Chapter 13: Kids who kill Teachers

The rest of my middle school was spent in a haze of weed, cigarettes, LSD, liquor, and shrooms. Mostly by the end of it, we’d chilled out, as far as pranks and violence. Our routine generally consisted of us gathering at Taylor’s house to smoke up, play video games, listen to tunes, and pass out on the floor.

(Taylor’s parents were old hippies that’d become businesspeople and were usually away on business trips. They didn’t care that we smoked weed, did whatever drugs. As long as we did it at their house. And not on the street. I guess they figured it was better us doing it there, where we could avoid arrest, other indignity.)

((It was cool of them, for sure, to allow the house, the basement, to be party central. But fuck, if that wasn’t the dirtiest house. No one would ever clean it. There’d be half-eaten food in the kitchen, dirty pots and pans, plates everywhere. The bathroom was straight funky, covered in soap scum, mold, and stray hairs. We’d crash there, party there, but no one ever wanted to shower there… Amazingly, though, I don’t recall any insect infestation there, in that house… Maybe it was even too dirty for the cockroaches…))

Our crew had become quite chill, for a while. Playing video games, hacky sack, and passing out high, drunk, fucked on whatever had become the mission of each and every night.

I remember our friend Armando, always passing out in this big brown comfy La-Z-Boy recliner. Dude’d melt into that chair. Become one with it. Dude had skin like crude oil and a shaved head and when he’d fall asleep with his tongue out he’d look like a high, incapacitated, Cuban Michael Jordan.

By then we’d become a crew of aspiring Cheech and Chongs…

It wasn’t until high school that things took a darker turn.

High school got off to a bad start when I was shipped to another school, separated from my friends.

I’d been banished because throughout most of middle school, I was a true truant and preferred not being in school, trapped in a classroom, seeing the golden sunshine from barred windows. I preferred not being around bullies and didn’t like being told what to do and what to learn. What I preferred was ditching class to read Stephen King books in the library, taking walks in the sun, smoking whatever I could find, or going to the local guitar shop, jamming with whomever was around.

So, yeah, it was because of my habitually skipping school that I’d been assigned to a “Level 4” program for at-risk youth. The program was located at another local high school, one slightly farther from my home, not the school I’d have normally attended.

The program had half its classes in the high school’s mainstream classrooms and the other half in a “special” classroom, a containment unit with a teacher’s aide and special needs teachers, plus a program coordinator, who was like our principal and in charge of disciplining us.

Beside our special containment classroom sat our program coordinator’s narrow little oblong office, where he, Mr. Maroni, a dude who bore a striking resemblance to TV’s original MacGyver, sat hunched over his overflowing desk, doing paperwork, watching us like a hawk through the translucent rectangular window cut between his office and our classroom. The window was about the size of a coffin. Once a week he’d summon us into his office for progress and performance evaluations.

It was sort of good practice for the corporate world, I guess.

The other kids in the school knew we were fuckups and usually kept their distance. Most were scared of us and our ilk. And with good reason.

One time on the way to class I overheard a couple of the school’s mainstream students discussing our program. Both were in standard preppy attire, collared shirts and blue jeans, white baseball caps. They both appeared as if they’d later be Duke students.

“Hey, what’s that?” one asked the other, pointing at our classroom, his blue eyes narrowing.

The other tilted his head and giggled, then said, “Oh that, that’s a special program for students who, like, kill their teachers and shit.”

But that was far from the worst indignation. The worst was being forced to ride the short bus with the mentally retarded kids.

Not that I had anything against them. It wasn’t the best optics, though, making us ride in the short bus with them. And I did hate the bus driver.

The bus driver and her assistant, both fifty to sixtyish Black ladies doted on the retarded kids but completely reviled us, we the other, less helpless, but still special needs kids.

If the retarded kids weren’t at that bus stop, the bus would wait five minutes, and the driver’d go up to their door, knock and ask about them. But if one of us wasn’t there, right when the bus showed up, they’d peel off. Once or twice I saw the bus from down the street, and I chased after it to no avail. I suspected they’d seen me in the rearview, too, and sped up.

Another guy, Stan, in my program had the same problem; he hated that fucking short bus. We were friendly and it so transpired that he lived nearby me. He was a few years older than me, and when he got a car, he’d give me rides to school.

He was a big burly meathead dude and used to be a star running back for the high school in our immediate neighborhood, where we should have gone, if we hadn’t been fuckups.

A virtual high school football legend, folks all around Miami would talk about his exploits on the field, him breaking records, running for 300 something yards per game.

Recruited by several D-1 college programs, he shocked everyone and quit the game. Never told a soul why. Just stopped playing. Stopped going to school. His grades plummeted, and he got sent to the same “at-risk” program as me.

Half-Japanese, half-Latin, very few knew he was half-Japanese, and when the kids in our class would taunt, fuck with this Chinese kid in our class, for being Asian, Stan’d simply up and leave the classroom. My teacher told me later why, that he was part Asian, which I’d previously had no idea.

(Not that it mattered anyway, and I never participated in the racial abuse of the Chinese kid. It’d grossed me out, honestly. And I regret not speaking up about it. Racism wasn’t a thing I ever appreciated, in any form. I find that most people are equally shitty in various aspects. No one’s passing a purity test...)

Our homeroom teacher was the person who told me about Stan’s football history, which I’d also not known. The teacher had been a former high school and college football player himself and had treated Stan with a certain reverence.

(Lucky for those kids that Stan was a nice guy. He was big enough to whip any one of them for being such racist pricks. And he’d have had every right to do so…)

Stan and I got along well, I think, because, unlike everyone else, who’d try to get him to play football again or talk football, I didn’t care about football. And I never joined in with the other kids fucking with the Chinese guy.

Stan and I liked a few of the same video games, TV shows, and we both smoked weed, got high a few times in his car, on the drive together before school. He was a kind, gentle giant, Stan. But soon enough he got irregular with the rides, not showing up, several times, ditching school. Since I’d missed the bus, I had to pay, from my own pocket, for a cab, since no public transportation went to our school.

Finally, I had to go back to the short bus.

Last time I saw Stan, he offered me a ride to school the next day and was disappointed when I politely declined.

I didn’t see him much anymore after that. He attended school only sporadically, and I think he dropped out or was forced to leave. He’s disappeared into the fog of my adolescence, too, and I never saw or heard of him around the neighborhood, either. I bet he probably had CTE or a condition to that effect. Probably had it far worse than me. I hope he wound up better than Junior Seau...

There were a few other memorable kids from that program. One, a big Black dude, named “T,” once pulled me aside, asked me if I was selling weed. I told him no. Which was true. I was only smoking it. My stepsister’s crack dealer boyfriend supplying me with killer Jamaican.

I smiled and asked him if he was selling. He smiled back. I knew the answer. It was his turf, and I respected that, at that time I wasn’t selling at all.

He turned out to be a chill dude, and we smoked weed, cigarettes a couple times together at lunch in the woods near school.

The only time I ever saw him get ugly was when a skinhead, this weird fuck, named Bobby, threw a pencil at him, and the pencil hit T’s head.