I guess now we have to talk about the Freedom of Press.
It’s a powerful thing. A person with no qualifications can start up a paper or a TV channel and force their way into the lives of everyone willing to read or watch. If radio, listen to any bit of information that can be gathered, scraped up or made up and truth is born. Freedom of press is a piece of every free nation that is vital and dangerous. I guess Mrs. Learmann taught me that when I almost killed a kid.
It started with Mrs. Hegg. She had to run off at the mouth and, when I just wanted to sit in an English Literature class and skate by, she told that teacher I was a writer. Mrs. Hegg told Mrs. Learmann that she needed me on her paper.
I’ve talked about some of this before, so let’s rush past the land, jump the rivers, and skid to a stop before we leap off the edge of the cliff.
Mrs. Learmann said that a little birdie told her I could add to her paper. The school paper was called Tiger Tracks, and getting the gig was simple. You take Journalism 1 your sophomore year and you get a B. You then have the option to take Journalism 2. That is the paper. Journalism 3 is the yearbook.
Well, I took Journalism 1 and I secured myself a C. I did it because Learmann had us read newspapers and write articles with leads and headlines, and that all had rules and they needed to be- ahhh, and gahhh and too many things holding me down from writing what I thought was a news article.
Of course, I had no idea what made a good news article, but I knew better, right? I had been reading newspapers for about three months, I knew better than the teacher who had been reading them for her entire life.
I remember real quick, quick as a lick, I had written a brilliant article about a current event. Which, let me say, could not be any dryer. And I made it spicy. I added the things the story needed. My sophomore year, Mrs. Learmann had the nerve to mark it to shit. She did not use a pen. She used a fucking meat cleaver, and she chopped it to bits. I think she added at the end a little swirl that said:
Mr. Teller, we do not need your opinion just yet. This story has a set of facts and I intend for you to stay to them. I give this paper a D. The only reason I have not given it an F is because it is well written.
Stick to the facts.
Well to hell with this class. Newspaper sounded fun for all of the time leading up to this assignment, but if I can’t be creative, then what is the point?
But then Mrs. Hegg. And my senior year, I am trying to steal a copy of Frankenstein, and I find the teacher that technically owns the book sneaking up behind me.
“Mr. Teller, I hear from a trusted source that my paper will suffer without you.”
It didn’t take me even four seconds to know she was talking about Mrs. Hegg.
“Mrs. Hegg is very gracious.”
“She might be. But still, she says you are a great writer, and that I need you. You are welcome to join my paper if you are willing. Her word carries weight. And I am willing to take a chance on you.”
Paper is seventh hour. Now, Waynesville High school had a counselor that was better than God. She knew who was right for which class and who was not. She knew that a crumb like me did not deserve a certain class, and no matter how I begged for it, she was in charge of my schedule and she would not allow me to take it. Like this, she decided who got what teachers, or what caliber, and who was given the scraps.
I asked her for world history my senior year. I wanted Mrs. Hardman. She had asked me if I was going to take her class, and I had given her a resounding yes. But the God of class schedules told me that her talents would be wasted on me, and that I was getting Cagle.
Cagle was the wrestling coach. Cagle was the defensive coach for the football team, and Cagle saw these two things as the only things that he was being paid for. He was legendary for them. And he would not let anything get in his way.
I had taken him my junior year, for American History, but even though Mrs. Hardman had asked for me specifically, the god of class schedules had dropped me in Cagle’s World History class. First hour, I am being invited to write on the paper because of merit. Seventh hour, I am staring at the frowning face of Mr. Cagle. I know what to expect.
Read the book, answer the questions in full sentence form, and get your points. He would be found at his desk drawing and cutting, pasting and framing wrestling t-shirts.
The first day I heard his speech, which was the same one I had heard the first day of my junior year, and I decided pretty quick that instead of writing out answers to a question from a book, in a silent class with a frowning toad of a teacher, I would definitely be writing for Learmann’s paper.
First few days were kind of weird. We introduced ourselves. Why we wanted to write for the paper, to which I said, “Mrs. Hegg would be disappointed if I didn’t.” And we had to assess each other. We had to shift our eyes from one to the other and hear each other talk, and by the end of our posing and questions, we had to pick an editor.
We had two. They were both geniuses, and by the end of the year, we would be lucky to have them. They would never do anything to harm the Waynesville High School newspaper. Tiger Tracks was in their blood by the second day when we voted for editor, and they would keep us on track. They would never do what I did.
They would never bring the legendary paper that Learmann had spent her entire career working on to the very brink of extinction.
Third day, we brainstormed article ideas for the first issue. It was all pretty basic. Interview the foreign exchange students. Talk to the football coach about his thoughts on the upcoming team. Cover the volleyball squad. Talk to the lunch ladies about some such bullshit.
Okay, I might have made that part up. But the paper was pretty basic. Until I started to panic.
It looked to me, as the clock ticked down and more and more real articles were being discussed, that I wasn’t going to have fun on this paper.
“Ah, what about short stories?” I blurted out. It was minutes before the bell rang. The next day, the editors and Mrs. Learmann would be handing out assignments, and I would have to actually, you know, be a journalist.
“I usually try to stay away from short stories,” Mrs. Learmann says. “I have done them in the past, and they just take up too much space and shove out other articles the student body is more interested in.” She started to turn away.
Frantic I yelled out, “But I can make it cool.”
Silence, and her head slowly turns to me. Right there. I can see it in my mind as I type this out. I can see it through the typos of this first draft. Right there is where I caught her eye.
“How?”
Well, I reached out for anything this stern, kind, brilliant woman would find interesting and cool, and I found lessons I had learned in Journalism 1. “Well, you said that Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe wrote for the paper. They wrote serial stories. Start in one issue, finish four issues down the row. You said that they did that.” In that moment, her face was so solid that I was almost sure I had made it up. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes Jesse, I did teach you that in Journalism 1. I might be willing to try a venture like that. Sell it.”
Artist is just grabbing ideas and throwing them around now. The clock is ticking. He has five minutes to get her to agree to this before the bell rings and it is all over.
“Well, I could use a pen name.” The eyes have not left me yet. She is not shaking her head, so I push a little harder. “No one will know who is writing the stories.” She lifts her head a little, maybe cocks it a little to the side. “My pen name,” Artist almost yells out, “could be Charlie Poet.” She leans forward. “Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe. Charlie Poet.”
“Hey, I like this idea,” an editor says. “We could ask the school for ideas on what to write.”
I didn’t like that idea so much, but they continued. “Yeah, we could tell them in each issue to give suggestions on what they wanted to have happen next in the story.”
“How?” Mrs. Learmann said.
“Charlie’s Bag of Tricks,” someone yelled out. I have been taking credit for that idea for years. “We could hang a bag on the end of the chalk board and the students could stick in suggestions.”
“We would need a cool bag,” someone said.
The bag was more like a sack. About a foot around and covered in patchwork of colors and textures. It had a tag on it that said, “Charlie’s Bag of Tricks” and we were there. Right before the bell rang Learmann nodded. “We’ll do it.” She looked at me and smiled.
That was when I started to become afraid of Mrs. Learmann.
The first issue was easy. I tapped into the freshman boy I had been, and how scared and overwhelmed I was on my first days of school. By the end of the first issue, I am being bullied. I am in trouble all the time with my alcoholic parents, and I hate my life. It’s dark, and when Mrs. Learmann read it, I stood back, chewing my lip and she said, “It’s darker than I thought it would be.” Stern face.
“So is high school.”
Second issue, he is failing his classes. He has a face covered in acne. And he has been dumped by a girlfriend he didn’t like in the first place. Now that she is gone, he realized that he loved her and treated her wrong, and this freshman that I was is miserable. He is on the edge. He is falling apart.
“Where are you going with this, Jesse?” Mrs. Learmann asked. “How can I expect this story to end?”
I was almost crying when I said to her, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to expect. I’m kinda trying not to get that far ahead.”
Third issue, the bullying intensifies and his parents divorce. He is late to school all the time, and his history teacher is on him constantly. He loses his best friend and he is lost. Totally lost. He runs to the edge of a cliff, and he leans over. He does not want to live. He does not want to go to school the next day and get his ass kicked. He does not want to have to face a history teacher who hates him and try to crawl out of grades that he is failing.
That issue is printed, and as I walk out of class that day, Learmann is staring at me. I don’t know if she is worried about me or the story. I don’t know if she is going to print it or mock up something else.
The next day, I check the bag on the end of the board, and there is one note with a macabre suggestion for Charlie Poet. One desperate note folded up so small that I can almost not read it at all.
He kills
himself.
One of the editors walks over to me and says, “Mrs. Learmann wants to talk to you right away.”
I still have the note in my hand.
I walk to the back of the classroom where she is sitting. She has the desk turned, facing the desk next to it.
“Please, sit.”
I drop into the chair, and though I am tired from the classes before, the thing that is weighing me down is the note I just slipped in my pocket.
“I was visited by the principals. Yesterday evening.”
“Principals?”
“All of them, yes, and a few members of the school board. They had read your story. They had concerns.”
Again, I think of the note in my pocket.
“They asked the identity of Charlie Poet.” She looked at me hard, and I think I saw fear in her eyes. “I did not give it. They told me that my paper was in jeopardy. That the entire school was in jeopardy. They informed me that if Charlie Poet was allowed to let the protagonist of his story kill himself, there would be dire consequences. They said if the paper printed a suicide, it would kick off a rash of suicides in all corners of the school. They told me that I was not to print the story if Charlie, whoever he was, decided to kill that kid.”
The weight of the paper in my pocket now is crippling. I am sure I will never be able to stand again.
“My career will be over. This paper will shut down. Charlie Poet will be expelled. Kids will die,” Mrs. Learmann said. “They demanded to know who Charlie Poet was. I told them no.
“They told me they would bring in every member of my paper staff and question them until they found Charlie Poet. I told them no.” She drew in a deep breath. And I then knew. I understood in that moment what a powerful woman really was. “I told them freedom of the press would hold up, no matter if it was an international newspaper or my Tiger Tracks. I told them they would not harass my staff, and they would have to trust Charlie Poet and the ending he had in mind.”
The weight of lives. Of my education. The weight of the school pressed down on me. But more than anything, I now understood. The paper, folded so many times into such a tiny scrap, was a person out there begging for permission to kill themself.
“I am with you,” Learmann said. “I just wanted you to know what was on the line.”
I saved that kid.
The one in the story, and the one that wrote the letter. And I would find out that by writing a real and powerful story, I had saved countless other kids that were on the brink.
Freedom of press is a powerful thing.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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