Lonely heart

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Sarah Miller on putting people into songs.

My eighth grade algebra teacher Mr. L was an extremely weird guy with thick yellow hair, an intense gaze, and a demeanor that swung between cryptic and expansive. He was also the tennis coach, and when he hit against you, it felt like he might break your racket.

This is a good enough novelistic description that says nothing about what Mr. L, who died a few years ago, was actually like. Also, playing tennis against anyone who is way better than you always feels this way.

The problem with trying to bring Mr. L to life is that he didn’t fit into any genre. I’ll try a different strategy, something that my friend and I developed together as teenagers.

A few years after our eighth grade Algebra I experience, when the Yes song “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was number one, I turned to my high school best friend, Martha, and said, “You know the part of this song (at 2:22) where it kind of goes ‘apeshit?’ Well, don’t you think Mr. L likes to put on his madras pants and his loafers with the gold bars and the green and red ribbons across the top, and listen to that song, and when that part comes he just lets his whole body go?”

“Holy shit,” Martha said. “Yes. Totally. That is when Mr. L is MOST HIMSELF.”

A sense of profound relaxation came over us. For years, we had been trying so hard to sum him up and we had finally done it: Mr. L loved that part of “Owner of A Lonely Heart.” He loved dancing to it in his favorite outfit. This was his essence.

Martha and I called what we did with Mr. L—imagining him listening to a song and always doing the same cartoonish thing while he listened—“putting people into songs.”

We put lots of people into songs.

We put my father, a school superintendent (of our school), into “It’s My Life” by Talk Talk. My father was the kind of person who you think is really buttoned up and then you think isn’t, and then you think is. He is not without a powerful sense of humor but in those times his life was often grim. “Oh Jeez. Yeah. Huh. Hm. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” he was always saying into the white phone in the kitchen. Whether insulted or praised, his response was a faint grimace, a weary nod, and an, “Ok. All right.”

We imagined my father fleeing his life of service to town and family in the wee hours of the night to drive back and forth between the second (Lee, Pittsfield) and third (Westfield, Northampton) exits on the Massachusetts Turnpike in his beige Toyota Camry, wailing “It’s my life/Don’t you forget/It’s my life/It never ends” out of the open windows as the snowmelt-scented air lifted and lowered the thin sweep of light brown hair across his high, furrowed brow.

Other people we “put into songs”: A guy three years older than us who had tried to kiss Martha at a high school dance when she was 14. She had run away from him at a full sprint. He, for us, lived inside Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” which he played on a banjo, while sitting alone on a rock in the middle of a very small pond—a pond version of a personal pizza. Our ninth and tenth grade science teachers, a married couple, strip-teased for each other inside the Heart song “Barracuda.” A guy one year above us, a born salesman (who started out petit bourgeoisie and proceeded to become much richer petit bourgeoisie) was forever descending one side of a double staircase in a Georgian mansion, in a light blue tuxedo, snapping his fingers to Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

I was terrible at algebra. Up until this cursed class, I’d had a hot-knife-through-butter relationship to school. The knife suddenly went cold. I cried every night.

We were all suffering, and Mr. L was patient with our confusion, though not with our laziness or inattention. He could turn nasty very fast. If people were talking when he was talking, he would explode, pouncing and shouting. I heard him call a kid on the tennis team a fucking idiot and I was like HOLY SHIT. In retrospect, it seems like a normal thing for a 46-year-old to say to a 13-year-old on a bad day in 1982, though I think these days this would be grounds for him being labeled “a bad person.” He’d calm down quickly but that almost made it worse. His solid body, in pastel Izod shirts, and his broad face, half covered in large glasses, carried a charge of menace.

I got a C the first quarter, then a D. I thought my life was over. I kept going after school and doing problem after problem. Mr. L never got mad after school. Sometimes there would be five or six of us there in tears. Mr. L would stay late. I wish now that I had paid better attention to his mannerisms and the things he said, or the way he taught. I know he was really into why things were the way they were in math. I remember thinking that this process should be sped up somehow, that we should be understanding it faster.

When you were not understanding, he stared at you with a secret smile. He thought it was funny how upset we all were about our suddenly bad grades. “So you don’t understand something! Isn’t that beautiful? I’m envious of you. I wish I could learn how to do algebra again!” He told us in September that we were going to hate algebra but that by March 1st we would be beating down his door to do more algebra, that we would all come to love it that much.

One day I found myself at the chalkboard after school actually kind of knowing what I was doing and a few days later, February 25th or March 4th or so, I got a 65 or a 71 on a test instead of a 14 or a 23.

“You see?” Mr. L said. “March 1! What did I tell you? Beating down the door to do algebra!”

Unlike Mr. L, most of my teachers were easy to describe. Here are a few of the important characters. Mr H: “He wore Dacron pants and barked ‘figure it out’ from behind the Berkshire Eagle sports section whenever we asked him a question.” Mrs B: “She had a thick North Shore accent roughened by cigarettes and cackled deep into her lungs when we whimpered over slicing into a pickled baby pig.” Mrs. V: “She was little and cute and sweet and smart and mostly in a good mood. But when she got mad, she would clasp her manicured hands over her narrow pelvis and tremble like a dashboard ornament.”

When you got something right or made a breakthrough, Mr L would fly around the room like an airplane. He would continue to do it as you moved through a problem. Mr. L and my parents were both 45 or so when I was in 8th grade. Mr. L and my father, who was his boss for many years, weathered some tense moments in their relationship. My father says he doesn’t remember this. My mother said he has just forgotten, I believe her. My mother, an English teacher at another school, was loyal to my father in all things but always respected Mr. L as “a wonderful educator.”

Mr. L helped me with math all through high school, even when I wasn’t in his class. One time, I was about to fail a test, and he was out sick, but he invited me to his house and he helped me in his dining room, in a bathrobe. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, maybe it was his back, maybe it was his mind, maybe he had Sick-of-kidsitis. His bathrobe, thick, white, and expensive, muted everything about him, like soundproofing in a music studio. In this state, he reminded me of a lamb that knew math.

In algebra the first lesson you learn is how you have to treat both sides of the equation the same way. The world, obviously, has no such laws. I have no idea if Mr. L would have appreciated such an observation or, if someone made it to him, he’d just pretend he didn’t hear it.

When my mother told me Mr. L died, I was on my way out somewhere and I had to sit down for a few minutes. I thought of him sitting there, forty years ago now, in his bathrobe with his giant glasses, his incredibly bizarre personality hiding behind them as he helped me.

The part of “Owner of a Lonely Heart” that Mr. L “liked to dance to” is not a bridge exactly. My friend Adam, a musician and fan of the band Yes, said if he were talking to his bandmates, he would call this jam at 2:22 “the freak out before the solo.”

The fact that it’s hard to name this part of the song, even though it’s clearly a departure from what’s preceded it, is very Mr. L, who, as I mentioned, defied explanation as a person. Mr. L was a more obscure, longer song from Yes, like, “To Be Over” or "Siberian Khatru" trapped in the “freak out before the solo” of a number one hit’s body. He didn’t know if he was prog rock or pop. This question must have haunted him.

If my friend Martha and I had known his loafers were Gucci horsebit loafers, (with the ribbon!) or what Gucci was, we would have been even more confused by Mr. L. No one in our high school wore anything designer/luxury. I think one girl had a Coach bag, but it was when she became a senior and got a job outside school where she worked more than she went to classes. Gucci was not a thing in our lives, though the sister of the girl who had a Coach bag told me a few years ago that the Smooth Operator guy had a Louis Vuitton wallet or keychain, but I never saw it.

I know now that Mr. L’s Gucci loafers were his way of telling the world he was right where he wanted to be, and I don’t know if that was true, but I hope he felt he convinced people. He convinced me.

The Dirt: There is no right life in the wrong song.

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