He was the first person I ever heard use the word ‘awesome’. He was the first adult to ever utter the word ‘fuck’ in front of me besides my father. When I took my parents to his classroom for 7th grade open house, I figured he was on my side. This was one teacher who really liked me. The first thing he said to my parents was that “Sometimes, I just want to shake the shit out of him”.

It was a sucker punch.

He was the first teacher to ever give me detention, or as he called it “The puddle of puke room”.

He threatened to “Pinch my head off and shit down my neck”.  He once called me to the back of the classroom during the absolute silence of a test to point at a car outside the window with a for sale sign. “Ugly sonafabitch ain’t it?” he said.

Not much later I figured out that car for sale was his.

If I am any good at anything at all today, he was the beginning of it.  Outside of my exasperated parents, he was the first person to convince me I was smart.  That I had something to offer.  To respect and believe in myself. That I could do anything I wanted.  He was rough but never mean.  Never awful.  He walked that line with an informed and intellectual compassion that often confused me but ultimately inspired me.

Everybody has that one teacher.

He was mine.

He taught me the beauty of language and how every word and every punctuation mark matters.  The difference between Hemingway’s austere economy of language and Capote’s rich and evocative prose.  Steinbeck’s pointed but artful technique as opposed to the flowery and loquacious verbiage of Edgar Allen Poe.  He made me see it. He showed me how to understand the similarities and differences.

He taught me about the art of literature and therefore about the art of everything.

I landed in his English class for 7th grade.  I signed up for various English classes instructed by him my freshman, sophomore and junior years in high school.  When I went to sign up for his class as a freshman he said to me, “They don’t fuck around here.  You’re not gonna get away with your bullshit.  Do your goddamn homework or I’m gonna have to spank your face with a brick”.

He got word through my sister that I’d mentioned him in the credits for the first record I produced recorded and mixed some ten years later.  I had every intention of doing so at the time but perhaps fittingly, didn’t get my updated label copy in on time.  I turned in my homework too late.  It wasn’t until the third record I made that I was able to give him a nod.  I regret it because all through the making of that first record, it was his assurance that I could do anything I put my mind to that kept me going through a wilderness of fear and doubt as much as anything else.

But because of this I was afforded the privilege of a kind of second relationship with Nick Tobey.  He reached out to me asking about it.  I wrote him emails and he responded with long, hand written letters in tiny script.  I tried to tell him about the difference he’d made in my life without sounding pious or obsequious and I can only imagine I failed.  He wasn’t having it.  He was clearly uncomfortable with what I was trying to tell him.  I was disappointed.

But it fit.

His humility was something I understood about him even as a teenager.

It’s why I loved him.

He saw being a catalyst for so many students as his job.

Nothing special and certainly not heroic.

He was wrong.

Tragically wrong.

I can still see him.  Leaning back against the front of his desk.  His left hand palm out down the back of his pants with a book in his right hand, looking at us individually and collectively through his 80’s style glasses, reading a passage and then laughing with amazement at the author’s prowess.  Putting the book down and turning to us again to explain the power of the words he’d just read.  I swear, at least half of us were enthralled.  In the midst of an epiphany.

And then he’d pull me into the hallway when no one was looking to remind me I was fucking up and ask me if maybe I was working too many hours at my after school job.

This when I was writing papers for my female employees at that job and getting them an A or at least a solid B in exchange for a delivered fast food breakfast to my bed.

Nicholas West Tobey was the rarest of human beings.  He gave a mad fuck absent hubris entirely. He told me later in life that he didn’t miss teaching and that he didn’t feel he’d made much of a contribution.  It really messed with me and not long after, he ceased all correspondence with me.

It occurs to me that he was a disappointment to himself for other reasons.  He was a reluctant artist and intellectual.  I can only guess at that.  All I can say is that for me, it doesn’t matter at all.  There is no way to measure the difference he made in my life.  It would not surprise me at all to find out that he was less than perfect to people closer to him.  It should not surprise them when I say it does not matter to me.

Rest in peace Mr. Nick.

February 21, 1939-February 25, 2016.

Drinks for my friends.

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