What Things Are Made Of

Don’ Like

42 Don’ Like The Arabs who invented Algebra can’t have known Miss Seitz would teach it, any more than Einstein knew he’d be the Father of Catastrophe. The Miss which prefaced her name proudly (would no man have her, or would she have no man?) made me think Mistake, Mischance, Miserable Misfit, Missing Link, Lord of Misrule. Only the fiends who stoked the furnace of eighth grade were glad to see her hunched at her desk, gutting papers with her bloody pen. X’s identity counted for nothing, next to perfect headings: student’s name, class name and period, her name, and the date in that order, starting exactly three lines from the top, margins one inch, paper creased in perfect thirds (no crooked ends, no refolding), or she would fix you in a basilisk stare, shove back your work, and hoarse as a reanimated corpse, croak, Don’ Like. What math we gained is gone now as Del Shannon’s “Runaway”—as Billy Tilly’s spit-shined shoes, and the blade Ray Montez applied to my throat, hissing, “Gimme all your cash, you little fruit”—gone as the mush-burgers Ms. Hairnet slapped down on our lunchroom trays—as Teddy Jones, falling between the granite blocks at Freeport Jetty, crawling back up, extending the cracked glass stump of his new Pfleuger rod, groaning, Don’ like. The words remain: an anthem as I near Miss Seitz’s age. 43 Hip-hop and bottles crashing next door after 9:00— the candidates and their campaigns— the way my clothes fit, and the barber cuts my “hair”— hot salad and cold soup served by a pretty waitress who thinks middle-aged manhood’s a dirty joke— Time’s scaly hand, Xing, in red, my dwindling . . . ...