04. WRITING
–
What Work Is
A Story in Three Days
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
–From “What Work Is,” Phil Levine
No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author,
but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true.
–Neal Cassidy, The First Third
I. The Connection
Curtis Brown’s ‘86 Cutlass is parked outside my window. It has a new paint job he calls “bass boat blue,” a metal flake coating that sparkles like nothing I’ve ever seen. Curtis emerges from the driver’s side door, which floats upward, Lambo-style, toward the sky. The day has begun.
Curtis, like all the students here, has a past that no one knows about. It’s a requirement to go to school here: you waive your rights to any kind of special services, including special ed. The school you came from likely has an understaffed office, so even attempting to request paperwork on a student's academic history is futile. We have a phone number and a home address. Little else. But for a few hours each day, we meet in this cinder block building, and we attempt to talk about reading and writing.
There are no bells, so Ken hits the filing cabinet to get everyone’s attention. It works. Today’s lesson involves elements of persuasive writing. If you want to make a convincing argument, I say, you have to put the different components together in a certain way. Students nod, a coping mechanism. They’ve mastered this tactic from years of making it through systems that don’t see them or, worse, actively work against their interests. If I’m being honest, this school is not much different. But I have this new job and here we are, so let’s get on with it.
Ken smells like weed and raises his hand. Yes, Ken, what’s up?
I’m not gonna lie, he says. I just hit Curtis’ blunt and I’m high as hell. The class roars. He gets his attention. Ken is obviously high as hell.
Ken, I ask. When you go to someone else’s house, and their mom is there, do you reveal that you’re high as hell?
No, he says with pride. I ask him to consider this space ours, which means it’s also partially mine.
I live here, I say. I spend more time in this room than I do at my own house, which means I think of our space as more of a home than the place I sleep at night. Out of respect for me and our shared space, I ask, can you take care of your business somewhere else? Ken thinks about this. He looks to Curtis who looks back at him. They nod. Yeah, Mr. D___. I can do that. An arrangement.
I’m really good at this job, I think. I’m working. We continue.
Two men in suits appear in the doorway, accompanied by the assistant superintendent of our school district. I learn that these men are real estate speculators who want to buy the building. They plan to knock it down, build expensive single-family houses, and sell them for a lot of money. This is development. They, too, are at work.
Hey everyone! Don’t mind us! We’re just walking through! Hey, what are you guys learning about? Our assistant superintendent has arrived in a very noticeable business ensemble. She speaks to us, all of us, as though we are young children. This is a test, it seems, and I begin to sweat. The start of a professional career in education hinges on this one moment, and the only person I have to rely on, the only person on my fucking team who can make this shot is high-as-hell Ken Johnson. Don’t do it, Ken. Just say nothing, and she’ll leave. Ken, fucking shut up for the love of Christ.
Ken raises his hand with real enthusiasm and what happens next is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We’re learning about persuasive writing, Superintendent C___. We’re talking about the importance of organizing your thinking to make the greatest impact. Superintendent C___ is surprised. Not what she was thinking. Seeing an opportunity, Ken continues: We begin with a clear claim and then we arrange our evidence and our analysis. We explore the implications at the end and then wrap up. Ken leans back, grins slowly, stoned as fuck. The class is stunned. Ken and I lock eyes, his grin is ear to ear. Superintendent C___ gives a glance to the real estate guys like it means something, and then she looks at me. Like a parent too busy to care, she says in her most patronizing drawl: Very impressive! I can see that Mr. D___ is doing good work here. Keep it up everyone! Then she leaves.
We laugh for a very long time and kids jump out of their seats to high five each other. I didn’t realize it until it was over, but this moment was some kind of communal action. Ken, I ask. How the hell did you pull that off? Without missing a beat, Ken says: Easy, Mr. D___ I know what’s up. And when you know what’s up, you do what you have to do.
This was a big deal, I tell him. You helped me out. And then I thought, perhaps, that such help was to such an extent that Ken might not fully realize. Why did you do that when you could have just told her you were high as hell? I asked.
Ken laughed. Easy, Mr. D____. You’re one of us. You’re one of the brothers.
II. The Raid
The next day began the same way. Curtis’ car is outside, kids in circles laughing, smoking, telling stories. People slowly finish up and wander into the building. Bill, the director of vocational ed whose office is down the hall from my room, comes by with a look on face. No one can leave the room during the first period, he says. Especially to go to the bathroom. Good luck, he says, and walks away. This is the most he has ever said to me.
Fifteen minutes into the lesson, everyone’s flip phones go off at once. Noticeable unease. What’s up? I ask. We have a policy about no phones, and now no one seems to care about that, so what’s going on?
Curtis says the police are here. He asks to leave, to go to his car, the blue one. I say that no one can leave our room until the police leave. This is not received well. Everyone’s back on their phones, and another student, Tatyana, who is taller and older than I am, says that she is most definitely leaving.
Tatyana, please. Just don’t go outside right now, I beg. I’m begging. This is part of my job, to beg my students to comply with rules I didn’t create so that I can keep my job.
Emergency, Mr. D___. No choice. I’m going.
I can’t stop you from leaving, I say. But I’m going to ask that you fucking please not go outside.
We had an agreement. She knew that she was doing something that could cause me trouble, and I knew that–as a condition of my job–I was obligated to do something that was causing her trouble. We were in a terrible bind that neither of us asked to be in. We were beholden to powers beyond our control, powers that required we not have each other’s back. I moved out of the doorway, and she stepped out.
There were cops in the hallway, of course. They were armed with guns; nightsticks; mace; and zip-tie cuffs, the kind you see in riot footage. Two men had German Shepherds (one each) who barked ferociously when they saw Tatyana.
Like pretty much everyone on Earth, Tatyana was seriously afraid of big dogs. The moment she saw the dogs barking at her, tightly leashed by a heavily armed police officer ordering her to freeze, she transformed. Fight or flight. At the same moment, another student, equally tall and older than Tatyana, came out of the neighboring classroom, also concerned about the situation that was unfolding.
Seen through the sidelight window of my classroom door, what played out next was like a 1950s rumble. Caught in the middle of the two barking dogs, the young women saw each other not as allies but as enemies. For reasons no one entirely understood, the two students elected to fight each other. The other girl removed from her purse a medium-sized pocket knife and began to lunge toward Tatyana. Not to be outdone, Tatyana reached into her loose-fitting boot and removed a metal box cutter, switching the blade all the way out and informing her opponent that she was about to face serious and permanent injury.
Utterly confused by what they were witnessing, the police moved to restrain the two students while the dogs were ordered to heel. The girls struck each other with fists, pulled at each other’s hair, but the blades never made contact, fortunately. The dogs continued barking and ran toward the other girl’s purse. One officer pulled out a small bag of weed, and by then the students were too tired to continue on with the brawl. The police cuffed them both and escorted them out to the cars.
I hadn’t realized that the class had been watching the whole drama play out through the hallway windows just as I had. They were firing off texts on their flip phones with unbelievable speed, making arrangements to be picked up, or to meet up after this wrapped up, or to do whatever else they felt like doing after school.
With nothing else to do in such a surreal moment, I wrote a letter to my future self as we waited for an all clear from our building principal. Whatever you do and wherever you find yourself during the course of your professional life, I wrote, never ever let it get this fucked up again. You can always run. There has to be someplace else where shit like this doesn’t happen. I signed my name and dated the paper.
After the hallway was fully cleared, everyone else knew they had no chance at making a run for it, so they sat quietly, played games, told stories, and waited for the police to pack up their shit. Any hope of continuing the lesson was lost, so students did their own thing and that was pretty much that.
The cops took significantly more time than anyone thought, so we all continued to wait, listening in the hallway as the dogs’ paws scratched along the linoleum. Students saw them outside in the grass, too, like robots, sniffing the perimeter of our soon-to-be-sold building while patrol cars drifted by every so often.
Bill came and knocked on the door. In a whisper, he said that the raid had been a success, and that I could now let everyone out of my room. I asked what happened to make it so successful. And with a strange smile, he said that the two girls who were busted were returning to a juvenile detention center on the other side of town. He was proud of this. A student in the neighboring classroom, he said, had stashed a bag of pills and a couple joints in the math teacher’s closet. When the dogs came in, the students insisted the drugs belonged to their teacher, and after no one fessed up, the principal had to let them all go. Bill said that he knows who did it, but he’s working out another way to get them. With the most confidence I’d ever seen anyone exhibit, he smiled and simply said We’ll get ‘em.
I went to the front of the room to deliver the update. What’s the word, Mr. D___? Are we all settled? Asked Ken.
Yeah, Ken. We’re all good. Everyone can go after I take attendance. With everything going down, I completely forgot to do that today.
I sifted through the names and people signaled in their own way. Halfway down the list and then I got to Curtis. Where’s Curtis? I asked. I could have sworn I saw him earlier today. Ken? What’s up? No one said a thing. The window was conspicuously cracked open; Curtis had fled on foot.
III. The Next Day
The day begins like any other. Curtis’ car is still outside, but a man in a vest is latching a chain to the back end and pulling it onto a flatbed truck. Definitely impounded. Ken was eager to tell the class what had happened.
Curtis’ father had used the car to sell enormous amounts of weed. The two bricks of weed that were in the trunk when the school day began yesterday had definitely been confiscated by the police. Ken wasn’t sure if Curtis knew about the weed in the trunk. Even if he did, Ken said, I sure as fuck wouldn’t tell any of you. The class laughed again. More attention for Ken. We shift gears back to class, and Ken asks about our agenda.
We’re going to continue our work with persuasive writing, everyone. Let’s take out our materials from a couple days ago and continue working through our drafts. Back to work, I think.
A knock at the door. It’s Bill.
Hey, Bill. Can this wait? I’m—
With glee, Bill says it cannot wait. They got him, he says.
Who? The kid who put the pills in Dean’s closet? I ask.
Your kid, Curtis. Turns out he escaped from the building when the cops weren’t looking. He outran everyone. Sargent P___ called me last night to tell me they were looking for him, on suspicion of all kinds of shit. Turns out he ran down to that Burger King two blocks away and hid in the dumpster until the middle of the night! Can you believe these kids. My god. One of the managers called the cops after they found him eating some of the leftover food. I mean, can you believe that shit?
Damn, Bill. That sucks. Do you think he, like, has enough to eat?
What? Bill was incredulous. I scheduled this raid to get this element out of our building. Thanks to Sargent P____, we know that Curtis was the ringleader. I hope they throw the book at him, frankly.
Wow, well… Thanks, Bill? I add an upward inflection to make it sound like a question because I’m not sure what to say, and I don’t want to express any level of gratitude for Bill’s actions. I turn around and see Ken working in a small group. He’s taken it upon himself to instruct two of his classmates who are struggling to form their thesis statements. Ken is helping out, and he’s also high as hell.
I look at the clock and we’re only seven minutes into a 90 minute period. Bill closes the door, supremely confident. I look out the window as I hear the beeping of the tow truck, backing into a 3-point turn and getting ready to head toward the impound yard. It leaves the parking lot and heads down the road. Curtis’ car gets smaller and smaller until it vanishes entirely.
