Searching for Lost Teachers
A dream about going back to find Mr. Dunn and Mr. Prezioso.
Last week, I packed up Perla with Haley and the kids and drove east toward Topsail Island in North Carolina for the annual Canever Family Beach Vacation. No matter how comfortable the place I’m staying or how large and clean the mattress I’m sleeping on at night, I never rest much when I’m away from home. The only benefit of my nights spent on foreign beds is this: my dream life becomes even more vivid than usual.
Midway through the week, I closed my eyes and woke up back in Bayonne, walking down Fifth Street toward the corner where the schoolyard of Mary J. Donahue Elementary splits the distance between Mickey’s grandparent’s house and my cousin’s a block away. The dream had two parts, and in this first one, I was looking for Mr. Dunn, the anthropology teacher I briefly described in “Creating Yanzek Hestal.”
Neither Mickey nor I knew a thing about Dunn before signing up for his anthropology elective our senior year at BHS. On the first day of school, we strolled into his classroom at the far corner of House Six. Inside, we were greeted by a grinning, middle-aged dude with leather skin and a neat flat-top haircut. He was leaning back in his chair, his legs kicked up on the desk. We didn’t realize it then, but by week’s end, it became apparent, at least to me, that it wasn’t a decision I’d made in the guidance counselor’s office the spring before that had brought me to Dunn. God himself had guided my best friend and me to the man who would become a kind of mentor for us before graduating and departing Bayonne for college the following summer.
Mr. Dunn was a globetrotter. Though he was as much a product of the Peninsula City as we were. I think that’s what made us trust him when, instead of lecturing or making us memorize lessons from a textbook, he regaled us with magical tales of island nations he’d gone scuba diving in, and then challenged us to locate them on the enormous world map at the front of his room. The only island I could verify as a real place was the Turks and Caicos, a chain Dunn had been to so often they’d made him an honorary citizen. After telling of how he’d eaten raw sea snails with the natives and wrestled tiger sharks in coral reef systems during summer break, Mickey and I suggested he petition the government to name him a sort of foreign ambassador. Or better yet, it’s White King. It was a bone-headed suggestion (“bonehead” was the term Mr. Dunn favored when Mickey and I challenged him to trivia about world geography or questioned the veracity of his exploits in the Caribbean). Yet instead of dismissing us, our teacher gave a long and serious explanation of the country’s legal system and how, as a British Overseas Territory under monarchic rule, the best government role he could aspire to, technically, would be prime minister.
I’ve thought about Dunn a hundred times since leaving Bayonne. He is one of the teachers who made the biggest impact on me believing I could become something more than what I’d seen before (right alongside Mrs. Giovinazzo and Ms. Z, also described in detail in “Yanzek Hestal”). Now that I’ve had months of strange encounters with my future self, my subconscious must’ve sought to track him down after Google failed to do so time and again in the past 17 years.
In my dream, I was standing on the sidewalk beside the school when I saw Dunn rounding the corner away from me. I chased him down, but when I got to the spot he’d last been in, he was gone. I scoured the streets of my hometown but found no sign of him anywhere else. Eventually, I was in a room meeting with someone, possibly a detective or a guidance counselor. As I explained my ordeal to the stranger, I kept my eyes on the floor. I told them what Dunn meant to me, why I yearned to see him one last time and thank him for putting up with all my stupid questions and telling me stories that, whether real or not, fortified the belief that a boy from Bayonne could become somebody outside its borders. And when I looked up and locked eyes with my interrogator, he had Mr. Dunn’s face. “I’m right here, bonehead,” he said, smirking. My eyes filled with tears.
The dream cut to another search scene.
Now that I’d been reunited with Dunn, I also had to find Mr. Prezioso, another of the teachers who’d guided me when I was 17 and needed it most. I’d met Prez on the last day of my sophomore year at BHS. A year earlier, I’d dropped out of the English–History honors program. It was a stupid decision made out of fear of failure and complacency, for that was also the time I dreamed of my band Catullus getting signed to a record label and touring the world. Fortunately, my Level-A1 history teacher, Mr. Maset, detected I didn’t belong with the normal kids and petitioned the school to let me back into honors for my junior year. I met Prez and his co-teacher, Mr. Sweeney, in their classroom before summer break to pick up copies of the dozens of books we’d read the next year, most of which remain my favorite a half lifetime later.
Mr. Prezioso has been described here before, most recently in my Attic Club story about when I wanted to be a World War II historian. He was exactly what you picture when you imagine a public school history teacher: shaggy hair, bushy mustache, grocery-store eyeglasses. He wore half-tucked, neutral-colored dress shirts with coffee-stained ties and loose-fitting slacks. Like Dunn, Mr. Prezioso was Bayonne through and through, an Italian-American son of Sicilian immigrants who lived in “God’s Country” (the name locals use to refer to the downtown area of the city, which has remained predominantly Irish and Italian through waves of newer, browner immigration). But he’d also told stories of getting arrested at college protests, presumably over civil rights or Vietnam. He was grumpy but gracious, stern but fair.
Junior year, he announced that we’d be one of his last classes; he was retiring the next year at 55, the earliest he could draw his state pension. After making it through his history class, I took Prez again for AP Government with Mickey and Jeremy during our senior year (three periods after anthropology with Mr. Dunn). He and Sweeney retired together at the end of the year. Ms. Z, the journalism teacher who my friends and I all had crushes on, and Mr. Maset took over the English–History honors program the next year. I’ve heard the program was discontinued a few years later, though I hope that’s not true. I wouldn’t be the writer, or the ham, I am today without Mr. Glover and Mrs. Forgione my freshman year, Mr Prez and Mr. Sweeney my junior year, and Mrs. Merkowsky and Mr. Szyposzynski my senior year of high school, egging me on toward achieving something meaningful with my life.
I saw Mr. Prez once more before heading south. In 2011, at a screening of The Fighter at Frank’s Theaters (now long gone), we talked for five minutes as he left with his wife and another couple. I told him I was at William Paterson University and would’ve brought him a pennant—he and Sweeney hung up all the pennants of the different colleges and universities their former students made it to—but I didn’t know where he lived or if he’d kept them after retiring. A year later, Mickey sent me a clip of Prez being interviewed by the local news after a shooting across the street from his house.
In December, with some help from Google, I went looking for that house with Haley. I’d just published Big Head on the Block and wanted to gift him a copy. I found the house from the news clip and rang each bell. I could feel my heart pumping from the adrenaline. When no one answered, I rang the nearest neighbor, but they didn’t answer either. Instead of leaving a copy behind, I got back in the car with Haley feeling sad that I couldn’t travel back in time to see another teacher who’s played such an important role in my education.
In my dream, I stood on the same sidewalk outside of what I could now confirm was Prez’s house because of a small detail my memory pulled from deep inside itself: a flag of the Conch Republic hanging just outside the front door. Prez had told a story my junior year about how, in 1982, Key West had seceeded from Florida. On a trip there, he’d picked up a flag and proudly displayed it every April 23 to commemorate the phony holiday. When I rang the bell, a dark-haired woman a little older than me came to the door. I told her I was looking for my high school teacher, and she said she was, too. One day, he’d up and left Bayonne. Her rent payments were made to a PO Box, and she had an important question for him that she wouldn’t tell me. But she did have something else for me.
In this alternate timeline, I had left a copy of my book on the porch. After she’d read it, she reached out to all the people who’d been helping her look for him asking that they look all the harder for this unwell kid living in Knoxville who missed his former teacher. She showed me copies of letters they’d written on my behalf to addresses they pulled from Google and the dark web. Each one had been returned to her unopened.
After a while, I left the woman’s house and was walking through the hallways of BHS. I passed my old locker in House 1, my old homeroom, and then walked into what seemed to be a mailroom with secretaries answering phones and shelves full of mail slots with teachers’ names beside them. One was marked Ronald Prezioso. And just as I noticed it, Prez walked into the room with his wife and the couple I’d seen him with at the movie theater all those years ago. He was sporting a flat cap and long coat (it must’ve been winter in this dream, much like when I went out looking for him with Haley). As I approached, Prez made small talk with the secretaries, laughing it up. He told me he’d left town for the same reason he’d retired young: life is too short to be stuck in the same place forever. He had his mail delivered to the school and would pick it up once or twice a year. He wasn’t on social media, though he showed me an iPhone, which he said his grandkids were teaching him how to use. He was curt, and the conversation was brief.
In my dream, Mr. Prezioso had no interest in learning how much he’d impacted me. He walked out of the room with no way for me to reach him besides camping out in that mailroom, hoping to catch him on his next trip up from the Conch Republic or wherever he was living. When I woke up, I was crying, though the tears were different from the earlier ones.
In the past three years since joining Substack, I’ve contacted many of my former teachers. Mr. Maset became a subscriber in 2023 (though he hasn’t opened any of my emails since). I became friends with Ms. Z on Facebook. We write each other from time to time. She’s read my book, which I left with an English friend of hers in Bayonne (like me and all the others, she’s left her hometown, too). Ms. Z gave me Mrs. Giovinazzo’s email address, and we exchanged a few wonderful emails. She said she’d order my book on Amazon.
Perhaps the reason I’ve been seeing apparitions in the basement, in a camping chair at the end of my driveway, on bike rides to abandoned movie theaters, and even as recently as last week in a trailer park being torn apart in Surf City (that story later), is because I spend so much time living and thinking in past tense. Is it possible I’m manifesting my future somehow? That I might, in 10 or 20 years, figure out a way to return and contact all the people I’ve lost one last time.
For now, I’ve found Mr. Dunn on Facebook and will write to him with a link to this story as soon as I hit publish. Social media tells me he moved not to Turks and Caicos but to another island in the Caribbean nearly a decade ago. I hope we meet again over Red Stripe, pointing out countries on a world map and telling fabricated stories of great feats no one but us would believe, before this life is over.
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At BHS, the smartest kids were in honors, the normal kids were in Level A, and the dumb kids who weren’t criminals were in Level B. Though, in the end, the classification system didn’t count for much. My brother was in Level B, is much more successful than I am, and reads all the same books.