Flick’s tongue

by David Benjamin

“Parents had nothing to do with school. Once you were out the door in the morning, your parents washed their hands of you. You became entirely the property of the school. St. Mary’s could do anything it wanted to me—hang me by my thumbs and tickle my feet—and Mom didn’t want to hear about it. The school had an authority that no grownup ever challenged because they had all been to school, too—not that long ago.”

—David Benjamin, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love

MADISON, Wis.—One of the memorable scenes in Bob Clark’s classic film, A Christmas Story—based on stories by the incomparable Jean Shepherd—is about Flick’s tongue. Dared by his classmates to lick an ice-cold flagpole, he ends up stuck there, bonded to the steel column while every kid forsakes him. The aftermath of Flick’s dilemma is a significant lesson in cultural evolution.

Once Miss Shields spots Flick through the window, the teacher summons the Police and Fire Departments and enlists the school nurse to treat the kid’s dermabraded tongue. No one, however, calls Flick’s parents. In the era of Jean Shepherd’s upbringing—and mine—school, for parents, was a black hole of consciousness. This is why I was bemused by a TikTok video in which a teacher, Miss Davis, had to explain to a mother why she confiscated the mobile phone belonging to the woman’s daughter.

This dialog reveals that the girl was talking to her mom, in class—and evidently asking for the solutions—during a math test. As most sane grownups would understand, Miss Davis had solved the problem by taking away the phone. Later, when the teacher was compelled—probably by her principal—to call the mother and explain her drastic action, mom invoked the predictable “How dare you!” outcry. To this she added the argument, peculiar to smothering parents, that the daughter needed her phone to call home in an “emergency.” Miss Davis, familiar with the girl’s addictive viewing habits, said, “Yes, emergencies do happen,” she said, “but a TikTok video is not an emergency.”

This prompted Mom to redouble her grievance and accuse Miss Davis of prying pruriently into the girl’s photo files. “Ma’am,” said Miss Davis, in a weary tone brimming with adulthood, “I don’t want to look at your daughter’s pictures.” At this point, Mom became abusive and threatened Miss Davis harshly enough that the teacher called school security for an escort to her car.

Miss Davis’ surreal conversation with that hypermaternal mother has become a motif. Parents everywhere, especially in America, have insinuated into the classroom an opioid in electronic form whose tiny, constantly active and seductive screen overwhelms the striato-thalamo-orbitofrontal circuits in a child’s developing brain. Dazzled by the onslaught of zombifying eye candy available on a smartphone, most kids are defenseless.

Just as significantly, the plague of mobile telephony has miraculously re-attached—although invisibly—the umbilical that was life-giving in the womb but, as a surveillance device, enfolds the child into a sort of fetal stupefaction. Kids who are “always on” can never get away, and might not be able to imagine how it feels to be out of sight, out of mind, out of touch … free.

Let’s reminisce.

I suppose, at, St. Mary’s School, there was a phone. I have no idea where it was. If it rang, no pupil ever heard it and no kid, in the history of St. Mary’s—at least until well after my attendance—ever made a call or, God forbid, received one. The possibility of a pupil in, say, Mrs. Ducklow’s fourth-grade classroom talking on the phone with a parent, during school, was slightly less fantastic than a Martian tripod erupting from the playground and swallowing a first-grader.

I guess that if a kid’s mother had been killed—better yet, both parents—in a fiery crash on Highway 12, someone might have put in a call to the (alleged) St. Mary’s phone. But the communication would stop there. The kid would not know about the call. Sister Terence would take the clueless kid out of class and dispense the horrible news. Indeed, more likely the fateful call would not have gone to the school (which, I emphasize might have had no phone at all), but to Father Mulligan in the church rectory.

I can easily picture the first responder to this hypothetical car crash (let’s call him Fireman Fred), after hosing down the wrecked vehicle and determining that the multiple corpses were irreparably deceased, looking at his wristwatch. He notes that it’s 11 a.m. and says, “Jeez, we’re gonna have to tell their kids about this. But we better wait ’til school gets out.”

Fireman Fred would hesitate because school was inviolate. It was every town’s East Berlin, where the Wall consisted of basilisks like Sister Mary Ann, my seventh-grade teacher, who ruled her domain with a steel-edged twelve-inch ruler that could slice fingers, with one lightning swipe, all the way to the bone. Fireman Fred had had teachers, or a principal, like Sister Mary Ann. We all did. He understood, from experience, that any class interruption—especially the disembodied effrontery of a phone summons—merely to announce the orphaning of a pupil whose last report card was an offense against the Holy Trinity, would send Sister Mary Ann into a rage that would melt her rosary and leave her traumatized pupils walking on eggs for weeks.

So, better to wait. After all, the parents would be just as dead at 3:30.

I understood. As long as I was in school, it mattered not whether my Mom and Dad were dead or alive. They ceased to exist when I stepped inside St. Mary’s Church for eight o’clock Mass. School was a hiding place, seven hours of escape from Mom’s meddling and muddling, from Dad’s absence and anger, even from the sniper war with my big sister Peg and kid brother Bill, who were incarcerated in other classrooms that might have been a thousand miles away.

Mom had attended St. Mary’s. But once she was out, she never looked back. When I was there, it was as foreign to her as Peru. She didn’t know that my seventh-grade teacher, Sister Mary Ann, existed. My day-to-day act in Sister Mary Ann’s class was a tightrope walk over a lion’s den. But the last thing I wanted—I could not imagine it—was to enlist my mother’s aid. If Mom had attempted, somehow, to help me cope with Sister Mary Ann, she would have been eaten alive, leaving me with a bigger Sister Mary Ann problem than before.

School posed myriad problems for me—sentence diagrams, the multiplication tables, bullies on the playground and the predatory malice of Sister Mary Ann. But the hermetic nature of school, cut off from all outside communication, made my problems mine alone and mine to either solve or suffer.

I was learning, through trial, error and the occasional onset of sheer idiocy—and without recourse to parent or Wikipedia—what Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance about the resilience and creativity of a kid left to his own devices:

“God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me … Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.”

School, before iPhones, might have been a solitary cross to bear up a lonely mountain, without motherly counsel or any other grownup supervision. But the cross was all mine to drag uphill, to dig its hole and plant it, and then climb up onto its swaying arms and provide myself a vantage point—unlike anyone else’s—on the life that lay in store.