Ask me to say chiaroscuro three times fast and I can do it. Ghirlandaio? I can nail that one too, thanks to Mr. Hames.
He was surely the most frightening man I had ever seen in my sheltered upbringing. His excess skin?which he had on account of losing something like 200 of the 400 pounds he had weighed before he had his stomach stapled?dangled from his chin like a turkey gobbler. It swung when he moved his head from side to side, an act of disapproval that he performed often.
His eyebrows had a natural, unnaturally peaked arch that made him look like the Grinch, especially when he didn’t get what he wanted. He wore a pair of now trendy black-rimmed glasses, a look which he probably stole from Truman Capote, and he had a very southern, very feminine manner which he probably stole from Capote too. He was around the age of 60.
In one of my first classes with him, a Renaissance art history course that he offered during my 10th grade year, he made a girl so upset that she fled the classroom and dropped the class mid-semester, all because she couldn’t pronounce the word chiaroscuro. But before you feel sorry for her, consider that for the remainder of the four-hour class period, he sat at his desk clipping his fingernails while the rest of us sat with our sphincters held so tight from anxiety that it made it hard to breath when it came our turn to read aloud.
When I started working as Mr. Hames’ assistant my first year at my new high school, he was not someone I considered to be my friend. Sitting on the opposite side of his office from him in an uncomfortable, black, wooden chair, I was so scared of him that I couldn’t speak unless he spoke to me. I suffered on many occasions from painful periods of silence and discomfort.
He barked orders at me constantly, orders that he considered self-explanatory but which
I could not for the life of me understand. I was afraid to ask him to repeat himself so that maybe I would have a shot at ordering the right amount of baby shower gifts from his jeweler, for example, or at pasting restaurant listings in the order he preferred into his big black book of names and numbers. (Though I’m not sure when he used them, since most of the restaurants were in foreign countries, and since most days I got him an Everything-On-It Chili Dog and a Dr. Pepper from the local diner for lunch).
On one occasion I was sent on an errand for lemon-pepper sauce for Mr. Hames’s chicken salad and tomatoes. Little did I know that lemon-pepper sauce does not exist, and that what he had actually requested was lemon-pepper salt???one of the many negligent acts on my part. I went to three grocery stores in town, begging for the sauce in a state of panic excessive for task at hand. The grocers assured me that they had never carried such a sauce.
An hour-and-a-half later, after I had finally discovered my mistake, I shyly walked across the floor to Mr. Hames’s desk with the bottle of salt.
He sat in the same position in which I had left him, his gaze down with his forehead in the palm of his hand, and a big plate of tomatoes beneath his nose. As I handed him the salt, I told him I was sorry???no response. He salted the tomatoes and ate them (inhaled them, rather) quicker than it took me to walk across the room and sit down. As I looked up from my chair, I saw his head tilt upwards in a gesture of sheer ecstasy, as he murmured in forgiveness, “Mm-mm. It was worth it.”
