Teacher told stories, the kind of stories teachers weren’t supposed to tell, the kinds of stories in which Teacher was the star. In these stories, Teacher wore leather jackets covered in cigar burns and dropped acid in the back of a car his friend Vinny claimed was stolen. Probably not; but who knows? One could never be sure with Vinny.
“Vinny fancied himself something of an artist,” Teacher said one day, the sentence punctuated with a laugh of cold scorn. “We used to call him Vinny Van Gogh. But he wasn’t an artist; he was a thief. And I don’t mean the car. I am talking art. I’m talking plagiarism. I’m talking fraud.”
As he spoke, Teacher paced the room. I was reminded of jaguar I once saw in a zoo. The cat’s cage was no more than a narrow glass box with one dead tree and one concrete rock. I could tell the cat wanted to be running. Wanted to be fucking. Wanted to be killing. But there wasn’t anyone to fuck and there wasn’t anyone to kill and, no, there wasn’t even anywhere to run. So all the cat could do was pace, which it did, methodically and resolutely. Its muscles stirred beneath its pelt, and it looked like the way water ripples when a fish goes by just below the surface.
Teacher moved in just the same way.
A murderous grace.
“Vinny might have been shit as an artist,” Teacher went on, “But he sure did have an eye for snagging art that would make mad money. The boy was good. You know that old saying? The one that goes: whatever you are, be a good one? Well Vinny must have heard that and taken it to heart. Because he was a damn good thief. A good student, too. Smart as a whip. Leagues smarter than any of you. Me, too; don’t think this is some kind of superiority gig. The boy was brilliant, I’m telling you. We’re talking child prodigy all grown up and bitter to the bone. We’re talking serious potential. The kind of brains that make people talk about how you always have a choice, if you want to use your power for good, or if you want to use it for evil.
“Vinny had a choice: save the world or burn it down? But the boy was too doped up most of the time to make up his mind. So in the meantime he just partook in lesser evils. He did his art-thief-thing and he did his junkie-thing. And he talked our heads off. You think I like to hear myself speak? You haven’t heard anything till you’ve heard Vinny.”
Teacher paused. “It’s a little cold in here, isn’t it?”
No one seemed to be listening.
Teacher pulled a pack of kamel reds from his pocket and asked, “Do you mind?”
Franscesca, a bird-boned girl with a ghastly overbite who sat in the front row and took notes on graph paper, made a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Teacher, ignoring her, lit a cigarette, then resumed pacing.
“Now this is important,” Teacher said. “So listen close. In fact, I’m going to put this on the test, just to give you incentive. Good. Now where was I?”
“Vinny Van Gogh,” I prompted.
His eyes flashed briefly into mine.
