DIASPORA
ONE OF MY FAVORITE AUTHORS, KAHLIL GIBRAN, WROTE, "ONLY ONCE HAVE I BEEN MADE MUTE. IT WAS WHEN A MAN ASKED ME, "WHO ARE YOU?" THIS STORY IS SUPPOSED TO BE MY BIOGRAPHY. BUT HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AND YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES? THAT STORY IS STILL BEING WRITTEN. THIS CHAPTER IS PRESENTED AS IS - NO APOLOGIES.
Teachers are a strange lot. Most appear as adult versions of the annoying kids we all knew when we were in grade school. You can almost imagine them as children with their extra fancy three ring binders and jumbo crayon boxes eagerly striving to earn the most gold stars in the class, all the while telling themselves that someday they would be in charge. Courteous, obedient, diligent, they weren’t necessarily the brightest kids in the class just the most obsequious: the perfect teacher’s pets. Most appear to have gone directly from high school to college to classroom without ever having to sully their hands in any field other than education.
This wasn’t exactly my experience. Believe it or not I’ve somehow managed to become a teacher without ever being a teacher’s pet. And while I’m still shaking off the dust from the rather circuitous path that has led me to this position I’ve discovered something: life’s most important lessons aren’t learned in a classroom.
When I was little my family practically lived on an island - like apartheid in reverse. Long Island Drive was an isolated stretch of low-income housing projects on Milwaukee’s north side. But tucked away on the opposite side of the river and connected to the larger city by a lone footbridge we were more like the bastard sons of Glendale, a more affluent suburban community with which we awkwardly, regrettably shared a border. Just across the river to the south of us lie Northlawn, one of the city’s largest housing projects.
My earliest memories of Long Island Drive all involve violence: a neighbor kid whose name is lost to memory smashing me in the face with a rock while I stood bewildered, crying and bleeding on the sidewalk; my older brother running into the house to grab a butcher knife and end a fight on the footbridge; me being whisked away on the back of an older kid’s bike when a soccer game at a park on the wrong side of the river threatened to turn into a rumble. Rumble. In an age of drive by shootings and terrorist attacks it almost sounds funny - like something out of West Side Story with Sharks and Jets and choreographed fight scenes, where the rival gangs always broke out in song before anyone got hurt. In reality they weren’t singing show tunes on the footbridge, but there was an almost audible rumbling, like the ground was shifting and we lived on a fault line.
Most of the nation’s low-income housing projects were built after World War Two to help relieve the housing crunch of returning G. I.’s and their families. Many of these federally supported projects remained racially segregated until the late 1960’s. As the civil rights movement heated up these developments were eventually opened to black families. Northlawn rapidly became desegregated while for some reason Long Island Drive was left as an enclave for low-income whites. But things changed quickly. If family folklore is to be believed, we finally left Long Island because of Skeeter, the family pet. The subdivision was being privatized and the new management company wouldn’t allow dogs. Whatever the reason for the move, we eventually relocated to a sprawling Milwaukee bungalow less than a mile away. It was a quiet neighborhood with few children and very different from the place we left. Among our neighbors were remnants of the German families that had settled the area decades before. Widows with sir names like Liestwurt and Kohl and Horn maintained well tended yards and thoroughly swept sidewalks. My school was within walking distance from home. It was an old three-story limestone building and my classrooms there reflected the diversity of the surrounding neighborhood. Black kids and white kids mingled together oblivious to the cracks forming. There was talk of “desegregating” the schools, but that didn’t make sense to me because my school was already mixed. One spring day things changed quickly when the Nazis came to our school. It seemed that the fault line had followed us west.
The American Nazi Party was at my school to protest Milwaukee’s plan to integrate its public schools by forced busing. They were just a bunch of kooks with uniforms and bullhorns, but to a kid that was enough. I was in fourth grade – the grade I teach now. It was so long ago that most of it is lost to that gray area between myth and reality. But I do remember the crowds and the fear and me, just a kid, adrenaline pumping, running scared through the chaotic gauntlet, keeping my head down and sprinting east through the cloudy, cool spring day, sweating; my open winter jacket catching the breeze like a sail with hat and gloves crammed into my pockets for ballast. ***(more about mood)*** My parents knew they had to get me out.
Our school choices included either Golda Meier, Milwaukee’s school for gifted and talented, or a tiny school connected to the church our family attended. It was the quintessential example of white flight. We were retreating from the public schools while there was still somewhere safe to retreat to. Based on our experiences on Long Island Drive we knew the danger of living on the other side of the river. The city’s aggressive push for school desegregation was going to affect people on the margins most dramatically. The lily white suburbs were able to appear virtuous by advocating forced integration, but their schools didn’t have race riots – that was an urban experience.
The final choice was a parochial school named Christ Memorial. My siblings teased me about it and I became the caricature of the spoiled little brother. But they were all grown. I was ten and scared and not feeling particularly spoiled. Like most of the other kids that had arrived there by fleeing the public schools, I found God on Sundays and usually lost him again by mid-week. Kids without faith became their own Mongol hordes descending on Christ Memorial. I was there for the wrong reason and out to prove that I could be just as tough as my brothers. I became part of a group who took pleasure in tormenting the weaker kids, like the time threw a kid named Les over the fence into a yard full of dogs - no harm, no rabies no foul.
I still remember during one of my later years at Christ Memorial carving my initials into nearly every desk in the classroom and spending the last days of school standing out on the playground with desks all around me sanding my marks away. Was I tough? No, just stupid, mean, scared.
My next stop was Custer High School. Custer, home of the Indians, was a family legacy. All of my siblings had gone there. In all honesty the school wasn’t named after George Armstrong Custer, it was named for some other Custer – no one is sure just what the Indians did to him. I made a friend on my very first day. He was a black kid named Joshua who sat in front of me in homeroom and showed me a huge bowie knife he kept sheathed in his book bag. He’d somehow survived the middle school chaos that I’d managed to dodge.
High school bored the hell out of me. By my junior year I was already attending half days and skipping out regularly. My buddies and I would go down to the railroad tracks every day at lunch to get stoned. I’d get so high some days that I’d forget my locker combination and just go home instead of returning to class. But I wasn’t your typical truant. I’d often head for the public library to learn more from my real teachers: Kerouac, Steinbeck, Hemingway etc. While most kids my age were formulating their career plans I was doing field work in pharmaceutical research. I hung out with car thieves, drug dealers, burglars and arsonists. One buddy of mine got so strung out that he actually broke into a public library for the money. We spent endless nights partying on the same footbridge in the old neighborhood where my brothers used to hang out. By then I was confident that I could hold my own on the bridge. Fast times. Reckless.
Despite my best efforts to fail, I somehow managed to graduate from high school. As a gift I received luggage from my mother, but with the skills I’d acquired over the past four years I had nowhere to go, so I stayed at the pizza joint where I’d worked since my junior year. Besides, my father was dead by then, my brothers had all moved out, and I was left as the man of the house.
In the months after graduation I worked and partied, partied and worked with no view toward the future. I was talking to several military recruiters but never entertained the idea of entering the service very seriously. I was going nowhere and needed a kick in the ass to get back on track. Instead I got a hit in the head. Literally. After a long night of partying on the footbridge and running from the cops a buddy of mine was driving me home when he gunned his piece of shit car around a corner on wet pavement and crashed into a concrete light post. The driver and the guy in the passenger seat were fine, just cuts and bruises. But a chunk of concrete several feet long speared the car directly where I was sitting and crushed the roof pinning me inside. I couldn’t get out, couldn’t see and could hardly breathe. Every time I tried to move I felt the shards of glass digging further into me. I remember my buddy Brian working frantically with a car jack handle trying to pry the top of the car away but only succeeding in knocking more broken glass on me. I was unconscious when the ambulance got there and didn’t regain consciousness until I was in the emergency room. Once awake I was sure I was going to die. I asked for pain medicine and to be knocked out again but my concussion was so bad that the doctors feared I might slip into a coma. Instead I lie completely awake with my eyes rolling uncontrollably in all directions, my head aching so badly I wept like a child. I watched as the nurses tried in vain to run a tube up my nose and down my throat while I vomited violently and clenched my broken ribs pleading for them to stop.
That night I wasn’t allowed to sleep. Coma watch. Every so often a nurse would come in and make sure that I was still conscious. So for entertainment I lay awake and watched the clots of blood being sucked from my stomach and out through my nose.
In the weeks that followed the accident I had plenty of time to think. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew that if I didn’t distance myself from my friends I’d likely end up either in jail or dead. The army and marine recruiters both ditched me as soon as they found out about my injuries so that was one option eliminated. It took me a year before I finally decided to go back to school. It wasn’t an easy decision. High school sucked and I couldn’t imagine that college would be any better. To make matters worse college wasn’t cheap. I knew that I would be eligible for Social Security death benefits because my dad died when I was a minor, but that didn’t seem right. I probably wouldn’t have gone to college if he had lived but now that he was dead I was going to profit off of it? It sounded like blood money, tarnished, tainted, but I took it because I didn’t see any alternative. Most of my friends had dropped out of high school and were working in shit hole jobs. I’d graduated, but wasn’t doing any better than they were.
shit hole jobs – pizza man, robbed, handyman, printer in a sweatshop, truck washer, crashed a semi truck frozen pant legs
Flag cutter during Gulf War
Telemarketer for the POAN and trouble with head of police association
Painter/landscaper/Hernia Movers
Two degrees accidentally
Dave has had so many drunk driving convictions that I cringe whenever I see him behind the wheel of a car. He partied so hard that he graduated from stealing ashtrays and glasses when he went out drinking and began stealing pitchers and bar stools.
Troy nearly married a stripper and part-time prostitute. He fathered two illegitimate children with her. I was supposed to be the best man in their wedding. Thank God she went off on a crack binge at the last minute and canceled the big day at the last minute. But it still left me the godfather of a child who should have known a much better life.
Trent’s life since high school has been a train wreck of odd jobs and petty misdemeanors. Last year he and his son were evicted from their apartment and I had to help him move nearly everything they own out to the dumpster because they had nowhere to go. I spent hours driving them around trying to help find them a place to live.
Next there’s Jay, who refused to follow in the steps of his alcoholic father, but instead blazed his own trail from pot to cocaine to crack. He was such a quick study in the art of addiction that he was in rehab by the time he was sixteen, born again by nineteen, and in the psych ward by twenty. No one knows what happened to him and I’m not sure that I want to know.
Will served several years in prison for killing a pregnant woman with his car after an all night binge. I saw him a few times after he got out of prison. He had given up on driving and was riding his bike instead but he still hadn’t given up drugs and alcohol. We all learn our lessons in different ways.
Finally there’s me. School saved me. That blood money I was so reluctant to accept turned out to be my salvation. I’ve spent much of my adulthood trying to gain my father’s respect and to mend the fault lines that have crisscrossed my life. . . .
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