Bill the Salesman

In 1969 a guy I knew in college, a freshman football player named John, socked an antiwar demonstrator in the jaw, an act caught by a news photographer and displayed on front pages all over the country. That earned John free meals from many alumni who detested long-haired peaceniks. About a year later, John was smashing windows as a member of the most radical faction of the antiwar movement. Nobody bought him dinner for that. When he graduated, John took a job on the same campus police force with whom he'd been exchanging blows a couple of years earlier.

I remember saying to my roommate, "John's politics are inconsistent, aren't they?"
"Not at all," he replied. "John enjoys hitting things."

I have a student this quarter who reminds me of John. I'll call my student Bill. We've had 20 classes since the quarter began, and Bill has missed eleven of them. Only three of those absences were legitimate, which is to say he never showed up at school. Six times he was present, but didn't come to class. The other two times he was on in-school suspension -- for cutting classes. One of those days, he sneaked out of the guidance office, where he was serving the suspension, and came to class. That seems inconsistent until you realize that Bill just doesn't like to be where he's supposed to be.

When I told Bill I was assigning him a detention for every day he'd missed, he laughed at me. "You don't seriously believe I'm going to serve those, do you?" he asked.
I shrugged. "That's between you and the administration. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do when students cut class. I'm following the rules."

He looked incredulous. He also looked sick. He was pale, sweating profusely, and coughing frequently. I asked him if he wanted to go to the nurse, but he shook his head. A little later, when I looked over at him, he was asleep.

I think he's probably taking a lot of drugs. His pants fall off him, not because it¹s the fashion, but because there seems to be little flesh on his bones. I've asked administrators about him, and they roll their eyes. They say they're in communication with his family. I tried calling his parents early in the quarter, after he missed every day of the first week of class, but got their phone machine. I said I was worried about Billl and suggested we talk. There was no call back.

Bill's having problems in other classes, too. One of my English department colleagues has him in her Modern Literature class. Last week she was telling her class, which is reading Tim O'Brien's Vietnam war novel The Things They Carried, how Buddhist monks in Vietnam burned themselves to death to protest the war. "Bill started to cackle," she told me. "He thought that was hilarious."

Bill doesn't disrupt my class much, because he's rarely there. It comes at the end of the day. Once I asked him where he went when he cut my class, and he said, "I had more important things to do. I wouldn't expect you to understand."

He said it in a friendly way. He's told me I'm one of his favorite teachers. He's intelligent, even charming at times. I can imagine him being very successful in a job that involves talking to people, such as sales. Maybe that's what he's doing when he's cutting my class.