Having None of It

by Myriam Gurba

  There I lived and breathed in the pages of a self-help workbook. My hands started to tremble.

  “Rae!” I yelped.

  She couldn’t hear me over the cacophony of dishwashing.

  I flipped to Chapter 20, “Related Disorders.”

  Trichotillomania, nicknamed “trick”: the pulling out of one’s own hair.

  Body Dysmorphic Disorder, BDD: seeing oneself as deformed when one clearly isn’t.

  Tourette’s: tics, semi-voluntary, hard to control sounds and movements that besiege you constantly. Common ones? Hair twirling, eye blinking. Sniffing. Jerking arms, jerking neck. Twitching. Uncommon ones? Coprolalia. In Greek, fecal talk. Compulsive swearing, only 15% of Touretters have it. And they don’t always give in. Some Touretters find creative ways of satisfying it. Repeating the words up in the old noggin. Making barely audible sounds to scratch the dirty word itch.

  I clapped the book shut, and clutching it to my chest, got up and walked to the kitchen. I stood by the refrigerator.

  “Rae,” I said. I was crying, stupid as it sounds, tears of joy.

  She hollered, “You scared me! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” Slowly, Rae turned to face me. Her wet fingertips rained water onto the kitchen tile. Her smile dropped. Mine didn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I grinned. “Rae. I have Tourette’s.”

  Extra Terrestrial

  I replaced Animo’s most popular ESL teacher, el profesor Alvaro, and my boss, Principal Shields, tried putting a scare into me before letting me take his position.

  “They loved Alvaro,” he warned me grimly. “They might eat you alive.”

  “I’m up to the challenge,” I answered. I signed my name on the dotted line, good as swearing a blood oath.

  Mustafa, the Afghani security guard who patrols Animo, walked me up to my classroom on my first night.

  “You want to know why Alvaro leave?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “He fired! Evedy Friday night was fiesta! The estudents bring up coolers of esodas and emusic and edance and profesor Alvaro,” he pronounced well en Español, “sit at his desk and watch. Efood lady cam and sell tamales and tacos and tortas and Alvaro, he take part of the cut! He erunning enight club, enot eschool!”

  I raised my eyebrows. What kind of racket was I getting myself into? I feared I was being fed to a pack of partying piranhas but as I stood, facing my students for the first time, I realized Principal Shields and Mustafa had pegged them all wrong. They all looked like my mom more or less. Harmless. Plus, they were adaptable. They might’ve loved Alvaro once but they got over him quick. They were going to fall in love with anyone willing to teach them English.

  Two weeks in, compliments showered me. Principal Shields was impressed. “Chee teach us much more than Profesor Alvaro!” I overhead Lupe Diaz tell Mustafa. “Chee eez a fun, happy teacher!”

  Advice from my workbook made adjusting to my new job easier, too. I stood at the blackboard, intrusive images flooding my consciousness, but like Taming Your OCD instructed, I let them enter; I put up no fight. This yanked the rug out from under them. The suckers melted into so much background. It was weird. All I had to do was welcome the sickness and it became a teddy bear, no longer a slimy-toothed grizzly. The urges didn’t disappear quite the same way, but once I got into the groove of lessons, I realized they usually quieted of their own accord. Demonstrating verbs on my hands and knees, pretending to be an exotic noun, I’m usually too busy to be interrupted by tics.

  ESL tends to be a gender-skewed affair, and most of my students are women. Some are stay-at-home moms who want to learn English in their spare time, but others are the backbones of entire black market industries, captains of major under-the-table enterprises. Take Lupe Diaz, for example. She’s a baker whose cakes are in demand for everything from Bat Mitzvahs to quinceañaras. Sylvia Mendez cleans houses naked all over the bay. Julia Juarez is becoming a millionaire selling Herbalife.

  I pity my few male students. They’re swimming in a sea of estrogen. In level one, I’ve got a teenaged boy who should be attending public high school. The registrar claims they’re all full though, so he’s stuck till next fall with me and the clucking comadres64. In level two, I’ve got a retired janitor and his son. The father’s got a silver moustache and goes by the distinguished-sounding “Don Chencho.” The kid seems like riffraff, a snot-nosed cholo.

  Recently, a newbie hopped into Level Two on crutches. His name was printed on the night’s roster but when I called it during roll, he corrected me.

  “Not Luis Guzman,” he said. “El Tecolote.”

  Sara Martinez giggled. Lupe Diaz’s jaw dropped. Julia Juarez’s eyes twinkled. I cocked one eyebrow at the guy. He was asking to be called The Owl.

  “El Tecolote?”

  “Jes,” he grinned.

  I got nervous. Oh shit. A major urge to hoot. My hands got sweaty. I balled up my fists. I would not hoot.

  “Can I call you E.T.?” I blurted out.

  “Jes. E.T. eez okay.”

  “Okay, E.T… E.T. it is.”

  Beside his name, in pencil, I wrote, “Lunatic.”

  I went to dinner with Animo’s math teacher, Artie, before work. We sat under a donkey piñata at La Fiesta, waiting for our waitress to bring us our burritos. Artie drank a beer. I sipped water.

  “Have you got that El Tecolote in any of your classes?” Artie asked me.

  “Yeah! I call him E.T.”

  Artie laughed and salsa spilled off his chip and splattered onto the front of his Hawaiian shirt. The guy’s an aging surfer, a manic Hispanic from back in the day who really wants to retire to Oahu when he’s done teaching. He’s almost there. He’s only got, like, two years left to go. I watched him wet a paper napkin and wipe the stain.

  “E.T.,” he laughed one last time. Then his tone changed. “That fucker’s such a fraud. You know what the big chisme65 on him is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Supposedly he got his legs crushed in a forklifting accident. He claims one of them got torn to shreds and he got himself one of them personal injury ambulance chasers and took his boss to court. He’s gotten part of his settlement but he’s waiting for an even bigger part of it to come now. Guess how much.”

  “I don’t like guessing.” I twirled my hair with both hands. Artie didn’t seem to mind. “How much?”

  “Two hundred thou.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah. But guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I know that fucker’s full of shit. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with his legs. I swear to God, I seen him hot-footin’ it up Shattuck to catch the bus.”

  “Serious?”

  “Serious. He was carrying his crutches and everything. He was running.”

  “Man.”

  “God, I hate assholes like that. They come over here and work the system and they give people like you and me,” he gestured at us, “a bad name.”

  I didn’t like Artie’s cynicism, but I was too hungry to argue.

  “I hate those fuckers,” he mumbled and shoved a handful of tortilla chips into his mouth.

  Despite the mariachi music, I could hear Artie’s crunching. It made my toes tic. Bad.

  El Tecolote showed up late to class. He looked a little drugged. I paused the lesson.

  “Why tardy?” I asked him.

  “Heedro-eterapy. Efor mai leg,” he answered. “I seat een yacuzzi weet babbles for lon time.”

  “Heedro-eterapy, heedro-eterapy, heedro-etarpy,” I thought. Bingo. Hydrotherapy. I turned around and erased the verb “to be” off the chalkboard and rolled my eyes. Fucking hydrotherapy. I turned back around.

  “Okay, E.T. Have a seat.”

  Because I was running out of ideas, I was in the midst of killing my students with grammar drills. I’d dittoed them to death for two hours and the class was quiet, all the ladies chewing their pens, stumped by my page of irregular verbs. I didn’t like the sil
ence. It unnerved me. It made me feel like jerking.

  I dismissed class fifteen minutes early. Mustafa came by and poked his head in through the door.

  “Everyting alright, ma’am?” he asked.

  “Yes. Everything’s fine.”

  I wanted to lick the chalkboard, count cracks in the ceiling, but E.T. was loitering. He had his gimp leg propped up on a chair. He stared at me.

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked.

  “Jes.”

  “What?”

  I sat down behind my desk, which I never do. I hate it. Usually, it makes me feel bad to sit at it, like “I’m the teacher, I sit here. You’re the students, you sit there.” The desk creates stratification. In this instance, however, the desk offered protection. I wore it like a fort. It was a big wooden barricade separating me from danger.

  E.T. hoisted himself up, propped himself against his crutches and hopped over. He stopped two feet from the desk and watched me pick up a red pen. I began grading papers with it.

  “Meece Garcia,” he began. “I leeb een a duplex?”

  “Luis,” I interrupted. “Just tell me in Spanish.”

  He nodded and smiled. In Spanish, he repeated, “Señorita Garcia, I live in a duplex. With my mother. She has diabetes. The building is for sale and my attorney told me it’s a good investment; I should buy it. There is one problem, however.”

  “What?”

  “I am not a citizen,” he grinned sheepishly. “But if I put the house in a citizen’s name, it will be okay. And the citizen can live in the other half. For free.” He stared at me.

  I wished for Mustafa to poke his head in right then. E.T. had me cornered but I couldn’t show him that he was making me angry or nervous.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked.

  Same stupid grin.

  “Uh-uh. No,” I answered. “And what you are suggesting is very wrong. On many different levels. I’ve gotta go.”

  “Wait!” he cried in English. “Joo meesunderstand me.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said firmly. “I’ve gotta clean up here and shut out the lights. You need to go.”

  He looked at me funny. “E.T. is sorry,” he said.

  “Fine. Goodnight, E.T.”

  “Goodnight, Meece Garcia,” he said and hopped away.

  For my twenty-second birthday, Lupe Diaz baked me a cake in the shape of a princess. She wore a pink frosting dress with gold beads on it and a tiara on her blonde head.

  “Eez joo,” said E.T.

  The students looked at him like he was retarded. I ignored him.

  “Cut me a piece of her skirt!” I said.

  Lupe handed me a big, tasty piece of petticoat and Julia served me flan and gelatin treats the other ladies had brought from home and instead of studying English, we spent the evening singing and doing the limbo under a broomstick.

  We were having plenty of fun, but then E.T. got up and hopped to the boom box. He pushed stop. The cumbia66 ended.

  “Aw,” people grumbled.

  E.T. ignored the whines. “Attention!” he cried. People looked at one another, rolling their eyes. “Attention please!” he cried in English.

  People sat at their desks and folded their arms, letting E.T. speak.

  He cleared his throat and continued in Spanish, “I have composed an original work in honor of this evening, for the birthday celebration of our teacher. It is a poem entitled ‘Poetry.’ “ E.T. lifted a sheet of lined paper to his face and grew quiet.

  “It was at that age…,” he read, and he delivered a beautiful poem about the nature of poetry, of it finding you, not you finding it, and it taking you and you realizing that you are none other than poetry itself. “Poetry” is by Pablo Neruda. I took a seminar on his work senior year at Cal. Dad had insisted it was a useless class. Now I could prove to him that it wasn’t.

  E.T. whispered the poem’s final word, “…wind,” and the class sat, amazed. Slowly, they began to nod their heads and clap. Nena Rodriguez, who thinks she’s very sexy, lifted her cup of atole67 in the air and cried, “Little did we know we had a poet among us.” She brought her cup down and clasped her arms firmly to her sides, intentionally squeezing out more cleavage for the writer.

  Lupe shook her head in disgust.

  At 9:30, Sylvia took charge of a clean-up crew that wiped away the pachanga in no time, had the space looking like a classroom again within minutes. Lupe scooped my leftover cake into a pink box and gestured for me to join her behind the file cabinets. I went and stood beside her and in her husky voice, Lupe whispered to me in Spanish, “Be careful, Señorita Garcia. El Tecolote knows you are gay.”

  “He knows I’m gay?” I was astonished.

  “Yes. He told Nena Rodriguez that he saw you kissing a woman with big breasts who looked like a man at the flea market on Ashby. Be careful. He told her, ‘I am going to change the teacher! She is too pretty to be a lesbian.’“

  “Thank you,” I whispered to Lupe. On second thought, I added, “Are you okay with it?”

  “With what?”

  “With me being gay.”

  Lupe nodded, “Of course. My sister is gay.”

  I left Animo weighted down with leftover princess cake and gifts. I walked up Telegraph Avenue alone, past the organic foods market and the dentists’ offices, and the piercing parlor. The whole time, I felt like I was being watched. I got to my building and took my key out of my pocket and spun around to look over my shoulder. In the bushes beside the Lady of Shalott, I heard leaves rustle and crutches fall, clattering to the ground.

  Right To Bear Arms

  Oakland First Presbyterian is a brown and white church that looks a bit like a photograph I once saw accompanying an encyclopedia article about the Globe Theatre.

  It’s got a white face with brown crisscrossing beams over it and little apses poking out here and there. I know for a fact AA holds meetings there because on our way to Jack London Square one night me and Charlie drove past First Presbyterian and clustered outside we saw blacks, whites, Asians, and brown people all being nice to each other. There were rich and poor, greaser and soc, talking pleasantly, sharing cigarettes, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. It was Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech manifest.

  That’s what an AA meeting is all about, sitting at the table of brotherhood, I Have a Dream, and if you see a similar-looking crowd but they’ve got hepatitis and are dressed a little funkier, don’t fear: That’s just NA.

  Sunday afternoon, I looked at the concrete ground outside First Presbyterian’s main entrance. Cigarette butts littered it, evidence, good as fresh dung or rabbit tracks, that the Friends of Bill W. had indeed conducted a recent meeting. I was procrastinating, already half an hour late for the one I’d come to attend, the monthly gathering of Oakland’s T.S.O. chapter, the Tourette Syndrome Organization. I’d found the D.C. headquarters’ number listed in the resources section of my workbook and on a lark, I’d called them up and gotten the skinny about support group locations and dates and times.

  I did one of those deep kneebends I only do when I’m nervous as heck. What was I gonna see in the Round Table Room? Knights? King Arthur? That was the epic-sounding name of the place where a woman named Lorraine who I’d spoken to on the phone had told me to go.

  I stared up at the steeple and worried, “What if I don’t really have Tourette’s? What if I have early onset Parkinson’s? I’ll die soon if I didn’t get proper medical treatment!”

  “Stop it!” I hissed at myself and stood up straight and jammed my hands into my coat pockets.

  I walked through the church’s tall doorway and followed the signs left, down the hall. Standing six feet from the Round Table Room’s door, I heard a woman growl, “Nappy niggers!”

  I braced myself. I wished for a second I’d taken Rae up on her offer to come with me. Then I walked in alone.

  A mixture of kids and adults sat on folding chairs organized into a circle. A podium was pushed into a corner a
nd a table had been collapsed and stacked against a wall to make room for the meeting. I scanned the faces to see if I could make out who I’d heard screaming from the hall.

  “May I help you?” a man with glasses and a shiny red nose asked me.

  “Yeah. I’m Desiree. I called last week. Someone named Lorraine told me to come here.”

  “Oh. That’s my dwaughter,” he explained in a thick New York accent. “Have a seat, deah. I’m Glen. The group maderatuh.” After I sat in an empty chair beside a little ginger boy who kept flinging his head back and snorting, Glen said, “Nancy was just finishin’ up.”

  He gave the floor to a wholesome twentysomething with a face like a sitcom star’s, plain Jane pretty enough for people to project their own fantasies onto. Glen stared at her, one hand on his knee, the other stroking his spiky, white beard. Glen’s glasses glinted. His hair looked windswept. I wondered if the motorcycle helmet beside his chair belonged to him.

  I focused on Nancy. Her fingers played with a plastic drinking straw, and she mangled it, twisting it and twisting it and twisting it. Her leg jiggled, too, bouncing up and down, and a woman who looked like an older version of her stroked her hair.

  “So, as I was saying,” Nancy said, “I was in a crunch and it was close to finals. I had a paper due, and shame on me, tsk, tsk, tsk, I had a coffee drink.” Nancy turned to the woman smoothing her hair and looked at her with remorse. She glanced back at the rest of us. “Well, I paid the price. I went to my early childhood development class but I couldn’t even stay in my seat ’cause my tics were so out of control so I excused myself to the back of the room where I thought I wouldn’t bother anybody and let everything out.”

  The memory made her widen her eyes, and she laughed. “The professor, well, he called a break and motioned for me to come over to him and he asked me in this very serious voice, ‘Are you ill, young lady?’ ”