on>
The Punk and
the Professor
A Novel
The Punk and
the Professor
A Novel
Billy Lawrence
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland
Copyright © 2017 by William K. Lawrence
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
This book is a work of fiction and any coincidence with real life people is purely the imagination of the author.
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62720-136-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-137-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-138-4
Design: Apprentice House & Mary Del Plato
Editorial Development: Rachel Kingsley
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.ApprenticeHouse.com
For All My Teachers
A stuttering little boy spells out the word butterfly for the first time.
My brother’s smile.
A faded black and white photograph of six smiling friends, a world ahead of them. The Kennedy brothers on each end. Steven and Paul to my left. Gene to my right. Me in the middle.
Wrestling. Guns N’ Roses. Running free on the track.
The beach. The bay. The birds.
Long Island in the shadow of the city.
The nineteen eighties crashing into the nineties.
A girl in a Catholic school dress stands there laughing and talking with her girlfriends. She doesn’t see me, but I see her. She has long straight brown hair, eyes the color of a forest, and a smile that captures me. Something inside feels funny.
$$$
A horn blared and a light flashed——
—My swollen eyes stretched open. My face muscles were numb, and my lips were tight and chapped. A layer of frost covered my hair. The car approached and its window opened. I struggled to roll my window down.
“You gotta go. Can’t stay here. Get on now.”
“No problem. Thanks,” I said.
The security guard couldn’t even let me stay in the empty lot, but I didn’t complain. The guy had saved my life. Another hour or so and I would have frozen to death for sure. I turned the ignition, cranked the heat, and then drove off to the safety of the twenty-four hour diner with twenty dollars in my pocket and several hours to waste before the rest of the world woke.
PREFACE
The professor steps out in front of the room with an invitation to another world. Behind him is a giant lit screen with a picture of the opening of a cave labeled along the bottom: “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, Greece, 360 B.C.E.
The professor asks,
Why do we appreciate it?
The students stare back.
Because we live it, he says.
Plato sets up a scenario where prisoners are born into the world deep down in a cave beneath the surface of the world. The prisoners are chained and face one direction— the cave wall straight ahead. The chains are so tight that they cannot even turn to their sides. They have no concept of what’s behind them. All they see is the cave wall in front of them— this is all they know. This is all we know. We are the prisoners born in the cave.
Behind us sits a roaring fire. Above and beyond these flames is a platform— a kind of walkway where puppet-masters hold up puppets and statues in the form of various elements of nature— a tree, a bird, a tiger, a lamb— and they reflect onto the wall like the fake monsters one makes in a campfire. We see the shadows and believe these visions are reality. Shadows and illusions— this is all we really know sometimes, maybe most of the time.
The professor reveals a new scenario where a prisoner is unchained.
The prisoner gets up and looks around. He is now able to see the statues and puppets but is fooled once more. He thinks he is now looking at the real tree, the real bird, the real tiger, and the real lamb. We know he is staring at just another layer of reality— the puppets and statues that imitate the real thing. To see the truth he must crawl out of the cave to the surface of the planet, and there’s no holding him back. The prisoner is bound to come out. Sometimes he wants to crawl out on his own, hungry, curious, eager. Sometimes he is dragged out, against his own will, for his own good.
The professor walks over to the side of the classroom and opens the blinds on the large window that spans half the length of the wall.
Look out there, he says pointing out to the far end of campus. A thick green forest seems to stretch for miles. Blue sky painted with a scatter of white fills the top of the window.
We only see what we see. When we’re in the forest we see the individual trees right before us, but we can’t see the whole of the forest. When we’re far away we can’t see the individual trees. We can’t see the details of the bark and the leaves. From afar we don’t know much about what those individual trees look like or anything else going on in those woods. We don’t even know what’s going on in the next room, do we? There is a lot we don’t see. There’s danger out there. There are good things too, but we can’t see them either. We would need a microscope and a telescope. We can’t measure them with the eye.
Our senses fool us.
The professor clarifies— We are all in the cave. The puppet-masters are insiders, the ones who control our world. They’re the ones with confidence; they’re the ones selling something. But even they are inside their own caves and don’t clearly see the world for what it truly is. They are the biggest fools because they think they have something over everyone else.
The professor takes a good look at the students and then asks,
What do you think it will take to get us to see?
The professor challenges us to remember.
Wheels turn in one student’s eyes. He closes them and remembers.
PART I
The Cave
1
IT WAS A CLEAR SUNNY DAY in late May, but the inside of that school felt subterranean. Some rooms had an unobstructed window to look out of— initial joy for the view of the sky— blue all around from the bottom to the top of the window— only to be followed by the sinking recognition that plexiglass stood between us and nature. It was a glimpse of the world out there, but so difficult to break through. The plexiglass was deceiving. We were caged in that building like broken animals gone from the jungle far too long.
I sat in English class distracted by images of