Dr. Jack

In past columns, I've never attacked administrators or central office personnel, the usual whipping boys and girls for bitter educators like me. For one thing, it's too easy to keep hammering teachers, and for another, I actually respect the vast majority of the people who have the cantaloupe-sized balls it takes to want to be one of the higher ups in education. Let me tell you about one central office bigwig who played a very influential role in my life. This story, told a bit in reverse, will show you what some of education's best and brightest are made of.

Dr. John Garrison is the Director of Some Important Section of an Entire Big City School District somewhere east of Chicago and west of the Atlantic. He is handsomely paid and saddled with great responsibility. He dresses in finely fitted suits, wears expensive Italian dress shoes, belongs to a country club and lives in a house that would be the envy of the most obscenely rich and tacky professional athletes. (Dr. Garrison's wife is well paid and comes from serious money, hence the opulent lifestyle.)

I knew Dr. Garrison when I was in grad school. He served the dual role of teacher and mentor. I found him to be brilliant, and this was before he told me that the education department had no worries about me and that they knew I was going to be a fine teacher. He still felt this way even after the Chernobyl-like disaster that was my student teaching experience. He was the university official in charge of overseeing my (if I may use this word) "teaching," where I managed to do every single thing wrong on a daily basis. He remained continually upbeat and encouraging, and he assured me that my 30 daily fuck-ups were all just part of a brutal learning experience.

In the college classes he taught, he was as hardworking a teacher as I ever had. His preparation and knowledge were incredible. No matter what assignment was turned in, I could always count on Dr. Garrison not only to read it, but to provide insightful, enlightening, and useful comments throughout the paper, comments that were always written in pencil and in letters the size of very small ants. They weren't just the usual bullshit "good job" or "good point" variety. They showed that he read my work, then critiqued it and offered other things to think about. I had no better education teacher.

Now he has a big position in a highly regarded big city school district, and from what I've heard he does his usual stellar job, working long hours and pleasing those over and beneath him.

But I knew Dr. John Garrison not only before he got his current position but also before he started teaching college education classes. He was teaching me and encouraging and enlightening me back then, as well.

When I graduated from high school, I got a job at a local restaurant near my house. "Jack" Garrison worked there already. I was still 17, and he was in his mid-20s. He had two jobs. One was working at this restaurant as a cook/register person/shift supervisor. The other was coaching at a city school sports powerhouse. He had been an individual champion at this sport in high school and college, so he was doing a bang-up job of coaching the girls' team. I say "bang-up" because he was banging a different athlete every season. Why this was allowed I do not know, but he was doing it and loving it. (One of those athletes later became his wife.) He looked, dressed and acted just like a surfer-dude beach bum, but he was living in a city hundreds of miles from the nearest beach. He had the requisite beat-up, multi-colored van that was fitted with some sweet bedding in the back. Every time he pulled up I half expected Jeff Spicoli to come rolling out. (Sorry to date myself with that Fast Times at Rigdemont High reference.) Along with some of his athletes, many of the restaurant's waitresses and busgirls got to experience the downy softness of Jack's mobile love nest.

When I walked in for my first day of work, Jack immediately began to educate me. Oh, sure, he taught me how to work there, but he taught me so much more. I think his first words to me were, "Nice shoes. Does your grandfather know you're wearing his Sunday best?" Over the next few months, I would learn the ins and outs of fucking virgins, fucking heavy girls, fucking older women, rolling joints with just the right tightness, how to wait in line all night for concert tickets and how to work with a skull-splitting hangover.

Since Jack sampled many different kinds of drugs and all types of alcohol, he was an expert in the last item. Hell, he was an expert in most things, from my young and naive perspective. I saw him take out a decent looking waitress in her late teens a few times, and he wore her out, from what she told me later (long after Jack moved on). When he was finished with her, he took the girl's mom, who also worked at the restaurant, to an NFL game, then took her home and banged her silly, too. I remember his response when I asked him if really banged old Mary Ellen. "Dude, older women know what they're doing and they don't play games with your head."

Despite my young age, the manager decided that I was a good candidate to become a shift supervisor, so he put Jack in charge of showing me the ropes in terms of running the register, doing the closing books and generally everything there was to know about running the show when an official manager was not on the premises. Jack was an outstanding teacher, patient and thorough and comprehensive in his efforts. For instance, he showed me how he slyly poured himself beers all night, where he hid them and how he managed to drink them undetected. He told me at what hour he stopped drinking beer and switched to coffee so that he would have a clearer mind when it was time to do the books and make sure the money came out right.

Ah, the money. This was where Jack's greatest lesson came into play. I remember asking him what happens when, at the end of the night, the money doesn't add up and you are "short." He said there was a foolproof way to ensure that this never happened. It was called "bagging" checks, and the summer I spent doing this remains one the most shameful and prideful periods of my life.

Jack showed me how, when the opportunity arose, he would refrain from entering a take-out order into the register, and when a customer paid for said order, he would calculate the cost and tax in his head, charge the customer, issue change, and put the money in the drawer. This was in the days before people paid for everything from cars to whores with their Visas, so you could almost always count on cash. The original purpose of this practice was to ensure that you'd have a little extra cash on hand at the end up the night to keep the books balanced. I said I understood and continued working until I had an epiphany. I went back to Jack, who, since it was still only 8:00 or so, was still drinking beer, and I asked him, "Couldn't you do this a lot and make yourself some extra money each night?" I've never seen such a grin. He pulled me aside and assured me that that was exactly what he did every night, which is why he still worked there.

Instead of giving me good elder advice like, "But this isn't for you - you can get in serious trouble!" or "It's too difficult and stressful and just plain wrong, and you're better than that," he gave me just three words of advice for those nights when I was the shift supervisor: "Dooooon't getttttt greedy." He said that if I did it too much, then the stores costs of sales would be off, and the manager would start looking for reasons, and that would affect not only me but him, and he needed to keep the love-mobile gassed and ready for fucking. The key was to make $40-60 a night. Remember, this was 1981 dollars, so that was a lot. Hell, it would be a lot now.

After Jack quit the next spring to pursue his doctorate in education, (where he eventually became my teacher ... again) I spent the next summer skimming so much money from the joint that I never needed to cash a paycheck all summer. I had to stash the cash between my mattresses lest my mother find an unaccounted-for wad while putting away my clean socks. I let two other co-workers in on the deal, and the ensuing nights were legendary in our little world. We loved the adrenaline rush of doing this when a real manager was on duty, when it was nerve-wrackingly busy, when we were drunk, when it was hard to remember just how much of a profit was in the drawer, when we weren't sure if a suspicious customer was going to ask for an official receipt or ask the manager why we didn't ring up his order, when we knew we had to do a cash-drawer skim before a manager did a mid-evening cash check and found the extra $200 we intended to split up later.

We drank at work and bagged checks for months, but we never got caught. We had a good teacher. His name was Jack. He did drugs, drank all the time, fucked anything that didn't have a cock, and saw nothing wrong with stealing from a national restaurant chain. Now Jack is called Dr. John Garrison and works in a major city school district with a job title that includes both the words "budget" and "management." And you wonder why I don't rip administrators. They are the world's best educators. Because, like I said, we never caught.

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.