Virginia Pizza Consultants and Creative Imaginings

A TEACHER GETS A PORSCHE

 

So there I was, sitting in my classroom, C-213, after school on October 9, 1976, when in marches my entire fifth-period junior honors English class, along with a middle-aged guy in a tweed sport jacket, a woman wearing sunglasses and carrying a notebook, and a very tall black guy with a couple cameras around his neck.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

The kids just laugh (a few of the girls still giggle) and Jim Pekar hands me a long, thin envelope, the kind that greeting cards come in.

“What’s this?” I ask this time.

“Open it, open it!” a few kids say excitedly.

So I slit it open somewhat hesitantly, still wondering about these three strange adults standing by in the room.

I take out a greeting card, a birthday card – and I apologize for not remembering a thing about it…and out slides a car key on a keychain.  The ornament on the end of the keyring (if that’s the right word for it) is the Porsche crest encased in plastic.

“Okay, what’s this?” I repeat.

“It’s for your Porsche!  Happy birthday!” young Jim kinda shouts as the rest of the kids clap their hands, ending my concerns that they were all there after school, voluntarily, to complain about their research-paper assignment and that the adults were a couple lawyers and their photographer, there to gather evidence of how unfair a teacher I was.

“Are you serious?!” I say, somewhat skeptically.

“You said we’d all get A’s if you got a Porsche!s” Joanne informs me of something I may have said…well, I’m sure I said it, but….

“It’s waiting for you out in front of the school,” the guy in the sport jacket informs me.

“C’mon, Mr. B.!” some other student shouts.

Thus begins a march to the other end of the very large suburban school in suburban Clifton, New Jersey.

And there it was, indeed, a metallic lime-green 1976 Porsche Targa 911 convertible.

“Get in, get in!”  the kids all shout as the guy in the tweed, who I have since discovered on the Long March is a Porsche salesman, the woman is a reporter for the Passaic Co  County Herald News, and the black guy is the photographer for the paper.

“You told them they’d all get A’s, huh, man?  Boy, you’re in it now!” he had whispered to me.  Tweed Guy opens the driver’s side door and gives me the “get in” gesture.

So I get in, along with the salesman…and I turn the key.  You know, the engine sounded just like the one in our ’68 VW Beetle that was sitting at home, in our garage. (We lived a couple blocks from the high school, so I walked to school with the kids every day.)

“Go ahead, take it for a drive,” Tweed Guy says.

So, gritting my teeth and hoping I don’t have a problem with an unfamiliar clutch – it would have been kinda embarrassing to stall the thing out, after all – we pull away from the front of the school to the cheers of an entire English class and the clicking of the guy’s Nikon.  Maybe it was a Canon.

As we near the end of the school’s driveway, about to exit onto Colfax Avenue, Tweed Guy turns to me and says,
”You know, this is great!  The local paper is gonna give us great free publicity for this and we can make your dream come true, all at the same time!” he says with this big, manure-eating grin.

So I have to ask, somewhat incredulously,

“Listen, are you giving me this car, like as part of some kind of tax write-off?!”

I thought Tweed Guy was going to have a stroke.

“No, no!  We’re not giving it to you, but I can give you a good price on it!”

“Listen, I’m a teacher, not a lawyer!  How much does this car cost?
After he tells me, I inform him that I make less than that for my annual salary.

“Well, we have some good used Porsches at the dealership.  What kind of car are you driving now?” he asks.

When I tell him about the Beetle, he smiles and says,
”No, I mean, what is your regular car?”

So I tell him there’s only one car at home, the same VW.  He doesn’t say anything else. So I inform him that he is not making my dream come true, that’s it’s more like taking a kid from the ghetto to Disneyworld but making him go back home to the projects that night.  He doesn’t say anything.

So I drive to our house, the same one that’s a couple blocks away, put the Porsche in neutral, get out, and go ring our front doorbell since my wife is not working at the time in order to be a full-time mother to our second kid.

Toni opens the door and I point to the Porsche at the curb and tell her I’m taking it for a test ride and thinking of buying it.

“Oh, sure,” she says and closes the door.

So fifteen minutes after getting into the car, we pull back in front of the high school where most of the kids are still waiting to greet me with some scattered applause.  I park and turn off the engine and get out.

The article in the paper the next day said that I stood there with “a  bemused look” on my face, so I guess that’s what was there.  I shake hands with Tweed Guy, who tries once more to entice me to go look at the dealership inventory, at which point I remind him that I’m still a teacher and that I’d have to take out a second mortgage and sell my first-born, the daughter, to some Arab sheik to be able to afford a Porsche.  He gets in and drives it away.

“We all get A’s now, right, Mr. B.?” someone shouts.

“You’ll be lucky if you see a passing grade after this!” I growl and they all laugh, knowing that I’m kidding…they hope.
Well, Andy said we all have fifteen minutes of fame…in my case, I guess it was fifteen minutes of being a Porsche owner…or borrower.