“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others…. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” – P.B. Shelley
This story starts where it should have stopped. With an old classmate of mine—let’s call her Dana. Recently I reconnected with Dana on social media and discovered that she is married with children, and my reaction to this unremarkable mid-thirties fact was undue relief paired with overdue disgust—in myself, certainly, but in countless other as well. Somehow, it had been years since I’d even thought of the high school teacher who had so openly preyed upon her, and while I didn’t know exactly what had transpired then, I finally knew enough to want to know more.
So I opened a browser, searched his name.
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Mr. Longo was short and reptilian with slit-eyes and a thick, squat neck that plugged his head into his shoulders. He had slicked back black hair, and he compensated for the fact that many of his students towered over him by walking on the balls of his feet, creating a loping,bouncing gait as he moved between the rows of lab tables. Acne scars mottled his cheeks beneath his thick-lensed glasses, which magnified his eyes, and more acne rose in waxy welts like bee stings or burns on the back of his neck. He was not cool by any definition, but he was young, and where teachers were concerned that fact alone made him cool enough. He was of our world: He’d grown up in the neighboring town and was close enough in age to us that he could have played against my brothers in youth sports, though I was certain he’d never played sports. Still, he watched our shows, played our video games, and co-existed in our universe of dial-up AOL, where identity was malleable and conventional boundaries blurred. Mr. Longo’s screen name was Dr Mario 1. He was always logged on, and at the time I assumed he was patrolling fansites for the heavy metal band GWAR. He’d told us about them during class, how they wore costumes of spiked armor and sprayed fake blood on their crowds, and we’d laughed at his bizarre taste, his unembarrassed enthusiasm. His voice still cracked sometimes, and when it did he’d throw his head back to laugh along with us, his Adam’s apple a knob in his throat, where chest hair escaped from the neck of his shirt, the same dark, dense curls that shrouded his over-sized watch as he pointed to a diagram on the board, to the skeleton, “Mr. Bones,” fixed to its post in the corner, or to me, my friend Steve, and my not-yet girlfriend, Allison, seated together in the back. We thought we knew him, or we at least wanted to think we knew him, and it’s that small difference that troubles me now. In that gap resides this entire terrible story—and its moral.
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Twelve years after he taught at my school, Mario Longo was sentenced to eight years in prison to be served at Connecticut’s Brooklyn Correctional Institute. According to newspapers, Longo assaulted the victim over a five-year period, beginning when she was only fourteen. At the time of Longo’s arrest, he was no longer teaching at my old high school, but he was teaching at another Connecticut school, an alternative high school. The anonymous victim was not a student in that district, but Longo tutored her—or that was the pretense by which he got her to his house. There, after one tutoring session, he gave her a massage. He spoke with her about her sexuality and masturbation, and after she lost to him in Scrabble, he pressured her to text him naked pictures of herself as penalty for her loss. Eventually, she performed sex acts with Longo, whom she trusted, after he told her that she could hurt someone if she didn’t learn to do them correctly.
He was charged with second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to or impairing the morals of a minor. In the course of the investigation, the police found enough incriminating evidence in Longo’s home to levy additional charges: possession of child pornography in the first degree and a class one felony of voyeurism. He hadsecretly filmed his twelve-year old cousin and her friend changing into their swimsuits. He pled guilty to all charges. “I understand I am guilty for the poor decisions I have made in my life,” he told the court at sentencing. “The person who made those mistakes is someone who I have tried to change.”
Longo was thirty-six years old at the time of his sentencing, though his earliest recorded crimes dated back eight years prior, when he would have been twenty-eight. The papers, however, say nothing of the crimes he perpetrated at my school another six years before that.
How could they? We never reported them.
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I’m a high school English teacher now myself, and it can be tempting to dismiss the overwrought displays of love I witness in the hallways, but I try not to. Certainly it’s serious to them. And when I was their age, I too loved as if I were the first to ever feel that way. In fact, sometimes I think I’ve spent my adulthood chasing that first blush, trying to find Allison again and again.
It was the first day of ninth grade. Our lockers, side-by-side. She had looping blond bangs and silver braces that made her mouth appear too big for her thin, girlish face. She was new to the school and young for our grade, almost a year younger than the rest of us; in most ways, she was still a middle-schooler that first year of high school. To our surprise, we had every class together, a coincidence we went to great lengths to replicate every year that followed. We started speaking on the phone for hours every night, and we didn’t stop when the school year did.
Over the summer, I gazed at her yearbook photo while cradling the phone, listening to her voice. But when tenth grade began and Allison met me at our lockers once more, her braces were gone, her bangs grown out. She was no longer the girl I’d stared at in the yearbook all summer, and she knew it. She’d arrived that first day of school in a baby blue shirt that hinted at her new cleavage and revealed a mole I’d never had the occasion to see before.
Sophomore year also marked Mr. Longo’s arrival in our school. He was an assistant teacher for our chemistry class, logging classroom hours as a final requirement for his own teacher certification. We liked him right away. He didn’t take the class nearly as seriously as our actual teacher. If we feigned incompetence long enough, he more or less did our labs for us. This was particularly helpful to me, since schoolwork was not my priority. I was, however, a dedicated student in the subject of making Allison laugh, and Longo didn’t seem to mind my buffoonery. So when he was hired as a full-time teacher the next year and Allison and I learned we would have him for anatomy, we were excited. I told my friend Steve to join the class.
Allison and I wouldn’t officially date until our senior year, once Longo had left our school. Teacher turnover was normal, and I hadn’t given much thought to Longo’s exit after only one year as a certified, full-time teacher. Besides, I was in love! My world had shrunk to the space between Allison and me. She and I still spoke on the phone every night, and one evening when Allison called my house her voice was different. She’d been online, she said, and Mr. Longo had sent her an instant message. In it he explained that he had recently accompanied a friend, an artist, to a life drawing class. While his friend had sketched the nude model posing on the stool, Mr. Longo had written a poem inspired by the model. Much to his surprise, a publisher liked the poem! And so he was wondering whether Allison might be willing to model for him.
“Are you serious?” I said. She told me that she’d printed out the conversation, but she wasn’t sure what else to do. I wasn’t sure either.
But I am sure it made us think about Dana.
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In elementary school I’d been friendly enough with Dana, but by high school we’d more or less stopped talking. Her mother had carried on the most obvious of affairs with one of our middle school teachers, and the public implosion of her home life had cast her natural quietness with a crimson tint of shame. The town was full of rumors, and she’d had to exist among them.
Had Longo heard the rumors too? Did he choose her because he knew she was vulnerable?
Now, of course, not only as an adult but as a teacher myself, the role of—the abuse of—power in Longo’s relationship with Dana horrifies me. But not as much as it must have frightened the girls I went to school with. Even if Longo hadn’t made direct advances on them, they’d seen him go unreported and unpunished for his relationship with Dana. Their knowledge that he was willing to act but that our community was not must have given him a terrifying power and made his mere presence—a passing smile in the hallway—feel like an open threat.
When I was sixteen, I didn’t see that. Instead, I located no small amount of my feigned pride in my assumption that I was equal with, or superior to, my lame teachers. If I didn’t recognize that Longo had any power, then I couldn’t entertain the notion that he was abusing it. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I was the only one who felt that way. We’d had five principals in four years. The dysfunctionempowered our teenage impulse toward self-importance and disrespect.
There was, too, the fact that other girls in my grade were dating guys who had graduated from, dropped out of, or never attended college. Their existence on the periphery of my life—buying us beer for parties, even hosting—made Longo’s behavior seem something like normal.
Even so, my teachers were mandatory reporters obligated by law to notify authorities if they suspected abuse. And how couldn’t they have had suspicions? Surely they, too, knew that Dana had been seen with Longo off of school grounds—at a gas station, at the mall, in his car. They had to have noticed how Dana’s friends were distancing themselves from her, how she spent more and more time lingering in his classroom, alone, laughing too loudly at his jokes. And certainly they must have witnessed Dana walking him to his car after school, his cautious goodbyes—a squeeze of her hand, a rub of her shoulder—before she jogged off to track practice.
What did they imagine was taking place?
Maybe, I think now, we didn’t imagine. Maybe that was the problem.
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Allison is happily married now and has two adorably big-eared children. But I still can’t help wonder what if? She came from a stable, two-parent home, and she had friends whom she knew she could trust. But what if she had been vulnerable in the ways that Dana was? Or what if, for any reason, she’d felt compelled to fulfill Longo’s request, and she agreed to meet with him?
I imagine she would have lied to her parents about what she was doing after school, and, to avoid rumors, she would have met Longo that afternoon in the parking lot of the local IGA, not pausing to question his explanation that it was easier to drive together than to give her directions to his house. She’d leave her car there, climb inside his late-model compact, and as he drove her to his house, he would have told her more about his poetry, about the muses, and how he was sure she would be a wonderful model. Not to worry, all she had to do was sit there.
Soon Longo would park in the driveway, hurry her inside.
Maybe Allison would ask for a snack, or water, or a tour of the small house—anything to delay what she’d come for. And as she scanned the room—a lone stool in the center, a coffee table moved out of the way, over by the window, its curtains drawn—her body would go cold with fear. Of course she wouldn’t notice the video camera among the clutter on the bookshelf.
When it was all over, Longo would have rushed Allison back to her car so she would get home in time for her family dinner. How would Allison feel then? Would she understand right away what had happened? Would she be reliving with every shortened breath the unending minutes she’d perched on that stool? Certainly she’d be oddly quiet when she sat down to dinner.
“Everything okay?” her mom would ask, perhaps thinking that Allison and I had fought.
“I’m just tired.”
That night, Allison would have stayed a long time in her barn, tending to her horses, too scared to cry. She’d shovel the manure, fetch hay from the loft, and scatter it at her horse’s feet to preoccupy them while she filled their buckets with grain. The routine would feel comforting, and she’d wish she could do these chores all night long. But eventually her mother would holler for her. That night she wouldn’t call me on the phone, and I’d get no answer when I called her.
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I recently reached out to Allison on Facebook. I see her rarely now, every few years, and our interactions are always friendly but stilted; after being such close friends, we’d entered our year-long romance with the naive assumption that we would be forever. But Allison was kind in her response and thoughtfully indulged my questions over the phone. She told me, “I bet if I dug long enough in my attic, I would probably find the printout of those instant messages,” and I laughed at the idea. Sixteen years had passed, and we were talking about a single sheet of paper.
But later that day she texted me a photo of the printout.
The document itself is printed on lined paper, hole-punched, probably pulled from one of Allison’s school binders; if I were unable to read, it might be a charming relic of a lost era. But I can read, and I can see now so much in the text that I wasn’t able to see when I was younger.
The message he sends her to start their conversation was so tactical that he must have learned this approach elsewhere: “Okay, so I freaked you totally out, right?” Once Allison responds with confusion, he clarifies that he had sent her an IM a few minutes prior. Allison goes on to blame her AOL connection for the message’s not having come through, but already Longo has managed to frame his future request within a sort of innocent self-awareness. He adds, “Okay. I just wanted to be sure I didn’t give you a massive coronary.”
Now that he has made himself sympathetic and has preemptively normalized his out-of-bounds request, he responds to Allison’s reasonable question about what his missing instant message had said: “I asked if you’d ever consider posing nude for an artist if it paid $40/hr.”
As he goes on to explain this request, his diction becomes stilted, absent contractions, and his sentences stiffer, shorter—what, I’d suggest, may indicate he had even copied and pasted it.
Dr Mario 1: Okay, well, a friend of mine is a professional painter. She paints mostly nudes. One day I sat in on her session. I had an idea—to write a poem that was inspired by a nude model…
Dr Mario 1: I sent that poem to an editor who forwarded it to a publisher. They want me to write an anthology and they will publish it. They would like five more samples by July 18th…
Dr Mario 1: So I asked my artist friend how she gets models. She says that you have to pay models a wage…
Dr Mario 1: The publisher offered me an advance on the poems. $40/poem. So I’m using that money to offer to models.
Dr Mario 1: So, anyway, from all that I’m asking everyone I know if they’d consider it for $40/hr.
He might have found a more plausible story for a science teacher.
Over the years I’d forgotten that he’d offered her money. (Would that make it more or less legal?) Perhaps most surprising to me, though, is what Allison says to Longo at the very end, clearly in an effort to escape the conversation: “brad is like screaming upstairs so I have to go. but good luck on your poems and stuff.” I have no memory of my name appearing in the document. Nor do I remember being at Allison’s house when the messaging occurred. Had I been there? Or had Allison dropped my name to suggest to Longo that he should stay away?
I swear she’d first told me over the phone.
I called her again after she texted the document to thank her and assure her I would use it responsibly, and she shared something else she remembered. Dana had been in our junior year anatomy class. “I remember,” she told me, “because she sat at the table right in front of us, and you and Steve used to make jokes about how big her butt was.” I make no claims about having been a good kid, or of even being a good adult, and her memory rang true with me immediately.
I recognize now that comments like those helped create the environment in which Dana would be receptive to Longo’s advances, the insecurities he would play upon, but on the phone that day with Allison, all I could think to say was, “God, what a little fucker I was.” We both laughed, but behind our laughter was something else, something shameful and much more honest. A few minutes later, Allison would voice some of those unspoken thoughts for the both of us: “When I look back, I’m like, you’re an idiot for not saying anything.” Allison has stayed in the area, and she recalled the moment when she saw Longo’s face on the local news after his arrest. “If I had done something,” she said, “then nothing would have happened to those people.”
She’s not wrong, though of course she shouldn’t put it all on herself. Those statements are equally true for me. And true, too, I can’t help but wonder, for how many others?
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The last time I interviewed for teaching jobs, two of the four schools that welcomed me for campus visits were managing teacher-student abuse scandals. One was a cover up of widespread, decades-long abuse, the other a lone teacher who, after he was caught, jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Longo’s actions were not only Longo’s actions, of course. They happen in schools across the nation, public and private, day schools and boarding, and our collective discomfort with the thought of such abuse helps create the silence that the perpetrators rely on.
The victim of Longo’s later crimes, the victim who would send him to prison, received damages amounting to one million dollars. She is now in her late-twenties, and though I hope she has managed to move on, I don’t know. She has remained anonymous, with good reason. More and more I’m realizing how important anonymity is in issues like this—not only for reasons of privacy, but for purposes of awareness as well. She could have any name, be anyone.
The same is true for Longo, who was denied parole but who will soon be released—a fact I certainly don’t want to think about, but which I now recognize I—and we—need to imagine.
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A week after Longo’s release, his mother has a date. The scent of the meal she’s cooking—for the man, not for him—wafts upstairs to his bedroom. His mother had been nervous to mention the date, nervous to ask if she could have a little privacy, if there was anywhere he could go.
Now she knocks at his door. “Mario? Are you in there?”
He tells his mother to come in, but she doesn’t. She opens the door and stands at the threshold, wearing one of her good dresses. “Well,” she says, “how does your mother look?”
He tells her that she looks nice, and she reminds him that her date will arrive soon.
“I just need to put on some shoes. Then I’ll be gone.”
“Where will you go?” she asks, and there it is—her fear of him.
He pulls on one sneaker, another. His old clothes don’t fit anymore, but his shoes do.
He jams the twenty she gave him earlier into his pocket. “I’ll find some place.”
Together they descend the stairs and enter the kitchen, where a tinfoil-topped casserole dish sits on the stove. They pass a cabinet where his mother thinks she’s hidden her laptop.
In the mudroom, his mother says, “I know I said you had to go, but—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” he lies. “You need to have a life too.”
“You can always come back. Even if he’s still here. If you’re bored or—”
“Okay,” he says. Then he opens the door and steps out into the world.
All names in this piece have been changed except for the author’s.