Man of the Hour Read Online Free Page A

posters celebrating Italian American week with pictures of famous actors, pop singers, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and pasta dishes. But the feeling was a little bit different. He no longer wanted to fit in here, he told himself. He no longer wanted to be one of them. Let them swagger by, talking in code, flirting, fighting, making incomprehensible private jokes. With their bared midriffs, their pierced noses, dyed hair, black nail polish, foul language, their tight and baggy clothes, their frank appraising stares. Seeing him but not seeing him. Someday a Great Chastisement would befall all of them.
    On the other side of the building, David Fitzgerald hiked a black Jansport book bag over his shoulder and walked past the gauntlet of kids on his way to the office. The inside of the school was like something dreamed up by a fun-house designer. Long, dark hallways that didn’t go anywhere, stairwells that didn’t connect from floor to floor, offices with tiny windows. Traffic patterns loosely based on Boston and Tijuana. Acoustics appropriate for a heavy-metal concert or a Manhattan restaurant. Buzzers going off for absolutely no reason.
    A group of loiterers in front of the boys’ room called out to him.
    “Yo, what’s up, Mr. Fitz?”
    “Yeah, look out, don’t step on me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”
    “Yo, you’re scaring me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”
    Though he had a few inches on most of the kids, occasionally a hand would reach out to touch him on the head or the shoulder, either mockingly or affectionately. It was hard to tell at times. But there was something comforting about it anyway. A kind of assurance that he had a secure place in this intricate little municipal beehive.
    “Yo, Mr. Fitz, you gonna call my parole officer for me?”
    “Mr. Fitz, you gonna talk to my moms? Right?”
    “Yo, Mr. Fitzgerald, how’s the bike?”
    Oh yes, the bike. An old-fashioned Schwinn with a banana seat he’d picked up for five dollars at a sidewalk sale. He’d first developed an image as an eccentric because of that bike. Some years back, he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Renee had been living in Park Slope and he’d ridden it to school a couple of days a week, instead of taking the subway. So he became the bicycle man. Even after they moved back to Manhattan and he started taking the train again, he was still “the bicycle man” to the kids. He had a reputation to uphold. Funny Mr. Fitzgerald. Weird Mr. Fitzgerald. Not a bad thing. It was an identity. A way for people to think about him. One time he brought a baseball glove into class when they were talking about The Catcher in the Rye. So that became another part of his mythology. Mr. Fitzgerald brought in props. Now every year he had to bring in the glove for the imperfect hero discussions. The kids expected it.
    “Yo!” he shouted out to a Dominican kid called Obstreperous Q from his seventh-period class, who was sweet-talking a girl by the fire stairs. “Come by my office later. I got that book of García Lorca poems I was telling you about.”
    When David arrived at the door of the English Department office Donna Vitale was standing in the doorway, waiting for him. Donna with her frizzy straw-colored hair, her wonderful warm shining smile, and her one wayward eye staring slightly out into space.
    “You have a visitor,” she said.
    “Tell me it’s not Larry coming to complain about my programs again.”
    Larry Simonetti, the school’s principal, had been in a state of high fret for the past week, ever since Albany issued a report calling the school “one of the ten worst-managed” in the city. Test scores were fine, but the school had ricocheted from scandal to scandal in the last twelve months. There was the security guard running away with the ninth grader, the falling bricks that seriously injured an eleventh grader last spring, and of course the $75,000 from the annual budget that was mysteriously missing. The governor himself was scheduled to come next week