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Mr. Garcia had a voice like a bell curve. He’d start off soft, mumbling until the words fell louder into some semblance of what he had planned, and then he’d leave the thought with just a bare amount of audible resonance so that it seemed he had stepped in and then out of the mist that shrouded the topics he taught. He taught World History for freshmen, and he was a better teacher than I wanted to admit any of my teachers that year were. I managed to stay willfully disengaged until we reached the section in our course on the Roman Empire. He would joyfully arrange the scandals that reached us, paraphrased from Suetonius and like, so that we could almost hear them taking place modernly, announced with the masked joy even the stodgiest of news anchors has when breaking a truly juicy story with horrible implications for all involved.
Discussing Nero and Caligula, the latter’s nickname “Little Boots” was explained to us as an endearing one, like that given to a gang member, that was designated to him by military officers who enjoyed watching him as a child walking around in the full military garb and affect of a veteran soldier. Mr. Garcia, in these lectures, for the first time, appeared to me a bridge between the dramatic world of the teenagers in his class and the adult world, if it was filled with stories like that of Rome, which at times seemed so teenaged. I approached him after class, driven to do so without much thought, and asked, “How did people not kill these guys?” He laughed and said to me, “Well, first of all, they did. And second, it’s easy to laugh now, but would you have laughed to his face while he was at the height of his power? And in fairness to Nero, he may have fiddled while Rome was burning, but Rome was also burning while he fiddled.” He said it as if I understood, though I did not. My questions though, were more frequent thereafter. Through this relationship, he convinced me to go out for the wrestling team, which he coached.
The wrestling team at our school, like at many public, inner-city schools, was far less a competitive sports team, and more a club to keep kids out of trouble. Especially with wrestling, the kids were allowed a tough veneer and a socially sanctioned gang, that gave them some feeling of toughness over the individual members of the more conventional gangs that also frequented the hallways of the school. Mr. Garcia knew this, was friendly with us, and made us feel comfortable talking to the teachers and others in our lives who we had before distrusted as alien, with interests equally alien. We saw how he was often in the center of discussions between teachers, how he would stretch his outreached hand to one side, and then reach out his stretched hand to the other in turn. If he was enough like us and enough like them, by analogy we could be too.
He achieved his comfort with us largely in the way he openly joked with us about life and sex, and his past of petty crimes and drugs before he turned to wrestling and teaching. He introduced us to his mother, who, before our matches, gave us prayer candles with elaborate instructions and absurdly specific patron saints. He had a crudely inked tattoo of Jesus on the cross on his back, where Jesus seemed inappropriately muscular. Even then, before I had ever heard the word theology, the Jesus on his back seemed the fun Jesus more than the Jesus of well-dressed and stern faced white politicians. The Jesus who high-fived death row inmates on their way out, the winking queer and beaten Jesus.
The wrestling room itself, an abandoned basketball gym, had no door on its hinges and seemed to glow light at us as we passed it during the school day on our way to class or lunch. The intensity of the practices had the effect of fading our day before and after we entered that room. For his own part, Coach was one of those kids who had achieved success for a school with no precedent of success. He had taken fifth in the state championships when he wrestled and had been that rare kid who proved the exception to the rule that it is infrastructure and the technical instruction resources provides that wins championships. The type of story they write up in the paper and coaches from the better schools read with some amusement, and some chagrin.
While wrestling, he moved in a way that infuriated those of us whom he allowed to think for a moment might be able to overtake him. He was self-possessed in every exercise and move. He would pull a sudden grace out of a lazy or uninspired entry, and every motion seemed trim and planned. He pulled us in, however, to a similar grace, we learned the moves by being danced through them. He would always say, “When you get the move, the move gets you. Your best matches, while you’re actually wrestling, won’t even feel like yours, they’ll just be something that happened to you.” A lot of kids didn’t last long on the team. For a generation raised on cartoons and video games where every step is a prelude and confirmation of ultimate supremacy and rescued princesses, losing came hard to a lot of my friends. Around seven of us took some joy in even the losses though, and stayed.
By my senior year, he gave us a philosophy as a team. “How long do you have to win for it to count”, he would ask us. “One second. You have to pin them for one second. All of this is getting there.” My senior year was also when the rumors started about him. I had for my part seen him on my way to practice once hunched over something, a spark and a cough, and a dirt caked man standing sentry. He shyed away and waved me on. I disengaged briefly and remembered him as first day of class Mr. Garcia, and not my coach.
That year I wrestled for entry into the state tournament, though I knew that I would not place there as coach had. In my final match of the entry tournament, for first place and the one qualifying spot for the state tournament, I faced a much better wrestler. The first round I started slow, and my opponent seemed to wrestle with as sudden recall as a person states their home address. Where I stepped for balance he had already undermined me, he had already pulled me where I thought I was stepping. The crowd watched the match with a familiar ambivalence – excitement over seeing a true talent, and disinterest in a foregone conclusion. During a lull in the action over a clock malfunction, my coach called me to him before the start of the second round. “You can’t let this get to the third round. I’m not going to bullshit you about wrestling the whole match, you just need that one second. Go for that one move.” I have no doubt in my mind that in the third round I would’ve been beaten decisively, but the match didn’t last that long. I caught my one move and there was no before or after, what I did counted, went in the books and he took me to his house that night and his mom made us dinner.
Later that year, after the season, Mr. Garcia was fired. There were informal allegations that he had inappropriately touched a boy in one of his classes, and there were rumors of drug use. We didn’t rally around him as a team really. He had introduced me and a few other kids on the team to other teachers who now took interest in our capabilities in the way he had. As teenagers we could hardly be expected to give that up.
Years later, I was walking down streets near my old school, but away from the campus, in the part of town where the sidewalks are stained with strange untraceable stains shaped like countries antiquity has not preserved. He was walking shirtless and I only recognized him from his tattoo. Jesus, though faded, was still inappropriately muscular. Our eyes met and I made an effort to show that I avoided eye contact. “Little Boots!” he mumbled into a roar. He approached me in segments and sputtered half-words with unfamiliar ritual like a possessed exorcist, and I waited as he steadied himself on a parking meter. Barely coherent, he asked me, “Do you think it’s possible to ask one question so well that the answer is everything? Or would you have to know everything to even ask that question?” I realized then that he had been a bridge not between childhood and adulthood, but between capability and bewilderment, between moments of recognition and obscurity in history.
I stood for a moment, his hand rested on my shoulder and my leg braced and steadying his erratically bending knee and ankle. I said, “If you could ask a question like that, it could happen in one second, and one second would be enough.” I said I had to go, and I did, and the sound of him slurring out “I taught him” faded as he walked into a nearby alley that held the noise in diminishing echoes like a room with no door on its hinges. I looked back and it seemed to glow darkness. When I tell this story to my friends now, they tell me it is sad, as if they would laugh right in Nero’s face.
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