Graf #2

“If I have a stroke, you fools will be dancing all over my corpse, I just know it!” Mr. Hooper yells.

When Mr. Hooper yells and opens his mouth to exhale syllables, spittle flies out. If he allows you to violate his personal space long enough, you can smell his breath. Always of stale cigarettes, old coffee and an accumulated bitterness. Before every class, perhaps due to an encroaching senility, he begins his lecture by accusing all of us that we're conspiring to kill him.

“You little pukes are gonna put a microwave in this classroom one day and kill me, I just know it!” He yells. “You all know I had a pacemaker put in last year and you'd like nothing better than for it to just..... stop!” He sputters out the last word, a chugging engine desperately trying not to stall.

Yes, we all know. He is so thin and skeletal the roundness of his pacemaker bulges beneath his clavicle, on the left side. Sometimes, subconsciously, he will grace his dried, crooked hands across it.
I'm sitting in the back, with my head shoved in a tattered copy of The Bell Jar, snickering and looking around the room to find an unoccupied outlet. There are none.

I mention this to him and he scoffs, "Well, I suppose I won't be dying today. You little shits. Now open your book to page 178. And hurry. I could be dead before the end of this class."

Mr. Hooper has retired four times. Each June he vows never to come back, that he's done teaching English and now his only want is to read Keats by the fire. I have the distinct feeling he dreams of dying in his sleep after reading A Thing of Beauty.

Yet, every fall, Mr. Hooper returns. It's expected now. They've given up attempting to fill his spot when he threatens to retire again. They don't waste the ad money. There seems to be a silent agreement that he's simply too old for it to be worth disputing. The consensus being that pretty soon he'll retire from life altogether and not even grumpy, irate Mr. Hooper will work up the energy to roll out of his grave come fall.

He's not the worst teacher, by any means. He quite fascinating, actually, even though some of the less appreciative students would rather eat glass for lunch than write another essay on an e. e. cummings' line, such as his favorite "...for whenever men are right they are not young..." I suppose that would mean Mr. Hooper is very, very old.

He's an eccentric soul and I love him. He is the pear I bite into and find I just swallowed half a worm as well, and the taste is intriguingly acceptable. He terrifies and amuses simultaneously. Like good writing. One day soon Mr. Hooper will drive his baby shit colored vehicle away from the school with every intention of coming back to harass his next crop. He will not return and I will read A Thing of Beauty at his grave come fall.