“I’m Zovak.”
“I’m Jack.”
“Hagop.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, if I was in Armenia. But on my birth certificate it’s Jack, from Burbank.”
“Good. Married?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so nice. Kids?”
“One.”
“Precious. Boy?”
“A girl.”
“God bless your whole family. Ok. Good.”
He was about five foot seven and he hadn’t yet invited me to sit and I felt like a giant in his small office where he sat behind his desk.
“I was on break. I’m teaching the grammar class. I was going to ask you…”
“Two hours of grammar. They must want that diploma pretty bad?”
“Yeah, they’re motivated. Well, most of them. Night school’s different from high school. I was just wondering about the books…”
“I’m single. Just me. No real family to speak of. That’s good though. I like it. It’s alright.”
“Uh-huh.”
I sat myself down across from him and rested my binder on his desk. I hadn’t noticed how tired I was. He wore black. A black turtleneck, black pants, black shoes. He had a gold watch. Sometimes he wore grey. His face was square and his smile was genuine.
“I’m a vice-principal. I’ve been at other schools but at the end they put you at Adult School. At night. Don’t stay here too long. It’s the elephant graveyard.”
“Huh.”
“Don’t tangle with the big boys. They will pay you back, eventually.”
“Really.”
“At any point. Even at the end.”
“That’s not good.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Well, I….”
“You’ll see it. You might experience it. You’ll be sad. Then you’ll be mad. Then you’ll say, that’s just how the world is.”
“I’m at Roosevelt. I’m doing ok.”
“That’s good because here they think they’re adults. But most of them are just grown up puppies. You still have to scold them when they make a mess. Roll up the newspaper and whack them sometimes. They’re puppies.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t like to be the mean guy but sometimes you have to. I tell the Roosevelt kids that I teach night school so they can see me now or see me later.”
“Good. That’s good. Puppies. Sometimes you step on their tail, but they’ll get over it. You take your wife out to dinner?”
“What? Uh, yeah.”
“You like Mexican?”
“Sure.”
“It’s the best.”
“Yeah, I…”
“The real stuff though.”
“Real?”
“Yes. There’s a place Downtown. Near Downtown. It’s dark in there. But it’s a dump so you don’t want to see everything.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s small but it’s cheap. And the food. It’s the best ever. Anywhere.”
“Ok.”
“You don’t believe me. But when I go there. Yeah, I go by myself. It’s ok. I’m alone in this world, but I’m all right.”
“Of course.”
“The food is hot. Like you’ve never known.”
“Hot, huh?”
“You can’t believe it.”
“Maybe I could.”
“Like your mouth and face and stomach and all your insides are on fire.”
“Wow.”
“Your intestines are, are melting!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Even your ears are burning. From the inside out.”
“Oh, wow.”
“It makes me cry and sweat and my nose runs.”
“What?”
“Fantastic. The sweat pours down my face and down my neck.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Of course. I eat the peppers. Most people avoid them. At that restaurant they at first just brought me a little dish of their hottest hot peppers. They stood around to see. They didn’t know. But the last few times they brought me the whole jar.”
“Wait a minute now.”
“God’s truth.”
“Well.”
“Are you a religious man?”
“You could say that. I try to…”
“It’s a religious experience.”
“Eating a meal?”
“Listen to me now. It’s like this. The beans and the rice and a warm tortilla? That’s just the stuff we have to have to get through this world.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not that that’s not important.”
“But….”
“But the hot salsa and the hot peppers, and the burning and suffering, and the sweating and crying! That’s the real thing.”
“Suffering?”
“It’s all part of it. Passion. So you know you’re alive and life means something.”
“I don’t know if I…”
“You don’t but you will. And you have your wife and child, and you’ll have other children. They’ll grow and laugh and cry and you’ll go to Yosemite and the coast. You’ll stand in the shadow of a redwood or you’ll stand barefoot on the shore while a wave touches the top of your feet. It will be wonderful.”
“Yeah, that’s what I…”
“But you should experience the food. The sweat pouring out everywhere. The place is fantastic. I go there often. As often as I can.”
“Zovak, don’t you like Armenian food?”
“Of course. Dolma, sarma, yalanchi. Boreg, choreg, kufteh. It’s all family food. It’s amenable to our digestive tact. It’s in our DNA, you might say. When you have that, you are back in Grandma’s house. Your grandma cooks good food, right?”
“Both of them.”
“Of course. They’re from the Old Country, huh?”
“Yeah, and my cousin’s grandma. She cooked great Armenian food, too.”
“Yes, naturally. That’s home food.”
“Pilaf. Bulghar.”
“All of it. It takes you back. Even all the way back to the Old Country.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s not fire. That’s ice. You’re not burning, you’re preserving.”
“I guess.”
“The Mexicans though. They might know something we don’t know.”
“They…”
“Something we should know.”
“You think so?”
“Mexican food. They have it right.”
“Even corn chips?”
“You are trying to be funny when you shouldn’t. The chip is nothing without the salsa. And only the hottest salsa will do.”
“But I don’t like to burn my mouth and stomach. I don’t…”
He didn’t answer. He held up his hand and closed his eyes, as if he were imagining the hottest hot peppers hitting his system. We sat in his small office for a while, until I finally just left without saying anything.
I had that night class for three years. On break I would go outside my classroom to stretch and breathe the night air. Sometimes I would go visit Zovak, who rarely came out of his office. There was never a time when he didn’t bring up the subject of that place somewhere near Downtown Fresno with the food so hot it burned everything and left you wiped out but feeling very alive at the same time.
Joanne Cooper enjoyed tormenting me. She was two years older than I and wherever I was about to go she had already been. When I was promoted to the first grade everyone in the neighborhood was happy for me, except Joanne.
“First grade is so hard,” she said, “You’re there all day. The bathroom is way at the end of the hall. They expect you to read and write.”
“But I don’t know how.”
“Then you’re in trouble.”
I managed to do ok in first grade and Joanne left me alone for a while. But when I was done with 3rd grade she felt compelled to advise me again.
“The big yard is so much bigger than the small yard,” she said shaking her head.
“Yeah, that’s gonna be great.”
“So you think.”
“What’s so bad about the big yard?”
“The sixth graders.”
“The sixth graders?”
“All they want to do is beat up fourth graders.”
“You’re a sixth grader.”
“I’m a girl, duh. We don’t fight boys.”
“So they beat up fourth grade boys?”
“Yeah and that’s not all.”
“What else?”
“You have to write in cursive!”
No such thing happened in 4th grade. In fact quite a few 6th grade boys admired my flag-football skills and wanted me on their team when we played at recess or during lunch. I did learn to write in cursive but it wasn’t as awful as Joanne made it sound. Three years later though, she hooked me again.
“You’ll be so lucky if you survive 7th grade,” she said, with her hand on her heart and her eyes closed.
“But I didn’t get jumped at the end of the year.” It was widely held that junior high kids beat up “scrubs”– graduating sixth graders– as they walked home from their last day of elementary school. Everyone believed it, but no one had ever witnessed it.
“In the first place, they can’t get every single scrub; in the second place you’re only four blocks from home. I swear, are you a retard or something?”
“So what’s so hard about junior high school?”
“What isn’t? You have six different classes to go to,” she said, holding up her right hand and left index finger, “and between classes you only have five minutes to open your locker, put your books in, take out the next ones and make it to the next class.”
“So?”
“So if you’re late you get detention and if you’re still late you have to go see the Boys’ Dean, Mr. Doyle, and believe me you don’t want to tangle with him. He’s so mean you’ll think he’s either crazy or just plain evil. The teachers are hard and they give out a ton of homework. Your fun days are over, believe me.”
But she had been wrong every single time before so I had no reason to believe her now. On my first day of school I had on a paisley shirt, Hush Puppy shoes, and a nice new haircut. Finding classes was a little chaotic but I knew I would get in the swing of things in a few days. I panicked a little when I couldn’t open my locker after first period, but a 9th grader approached me to help out.
“Need some help?”
“No, it’s ok.”
“You’ll be late if you don’t get that open pretty soon.”
“Late?” Joanne’s words came to me and made me twice as nervous as I already was.
“Lemme see your combo there.” He reached for patch of paper that had the locker combination.
“No!”
“It’s all right, I’m not gonna steal anything from you.”
“But …”
“Don’t give anyone your combo, I know. But think of it this way, what’s there to steal? Books? What would I want with books?” He snatched the paper from me and in an instant, the locker was open.
“Thanks,” I said, although I still had my doubts.
“Don’t worry,” he called back, “I already forgot the numbers.”
I was impressed. Here was a ninth grader who didn’t want to rob, beat or otherwise humiliate me. Maybe I would do all right after all. But Joanne Cooper was right about hard teachers. My English teacher, Mrs. DuCharme, began the intimidation process on the first day. As soon as the tardy bell stopped ringing she dropped a huge notebook on the table from above her head, which landed with a resounding thud that. The notebook was so thick and heavy it actually moved the table. It was like two phone books bound together.
“There,” she said with much malice in her voice, “is the work you will do in the first semester.” I immediately made plans to get out of the class. I wasn’t going to do all that work, no matter what the benefits may have been, and I wasn’t going to work with a teacher who didn’t even care to say hello on the first day of school. I was placed in a different class within a day and the teacher in the new class greeted me and seemed to understand teacher-student rapport.
I dodged another bullet with selecting electives. I almost took music appreciation, a class where students had the opportunity to learn about and appreciate classical music. I had heard the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th from a Bug Bunny cartoon and thought I might like to learn more. But Lenny put me wise: the class wasn’t about listening to classical music; it involved books and reading and test-taking. I would be better off taking choir in lieu of music appreciation. So I took choir, and that’s when the trials and tribulations of junior high began.
Mr. Malm was our choir director. His claim to fame was he stayed out of the Korean War by becoming the band director for the Army. He told us that this was proof that music could pay off in big dividends, even when you weren’t looking for it.
If we were well behaved he let us sing along to a 45 of our choice at the end of class. That year we sang along to “California Dreaming” by the Mamas and the Papas at least 15 times. He would wince and cover his ears every time John Phillips tried to get soulful when he sang, “Well I got down on my knees, and I pretended to pray. You know the preacher likes the cold, he knows I’m gonna stay.” He liked us and he liked to play. He would make us sing “Alouette” and when he came to the part that sounded like “a la pot” he’d sing the first line
“A la pot!” and then we’d echo him.
“A la pot!”
“Not that kind!”
“Not that kind”
“OH! Alouette gentile Alouette….” And of course being in junior high school we thought this was the highest form of humor, and we loved the fact that it came from a teacher, an “old” teacher at that. He made everything a funny game, even when he had to discipline us.
“I know you think the best students sit in the front and the most ill-behaved students sit in the back,” he said at the beginning of the year, “but that’s not sensible at all. If there are students who are trustworthy, I put them in the back, whereas the students I need to keep an eye on sit right up here in the front row. For now the students I don’t know will be in the front, the students I know but need to keep an eye on will be in the middle and the students I know and are trustworthy will be in the last row. But remember, things can change rapidly, either forward or back, depending on your behavior.”
Lenny and I did not want to be in the front row. It took us three weeks to work out way to the last row.
Once there I realized that our row-mate was the guy who helped me with my locker. His hair was combed back like James Dean. He favored t-shirts and wind-breakers. He appeared to be always bouncing, even while he sat in his back row chair.
“Ok,” he said to us without introductions, “I’m the captain of the baritone section, and the first question is ‘Who’s better the Beatles or the Stones?’”
“The Beatles,” I answered, “they….” But before I could finish he hit me hard right on the clavicle. “OW!”
“Let’s try it again,” he said checking the whereabouts of Mr. Malm, “Who’s better, the Beatles or the Stones?’”
“The Stones?” I said, rubbing my shoulder.
“That’s better,” he said, relaxing his fist.
“Sheesh!”
“My name’s Dick Blecher,” he said raising his fist in the event that I thought his surname was material for humorous remarks. Under the circumstances though I was a very fast learner.
A week passed without incident. Lenny and I switched; I thought I would be safer with him as a buffer. I thought maybe the Rolling Stones were Dick’s only issue, but evidently not. One day he turned to Lenny.
“Lenny. Hit Jack.”
“What?” I said.
“Hit him,” Dick said, his fist raised. Lenny tapped me on the shoulder.
“There,” Lenny said, “how’s that?”
“You’re a weenie,” Belcher said. Then he called out to Scott, our other back row baritone, who sat on my left. “Scott. Hit Jack.”
“Sure,” he said cheerily and gave me a pretty solid punch on the shoulder.
“You gonna take that?” Belcher said to me.
“Uh, no.” I said and I hit Scot harder than he hit me for not following Lenny’s strategy, and Scott hit me back.
“Lenny, are you gonna defend your buddy, or are you still a weenie?”
Soon we were all punching each other at Belcher’s command. We looked like the Three Stooges in a slug fest. It didn’t take long to get Mr. Malm’s attention.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! And I use the term loosely!” We stopped immediately.
“They weren’t really fighting, Mr. Malm,” Dick Belcher said, “they were just horsing around.”
“Lenny, Scott and Jack,” Mr. Malm said calmly, “you’ve lost your back row status. Welcome the front row.”
“But I didn’t….” Scott started to object.
“I don’t care who started it. I’m only interested in preventing it from happening again, and the front row is best for that, until you earn my trust back.”
We moved sullenly to the front while Belcher, the unidentified perpetrator, waved us goodbye. I couldn’t believe he was the same guy who helped me out on the first day of school.
We did eventually earn our way back to the back row and were left alone by Belcher who began treating us as something better than objects of his amusement. There were other difficult days but there was nothing as bad as Joanne Cooper described it, and I was glad for that; it made everything seem easier. Maybe that was her intent in the first place.
The war in Vietnam eventually created a job market in teaching in the late 70’s and early 80’s. All through college, which for me was ‘72-‘78, we were repeatedly told, “there are no jobs.” We didn’t care though because we were young and egocentric and believed the no-jobs message was for someone other than ourselves. It worked out though. I guess you could say that the CIA played a part in my employment. During the war they employed the Hmong, an ethnic group from the mountains of China, to lead escape raids in North Vietnam to liberate captured American soldiers. That’s what my adult school students told me. They were very strong anti-communist (“communee” is what they called the North Vietnamese) and gladly risked their lives and went on countless dangerous missions.
But when the war ended and the United States left, the Hmong were without their powerful sponsor. The North Vietnamese had not forgotten them and pursued them relentlessly. They fled along the Mekong River which runs for 3,000 miles like a long scar through Southeast Asia. My students told me stories of trying to get from one side of the river to the other where thanks to politics or rules of engagement or the Geneva Convention or the U.N. or who knows what, those pursing would stop. The students told me that at the midpoint of the river, not the banks of the other side, the “Communee” would let them go.
So those who survived, those who got to the midpoint without getting mortally wounded found themselves in refugee camps in Thailand. Their experiences there though were wrought with trouble and misery. In many of the camps there were tens of thousands living in a square mile’s worth of space. They were abused by opportunists and bullies. The American government eventually began taking the Hmong out of Thailand. By 1978 30,000 Hmong were in the United States. The current population is 260,000. The government distributed the Hmong all over the country, including Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Washington and California. The Hmong people discovered they didn’t much care for snow so those who were living in states with inclement weather eventually came to California, where the Hmong population is 87,000 currently.
That’s how I got a job with Fresno Adult School, and when the adult school campus was maxed out, I was sent to McLane High in a classroom next to the library, and was treated quite well there. And then I was sent to Duncan Polytechnical High. Initially it appeared that Duncan would welcome me with as much warmth and enthusiasm as McLane did.
“I’m Jack Chavoor from Fresno Adult School. Mr. Maclean told me that you had a room for my class?”
“Oh yes, Jack. Nice to meet you. Betty Wallard.”
She had a very strong grip and looked me square in the eye.
“He said the class was going to be really big and…”
“Don’t worry. That’s no problem. I’ll show you the room if you like.”
“That’d be great.”
She unlocked the door and left.
But there was a small drawback—there were no desks in the room. When I tracked down Ms. Wallard she assured me that the Thursday or Friday before school started the desks would be there. She then gave me a tour of the main office and told me that I was welcomed to use the Xerox machine in the copy room and showed me where the storage room and copy paper was and she showed me the faculty room as well. Wherever we went Ms. Wallard was in the habit of walking a little ahead of me with long, loping strides, hands behind her back, leaning forward, something like an aging general in the middle of a long, tough battle.
On Thursday before school started I went to the office with some things to copy. I picked up some paper and went to the copy room. I didn’t notice that the secretary had followed me.
“What are you doing?” she asked sharply.
I felt like a middle schooler who had just been caught attempting to shoplift.
“I, well, I was going to make some copies.”
I held up my originals as proof.
“Not here you’re not. And where did you get the copy paper?”
“From the copy room?”
“You can’t take paper from there. You get your paper from Adult School.”
“What?”
“You’re only using the room here. Not the equipment or the materials.”
“Ms. Waller said I was welcomed to use the Xerox machine and the paper.”
“She didn’t say that. She wouldn’t say something like that.”
“She said it just the other day.”
In the next moment Ms. Waller came into the office. She was all smiles. I looked forward to embarrassing the secretary.
“Good morning Ms. Waller. I wonder if you could help us clear up a misunderstanding.”
“Sure.”
She had that anyway-I-can-help look in her eyes.
The secretary was grimacing. I glanced over at the name plate on her desk. Marcie Garland. Tough luck, Marcie.
“Ms. Garland said that I was not allowed to use the copy machine or the materials.”
“That’s correct.”
The gears in my head locked up. Ms. Wallard was looking straight at me with a wide-eyed innocence.
“But you said that I could use the Xerox machine.”
“I never said that.”
“Just two days ago.”
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.
“You’re mistaken. I said nothing like that.”
“You showed me the copy room and the storage room. You said I was welcome to it.”
She stared at me as if I was on drugs.
“No. Never said anything like that.”
“But why would you say…”
“The copier and the materials belong to Duncan. Get your stuff from Adult School.”
“I’ll be teaching and working here though.”
“When the going gets tough…” she said, and walked away.
Ms. Garland was looking at me with utter contempt which was an understandable response assuming she didn’t know that her boss was a straight faced liar.
“May I have the keys to my room, please?” I said to her.
“There’s only one key,” she snapped.
I walked down the hall looking for something good like a sparkly clean room with waxed floors and desks in neat, straight rows that were not in disrepair. What I got was an empty and untouched room. There was not a single desk, not even a teacher’s desk, not even a chair. I got in the car drove the three miles to Adult School, and found Mr. Maclean sitting on a bench outside the office smoking a cigarette.
“Hey Boss.”
“Hey. What’re you doing? Did they give you a room over there?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t have any desks.”
He began to cough and laugh simultaneously. He calmed himself, then took a deep drag.
“I’ll call her,” he said, “she’s not going to jack you around. Ha-ha.”
“Ha-ha. Ok.”
“Everything will be right by tomorrow.”
“She lied to me about…”
“Yeah, yeah. Same old story. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her.”
On Friday though there were no desks. I went to Waller.
“Did you get a call from Mr. Maclean?”
“Sure did.”
“Did he talk to you about desks in my room?”
“He thinks I’m responsible for getting desks in your room.”
“Were there desks in there last year?”
“That doesn’t matter one way or the other. You want desks, go hustle up some desks.”
“Do you have any desks to spare?”
“All the desks I have are for Duncan.”
“I’ve got students coming on Monday. What am I supposed to do, put them on the floor?”
“Do what you have to do.”
“I can’t put students on floor.”
“You can ask ROP if you want. They might have a few to spare.”
She was smirking at me.
“Who’s ROP?”
“Regional Occupational Program. They’re sharing the campus with us.”
I found an administrator from ROP. She was sympathetic and honest; they didn’t have any desks. She speculated that Wallard was hording them and they were in storage somewhere. The only time a classroom stood empty was when the floor was being waxed. I called Mr. Maclean and he was angry and said that hell or high water, on Monday I would have desks. Then he began coughing violently and hung up.
I had 43 students, most of them Hmong refugees. They laughed when I opened the door which is a cultural tick: they laugh when they feel embarrassed for you. They offered to sit on the floor but I took them out to the lunch tables and conducted class the best I could. We held class that way for the next three days.
Both Wallard and Maclean claimed they were the ones who got me the desks. I believed Mr. Maclean. I avoided the main office, Ms. Garland and Wallard like Superman avoids kryptonite, and things settled down and I was having a fairly good start of the year. I heard from colleagues that swagger and lying were just part of Wallard’s MO. After all I had been through with her though, I still couldn’t believe that anyone who was fully functional in the adult world could routinely lie about day to day things. I have always believed that there is a good part of everyone, even the worst among us, and Betty Wallard certainly wasn’t the worst the world had to offer. I was thinking maybe I could make peace with her in some way.
I was in the lunchroom one day, working my way through my sack lunch of chips, a sandwich, a cookie and bell pepper slices. At the table behind me Ms. Wallard was telling stories to a couple of teachers. I listened in thinking I might be able to enter the conversation at some point. Turned out Ms. Wallard was a Marine veteran and she had been to Vietnam.
“Being on patrol in the middle of the night. Some of these guys weren’t so tough,” she said, like she was getting ready to tell a ghost story.
“Yeah?” her lunch partner said drily.
“They couldn’t handle it. Three steppers everywhere. Rats this big.”
“Three steppers?”
“Vipers. So poisonous that on your third step you were dead.”
“How big were the rats?”
“The size of cats.”
She went on and on with the story. Not having served in the military there was no opening for me to enter the conversation. I was about ready to leave; I was out of food and listening to her tell war stories wasn’t interesting.
“I tell you, when I got back to Burbank I was very restless.”
I swung around and look at her.
“You grew up in Burbank?”
“Sure did.”
Her lunch mates took the opportunity to leave.
“Me too.”
I had my connection. Things would improve because maybe she only misused people she didn’t know and now that we had a common link she’d be a little bit more cooperative and truthful to me.
“Ha. Small world, huh? I’m Burbank High, class of ’64.”
“Wow, cool. I went to Burroughs, class of…”
“Flatlander.”
“What?”
“Flatlander.”
Her tone suggested I was a leper. She was wagging her head like a poker player who just drew three Aces. I was from the flatlands, the west half of Burbank; she was from the highlands, up in the hills to the east. Our respective schools were cross-town rivals and Burroughs was considered déclassé by those who attended Burbank High. It was some ancient, adolescent, regional name-calling. I should have laughed, but I couldn’t. That word actually stung some core part of me. Yes, I was a flatlander. We felt that we were the real part of Burbank. In fact we never thought of the people on the hill except during the Burbank-Burroughs game. My thoughts were tumbling like water off Bridalveil Falls and I eventually became aware that I was standing there mute. I had to say something but I couldn’t imagine what.
“Yeah? Well, we beat you twice in football. My junior and senior year.”
“Hah. You’re still a flatlander.”
She laughed and walked away. I decided it was a fake laugh and that I had got to her by beating Burbank High twice. I was replaying both the ’70 and ’71 games in my mind when the bell rang and I headed back to class where my students were anxious to learn English so they could explain what more serious regional differences were like.
I always imagined that the phone would ring and someone at the other end would say, “You’d better come.” Well, I didn’t always imagine it; at first being from Burbank and living in Fresno was ideal. Like a lot of young adults I loved my parents but it was good to be too far for a daily visit and close enough for a weekend visit. After my 10th year though I realized that they were old and there would be a time when I wanted to be only five minutes away instead of three hours. When that phone call came it was Veronica, my sister-in-law, and she used those exact words to which I could only say, “Ok.”
“I gotta go,” I said to Grace.
“Ok. Just promise you won’t speed.” I nodded but we both knew I would.
I blew past a CHP just south of Delano. He didn’t stop me though and I assumed he sensed my resoluteness and understood what was happening. I tried not to think about why I was driving or where I was going. I didn’t put on the radio; I didn’t want to have a memory of a song. Radar warnings didn’t slow me. In-n-Out signs didn’t distract me. I was never below 85 miles an hour. I was finally stopped just before the Grapevine. The officer never even got the chance to ask me if I was crazy or if I had seen him.
“My mom’s in the hospital,” I said, not caring whether he believed me or not.
“And I want you to live long enough to get there. Slow the hell down,” he shouted, closing his book. I drove the limit the rest of the way, trying to keep my mind blank. If I thought about Mom in a hospital with cancer and other complications, I would crack up, one way or another.
I got off the freeway at Buena Vista Street when my irony loving mind informed me that Saint Joseph’s Hospital was where Mom and I first met, and it might be the place, maybe that night, where we would say goodbye. I knew she wouldn’t want a blubbery scene, so I gathered myself and entered through the sliding glass doors.
“You can’t see anyone now; it’s 12:30,” the startled young receptionist said.
“I am an out of town son whose mother is dying of cancer. I want to see her.”
I stood waiting. She relented.
I walked into the room where my mother was, the nurse waiting for me to decide to let the poor woman sleep and turn around and leave. I ignored the nurse and she disappeared. Mom was a strange color I had never seen before; a greenish hue. Her breathing was more labored than usual. I pulled up a chair and rested my chin on the bedrail.
“Hey Ma,” I whispered, “I’m here.”
Unable to wake her, unable to leave, I just looked at her for a while. The cancer which was once, “Pretty sure we got it all,” was now, “In every organ in her body.” “Pretty sure” had been their escape hatch but I didn’t feel tricked or manipulated. How else to put something like that? From there she had 18 months and did everything as usual except go to church but that was a choice she made, not something that came from the cancer, unless she decided that after 80 years of church she was going to spend whatever time she had left not going. Any inquiries from me about how she felt got the same, “I’m alright,” but there was always the trace of fear in her voice.
Then came that ugly day at the restaurant. We were all together on a Sunday afternoon at their new favorite Middle Eastern restaurant on Victory Boulevard. The food looked more like Italian food—we were all having some kind of chicken and bell peppers, only on rice instead of pasta—and Mom wasn’t eating it. She looked like a kid who hoped for hot dogs; she was pouting and pushing her food around with her fork.
“What’s the matter, Ma? You’re not hungry?”
“I can’t eat this.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I can’t eat it.”
“It’s OK, just have the guy put it in a take out box. Eat it later.” She looked at me and shook her head. There was fear in her eyes which told me the whole story: she wanted to eat but she couldn’t; this had been going on for a while because she had lost a lot of weight and she was afraid now that the cancer had come back.
It was one in the morning. Mom’s sleep was fitful. I couldn’t decide whether it would be best to think, feel and reflect or not. I pulled her oxygen mask up, kissed her goodnight and drove home where my sister and Dad were sleeping soundly. I went to the room which had been mine, got into the bed and stared at the darkness.
The next day we had a family conference regarding Mom’s status. It was the kind of gathering Dad had always dreamed about but never had: all of us gathered together to reach consensus with Dad leading the way. But the agenda item in this case was his worst nightmare; not only would he not lead it, it but he would be hard pressed to even contribute. To Dad, talking about death and illness meant you were inviting it. He sat in the living room, not in his favorite chair but in a stiff backed wing chair that none of us sat in. My brother stood by the door leading into the kitchen. I sat in Dad’s chair. My sister sat on the couch, forlorn but calm. My sister in law, Veronica, stood near Dad and led it off, laying out scenarios gently but factually. Dad sat with his feet up on the cushion of the chair, knees drawn up to his chest, an arm draped across the top of his head, as though someone were hitting him.
“It’s so sad,” my sister, Shamera, put in. My brother, Charles, leaning against the doorjamb, nodded in agreement. I didn’t want to participate; if I did, I would be acknowledging that Mom had cancer and was in the final stage of it. I did however, have a thought that would not go away.
“No machines, no tubes. If she’s not going to recover, let’s have her die at home, in bed.” Dad put one foot on the floor, took his arm off the top of his head and pointed to the middle of the room.
“He said it right,” he murmured with his eyes closed.
We all agreed. The meeting was over; Dad, in a way, had led it after all.
That afternoon I went to see Mom. I told myself she looked better; that the greenish hue was the lighting.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Hey,” she answered, her eyes showing resignation.
“I visited you last night at midnight. I kissed you goodnight.”
With a trembling hand, she pulled off her mask.
“Shucks, I thought that was the doctor,” she said in a cracked voice, the sparkle in her eyes returning for a moment.
“I’ll let him know.”
“Ok.”
“They treating you all right?”
“I had pork chops yesterday.”
Pork chops, along with sardines, any kind of fish, sausage and liver were among the food items that Dad banned when they were first married. There were activities, too that ended in 1943. There were no vacations, no camping, no plays, and no movies; in the entertainment capital of the world, Mom had seen none of it that I knew of. When I was in college I envisioned a list of events I wanted her to experience. The Rose Parade, a Dodger game, a play at the Dorothy Chandler, a visit to the Norton Simon Museum, a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, a trip to the Grand Canyon, maybe even a cross country trip all crossed my mind at one time or another. All things Dad wasn’t terribly interested in. I took her to the Rose Parade and two plays; one was “Much ado About Nothing” at Fresno State and the other, “The Sunshine Boys,” at the Dorothy Chandler. The rest I didn’t do, and now it was too damn late. She knew I understood about pork chops.
“How about some fish? They got any here?”
“Had that the night before,” she smiled.
“Are you scared, Mom?” I asked, assuming that one of us had to speak directly to the issues at hand.
“A little,” she said in her school girl voice. We were quiet for a while. I cursed myself for asking such a stupid question. What else was she going to say? Why did I want to know? What difference did it make?
“Jackson Boss?” She had several nicknames for me. This one she hadn’t used since I was 9.
“Yeah, Ma?”
“Promise me something?”
“What is it?”
I leaned closer. She waited a beat.
“Lose weight.”
“Ma.”
“Promise.”
I looked at her and wondered if somewhere in her life in Burbank she ever just snuck off to a restaurant, maybe with Pearl Laws, her best friend, and ordered up some pork chops. I wondered about the can of sardines in the pantry that had been there since I was five. Was it the same one or had she been eating them out on the patio while Dad was at work? Did she ever know that I always tried to alleviate the hurts that she always tried to cover? But I guess we would never talk about any of that, instead one of the last things on her mind was my weight.
“Ok, Ma. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, I gotta go, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“No. Grace is home alone with the babies. Go home, they need you.”
“Well…” I wasn’t sure which she really wanted; my mother-reading skills had atrophied.
“It’s ok. I’m alright.”
It was something she would say even if she had been caught in a rainstorm of anvils.
“I’ll come back next weekend. I’ll be back.”
“Get up in the morning and go straight home.”
“Ok, Mom.”
I kissed her. I wouldn’t say goodbye.
“I’ll see you next week.’
She didn’t answer. Her eyes closed and then opened again. I left. It was our last conversation.
The following Wednesday, Veronica called late in the afternoon to say Mom had suffered a heart attack. I was ready to jump in the car immediately but then she said there wasn’t time. I hung up and stood in the living room, alone. I prayed, telling God that if He wanted her to take her home, and not to dawdle. It was the fastest answer I ever got from God. Usually He is slow-moving and enigmatic. This time the phone rang again in less than an hour. Veronica told me that before Mom died, she asked where I was, then coughed up blood, then saw the room fill up with butterflies, remarked how beautiful they were, and then she died.
Weeks later I went with Shamera to close accounts and cancel various appointments. I witnessed clerks and receptionists openly crying, telling us what a delight it had been for them to know her. I didn’t know about any of this but none of it was a surprise. It was her nature to make people feel like they were family; she called all my friends her sons and daughters. She had scores of running gags with people at church, in the neighborhood, and in the community. She was always looking for new acquaintances, and unless the person was hurtful or mean she never turned anyone away.
There was resilience to Mom, not that she couldn’t be hurt but that she would not let her own hurt and sadness keep her from being a genuine encourager, and that is what I admired about her so much. They say that there’s a hole or vacuum in your soul when you lose someone you care about. It’s not so bad though because whenever I feel that vacuum it’s like her memory or legacy is there with me and that’s not such a bad thing to have, not at all.
I took the week off when Mom died. I thought I might come back on Thursday of that week, just two days after the funeral, but I realized I just did not have the emotional energy to do it and so I stayed home, and discovered that at the right moment in the right context, flowers have some kind of healing power. I knew though that I had to re-enter the regular world again at some point, and a full week felt like that was going to be an appropriate amount of time.
My friend and colleague, Shelly Powell, gave me a card and a poem that talked about how when we experience loss, God wraps us up in a cocoon until it is time to remerge. It had been a week in the cocoon for me and then it was time to leave it. I didn’t want to spend any more time away from the kids; I had barely got to know them when mom died.
I was in West Hall that year; upstairs on the south side of the building with a balcony that looked out on the auditorium. It was the fourth week of September, those days when there might be a slight chill early in the morning and then that soul-piercing heat in the afternoon, as if autumn and summer were battling it out for exclusive control. I climbed the stairs to get ready for the first period of the day.
What would I tell them? They knew that there had been a death in the family and I believed that under most circumstances a controlled amount of self-disclosure has its place in the teacher-student relationship. My mom had cancer which had spread to every organ she had. While we pondered what was best for her, she had a heart attack and died. That was it in a nutshell. In the students’ eyes it is acceptable for the teacher to be human but while at the same time keeping a small gap; there was such a thing as too much. I needed to be able to tell them enough and not too much so that we felt as though we could proceed. Kids can be compassionate and the exact same kids can be merciless. I decided to come at them sideways; I would give them personal information but I would use the information to make a meaningful point.
They filed in, a little hesitant. I was with them the first three weeks of school, then gone the fourth, now back the fifth. They weren’t sure what they had in me, who I was or what I was about or how I would act after a family crisis. I reintroduced myself and took roll; then I stood squarely in front of them and spoke. Their faces said they knew what I was going to talk about and that they wanted to hear.
“My mom died last week. She had cancer but she died of a heart attack while she was in the hospital. My mom and I were on good terms; I am going to miss her, but in a way something sadder than that happened over the summer.
I know that a lot of you knew Pete. He was a student of mine last year. Those of you who knew him know that he was an outgoing, friendly person who was not perfect, but what I know is that Pete could read and write well enough to go to college and a make a better life for himself. Some of his teachers from last year were pressing him to go to City College. The last time I spoke to him, on senior check out day, he told me was going to go. When school started this year I heard that he was shot and killed. His friends told me how he was over there at Fresno High trying to hop the fence and go for a late night swim. They told me that he was off his turf and was confronted by members of another gang. They told me how Pete told them respectfully that he did not want to cause any problems, that he and his friends explained that they were just going to walk away and not come back. They turned to walk away but Pete was shot in the back of the head and died before he got to the hospital.
What I’m saying is my mom was 80 years old when she died. I wish she could have been with us another 10 or even 20 years, but still, she lived a full life. She went to college, she got married, had children, saw her children grow up, and she saw her grandchildren grow up. Not Pete though. Pete deserved to have the same full life that my mom did, but he didn’t get the chance. His friends tell me that Pete lived a life with a foot in both worlds. I just want to tell you, don’t do that. I wish Pete had stayed home that night. I wish that there was no such thing as turf and colors and gangs, but as long as there are, choose what you do carefully. You have more options than you realize. And you don’t have to…”
That’s as far as I got. There was a girl in the back row with her hand raised. She was waving it impatiently, and I thought she had to go to the bathroom.
“Yes?”
“My boyfriend was the shooter.” She sat up proudly, convinced that she had just assigned herself some kind of special status. Other kids turned in outrage to glare at her. She appeared to be oblivious to them.
“He…”
“He was the shooter.”
No change in her tone; she was proud of the fact.
“I’m sorry that he decided to do that. He…”
“He’s not. He’s the shooter, and I’m having his baby.” She caressed her abdomen. The class went stone quiet for ten seconds.
“Well, I…”
“He’s locked up but if it’s a boy, I’m gonna name it after him. He’s supposed to get out in a few years.”
She was so far removed from anything approaching the normal world, even the street world, that there was no hope that she would understand why the rest of the class hated her.
“I feel bad that he decided to do what he did. Nothing good came out of it. Pete’s dead and your boyfriend’s locked up. My point was we need to make smart choices and avoid bad ones. But we don’t have anymore time to talk about it. So take your books out, please, and let’s turn to page 27.”
The kids were relieved to resume their regular routine; so was I. Not the shooter’s girl though, she looked disappointed, as though she had more to say.
“Ok, we’ll go in the back there and fight. That’s good,” I heard a voice behind me say.
I ignored the comment, assuming he was speaking to someone else and that he was kidding with a friend. I was at Frank’s Coffee Shop heading toward the bathroom because I didn’t want to take out my retainer in public. Such are the trials of being 19. I was embarrassed because I felt I should have been done with braces. I stood outside the door, thinking I was away from everyone and anyone and removed my retainer, put it in the plastic container and when I looked up I was face to face with a middle aged man I had never seen before. I backed myself away but he followed me, with a dull but determined look on his face.
The only reason I was at Frank’s in the first place was because Lenny and I thought we were too old to hang out at Bob’s Big Boy with high schoolers after a game. And the only reason we attended a game at Burroughs was because we had sat out a year so it wouldn’t look like we had nothing better to do but to return to our old school. Well, the year was up and we had 5 years passes—a perk for having played varsisty sports—of which now had only 4 years left. We went to the second game of the year so it might look like we were doing something else for the opener, and had sat out the previous year but now we were old enough to come back and take in a game without looking like hangers-on, but we were certainly not going to go try and make the scene with a bunch of kids at Bob’s. That would just be too pathetic. So we went to Frank’s, a simple coffee shop which featured gum-chewing elderly waitresses with beehive hairdos. There certainly would be no crowd there.
The plan had gone well; the place was empty except for a few really old people, like maybe 40 years old or more, even. But now this loony guy was actually chasing me around tables at the deserted back section taunting me to fight him like a man. I noticed he was either drunk or very uncoordinated because he could not keep up with me. He kept bumping into tables and chairs as I made my way serpentine back to the booth where Lenny sat.
“What’s a matter with you?” Lenny asked, “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“This guy.”
“What guy?”
“This guy was chasing me around the tables back there when I went to the bathroom.”
“What do you mean? What is he some kind of fag or something?”
“No. He wanted to fight me.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Why would he want to fight you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Jackson, you’re not making sense, guy.”
Before I could answer Lenny, the man arrived at our booth. He wore a blazer, slacks, a white shirt, but no tie. He held the edge of the table so he wouldn’t wobble.
“There you are. Why won’t you fight?”
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“Oh, so you stare at my wife but then you won’t fight, huh?”
“I’ve never even seen your wife. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re a chickenshit and a liar. You were staring at her when you walked in here.”
“Look buddy. You’ve been drinking. Why don’t you go home and sleep it off?” Lenny interjected.
“Oh, so you got your friend here to defend you. Chickenshit. That’s all you are.”
“I didn’t even see your wife. I was looking at the two cops who were in the parking lot. That’s why I turned around when I walked in.”
“Chickenshit. Tell your friend here you’re a chickenshit.”
My dad used to tell the story about the time he worked as an account on a government farm in Imperial Valley during the war. He was picked on daily by one of the field workers; the man suggested that bow tie wearing accountants were less than manly. Dad ignored him for a week until one day Dad wheeled on him and asked him if he’d like a sock on the jaw. The man said Dad was too weak to do any harm but that was all he said because Dad came with the left and knocked the guy on his wallet, and there was no more razzing Dad while he worked there. But that story was meant for entertainment purposes because the times when he spoke directly to the subject of fighting he almost always concluded that when two men get ready to fight, the one who walks away is the real man. Would I follow Dad’s only fight story or Dad’s fight advice? I decided to be a real man.
“Lenny, I am a chickenshit.” The man pushed himself back from our table and bumped into the waitress who was bringing our burgers and fries. He stumbled out the door muttering. His wife was nowhere in sight. Lenny called the waitress back.
“Excuse me, Miss. That man that just left tried to pick a fight with my friend here.”
“Nothin I can do about that, Hon.”
“He’s drunk and he’s about to get in his car and drive.”
“He’s not drunk.”
“Well does a sober guy stagger around, try to pick fights and bump into tables and chairs?”
“I’m not gonna stand here and argue this with you.”
She turned to walk away.
“Can I have some ketchup, please?” Lenny shouted at her. She brought the ketchup and banged it on the table. With her arms crossed over her stomach she stared at Lenny for a while before she finally spoke.
“Why don’t you run out there and make a citizen’s arrest, or call a cop?”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea, then I’m gonna tell the cop that this wonderful establishment let a drunk get in his car and that you didn’t believe what I’m telling you.”
She walked away again.
Lenny wasn’t done though. He jumped up and ran out the door. I stayed at the booth so the waitress wouldn’t think we were pulling a “dine and dash,” not that we had dined that much. He went to the two cops in the parking lot. I could see him pointing toward Olive Avenue and then pointing back at the Coffee Shop. Then the cops started heading toward the door. The waitress came to our booth and stood with her hands on her hips awaiting their arrival. The older of the two cops spoke with a wink in his voice.
“Now, what’s going on here tonight?”
“These two longhairs here were bothering one of our best regulars.” I was so astounded at the comment I couldn’t even feel anything. Lenny repeated what he must have told them out at the parking lot.
“That guy was drunk and staggering. He tried to pick a fight with my friend. He is in a car and could get in accident and hurt himself. Are you going to let him do that or are you going to go get him?”
“Slow down there, fella. Let us do the policing, ok?”
“ Well, fella, there’s a guy out there behind the wheel, drunk and you’re in here telling us to slow down.”
Lenny was going to have his say. I admired him.
“See what I mean, sir?”
The waitress was getting her digs in.
“Did you see the car?”
“’64 Nova, green.”
“License plate?”
“How should I know? It’s too dark out there. You’re wasting time. The guy was going east on Olive, like I told you five minutes ago.”
“Well, we’ll look for him. Thanks for your concern.”
“Thanks for being one of Burbank’s finest,” Lenny said, with enough sarcasm to last Don Rickles the rest of his career. The cops left; the waitress looked at us with contempt. Lenny and I paid for our uneaten burgers, left three pennies for a tip and walked out into the dark parking lot.
“Maybe I should have punched him.”
“No Jack, you did right. When they’re drunk like that they can’t feel anything. Your best punch wouldn’t have fazed him.”
If I had been driving I would have called it a night but Lenny wasn’t through. We drove to the Burbank Police station and he spoke to someone seated behind a desk about two cops at Frank’s neglecting their duties, and a drunk in a green Nova who could be running red lights, endangering the fine citizenry of our fair town. I had never seen him like that, possessed and determined to set things right. The next day he told me he made phone calls trying to get someone higher than the guy at the desk, but they gave him the runaround.
Sometimes I wonder where all that pushback came from and where so much of it went in all of us.
There won’t be a story today. I have written a story about where I was, what I was doing, who I first spoke to, how I felt and the impact it had on how I looked at my life and our society in light of what happened that day 13 years ago. I wrote it a long time ago. But I’m not posting it. I’m done with it. We’re still entangled and we have been long before 911 took place. I quit. Aren’t you sick of it yet? Aren’t you tired of trying you work your way through phrases like, “surgical strikes” “coalition” “boots on the ground” “drone strikes” “collateral damage” “freedom” “democracy”?
We cannot expunge evil. We cannot degrade and destroy it. We can kill evil-doers. But if the survivors of the degradation and destruction and the shock and awe and those who lost homes, limbs, and loved ones don’t see value in that or if we’re really just doing all this for oil, then those survivors will be the next wave of terrorists. And we’ll have spent another three or four trillion dollars and end up in worse shape than before and we’ll have the blood of innocent noncombatants on our hands and in ours soul. I’m through with what doesn’t work and only makes things worse.
I do not hate my country. I love my country. I respect our soldiers and appreciate their willingness to serve. I grieve the loss of the passengers and crew who died, as well as those who died in Twin Tower buildings and elsewhere. I do not have a political bias against one party or the other. Both parties are doing the same thing and it hasn’t worked. I am through with them both on this matter. And if I don’t have a solution or an alternative that is conceivable to the general population, that doesn’t make what we’re doing the right path. There is no doubt in my mind that terrorist groups do evil things, have done evil things and may continue to do evil things.
No more 911. No more using it for excuses to wage war. I look at the outcome and things are worse and no, not because we didn’t use enough military force of one kind or another. I will not talk myself into obliteration of one or two or three or four other countries. We haven’t made peace out of war in 70 years. It doesn’t work.
The regular stories will resume next week. Sorry if this essay upset anyone. It upsets me. But I’m done with it.
I was 0 for 9 on interviews. Grace kept saying I had to sell myself, but while I understood what she meant, the multiple meaning of selling one’s self was repugnant to me. It was the first hurdle of the adult world; you had to jump it or get out of the race. The interviews were long torturous affairs—sometimes nearly an hour long with interview panels of five or six—littered with hypothetical classroom situation questions that could have been answered in a dozen different ways. Then there were questions about my educational philosophy. Holistic education was a hot word at the time along with “making meaning,” but I was proud and would not phrase drop. Instead I gave my personal views on the matter which varied from one interview to the next, depending on what I was thinking about at the time. I didn’t believe in trying to figure out what they might be hoping I would say, and I couldn’t figure a reasonable way to determine it anyway.
One thing I was sure of though was the tricky question on discipline. “What about discipline?” My problem was I didn’t believe in it. Or rather, I believed that if most of them were with you most of the time day after day, week after week there wouldn’t be a discipline problem. That hadn’t been the case at Kings Canyon Middle School where I struggled with classroom control, but I still clung to it because it was such a vital part of who I was and who I wanted to be as a teacher. In our Ed classes we were taught not to teach as we were taught but I couldn’t help it; it’s like an instinct, and what I had learned about teaching from my 13 years as a student was if you had their hearts they would open their minds. Later on I would learn that this was called “lowering the affective filter,” but at the time it was just common sense.
I was married and we had Baby Kathleen. We had a mortgage and a car payment, too. I had to get a regular teaching assignment where I wanted to be, as a high school English teacher.
The Roosevelt High interview took place the Friday before the first faculty meeting took place to start off the ’84-’85 school year. My mother-in-law knew someone downtown in HR and offered to make and send her some paklava; I said no. The minister of our church offered to put in a good word with Russ Console, a parishioner I had not yet met who happened to be the vice principal of the school; I said no. I was at war with the adages of the wise. I wanted to get the job on my own, because of what I knew, not because of who I knew. But they ignored me. The paklava was delivered, Russ Console got a phone call from his minister, and I was annoyed.
Joe Spino, the principal of Roosevelt High, sat at his desk so perfectly straight it left the impression that he had rebar for a spine. He wore green pants, a yellow shirt perfectly pressed with sleeves rolled to mid-forearm, and a green and gold tie. He had no questions about educational philosophy. He did not have anyone else present for the interview. He was a former Marine and abstract notions did not hold his attention. He glanced at my resume and set it aside like it was a birthday card with no money in it.
“You did your student teaching here?”
“Yeah, yes, yes I did. With Mr. Katchadorian.”
“Uh-huh. He tossed you the keys, right?”
“Well…” I hesistated, not wanting to sell out an Armenian.
“Just sink or swim, huh?”
“I swam.”
It had been five years. I didn’t expect him to remember me. I had tried making conversation with him back then at a freshman football game; he gave me a who—the—hell—are –you look. It was better that he didn’t remember.
“Huh.” He opened his mouth slightly and nodded his head like a ventriloquist’s doll.
“I had two sections of seniors,” I said when he suddenly grimaced.
“This isn’t for regular English though. It’s for the ESL kids.”
“That’s ok. I’m where I want to be.”
“Where’s that?”
“At a high school.”
I didn’t want ESL but I figured I could slide over at some point.
“Can you do the job?” he asked shifting his weight to lean forward.
“Yes.” I answered with conviction. He leaned back, laced his fingers together on his head and stared at the ceiling, as if the authenticity of my response was written on the ceiling.
“What about discipline?”
“Gotta be there,” I said, a bit ashamed; I knew I was imitating his style—decisive, crisp, and succinct.
“I figure it like this,” he said in a confidential tone, “if I hear from students and parents and counselors about what’s going on in your class then it’s something wrong.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But if I don’t hear anything, then it’s good. You’re doing your job.”
“Makes sense.”
“Ok, great. You missed the breakfast and the new teachers meeting but you’ll get all the rest. You’ll be ready to go?”
“Yep. Yes. Yes, sir.”
“You got materials?”
“I have three years worth of materials.”
“That was the adults.”
“It’s ESL, it will only need a few adjustments.”
“Great. Then, we’ll see you on Monday. Don’t be late.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
I was thinking this couldn’t be it. How could I be in just like that? I shook hands and I remembered my Dad’s advice not to shake hands like I was dead but instead to shake like I meant business.
I had been interviewed and hired in less than 10 minutes. I was mad about the paklava and the phone call and I hoped that they wouldn’t bring it up again but they both did. I wanted to be hired without help and I will never know how significant the help was but I also know that it was entirely up to me to prove myself worthy of the job. I was blessed to work at Roosevelt for the next 29 years, and my best years came when I didn’t have to use discipline but used humor and love and meaningful content instead. It didn’t happen all the time but when it did it was a real blessing. I am glad to have had a career that involved itself with kids and the power of transformation. I am grateful to have met some of the most loving, thoughtful, devoted, amusing and fully human people on the planet earth. I knew that the Roosevelt interview was different. It had me standing at the crossroads, sensing something good but I didn’t know at the time what a complicated, demanding and wonderful journey it would be.
Nothing was going to stop me from going to LA for Sam’s party. Sam was the funniest, craziest friend I had. He was louder, more out of control, more wickedly cynical than anyone I knew. He was the Don Rickles of our group. He would say things out loud what the rest of us were even afraid to admit we thought privately. His imagination was frantic, unpredictable and ungoverned. Everyone loved Sam. It wasn’t that I had no friends in Fresno; Grace had several friends and they were as funny or lame, smart or dumb, cutting or dull, and kind or cruel as any of my friends in LA. But I had no history with them and as nice to me as most of them were, I was still the outsider, which was not a role to which I was accustomed.
In those days I would rush to LA for the slightest of reasons with or without Grace. I’d leave Fresno right after school on Friday and leave LA Sunday evening, squeezing every hour out of my trip that I could, meeting with as many different sets of friends as possible. I had known Sam since junior high school and there is something about friends you’ve known from that developmental stage and still know that sets them apart from friends you meet later on, as an adult. At least that’s how I looked at it at the time.
It didn’t matter that my car—a worn out ’71 Dodge Colt—had high mileage and hadn’t been out of town yet; I believed at the time that nothing would go wrong that wasn’t supposed to, and that whatever was on the verge of breaking, failing, leaking or otherwise shutting down would surely have the decency to do it after it successfully returned us to Fresno. Yeah, and it was overheating a little, but we were having a bit of Indian Summer and well, if it’s hot, the engine will run a little hot. Besides, I had just bought a new radiator at Brownie Radiators on Ventura after the time I almost burned my face off trying to remove the radiator cap when the engine was hot and shut off. With the new radiator everything ran fine for a while– I even gave it a test run to Yosemite– but about a week before I got the invitation to Sam’s party it began running a little hot. It would make it though.
I had a high school Sunday school teacher, Mr. Thurber, who told us about two guys trying to get back to LA from Bakersfield on an empty tank of gas. They prayed all the way back to LA and made it home. Mr. Thurber said he wasn’t sure if God operated that way because what was God, anyway, just some cosmic candy machine? Still though, he had to concede that the two guys made it, so maybe under certain circumstances, and enough faith, God could make happen. So I figured if the two guys could do it, so could I. And I wouldn’t be what they call “testing God.” I would have a full tank of gas, the tires would be properly inflated and I would check the oil and the battery cell levels. When you did all that stuff you figure you’re going to have a trouble free journey.
Dad used to change the oil before any long trip, and the only long trip we ever made was to Fresno. We would go to Fresno at least twice a year so it was a fairly good system. I thought about following Dad’s example and changing the oil and maybe even getting a tune up, but without money I thought about it for so long the Friday before the Saturday of Sam’s birthday party was already upon us.
Grace wanted to take her car, the Corolla, a much more reliable car, but mine had a $15 8-track player in it. Need for music trumped common sense.
“The Corolla has air-conditioning,” Grace said.
“So does the Dodge,” I replied.
“No it doesn’t.”
“Yeah, Uncle Harry told me about it.”
“What?”
“It’s got 4-60 air conditioning.”
“What’s that?”
“Roll down four windows and go 60 miles an hour.”
“It’s so hot. It’ll be worse in Burbank.”
“It’ll be ok.”
But it wasn’t ok. What’s the opposite of ok? Would it be No-kay? It was very No=kay then. We made it 99 but didn’t get past Fresno County when the engine started heating up. The needle on the temp gauge was clear not in the middle. I told myself that it wasn’t all the way to the right and I kept driving. Just outside Kingsburg the needle moved again and was at a very menacing angle
“Hey, Jackie. You know what having a temp gauge on your car is worth?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing. Know why?”
“Why?”
“Cause by the time you see it, it’s too late. Your engine is already ruined.”
“Huh.”
“And the engine light. Know what they call that?”
“What?”
“The idiot light. Only an idiot would keep driving.”
“That’s a good one.”
“Yeah. You know something, Jackie? Know what dummies do when the engines heat up?”
“No.”
“Put water in the radiator. The dumbest thing you can do.”
“What?”
“Always remember, Jackie, the engine heats up for a reason. Could be the water pump, or a whole lot of other problems. Adding water don’t do nothin’.”
“Oh.”
“Dummies though, they just keep adding water. Then they drive a little bit and when it heats up again, they add more water. That’s how dumb they are.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. The idiot light comes on, know what to do?”
“What.”
“Put a for sale sign on your car. Sell it for fifty bucks to a Dummy.”
Maybe it’s just an impulse among those of us with limited car knowledge. Your car has a fever, you give it water. Maybe it was my need to be in LA for Sam’s birthday party no matter what. The car overheated, I pulled over and added water, then it overheated again and I pulled off at the Blackstone offramp in Tulare. We were 160 miles from LA. The temp gauge was actually behind the H. The idiot light was on. Heat was making those shimmering waves from the hood. Dummies weren’t dumb; they just needed to get somewhere. I was determined to figure out a way. Grace had been suggesting that we turn around, go back and return the next day, and she was right, that would have been the smartest and best thing to do, but now the car was in too much trouble and too far from Fresno to drive back. Part one of the plan was to let the car cool down which would give me some time to figure out parts two, three and four.
“What are we going to do?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know. Have to let it cool off. You hungry? There’s a Del Taco right here.”
“No.”
“Want a coke?”
“Guess we should have bought a car from a car lot instead of a private party.”
“Let’s talk about that another time. Right now, this is our situation.”
“Yeah.”
“Coke?”
“Yeah.”
I headed off in the direction of Del Taco. I was thinking that what I should have done was buy the ‘56 Mercury instead of the ‘71 Dodge Colt. The Merc was a beautiful two- tone yellow and black MontClair. It wasn’t in perfect condition but its owner clearly took care of the car. The interior and exterior were in better shape than the Colt but the Colt was only 8 years old while the Merc was three times that age. And the Colt got better gas mileage and gas was nearly a dollar a gallon. I had wanted the Merc but my pragmatic side won out. Now I was mad at myself for going with the Colt. Then I was mad at myself for not following the advice I had just given Grace. I wasn’t staying in the right now; I was waffling in the coulda-shoulda-woulda. I bought two Cokes, pressed one against the side of my head and waited for the next bright idea, but nothing came to mind, except that I should open the hood.
“What are you doing?”
“Opening the hood. It’ll cool off faster.”
“It’s not the radiator.”
“Can’t be.”
I was thinking that it might be the radiator when a man with a shiny face and hair that looked like it had died and had been dead for some time approached us. He wore dirty grey corduroys and a t-shirt that said, “Up your nose with a Rubber Hose!” and a faded out image of Vinnie Barbarino. He looked older than I was but he looked so worn out that he might have been younger.
“Trouble?”
“Yeah.”
With his beard he made me think of Jesus asking the disciples if they had caught any fish when everyone involved knew they hadn’t.
“Car overheat?”
“Yeah, guess so.”
I couldn’t decide whether to trust him or not. Alone I would have been more inclined to trust a stranger. With Grace though, the equation was different.
“Leaking?”
“No.”
“Huh. Need help?”
“Well. Right now I’m just waiting for it to cool down, you know.”
Guys who don’t know much about cars don’t feely admit it. I handed Grace her Coke and she mouthed the words, “Who is this guy?” I shrugged.
“When it was running what color was the exhaust?”
“The exhaust?”
“Yeah. Sometimes coolant gets in the cylinders.”
“And the exhausts turns blue.”
“No, that’s if you’re burning oil. Was it blue?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry. It could be just the thermostat.”
He scratched his stomach as if it was helping him think.
“Well, yeah.”
They were all things I had heard before, but if he only knew a little more than I did then there wasn’t much hope.
“Or could be the water pump. That would be bad.”
“Expensive.”
“Depends. Did you drive with the engine light on?”
“No. Not too much.”
“Well, running it hot can warp the head.”
“Uh.”
“We want to try and get it to a mechanic,” Grace said, guessing that he was about ready to offer to repair the car.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” the stranger replied, “around here I don’t think they take to foreign cars that good. That’s a Mitsubishi you got there. I’m Rob by the way.”
He put out his hand and the fingers seemed to be pointing in different directions.
“Hi Rob, I’m Jack. Yeah, I know. Japanese car with the American name. You mean to tell me they only work on Fords and Chevies around here?”
Some of the fingers didn’t move or grip right. I recalled my dad’s advice to measure a man by his handshake. I pondered.
“It’s a little reddish neckish in these parts,” he said with a halfway kind of smile.
“You from around here?”
I suddenly felt like a character in Grapes of Wrath and that I should have said “from around these parts” instead of “from around here.”
“My wife and I came all the way from New Jersey.”
“Really?”
“Wow,” Grace said, looking at the dilapidated ’66 Bel air.
“Yeah I didn’t think Betsy would make it. But I’m a mechanic. We’re going to Anaheim for trucking school, and it’ll be like starting over.”
“Betsy’s your car?” I asked, while wondering what he had done to need to start over.
“Yeah. Jenny there, that’s my wife. Not to be confused….” He laughed at his little joke, I saw his gold tooth and thought of the Steely Dan song.
“Right,” I said, smiling.
Throw out your gold teeth and see how they roll! The answer they reveal, life is unreal.
“Let me get my toolbox and see what I can do,” he offered. Grace and I looked at each other in an unsubtle way. I put my Coke on the roof of the Dodge and followed him to his car. Grace stayed put.
His car had been gold originally but now it was faded, dented, scratched, rusted out and bondoed. The tires were bald, the hubcaps were gone and even lug nuts were rusted. Jenny was asleep on the passenger side of the front seat. Her shirt featured Ziggy holding a sign that said, “I need a hug.” Although she was sleeping she was clutching a shop rag in her left hand, and her right hand was balled up in a fist. In the back seat, well, there was no back seat, in fact even the panels of the back doors were gone. But it was by design; their dog, the biggest German Shepherd I have ever seen, would not otherwise have fit in the car.
“That’s King, our burglar alarm,” Rob said while King lifted his gigantic head to look at me. “Don’t worry, he won’t bother you.”
“Hope not,” I muttered as Rob opened the back door. From the look of all the things that surrounded King, I got the impression that Rob and Jenny had been living in the car. There were clothes, blankets, unidentified boxes sealed shut with duct tape, and camping gear.
“Let’s see here now,” Rob said as he moved various objects here and there.
“Hey man, you know what? I think our best bet would be to get the car towed.” I didn’t want Jenny to wake up. Ok, I didn’t want to disturb King.
“I think I gotta strong enough chain here somewhere.”
“Uh, well, we’ve got triple A.”
“Oh, no. We’ll tow you. It’s no problem.”
“But….”
“Ok, no chain. But a good rope would do it.”
“No, I think….”
“I’m not making this up. You can get it towed but they won’t fix it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was. See that station across the way?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s hoof it over there and ask him about your car.”
So we did. The mechanic on duty actually used the word fur-in, as in “We don’t fix no fur-in cars.” I suddenly felt like I was in Mississippi. So I had no other plan except to get a tow back to Fresno with a guy with a gold tooth living in his car with his wife and a dog bigger than a very large wolf. We had left Fresno late in the afternoon and now the sun was going down. Short of staying in a hotel for the night and waking up with the same dilemma, I was out of options. Without comment we went to our respective cars.
“So you know those stories on the local TV news?” Grace asked when I returned.
“What stories?”
“About dead bodies in the fields in Parlier somewhere?”
We laughed out loud. It was a good time for black humor. Better to get the worst case scenarios out and poke fun at them than to let them burrow inside the subconscious.
“Did you see the dog?”
“He’s big but pretty passive. I don’t think he’ll contribute to the crime scene,” Grace said.
“You never know. Maybe there’s an attack command.”
“Better be careful what you say around him.”
“What would it be? Shredded beef!”
“Snack time!”
“Ok, get this. He wants to go to K-Mart to buy rope!”
“Uh-oh!”
So I started the car and Rob, Jenny and King followed us to K-Mart where Rob found a very heavy rope and a few other items. I offered to pay but he declined. We offered to treat them to Del Taco but Rob said they weren’t hungry.
“Rope’s too long,” Rob mumbled when we came back. He pushed King forward and back as he rummaged through stuff. You could have told me King was drugged and I would have believed it the way Rob treated him like an annoying but very large piece of baggage.
“Ah, here we go,” Jim suddenly cried out with delight. The blade of his Bowie knife was a foot long, half a foot wide and an inch thick. It glistened from the interior light of the Bel air.
“Uh.”
My brain couldn’t formulate words.
“It’s a beaut ain’t it? My grandpa’s.”
He flipped it in the air and caught it by the oak handle.
“It’s something,” I murmured.
He cut off a length of rope, put the knife down and began tying the rope to the bumper of his car. In a minute our two cars were joined together.
“That’ll do it,” he said, “Just pay attention and brake when you see me brake.”
“Ok.”
“We’ll stay in the right lane and take it slow.”
“All right.”
Back in the car I told Grace about the Bowie knife. We talked about who had sent Rob and Jenny, God or a darker source. It seemed that we were convinced that Rob was one of those helpful souls, but we also considered that the meanacing souls were sorts who knew how to imitate the good guys. Still though there was something good at the core. The question was whether we trusted someone who would do a favor for a stranger that neither Grace nor I would ever consider doing ourselves. We agreed that we trusted him, but it was a little nerve wracking. We were 10 miles north of Tulare, the middle of nowhere, when he pulled over.
I got out of the car first. I was bigger and stronger than he was. As long as he didn’t have the knife I figured if I had to I could overpower him. Even with the knife I knew I would defend my fiancé. I didn’t think any of that was going to happen but I was and remain a believer in contingency plans. He got out and we stood face to face.
“You got any soap?” he asked as cars flew by on 99.
“Soap?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, a bar of soap?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll look.”
I walked back to my car keeping an eye on him. He stood waiting for a bar of soap. I still somehow expected to make it to LA for Sam’s birthday party. All I needed was a bar of soap for some reason, then make it to Fresno, then up early the next day and back on the road in Grace’s Corolla, which we should have taken in the first place. The fact of the matter was I did have a bar of Irish Spring in a plastic soapbox in the glove box of my car. I took it as a providential sign that I had soap when Rob asked for soap. What I didn’t know was why he wanted it. I held it in my hand as if I were weighing a brick of gold and handed it to him.
“I realized something,” he said as he went to the back of my car.
“What.” I said.
“Other drivers may not realize you’re being towed.”
He held the soap like a giant piece of chalk and wrote the words, CAR IN TOE across the back window. I didn’t bother to correct his spelling.
“Great,” I said.
Back in our respective cars, Grace was a little punchy and couldn’t stop chuckling over the misspelling. She thought it would make a good title for a short story as soon as we found out how this long, strange trip turned out. We didn’t feel he was going to kill us any more though. After all he certainly had several opportunities. We got as far as Kingsburg when he pulled over again. He was overheating, so we offered to treat them to dinner at Denny’s.
We had been together for so long by the time we sat down at Denny’s that there was a straining, a feeling of exhaustion, a feeling that the objective would never be reached, that the favor would never be done and that we were in car folly purgatory for an indeterminate but lengthy visit. When the food came we ate as though we had taken a vow of silence. Finally, Rob pushed his plate back and cleared his throat.
“We won’t be living in the car too much longer,” he said, without looking at any of us in particular. Jenny studied the contents of what was left of her chef’s salad, absently pushing the half a hard-boiled egg from one side to the other with her fork.
“When does the truck driving class start?” Grace asked.
“Well we’re waiting for a check that will pay for it. We had to get a P.O. Box and we’ve been hanging around waiting on that check.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said. I was curious but I wasn’t going to ask what the check was about. We all wanted to get back on the road but the Bel air needed more time and we were forced to be leisurely.
It was past ten p.m. when we got on the road. Rob had really done all he could for us. His revised pledge was that he would take us as far as he thought his car could handle it. When we got to the Clovis off ramp and the engine was hot again, he was ready to call it quits. Grace and I tried out different scenarios. We were close but impossibly far from home and it was late at night. It took us a while to realize that we were now in range of her AAA towing service. I walked with Rob to the other side of the freeway where we found an open gas station and got water for the car and I made the call for the tow truck. I tried to give Rob some money but he wouldn’t take it. He waited with us until AAA, which was delayed for some reason, arrived. The driver, Danny, was nice enough to drop Grace off at her house and then take me to my place at the Winery Apartments. We told him about Rob from New Jersey and the gigantic dog and the Bowie Knife but he answered with stories about Lynrd Sknyrd and the San Francisco Giants.
The engine of the Dodge Colt was ruined. I had it rebuilt for $800, thanks to Dad.
The next day Grace picked me up in the Corolla and we got to LA just in time to shower and change at my sister’s house and drove from there to Sam’s birthday party. And I don’t remember a single moment of it expect that we told all our friends about our crazy adventure the day before. We were convinced that Rob was a God send, an angel, an agent of the Lord, but our LA friends thought that Grace and I were far crazier than any story about a guy with a knife as big as a sword and a dog bigger than a pony being an agent of the Lord. We didn’t mind; we knew we had a good story title, a good story and one that we had lived through together.
I was not afraid of school, nor was I afraid to be left there by Mom. My first concern was that I didn’t know anyone, which didn’t bother too much, except that other groups of children knew each other. I wondered where they had been that I hadn’t been. Maybe the others had been going to kindergarten before I came along. I tried to resolve this on my first day by picking out a name from a conversation I had heard.
“Hello Marilyn,” I offered tentatively.
“You don’t know me!” she shouted, storming off to talk to her friends about my breach of some kind of indecipherable etiquette. It wasn’t so bad though; it turned out that Charolette, the girl standing next to Marilyn was more sympathetic to my effort to make friends. We became friends and she told me about a game called flying horses which we played for a few days until Gary, Dale and Billy told me the game was for girls.
But other the unpleasantness of being yelled at by Marilyn, I was fine with going to school. Our teacher, Mrs. Hefelfinger, was a tall, calm woman with a kind patient, sweet-sounding voice. Her assistant, Miss Donan, had a grandmotherly look about her that was very comforting. I found the activities to be worthwhile, and I especially liked the giant blocks, the smell of finger paint, and the taste of real butter, which we had made ourselves.
I even picked out a girlfriend. Her name was Julie, she looked like Rita Hayworth and she had a soft lower register voice that was sultry before I even knew the word or the value of the word. One day I decided that even though she didn’t know that I was her boyfriend that I should do what boyfriends do, so I kissed her. She looked at me and smiled and was saying something, but I couldn’t make out any words just that soft, low tone that seemed to be making a humming sensation in my chest. By the time recess was over, the entire kindergarten class was talking about us. This was more than I had planned for; I didn’t realize this having a girlfriend stuff was so complicated. I never would have guessed that Mrs. Hefelfinger would get involved, either.
“Boys and girls,” she gently announced just before story time, “let’s save all our kisses for our mommies and daddies.” The entire class turned to look at me. I looked at them, hoping that the moment was pass soon so that everyone and everything could get back to normal. I was perfectly willing to stop thinking of Julie as my girlfriend; neither did I care too much if I couldn’t kiss her anymore.
But other than Mrs. Hefflefinger embarrassing me and Marilyn snapping at me, I had a pretty good time in kindergarten. Despite those setbacks I retained my self-confidence. I even walked the four blocks from home at Catalina and Verdugo to Lincoln Elementary and then back home at noon. Eventually I got bored with that and decided to find a different, maybe shorter way home.
Instead of walking north one block on Buena Vista and then four blocks west to my house, I headed south on Buena Vista one day, intending to have an adventure and find a new way home. I came to Oak Street and decided I had ventured far enough into unknown territory. I instinctively turned west and guessed that I was now heading in the correct direction. Two blocks in though I began to lose faith.
I could not count and I could not read so the number of blocks and the street names were not useful. I had been walking home by sight, straight down Verdugo until I saw the happy looking green house. Now that visual cue was gone. I remember looking for a long time at a street that was probably Frederic Street. Giving up on that strategy I guessed that I had not walked long enough to be on what would have been my corner if I had been on Verdugo. When I walked what I thought was the right amount of blocks, I sat down on the curb at the corner. I was in fact, on Catalina, one block south of home. I knew I had to turn, but which way? If I had come one way to get to the new street, I would have to go the other way to get back to the old street. But which way was the other? One block lost was the same as 100 miles at the moment.
I assumed that the answer would come to me if I pondered long enough. I sat with both hands propping my head, moving only occasionally to look either south or north as if I might be able to actually see the house. Eventually my skinny, sore butt forced me to decide. I stood up, stretched, looked left, then right, made my choice and started walking. I figured if I didn’t see any familiar sights, if things looked more and more foreign, I would turn around, come back to my sitting spot and try walking the other way. If that didn’t work I would have to sit down and think some more. The block seemed impossibly long, like something from a Dr. Seuss book.
The first familiar sight I came across was the white fence around our backyard. I do not remember seeing the police car that was there in Mom’s version of this story. It was after five o’clock and Mom called the police. She rushed toward me like I was the prodigal son, hugging me like she had never hugged me before and in fact never did again. It was not until that hug that I realized that I had been gone too long and nearly got lost altogether.
“Where were you? What did you do?” Mom asked in her high- pitched voice, which she reserved for special calamities.
“I came home a different way.”
“You sure did!”
Her voice was already calming down.
“But I got lost.”
“Yes, you did,” her face bore in on me with love and curiosity, “and how did you know how to come home?”
“Well, I thinked and I thinked and I thinked and decided that this was the way to come home.”
My explanation merited another neck-bending hug and she picked me up and carried me into the house.
“I thinked and I thinked and I thinked!” she repeated, laughing with delight.
The Talking Wall 