It was always a hustle.
I’d narrowly avoid arrest trespassing on the roof of the mortuary, drink a shit-ton of malt liquor, let my best girlfriend bite into my arm as she got her first crappy homemade tattoo, cry to get him off of me, but I’d still arrive promptly at ballet the next morning. Pink tights. Hair in a bun. Rond de jambe. En L’aire.
Some mornings, I would have to run a few blocks. Run to pretend I’d really stayed at that friend’s house. The friend whose Mom was so crazy that I knew mine would never call to check up. And when I’d get into the car, my mother waiting for awhile out front, I lied about where I’d been, why I was running down 9th Street, why no one answered when she’d knocked. She said, “You stink,” but never called me out on my bullshit story. She didn’t really want to know. Maybe she admired the hustle.
We always gravitated to this one house, a grayish rundown Victorian. Tall bald guys with leather boots lounged all day on couches on the porch. No one worked. A couple were in bands. One was still on reserve for the U.S. Army. The music they listened to was cacophonous, hardcore, the lyrics murderous, enraged. I walked into the house one day to see blood on the ceiling. The guys were laughing, re-telling the story. I had already learned about the brutality of men. Always so malicious to others, to themselves. Hours later, that guy that Michelle would later hook up with pulled out a black leather case, no bigger than the binder I had taken to my junior high school classes, and unzipped it, pulling out needles, tubes, alcohol swabs. Mom hadn’t become diabetic yet or I might have confused it with insulin supplies. Erica’s boyfriend told him to put it away. “Don’t do that in front of these girls. Go in the bedroom, asshole.” He walked into the bedroom and slammed the door. He came out later, eyes so vacant, so far, far away.
“Dat you, ‘weetie?” he hollered in his Midwestern drawl as soon as I opened the front door.
“Yes, Grandpa, it’s Jenner.”
Early morning, I was at Grandpa’s apartment before the summer barbecue that doubled as my Auntie’s birthday party. Mom had said I could bring Tara already, but I needed to get Grandpa’s cash first. Like any teenager, I dreaded family functions. But we had a plan. This time we would have fun.
I heard Grandpa grunt as he rolled to his side, pushing himself up to sit on the edge of the old mattress. After lying on the bed for awhile he got stiff. “Oh, Jenner, now don’t you never get old, my sugar . . .” But he didn’t have much to do these days except sit back and watch time pass, waiting to get even older. Waiting for the reaper to come knocking. He appeared in the doorway in striped overalls, the sides unbuttoned to accommodate his huge belly, his thick silver hair cropped very short. As a little girl, Mom would dress me like him. I was a tomboy anyway, so any dresses she bought would remain in the closet, pristine and untouched, until she decided I had outgrown them. When we walked down the street in matching overalls—me, a tiny little girl, next to him, at 6’4” a near-giant—we were a spectacle. A picture out of another time. Because he’d lost his sight when I was so young, he relied on me a lot. He’d tell me, “Jenner, you’re my eyes now,” and I would always explain what he couldn’t see, help him find what he couldn’t look for himself.
Before I could get started he would hold me tight, a bear hug that stifled my breath. If I let him, he’d pull me down onto his lap and cradle me like a child even though I was quickly becoming an adult. He might have felt me getting bigger, but he never saw it. He certainly didn’t believe it. So he still spoke to me in baby talk, expecting me to sit with him instead of going out with my friends. And when he squeezed me, I knew his love was serious. I could feel it.
I grabbed some rags from the drawer, the bucket from the pantry, the cleanser from below the sink. The range was a mess. Grandpa was living off Campbell’s vegetable beef soup and cereal at this point, so the damage was relatively harmless. He couldn’t see to clean up after himself anymore even if he had wanted to. He could always spare a few dollars out of his meager fixed income to get an hour or two with his favorite girl.
“Oh my ‘tweetheart, I’m suh sorry. I just cain’t see a doggone thing.”
“I know, Grandpa. It’s not that bad.”
The food bits accumulated all across the surface, the dials. I scrubbed and scrubbed. Soaked the dials in bleach. The apartment was tiny, but after Grandma died, it was so clear how much he relied on her, how helpless he was if left to himself. All the while, Grandpa telling me how perfect I am. How I’m his sweetie. How I’m such a good girl. Two hours, ten bucks and an even bigger hug later, I left. The sweetest girl that ever did live.
I left his apartment, walked the two blocks to Lincoln and waited for the 64 bus. I rode the bus out to Almaden Valley, where I would use the ten bucks to buy two hits of acid from Tony Flynn’s older brother. Then I’d get back on the bus northbound and go back home. Tara was meeting me there and she’d be going with us to Auntie’s party. In the backseat of the ‘84 Ford Escort, we swallowed the tabs while Mom argued with Grandpa, and he told her how to drive, always following with: “not to tell you how to drive . . .”
At the party, we’d sit for hours on the fluffy sofa with the huge cushions. The textured ceiling twisted itself into a silhouette of the Marlboro Man that made us want to take a “walk,” which everyone knew was code for a cigarette. They might not have guessed about the acid, but everyone knew we were up to no good. Outside we saw those little girls, Asian twins in pink. Or at least they looked like twins. We walked down the street laughing and laughing, smoking our Marlboro Reds and examining the vivid, brilliant surroundings.
Eventually, it became a different kind of hustle. I went to college to become a teacher, the perfect job for villains and saints. A mixture of chance and smarts delivered me into adulthood virtually intact. Always learning enough from everyone else’s mistakes to keep me on the safer side, I did the right things. I worked hard. I dedicated myself to doing something good and doing it well. Even after Mom died and I was still drinking really heavy, I would always be at class in the morning, smiling, mascara’ed, high heels. But with these bruises I couldn’t explain, didn’t want to remember. By the time I started teaching the at-risk kids, the ones most like that girl I had almost become, my graying hair balanced out my baby face, sweater vests and straight skirts replaced jeans and Doc Martens. They thought I was one of those perfect girls, the one who sat in the front row. The one with all the right answers. They had no idea what I’d seen or where I’d been. They thought those little victories came easy. The advanced education. The years of experience. To them, I was the good girl, the one who’d done ballet, rather than the one who went to ballet still drunk with some skater boy’s juices dried on my thigh.
On the first day of my new class at the ghetto junior college, this kid tells me he hasn’t been in school since 7th grade and now that he’s earned his GED he wants to get back into school at nineteen. Tall and athletic, he looked like the prototypical thug, a ball cap, scrappy facial hair, homemade tattoos across his forearms. Though I usually wouldn’t see his arms. He typically wore a hoodie, long sleeves even on hot days. Always all covered up. I’d already known guys like that—guys who hid all the marks.
After the first class, he had walked up and said, “Hey, I bet you don’t like rap, but I write rap. I was wondering if you wanted to hear one.”
“Actually, Luis, I really love rap. Show me what you got.”
Then he starts rapping, standing there, looking down, intensely. His words flow. He has a style. He talks about white powder, broken homes, pain. What’s real or what’s hip-hop cliché, I can’t tell, yet. But after class that day we had a very real moment together. He reached out, showed me that he was sincere. Reluctantly. Staring down at the floor. But it was a small gesture of trust.
At first, I thought he was exaggerating about that 7th grade dropout thing. I knew you had to be sixteen to officially drop out in the state of California. But a few days later I saw him fidget uncomfortably in the seat, interrupt incessantly, and text message openly, above the desk, even though I started and ended each activity with: please put away your phones. But for Luis it was compulsive, he did everything but listen and learn. He was his own worst enemy. Chafing under the pressure. So ignorant of the customs of school that he was barely conscious of how completely he violated them.
“Jen, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“Luis, I just explained the directions, but you were texting. You should have been paying attention to me.”
“Jen, I don’t understand what we’re supposed to be writing about?”
“Did you read the assigned pages?”
“No, I didn’t—“
“Well, no wonder. You need to do the homework to be able to do the classwork.”
“Jen, I don’t have my paper printed out.”
“Can you print it in the lab right now?”
“Uh, I’ll see . . . .” But then a half hour later, I hear him laughing in the hallway and when I find a convenient time to stick my head out, he’s chatting up some girl across the hallway. He sees me and I scowl, wishing I could just pinch his ear and drag him back into class, save him from himself.
Because this was the at-risk group, Luis wasn’t my only problem student. In fact, they all had problems, big ones, and most wouldn’t complete the class successfully. Another guy had some significant developmental issues. Facial tics. A very loud, grating voice. Snorting. Even though he was earnest in his efforts to participate, he was disruptive, a nuisance. The other students pretended not to laugh as he stuttered and struggled. While he was clearly very intelligent, all the social awkwardness overwhelmed everything else and he became The Alienated Guy.
One day, Luis and I were having one of our many after-class conversations about interrupting during class, or finishing the reading, or leaving for twenty minutes to ‘go to the bathroom.’ Those conversations weren’t like the ones we had in class, when he was trying to be good. When he was trying to do the right thing, to give the right answer, or any answer at all, he would smile, look me in the eye, show genuine respect. But once I pulled him into the hallway, the corner, wherever I could less obviously chew him out for his horrible behavior, then he would look down, dejected, like a victim. Someone so accustomed to being berated that he’d given up fighting back.
I’m in the middle of our “talk,” trying to be really clear about what rules had been violated, about what would be necessary to rectify the situation, when The Alienated Guy walks up. His nylon backpack dragging on the floor behind him. A finger in his ear. I stop in mid-sentence and turn to address him, but before I begin, Luis says, “How’s it going, buddy?”
The Alienated Guy didn’t respond, just stared at Luis, puzzled. He didn’t know how to put the pieces together either. So I said what I needed to in order to get rid of him.
But when I turned to continue with Luis, he didn’t look the same. He wasn’t that delinquent with the scary tattoos. Or the guy who made my job impossible. The thug from foster care. He became the only person in the whole class who could treat the weird kid with kindness. And he wasn’t fake or phony about it, like I was. I smiled and repeated myself politely, but I thought the kid was weird and gross just like the other students did. I acted nice, but it was a hustle, just like this whole game I was playing. It was Luis, the biggest hustler in the room, who could call him “buddy” with sincerity. And he would have been his buddy too, I just bet.
A week or two later, as I’m heading to the staff office before class, I hear high heels trailing me down the hall. I walked fast enough as it was, but these heels tapped out a frantic rhythm. It made my pulse rise. As soon as I get to the desk and put my bag down, the office manager walks in behind me and closes the door. Immediately, I say: If it has to do with Luis, I just don’t think I can take it . . . She goes on to describe the crime he’d committed, the charges he faced, the bleak future ahead. As the story sunk in, I felt like tears were flowing, but on the inside only. I couldn’t let anyone see how much it shook me. How heartbroken I was.
“Well, we did the best we could.”
“We did all we could. You did more than anyone.”
I smiled weakly, gathering my copies and walking the long white hallway to the classroom.
I’d let her believe it, the hustle. I’d go ahead and let her think that I was a good girl, always doing her best, always trying to help. And she would believe it. Everyone did. They would never see all the darkness inside. And they would never know how Luis called that kid “buddy.”
