A Wiseacre Student, Now a Star, Was a Handful Then
While Chicago beams over the meteorite success of Bernie Mac, its hometown comedian-actor (“The Original Kings of Comedy,” “Ocean’s Eleven”) and sitcom sensation (“The Bernie Mac Show”), I watch on the screen the tall, beefy and obscenely uproarious man take possession of the camera with arachnidan eyes and the seductively bullying stage presence of the man-child I knew 30 years ago as Bernard McCullough.
As I listen to his mishmash of South Side dialect and convoluted usage, I wonder how much of it is comically purposeful, ironically fortunate or vindictively calculated as rebellion against my efforts as his freshman English teacher in 1972 at Chicago Vocational High School on the Southeast Side. Were it the last, I could hardly blame him; for Bernie Mac became a success in this world in spite of and, possibly, because of this first-year teacher’s inexperience, naivete and inability to manage the class in Room 180 in which Bernard McCullough launched a coup to become “king” of eighth-period English.
Fifteen years old and coming from a poor family with 10 children, McCullough had a psychologically understandable craving for individual attention, which he implemented in every way possible in my classroom of 28 students. Twenty-two years old, I was a recent college graduate with a teaching degree in English, a white suburban neophyte with lofty ideals and expectations, and zero experience in both teaching and classroom control.
Bernard sat in the rear seat of the second row in Room 180 in the cavernous school’s Anthony Wing. Seating was alphabetical, but it couldn’t have worked out better for McCullough, who used the last position as command center in a constant tug of war between him and me for the class’ attention.
From 2:02 to 2:42 p.m. each afternoon, he kept up a nonstop barrage of jokes, jibes and extemporaneous replies, loud enough to crack up the poor pupil in front of him, and often the entire class, but out of range of my hearing. Someone would laugh, and I’d look up or turn from the board, but McCullough was always quicker on the draw, his bug eyes staring back innocently or looking up at the ceiling in a nonchalance that drew even more guffaws.
As a new instructor, I made the fatal mistake of considering the chatter and horseplay unworthy of my consideration, so I initially ignored it. A lot of rookies do the same thing, thinking that peer pressure and the importance of the learning at hand would eventually cause the distraction to go away. As all America knows, Bernie Mac did not go away.
Had I somehow known of his future celebrity, I would have written down some of the things he said and did for posterity. If a student came in late, Bernie Mac called attention to his shoes or his pants. One word would do it--”Floods,” he would mumble like a ventriloquist--and the class would crack up, the student would be embarrassed, and I’d lose a couple of minutes of instructional time. If a student were called on for recitation, he or she would immediately become the object of Mac’s scrutiny for the former’s speech, hairstyle or very smell. I would tense and the class would salivate, if a particularly portly female or a nerdish male would take the floor. Bernie must have felt our anticipation, for sometimes he said nothing, just let his clownish stare--an affectation of shock--explode the atmosphere.
He was tall and skinny at age 15--a stick version of his current self--so that physically he was all eyes: taunting, bedeviling, lightning eyes. It got so that no one even wanted to raise a hand to volunteer an answer about the sentence’s predicate or the meaning of a literary term. And then my bright idea to put the instigator himself on the spot would invariably backfire.
“Well, then, let’s see what you know about it, Mr. McCullough,” I’d challenge.
“Huh?”
“Your interpretation?”
“Come again, Mr. Teacher, sir? In English, please.”
General laughter.
“Quiet, everyone.”
Buzzing and commotion.
“Do you remember what ‘couplet’ means?”
“Huh?”
“Couplet,” I said louder, thinking I had the advantage for once.
“Oh, yeah. Couplet. That’s a little bitty cup, ain’t it?”
Bedlam.
I tried changing his seat. Sent a failure notice. Changed his neighbors’ seats. Called his home. Flunked him for the first quarter. Sent him to the disciplinarian. Kept him after class.
*
One day, in a department-wide experiment encouraged by our English chairman, I traded eighth-period classes with another teacher who had more confidence and facility in dealing with the students. Returning through the hallway after I had proctored his class, I saw the teacher zigzagging through hallway traffic to confront me.
“I nearly hauled off on one of your students, McGrath.”
“I’m sorry. Who?”
“Tall, dark-skinned guy, sits in the back. He taped a note on the back of my sports jacket. You better do something with him.”
He turned on his heel, handing me the half sheet of notebook paper with the green ink inscription: Kik me if I is Ugly.
You couldn’t actually do anything with Bernie Mac. You could watch him, glare at him. Or pray he’d get sick. I couldn’t quit--I had a wife with a baby on the way and needed this job. I hoped things would get better as the year went along. I do know I learned to write on the board while facing the class.
The only recourse I had was with my grade book. It’s not that Bernie Mac did not do his schoolwork, but his entertainment needs had priority over writing lesson retention, so his written work suffered accordingly. I still remember his two- and three-page stories (voluminous by freshman standards) in his very large and sprawling orbital script. He’d fill line after line with earnest reportage of his life and his family, never pausing with a comma or stopping with a period. He could have earned A’s for his papers’ content but always rated an F for the sentence structure and the punctuation. Always an F for the mechanics--a shortcoming I judged to be a consequence of his attention deficit (though ADD had yet to be coined), when it really may have been, instead, a manifestation of his all-consuming need for unrestrained self-expression. He was bursting back then, and there was no stopping him.
When he missed class, I was secretly relieved. One or two of the other male students would try to fill the “inanity” gap, but I dealt with them quickly and efficiently, since disciplining them was child’s play after contending with McCullough all week. He was gone, and I’d have a quiet, productive session. I wouldn’t even report the cut to the attendance office, in hopes of encouraging his further absences.
He missed other classes, too, as multiple FAs (F on account of absence) in his other classes testified. I put an F in red ink in his “course book” on grading day and would see with some lukewarm relief that I wasn’t the only one whose life he was making miserable. He failed nearly everything, to my best recollection, and did not return to CVS after his first year. I concluded that he must have turned 16 and dropped out entirely, for I never saw him again. Never heard from him again, until I ran into a teaching colleague last year.
“What do you think of Bernie McCullough now?”
“What?”
“Bernie Mac. You know who he is, don’t you?”
*
Since the revelation, I’ve watched his breakout film, “The Kings of Comedy,” and have seen highlights of his TV show. I observe the talent, the energy, the ambition, the almost desperate need for undivided attention. I listen to his fractured usage and pronunciation, watch him imitate the strut of Phil Jackson, coach of the Lakers. And then I hear his anger, affected, of course, or supposedly so, in his disparagement of the New Age hands-off parenting practices.
And I turn him off because I am ashamed. Not of him or his show. He is tremendous. With his onstage rhythmic deprecations, cathartic tirades and astute impressions, he is an artist who has thrived in spite of me. I’m ashamed because I failed him. Not by giving him an F, but by not knowing or soon enough learning how to nurture his gifts. I think how if he had come to my class when I had three or four years of experience, I could have channeled his force into wonderful avenues of creativity and leadership. And then I think how maybe I did after all--channeled it straight out of the classroom, out of the school, out of the establishment, putting it on the stage where not 28, but 28 million can be led to laugh at themselves and forget the reality for a while.
Bernie Mac. Bernard McCullough. An Einstein in McGrath’s eighth-period English.
*
David McGrath is a free-lance writer for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.