I Am the Lord

         “I am the Lord!” a lanky boy with long blond hair announced as he arrived ten minutes late for my class. The class tittered. He had made his dramatic entrance; l wanted to get on with things.

         “Welcome, Lord, but you are very tardy,” I chided with a slight smile and marked it in the gradebook. “Kindly take your seat.”

         Groping for the topic the boy had interrupted, I intended to regain my momentum. However, Our Lord was drifting and sleep-walking about the back of the room.

         "Your seat is there,” I motioned.  A silent tension built in the classroom. The students saw a second before I did that Lord Jim was stoned completely out of his mind and judging from the way he listed and swayed, half-way out of his body as well. The class was transfixed as if watching a chess game, trying to predict the next move. It was widely known that Jim used multiple drugs, sometimes in combination. I saw he was delusional at the very least, if not in a drug-induced-psychosis. In that state, who knew whom he might hurt? 

         I stood up to approach him, but thought better of it. Hopefully, I called him by his own name.

         “Jim, I need you to sit down now.” If he complied, I would have a moment more to consider my options. Jim ignored me. Arms outstretched, he floated back to the classroom door and turned to address the class.

         “I am risen,” he proclaimed, “and you are dismissed.” He slowly drifted down the hall.

         “Don’t you move!”  I said to the class and stepped out to see where our Lord Jim had gone. What might he do next? At the end of one hallway, an open air passageway on the third flood connected the elevator in the library to the classroom wing. In that state, Jim could easily try to rise further into the heavens from the open passage. The building’s architects had designed it in such a way as to communicate that we trusted students to take care of the building. As a rule, they did. Unable to leave my class to follow the floater, I grabbed the phone in the faculty room across the hall to call the principal.

         “Jim P. is so high he might jump off the balcony. He’s in the third floor hall. Go get him, please, before he hurts himself.”  I stepped back into my classroom, ready to resume, but the entire class was still motionless. You could have heard a paperclip hit the carpet. Bell-bottomed jeans were crossed above sandals and Adidias. Books lay open on their faces on the desk tops. Dozens of intense eyes were fixed on mine above arms folded across jeans jackets.

         What am I missing here? I thought. But before I could get words out of my mouth, we heard police and ambulance sirens approaching the school.

         “What’s the matter?” I asked my class.

         “You  narked on Jim,” accused a back row jeans jacket. So the whole class was punishing me.

         “Jim could have hurt himself. We had to get him some help.” It sounded lame, even to me. But I had transgressed -- broken the unspoken agreement among teenagers. I had taken the side of the “authorities.” Uncool. I was no friend of theirs. The deep freeze lasted two days. Literature may not have suffered the loss, but my status as a teacher sure did.

         Our Lord was admitted to the psych ward, detoxed, and brought back to class a few days later, apparently none the worse for wear. I wish I could say the same thing