La Mesa off Hercules Street in the middle of nowhere San Diego County. One of the court schools on the sub list. A place for students on probation who needed to stay in school as part of a deal.
Because of the drought, the scorched brown grass never needs mowing and the shrubs don’t need to be trimmed. Most of the buildings of the former elementary school have been closed up. Empty parking lots and silent rusted slides and monkey bars shine in the sun. My students won’t be using them.
I push through the door to the classroom and part of a hall connects to the bathrooms that remain open for use. The whole sprawling campus, once teeming with busses and shrieks and swinging jump ropes, now a ghost town for a select group of students a few credits shy of a diploma and a few credits past eighth grade; too old to stay home, and according to the legal system, not ready to go free.
Desks in rows, cheerful sunlight reflecting off the waxed floors, the teacher’s desk parked in front, facing the in-coming students when they show up, if they show up.
I’m the over-40 rookie teacher white guy. Not many jobs jumped up and grabbed me when I got my credential that year. In fact, not one. I went straight to the sub pool and told my wife it was because I graduated from the program in December, middle of the contract cycle, and I was sure to get something for the Fall. I didn’t mention that the young co-eds—fresh-faced women in the same program with tanned arms and white teeth—had been offered jobs where they did their student teaching. I was promised an interview that never happened.
No sour grapes. I had my credential and was launching on a new career path that included steady pay checks, health care, retirement package, opportunities for promotion and the all-important kicker, a chance to do something meaningful: work with kids.
Except subs get none of that. But I needed the experience, so I took the out-lying jobs that nobody else wanted: court schools and special ed.
I look over the sub plans left on the desk.
Dear Guest Teacher,
Students work independently. The bulk of their time is spent on GED prep which is in files by subject. When they finish one assignment, they go on to the next until they get to a chapter quiz. Those are in the file cabinet behind and to the left. It is locked for obvious reasons. You won’t be giving quizzes.
If you have an activity you like to do, feel free to dive in. This bunch isn’t really used to working together as a class so any group lessons are problematic.
At 10:30 we go out for PE. There are fields past the playground in the back and basketball hoops. Bats, balls, etc are in the closet by the door. Usually they stand around in clumps until it’s time to go in. Sometimes they play catch.
Lunch comes at 11:15 or so delivered by the district. One per student. Any extras you can give away. Some of the girls have kids and boyfriends. Nothing gets wasted. Many wouldn’t show except for the sack lunch. They leave at noon. Some have jobs and half a day of this is more than enough structure.
Thanks again and have a great day.
Mr. Chernick (with a happy face).
I look up and a girl is sitting at a desk in the middle of the back row, staring into a hand-held compact stroking black onto her eyelashes. I had not heard her come in. Her dark hair shines in smooth planes across her shoulders except above her forehead where a brown flower of bangs blossoms in the style favored by Latinas at the time. I wonder how she got here; not just in the room, but in the school. What turn of events—legal, personal, and no doubt, emotional—brought her to this desk on this day when the world was so wide open and this place so, how should I put it, exclusive. You don’t get here by accident.
I know better than to ask, or even speak, since she was happy in her micro bubble getting ready for the day and all that follows. Maybe she doesn’t see me there reading the note at the desk, and we can spend another few minutes in the privacy of our own worlds.
“Where’s Mr. C?” Her voice is bright and hard like she expects me to know the answers.
“I don’t know. Gone for the day. I’m the sub.”
“Don’t usually have subs. I’m Lupe, and you are?”
She doesn’t stop stroking her eyelashes or look up. Multi-tasking, self-absorbed, confident of her place in the larger scheme of things.
“I’m Mr. Pelton. Mr. P if that’s how it works. Call me Mr. P.” I write it on the board. Not a green board or a white board, a black board with chalk. The school district spared no expense for court schools. They used every dog-eared book, bent desk, and leftover box of chalk they could muster. Nothing was too good for the court school. I don’t see any computers. There is an overhead projector rolled into one corner, and I wonder if it works.
A blue Ford Pinto pulls into a parking slot out front. A thin-faced kid opens the driver’s side door, short hair gelled into a fastback. He wears baggy shorts sagged low and skate shoes, a wide T-shirt under a vest with torn off sleeves. Two other guys get out of the car, both shaved-head Latinos with likewise low shorts and skate shoes untied, some chains hanging off belt loops. The gang costumes, uniforms really, only without the flags and bandanas that mark affiliations, associations, enemies.
On cue, walking in pairs, the rest of the class shows up and files in to sit at desks dispersed around the room. There is a secret seating chart that I do not know, but somehow it is better this way since I can’t move anybody without inviting ridicule or conflict. What difference would it make?
One day. They are here; I’m gone. Keep my head down. The school clock rolls around to 8, starting time. Nothing happens. At five after, I use my voice.
“Good Morning, everybody. Mr. Chernick is gone for the day. I’m the sub. Mr. Pelton. Mr. P if you want. The plans say everybody works on their own. That’s a good thing. But if you have any questions, ask me and I probably won’t know the answer.” Funny sideways looks from one to the next to the next, an echo of eye rolling. “Lupe already asked me where Mr. C is, and I told her I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him tomorrow.” Long silence. “It’s what you know that’s important.”
“I know you’re full of shit,” a shaved-head boy says with a smile. A wave of low laughs.
“Very observant, ” I hold out an upturned palm to my new friend. “And your name?”
“Bruno.”
“Thanks, Bruno, for getting us started.”
I go around the room as students say names. I have no way to know if they are made up. Abdul, Stitch, Corrina, Jackie, Bob (made up since everyone laughs), Rollie, Casper, Felix, Lupe. Ten in all, supposed to be thirteen. I have to take attendance. The court wants to know, needs to know. It is a key rule of subbing. There are other rules, like don’t get beat up for saying something stupid. Don’t touch people. Don’t hook into a fight. If you don’t know the answer, say so. Don’t give out your phone number. It costs nothing to be kind, so be generous. You will be tested. Fail the test. Then slowly start over again; you are now on even ground.
The morning unfolds, and people get to work pulling assignments out of filing cabinets and snapping open three-ring binders. There is no homework. No one has the inclination to do anything outside these few hours of seat time. A few work in journals, responding to writing prompts.
One of the girls, Jackie, tall with brown waves of hair, stands up next to her desk and arches her back like waking up from a long nap. People look up from what they are doing, and Jackie knows she is being eye-balled. She has the kind of profile that draws a long second look and likes the attention.
“What are you looking at?” she barks at Rollie, the Pinto driver.
“Nice rack,” he says, pouring on the charm.
“Good answer,” Jackie says. A wave of low laughs moves through the room, then everybody goes back to work.
I could sit there at the desk and do crossword puzzles if I wanted but decide to take a stroll around the room like they encourage student teachers to do to stay engaged. I wander off into the corner where Carlos, one of the shaved heads, is using his elbow as a tripod as he writes in a spiral notebook. “This is bullshit,” Carlos says as I walk by, an obvious call to action for me.
“What is?”
He reads me the prompt: If you could travel to any country in the world, where would you go and why? I notice in his block-printed ball point he wrote Disneyland and then crossed it out.
“I see what you mean,” I say. “Prompts are really just conversation starters like, ‘This is some hot weather we’re having.’ No clue to what a person is really thinking.”
“So it is bullshit.”
“Write something else.”
“Like what?”
I look at Carlos. At least I know what he is thinking. He hates these time-killing assignments that nobody will ever read. His face is a mask of resistance.
“Write about a day, one day, like a holiday or a birthday that you remember because something good happened. Something unexpected.”
“I can do that?”
“You can do that. If you get stuck, we can talk it over.”
I move on. I had pressed my luck with Carlos, and the risk is high that he will shut down for the day and drift into a nap. No blanket, no story time.
Felix is telling Lupe about his shift at McDonalds the night before and the fact that he works right alongside his mother. She is at the front, and he is on the grill.
“Can you believe that shit? I still like the food.”
“They put drugs in it. So you get addicted. That’s a fact.”
“Lupe, put the crack pipe down,” says Bob, who was not Bob.
I circle back to my desk and go over the note again, looking for details that I missed. I find it strange that this program, one room, one teacher, not an aide or front desk, could sit there day after day collecting worksheets torn out of GED prep books. McDonalds was a real career path compared to this brain fart.
On the bottom of Mr C’s note, a PS:
Lock the front door when you leave. Sometimes the custodian is late coming around. He’ll set the security alarm.
Good, I think. You wouldn’t want anybody breaking in here and stealing that overhead projector. Maybe I’ll take it home myself and orchestrate a light show for me and Ivy and the kid. Colored water in a pie plate while “Yellow Submarine” blasts away on the home stereo. We could lie on the living room floor and pretend we are high.
I look up and Carlos is standing there with his notebook. “Here,” and he walks back to his corner. I put the notebook square in front of me on the teacher’s desk. I already had decided I would not write on his work. If I have anything to say, I will say it to his face right then and there. Immediate feedback.
I won’t go into too many details because of the personal nature of the narrative. It was his 9th birthday, and they were at his grandmother’s house in Chula Vista. Carlos and his mother and little sister were there, and a car pulled up to the curb outside. It was right after the cake came out and they sang Happy Birthday. He got a wiffle ball and bat, a new Power Rangers T-shirt from his mother. His sister made a card with a crayon picture of herself holding the bouquet of flowers she was going to buy him when she got the money.
Then a knock at the door. Grandma went to the screen and saw a silhouette and knew right away it was her son. She let out a high whimper, like a dog getting ready to go out for a walk (Carlos’ own words) and flung the door open. The room went silent because the man, Carlos’ dad, walked in with a big fat smile on his face.
“I thought he was dead the way nobody talked about him, and there he was. He looked so happy to see me, all of us. My mom ran out of the room hiding her tears.”
I walk over to where Carlos was sitting with his jaw clenched, looking down at his worksheet. He squints at me like I’m there to collect money.
“Carlos, this is really great writing. The whole time I was at your birthday party and your grandma’s house.” A look of confusion moves from his eyes to his jaw before he speaks.
“You read it?”
I mention some details, what makes him a good writer. If he believes me or not, that is up to Carlos. But I tell him the truth.
Student’s papers pile up in a wire basket on the corner of the desk. Drill and kill exercises on prepositions. Bite-size chunks of history. The Cuban Missile Crisis served up in a one-page summary. Felix turns that one in.
Ten-thirty rolls around, and according to my schedule, we are due to go outside for some PE before the sack lunches arrive, so we take a break. I ask Lupe, my de-facto aide, “How’s this PE routine work?”
“Sometimes we just go out to the field and walk some laps. Nobody really wants to get all sweaty.”
“Mr C’s note said something about the equipment room.”
“Over there, balls and bats and jump ropes. Like we’re gonna jump rope and hop scotch. Some of the guys smack the softball around. There’s some hoops.”
So I make an informal announcement and open up the closet. Bruno grabs a basketball and starts dribbling off the top of desks, and I point him outside. Abdul, Rollie, Not-Bob grabbed bats and balls and mitts and wander off toward the baseball fields across a brown expanse of dry grass, past the tetherball poles and three basketball courts, one with a chain net.
Watching these strangers, muscle bound backs and arms—aluminum bats slung across their shoulders like they were heading to a rumble— makes me think this isn’t a good idea. But we’re out in the sun heading in the same general direction to do something as a group. It’s way better than being stuck inside, sitting at desks while the day dies by a thousand cuts.
We get to the diamond. The girls are not gonna play and break off to take their slow laps as far to the edge of the field as they can. The rest start picking teams.
“Mr. P. You gotta pitch for both sides; we don’t have enough guys,” Not-Bob says.
“That’s fair,” I say. “Equal disadvantage.”
The teams get spread around. Bats are tested for heft. Mitts flexed and squeezed and thrown back and forth. I loft a pitch up high and soft like they do in slow pitch so the ball almost drops on the plate. Carlos hits it about a quarter of a mile. Home run, he says. And it is, I thought. Except Felix, on the thwack of the ball and the following zing of metal, takes off on a dead sprint toward the fence, beyond which is the street and cars and the rest of the universe. His back to the ball, at the last second, turns around and stabs his mitt into the air. A sound like an axe in wood. Thunk. He catches the ball. Out.
Two all-star plays on the first pitch.
My next offering bounces off the dirt and rolls across the plate. Two pitches later, a line drive rattles into the weeds for a triple, but the ball comes back to the plate as the runner crosses. Safe.
“I tagged him,” Stitch says.
“You missed.” I am the umpire and the pitcher. One zip. One away.
Next pitch another smash goes to the fence but is thrown in late, and the runner breaks for third and rounds for home. The ball hops in and there is a high-speed collision at the plate with dust and dirt and bodies on the ground.
“Out,” I call.
“No way,” Rollie, the runner, says. The dust still hangs in the air, and temperatures rise along with voices on both sides. Stray bats are picked up. In two long seconds of screaming, no punches are thrown.
“That’s it. Roll it up; we’re going in. I can’t pitch and be the umpire. Get the stuff.”
I walk to the backstop and wheel my arms for the outfield to come in. No argument.
“We won,” Not-Bob says.
I wait. The rest of the team picks up gear, T-shirts ringed with sweat circles. The girls taking the long lap, Lupe, Jackie, and Corrina joined us. “Nobody won,” I say to Not-Bob.
I do not want to go back in the classroom. I walk slow, carrying one of the bats. Jackie has the basketball and takes a few high dribbles before clanging a shot off the rim. Abdul and Carlos zoom in to take the ball. Carlos gets there first and squares off in a one-on-one pose. Abdul hikes up his sagging shorts, so he can get low in the wide-legged stance of a defender. Carlos makes three jab steps and goes to his left. Abdul punches the ball out but doesn’t steal it. Carlos chases down the ball and puts up a shot that misses everything. Nothing but howls from the ever-hostile gallery. No hot temper this time, only insults.
I notice that we are all bunched up together watching. Abdul grabs the loose ball, takes three hops and one dribble and rattles the chain with a one-handed dunk. He is no taller than me but can defy gravity any time he wants.
We keep drifting back to the squat building with the classroom and the desks.
“Hey, Mr. P,” Felix says. “It OK if we flip?”
I am up on most of the street slang, but I don’t know this one. Flip?
“What you mean, flip?”
“You know, handsprings and shit. Watch.”
He stops and surveys a patch of dead grass. Standing straight, he swings his hands at his side. We all stop. He takes four or five running steps and launches himself forward onto his hands like a dive, comes out of that into a cartwheel that ends with a back flip round off. The chain on his baggy shorts holds a trucker wallet dangling to his knees. Loose change, cigarettes, a lighter, and a pair of sunglasses spin out of his pockets and into the grass during his airborne revolutions. “I could do way better,” Felix says, catching his breath. “But the ground is bumpy and goes downhill. That’s tough.”
“Mr. P, check this out.” Abdul adjusts his shorts. Takes the huge gold chain from his neck and tosses it to Jackie for safe keeping. He backs up a few steps, eyeing the ground, the slope, the loops and twirls that nobody else can see. He runs, dives forward, twists in the air into a back handspring followed by two more and finishes with a backflip that seems to hang in the air, head three feet off the turf, and lands at attention. I want to applaud.
“Abdul, you’ve been holding out on me,” Jackie says. “If I would’ve known…”
“You would’ve what?”
“Oh, I dunno, stopped being such a bitch.”
“That ain’t gonna happen,” Not-Bob says. And it seems to be the consensus opinion because everybody laughs, even Jackie.
“I can’t even do a fucking push up,” Not-Bob says.
By this time, Felix is walking on his hands across a grass slope toward the slides and monkey bars. His upside-down shirt showing bare ropes of muscle under a colored map of religious tattoos. When he stands upright again, he rocks back on his heels before launching into a series of springs that loop forward and back with a cartwheel finish.
Something has changed. The bodies spinning through the air so close to the ground have broken free. The big machine with levers and springs and turning cogs has unwound like a clock. The tension that comes with order and precision is gone, leaving behind the giddy feeling of flight.
Abdul moves in beside me as we slow-walk back to class.
“Where you learn how to do that?” I ask.
“Oh man, back in Georgia, everybody flips. Right out in the back yard. All day long. Nothin’ to do, so people flip. Even little-bitty fat people flip.” He holds his palm below his belt to show how short the people might be who spun through the air like bowling pins. “Nobody flips in California.”
“Felix flips,” I say.
“Yeah. He ain’t from here either. “
We walk along, the whole class in a cluster, listening to Abdul. “I wish I never come out to California. I wouldn’t be caught up in gangs and all that shit. Messed me up, know what I’m sayin’?”
I do and I don’t, so I keep quiet.
“Mr. P,” Jackie says, “What’s your deal?”
“My deal?” I’m not from here either. I never wanted to come to California, but my wife got a good job. Here I am walking across acres of dry grass to the abandoned school that had once been the home of screams and laughter, bananas and milk, games of tag, hopscotch, rope skipping, name calling, and bells ringing. “I’m just trying to get along,” I say. “Like everybody else.”
We are back in the classroom. A plastic tub full of sack lunches sits on a side table by the teacher’s desk. Written on the outside in black marker are the variety of sandwiches offered for the day. Turkey and cheese, ham and cheese, or cheese and cheese.
There is a list of names, but nobody seems to care too much who got what, except Lupe who wants to take home a cheese sandwich for her little brother. An apple and cookie package comes in each bag along with a small bag of chips. Snacks trade back and forth. They sit on top of desks and backward in chairs, eating lunch. A few minutes before noon they leave in pairs, trios, loose clusters. Nobody goes solo.
Rollie and Jackie get in the Pinto with Carlos in back. Abdul, Felix, Lupe, with extra food, walk across the heat-streaked parking lot, heading for the corner to wait for the bus. Everybody takes something home besides the sack lunch leftovers. Today, there is something new to carry.