the voices of belmont high

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shuster-belmont-20100613,0,2508932.story

little gift

A boy in my fifth period class who never stops talking and rarely does work went to El Salvador two weeks ago. Today he brought me back a tiny wooden pumpkin with a fake bug inside. I wonder if he knows he just made my year.

News of the World

One summer I was a camp counselor, and I watched a ten-year-old look through the astrology section of a Star magazine. When he put it down, he looked sad. “Lindsay Lohan has cancer,” he said solemnly. “Because she was born in July.”
Sometimes I ask my students about current events. A good number of my students have doomed sentiments, and many are convinced the world is going to end. I’m not sure what sources they follow.
“I saw, miss,” a freshman girl tells me. “This psychic on tv said that everything was going to end. Not a psychic…not like brujerias or anything. This lady, she knows. There’s gonna to be an earthquake in October. She knows everything. She has predicted earthquakes before.”
“Where did you see her?”
“On the news. One thing’s for sure: in October, I’m going to be flying in a plane or something. I’m not gonna be here.”
“You’re going to be flying in a plane the whole month?”
“I saw something, miss,” another tells me. “On channel Thirty Four, miss. A little girl got raped in a public bathroom in the park.”
“I saw that too. It was on the news. A woman kicked a guy in the nuts. She was a lady, not a little girl.”
“David Beckham can’t play in the World Cup.”
“Did you know that there’s going to be a big earthquake? It’s going to end everything.”
I don’t usually believe their news stories, but when my bed shook violently on Monday morning, I clutched my pillow and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the end. “If this is it, let it come quickly,” I thought. Then when I opened my eyes everything was the same. The floodlight from next door was still shining through my window blinds. It was four in the morning near downtown and my roommates were in the kitchen in their underwear.
The next day my students couldn’t stop talking about it.
“I was up all night, miss. Out in the streets.”
“Did you know there’s going to be another one?”
“Did you know everything is going to end in 2012?”
“Hey miss, are you going to see the Bounty Hunter this weekend?”
“I don’t think so, it looks kind of bad,” I sad.
“Damn miss, you need to have some fun in your life,” he said. “You’re too amargada.” (Embittered.)
Damn right. I must be a grapefruit.
“Hey miss, I think you just ask us about the news because you want to know what’s going on in the world,” one sophomore said to me.
I guess he’s kind of right.

Sherry

Sherry (not her real name) is in tenth grade. She is a cheerleader and often puts her head down on her desk, tracing her name on her paper while I’m explaining something. She fiddles with her lip ring when I ask her to do work.

For the autobiography project, Sherry wrote about her father. When she was six years old, her father took her to a place that she thought was a toy store, but was really a gun store. He bought a gun and drove home. While her family was eating dinner, he burst into the room and pointed the gun at her mother.

In the midst of everyone screaming, Sherry and her sisters made a circle around their mother, using their bodies as protective shields. He father then pointed the gun straight at Sherry, who said she just stood there, frozen, for a long time. Eventually the neighbors saw her father, and he put the gun down.  Sherry and her three sisters and mother ran to her aunt’s house and broke in through the window, where they were safe.

Sherry didn’t see her father again until she was twelve and he got in a car crash. She visited him in the hospital and saw him hooked up to machines, and thought that things had worked out just fine.

She ends her story saying, “even though I am only fifteen, I learned I don’t have to depend on anyone, especially someone who can’t remember your own birthday.”

Ever since I heard this story, everything about Sherry makes sense. She looks out for people who need help, she doesn’t really trust authority, she’s argumentative because she thinks for herself. She is not this way by choice; she had to grow up much too quickly.

I have gotten better at not being constantly affected by my students, but I came home the other day and sat down and cried. I was thinking about all the shit, the drunk dads, the criminal brothers, the knives and guns and fear and sadness so many of them went through before they could read, or talk. They are all survivors in some way or another,  but it’s still difficult to comprehend.

I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing the right thing, having them share their personal lives and putting everything  in a book. So many terrible things have happened to them and when they finally expose themselves, they have to face the experience all over again. They definitely don’t want people feeling sorry for them.

So I’m proud of my students. Some days I feel proud of them for just coming to class.

Bat out of Hell

I used to think people were mostly good until I got mugged on a fluorescent lit street corner with three of my friends, by two men wearing face masks, one holding a shotgun with an orange tip.

I have never seen a gun before, let alone a shotgun, and it was one in the morning and I was sort of sleepy after smoking half of a Marlboro Red cigarette. I tried not to inhale, but the cigarette felt so good burning between my fingers. My friend wanted to stop for tacos and when I turned my head, the men were yelling at everyone to lie down.

If I had been thinking more clearly I would have given them my purse. Instead I turned and ran across the parking lot, clutching my purse to my side. This is what gives me a terrible feeling, like dark bile boiling in my stomach: that I turned my back and ran, which everyone knows is the dumbest thing to do in a mugging. In my half-baked delirium, I must have thought they were going to shoot us all, and that running was the safest thing. It turned out that everyone was okay, and that the men were most likely tweakers out after the rainstorm, desperate for money.

I ran all the way home in my vintage boots, knowing I could be dead. Thinking I could not be able to shave my legs, or eat or pee or put on makeup or drive around and buy canned tomatoes from the grocery store again. I could have bullets in my liver and my parents could be crying. I wonder if my students would give a shit.

I was talking to a dark-haired freshman on Friday about the story of her life, and she told me she used to mug people with her cousins downtown using weapons. The girl is fourteen. Darkness intersects with other darkness and things change, that is the way of the universe.

“This happens in East LA all the time,” my friend said, like it had happened to her, like she had run away from tweakers with a shotgun.

I have been prepared to run my whole life. I guess there are always more things to be afraid of, so why be afraid of anything at all?

The Reading

One of my sophomores has a picture of her ultrasound on her binder. I avoid the situation, until I realize that she is passing the picture around in class, showing off ghostly images of her baby’s tiny hands.
“Hey, Stephanie, is that your baby?” I ask her after class.
“I think it’s a girl. I’m four months,” she says. The next day she writes a poem in class that says, “I’m a teenager/ I don’t believe in abortion/ I wear my Dodgers windbreaker/ I love my baby.”
The day after, she takes out her lip piercing in class using a mirror, and I ask her, “Stephanie, can you do that after the bell rings?”
She looks up at me for a moment, expressionless.
“Fuck you, I’m going to take a piss,” she says matter-of-factly. She swings her backpack onto her back and walks out. I contemplate how to punish her before realizing that she will transfer soon anyway.
Sure enough, a few days later, she comes by with her transfer paper. “I’m leaving to go to the school for pregnant girls,” she says. “Peace out, miss.”
Five students have transferred to other schools in the past month alone. My remaining students face a slew of temptations to slog through if they want to graduate.
My high school has a reputation for allowing students to get away with anything, and it’s true. Students wander the hallways during class time, knowing that the three security guards on campus are too busy painting over the tagging on the stairwells to bother writing them up for truancy. Students drop into class twenty minutes late, trailing sheepishly behind a teacher on their break. There is no tardy policy in place. The dean, a pudgy, cheerful man too similar to Santa Claus, says, “There isn’t a guard in the boys’ locker room, and they just use it to smoke weed. The whole place is one big hotbox.”
“Miss, don’t you know what kind of high school this is?” one student says. “People smoke out in class when the teacher isn’t looking. The use the little rain coverings of their backpack to cover up the smoke. I’ve seen it!”

If desperate times call for desperate measures, I’m more than desperate. In a fit of inspiration, I contact Ms. Lacey, a teacher at a nearby public school. Ms. Lacey does a project with her students where they each choose their best piece of writing for the year. The students edit their writing multiple times and finally put the finished piece into a real book, published by an online company. Each student gets a copy.
Many of the students choose to publish an assignment about the hardest obstacle they have ever overcome.
I decide to copy this entire project from her, and my vice principal agrees to pay for it. Ms. Lacey graciously offers to bring her students in for a reading of their personal writing.

“So guys, guess what?” I tell my classes. “You are going to be published in a book.”
One boy squints. “What do you mean, like a bunch of pages stapled together?”
“No, a book. A real book. You will be an author.” I hold up an example of the book from Ms. Lacey’s class. It is decorated with miniscule pictures of the students and their family members.
A cheerleader brushes her hair out of her eyes. “Can we have our book look like that?”
“Can we put a bunch of pictures of us? Of everyone in this class?”
“Can we buy copies?”
“I’m nervous my story won’t be any good,” another girl says.
All of my classes seem excited about the project, except my fifth period boys, who are defiant as usual.
“Hell no,” Gonzo says. “I don’t write about personal shit. That’s my shit. I don’t share it with nobody.”
“I don’t want to share. I’m scared they’re going to laugh at me,” another boy in military fatigues says.
“No one will laugh at you,” I say. But I am not confident about this. I have no idea how I’m going to get my students to share their writing with the class, let alone in a book that will be published for everyone to read.
***
A chunky boy wearing a red and white striped polo shirt stands at the front of my classroom. “I was ten when my father left and I took my place as the man of the house,” he says, reading from a book. “It was not my choice for my father to cheat on my mother, but it was my responsibility to help my mom out. It was what I had to do.”
My fifth period is staring up at him. They are silent. This boy is a former student of Ms. Lacey, who is sitting in the back of my class. She urges the class to clap for each student who reads.
“Any questions?” the boy asks after he finishes.
Gonzo raises his hand, and I’m worried he’s going to curse at him in Spanish.
Instead he says, “Did you cry when you wrote this?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I had to read it at an assembly, and I cried even before I started. I cried the whole time. But I used to be an angry kid, and ever since I wrote this, I’m not angry anymore.”
Johnny, whose Rockies baseball hat is resting on his desk, raises his hand. “How old are you?” he asks.
“Sixteen,” the boy says.
“Just like me,” Johnny mutters.

The day after the reading, one girl who is absolutely silent in class comes up to me and says, “I know what I’m going to write about, miss.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to write about my mom. We walked to the store yesterday and I told her I’m going to be in a book and she said, ‘Why don’t you tell my story?’ Her mom used to beat her, and she has ten brothers, and she has lots and lots of stories. So does my uncle. So does my whole family.”
“So many stories to tell,” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” she says. “Everyone has so many stories.”
I’m just beginning this project. I can only anticipate the stories that will be told, and what will happen to my students after they tell them. But seeing the smallest amount of promise in their eyes makes me feel less hopeless, and I hope it makes them feel the same way.

The Faculty Christmas Party.

Two weeks before the last day of school in December, I get a pink flier on a half-sheet of paper in my box, which says, “Come to the faculty cafeteria to practice caroling for the Christmas party!”
In the cafeteria, the college counselor sits at a lone table wearing a Christmas hat, holding a stack of printed lyrics to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
“We’re practicing for the Faculty Breakfast,” she says. “This is what we’re singing.”
I look more closely at the lyrics, which are rewritten to say, “Oh the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me: seven seniors sleeping, six cell phones ringing, five IEP’s!”
“That’s okay,” I say, beginning to walk backwards out of the cafeteria.
“Come on!” she urges. “You’ve never been to one of our breakfasts before. It’s really nice. Everyone goes to the cafeteria and they serve us a nice, catered breakfast and people sing songs.”
My friend who works at a private Jewish school received a Visa gift card loaded with seven hundred and fifty dollars as a holiday bonus, donated by the PTA. I receive a tiny pin decorated with a snowman’s face and a free breakfast. I’m hoping for something in the vein of lox, béchamel sauce, maybe with a swan carved out of a melon.
Upon arrival, the fluorescent-lit cafeteria is decorated with white tablecloths, and a karaoke machine is set up in the corner next to a fake Christmas tree. The principal is wearing a red striped apron, scooping potatoes from a pool of orange oil onto my plate, along with some gray scrambled eggs and a ball of crumpled bacon pieces. “Merry Christmas!” he says.
I arrive too late at faculty meals to sit with my real faculty friends, which is how I end up sitting next to the librarian, the Spanish teacher, and across from the middle school students who played in the Christmas band. The MC, a counselor sporting a thick mustache, grabs the microphone.
“We’re starting the festivities soon,” he says. “First, let’s introduce the woman with the vision of God! She worked in the front office for at least 200 years!”
He hands the microphone to an older black woman with elaborately curled hair, who rises up her hands and says, “I see God in all of you. You all helped me through my bereavement and glory to God who saves us and takes us under his wing!” The audience smiles and gives her a round of applause.
Meanwhile, I wait next to the high-tech toaster, designed like a conveyor belt; slices of toast are dropped in one end and plop out the other. The toaster is stuck.
The special education director kicks it with his black hiking boot.
“That should do it,” he says.
“That won’t help!” cries the office assistant.
I decide to eat my bread untoasted, and return to my seat to pick at my eggs with a plastic fork and talk as sparingly to the people around me as possible. The show has just begun.
“Here is Mr. Diaz,” the MC says, “Impressing us with his singing skills yet again.”
Without warning, the karaoke machine clanks up, and a young male teacher I have seen in passing, wearing a burgundy blazer, begins an earnest rendition of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.”
Everyone stares at him in amazement, eating their eggs silently. His polished rendition would be excellent for any nightclub or shopping venue. “He’s just great, isn’t he?” the Spanish teacher murmurs.
“Just great,” the MC blabbers, “and next up, we have Ms. Charles, who is directing our school play!”
Ms. Charles, a large black woman who is dressed in a ruffled shirt, pencil skirt, and stiletto heels, clearly once had bigger dreams, like being on Broadway.
“Please excuse me, it’s early in the morning,” she says, clearing her throat like Mariah Carey. I’m waiting for the music to begin when I realize in horror that this is an unaccompanied song; just Ms. Charles and the microphone.
She leans in close enough to hear breathing on the mic and closes her eyes, which is disconcerting, especially as I’m munching on bacon.
“There was a baby Jesus,” she sings in a high, quavering voice. Everyone is mesmerized. I look down at my eggs, turning pink.
“In the manger,” she warbles. “The baby Jesus in the manger.” She whispers a line, and then belts out the next as though she were playing Effie White in a production of “Dreamgirls.” After a long, excruciating ballad, she finally finishes and takes a bow.
“Next we have the line dancers,” the MC announces. A pregnant counselor, another wearing a cowboy hat, and the whole large group of Filipino teachers take the stage. The karaoke machine cranks out “Achy-Breaky Heart” for at least five minutes while they line dance. After this, the faculty chorus performs, and no one laughs at the rewritten lyrics to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” I feel guilty that I did not participate, but not guilty enough to wander up and join, as some teachers do.
“Somebody already put that on YouTube!” the MC cracks. “Now, for our final number.”
Ms. Charles and Mr. Diaz arrange themselves for the finale, with Ms. Charles sitting on Mr. Diaz’ lap. She musses his hair and rubs his chest. “Ew,” one middle schooler says. They begin an elaborately choreographed rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” about a guy cheating on his girlfriend.
“Please don’t go, baby,” Ms. Charles cooes, clinging to his shirt.
“It ain’t so, baby, I have to send this text,” Mr. Diaz ad-libs, and the audience howls.
“They’re just great!” the librarian shrieks.
Everyone gives them a standing ovation and rushes off to pick at the last of the free food. “Take two plates for lunch,” the Spanish teacher advises. Another teacher and myself are trying to get the last of the coffee out of the silver urns without scalding ourselves. After the requisite raffle that I don’t win, we all start to wander back to our classrooms to prepare for the last day.
“Wait, before you go, we are giving everyone a complimentary mouse pad with a picture of our beautiful high school on it,” the principal announces.
I’m appreciative of the breakfast. What better way to show your teachers love than feed them potatoes? But when I try to commiserate about the performances with someone, anyone, no one seems to think them odd or weird at all, which is, of course, the weirdest part.

My neighborhood

No wonder people are confused by LA. It confuses me every day. Recently I ordered a quesadilla off the street. Here is how the interaction went, entirely in Spanish.
First, I asked, “Can I have a quesadilla?”
The small woman working the cart formed a tortilla from a ball of blue masa and put it on the griddle. A woman sitting on a nearby concrete ledge wearing glasses peered at me with removed interest.
“Where are you from?”
“Here. Los Angeles.”
“Oh. I thought she was from Argentina,” she remarked to no one in particular.
“I lived in Spain for a while,” I said back.
As the woman in charge of the cart worked, a Latina woman, her husband, and a small girl approached.
“Do you have cheese and mushrooms?”
“Yes. We also have huitlacoche.”
“Cuit-la-moche? What?”
The man looked disgusted with the prospect of whatever huitlacoche could be, and said, “I would like a hot dog.” The very large woman manning the hot dog cart next to the quesadilla cart took an oily hot dog bun and squished it down on the griddle. She looked disinterested; in fact, I had seen her eating a quesadilla minutes before.
“What is huitlacoche?” I asked the quesadilla woman.
The nearby woman in glasses said, “It’s like elote.”
The woman who had ordered the quesadilla with mushrooms looked at me. She smiled. “Corn,” she said loudly in English. “Right, like corn?” she asked the woman in Spanish.
“No, it’s like the mushroom of the corn,” the woman said.
“I don’t know what that is. I just want regular mushrooms,” the woman said, looking confused. I ordered my quesadilla with squash blossoms, and huitlacoche, and all the other ingredients that sounded interesting. Whatever huitlacoche was, it was delicious.
There are some people who spend their lives trying to prove they are intelligent, or artistic, or any number of things. I have spent a great deal of time my life proving that I can speak Spanish.
I ate my quesadilla off a paper plate, perched over a trashcan, looking at the sunset reflecting off of Echo Park Lake. A few men in canvas hats were fishing, presumably to drop the fish back in the water when they were done. I wondered what the fish from the Echo Park Lake looked like. I wondered if they were like the fish in the Raymond Carver story “Nobody Said Anything,” where a hormonal teenage boy catches what looks like a long eel with scars all over its body; when his mother sees the fish, she shrieks for him to “get the snake out of the house.”
Two men in a white car pulled up next to me eating my quesadilla. The driver spoke in with a thick accent.
“Excuse me, sorry to bother you. How do you get to Universal Studios?”

Who are you supposed to be?

It’s always strange meeting someone for the first time when they are dressed as a monster covered in tiny pieces of green crepe. At a Halloween party in an unmarked loft apartment in Los Angeles, I saw a young woman getting beer out of the refrigerator.
“Are you a roller girl?”
“I’m one of the girls from Whip It, I don’t know which one, Drew Barrymore I guess?”
The girl was carrying six cans of Bud Light, and fell to the floor in a great crash, sending beer in all directions.
“Fucking skates,” she said, crawling to her feet, unfazed. “Who are you supposed to be? Are you Blossom?” I was wearing a floppy hat, a filmy pink nightgown shirt, and platform shoes.
“No! I’m Jodie Foster from the movie Taxi Driver.”
“Oh.” She looked confused.
“I’m a baby prostitute from the 70’s.”
The problem is, I know nothing at all about Jodie Foster’s character in Taxi Driver besides the fact that she was a baby prostitute in the 1970’s.
“Was your name Jodie?”
“I don’t know! I was a prostitute. I was twelve.”
“Oh.” She looked confused, and skated away.

Meanwhile, a monster sat on a nearby couch, looking melancholy.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked him.
“A monster,” he said.
“What kind of monster? Does your monster have a story?”
“No. I’m just a monster.”
“Halloween parties are so weird,” I said.
“Why?”
“There are just so many random people. Like those people. Who the fuck are they?” I motioned over to the stairwell, where two girls in eurotrash hiking boots and a man wearing white tights with his leg hair showing through were making their entrance.
“Those are my really good friends,” the monster said, looking even more melancholy.
“Oh. Oh no. I didn’t mean that. They look really cool. Um. So, what do you do?”
“Are we really going to have one of those LA conversations right now?”
“Oh. Not if you don’t want to.”
The monster looked at my tiny shorts, platforms and filmy shirt. “What are you supposed to be?”
“Jodie Foster. A prostitute. I don’t know. I have to go to the bathroom.”
I wandered over to the food table to eat a chocolate donut. “Do these chocolate doughnuts have weed in them?” I asked the resident of the house, who was dressed as David Carradine, complete with a gray wig, a rope around his neck, and a black dildo. About five people knew who he was supposed to be.
“The doughnuts are from Smart and Final,” he said. I stood next to a girl in a headdress, who was eating hummus and tortilla chips.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.
“I’m Smokahontas,” she said, squinting.
I had a sudden craving for carne asada tacos. “Do you know where to get a burrito around here?”
She squinted again and rubbed her eyes, thinking very hard about Mexican food in some deep recess of her brain. Finally she said, “Oh, like Chipotle?”
“Um, sure.”
Smokahontas wiped some hummus from her cheek. “Dude, I don’t even know where I am right now. Sorry.”

I spent the rest of the party dozing on the couch next to my roommate, who was dressed either as a band geek or a majorette, depending on her proximity to anything that resembled a baton.
“What’s a majorette, anyway?” she asked.
“A hot girl in front of the marching band who throws a baton in the air.”
“I don’t have a baton,” she said.
“What about a drumstick?”
“Look, here’s a walking stick!”
“That walking stick cost $25 at Walgreens,” my other roommate said.
“Never mind, then. I’ll just be a band geek.”
I looked around for any strangers within hearing distance, and then I asked my question.
“Hey guys… do I look like Blossom?”
My roommates looked at me in shocked silence.
“Eek! No, not at all!”
Here’s hoping, for everyone’s sake.

I saw Stevie Wonder at the Washington-Dulles airport.

I sat across from him on the Air Train. He was wearing a maroon velour suit and a leather jacket. As soon as I realized it was him, other people realized as well, and started pointing and mouthing silently, “Look, there’s Stevie Wonder!” This annoyed me until I remembered that Stevie Wonder is blind, and can’t see them.
Not everyone was so discerning. A passenger, eager to find seating, rolled over Stevie Wonder’s foot with his carryon suitcase. When this happened, Stevie smiled that big smile. His bodyguard looked pissed off. When they got off the train, Stevie put his arm through the bodyguard’s arm and off they went, like two British ladies going to tea.