A character sketch


Mr David preferred the company of boys.

Pushing thirty-five, Mr David, along with his wife, lived without children. A high-school history teacher, he walks to an all-boys school a few blocks away from his home. His wife, Estelle, could not be bothered anytime except during the morning when she performed the only spousely duty he liked: spreading peanut butter on his toast and pouring him his glass of pulpy orange juice (the only kind he liked) or chocolate milk, which he preferred when he wakes up grouchy. He would have no coffee even if he nods his way through the morning paper's comics. Mr. David is a man of strange tastes.

After the customary silent breakfast, Estelle would drive to her work and he would see none of her until he gets home late and sleeps beside her curled figure in the bed. In recent years, she had been going home later than usual and her forced smiles began to stiffen and stiffen painfully until she eventually gave up all attempts at smiling.

In all honesty, Mr David didn't care and his wife knew as much that she only allowed herself one admittedly futile attempt at an argument. One night, she didn't go home and appeared only in time for breakfast. She shouted that she's having an affair with her boss, that she shouldn't have given in to her fear of becoming an old maid, and that she would rather be that than be married to an immature, selfish bastard who cared nothing for her.

Mr David didn't say a word but walked to school without breakfast. Taming a grumbling stomach, he treated himself to a hotdog sandwich in the canteen. The following day, his wife was on her usual seat by the dining table and on his plate was a toast with peanut butter spread and on his glass was pulpy orange juice. Without word, they continued as they had for years.

Mr. David comes to life when he walks into the all-boys school where he worked. He was not a particularly good teacher, and most certainly not an inspiring one. Students graduated from his class with a mediocre knowledge of Asian history and with mixed impressions of him. He was the sort of teacher students figured to be lazy because he would rather have the students report about the lesson than him lecturing up front. And while a few students reported in front of class, he would often sit at the back of the classroom and not pay attention. Sometimes, he would laugh loudly at the antics of a few mischievous boys who were likewise oblivious to the influence of the Chinese dynasties to the silk trade which the reporter, feeling painfully ignored, tried to elaborate.

But when he would lecture in class, Mr David is a complete charmer. He was the sort of man who draws your eye and commands it to follow him and his engaging hand movements. Jokes, often green, were cracked as often as possible. And the class, goody-goody or no, would howl with laughter so loud that it often disrupted the neighboring class. Bitch, asshole, fuck, faggot were normal vocabulary for his class and they were often met by approving guffaws on the part of the students. The sixteen-year old boys believed Mr David was one of them, and for all his faults he was forgiven. It's impossible to fail the class if you were game.

Mr. David believed that his life starts every four in the afternoon when the dismissal bell had rung and released the jittering, restless teenagers to movement. Dismissal is the time of reckoning. What a boy does after dismissal defines a boy. Mama's boys would have their drivers pick them up from school, jocks would head to the gym or the field where they'd promptly begin training and no one bothers to find where losers hang out.

There's no regularity in the activities of the cool boys. Sometimes, they'd swagger to a store next to an all-girls school. The baddest boy is always the one who could get the girl off her skirt the fastest. Often, they'd play some computer game until dinner and from then onwards they'd smoke and drink until someone's irate mother would call him to please go the fuck home.

Mr David is one of the cool boys.

The unwritten rule that all cool boys follow: all of them sit at the back of the class. Since they hardly listen to any lectures, they cannot but form friendships over their shared disdain for school. As was mentioned earlier, Mr David likes to sit at the back of class whenever he
chooses to ignore group reportings. As such, he'd become some sort of patron faculty for delinquent boys.

After dismissal, he saunters to the school gate where all the cool boys are having a smoke. Another shitty day deserves a stick or two. He'd light a stick, mutter some derogatory remark about some asshole in the faculty lounge. Boys would guffaw in their newly deepened voices. Someone would say, "Tara, pare, dun tayo sa tindahan," when he really meant was that he wanted to pick some girls up and that he's horny.

Mr David didn't really have interest in girls as much as he feigned. It was cool to have a smoke in one hand, and an arm wrapped around a girl. On the part of the girls, Mr David didn't look too old or too bad. It was a matter of reputation that they were dating an older man. It was a mutually symbiotic relationship that Mr David drops as soon as the boys wants to go out drinking and the girl starts to whine that she needs attention.

The boys felt they were cooler now that a teacher was hanging out with them. And whenever they call him by his first name, or when they swear at him jokingly, they feel a rush of excitement and indolence. They were saying "Fuck you," to a teacher.
Outside the classroom, Mr David likes to say, that they're the same and be believes it with all his heart. They even call him by his first name, he thinks with a smile.