The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  That muggy morning, I felt an initial swell of enthusiasm as “my boys” pulled their desks screeching across the floor into a lopsided circle. They were a diverse group: staggeringly different in height (four foot ten to six foot three), weight (bantamweight to near-Sumo), age (thirteen to seventeen; some of the older ones at the ninth-grade rodeo for a third time), and even scent (untreated teen BO to full fumigation with Axe Body Spray). Just about all of them were from working poor families in public housing, but there were exceptions: One boy, Jamal, was living with his mother in a homeless shelter; while another, Lucas, was from “brownstone Brooklyn” and had two professional parents. To my surprise, they came from every borough in the city; some commuted more than an hour from the Bronx, while others could see their apartments from the school. Skin color ranged from ebony (a boy they called “African Adeyemi”) to near-albino (“I’m Puerto Rican but got Irish pirate in me”); severely asthmatic Norman brought up the middle with his own special shade of green-gray. Although mostly black and Latino, the kids were of many ethnicities, nationalities, races, and racial mixes—with one glaring exception: Caucasian. Similar to Eugene Debs, I identified only one white child in the entire school. As with so many New York City public schools, it was as if Brown v. Board of Education or desegregation had never occurred. (Today, New York’s schools are the most racially segregated in the Union; even Mississippi and Alabama are more integrated.)

  My advisees had fallen into line and were taking turns listlessly reading from a rule book whose cover featured this tagline: “This isn’t your old school, things are different here at Union Street.” It cataloged all the no-no’s: no electronics in sight or in use, no hats, no sunglasses, no gang wear, no inappropriate language, no fighting, blah, blah, blah. The list seemed endless. As we “reflected as a community,” I noticed a couple of distracting flashes of red at the door. I turned back to the circle.

  And then there was a dull thud, followed by a crash. Near the door he had just kicked open stood one Kameron Shields in pure renegade glory, a one-man violation of every possible rule. Above the neck alone, he was flaunting four violations: He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap over a red bandanna over iPod headphones. A silver flip phone was clipped to his baggy jeans. Everything he wore was cherry red—the hallmark color of the Bloods. I didn’t know much about gangs, but even I knew that.

  He turned his grinning face to the ceiling and howled, “WASS…UP…NIGGAS?” About half of the boys bleated with laughter at this spectacular entrance; the other half seemed as puzzled as I was. He charged toward the circle and double-high-fived the boys who clearly knew this local hero. I surmised that his fans had all attended middle school with him here at Union Street. I stood in front of him before he could complete his round of glad-handing.

  He turned 90 degrees toward one of his buddies, Fat Clovis, looked me up and down, and asked, “Who dat?” His question had a ring of genuine curiosity. I started the morning with first-day jitters made worse with too much caffeine; I was now approaching full-blown panic. My palms got clammy and my mouth sour.

  “Hey, somebody forgot to tell this nigga that it’s supposed to go like this.” He took his index finger and made a fucking motion into his rolled-up fist, while simulating what I supposed was a female orgasm.

  “Mister,” he continued, staring at me, “it don’t go like this.” He clumsily jammed the tips of his two index fingers together and accompanied the motion with falsetto male groans. Christ, I had barely said a word. Could he really smell the gay on me that readily? I’m bent, but I’m not Richard Simmons.

  Another wave of laughs. I wanted to assure him that gay sex was a hell of a lot more fun than he was making it out to be, but instead I scrambled to figure out a way to shut him down.

  “What’s your name?” I barked.

  “Nemesis.”

  “Well, Nemesis,” I said, summoning what I thought a real teacher would say, “you can’t just walk in here like that and disrupt this class.”

  Two years of graduate school and six months of student teaching offered me little to draw from. I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom. What little I had heard was wildly contradictory, a mix of folk wisdom, psycho-jargon, wishful thinking, animal training, and out-and-out bullshit. Most of what I’d learned wasn’t even from my professors, but from the shell-shocked first-year teachers I shared my classes with. The majority of our professors hadn’t taught in a public school in ages, if ever. One confessed she left teaching not long after being stabbed in the eye with a pencil. Another encouraged me, off the record, to call parents in the hopes of their using serious corporal punishment on the kids at home. “They’ll take care of business in a way you can’t,” he said with a wink.

  As I stood staring at young Kameron “Nemesis” Shields’s lightly pimpled and peach-fuzzed face, a chorus of voices shouted ten different sets of directions at once inside my head:

  Never use sarcasm with kids. You’ll just get it back fivefold.

  Kids can smell fear, just like dogs can. Stay cool in a crisis.

  At the first sign of real trouble, throw a freakin’ fit. Make a scene. Kick the garbage can, pound the desk. Make it clear you’re the boss, and the boss is pissed off.

  Choose your battles carefully. It’s a 180-day war. Don’t escalate too quickly. You only have so much ammo.

  Look, white boy, you gotta channel your inner angry black mama. Develop a churchy, righteous voice of anger. They’ll recognize that voice all the way back to the womb.

  Those battle-axe nuns in parochial school had it right: “Don’t crack a smile until Thanksgiving.” You can lighten up as the year goes by, but start out tough and then ease up.

  Teachers who make genuine connections with kids don’t have to resort to being disciplinarians.

  Not one of these nostrums seemed useful at that particular moment. Kameron and I stood face-to-face in showdown pose.

  He laughed. “I can’t come in here and do that? Well, it looks like I just did, don’t it?” He had me there.

  Christ! I was leaking credibility fast, a tanker run aground. I had been warned that the way you handle your first big public confrontation with a kid was key. I knew the day would come, but I just wasn’t expecting it three hours into my new career.

  “Well, it was nice of you to come here to advisory period and show us everything we shouldn’t do at Union Street. We needed a real-life example, so I appreciate your help,” I said. My humor had worked magic in tense office situations in the past, but here it got me nowhere. There wasn’t even a titter from the kids. Just silence.

  This kid obviously had far more practice with these kinds of scenes than I did. We locked eyes. His gaze was unflinching, mine wandered nervously. His breathing was slow and steady, mine fast and shallow. This was his classroom and, apparently, I had just mistakenly wandered in.

  The clock hit 12:30 p.m. and everyone scurried out to lunch in a hurry, laughing all the way.

  “That Kameron, man. He is one outrageous nigga,” mused Fat Clovis.

  I bolted into the faculty lounge and sought out a few of the veterans. “Who is this Kameron Shields?” I asked, and then in an attempt to camouflage my fear in humor: “And why isn’t he chained to a rock somewhere?” There was a range of frowns, laughs, and moans.

  Everyone burst forth with a witticism or story in quick succession:

  “Oh, you met dear Kameron, did you? He was the pride of the middle school here,” said Monica with a sheepish smile.

  “Oh yeah, he’s brutal. He threw an electric pencil sharpener at Miss Dimitriopolou’s head last year. That should have gotten him expelled, but our fearless leader thinks it’s a failure to throw any kid out,” added Marquis, the sophomore history teacher.

  “He’s still here? I thought he followed his girlfriend to New Jersey. She needed all that dental work. In Jersey, Med
icaid has much better dental benefits. Who knew? Maybe I should move there,” quipped Rebecca, the middle school reading teacher, as she fiddled in jest with a molar.

  I learned more in private from Sita, the guidance counselor-slash-social worker. Kameron was crushed by the departure of his adviser from last year, a young, charismatic science teacher who had made Kameron his pet project. It later turned out that the teacher himself had a problem with authority that manifested itself in pathological lying and rumored weed dealing. And I was not surprised to learn that Kameron’s home life was in shambles.

  It was only a matter of days before the harsh reality of so many of these kids’ lives tumbled out. Kids were being raised by step–half cousins, by foster parents, or in group homes while their parents were in jail, in a shelter, in a mental ward, in Santo Domingo, in labor, in a deportation center in New Jersey, in rehab (again), in Iraq dodging IEDs. All to say, with their lives in pieces. At first, many of their families’ choices seemed foolish or reckless, but I quickly realized just how few choices they had.

  I thought back to my own school years, but I had no point of comparison. Sure, there were some moments of neglect and embarrassment. In fourth grade, my bargain-hunting mother sent me to school in cheap cardboard shoes from a store worse than Woolworth’s. As soon as they touched the slushy playground, they decomposed into shit-brown clumps, leaving me practically stocking-footed and humiliated underneath the monkey bars. But hey, my mother was there soon enough with a hug and a kiss, and a slightly less cheap pair of shoes. And yes, she contributed to my status as a weirdo when, during her brief hippie phase, she refused to buy regular brown paper lunch bags, and forced us instead to use giant paper grocery bags to carry the deeply weird food she packed: something called yogurt that no one at the Sacred Heart School had ever seen before, leftover veal stroganoff in a paper cup secured with a tangle of rubber bands and foil, whole unwashed carrots with the dirt still on them and the green fronds poking out the top of the bag. I longed for Fritos and Ding Dongs, not only for their satisfyingly trashy flavor, but as clear signs of membership in the mainstream. While other children paid the music teacher with a typewritten check in an envelope, I produced a knotted Wonder Bread bag of crumpled singles, quarters, and dimes. “Tell your mother I don’t take change,” the teacher grumbled. But these were the worst I could conjure. What could I say or do in the face of the horrible deprivation so many of my students faced?

  Kameron’s reign of terror continued over the next few weeks, and he saved his worst antics for my advisory period. One of the first lessons I’d learned in student teaching was that often the most fearsome streetsy-looking kids were really sweethearts. All the tough trappings were just defenses, just “frontin’,” as the kids would say. Often, the students in the polo shirts and nerdy glasses were the ones you had to watch. But not Kameron. He looked like trouble and he was. I was genuinely afraid of him from the minute I set eyes on him. Behind his contraband red-tinted sunglasses, he had a dead-eyed look that unsettled me, and I could tell he liked it that way.

  But just when I thought I had him summed up as an unalloyed sociopath, Kameron would show his lighter side. One day before lunch, he was sitting in a corner when he pulled Fat Clovis onto his lap and started fondling him. As I tried to break it up, he cupped Fat Clovis’s considerable (and pointy) man-breast in his hand and said, “Mister, look at those tits; they are just perfect. Any bitch in this school would kill to have a rack like this.” He kissed one reverently and Fat Clovis giggled. The rest of the boys were howling with laughter. It took all I had not to laugh while I tried to reprimand him.

  I stupidly used the word misogyny as I scolded him, which earned me the unironic response, “Who is Miss Agany?”

  Another day, I actually got him to write a few short sentences. No one in the faculty room could believe it until I produced evidence. “Oh, it’s real. He wrote once for me last year, too. See, he writes only in red, like a real Blood should,” said Miss Dimitriopolou.

  A week later, a visitor appeared in my class. “How’s it going?” Mei asked me as she stood in my doorway. All the first-year teachers were struggling mightily and she was making some triage stops after school. She was right to be worried: One right-out-of-college newbie, Alvin the Spanish teacher, abruptly resigned after a month, citing health concerns (though most of us thought he was just pulling the escape cord).

  “If you really want to know the truth, I feel like I am standing in front of a tsunami with a mop,” I said. She chuckled.

  “Really, how’s it going?” she pressed. Even though she was the boss, Mei projected such empathy and understanding that I wasn’t afraid to unload on her.

  “Well, two textbooks were thrown out the window—though you knew that—and someone vandalized my overhead projector with lipstick yesterday. Keeping kids engaged for ninety minutes is difficult. I’m afraid not much ‘deep learning’ is happening.”

  “Don’t be discouraged. They are testing you. You’ll get it under control. I have every faith in you.” She tugged on my shoulder until I cracked a smile.

  “And then today Kameron Shields threatened to blow up the school.”

  She shuddered. “Are you serious? Really? He said, ‘blow it up’?”

  “Twice,” I said slowly, “but he was only joking. He’s actually done far, far worse than that.”

  Her hands shot up in alarm. “You don’t understand. This is different. After Columbine and 9/11, there are federal laws about this. I am mandated to report this way, way up the chain.”

  Mei had seen so much bad behavior in her career that I thought she was unflappable. I had never seen her so panicked. What had I unleashed?

  “I’m sure he wasn’t serious,” I said, trying to reassure her. “He threatened to mow down Porter with an Uzi on the first day of school. I don’t think he meant that either.” I felt my face grow warm. This was going to attract a lot of unwanted attention. Couldn’t I just fail privately? And, if I was really honest with myself, I was afraid of a reprisal from Kameron.

  “It doesn’t matter if he was joking. That kind of threat requires mandatory reporting.”

  Without knowing it, I had pinged a domino, and suddenly they all came tumbling down. Mei notified the regional superintendent, who in turn notified Homeland Security. Twenty-four hours later, a police sergeant and a patrolman had been summoned to the school. I was pulled out of my class in a hurry.

  I entered the principal’s office and there sat Mei, the cops, Kameron, and Kameron’s sister, who didn’t appear that much older than him. But in his sad web of family ties, she was somehow his guardian. She was whimpering; used Kleenexes were piled in a pink pyramid in front of her.

  “Mommy’s too sick for you to be pullin’ this shit, Kameron. You’re killing her with all this stupid stuff.”

  “It was just a joke, man,” he kept repeating. He showed the closest thing to fear I had ever seen on his face. Mei recited the turn of events from a folder.

  The two cops—the patrolman looked like Channing Tatum, the sergeant like Police Chief Wiggum—then pulled me out into the hall. “So tell me, based on your experience, is that kid in there gonna blow up this school?” asked the sergeant.

  “Officer, my experience with kids goes back exactly two weeks.” They looked at each other warily. “He is a punk with a real mouth on him, probably a bit of a sociopath, but no, he isn’t going to blow up this school.”

  “That’s all we need to hear,” said the patrolman. We returned to the office like a jury that had just deliberated.

  “Kameron, this teacher here just saved you from getting arrested,” said the sergeant. Kameron looked up at me, flashing his dark shark eyes. Maybe, knowing this, he would cut me some slack. What is going on in there? I wondered. An emotional volcano, numbed silence, death threat, or gratitude? Who could know?

  I went to the grimy windowless teacher’s bathroom and pushed my way into the stall. Somebody needed to rein this kid in, to show him that
his actions hurt people, but it killed me that of all his offenses, this dumb technicality was the thing that was going to get him in real trouble. It seemed unfair, and, worse, it would allow him to feel wronged by the system, like a victim.

  Cops, gangs, threats, Homeland Security? I was in way over my head. And, in a weird way I felt like I had done something terribly wrong. I put my head in my hands. I wadded up toilet paper and wiped the tears out of my eyes before they could run down my face. I’d be damned if the kids were going to see me puffy-eyed and weepy over Kameron.

  Soon enough, the official word came down from Mei: Kameron would be shipped off to a suspension center in the South Bronx for two months. He would have to commute an hour and a half each way and sit all day in a run-down trailer that served as a classroom in the Harris High School parking lot with other delinquents he didn’t know and a couple of burned-out teachers.

  I secretly hoped I might earn a little credibility with the kids since I was the first teacher in the three-year history of Union Street who managed to get Kameron suspended, though many had tried. But no such luck: I had sold their hero up the river on a trumped-up charge. Despite my victory, the damage he had done to my reputation that first day was beyond repair. Instead of the gay witch hunt dying down after he was gone, as I’d hoped, the rest of the boys declared open season on me in his name. To confirm what both Chantay and Kameron had insinuated, they took the trouble to conduct a battery of oblique questions about my girlfriends (none); appetite for contact sports (zero); and other butch hobbies (only opera and gourmet cooking). They never asked me point-blank if I was gay or not, but they came to the correct conclusion. In case I had any doubt as to what was going on, someone scrawled on a bulletin board outside my room, “Payback is a bitch. Boland is a bitch.”