On day after class he asked me to wait behind. All the other students winked at me to signify they thought I was in trouble and it pleased them to know it. But it was only that Mr. White wanted the recipe of the chocolate cake Brett and I had made that day. I told him I didn’t know it. Mr. White nodded for an unnaturally long time.

“Do you believe in the Bible, Jasper?” he asked suddenly.

“In the same way I believe in ‘Hound of the Baskervilles.’ ”

“I think I understand.”

“The problem is most of the time when God’s supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot ’s wife. What kind of divine being turns a man’s wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro.”

From the look on Mr. White’s face, I could tell he wasn’t following the lucid argument I was, not proudly, plagiarizing from one of Dad’s midnight sermons. Anyway, what was I talking about? Why was I haranguing a man who looked like the rotting stump of an old tree? It seemed I was able to do anything for a suffering man except be nice to his Deity.

What I should’ve said was this: “Why don’t you quit? Get out of here! Change schools! Change jobs! Change lives!”

But I didn’t.

I let him go on thrashing about in his cage.

“Well, anyway, I guess you’d better get to your next class,” he said, and the way he fiddled with his tie made me want to burst into tears. That’s the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can’t so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.

Not long after that, Dad came to pick me up from school. That wasn’t as rare as you might think. After exhausting his daily activities- waking up (an hour), breakfast (half hour), reading (four hours), walking (two hours), staring (two hours), blinking (forty-five minutes), he’d come and get me as “something to do.”

When I arrived at the school gate, Dad was already waiting for me in his unwashed clothes, his face carelessly shaven.

“Who is that grim man gaping at me?” he said as I arrived.

“Who?”

I turned to see Mr. White peering at us from the classroom window in a trance, as if we were doing something strange and fascinating, and I suddenly felt like a monkey to Dad’s organ grinder.

“That’s my English teacher. His son died.”

“He looks familiar.”

“He should. You harassed him for about forty minutes one day.”

“Really? What do you mean?”

“You came into the class and abused him for no reason. You don’t remember?”

“Honestly- no. But who keeps track of things like that? You say he lost his son, eh?”

“Brett. He was my friend.”

Dad looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“He wasn’t my best friend or anything,” I said. “We were just, you know, hated by the same people.”

“How did he die? Drug overdose?”

“Suicide.”

“Suicide by drug overdose?”

“He jumped off a cliff.”

Dad turned back to Mr. White’s sad face peering out the window. “I think I might go and talk to him.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not? The man’s grieving.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly,” Dad agreed, though to a totally different idea from mine, because the next thing I knew he was striding over to the classroom window. The two of them stared at each other through the glass. I could see it all. I could see Dad tap on the window. I could see Mr. White open the window. I could see them talking amiably at first, then seriously, then Mr. White was crying and Dad had his arm through the window, resting it on Mr. White’s shoulder, even though the angle was awkward and unnatural. Then Dad came back over to me, his lips pursed as if whistling, though he wasn’t. He was just pursing his lips.

After this shadowy conference, Mr. White went crazy in class. Of course, after his outburst, no matter how much they made short gasping sounds and said things like “I don’t believe it!,” no one on the staff was really surprised, and they couldn’t even see what I could see all over Mr. White’s sudden eruption: Dad’s influence.

It happened like this: One morning Mr. White came to class with the face of a thumb that had soaked too long in the bath. Then he commenced the lesson by staring wide-eyed and penetratingly, singling out students with his eyes without letting up, then moving on to the next student. No one could match him. You couldn’t sustain eye contact with a pair of peepers like his. All you could do was lower your eyes and wait for him to pass over you, like the Angel of Death. He was leaning against his desk, this hollow man with the X-ray eyes. It was morning and I remember the windows were open; a layer of milky mist wafted in, and the air was so thick with the sea you could almost taste the plankton. There was an oppressive silence, just the sound of the ocean rising up and falling on the shore. The students watched him in breathless suspense.

“It’s funny that you need training to be a doctor or a lawyer but not to be a parent. Any dolt can do it, without so much as a one-day seminar. You, Simon, you could be a father tomorrow if you wanted.”

Everyone laughed, and rightly so. Simon was not someone you could imagine fucking anyone, ever.

“Why are you here? Not just in this class, but in the world? Do you think your parents wondered why they had you? Listen to what people say when they have new babies: ‘It’s the best thing I ever did in my life,’ ‘It’s magical, blahblahblah.’ They’ve done it for their own enchantment, to satiate their own emotional needs. Have you ever noticed that? That you’re a projection of other people’s desires? How does that make you feel?”

No one said anything. It was the right thing to say. Mr. White moved through the desks to the back of the classroom. We didn’t know whether to keep our eyes forward or to turn them toward him or to tear them out.

“What do your parents want of you?” he shouted from the back. We swiveled to face him. “They want you to study. Why? They’re ambitious for you. Why? They look at you as their personal fucking property, that’s why! You and their cars, you and their washing machines, you and their televisions. You belong to them. And not one of you is any more to them than the opportunity to fulfill their failed ambitions! Ha-ha-ha! Your parents don’t love you! Don’t let them get away with saying ‘I love you’! It’s disgusting! It’s a lie! It’s just a cheap justification for manipulating you! ‘I love you’ is another way of saying, ‘You owe me, you little bastard! You represent the meaning of my life because I couldn’t give it to myself, so don’t fuck it up for me!’ No, your parents don’t love you- they need you! And a hell of a lot more than you need them, I can tell you that!”

The students had never heard anything like it. Mr. White stood there breathing noisily, as if through a clogged tube.

“Christ, I’m getting out of here,” he said suddenly, and left the room.

Unsurprisingly, within hours the whole school had feasted on the scandal, only it came all distorted: some said he had attacked his students; other said he tried to whip a whole bunch of them with his belt. And more than a few whispered that unmentionable word that people hate (read, “love”) to mention these days: pedophile!

I wish that was the end of it. I wish I could end on that happy note. Happy? In comparison with what happened next, yes. What took place that same afternoon sits solidly in history as my first official regret, remaining to this day number one. Any good I’d done in my life up to that afternoon was about to be demolished, and any good I’ve done since has been an attempt to make up for what I did.