INAPPROPRIATE

The Teacher With the Porn-tacular Name

A seventh-grade teacher with a phallic name has got to have a sense of humor — and so do his students’ parents

It was another communications era. We used answering machines and took voice messages by hand. Answering machines caused me quite a bit of anxiety and I avoided leaving messages for even my closest friends. A microdose of public speaking was enough to elevate my heartrate.

But there are a few memories I recall fondly about these simpler days.

If there ever were a time I wish I’d had a smartphone to snap a quick photo, it would be when I saw a written message my 11-year-old brother once jotted on a pad of Post-its.

My brother and I spent a lot of our late childhoods and tweendom at Aunt Kay’s house. Aunt Kay and Uncle Chuck lived down the street and had four kids who became our unwitting bonus-siblings. I was more independent at the time of the infamous message, as an 8th-grader who could fend for herself. But at eleven years old Mack was the 5th of their four-kid family, fitting neatly in age between their eldest and second children. Mack was often there after school. For dinner. For ice cream and popcorn and the MSU game on TV afterwards.

Chuck and Kay’s family was universally happy to see us — especially my affable and good-natured brother. It was controlled chaos, but the more the merrier seemed to be their Zeitgeist.

One fateful night this mirth increased.

Aunt Kay was always doing shit with and for her children. School bake sales. Having the post-performance party for the gigantic cast of the play. Driving people to Girl Scouts and travel sports. Collaborating with other parents for PTA fundraisers.

Somehow she also managed to be present at home a great deal; this was even the case despite there having been a few health challenges she dealt with. Some people can do everything and be everywhere at once. But Aunt Kay didn’t happen to be within earshot for part of one evening that Mack and I were over.

The phone rang.

It was a landline, of course, and one with a cord that was several yards long. That way, Aunt Kay or whomever was using it could do stuff in the kitchen while talking. You could reach the fridge, the pantry, and most definitely the sink and dishwasher and meal prep zone. You probably could reach the mailbox and post office and make a few runs through the schools’ drop-off circles if you stretched.

Multitasking is the air plug of a large family’s life raft, after all.

I don’t know where Uncle Chuck and our four cousins were at the moment of the call, and I can’t for the life of me begin to remember why Mack and I were standing in their kitchen together. Probably some of the family was in the front yard forcing our cousin C to free his latest captive wild pet. At least one cousin was down in the basement playing Command & Conquer, and somebody was rollerblading or shooting hoops.

Now that I am a large-family mom myself, I’d also speculate that somebody under age 12 was dropping a log in the bathroom and leaving it there to marinate for an unsuspecting parent. But recall that my brother was standing right next to me so maybe not.

Back to me, Mack, and the phone whose long-ass cord still wasn’t long enough that night. It was a bit presumptuous for one of us to answer, given that we were not direct Chuck-and-Kay progeny. But Mack did.

“Hello?” He asked.

“She can’t come to the phone. May I ask who’s calling?” Remember when we all were trained from an early age to say this?

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll tell her.”

He hung up and started to write. I didn’t think anything of it. Life went on.

I heard the laugh about 20 minutes later. Aunt Kay laughed and laughed from the phoneside. Uncle Chuck was summoned. He laughed.

The volleyball coach for 6th and 7th-graders had called because my cousin K had impressed him at the tryout. She’d made the “A” team!

Here is a very faithful, historical re-enactment of what Mack left on the countertop for Aunt Kay —

I feel bad for Mr. Cox. I mean, when I’m done laugh-grunting in the parlance of Beavis and Butthead. How would YOU like to be a middle-school teacher with a last name that’s a suggestive homophone?

More importantly, if students passive-aggressively misspell it on their homeroom forms, do they get in trouble? What about when they’ve made Mack’s innocent mistake?

The only IRL name I can think of that would be worse for a teacher’s mental health is either 1) Rodney Dick, the name of my mom’s first post-divorce boyfriend, or 2) this lady, who should probably have kept her maiden name instead of taking one for the team.

Your only hope, Mr. Cox, must have been to have a rock-solid sense of humor. Heh heh heh.

That and your having retired from coaching and teaching before the advent of voice-to-text.

Special thanks to Amy Sea for writing stuff that reminded me of this story!

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