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               Chapter Chair Quackenbush sent out a fresh bulletin to his troops
               assuring them the battle for John Wayne Cotter H.S. was ongoing; talks
               with the Board of Education were continuing. All was not lost, something
               would be worked out. In the proposals for change, the interests of the 
               teachers were paramount and would not be compromised.

               All of which had a nice ring of defiance, but did little to lift spirits. 

               Two teachers in Radix' department were among several who went on
               extended sick leave. The word was they were cashing in their accumulated
               sick days and, fearing the worst, looking for jobs outside the teaching
               profession. Their absence meant that substitutes were sent by the Board
               to man the classrooms. This led to frequent scenes of disruption, the
               mobilizing of school Security. 

               There was a huge commotion one day that nearly grew into a riot. A 
               substitute teacher had  "lost control of her class", as the dean of discipline
               explained later. 

               She was from Nigeria, and she wore a bright patterned robe whenever   
               she reported for duty. She didn't have a classroom key, so her class was
               usually found milling around outside a locked door. And she was tired of
               asking other teachers, who smiled but seemed irritated, to open doors for
               her. 

               The students couldn't pronounce her name so they quickly settled for "Miss 
               Mandela". They mimicked her accent  ̶  You children haavve no risspec!! 
                ̶  they drew chalk pictures of her on the board, exaggerating the tortoise
               shell glasses on her nose. They asked her questions about Africa, and made
               monkey noises which, she reminded them, were "very racist". 

               On the day she "lost control" she'd told a student to Shut up! (Later she
               argued she didn't see any harm in what she said, didn't understand why Be
               quiet! would be the preferred choice of words.) The offended student rose
               to his feet, threw down his chair in outrage, came up to her desk, and 
               screamed  ̶  You telling me to shut up?  YOU shut up! You shut the FUCK
               up!  ̶  his hands menacing, but not touching her. The class went  ̶  whoo!
               whoo! whoo!  ̶  and drummed on the desks; a few more chairs got thrown
               down. The commotion spilled out in the hallway, triggering an exodus from
               nearby classrooms of students thinking there was a fight". Worried
               teachers, fearing "loss of control" on the entire floor, called for Security. 

               Spring days, still cool but warming up, led to a breakout of seasonal
               colours and  fashion among the students, prompting Principal Wamp to
               issue stern warnings  about exposed mid-sections and the general tone of
               the building. 

               Despite the overhanging gloom some teachers seemed strangely energized.
               Bill McCraggen had switched to season (army) green tee shirts, short
               pants, sneakers and tube socks, and a Yankee baseball cap. His Girls
               Soccer team was out on the field getting ready for the season. 

               His commitment to task attracted smirks from teachers who couldn't see
               the point, since soon there would be no John Wayne Cotter H.S. To which
               Bill McCraggen would retort,  coolly swinging his coach whistle, that come
               what may, they would be really "stoopid" to shut down the sports
               department. Not after all the years of winning trophies. If nothing else,
               the school could boast about its fine sports tradition. There were plaques, 
               awards, teams pictures and memories going back decades. Doing away
               with the sports department would be plain "stoopid". 

               Jim Lightbody switched to blue jeans (under which he wore his long johns)
               a checkered shirt and cowboy hat. He kept saying he had a new job
               already lined up "out in Texas", but nobody believed him.

               There was now, more frequently than before, the strong aroma of 
               marijuana in the stairwells. Somebody was smoking marijuana in the
               building. No one was ever seen, no one was ever caught; and everyone
               suspected those quick-tempered, foul-mouthed Jamaican students who
               walked the hallways and hung about on the sidewalk during morning
               sessions because the weather was really nice.

               Radix tried not to think about what would happen come June.  He
               expected to be excessed; last hired, first to be laid off. Not much he could
               do about it. He carried on dutifully. He even took time out to quell
               student fears about their future, explaining there was nothing to worry 
               about, education in one form or another would continue. He avoided
               hallway huddles and didn't say much of anything to anyone.

                    (from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

                    We must work harder. We must keep stirring the pot, Mambisi Colon
                    exhorted, trying to keep the family spirits up. 

                    But anxieties were mounting among many of the John Wayne Cotter
                    Pyramid players. It was looking bad for everyone still in the game.

                    Judy Wiener felt the acute embarrassment of having to admit she 
                    might lose her investment. Some teachers, the sensible non-players, 
                    formed huddles of their own. In the hallways, in the cafeteria she 
                    could sense them smirking. Mrs. Caratini didn't drop by as often. And
                    the students, surely they must think something was going on. What did
                    they make of someone knocking on the door, interrupting the lesson,
                    calling the teacher outside for a hasty conference?

                    One morning Xavier came into the room, handed her an envelope and 
                    said brusquely, "Here". When she opened it she found 10 hundred dollar
                    bills. She looked at him, confounded, trembling. Where did you get
                    this?  He said one of the teachers gave it to him, told him to deliver it
                    to her. "I didn't ask any questions." What did he mean, One of the
                    teachers? "I didn't ask any questions." She looked at the bills, she
                    looked at Xavier. What did he mean, he didn't ask any questions? But
                    Xavier had retreated to his desk; his head was down, as if after hard
                    hours at his night job he didn't want to be disturbed.

                    Did he know what was in the envelope? Which "teacher" in his right
                    mind would ask a student to deliver an envelope with a thousand
                    dollars? What was going on here? 

                    Minutes later, a knock on the door. When it opened, Mambisi Colon
                    walked in. Her manner suggested unhappiness. Judy Wiener looked up
                    and her face must have betrayed bewilderment and fear.

                    "I was robbed last night" Robbed? "Yes, robbed. Three men came to my
                     house late last night and demanded money." Judy Wiener's face went
                     white with shock. Did she call the police? "Hell, no. I don't want the
                     police meddling in my business. Nobody's going to pull a stunt like this
                     and get away with it." What stunt? What was she talking about? "I'm
                     saying, three people barged into my home and demanded their money
                     back. One guy, I know who he is, wanted his money back. Which was
                     fine. But then he called the names of two people and he said they
                     wanted their money back too. One of the names was yours."  

                     Judy Wiener felt pierced through the heart. She uttered a half-
                     credulous laugh. "Me?…my name?" "Yes, your name." Her wide open,
                     not yet accusing eyes studied Judy Wiener's face. "But that's im-
                     possible. I didn't ask anyone to do anything like that. In any case,
                     my group split off from your family, remember? We meet in Queens."
                     "That's what I figured. It doesn't make sense. And you're near the top.
                     So why would you want your money back? Anyway I wasn't going to 
                     give them anything; but then these two other guys, they were
                     wearing these snow-day face masks so you could only see their eyes
                     and nose, they had guns in their waist bands." Judy sat down slowly, 
                     horrified. "Yes, guns; they unbuttoned their coats and I saw these
                     guns. And I knew right away I'd be dead, dead, if I didn't hand over the
                     money. So I gave them the money. $3.000. They wanted it in three
                     separate envelopes. I gave it to them"

                     Judy Wiener was now speechless. She hoped her face conveyed the
                     proper sag of commiseration, didn't give away anything else. She
                     sensed Mambisi Colon's eyes still looking for clues, for some give-away
                     flicker of complicity.

                     Over at the computers her class was pecking away at the keys. Xavier 
                     looked up from what he had written and said, What a predicament! as
                     if the words he'd just typed had given him great satisfaction. "I'll be
                     with you in a minute," she shouted, deflecting the watchful suspicion
                     on the other's face, and giving herself reason to breathe.

                     And Mambisi Colon turned and walked away in a flourish, showing off
                     what she was wearing that day  ̶̶  shiny black pants, shiny black shoes,
                     a turtleneck sweater  ̶  as if to suggest the loss of $3.000 in one night
                     had not in any way devastated her wardrobe. "I'm going to get to the
                     bottom of this, " she shouted at the door. And Judy Wiener looked
                     down at her desk and said, "Well, let me know what happened."

                     She looked at Xavier. She knew that inside his shiny skull lay answers
                     to all this. She had only to walk over there and gently tease the truth 
                     out; but would he be willing to talk to her? Maybe he was writing it all
                     down in his Journal. From his hunch over the keyboard she sensed a
                     surly concentration.

                     At the end of the class, without another word, Xavier left the room.
                     She restrained an impulse to call him back.

                     For the rest of the day she felt wretched with guilt and worry; it was
                     difficult to concentrate on familiar tasks. She muttered fretfully to
                     herself; and from a distance she sensed in the hallway the alarm
                     among teachers generated by Mambisi Colon who must have told her
                     story a hundred times and mentioned Judy Wiener's name; so that, like
                     it or not, her name was now linked to some alarming gun-brandishing 
                     incident in the Bronx.

                     She braced herself expecting to be stopped and questioned, with
                     unctuous smiles from the questioner, about rumours of her
                     "involvement". She was ready to protest, I really don't know what this
                     is all about.

                         (from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

                    Forced to decide whom to trust  ̶  Mambisi Colon and her Pyramid
                    enterprise, or Mrs. Caratini, friend and erstwhile savior, though nursing
                    surprisingly bitter resentment  ̶  Judy Wiener sided with Mambisi Colon.

                    In fact, she allowed herself to be won over by the woman's soft-spoken
                    but intense manner. When she wasn't speaking, Mambisi Colon  fingered
                    the chain with a cross that rested on her bosom. When she spoke she'd
                    lower her voice to levels of shared uncertainty; at the same time she
                    offered the assurance everything would be fine

                    She had wide, round hips and a double chin, but she moved down the
                    corridors at ease with her body weight distribution. To Judy Wiener this
                    suggested a woman of solid grounded trustworthiness who felt things,
                    who had good strong feelings about the Pyramid game. It seemed all
                    above board. If it was nothing but a scam, she felt sure Mambisi Colon
                    would have nothing to do with it.

                    The meetings for envelope exchange were held on Mondays. Mambisi
                    Colon came to her classroom with a hand-drawn map of directions to
                    the meeting place, so accurate, you couldn't possibly get lost.

                    And what an adventure it turned out to be; entering "strange"
                    neighborhoods, searching for parking space, sometimes blocks away
                    from the address; the walk back up a sloping sidewalk.

                    Judy Wiener walked as if she knew these streets. She was familiar with
                    the street names from addresses on home contact cards handed in by
                    students. She walked past brown and black faces, like the faces she 
                    passed in hallways; and she braced herself half-expecting to be
                    recognized and hailed. She took little notice of groups of idlers outside
                    the fluorescent-lit Delis at street corners, or in doorways of buildings,
                    feeling certain they preferred to remain unnoticed.

                    She was surprised at her own courage; and even more surprised when
                    nothing unusual happened. No one leapt out of the dark to assault her.
                    No one vandalized her car. Her anxieties quickly drained away; things 
                    seemed as normal as one would expect in any neighborhood; the sense
                    of danger, always exaggerated, quickly evaporated. 

                    One night she stepped into the elevator of an apartment building; its
                    occupants, two elderly white women, short, bespectacled, like almost
                    dressed-alike sisters, remarked how odd it seemed: the elevators were
                    crowded with strangers, particularly at this hour; on Monday nights; 
                    black men and women. 

                    Something was going on; they didn't feel entirely safe as they were
                    used to. They looked at her, hoping she'd confirm their suspicions. 

                    Judy Weiner smiled; she explained she was a visitor herself, and though
                    she couldn't comment on their suspicions, she didn't think there was 
                    anything to be alarmed about. The two ladies got off on the second
                    floor, muttering, Well I don't know. 

                    When she rang the bell a smiling face greeted and ushered her in. 
                    There were people everywhere, sitting, standing; a television set
                    flickered in the living room. 

                    She was surprised to discover white faces from John Wayne Cotter in
                    the crowd Carol Boardingham, Mrs. Fuqua and Amy Nirza from the 
                    attendance office. They sat apart, too tense and anxious to speak; they
                    acknowledged her arrival with a smile, but didn't appear eager to come
                    over and form a huddle. 

                    In the basement the newcomers to the game were receiving their
                    introduction, complete with charts and warm explanations. At some 
                    point Mambisi Colon, moving around in a capacious robe and turban
                    hat, and enjoying her role as Pyramid matriarch, announced it was
                    time to form the "family" groups; time for the good news, the hand
                    over of envelopes. "We have to work a little harder stirring the pot,"
                    she chided amiably. 

                    Judy Weiner had hoped to get Michael Radix interested in the game; he
                    was decidedly against the idea. To her surprise, Mr. Obanjemfuna, who
                    had initially turned down her invitation, came back to say he was 
                    interested. He came in eventually, bringing with him a few of his
                    Nigerian friends. 

                    For awhile it was comforting to be swept along in the undertow of
                    Mambisi Colon who'd been to the Pyramid top twice and was on her
                    third trip up. Suddenly one evening Judy Wiener learnt that her
                    "family" was about to be branched off; she was two steps from the top,
                    but she would be severed from the Mambisi Colon family; they would
                    form a separate group with arrangements to meet out in the Queens
                    borough.

                    This was alien territory to her. She had to pay a toll, cross the Throgs
                    Neck bridge. The directions to the house of meetings seemed less
                    precise, the street names unfamiliar. Mr. Obanjemfuna and his Nigerian
                    friends were with her, but sometimes they got lost on the way and
                    arrived late.  

                    Things were beginning to stall; new players just weren't coming in; her 
                    old fears that this was altogether a bad idea resurfaced. She could ask
                    for her initial investment back, but so close to the top it seemed
                    foolish to pull out; and in any case no one was quite ready to hand back
                    one thousand dollars. 

                    She drove back over the Throgs Neck Bridge, the car windows misting 
                    up, and she'd swear ugly words when the car hit a pothole. Her heart
                    was sick with worry she'd been wrong, wildly wrong, to get involved in 
                    this. She hadn't heard of one teacher, apart from Mambisi Colon, who
                    had made it to the Pyramid top. Not one.

                                  (from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001) 

                    He was about to pull in and lock the door when a sheet of paper near the
                    teacher's desk caught his eye. On an impulse he went back in, picked it up,
                    meaning to discard it in the waste container. On a second impulse he read
                    what was scribbled on it; some sort of conversation between two students they
                    must have written and past back and forth.

                             do u know what Anthony said 2 me this morning on the patio!    

                             Well I guess you want me to ask!
                             So what? 

                             Well u fucking right! He said, Jessica Delgado
                             report 2 my penis immediately.
                             I said F U!!!

                             I can explain how that Jessica Delgado report thing started.
                             Anthony is a prick!

                   Strange, that students would leave something like this lying around. Maybe it
                   slipped out of a student's notebook.                        

                   But there it was, evidence from the 90s generation  ̶   so carefree and careless
                   with their bodies, so blasé about sex; hormones swarming like locust through
                   the leaves of their brains.

                   Report 2 my penis! So much of this was nothing but Ready to Burst foreplay; the
                   bitches in giggling huddle, the dogs prowling hallways in sniffing packs. Those
                   baggy-pants boys with their gold chains, mouths and arms in constant motion;
                   boys wanting to be men.

                   The way they talked to the girls; the way the girls talked back; dogs and bitches
                   tossing casual snarls at each other.

                   And to think that back in his day Dana Ricci found black boys attractive. This
                   was what she told him  ̶  Black boys know how to do it!  ̶   when he tried for the 
                   second  time, humble and apologetic, to get her up to his room. I know what
                   I'm talking about, she'd sniggered, shooting a look of contempt at his crotch;
                   then walking away; knowing he'd stare after her in disbelief and resentment. As
                   if any black guy would want her. As if any black guy with attitude would wait
                   for her to get the snag out of her zipper. Dana Ricci didn't have a clue.

                   For the rest of the afternoon he seemed distracted. In the cafeteria he chatted
                   breezily, then lapsed into silence. In his stomach, the terror of anticipation: he
                   was about to try something he'd never done before; he was about to cross a line
                   here, forchrisssakes!

                   When the bell rang for the end of the 8th, he walked to the attendance office
                   with the attendance bubble sheet; he hung about chatting, he waved, Have a
                   good one! to colleagues hurrying out the building. He took his time walking back
                   to the gym, his eyes sweeping the hallways on the first floor for anyone who
                   appeared to idle.

                     Outside the gym door he saw a lone figure waiting, and he cursed at the thought
                  they would have to enter together; for, should something unforeseen happen,
                  someone might recall seeing Mr. McCraggen and a student entering the gym
                  together. 

                   It wasn't Ipanema Vasquez waiting. The girl had a narrow, delicate face and an
                   elaborate hairdo. Arms folded, she watched him approaching. "What are you     
                   doing here?" he asked sternly. Waiting for a friend. "Well, you can't wait here.
                   You must leave the building. Wait outside." The girl gave him a pouting fuckyou
                   glare and moved off, looking back at him just once. He watched until she had
                   cleared the hallway. 

                   Inside the gym he set about tidying, sorting out gym equipment. He looked
                   around his office space, which over the years had served every purpose but was
                   never a set for physical intimacy.  There was an old sofa in a corner; it sagged 
                   and was cluttered with soda cans, baseball mitts, cardboard boxes of balls,
                   books, other stuff. 

                   He needed a plan, quick and satisfying. 

                   He looked at his watch. She was twenty minutes late. Imagine: her graduation
                   depended on it, and she couldn't keep an important appointment; lazy…
                   voluptuous…fat fuck.                         

                   Slumped in his little stuffy office chair, his heart heavy with doubt and a
                   foolish adolescent panic he thought he'd outgrown, he felt a helplessness that
                   was beyond the usual Friday state of enervation..

                   More random thoughts kept popping in his head. If Ipanema Vasquez walked in
                   this minute he didn't think he'd be able to perform. Ten minutes back, maybe.
                   Not now. He couldn't do much with her now. Where the fuck was this girl?

                   To try and to fail with her  ̶  the embarrassment would be huge, huge; worse
                   than the scandal that would follow if somehow word leaked out about what
                   they did.

                   Nah! This wasn't going to work

                   He gathered up things for his briefcase. He reached for his coat, whistling to
                   himself. He looked around the room with a little regret and disappointment;
                   with a little relief, too, that nothing had happened. Maybe this arrangement
                   wasn't meant to happen. Not this time.

                                    (from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)