Author's Note
One of the great things about writing, whether it be on a blog, on a typewriter or with pen and paper, is that you start out with nothing. The page is blank. And what comes next is creation. For me, it's mostly about nonsense and stupidity. I prefer the absurd. And what you're about to read is absolutely absurd. But, the difference with this absurdity is that it's true. All of it. I've often thought of writing about it. In fact, I've tried to start it several times over the years but it never felt right. Maybe this won't feel right either, but at least I'm motivated and I know myself well enough that I know that this motivation may not last that long. For me, it seems like a long, long time ago but also maybe like it just happened the other day. I often worried that if I didn't write about it soon that the memories would fade and it would be more difficult to remember. But it is as vivid as waking up this morning. So, this is the way it happened, at least according to me. Besides my friends and the person responsible for this story being told, the other names of the characters in the story have been changed. Sort of.
This is chapter one. The prologue is to be read first, and it was posted in January of 2014 and appears up the list of the blog entries. Read the prologue first before reading chapter one.
The Curious Case of Christopher Comtois
By Chris Justice
Vail
"Are you guys really going to drive up tonight?" asked one of the school board members. It was Friday night and nearly eight o'clock. My friend Kermit and I were at a dinner party hosted by a parent of one of the kids in my 5th/6th grade combined class. It was the last weekend of Christmas break in early 2002 and it had just started snowing in Denver. We had plans to ski in Vail the next day and it seemed like a better idea to drive up at night instead of waiting until the morning and fighting the traffic and road conditions after an overnight storm. Plus, we wanted to get up there to enjoy the Vail Village night life. My friend Andrew was living there and working for the resort. We had a free place to stay, free lift tickets waiting for us and apparently a powder day ahead. We like free and we like powder.
"Yep, we'll be ok. We'd rather drive up tonight at the beginning of the storm than get up at 5am and fight traffic tomorrow," we told the group. It was apparent that they thought that we were crazy. But we were also young(er), single and anxious to leave a boring parent party and get up the hill where fun and beer were awaiting us. With open arms.
Kermit and I had been friends for nearly a decade. We met while working as camp counselors for multiple summers in Minnesota. Well, Kermit worked there for multiple summers. I worked there for multiple, multiple, multiple summers. As did my core group of friends, all degenerates whom I met up there. All of our growth and maturity stunted by years of basing our lives on mid-May through late August. The months of September through April were known as the "off-season" (or "college," until our respective schools finally forced us to graduate and leave. Do you know how difficult it is to stretch a physical education degree out to six and a half years?). I was finally on the "right track" and found a teaching career when I was offered a job in Florida after my final summer in Minnesota, which was 1998. I spent three years living and working as a teacher in Florida. First in Bradenton, then Port St. Lucie and finally in Orlando. OK, so the second year was spent teaching golf at Club Med, which was technically a camp for adults. But I was 31 years old and thought that perhaps I should actually get back to a career that didn't involve a job description that emphasized being in the bar by 8pm each night. Not that teaching doesn't require frequent trips to the bar, though. (Yes, the Club Med job description does include being in the bar by 8pm. People have actually been written up for not being there).
So, in August of 2000, I took a teaching job in Orlando. I was a social studies and physical education teacher at a grades 7-12 school called Orlando Lutheran Academy. I would teach middle school American history, 9th grade geography and senior government and economics as well as a couple of PE classes. I would also be the varsity golf coach, co-head coach for the varsity girl’s basketball team and the JV baseball coach. It was a fun year living in the shadow of Disney. I made lots of new friends, enjoyed the school and the students and really liked Orlando. Unfortunately, being a private school, it needed private funding and more students. I think the graduating class was something like twenty students. It had been in existence since the 70's but had fallen on hard times. As the school year wound down, and after multiple recruiting open houses and advertising, it was apparent that cuts were going to be made. Since I was the low teacher on the pole and the last one hired, I was on the chopping block. Unless there was a sudden windfall of money or new students I would be looking for work once again.
Sometime late in the school year, a Club Med buddy (more degenerates) called me to tell me that he had taken a job at a summer camp in Maine. He knew my camp background and mentioned me to the management of the camp. At the time I wasn't interested. I had already officially announced my retirement from "camp." I spent seven summers in Minnesota that pretty much changed my life. I had my group of camp friends and didn't think that I wanted to start over somewhere else. And besides, with my impending unemployment, I didn't think that it would be a good idea to head up to Maine without a plan of what I would be doing come September. Camp work doesn't exactly pay the bills. In fact, camp work doesn't pay any bills, other than bar tabs and road trips on days off. Anything left over at the end pays for getting home, and sometimes that was dicey at best. I'd be nearly 32 at the end of the summer and the responsible thing to do would be to stay in Orlando and focus on finding my next teaching job. But in keeping with the multitude of irresponsible decisions that I made throughout my 20's, the obvious choice would be to go to Maine and figure it out later. Which is what I did. The school year ended and there were no miracles for the Lutherans. I was in a group of five or six other teachers who were let go. I took the job in Maine for the summer, suckered another Club Med friend to go up with me and in late May of 2001, we started our road trip onward towards my next chapter of life.
Prior to leaving Orlando, I sent out about 100 resumes to various schools. It was much more difficult during those days prior to most everything being online. I spent countless hours jamming up the fax machine in the administrative office at school. But instead of focusing on staying in Orlando, I decided that it was time to make a serious push to move to Colorado. I had visited Kermit multiple times since he moved there in 1995 after his own camp career had ended. I did like Orlando and canvassed the area with my resume, but moving to Colorado had always been in the back of my mind. In fact, I had actually been hired to work at a ski resort in Winter Park after the summer of 1998. I made it as far as Denver and as close as two days prior to my start date when I got the call from Bradenton Academy that their physical education teacher had quit suddenly. Two of my camp friends were teachers there and I had applied to the school during the summer to no avail. It was late September of 1998 and instead of completing the trip to Winter Park and staying in Colorado, I accepted the job while at a pay phone at a 7-Eleven on Colfax Avenue in Denver. I turned around a few days later, unpacked my winter clothes, repacked my summer stuff and headed to Florida. So now, with an open slate and nothing tying me to Orlando other than my apartment, I sent about half of those 100 resumes to schools in the Denver area.
On day two or three of our road trip to Maine, in New York City visiting a friend, I checked my messages back at my apartment. On the machine was a voicemail from a school in Denver who was interested in speaking with me about a job. I called them back and explained my situation. They wanted me to come out for an interview but understood that I was to start my summer gig in just a few days. Upon arrival at the camp in Maine, a phone interview was set up and just a few days into my "new" camp career, I was offered the job in Denver. I would be moving to Colorado at the end of the summer! I immediately called Kermit, who would find us housing together, and then spent a wonderful summer making new camp memories and friends. I had to leave a week or so early to fly back to Orlando, pack up my apartment and drive my limited belongings across the country to once again arrive in Colorado with a job in hand. This time I would stay.
My U-Haul and I pulled into Denver on a Friday night and I immediately knew that I had made the right decision. Our new home was in the shadows of downtown and the front range mountains. I was in Colorado with one of my best friends and felt like I had finally found the place where I was supposed to be. The three years in Florida always felt like an accident. The death of my father ended my first teaching job early as I was needed back at home in Missouri to help my mother with the transition of being alone after 35 years of marriage. The detour to Club Med was just that, a detour. And although I would have loved to have continued teaching at Orlando Lutheran Academy, it wasn't in the cards. I was finally Colorado resident, albeit three years late.
The beginning at my new school, which was a three minute commute from my house, was lackluster. It was another private Lutheran school, but a big departure from my experience in Orlando. It was a pre-kindergarten through 7th grade school and I'd be the 5th/6th grade classroom teacher as well as the Athletic Director. The teaching staff was opposite from what I was accustomed. My other two years of classroom teaching featured larger groups of young staff. We bonded quickly and went out together often. As I met my new colleagues, it was apparent that this year would be different. The school was filled with older teachers, most of whom where devout Christians. And there wasn't a principal. In fact, there had been something like four different principals in the previous four years and they had not sought out a new one for this school year. The school board decided to administrate the operations themselves and appoint the kindergarten teacher to act as principal for the day to day necessities. But as I began teaching, I loved the kids and had always wanted to teach younger students in a classroom instead of just on the gym floor.
The school board president was a challenge from the onset. He was a businessman who had zero teaching or school experience outside of his daughter being in a school. In my class, in fact. Actually, I had something like six children of school board members in my class. Whereas I was really enjoying my teaching experience, the administration of the school was a continual grind. I was constantly monitored from the kindergarten teacher whose only administrative experience was teaching kindergarten. She had no idea what happened upstairs with kids who could tie their own shoes and color inside the lines. And Jerry, the school board president, was a grade A douche bag. A born again Christian who was arrogant and always seemed to be speaking from a pulpit, even when he was sitting. We did not get off to a good start. He had his own version of how teachers should teach, which was like me telling him that I had my own version of how accountants should do math.
A little over a month into the school year, I was in the administrative office making some copies of a test that I was going to give that day. It was just after 7am and the secretary got a call that I overheard. Something had happened in New York and her husband was calling to tell her about it. I called home and my buddy Will, another degenerate who was living on our couch temporarily, answered the phone. I told him to turn on the TV and see what was going on. He put down the phone, turned on the TV and then said something like, "one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York is falling down." It was September 11, 2001, and the school day in Denver was just beginning. The middle school teacher, who shared the upstairs with me, and I went up and turned on the TV in her room as the kids started arriving. We all sat and watched as the morning unfolded. The 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students and teachers who came and went watched and wondered what was happening and what it meant. We tried to interject and inform the students about the gravity of what was occurring. It was around 9:30am when Jerry called upstairs to tell me to turn off the televisions. He demanded that the school day continue as normal. I refused. I told him that this was important for the kids to see and that it was history unfolding in front of our eyes. He threatened to come down to the school and take the TV away. He was adamant that the day go on as scheduled. After several minutes of terse discussion, I told him that we would return to our classroom and keep tabs on what was going on outside of our school windows. Parents came throughout the morning to pick up their kids. I cancelled all after school sports games and practices. For those remaining, nothing other than the events of the day were discussed. When Jerry finally did make it to school, he was very angry and we exchanged less than friendly words again. This was our relationship. He demanded control and I pushed back. Every time. Unfortunately for Jerry, most of the rest of the parents of the kids in my class, including the other school board members, really liked me, as did my students. Jerry wanted teachers to simply teach the subjects and not to make learning fun in any way. And that pretty much is the opposite of how I teach. It was going to be a long school year.
As the semester wore on, it was more of the same. Day to day teaching was great. We had some fun, the kids were learning and enjoying their experience. In conjunction with a bunch of parents, we held a flag football game with the older kids. I was invited out on several occasions by parents to go to Rockies baseball games, watch football games out at local bars as well as several other social engagements. On many levels it was shaping up to be my most fulfilling year of teaching. But the specter of Jerry as well as his kindergarten teacher principal minion was always by my side, looking over my shoulder and interjecting their 1800's one room schoolhouse view of education in America. Finally the semester ended and a much-needed two week break was upon us. Just after the holidays were over and the second semester was just a few days away, I was invited to a dinner party at the home of one of my kid's parents. Other parents and school board members would be there to host Kermit and me for a fun, social evening. We had a nice dinner, a couple of drinks and then announced that with the impending snow storm, it made more sense for us to drive up to Vail that night instead of waiting until the morning. In retrospect, that may have been the plan all along, but for whatever reason, we waited until later into the party to announce this. Sometime after eight o'clock we headed out into the flurries and began our two hour drive to Vail to my friend Andrew's place.
Andrew was a friend that I had met the previous summer up at camp in Maine. He moved to Colorado to work for the resort, ski and drink beer. He had been bugging me for awhile to come up but the snow hadn't really kicked in until mid-December that year. We had made the plans to go up weeks previous and had originally thought we'd be up there much earlier, but the dinner party came up and I felt like it was something that I should do. That night, the roads heading up I-70 weren't that bad. We made it to his apartment sometime around 10:30pm and immediately went out to the "Village," where most of Vail's nightlife happens. The next day of skiing was epic and at the conclusion, Kermit and I decided to wait a few hours at Andrew's to let the traffic clear out a little. Ski traffic on weekend afternoons coming down from the mountains is insane. 20 miles can take two hours. 100 miles can take six hours. So instead of sitting in our car moving at five feet start and stops, we waited it out with a pizza and then finally left to go back home. It was Saturday night and the next day would be our last day before going back to work. Kermit was also a teacher and we decided on the way back down not to go out that night so we could be fresh on Sunday as we prepared for the second semester. We stopped somewhere to get some food, rented a movie and spent a rare Saturday night at home. There is a very good chance that we didn't go outside at all the next day as the NFL playoffs were on. We had two couches and both stayed occupied for the duration of the day before we went off to bed with our alarms set for the first time in over two weeks. Break was over and regular life was about to resume.
No comments:
Post a Comment