Pleasing Mr. Conrad
My neck craned steep upwards allowing my near-sighted eyes to squint at the large sign above the doorway. I burped. An acrid taste filled my mouth, re-acquainting me with the scrambled eggs and tomato I had for breakfast that morning. I grabbed my stomach. It felt like a pit.
Looking around, I studied the other 13 year old faces around me for any signs of similar symptoms. To my surprise, I couldn’t find any. Instead, where I didn’t see complete indifference I saw jovial expressions exchanging easy laughs with other jovial expressions.
“How did these faces seem to know the other faces so well?” I puzzled.
The sign above read “Sands Junior Secondary School.” It was the first time I would pass under this sign and through the doors below it, but it wasn’t the last time I’d do so accompanied with a nauseous pit in my stomach.
I’d had dreams about this day — nightmares, really. Of entering the doors with confidence and purpose, only to quickly become lost while swarms of kids dwindled in number around me. Leaving me alone, afraid and embarrassed.
To avoid this becoming a reality, I made plans in advance over the short Summer months. I did some reconnaissance, gleaning as much as I could by peering through the narrow windows and blackness on the other side. I devised strategies, detailing exactly how I would wind through these halls and doors on the first day of school, hopefully finding my place within it.
At first, the planning seemed to pay off. With surprisingly little effort I located my locker and happily discovered that my “Home Room” was just around the corner from it. It all happened very fast — mere minutes from buzzer to buzzer — but there I was seated at my Home Room desk, escaping the crucial first test unscathed. I imagined some other kid less fortunate than I stranded out in the quiet hallway. His chin quivering and making sad, muted sounds to himself as he moved about aimlessly.
Not me this time, nope. I savored my small victory.
And from there, it seemed things only got better on the first day. My Home Room teacher — the person I would see first class of the day every day for the entire year — was Mr. Conrad. I heard a great deal about Mr. Conrad from my older brother who had attended the very same school for the past three years, leaving just as I was arriving.
Throughout the preceding year my brother would routinely entertain me with stories about “the cool teacher” who he anticipated would surely become my favorite. Mr. Conrad, I was assured, was just like “one of the kids.” He was friendly, easy to talk to, understanding and — above all — he was “really, really cool.”
I took my brother’s word as golden. After all, he himself was indisputably cool. In no small part due to being one of the cool teacher’s favorite students, I figured.
This connection between my cool brother and the cool teacher, however tenuous, was my in I thought — my first class ticket to cool in my first year of Junior High.
By this point, I knew that becoming cool was an important part of High School life. But I didn’t quite know what it amounted to, or how exactly I was supposed to get there. All I knew was that to be cool, you had to be accepted by the already cool. Generally speaking, these seemed to be the genetically gifted, charismatic and confident.
I could usually spot them, but didn’t totally understand how the underlying secret formula worked. I noticed that, in general, their appearance was less overtly flawed. Wearing noses that were in proportion with their faces, and proudly owning straight smiles they’d flash frequently and with confidence. They talked a lot, seeming to always have something to say.
None of these were true about me. But, I figured it just took a bit of time.
By this standard of measure Mr. Conrad must have been cool from the day he was born. He had a powerful jawline. One that, I imagined, teachers from the math department periodically made use of.
“Excuse me, Mr. Conrad, but it seems our protractors went missing and we need to draw perfect 90-degree angles. Mind if we borrowed your jaw for a moment?”
To go along with that jaw was an impossibly handsome face and a towering frame that somehow managed to avoid typical gawkishness as a side effect. Instead, everything held in perfect proportion — like a freak, genetic jackpot.
But he wasn’t just cool looking, he acted cool as well. He told jokes with pin-point timing, and elicited smiles with a simple nudge and a wink. He was, in short, the epitome of cool. Anyone could see that.
— — —
Mr. Conrad stood at the front of Home Room and read out names on his clipboard as we took our seats that first day. Normally, I would brace myself for the moment my name would be read out loud. I’m not sure why, as it would be a fleeting second of no particular significance to anyone other than myself. But this time, I felt confident, reassured. I was quite sure that when he read my name out loud he would realize I was the brother of one of his favorite past students.
He called out my name “Nikolic!”
“Here” I said.
He paused for a second…
“Are you John’s little brother?”
“uh… yeah.”
“Oh. Oh wow. You and him look nothing alike.”
He looked back down at his list. “How is John anyways?”
It was a curve ball. I wanted to say something bold. Something that amplified the moment to everyone in proximity, no doubt already in awe of me having a connection to the cool teacher. I wanted to say something like:
“Oh, you know… still rocking with his band!”
Good thing I didn’t say that. I got nervous, offering the faithful standby instead:
“He’s good.”
There was dead air for a moment, then he looked back down at his list.
“… Novotny… where’s Novotny?”
I looked around to get a sense of the aftermath. To my disappointment, it didn’t seem to have much of an effect. I expected someone nearby to lean in and say something like “hey, you know the cool teacher?” but nope, nothing.
“No problem” I thought. Seeds have been planted and all that’s needed is time before I could savor the fruits of cool.
— — —
In those early first few months of Junior High you could plainly see the awkward transition of moving from Elementary School to High School for most kids. Like little moths sprouting from their cocoons hoping, eventually, to turn into butterflies. Among these moths lingered a great deal of initial confusion as to who had the cool factor and how much, exactly, they possessed it.
In my own search of it, I fluttered from group to group.
Typically, the groups were of a single gender and defaulted to familiar Elementary School behavior at first. We played basketball at lunch time and walked aimlessly, eating our peanut butter and jam sandwiches our mom’s packed for us.
Then, slowly, things began to change in subtle ways. In ways that I had a hard time understanding. I would come by one of the now familiar groups with a basketball in hand, asking if anyone else was interested. They’d start to laugh and shake their heads, as if they just figured something out in unison and completely independent of me. They would then pick up their stuff and start walking somewhere, while I’d trail behind. “Where are they walking to?” I thought. It didn’t matter, all I knew is I should probably follow them.
I would pretty quickly realize I could never get to where they were going, as they were just walking away from me.
Rebuffed by my peers, my chances at reaching cool at this point rested squarely on the broad shoulders of Mr. Conrad. My chances were good at first, I thought, what with that solid first day and all. But here too a now familiar pattern played out.
Before the start of class, and after it, I’d hover around a small group of kids formed around Mr. Conrad. He and the kids would exchange laughs — mostly inside jokes that I could only stare at blankly in response. I didn’t know what looked more strange: an expressionless kid in the presence of jokes he didn’t understand or a kid nobody really knew hanging around and laughing at jokes he had no way of understanding. I tried both.
They didn’t have to walk away for me to realize that here too I exerted a sort of anti-gravity, a repelling force. So I began to remove myself entirely.
Eventually, the social order sorted itself out and it was clear that Mr. Conrad spent his time almost exclusively with the cool kids — a group of whom I was clearly never going to be a part of. He had no trouble spotting them, pulling them one-by-one into his orbit. No doubt by using the same standards of detection I laid out before.
Proportional noses (Check).
Beaming smiles (Check).
Easy laughs (Check).
I noticed the female students took a particular liking towards Mr. Conrad, undoubtedly falling for that mathematically handsome jawline of his. But even the straight, male students seemed to fall for him in a similar way, gravitating towards his winning smile and spell of cool that oozed out from everything he did.
On one Spring day the entire school was out for a run celebrating the value of not being fat and lazy. I saw ahead of me Mr. Cool was stationed at a check-point. He casually leaned against his red sports car, wearing shades and blasting Top 40 radio at maximum volume through the car speakers. As the cool kids ran by, he traded jokes and high-fives with them. I strained to hear what was being said, but I was too far behind. When I got to the checkpoint Mr. Cool looked past me, clapped his hands and offered a generic “let’s go, Nikolic.”
Always calling me by my last name.
As fate would have it, not only did I have Mr. Conrad for my Home Room teacher that first year, but he was also my French teacher for all of my three years at that school. It made no difference. He would never anoint me as one of the cool. He probably figured out who I was before anyone else did, possibly as soon as that very first day.
The only other French teacher in the school was Mr. Frechette (pronounced: “Freshette”). At first — before my attempts at becoming cool fell apart — I felt lucky that I didn’t have him as my French teacher. I had no way of knowing if Mr. Frechette was a good teacher, or even a kind teacher. My only piece of information was the ubiquitous nickname the kids gave him:
“Mr. Fried-Shit”
It didn’t matter whether or not the nickname was earned. Fact is, he may have been a good teacher and he may have been a kind teacher, but he definitely wasn’t a cool teacher. In the minds of cool teenage kids, you’re either Mr. Cool or Mr. Fried-Shit — no in between.
Over those three years of Junior High I watched events flow by as if an anthropologist in my own life. Looking, listening, learning, but never really a part of what I was seeing. I studied — with equal parts disdain and curiosity — the widening gap between Mr. Cool, surrounded by his cool students, and people like me: The Invisibles.
By then I knew to stay away from social events like sporting meets and dances. I hovered on the outskirts of these events, the space between me and other Invisibles forming vast gulfs.
I recall one particular Spring Dance that I resolutely stayed away from. I was in the hallway, ready to leave school, when I heard muffled music open up and drip out through the halls. The doors to the “canteen” gymnasium swung open. To my horror, pools of kids spilled out past me, twirling and snapping their fingers low to the ground while Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” echoed outwards through the halls. Trailing behind them was none other than Mr. Cool himself, joining in their merriment making stupid gestures and snapping his fingers as if he was one of them.
“Idiots” I thought.
I didn’t think of that term entirely in the pejorative sense. In a way I admired their complete lack of self awareness. But hearing that song being played just amplified the ridiculousness of the entire situation. If you want to know how it felt in that moment, picture a crappy moment in your life and then picture it happening while “Life is a Highway” blares over a nearby sound system.
You want to laugh and cry at the foolishness of it all.
— — —
Years later — freshly removed from high school life and memories of Mr. Conrad falling away like Autumn leaves — I saw a picture of his face inset against a mention of him in the l0cal newspaper. The article was about none other than Mr. Cool himself.
I expected the headline to read something like “Cool Teacher Saves the Day” or “Teacher Charms All at Best Smile Competition.”
Instead, the headline read in large, bold print atop the page:
“Local Teacher Charged with Molestation of Former Students.”
The article didn’t include names, but it did note the ages of his alleged victims, at least 7 in total. From this bit of information I could tell that several of those girls must of been my fellow classmates throughout those three years of French class. I closed my eyes, hoping to remember, but couldn’t imagine their faces.
I realized that all of those cool kids — kids like my brother, and those I drifted past in my time in that school — had all fallen under his spell of cool, all the while just being used.
I never found out much of what happened to Mr. Conrad. I did a bit of research and all I could find pertaining to him was an official document from the B.C. Teacher’s Regulation website. It noted the termination of his teaching certificate on June 15, 2001 citing “professional misconduct.”
I always wondered if he ended up in jail, and if so whether or not he had a difficult time beguiling the other inmates with that ever-charming smile of his. If so, I’m certain it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
