There is Alan who draws exquisite pictures of guns and has the face of an old, old Black man. There's Peter Garcia who has a messy notebook, and Zuelieka who is snippish, but whose eyes fill, at times, inexplicably, with tears.

There's Samantha who tells Elizabeth, regularly, that she hates her. There is Nadia who moves about with "ancient modesty." There is Sammy who gropes, Charles and his hip-hop magazines, Randolph who one day pops up, to everyone's great amusement, and says, "Yo, Miss, yo a hot girl?"

There are the Three Weird Sisters --- Cindy, Marcy, Lucille --- who say, regularly, "Elizabeth, you are SOOOOO boring." There is Sarah Petel who gets hate letters and is harassed by the other girls and one day is chased through the streets and into the subway where she gets her beautiful nose broken.

And as if this wasn't enough, there are the other teachers, who don't seem to have her troubles at all, Leon the principal. This school is "truly like a family," she thinks,

one of those sitcom families where the inept dad intones something and the kids humor him and then go off and do whatever they want, or at least, what they can get away with.

Leon wants Elizabeth to teach Call of the Wild. She is determined to teach The Glass Menagerie. She wins. Or do the wild calls of her classeses win out in the end?

Any of us who ever itched to teach would probably abandon that idea at once after reading some of the hideously funny, knock-you-over rampages described in Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity. This is the real --- although certainly not the right --- stuff.

Gold starts off by telling us that only thirty-five percent of the students in New York City are reading at their grade level. That means that sixty-five percent are not. Twenty percent of students will drop out of high school, and of the remainder, only half will graduate.

These are the figures that she gives us on page two, and by the time we reach page 329, we understand all too well. And, too, long before page 329, we begin to suspect Gold isn't a very good teacher She doesn't much care for discipline and since most of the students seem to be there just to keep them off the streets of the Queens, they didn't have much motivation to try.

She isn't the Miss Field I had in the eighth grade who sucked me into literature (with, I am ashamed to confess, The Call of the Wild). Or that Ichabod Crane look-alike, Mr. Wilkie, in the tenth grade, who made math come alive for me.

But Gold has done something else as spectacular. Whether she's a sterling teacher or not is, at this point, moot --- she left New Millennium at the end of the school year. What she has done is to write a book about teaching that is howlingly funny, not a little tragic, and impossible to put down.

We not only get to know Alan and Sarah and Cindy and all the rest, we get to know, all too well, the reprehensible failures of the public school system. At the same time we get to know (and to love) this woman who can stop the narrative, as she does, and says, "look at me: shabby clothes, bad moods, dark circles under my eyes from night after night of insomnia." This is one who wants to do nothing more than write poetry and win poetry contests and be invited to travel and to do readings, but who through chance and circumstance ends up in an impossible job in a ridiculous excuse for a place of learning in a grim part of the city.

Gold can write like an old master, when she, for instance, refers to clouds "that turn themselves in a moment from frying pans into rhinoceroses;" or, when she sees Peter Garcia, thinks herself back to the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, seeing him as "my parfit gentil knight" --- a boy who has a notebook, a messy notebook, a very messy notebook whose papers slither out and go all over the floor and seeing this, at that Fellini or Proustian moment she remembers a kid who had notebook just like that in the eighth grade and when it fell and went all over the floor

she had to get on her hands and knees and crawl after those papers, while the teacher gave her a lecture on neatness and her classmates cackled their heads off.

"But I wasn't laughing, Peter. How could I laugh? I was the one on my hands and knees."

Perhaps this is the rub for her. Gold is just a little too much like these kids --- just too much like them with their not-too-well disguised foibles and sensitivities. She's just too much like them to be the authority they need, to be the perfect master who gets them to shut up their stupid Walk-Mans and their bad-mouthing her and bellowing HOMO HOMO HOMO or lying around on the desks or the floors, to just sit down and shut up and start to work.

As Gold is about to wind up the year, to leave and begone forever, we find ourselves thinking that it isn't a complete loss, this time of hers at Millennium. One or two students have picked up something she laid down despite the uproar. And she's picked up a thing or two herself. How to lie, to get what she wants, how to work around the system. How to put up with the noise and, even, at one point, contribute some noise of her own. For after Tiffany comes right out and tells Gold to "kiss my ass," she confesses, "I do not know what I am saying," for

Everything extraneous --- hair, anklebone, thumbnail, my upcoming visit to Leon's office -- is burnt away and the only things that remain are mouth, heart, lungs, fury, June, June which is setting me free, but for what, I don't know, I am tired of imagining, but no matter. For these minutes, even imagination is extra. Why imagine when you are utterly in the moment, and the moment is complete? In the beginning was the Word. It needed me, and I needed it, and the only thing I can see is that smug smile dying on Tiffany's face.

And then when she is done, "I sag, exhausted, spent."

And then?

Applause.

9A is applauding.

9A is applauding ... me.

All of them...

Wave after wave, it comes, applause, and I don't know how long it goes on for. I am too far away to either stop them or egg them on.