Page 20 - Contrast1971Fall

But ight now Gary and Sidney are horsing around, as she would say, and
you want to get in on the fun. They're talking about Ada the Buffalo. You.
don't know her last name but she's four seats up from you. Sid says something
about knowing when she walks in even without seeing her and then you all
laugh and throw in side comments. Then Apple comes over behind the three of
you and joins in too. He is a real jive-ass nigger and you all dig the hell out of
just being with him because he exudes this carefreegoodnaturedness that n.ever
quite lets you at ease because you know you could never be his equal. He I~ so
cocksure that you cannot help liking him, so real that you have to admire hun,
evoking more emotion from you and Gary and Sid than you even do from each
other. And he is the only one who can put her down. She has this attitude when
talking to him that she might have used with a pubescent school boy if she
were a nun, and he feeds her trucks of shit right back. It is great. He is sort of a
folk-hero to all of you, if a group of twenty, meeting once a day for one hour in
the basement of a high school can have enough group awareness to create a
folk-hero. But he got the worst grades in the class. You guess if he hadn't, he'd
have lost a lot of that charm.

But she comes over now and breaks it up with, now Richard this is art
class, not a social hour, and we must work now, mustn't we? I can see Sidney is
having a hard time remembering where she is and why ... and blah blah blah.
Then Apple asks her if she has had her adenoids out, but she just clicks her
tongue and looks at him like she's hurt and says, Richard. Then he says some-
thing else that you can't quite hear and 'the shit hits the fan. She throws him out
and when she comes back into the room after yelling at him out in the hall, she
turns to Sid and says how it was all Sidney's fault and Sid just kind of shuts up
and sulks. And Gary almost throws his clay at her, but you stop him.

But you still don't know what you're gonna make, whether to do some-
thing easy or something hard, or whether to do anything at all. Gary says he
won't do anything anymore after the shit she did today and you wish you had
the courage to stop turning in work. But it doesn't matter: right now because
you can decide tomorrow. There are only about ten minutes left in class so the
three of you sort of skulk back to the sink to get wet paper towels to store your
clay in so it won't harden by tomorrow morning, and she sends you back
because she wants to break up you three troublemakers, but it makes you mad
that 'she sent you back because she didn't. even yell at you all day. She says
something about she hopes tomorrow, certain ones of us would either come to
work or not come at all. And then she stands there, with her feet firmly planted
and her arms crossed over her chest as she makes sure the desks were lined up
straight, etc.