M's Story

Back at School A, the ghetto school, I encountered a young man last year in one of the classes where I was substitute who has an interesting story.

When I first met him, he tried very hard to conceal his name. He signed the sign-in sheet I passed around, but when I asked him what his name was he gave me a false one. What I immediately saw about this kid was that he was very popular with the other students, the sort of person they gather around and like to socialize with during class instead of doing their classwork. He is moderately good-looking, not an athlete, but with a football player's build, and larger than most of the other students his age. In the midst of the class we got into a conversation.

Several of our exchanges remain firmly in my mind. I asked him who he lived with, and he mentioned a younger brother and a sister. His sister was in her early twenties and worked at a local drugstore. His brother was in middle school.

When I asked M. what his hobbies were or what he did outside of school, he said to me, "You don't want to know." This sounded to me like a statement that he sold drugs. When I asked him what he wanted in life, trying to get the conversation directed towards the importance of education for achieving success, he replied, "The only thing I value is money." He also added that he didn't expect to live beyond that age of 22 or 23, so he was going to enjoy it while he had it.

Unless you live under a log, you cannot live anywhere in my city without knowing a little bit about the life of people who deal drugs. They die fairly young, usually shot up in some drive-by shooting or ambush. You see them in their neighborhoods, walking briskly and constantly looking nervously over their shoulder to see what cars or people are behind them.

I imagine some readers of this blog will think I should have called the police and turned this kid in as a dealer. With what proof ? My surmises wouldn't be evidence enough. You don't call the authorites when you suspect something. You call them when you can prove it. And further, I just didn't feel inclined to get anyone else involved in this kid's life when I thought there might be a chance that with someonme to talk to he might straighten out.

I asked M. if he had any adults to talk to. He said, "No." And then the class bell rang.

M. showed up in a few more classes I subbed in last year. I was certain he was a drug dealer. He knew that I knew and I knew that he knew and he knew that I knew that he knew. And I turned over in my mind what one could say to refute the notion that other things in life were more important than money. I told him that he should stop whatever he was doing, and that my assessment of him was that he is a good kid with a kind heart, and he needs to find some other way of life. His reply was that where he lives, there aren't many choices. My suggestion was to move his family to a better part of town. He mentioned how much that would cost, and I replied that he should use the money he probably had in a shoebox in his closet, and not worry about putting it to a better use, because that's the best use he could put it to.

He said that the "Bottom" was where his friends were. It was all that he knew. He would feel uncomfortable living somewhere else.

Over the summer while I was creating an online store or two and going about other business, I thought about this idea that the only thing worth valuing is money. How can one refute this ? And especially to a kid who isn't ready to believe anything else anyways ?

This year after I'd been back on campus a few days.I saw him again. He greeted me with a hug. and stopped to talk. I told him I'd been worried about him and whether or not he'd come safely through the summer. He told me that he almost hadn't. He'd owed some people a large sum of money he couldn't repay and they'd come after him with guns, but finally he had repaid them, and now everything was "cool." "I'm glad to see you back alive." I topld him. I knew the results of not paying drub dealers. I had known someone at a gym where I used to work out who'd appeared one day with two broken arms. He'd owed someone some money he couldn't repay and the main man's lieutenants had come after him with baseball bats.

All summer I'd been turning over in my head the central problem: How does a teacher divert a kid like this from the sort of drug life he leads back into a happier mainstream ?

I kept thinking of things to tell him. In the news school year I stopped him, once and discussed what he knew and what I knew. I told him that we were like two people living on opposite sides of a ten-foot high fence. All he could see was the "Bottom" where he lived. On my side of the fence, I'd been around. Now 70, I'd seen a lot of things that might make him happy, but that he'd never experienced or thought about. (Was I talking about Plato's The Allegory of the Cave ?)

Another time, I told him, "Listen to what the Godfather says, and think seriously about it. The Godfather says you need to get out of the "Bottom." Take your girlfriend on a 10-day trip to Hawaii. And don't tell me you can't afford it. Go see what some other kind of life is like."

He appeared to absorb this and seriously think about it.

I wasn't subbing at the same school for several days, but when I returned I heard about something new involving M. During my absence, his younger brother, a student at a middle school and who was already said to be dealing, had been shot five times and was now paralyzed for life. M. is said to have gone "crazy" out in front of the school, screaming and shouting and crying until the security guards came and calmed him down.

When I saw him the day after this, he appeared to be his normal self. However, he talked about going to France, to Paris. instead of Hawaii. The idea of travel seemed to be actively percolating through his mind. I told him he needed a passport, which he could get through the local State Department Office, that he should make sure his vaccinations were current, and that if he were really serious he should book his air flights as far ahead as possible.

He mentioned that he'd started working in a local store as a stock clerk -- which indicated to me that he had been considering getting out of the player's life for at least a few weeks. Maybe being unable to pay his drug debts over the summer had made him start thinking. And maybe what he really needed was an adult or two to give him some guidance. Maybe I can help.

Disappointing addendum, added 9 October 2008, several days after the above was written: Today I learned that M had a fight with another student and beat him up so severely that the other young man was taken by ambulance to the hospital. The beating was VERY severe. M is being held on charges of attempted murder.

[All material in this blog is copyright 2008 by Richard A. Goodman. If you are reading this somewhere other than on blogspot.com, see more at http://teachinginaghettoschool.blogspot.com/]