhere for the same beating. Neither art nor tenderness can heal him.
I touched on the masculinity issue because it is an instinct that is actually bigger than institutions. "I'm gonna punch you in the face, you fuck," is hard to stop no matter how many penitentiaries we throw up. I liked the reality of that standoff. Most males, at least, have stood in that crucible of am I going after you or not, consequences be damned.
Your last point. The reader's imagination is the spice drawer for these stories. Everyone's read is slightly different. Almost always I can see exactly why they read something a certain way even when I didn't intend it the way they heard it. The more I interact with readers—smart readers, invested readers—the more I see, yes, you are the spice drawer.
Thanks for the extended comments. I think the length of this one scared a lot of people away, but my sense is that it had more impact than a lot of what I write. I like to think it's because I'm becoming a better writer, but the subject matter is pretty hot, too.
Oh Jeffery, you're too kind with that bowl of water.
What a fun, but cruel, story. And Solomio's retribution is brilliant. Next time I'm mad at Dave I'll ask him to sing his apology.
“A good guy.”
Do not do that to Dave or bring him a little bowl of water?
Thank you for reading up to the bowl of water. 🙏 (did you have a favorite part? I don’t ask this enough. Like if you were going to remember anything what would it be?
I'm glad you asked! The entire scene in Steiner's office had me in a fit of snorts and shallow breathing. The almost-slow motion papers fluttering to the ground, Jeffrey's knocking knees, the clang of the fireplace tongs, the punishment progression from humming to singing to singing aloud the prank... it's all so bizarre and painful and absurdly lovable. Especially Pucc minding his own business throughout with his vacuum cleaner collar. ;) Like Dead Poet's Society meets Heathers!
You like all the “right” things! 😊 Thanks for sharing that.
Wait! I just finished writing my comment, saying I could envision the story set within Dead Poet’s Society. Well, wait a minute, I thought of it last night around 11.00pm!