Tomorrow the school smoking room will be converted to storage space, and there will be no more smoking anywhere on school grounds. Good news, it will make it easier to quit. But a lot went on in that room, and I'm reposting an entry from three years ago as a farewell:
The smoking room doesn’t offer much to a first glance, but it is a sanctuary for the weary and persecuted soldier of secondary education. There are no students, no teetering stacks of homework to be graded, not a trace of chalk in the still, poisoned air. Between each class half the men in the school stand shoulder to shoulder, silently handing round cigarettes. Lighters appear and are struck. 18 men inhale, nod appreciatively to one another, and release. The air instantly turns that perfect 20th century blue, the color only of television in strangers’ homes and dense tobacco smoke in narrow rooms.
The walls, last papered in the 80’s, are lustrous amber. A late history teacher’s still-life hangs near the door, a thick gloss of tar lending it the gravity of centuries. There is one machine for coffee and one for tea, both of which frequently work. There are two scruffy tables, across which two couches and six chairs face off. One couch is so soft that you are really, if we were to be absolutely honest, sitting on the floor. The other has boards beneath the thin cushions; sitting on it is like perching on a window ledge while the crowd below urges you on. The tables are set with four cut glass ashtrays, one smaller wooden affair with buxom native dancers carved around the rim, and one with beach sand and discolored seashells trapped in glass. The last two are souvenirs of K. Sensei’s Oahu wedding.
“My God, it sounds magnificent,” I hear you murmur among yourselves, and so it is but for one thing, a lone serpent fouling our Eden. The telephone.
It broods in the corner on a tall pedestal, its plastic-sheathed tail lashing menacingly, the sticky push-buttons and reeking mouthpiece making quiet threats. So long as that is all it does, we are content to overlook it, as we might ignore a fellow commuter fondling himself on a late-night streetcar.
But that is not all it does. It also rings. Or rather it bleats, it yawps, it sometimes quacks, in tones devised by some soulsick student of sonic warfare. At the sound, 18 men flinch, jitter a few inches across the scarred linoleum floor, and the game begins. The game, of course, is to decide who will answer the phone. In theory, the job belongs to whoever is nearest the thing when it commences its shrill gabbling. In practice, though, the room’s geometry allows several men to be equidistant from the phone, bringing a fascinating calculus into play. Who is junior? Who was the last call for, and how likely is it that this is a follow up to that call? Who is junior? Who last answered? Who is junior? Do we really think it’s for one of us? No one has called me on this phone, for instance, since November. Am I obliged to pick it up if I feel reasonably certain that the desired party is not present? What constitutes reasonable certainty? At any rate, isn’t someone here my junior? Eventually, often around the fourth ring, a determination is made and a trembling hand goes forth. The receiver is lifted, showering damp bits of bean cake from the last conversation.
“Yes, this is the smoking room. You want N. Sensei? He’s not here. No I don’t know where he is. That’s alright.”
Everyone relaxes. Everyone but the 24 year old PE teacher with the hunted look, who’s thinking, “Goddammit, I knew it wasn’t for me. Why the hell do I always have to answer the damn thing? What am I even doing in this room? I teach gym.” Worse, though, is when the recipient is present, but on the room’s far side. This requires a nimble hop over tables, a sliding step between chairs and around the corners of couches, a careful dance performed with 17 partners, each clutching a tiny, white-hot blowtorch in his hand. It’s an operation that demands rock-steady nerves and a relaxed outlook on the state of your necktie.
Our smoking room is also, during classes, a retreat for contemplation, for quiet downgrading of ambitions and spiritual certainties, and of course for deep, restful slumber. This is especially true for several older teachers.
I am thinking now of one man in particular, who is in his last year of teaching. He is old. He is peevish. He is tired, a special kind of fatigue reserved for slightly smelly, out-of-touch old guys who spend their days in girls’ schools. Don’t judge him too harshly. You’d be smelly too if you napped in our smoking room, or simply moved through it at a dead sprint. The consolations of teaching are lost to this man. He is waiting out the clock. His personal life is a disappointment too, perhaps. His only child, a daughter, lived under his roof until she was 36, when she very abruptly (it seemed to him) married a foreigner and moved to Sydney. Now he spends three minutes a week on the telephone with a five year old grandson who doesn’t speak Japanese. Lately he’s discovered his wife is stashing money away, in large sums, and he tries not to dwell on her possible plans for it. She’s stopped cooking his favorite meals, and no longer airs out the futons as often as he’d like. This time next year it will be just the two of them, together day and night, locked in a terminal staring contest across the tiny kitchen table.
I don’t anticipate much argument if I suggest that this guy needs the nap. And in fact it seems to do him a world of good. Not after he wakes up. He reverts to form more or less immediately upon waking. But if you were to watch his sleeping face, it would be clear he’s somewhere else entirely. In his father’s home, perhaps, in the mountainous north of the prefecture. It’s late autumn and he and his older brother, whom he loved very much, are sitting at the garden’s edge, shelling peas while they talk. A beautiful child runs out of the house, calling him grandfather in flawless Japanese. They play ball, the boy missing more than he catches but throwing well, very well. When the sun is down behind the pines, they enter the house, a newer house now, in the city, where his favorite dishes are laid on the broad table. Later he creeps into his own fresh, well beaten futon. His wife, young and bedwarm, stirs...
The phone rings. He reels up out of sleep with the kind of snort you mostly hear in zoos. He’s alone in the room, but it might be for him. Tottering around the tables to the pedestal where the thing lies mooing at him, he picks it up just as the other party disengages, and in the instant before the dial tone comes up he hears the chill whispering of a million kilometers of dead line.
The class bell. The tumbling entry of half the men in the school. The dance, as the saying goes, begins anew. Cigarettes out, the flare of lighters, the hiss of intake, the nod, the release. No one looks at the phone.
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