Bill Safer

Bill Safer

          After two years at ET Wrenn Junior School, my wife and I took our baby daughter Ruth and the foetus that was to be our daughter Abbie and went to teach high school in the Guam public education system. We were assigned to positions at Inarajan High School, a rural school near the far southern tip of the island, with pupils who came mostly from Chamorro, or the local islander, families.

          Inarajan High School was a place where student academic motivation was a personal matter. Those who wanted to learn what we were teaching did; those who didn’t had no reason to. The way of life that evolved in the south of Guam over the centuries required little advanced literacy. The fruit of the reef, the coconut-palm, and the jungle were still available to those who knew how to take them; the Government provided jobs or assistance for the acquisition of more world-economy needs like pickup trucks and cigarettes and boom-boxes and beer; and the church and the extended families provided social structure and support.

          Guam’s original, indigenous name, ‘Guahan’, means ‘we have’.

          The school was on a hill looking down on a little village with a postcard church, the ocean extending endlessly beyond. It was a large, two-story, concrete structure with external hallways. We joked that the kids at Wrenn would have been throwing each other over the rails of the upstairs passageways. The gym had no walls, just pillars, on two and a half sides, presumably to let the trade winds cool those sweating within it.

          The kids at Inarajan were highly sceptical about haole (honky; anglo; pakeha) teachers in particular, and I don’t blame them. Not only were they accustomed to these statesiders showing up and trying to impose their own, foreign ways on them for maybe a year, maybe less, and then shooting through, but the imported teachers were also, to put it kindly, a motley bunch.

          The Chamorro teachers were, with one or two exceptions, fairly stable, well-adjusted people, educated on the mainland — or at least Hawaii — but absolutely comfortable within island culture. They were the local educational success stories, who had returned to their villages to try to help: they knew the score and had little enough to prove.

          There were also a few Filipino teachers, hired as scabs during a teachers’ strike a few years previously, apparently self-conscious about their Tagalog accents and doggedly ingratiating towards those in authority. I remember once, a month or so into the school year, when the Governor announced that he was coming to Inarajan H.S. to dedicate the new wing. It had been finished for more than a year, but it was an election year and his handlers had identified this as a primo photo op. They told us the day before and made it clear that we were to let our students out of class to be background scenery for the TV cameras. The Filipino teachers went home and came back the next day with huge platters of expensive and meticulously prepared fiesta food for the Governor’s reception — entirely without being asked.

          The stateside teachers were universally — as far as I could tell — bent in one way or the other. There were those who came to Guam for the surfing or scuba-diving or sail-boarding. There were the born-again, fundamentalist bible-thumpers who came to save the natives from the curse of Papist idolatry, Guam being well over 90% Catholic of the sixteenth-century Spanish variety. But most were uncategorisable one-of-a-kinds — adventurers and misfits who had used their teacher certifications as passports to exotic (but comfortable and relatively safe) lives.

          Clearly the most popular teacher in the school was Bill Safer, a tall, lean, loud lefty (just a touch to the left of his hero Fidel, and an admirer of the Soviet Union) with a flowing grey beard. Safer was a science teacher, but, as he put it, “Most of these kids don’t need to know this bullshit they teach as science; I teach revolution, comrade!”

          He had an endearing way of calling everyone “comrade”.

          What he did in the way of classroom teaching was show movies. He gave the kids a list of 25 or so things to do in the semester, if they wanted to, and let them give themselves their own grades.

          Sometime during the first week or so of the school year, I was sitting in the non-smoking teachers’ lounge when Safer came in to use the photocopier. All of us present were just joking around about something, and Safer responded to some comment by saying, “Yeah-yeah,” in a little singsong, the first ‘yeah’ being about three notes higher than the second. And it sounded familiar. I knew I’d known somebody else once who’d yeah-yeah’d the same way. In a few seconds it came to me and I just casually asked him, “Bill, did you ever know a guy named Yabo Yablonsky?” [See #24 in this series]

          Safer looked at me as if somebody had just stuffed an ice cube up his ass. Finally he said, “Yabo Yablonsky and I were on the same swimming team in Brooklyn in 1948!”

          I still had Yabo’s phone number and I urged Safer to call him, but he refused. All he would say was, “What would I say to him?” When I contacted Yabo and told him about running into Safer, he said pretty much the same thing.

          Safer had seen combat in the Korean War and had hated every second of it. “I shit my pants with fear more than once,” was what he had to say about his wartime adventures. He had, however, plenty to say about war in general, none of it complimentary.

          Inarajan High School had a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programme with a proud tradition of winning close-order drill competitions, the team doing all kinds of fancy things with their dummy M-1s. I thought of them as the boys’ baton-twirler squad. Calling it an ‘officers’ training operation struck me as a cruel joke. The poor kids spent so much time drilling they were rarely in class, and most of them seemed headed for trouble meeting what were then the requirements to enlist in the Army as privates, let alone as officers.

          The teacher in charge of ROTC was an Army major. He used to march about the school in his officer’s dress uniform. It had large amounts of braid. I couldn’t help but salute him when we passed each other in the school’s covered outdoor corridors, and he’d salute me back. Once, unaware of the symbolism of what I was doing, I saluted him with my left hand. He announced loudly that he wasn’t going to return a left-handed salute.

          Then Safer came up, louder than the Major. “I’ll salute you,” he barked. “When I was in the Army they told me to salute the uniform, not the man. But I’m saluting you because everyone deserves respect. I’m not saluting your uniform. The uniform sucks. It doesn’t deserve any respect at all.”

          Before coming to Guam some years before, the Safer family had been living in various parts of the Caribbean, their last location before Guam having been Guyana. They had known the people at Jonesville, the place famous for its mass suicide. Safer refused to believe they’d committed suicide (“Primo people, Richard! Beautiful people!”). He strongly suspected that they had all been murdered, probably by some agents of the U.S. government who had come with the congressman who got killed in the incident. “And,” he concluded, “they were just sharing, gentle people who were no threat to anybody.” I asked him why, if they were out in the jungle and no threat to anybody, anybody would want to kill them all. He conceded that that was a good question.

          Bill’s wife, Brenda, was closer to my age than Bill was. They had two boys in elementary school and a girl a year older than Ruth. The boys were named Adam and Pol. Adam was blonde; Pol was Micronesian. The girl, Amanda (whom Brenda called ‘demanda’), was also blonde and confidently bolshie, rather like her dad.

          Safer was fond of telling a story about how shortly after Adam was born, the doctor had offered to circumcise him. “‘I’ll circumcise your mother!’, I told him!,” he more or less shouted, and launched into a lecture on the evils of circumcision. When I pointed out to him that his father had had him circumcised, he said, “Ah, but he was ignorant, comrade, and I’m not.”

          One place where he did seem to have a bit of conflict and doubt was in the area of bringing up his kids. Although he despised Western Civilisation in general and the colonial mindset in particular, it bothered him that Adam was growing up like an island kid who felt no reason to learn school stuff. The second school year we were on Guam he and Brenda sent Adam to a church-run private school that emphasised academics. I can remember him hectoring the poor kid: “You’re there to learn the subjects! Ignore the bullshit religion they teach you!”

          An avid anti-colonialist, as one might expect, but living in a colonial environment, he spoke the Chamorro language as best he could. To my untutored ear, however, his Chamorro vocabulary seemed to be limited to a few idiomatic expressions and swear words, but he ladled contempt on the haoles on the island who didn’t even try.

          Safer was at the core of a beatnikish social circle, which meant the availability of what on Guam is called songi. They lived in what people on Guam call a boonie house in Merizo — called ‘Malessu’ by people speaking Chamorro —  a somewhat isolated village on the island’s far southwestern coast. It was a slapdash affair with a big, open lanai; I’m sure it was built before the typhoon-proofing requirements came into Guam’s building code. The feeling it gave me was of adjusting closely to nature rather than of dominating it. Its big lanai seemed to be almost always filled with people.

          Sugar cane grew between the house and the driveway, which was usually blocked by Safer’s sailboat when he wasn’t fishing. A huge mango tree between his garden and the next provided marvellous shade, a place from which to hang a swing, and an enormous number of mangos in season. Chamorros like their mangos green and hard and bitter, sliced up, salted, and soaked in a mix of rice vinegar, raw sugar, garlic, ginger, and super-hot boonie peppers. They don’t seem to like them sweet and ripe.

          The house was close to the neighbours as well as to nature. The smell when they were singeing the hair off a pig they’d just killed was a potent experience when we were downwind from them. Safer assured me that the sounds that came when they’d killed the pig before I got there had been truly horrible.

          Still, the inside part of the house was hot and damp and far from mosquito-free. It was a place where a person would sweat copiously when no breezes could be found. Some people said that Safer had a permanent case of body odour, but I didn’t notice.

          The only part of the house that was air-conditioned was the little room where Brenda kept her computer. In 1986 the computer age was just beginning, and just by being able to use one Brenda was able to bring in money. Brenda was also into homeopathic therapy, the first person I recall having met who was, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Alfredo Valentino had dabbled in it without mentioning it. It seemed like hogwash to me.

          Safer, however, smoked cigarettes (then quit, then started smoking again); he knew how to get the alcohol down and wasn’t above a bit of pride in how strong and healthy he was anyway. Guam’s climate and soil are not conducive to dairying, and at least in the mid-1980s all dairy products were imported in one form or another, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. When at last a milk-reconstituting plant on Guam started turning out full-cream milk he was in heaven. “This is real milk, comrade!” he gloated, a white moustache on his grey one. No wussy fear of saturated fats and cholesterol for him. I didn’t get the point.

          He had highly refined woodworking skills. I think he told me once that he’d worked as a carpenter building Hollywood movie sets after surviving the Korean War. Another teacher, named Mick Subbert, worked out some kind of deal with Safer to build a hardwood sailboat from scratch on Mick’s back lanai. It was a fascinating process to follow.

          When at last my wife got the job in New Zealand and I was preparing to leave, I was astounded by how much Brenda knew about New Zealand politics, which were then going through intense turmoil. I knew next to nothing then.

          We kept in communication on and off for a while after I left Guam. Then Safer retired and the family moved to Tinian, a somewhat smaller, less-developed, and less-populated island to the north of Guam, and we lost touch. An April, 2005 Google search revealed that Mrs. Brenda Safer coordinated this year’s Tinian Elementary School Poetry Contest.

          In about 2013 or 2014 Brenda joined facebook. She posts mostly items of interest on Tinian and solid leftwing articles.