About Chris Crutcher's Ironman, quoted from Amazon.com

Editorial Reviews

Ashley is fourteen years old, sexually abused since age eight, and was taken away from her mother and stepfather after her stepfather brutally raped her. She is sent to live with the father she has not seen since infancy, his wife and their son. Ashley enrolls in a summer school English class taught by her stepmother, Bev. In the class, Bev uses the Chris Crutcher novel, Ironman, to teach the kids how to respond to literature.

 Chapter Excerpt:

Ironman is about a teenage guy named Bo Brewster who is training for a triathlon and having to face his anger problems.  Bev told us that Chris Crutcher writes about the truth.  She gave us some history on the author, and I can see why she wanted us to read one of his books.  Besides writing a really good story, he's also a person who marches to the beat of his own drummer,  like Bev does.

Another cool thing about his books is, he writes like people my age talk, so you can see the story happening in your head, and you feel like these people could be real.  No teachers in my old school would ever have  had us read a book like Ironman.  I mean, it has cussing in it, and it talks about stuff that usually isn't talked about in a book you'd find in a school library.  Why do adults want to pretend kids don't talk that way, or don't fight with their parents?

 It makes me think of my mom and her attitude of, "If I pretend it's not real, it's not."  Like that time I brought the book about Hitler home from the library, because I wanted to better understand the nature of evil people and why other people listen to them.   Just because she didn't want the book in her house, because Hitler was, you know, Satan on Earth, doesn't mean that he didn't still have power at one time, or that six million Jewish people didn't die in his Death Camps.

  I asked Bev if she taught Chris Crutcher books all the time, and she said this was the first one she'd taught, although she's read all his stories. Then she shrugged and smiled a little, saying, "Well, Mr. Walden did say I have complete creative freedom, as long as you guys are meeting the objective of analyzing literature and responding to it.  Besides, it's about the storytelling and the message, and I'm not into censoring what the world is really like for people your age."

            Bo Brewster gets into trouble by shooting his mouth off--kind of like I do when I have so much of Charlie that I can't take anymore, or when I see other people being picked on.  It takes a lot to get me to stand up for myself, but it doesn't take much to get me to take up for others or try to make them feel better.  Bo has a defiant streak that kicks in and takes over his thinking for him.  He describes it like this: “When I get freaked and go off on a guy like Redmond, I usually feel okay inside, even though I know big trouble is coming, because Redmond really is an asshole and I don’t care whether he likes me or not.  But the minute the word ‘asshole’ spills over my lip, I know he’s got me." 

            I've been there.  One of the times I could have gotten into big trouble was in French I. Mrs. Glover.  I'm still not sure how or why I got away with it.

            Mrs. Glover was maybe five feet tall, but she was definitely at least four feet wide.  She wore huge polyester gown-type blouses over very stressed -out stretch pants.  Even though no one has dressed this way since the sixties, according to what I've seen in encyclopedias, Mrs. Glover wore a curly black beehive wig atop her greasy slicked-back black hair, and black rhinestone-encrusted glasses, making her heavily-blue-eye-shadowed eyes resemble those of a cat.  But her sense of style, such as it was, was not the reason I went off on her.

            Actually, I threw a fit in her room, about a week before I told Charlie to go to hell and called him a sadistic son-of-a-bitch.  I was so angry, so tired of being picked on, and I never could stand seeing others victimized by bullies.  I felt like a time bomb.

              The worse it got for me at home, the more I felt like crawling out of my skin and destroying things.  I had constant images of ways to hurt myself flashing through my mind.  I talked very little at school because my throat was constricted with rage.  It was like trying to hold in a scream when your body is telling you to throw it up.

            Katie DeMarest's mother was dying of breast cancer.  Everyone knew about it.  Mrs. Demarest was sick through Katie's childhood and in the process of dying all four years of high school.  The DeMarests  were members of my church, and the minister told us that Mrs. DeMarest was trying to hold on long enough to see Katie graduate.

             I heard whispers from other kids that  Katie was a lesbian, and since I talked to her and said hi to her in the hall, I had heard the same rumors about myself.  They weren't true about me, and I wasn't concerned with finding out if they were true about Katie any more than I was about finding out who all the heterosexuals in my school were.  All I know is, she was a really nice person who had too much hard stuff to deal with.  And I knew a little about what that was like.

Mrs. Glover kept her huge King James prominently on her desk.  The  first day of school-- public school-- Mrs. Glover planted her squatty self at the front of the room and announced, "I am a Christian. I run my classroom like a Christian."

I don't know how she thought a Christian's classroom in a public school should be any different than the teacher next door who did not profess his faith to his students, but I do know that Mrs. Glover, like the majority of  people in Northside, was a member of its mega-church, First Church North  (the purveyor of pizza parties and salvation).        Apparently in Northside, the Constitutional separation of church and state could be ignored if enough people attended the same church.  Those of us who were non-mega-church members were on the highway to hell anyway, and those of us who didn't "choose" to be heterosexual were being express-mailed to sit at Satan's feet.  Somehow, I don't think Mrs. Glover's "brand" of Christianity was what Jesus had in mind when he said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  From what I have read about Him, it seems like He would hope  people who call themselves His followers would do so in a way that didn't make Him hang His head in shame.

 This outstanding representative of the Christian faith rode Katie constantly.  If her pronunciation was off, Mrs. Glover raked her over the coals as if Katie was the one student in our class who was never permitted to make a mistake.  This, coming from a woman who spoke French with a heavy Texas accent.  She definitely did not sound like the audio tapes we used for practice, unless we were supposed to be dragging out one syllable French words to at least two, if not three syllables.  In French, the word "bread" is le pain, pronounced like this: luh pan.  But according to Mrs. Glover, the way to say it is this: lu-ah pay-an.

On the day I stood up in class and went off on Mrs. Glover, Katie looked like hell  because she hadn't slept all night the night before.  She had stayed up with her mom, not knowing if her mom was about to die, because it sure seemed like the time had come.  For some reason (note the sarcasm), Katie made her mom the priority instead of the homework assignment on passe' compose' verbs.

Since Katie was a senior, her mom insisted that she not miss any school.  She wanted Katie’s life to be as normal as possible, no matter what.  So, Katie came to school homework-less.  It was last period, and she was struggling to stay awake and keep her emotions in check as well.

Mrs. Glover sat behind her desk-- where she usually remained all class period. She called roll and collected homework at the same time, and when Katie didn't have hers, Mrs. G. said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "How can you expect to keep your scholarship to your fancy women's university,  if you're going to have such sloppy work habits?"

Mrs. Glover had made rude comments about the scholarship to a private women's university ever since Katie found out she got it and actually had something to be excited and happy about.  It seemed to get under the Queen of Christianity's considerable layers of skin that  Katie wasn't going to a co-ed school, and she constantly implied that Katie would not be interested in attending a school with men as students too.  To her credit, Katie always acted like it was water off a duck's back.

As she continued her rant about Katie's screwed up sense of what was important-- spending time with her dying mom or completing page 137, Exercises A, B, and D, Mrs. Glover's beehive was a-bobbin', and her third chin-- which we all highly suspected she had to shave because it sure looked like it had a five o'clock shadow visible through layers of base and powder by that time of the day-- was jumping up and down in a rhythm separate from the rest of her face.  She  looked so freaking ridiculous, and her eyes expressed pure delight at watching Katie's face take on a vacant look.  I wondered where Katie was in her mind; what she must be thinking about right then.  Taking mental vacations when reality sucks too much to stay in it.  I know a little bit about that. 

The surprising thing about what I did that day is, I was Mrs. Glover's teacher's pet.  I took both Conversational French and French I from her, always did my homework, and didn't give her a hard time like a lot of people did.  What she didn't know is, I used to sit in her class and fantasize about hanging a fishhook from transparent line in the center of the doorframe, and when Mrs. Glover walked through the door, the hook would catch the beehive bun atop her greasy 'do.  She had no idea how little respect I had for her, not because of her ridiculous appearance or shitty accent, but because of the way she trampled on people's self-esteem.  As far as the fishhook, I never did it, but it gave me something to think about while she was slaughtering the French language.

Katie lay her forehead on her desk.  Her armor cracked, and she began to cry.  She broke down, I'm sure more from thinking about her mom than Mrs. Glover's tirade.  I was sitting in the front row (of course) right next to Katie, and I know I saw myself, my own armor cracking, in her.  It was Bo Brewster time, and I like to think it was Jesus Christ Himself lifting me up out of that desk and standing me up right in front of Mrs. Glover.

"Who the hell are you to tell her anything about the future?  She doesn't know from one day to the next whether her mom's going to be here, but instead of being compassionate to her, you make her life even worse.  What's wrong with you, Mrs. Glover?  You act like you're a perfect Christian, but you're actually a perfect bitch."

Her third chin bounced so hard off her polyester blouse,  I thought the makeup layers over the whiskers might crack and fall off.  Mrs. Glover  couldn't believe that  I -- the meek little perfect teacher's pet-- was standing up at the front of her classroom, pointing at her and yelling. She worked her way out of her desk chair until she was standing, her frosty pink painted fingernails nearly puncturing the laminated top of her desk.

  "What's wrong with you?  Who ARE you, Ashley Asher?  I've NEVER seen this side of you!" Her mouth hung open on the final word.

My heartbeat sounded in my ears. I could tell my face was red without even seeing it. "I'm a person who is sickened by watching you get off on torturing other people!  I'm a person who thinks you're a goddamned joke, Mrs. Glover, and you seem to be the only person in the universe who doesn't realize it!" How long had I thought about telling her that? Only from the time it started leaving my mouth. It surprised me as much as it did her.

Then I sat back down in my seat and became aware that my heart was beating so hard, I could see it through my shirt.  My whole body felt like a white-hot-charcoal briquette.  Whoosh, said the sound in my head.

She was speechless; the look on her face told me I had hurt her deeply. The good one, the reliable Ashley Asher, had gone to the Dark Side. The words I said still echoed off the walls, and I wanted them to stop.  My rage quelled slightly by my outburst, I began to feel  terrible for saying what I said to anyone, even a miserable bully like Mrs. Glover.  She had hurt other people and I had hurt her.  I was no better than she was, plus, she being an authority figure and all, I knew I was in deep shit.

 I didn't wait for her to send me to the office.  I picked up my stuff and took  myself there.  I couldn't even think about what would await me at home.  I was supposed to be perfect, and unlike other parents who rush to school to bail their kids out whenever they act like shit heads, I knew my parents would multiply whatever happened to me at school by one hundred.  It was going to be a long night on the sticky leather seat of doom.

 I sat in the office on an ugly chrome and orange-vinyl chair until the 3:15 school bell rang.  I waited for someone in my French class to bring down an office referral slip.  I expected Mrs. Glover to waddle downstairs and get the assistant principal, Mr. Watson, to take me out back and shoot me.  She never came down.  Nothing happened to me, and Mrs. Glover suddenly came down with the flu and stayed out of school the rest of that week,  and Monday and Tuesday of the next week too.  I haven't seen her since the day I gave her the shock of her life.

I think, maybe, Mrs. Glover was too ashamed of herself for the way she behaved, to tell on me for the way I acted.  I'll never know for sure.  My friend James told me that after I left, Mrs. Glover told everybody to study for the upcoming test, then she sat at her desk and stared at a paper.  Once in awhile she would swipe at her eyes with a tissue, and she didn't say another word to anyone for the rest of the class.

Even though I may feel like I got away with something since I didn't get into trouble, I also felt ashamed.  I felt proud of myself for standing up for Katie, but  I also knew  I took my defense of her to a level so low and so personal,  I blindsided Mrs. Glover completely.  I can be vicious when I see people being victimized.  It’s like Lionel Serbousek tells Bo Brewster in Ironman: “Bo, Redmond may or may not be an asshole, but your anger comes from your life.”