A Wiseacre Student, Now a Star, Was a Handful Then

You couldn't actually do anything with Bernie Mac. You could watch him, glare at him. Or pray he'd get sick. I couldn't quit--I had a wife with a baby on the way and needed this job. I hoped things would get better as the year went along. I do know I learned to write on the board while facing the class.

The only recourse I had was with my grade book. It's not that Bernie Mac did not do his schoolwork, but his entertainment needs had priority over writing lesson retention, so his written work suffered accordingly. I still remember his two- and three-page stories (voluminous by freshman standards) in his very large and sprawling orbital script. He'd fill line after line with earnest reportage of his life and his family, never pausing with a comma or stopping with a period. He could have earned A's for his papers' content but always rated an F for the sentence structure and the punctuation. Always an F for the mechanics--a shortcoming I judged to be a consequence of his attention deficit (though ADD had yet to be coined), when it really may have been, instead, a manifestation of his all-consuming need for unrestrained self-expression. He was bursting back then, and there was no stopping him.

When he missed class, I was secretly relieved. One or two of the other male students would try to fill the "inanity" gap, but I dealt with them quickly and efficiently, since disciplining them was child's play after contending with McCullough all week. He was gone, and I'd have a quiet, productive session. I wouldn't even report the cut to the attendance office, in hopes of encouraging his further absences.

He missed other classes, too, as multiple FAs (F on account of absence) in his other classes testified. I put an F in red ink in his "course book" on grading day and would see with some lukewarm relief that I wasn't the only one whose life he was making miserable. He failed nearly everything, to my best recollection, and did not return to CVS after his first year. I concluded that he must have turned 16 and dropped out entirely, for I never saw him again. Never heard from him again, until I ran into a teaching colleague last year.

"What do you think of Bernie McCullough now?"

"What?"

"Bernie Mac. You know who he is, don't you?"

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