by Ed Boland
Maybe it was the warm spring air or being liberated from the school building, but romance and vulgarity were in the air. Several established couples, led by Nestor and Blanca, joined hands as we made our way back to school. Singles were flirting up a storm with off-color jokes and frisky horseplay. To my surprise, attention suddenly turned my way.
“Hey Mr. Boland, you got a girlfriend?”
“No,” I answered, for what was probably the two hundredth time that year.
From the beginning, I had always vowed that if asked, I would never lie about my sexuality, but I hadn’t been directly asked. For whatever reason, though, that afternoon Stephan Epperson broke through and said what no one else had the temerity to ask all year: “Have you got a boyfriend?”
Without much thought, I answered with a simple “Yes.”
I realized what I had said as it was leaving my mouth. In my fog, I lacked the energy or even the will to brace myself. I had already been shredded and fed to the crowd; there was little left to devour. I looked into the sun and numbly waited for the onslaught. I heard a short giggle, a tiny gasp, mostly silence.
“Have you got a picture?” Blanca asked with genuine curiosity.
Warily, I pulled out my phone, which had a tiny magenta sticker-photo of Sam on the back, smaller than a postage stamp. They gathered around the phone and inspected the image with care and intensity, as if they had uncovered a rare coin.
“Ohh, Mr. Boland’s boyfriend is black!” Stephan said.
“No, he’s not, actually,” I said.
“Ohh, Mr. Boland’s boyfriend is Lat-in!” said Nestor.
“No, he’s actually Jewish.”
“Ohh, Mr. Boland’s boyfriend is rich,” a voice at the back said.
“No, he actually makes very little money.”
“Jewish? Oh yeah, that’s right, I heard when you can’t tell what they are, they Jewish.”
“Does he got a big dick?” asked Fat Clovis in an earnest tone, as if he were asking Sam’s name.
I conjured a last vestige of professionalism and tried to act indignant. “That’s really inappropriate, Clovis. What are you thinking, even asking about that?”
“Yeah, tell us about that salchicha!” said someone at the back of the pack.
“Salchicha! Salchicha! Salchicha!” they chanted in unison. The Chinese mothers and Hasidic men from the neighborhood gave us a wide berth and shot disapproving looks. The chorus grew louder and more raucous, but it wasn’t the hateful chants of The Lord of the Flies. It was jolly and real and human. And they seemed happy for me. Where was all that hate? Why hadn’t I just done this from the start? I blushed.
I was standing on East Broadway surrounded by a group of thuggy teenagers chanting about my boyfriend’s junk. This was to be the greatest moment of communion with my students?
I took what I could get. Victory, thy name is salchicha.
Chapter 12
The Ivy Curtain
“THIS PLACE IS sweet. Dope as fuck.” Solomon Figueroa pulled off his knockoff Sean John sunglasses and squinted into the white winter sun on Columbia University’s campus. He was jaunty, light-skinned, and round-faced. “A man could get used to this kinda school.”
He gazed up at the statue of Alma Mater. “Who’s she?” he asked, a little out of breath from having sprinted up the stairs. As she had for more than one hundred years, Columbia’s famous icon, personified as Athena, sat in glazed majesty, overlooking the imposing campus. Draped, busty, and bronze, her upheld arms formed a commanding W. The Quad was quiet and lightly dusted with snow, and only a hint of ambient city noise wafted in. Even though Solomon and a few of his classmates lived nearby in Harlem, no more than a subway stop or two away, none of them had ever been to the storied campus. They were suitably awed.
I was pleased by his curiosity and was ready to remind him about our unit on Greek mythology or tell him how the Weathermen had planned to blow the statue up in the sixties. But before I could say a word, he and the group of ten other boys were already on to the next thing—the quicksilver nature of the teenage mind.
It was early February and we had just arrived on campus for a Model UN competition. Since Union Street had a focus on international studies, Model UN was supposed to be an integrated part of the curriculum and a prominent extracurricular activity. I was serving as the coach and chaperone for the ninth-grade boys’ team. Secretly, I hated it. I was forty-five and had a master’s degree, but I could barely understand the club’s bureaucratic rigmarole. So how was I supposed to explain it to the kids? How does a delegate from Vanuatu introduce an unmoderated caucus on potable water desalinization? Got me. Robert’s Rules of Order seemed riveting in contrast. The kids didn’t love it much either, though we were all pretty happy to get out of the classroom for a day.
A leggy blond undergrad bundled up in a Marmot bubble coat and carrying a backpack clacking with activist buttons strolled by. Solomon puffed up his chest, craned his neck, and gave her an overeager smile. Obliviously insulated by earbuds, she smiled back and nodded, wondering if she was supposed to know him. He put on his “Hey, ain’t I handsome?” face and smoothed his cropped black hair.
“See that? Bitches can’t get enough of my shit here.”
“Solomon, check your language!” I said. At this point in the year, I had given up on any kind of profanity check, save the most egregious, because otherwise, language policing would have been my full-time job. But in public, I tried to keep up at least the illusion of propriety. He raised his palm to me to show he knew he was in the wrong.
To teachers and classmates alike, Solomon was easy to love and easy to hate: half smart-ass, half bighearted goofball. Our shared ambivalence grew out of the fact that he couldn’t make up his mind about what kind of kid he wanted to be. Although I struggled not to think in such absolutes, I found that by high school most kids had decided which road they were going down. Frankly, there were good kids and bad kids and not so many in-betweens, but Solomon was a clear and confounding exception. His great flaw was that he was a consummate pleaser. (It takes one to know one.) He wanted the affirmation of both the bad-boy posse and the full faculty. Sometimes he wanted that love from everyone in the same hour.
I met him the first day of our advisory group, when I was still in a state of shock from my showdown with Kameron. Solomon acted differently than most of the boys. He looked me in the eye, shook my hand, and said, “In kindergarten, my teacher told my mother, ‘Little Solomon has the qualities of a lawyer.’ That lady was right. I’m a gonna be a lawyer.” It was an impressive first showing. Impressive, that is, until an hour later, when he twisted gum in some new kid’s hair and a shoving match ensued.
Solomon would make insightful comments about world history while simultaneously soaking spitballs in his copious chipmunk cheeks. (Spitballs seemed so old-fashioned, right out of Ozzie and Harriet, even to me, but I suppose some modes of misbehavior are timeless.) One day, after I caught him red-handed, ready to hurl a thoroughly spit-soaked, Ping-Pong ball–size wad of paper, he yelled, “Get away from me, you fuckin’ faggot!” While it was always stinging to hear those words screamed in my face, this time I also felt a horrible sense of betrayal because I liked and respected this kid and thought he felt the same way about me. I expected more and he knew better. An hour after his tirade, he stood in the doorway with a heartfelt apology letter (unmandated by any authority) and yet another handshake.
At the time of the Model UN conference, we had recently reached a low point in our relationship. Because Mei had a soft spot for him, Solomon had been rewarded with a part-time job as a gofer in the school’s main office. One of his tasks was to assist the school’s attendance coordinator, an older woman from nearby Chinatown, Mrs. Tang. There was no gentler and kinder person in the school. Even the bad kids were nice to her.
About two months into his time on the job, a shaken Mrs. Tang reported to Mei that she’d found Solomon standing silently in the staff coat closet near her things. That a
lone was a huge violation. She looked at her purse, which had been rifled through. A twenty-dollar bill was missing from her billfold. I had learned from an earlier incident that an experienced thief knows not to take everything, but just enough that the owner might not miss it. As you would hope with an attendance coordinator, she knew what was where in her purse at any given time.
I attended the subsequent disciplinary committee meeting as his adviser. It was harrowing. Instead of the usual stone-faced defiance kids usually presented, Solomon was outright bawling within minutes. “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that to Mrs. Tang. She’s nice.” He kept repeating, “I’m a good kid.” Like some kind of mythical creature, every day he rose to face the primordial struggle between good and evil. It was no fun to watch. He was fired from his job and written up. The theft was the last straw for many of the teachers. I tried to forgive him, but the whole incident left a terrible taste in my mouth, mostly because I knew how much he liked Mrs. Tang.
I would soon learn that it bothered me more than I knew. Not long after his firing, I held our advisory period in the computer lab to do a career interest survey. Solomon exchanged words that quickly grew heated with Big Mac, a quiet, surly giant of a kid who started the year at six foot five and seemed to add an inch a month. Normally the best of friends, they were suddenly exchanging blows. Big Mac’s fist was the size of a ham and even a first halfhearted blow sent Solomon reeling. Now having had the experience of a few fights under my belt, I knew I had to act fast, particularly with a lot of expensive computers around.
I got in between the boys and pushed them apart. Big Mac seemed more than happy to be stopped from beating up his friend, but Solomon kept provoking him. He shouted to all who would listen that I had ruined his chances to take down “that punk-ass Big Mac.” Solomon rushed up on me so close I thought our noses would touch. “FUCK YOU!” he blasted in my face. Without a second’s thought, I seethed back at him, “No, Solomon, FUCK YOU!” My words came with a spray of spittle. Wild-eyed, Solomon turned and stormed out of the room.
My face was fiery with embarrassment. I fully expected the other boys to go apeshit after the exchange, but they were entirely unfazed. I was ready to apologize to them or maybe ask them not to say anything to Mei. But before I could say a word, they were glued to their computers playing the video games I had forbidden them from using.
I sat down and tried to make sense of what had just happened. I easily conjured a dozen good reasons why I’d fired those words back at him, but I wasn’t fooling myself. Not a single one of them came close to justifying my behavior. I was a teacher who had just screamed a profanity at a fourteen-year-old boy, fueled by a temper I was fast becoming familiar with. Solomon had acted low, and I was right down there with him. I was lucky that Mei and Gretchen never got wind of it.
Solomon was given to grand pronouncements, and that morning at Columbia he let out a doozy. “I’mma go to this college, live in that dorm, and gonna get with that girl,” he said, pointing to the undergrad who was about to round the corner. All the boys chuckled.
I shepherded my team into a nearby auditorium for the opening ceremony of the “UN General Assembly.” Once the tiresome pomp and circumstance was over and the boys were dispatched to their “committees,” I had a free hour to myself. I sat in an oak-paneled dining hall, sipped coffee, and considered Solomon’s three wishes. Despite the best efforts of everyone at Union Street, did he or anybody else there have a viable chance of attending a college even remotely like Columbia? I glanced at a cluster of animated undergrads at the next table. They were flirting and shooting the shit, but I knew soon enough they would dive headlong into the books beside them, Thucydides and Thoreau, and notebooks packed to the margins with math I couldn’t begin to understand. In my backpack was a stack of work sheets my students had turned in about the life of the prophet Muhammad. I was pretty sure not one of them had a single complex sentence in it (save for those by Byron and Lucas); some were even presented as cartoons—a concession I’d made to get my most reluctant writers in the game. I let out a barely audible moan.
I thought back to my first jobs out of college, when I’d worked as an admissions officer. As an undergrad at Fordham, I had been a star student tour guide, persuading nervous suburban parents that the Bronx was no longer burning and that the Jesuits would give their children a rigorous and moral education. Immediately after graduation, I was hired full-time by the Admissions Office. Two years later, I was over the moon when I landed a job as assistant director at Yale.
Working as a gatekeeper there gave me lasting insight into the formation of the American elite. On my first day, I stood across from the white clapboard office in New Haven and patted my twenty-four-year-old self on the back for getting hired. The building was adjacent to a leafy town square that was home to three churches. It was so damn Yankee, it looked like the Pilgrims and the Indians should have been sharing a bowl of succotash on its lawn. The surrounding campus was a stunning Gothic redoubt circled by a ring of deep urban decay.
In my first few weeks, the dean of admissions, Chan Morris, an avuncular, soft-core preppy, and the rest of the staff warmly welcomed me. They were an accomplished, diverse, and dedicated bunch. I was assigned to a cozy white office on the top floor with a gabled window and a sagging green leather couch. The floor was so warped with age that from time to time, it would send me and my wheeled desk chair inadvertently careening to the middle of the room without notice.
I had barely settled into my new digs when my colleagues and I were sent to scour the country looking for the best and the brightest young minds. In the fall, I went everywhere, from Charleston, West Virginia, to Kokomo, Indiana, to Montreal, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I was welcomed with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm. In Ohio, an eager headmaster at a second-tier boarding school took me to a nice lunch and toured me around the campus in his convertible with the top down. At a large public school outside Detroit, I sat outside the cafeteria at a sticky table chatting with a representative from a local cosmetology school. Largely ignored by the students, we passed the time talking about the challenges of having very fine hair.
After the recruitment season wrapped up, the admissions staff returned in the late fall to New Haven and started the early-decision process. We would spend hour after hour poring over huge stacks of applications and green-bar computer reports. We parsed transcripts and called guidance counselors with questions like “So far, there seem to be three students ranked number one in your school who have applied to Yale. How do you account for that?” As a first step, two staff members read each application and assigned it an overall ranking of one (TAKE THIS KID!) to four (NO WAY).
The applicants were an impressive lot. A girl wrote a brilliant feminist essay—worthy of Harper’s, really—about gender and socialization, revealing that she was a phantom serial farter in public and yet no one ever suspected because of her gender. An aspiring art major sent in a dazzling, poster-size pen-and-ink drawing of himself suspended high over the campus on a pair of gymnastic rings, his body forming a perfect Y for Yale. A Vietnamese refugee wrote about finding solace in a school in Nebraska after a near-death experience as a “boat person” when she was six years old. They all waltzed into the freshman class.
I also learned quickly that being too clever or familiar could backfire. A self-saboteur from Chicago wrote her essay about her fear of going to the dentist—in backward letters, colored pen, and a spiral “Yellow Brick Road” pattern; not the kind of thing an admissions officer wants to tackle in a mirror at midnight. A few years before, an overeager Eagle Scout from Pennsylvania on the wait list had pitched a tent on the lawn of the Admissions Office to show how ardently he was interested in attending. I am sure he enjoyed Haverford. Having the president of Stanford write you a letter of recommendation to Yale might seem like a good idea, but it resulted in a note from the dean that said, “If he’s so enamored of the kid, let Stanford use a spot on him.” It was the kiss of death wh
en the daughter of a prominent alum from Columbus, Ohio, “discovered” she was one-sixteenth American Indian and checked the box for Native American.
And then there were the athletes. After fierce pressure from the athletic department, I had to admit a highly sought-after French Canadian hockey recruit. He had crappy grades, dismal scores, and his essay consisted of one sentence scribbled hastily in pencil: “I want to bèe a great hockey player,” with an accent aigu hanging over the first e. Alors! To add insult to injury, he decided to go to Boston University.
After the preliminary votes were cast, the Admissions Committee was convened. Composed of faculty members, deans, and the most senior admissions representatives, they served as judge, jury, and executioner for the nearly fourteen thousand applicants.
Because competition was fierce and time short, you had to make your notes about the kids you were advocating for pithy and almost Zagat-guide-esque:
“Another hothouse flower with a perfect GPA, pass!”
“Virtuoso bassoonist and published poet at seventeen, an Eli to the core.”
“Milquetoast, yes, but brilliant milquetoast.”
“AP English teacher (Yale Class of ’79) says she is the most original thinker she ever taught, not just a ‘rara avis’ but ‘rarisima avis.’”
Any member of the committee could challenge you to back up your recommendation on any candidate in your region. After you made your case and answered their questions, the committee of eight or so would decide a candidate’s fate on a wacky voting machine, rumored to have been specially designed by some nerdy electrical engineering major. It had small electric consoles from which members would anonymously flip a switch to light up either a thumbs-up green light, thumbs-down red light, or wait-list white light. Any applicant with more than a total of two reject and/or wait-list votes was automatically denied.
