Nobody but nobody knew anything about elbow grease anymore. People were so friggin’ lazy. Work like a German! It was the golden key to riches and prosperity beyond imagining. Most American educators were shell-shocked, blown. In the trench warfare of public schooling, one needed to concentrate, work hard, confront problems and wrestle them down. Engage the mind. Work! In the trenches, friends, family, and personal recreation were inexcusable diversions. Insipid fuck-fiddle. You could pick up on that action later. Climb the ladder and then harvest the bounty…in the meantime, later, alligator.

In Hammerstein’s office, on the left side of his desk in a small glass cage—the bottom covered with pea gravel, the top fixed with a warming lamp—Hammermeister kept a tarantula named Lulu. Hammermeister waited a few days before he brought the spider in. He wanted to get the lay of the land first. Lulu was a statement, and he wasn’t totally sure how to “play” these Americans. A big-ass hairy spider could get to be too much, but then, with his pleasant, affable good looks, his Mr. Nice Guy demeanor, Hammermeister wanted to establish a darker aspect of himself—a presentation of danger. If it gets down to it, boys and girls, if it comes down to it, I’ll fuck you up in a second! I’ll mess up yo’ face!

Did he really say that?

No, but he conveyed it just the same. He put out the vibe. When a recalcitrant student was sent to his office, Hammermeister liked to rock back in his executive’s chair, tapping the edge of his desk with a number one Dixon Executive pencil, affecting a debonair Donald Sutherland style, and say, “You aren’t getting through to me, my friend.” Tap, tap, tap. “You aren’t getting through.” It got to even the baddest of the bad—the sneaky quiet malefactors, the toughest thugs, the sulkers, wrongdoers of various shapes and descriptions. Hang a leading question on the guilty soul and he spills his guts. It never fails.

Hammermeister was the first administrator to show up in the morning and the last to leave at night. He attended the football games, the band, orchestra, and choir recitals—plays. He even showed up at girls’ B-squad volleyball games. He wanted everyone to know that he was at the school and of it, and that because of him and through the sheer force of his personality, the school was going to get better, improve, blaze into the heavens—and the plan was working. A man has to have a plan, and Harold had a righteous plan. Beautiful, wonderful, mar-ve-lous!

The students and discipline were his forte. He soon had them all under control—the wild-ass freshman girls, the dopers, the gang bangers; the whole spectrum of adolescent vermin. It didn’t have to be “I’ll fuck you up!” It hardly ever was…really. With Lulu on the desk he could focus totally.