Shebelazy

School Story, Scar Story

Recently, I assigned to my high school English students a story about a physical scar written from the perspective of the scar.

While I won’t share my students’ stories here, in this forum, I will share mine.

As you read, think about any sharp objects your teachers might have ever thrust upon you.

Hand Across a Globe

Before I was born, I was made only of possibility. I was just an inkling of what might happen if  – if you put your  hand on an electric burner that’s still hot, if you fell on the ice while carrying, rather than wearing, your ice skates, or if you, or someone coming toward you, were to actually run with scissors.

Existing in a realm hovering above suburban Minnesota, I didn’t think I had much of a shot at being born at all. I figured I would have to wait for another assignment to another part of the globe where humans were more prevalent and accidents were more mathematically likely to occur. Asia, for example, or Africa.

I was even jealous of my brother who was assigned to a small island in the Pacific where machetes were held more than eating utensils.

He was born right away.

 Despite my fears of never being born or of waiting for a seemingly interminable amount of time to be born, I was compelled into action on a mild spring day in 1976.

 My host, Andrea Hansen, was attending her fifth grade science class at Countryside Elementary School in Edina, Minnesota, and attempting a newly prescribed project involved building a scale-model of the school – the entire school, with parking lot, playground and all.

 Apparently, according to Andrea, the students were to first measure every aspect of the school’s grounds, using a surveyor’s wheel made of cardboard and string.

They were to walk from north to south and east to west, rolling the wheel and recording the number of rotations in order to determine the exact number of feet from here to there and there to here and upward and downward, too.

They were to record the measurements precisely enough to replicate them later, to scale, and then form, in proportional likeness, a mini elementary school made of wood, cardboard and papier mậché.

Andrea was fascinated by this challenge and wholeheartedly enjoyed the preliminary preparation. She was absolutely up to the challenge of recreating the one place she loved most in the world.

After Andrea spent two evenings measuring every aspect of the school, which covered approximately three square suburban blocks, she arrived at fourth period ready to take the next step.

As the bell rang, Andrea perused the board, saw what was on the day’s agenda, took out the appropriate supplies and sat straight in her chair eager to delve in.

Andrea’s teacher, Mr. Koklas, announced with enthusiasm that they would each finally transfer their two-dimensional measurements into three-dimensional reality. 

Mr. Koklas asked them all to put the flattened cardboard boxes they had brought from home onto their desks as he handed out additional supplies, including card stock, tape, glue, scissors and double-edged razor blades.

Come again?

Andrea thought to herself.

Double-edged razor blades?

Indeed. 

Andrea’s fifth grade science teacher, Mr. Koklas, handed out to each and every eleven year-old semi-scientist a shiny, albeit still-in-its-sheath, double-edged razor blade with which they were to cut the cardboard they had brought and the card stock he had passed out, so that they might create exactly to scale the entirety of their school.

Andrea wondered if she should include in her requisite replica the razor blades themselves because surely they were more compelling than any set of stairs, pair of columns or collection of monkey bars.

But she didn’t dare ask about that for fear of being considered flippant or caustic or rude.

Instead, she bit her lip, took a razor blade from the box, passed the box along to the student on her right and analyzed with wide open eyes this newfound tool that would certainly change the face of the school.

She took the blade from its sheath, touched its edges gingerly with her pointer finger, turned it over on its back and took the same action again.

Then she set the razor blade down and looked at her cardboard and her measurements. She knew that in order to cut correctly she would have to first draw some lines.

She measured and drew and measured and drew, then picked up the razor blade up and set in.

As she started to cut in a straight line directly toward her, she looked at the box she was cutting – at the angle and its path.

She thought, as she cut, that the blade was headed for her wrist, but for some reason she didn’t stop. Either she didn’t know how to stop, or she didn’t have time to stop, or she had hoped in vain that she wouldn’t need to stop.

Nonetheless, Andrea didn’t, and she slit a deep line across her wrist over an inch and a quarter long.

Andrea stared at the open gash with the same fascination she had once used to stare at the blade and at school and at campfires and at moose and at all things she found to be awesome.

The gash turned from green to red and from painless to painful in about ten seconds flat, after which time she glanced at the front, toward the board, for either the teacher or for instructions on what to do if one should accidentally cut his wrist.

After she found no definitive direction, she clasped her hand, went up to the teacher who was sitting in his chair near the board. She nudged him with her elbow, showed him her hand and silently waited for him to respond.

Mr. Koklas reacted by grabbing her hand as tightly as a tourniquet, holding it up in front of the class and declaring, using his outside voice, “This is what happens when you don’t follow directions!”

Andrea thought to herself, using her internal voice: This is what happens when you give elementary school children razor blades…

But knew enough not to say what she thought out loud.

Mr. Koklas gave her a pass for the nurse who wrapped her wrist in layers of gauze and told her to keep her hand in the air in a perpetual raise-your-hand-if-you-have-a-question gesture while she called Andrea’s home.

Andrea’s mother took awhile picking her up but arrived before too much blood had been lost. She brought her to a doctor who would no doubt have a slew of questions.

The doctor asked a few and gave Andrea stitches and a tetanus shot and a sharply admonishing speech, which Andrea thought would have been much better placed upon her bold and brazen teacher, Mr. Koklas.

On the way back from the doctor Andrea wondered a few things like what would have happened if she had cut her hand about an eighth of an inch to the right. Would she have bled to death?

And would she still be allowed to finish her scale model because she really, really wanted to.

She also knew that henceforth she would heed her own instinctive warnings. If an internal voice were to say If you keep going on this path, you’ll get hurt she would listen and try to somehow stop.

This is where I come in.

After a few days of gestation, during which eight stitches plied together two separate banks of skin, I started to form. I was increasingly bumpy and crooked and hard around the edges and displayed miniscule marks where the thick plastic stitches entered my host’s punctured skin.

I think I made myself purposefully lumpy and imperfect so that Andrea would be reminded that life is lumpy and imperfect. And my location being dangerously close to a major artery would remind Andrea to not take life for granted.

After about a week, when the stitches were pulled out, I was ready to make a full appearance. I was red, perhaps from feeling shy or from being newly born, and I was raised as though on alert.

Just as Andrea sat in her classroom chair eager to glean what was proffered, I was and have been raised up above skin, willing to dare to live.

After 35 years, I am still not very smooth, though I am more settled in and less interested in rising fully up.

I guess that comes with age.

Pen Pals

My former boss is out of prison, or so it would seem, since he just responded to my recent e-mail asking him.

He was serving 37 months for piracy. I don’t know how many months he actually served, by the end, or if he really does, now, have to comply with three subsequent years of supervised release.

I also don’t know how pirates are treated in prison. Do the sex offenders look down or up at them? How about the murderers? Do killers hand the pirates business cards in case they should need to eliminate someone iffy at some point down the line? Is prison just one big mixer sans cocktails?

And do white-collar pirates share the same basketball court with the Gulf-of-Aden-blue collar pirates? Did my boss have to learn Somali? Or did they learn html?

I don’t know when or if I will ask my former boss these and other prison-related questions. I will have to gauge his openness when and if I see him again. He said in his e-mail that he might move to his homeland where he presumably learned his marketable (albeit temporarily so) skill of piracy. He also said that he would contact me once his new business (quite probably legal) is off the ground, wherever that might be, so that I could get back to writing technical manuals and advertisements for him. Remotely.

I hope so because I really want my old job back.

I liked being able to work part time, according to whatever schedule I wanted,  doing something I’m good at and getting paid whenever I needed.  

Speaking of pay: Interestingly, I was on the official payroll and was not handed neatly stacked bills under any table or in any padded room behind trick bookshelves. Everything appeared to be very above board.

Almost everything.

While I didn’t know that my boss was a pirate, I did know that he was somewhat whimsical about copyright laws – not because he was immoral, but because he was from a country where they don’t seem to consider intellectual property as, well, property. I spent the bulk of four years trying to convince my boss that it is indeed a crime to cut and paste – even one sentence. He would chuckle and wave his hand as though I were silly. I rewrote everything I could get my hands on. I strove to not just appease my own conscience but to save my boss from having to learn about intellectual property the hard way.

Then I moved to LA.

And he moved to prison.

Not just like that. There were months in between and a whole other side-business I knew nothing about, which involved two other guys. But I often entertain myself with the indulgent notion that as soon as I left, my boss had no one to read him aloud Chapter 5 of Title 17, and it was therefore me who kept him out of the pen for all those years.

This was a typical day at said job in northern California:

I would stroll in after school at around 4 p.m. One or two software engineers would be writing tutorials in Chinese and/or English. I would wave hello to my boss’s 80 year-old mother who was in the back putting tchotchkes in boxes. My boss would offer me shrimp fried rice and a carton of ballerinas or key chains or bobble cats. He was always selling something.

Then I would sit at my desk and rewrite whatever was sent to me. Either it was written by one of the foreign engineers in broken English and needed to be edited, or it was cut and pasted from some published treatise and needed to be completely erased and redone, or it was empty and I had to write it myself.

After an hour or two of writing, I would yell, “I’m going to record!” and everyone would fall silent. I would turn on the microphone that was resting on a stack of soon-to-be-unplagiarized books, and I would read aloud phrases, such as “Welcome to PC Builder 2000. To begin the tutorial, go to file, open…”

After recording for a while – for maybe half an hour – I would get up and walk around, letting everyone know it was okay to talk or chew or sneeze. At some of the locations (there were four or so over the years), I had a relatively sound-proof office with a door that closed, and I could get a lot of recording done in one sitting. At others, I would have to wrangle the room.

Following three or four hours of writing and narrating and eating shrimp and agreeing to buy no bobble cats, I would go home to bed and think about how nice it was that my boss served me dinner and gave me plenty of freedom and paid me well (and sometimes in advance) and never – okay, only occasionally – doubted my expertise.

If my former boss does call me from China or Mali or Greece or France in a few months to offer me the opportunity to write/rewrite text for him again and to say into a microphone, “Welcome to…” I hope it is with new-found clarity about the importance of selling only what is legally yours, yes, but also the same old understanding that I will always do what I can to keep him out of trouble, and I trust that he (and his new, cocktail-mixer pals) will do the same for me.

Super Shuttle Story #1

Phantom Pain

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

That is the first thing I asked the three chaplains who were in my Super Shuttle as we left the San Francisco Presidio, back when it was still an Army base. I was taking them to SFO. They were on their way to a suicide convention in New Jersey – a convention whose goal was to limit the number of suicides among returning Desert Storm vets.

“Why do you ask?” responded one of the clergymen?

“Well, well…” I launched into an anecdote that was really more of a ghost story.

A few weeks before this trip to the airport, I had completed my MFA thesis at San Francisco State University. It was a one-act play entitled “An Elephant Stepped on My Head.” The play centered around an event of my childhood – an event that encapsulated the entire ordeal.  

One day after school, when I was in sixth grade, I walked into my bedroom to find all 33 of my stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling. They were of varying sizes, including a few that were life-sized. The fuzzy victims were hanging by chains and ribbons, which were wrapped around their necks – some loosely, others tightly. These executed creatures were spread evenly about the celing as though the designer/perpetrator had used measuring tape and a pencil in an effort to effect precision.

That designer-perp was my mother.

“Mom!” I yelled.

“Mooom!!” I shrieked louder.

In an existential panic, I ran into the backyard where my mom was pruning plants.

I confronted her.

“What the hell happened in there?!”

I used the language of an adult, since, in my family, the roles had never been clearly laid out. No measuring tape had been used to effect familial function.

“What do you mean?” My mother nonchalantly replied. Nonchalance was her forté whenever maniacal wrath was not.

“Um, my stuffed animals are hang – “

“Oh, isn’t it great? It’s all the rage.”

“All the rage?”

My stomach dropped to the bottom of a lagoon. It felt immediately laden like a trunk full of histrionic junk. I would have to pry it open just enough to stuff my feelings deep inside. Emotions were treated by my mother like uninvited guests–like trespassers, really. I would have to stow them away until later. Until it was opportune to bring them out. Perhaps a play or a blog some twenty or thirty years later?

After pleading my direct case to my mother, sans threatening emotion, I shifted strategy and argued as convincingly as possible, that while this particular design choice was arguably clever, judgmental neighbors might think it sick.  

She wasn’t having any of it.

I resigned myself to the fact that I would witness and re-witness this public hanging for the next twelve months because my mom had a few rules: 1) she was in charge of décor; no one else had any say; 2) all the rooms had to flow together, exhibiting a common theme; and 3) in order for the theme to be fully realized, it would have to stay in play for at least a year. A year was the typical run of a fashion idea, was it not? An entire year.

In my play, the main event is this particular stuffed animal execution while the main characters are a giraffe (my mom), an elephant (my step dad), and a human girl (me). The giraffe is tall, eats flowers and likes to decorate. The elephant is lumbering and drunk and throws his weight around.  

Why is the elephant the title character of this piece and not the giraffe? Because once the giraffe invites the elephant in – once she spruces up the place with the elephant’s malevolence, he completely takes over – all except the general physical décor, of course, which will always belong to her.

How does this bit of history connect to three Army chaplains in an airport van?

Well, two weeks before my play opened, which was about a month before this ride to the airport, I was rewriting the ending of my play. I needed the whole thing to tie together somehow – to have a theme that was tethered between two tidy bookends. I wanted the play to begin with the end and end with the beginning.

For the ending, I wrote about the first time I met my stepfather:

I was five. He was 45. He was coming to pick up my mom for a date. He trolled up the street in a black Fleetwood Cadillac, waving out the window a “Chutes and Ladders” game as though it were a Star Jig and I a trout.

I watched him approach from the stoop. Then I ran inside and lighted on my perch.

He joined me on the couch. All of our feet were dangling. Mine because I was five, and his, no doubt, because he was evil.

My mom came out. The two kissed and went on their date and then got married and the rest was a ten-year circus act. While some people leave home to join the circus, I needed only to stay.

Over the subsequent ten years, the hanging of stuffed animals was predicated upon and punctuated by the hanging of vegetables that were tossed during dinner and the defenestration of Christmas trees and the smashing of mirrors and windows and teeth and souls.

At the end of my play, I wrote this line: “He stills scares me, and I haven’t seen him in twelve years.”

Then I turned off my computer and went to bed. I flopped around on my bed like a fish on a dock right after being caught. I thought I don’t want to give him that much power.

I turned back on my Mac and deleted that final line.

Within seconds of rest, I felt a thump right next to my head. I sat up and looked at the source.

On the floor next to my mattress was a candle. It had flown from atop the bookcase to a spot fifteen feet away at the head of my bed.

I turned on the lights. Holy shit! I thought. That’s Bill. He is responding to my having deleted him.

I tried to reason: Surely he can’t read over my shoulder when I write.  

I went to the bookcase and placed the candle back in its holder. I wiggled the bookcase to see what would happen if the candle were to naturally fall. It plopped and rolled, no more than an inch.

It certainly did not fly.

I placed the candle in its holder again. I knocked it off its spot with my hand. It plopped and rolled, again, no more than an inch.

No matter what I did, the candle plopped and rolled – with an almost apathy – a certain nonchalance. It did not catapult over fifteen feet and land with a thunderous thud.

Even though it was midnight, I called my sister in Colorado.

“It wasn’t Bill” Robin said. “How could it be? Bill isn’t dead.”

Robin and I brainstormed all the people, entities and energy forces that might have tossed the candle at my head. Robin decided it was a guardian angel telling me I was channeling my inner light.

I thought that sounded hokey, but I went along with it because I didn’t have a better explanation.

The next afternoon, which was a Saturday, my sister called to tell me that our mother had just learned that very morning that Bill had passed of cancer six months before. (He had twelve years before gone on a road-trip to Florida and never returned – no phone call, no note, no divorce, just gone.)

I knew it! I thought.

Bill had thrown the candle. He had a penchant for throwing things in life, so why shouldn’t he throw things in death?

After telling the chaplains about the candle and the discovery afterward that my stepfather was indeed deceased, I asked the question again: “Do you believe in ghosts, and if that wasn’t a ghost, what was it?”

Each chaplain had a different response – a quasi-manifesto.

One chaplain said aloud absolutely nothing. He might have secretly believed I was a kook, or he might have been too busy considering how he would answer the same question if asked by a soldier – a soldier wanting to know if life outside of life existed – if faith might be a reasonable cure for phantom pain.

Another chaplain shared his belief that ghosts were possible because no one is entirely sure what happens to spirits after they leave the confines of the physical body.

The third chaplain proclaimed, “Anything I can’t explain with physics didn’t happen.”

Instead of pointing out to the third chaplain the irony of his declaration, I just let it waft in the air. I decided to let it plop and roll according to the laws of physics.

Taxi Story #1

Taxi Story #1

Radio Call

I rarely take radio calls. Mostly just flag downs. I find that radio calls hardly ever pan out. The customer becomes impatient or worried and then walks into the street and flags down whatever comes. So, I just drive around town and pick people up.

It works for me.

So, why did I take this radio call? I don’t know. Maybe because the dispatcher, Dave, told me about it when I checked in, and I felt obligated to please him.

Dave lets me rush in after work on Fridays and cut in front of the 90-minute line consisting mostly of attractive Brazilian men who work just this one job – perhaps the only well-paying job in San Francisco that doesn’t question the legitimacy of a Latino’s green card.

He lets me stroll right in and roll right out, so I should probably just take what he gives me. And this passenger is going quite a ways, which is nice, because I’ve had a long week teaching Kindergarten.

This call is not for a passenger going to the airport, but it’s the next best thing – the Amtrak station in Emeryville.

So, I walk among the rows and rows of black and yellow rides to find the Crown Victoria that for the next ten hours will be mine.

I move the crowbar from underneath the front seat and place it in the trunk. I check the glove for a gun or any other similar leftover from the previous driver. I am a firm believer in the adage that weapons are usually used against you.

Once the car is, weapon-, newspaper- and food-crumb-free, I test the blinkers and lights, slap my ID on the dash, turn the radio on, press my PIN into the system and confidently peel out. Thankfully, none of the men on the lot seems to mind the swiftness with which I get a taxi, and if they do, they don’t say anything. Or maybe their English just isn’t that good. Or, perhaps, it’s because I frequently give fellow drivers just getting off work a free ride home.

Today, there seems to be no such need.

Driving up Cesar Chavez, I take a right on Mission in case someone’s got too much to carry for either Bart or the bus. My radio call is for 4:30 in the Western Addition, so I’ve got time to convey someone into that vicinity.

Sure enough, there’s a man in a hurry somewhere near 25^th. He’s headed to Page and Market. Perfect.

I punch the meter and get down to business. He’s dressed all in black.  “What time’s your shift?” I ask.

“Ten minutes ago.”

I press on the gas.

My favorite part of this job is driving fast.

Incredibly fast while maneuvering in, out and around.

I relish the look of gratitude mixed with surprise on my passengers’ faces when they’ve gotten to their destinations in near-negative time.

When I park in front of the restaurant where Raul or Jorge or Pepe is a busboy, he hands me a twenty and tells me to keep the change. I smile and say “Gracias” with an accent good enough to make him only slightly embarrassed for me. Then I head up Page to Fillmore to Pierce to unit #416 – or somewhere thereabouts.

A weathered woman in her early forties (or maybe her fifties?) and dowdy clothes stands waiting on her stoop. Her suitcase is a small, overstuffed grocery bag. I get out to help her in.

She asks me to drive down Market Street so she can admire the buildings and the bustle. Fine with me. There are lots of stoplights, so maybe I’ll make more money.

She also asks me to drop her at the Ferry Building, where the Amtrak shuttle is, rather than all the way to Emeryville, which is OK too. There’ll no doubt be plenty of riders, there, headed deep into The City.

As we edge down Market, she tells me her name is Penny and that she’s off to Sacramento, to her fiancé’s mother’s for an extended weekend where she plans to “make nice.” Penny’s taking the train because she’s afraid to fly. “Deathly afraid,” she declares.

Her live-in fiancé, Walt, (or is it George?) is to meet her there. He prefers planes.

We cruise the street and point at landmarks and talk about city history. Then Penny asks if her make-up is too pancake-y. I glance through the rear view mirror and then directly at her as she leans eagerly into the front seat.

I let her know her makeup’s just fine.

She says that’s good because she had a run-in the night before with a mop. She was rushing to get everything done and got walloped.

“Ouch,” I say. “That must have hurt.”

“Yes, it did. Yes, it did,” she repeats.

Then she giggles and rifles through her purse for gum. She offers me a piece, which I take even though I don’t much like gum. This ride is about her.

I thank her for the peppermint stick and look at her again, but this time not so directly.

I don’t want to inflict more hurt.

I keep my energy engaged, but not my speech. I am alert, but quiet – in part to let her off some sort of hook, and in part because Market Street is stop-and-go, and it’s Friday during rush hour.

I have to pay close attention to the road.

Penny begins a monologue that grows increasingly impassioned:

“We met five years ago. He is Black. My family wasn’t too keen on me marrying a Black man, but I’m not too keen on my family. His mom is hard to please, you see. I think that if I let her know how nice I am, she won’t be bothered anymore that I’m White. Do you like my hair? I had it done yesterday – special. I wanted to make a good impression…

“See, the last time he did this, I canceled my trip to his mom’s…

“This time, well…I sort of have no choice. I am looking forward to it, though. I think that if everything goes well, if everything goes well…If everyone gets along, ya’ see…it will make things a lot easier. A LOT easier….”

I pull into the passenger zone near the Amtrak window.

She laughs. “You sure are a fast driver…

“But that wasn’t scary at all…

“Thanks.”

Penny gives me a handful of fives and ones and wishes me well. I look her in the eye and say, “Take care.”

As the next passenger enters – a couple, actually, going to the Marina – I ponder what had just happened. The profundity and the irony. Mostly the irony.  

Penny is afraid to fly but not afraid to love a man who beats her.