Surfing U.S.A.

Summer. School's out. Theirs, not mine. I'm teaching my ESL class in one of the long-lived temporary classrooms at the ALI. I have a mixed group of students from all over the place, Turkey to Brazil. It's a reading class, higher level. The students speak English well enough do to most of the things they might want to do. At the moment, they are in groups working on a vocabulary and comprehension worksheet.

It's about 9:30 a.m. The door opens part way. One at a time, the boys squeeze through the narrow opening. I'm amused by the melodrama; there's no way they can sneak in.

Jimmy. Cut off work pants, cut off diving suit legs, worn Vans, stretched out white socks swinging around his ankles, T-Shirt, enormous grin. Craig, homemade Mohawk, wife-beater T-shirt, jeans, beat up Vans, safety-pin hanging from the lower lip of his grin. Mikey, his mom still dresses him. Jeans, boy's plaid button-down, undershirt, freckles, grin. Jason, tall, shirtless, a character from a Paul Newman movie, narrow hips, broad shoulders and strong abs from lifting the front end of the bike on jumps, wheelies, tricks.

I am grinning, too, at the expressions on the faces of my students. I don't think they've seen anything quite like this.

"How'd you get here?"

"We rode. We took the trolley from IB then rode from my mom's house up here."

That's twenty miles or so. I shake my head.

"How'd you find me?" I ask them.

"We asked at the office," said Jimmy.

Alrighty then. This lot has been to the office asking for me. Ah the stories about ourselves we never hear; this will be one of them, but I can imagine it. "I'm teaching, guys."

"Yeah, we know. We'll go outside."

My students protest and I think, "Hmmm, these are real, live Americans here, unique specimens." I say, "You want to help my students? They're working on a project -- wait, I have an idea. Put your stuff away," I tell my class. "We're going to do something different." I see the fascination in their eyes looking at the boys. I decide to capitalize on it. For some of these kids, it'll be their first conversation with an American; for all of them it will be their first conversation with Americans from the world the boys come from.

"Stay in your groups. I know you are wondering what these boys are doing here, how they're related to me, what they are like. OK, you guys, each one go join a group. Students, you can interview the boys and then I want you to work together on a paragraph about the person you interview."

I hear the questions, "How do you know our teacher?" "Why do you have a pin in your face?" "Do you go to school?" "How old are you?" "What do you study?" "Do you like America?"

In spite of the fact that every one of these boys has been short-changed in some way by the "American Dream" they defend their country to these "foreigners". "America is the best place to live," they say to Swiss, German, Turks, Brazilians, Japanese. It never crosses their minds that could be up for debate and might not win and, what's more, they themselves might be the evidence presented to refute it.

The boys ask questions, too. "What music do you listen to?" "Where do you live?" "Do you like it here?" "Do you know BMX?"

Class ends and no one has written anything. I'm proud of the boys, their good manners and gentility in answering some of the questions which were quite rude, actually, very personal. They front for their friend, me. If anyone says anything about them to me later, anything pejorative, they will have to fight me.

"Can we go to Mission now?" asks Mikey as we walk out of the classroom together.

"I can't. I have a meeting."

"Don't go."

I look at this splendid June day. I look at them, think of their long trek, and want to ditch. I want to practice anarchy right here, right now, but I'm still laboring under the illusion that I have a future in this place.

"Let's go get lunch. I have to hang out, but then we can do something." We go to McDonald's. After, they sit on the tailgate of my truck, waiting. One of my colleagues walks past my truck on his way to the meeting and takes the seat next to me when he arrives. "Are you in a gang, Martha? There are a lot of rough looking kids hanging around your truck."

I think that's hilarious. "Yes, John, I am in a gang."

"No, really, who are those boys?"

"That's my gang," I insist. "They are my friends. We're going to Mission Trails as soon as I'm done here." And, at that moment, I decide I'm done there. I put my things together and stand up. "I have an appointment," I tell my boss. "Sorry!"

I take the boys to Mission and then go home to change. I go back with Molly and the video camera, but most of the footage I take is with the lens cap on the camera. We eat pizza after and the boys spend the night at Colleen's. The next day I offer to take them back to IB. No one wants to ride; it's blistering hot. They pile in the back of the truck with their bikes. We have decided to go to the beach near Coronado because it's so hot and we've never gone to the beach together.

"Have you ever surfed?" asks Jason, who's sitting in the front seat for some reason I do not yet know, but will learn before long.

"No. Is it fun?"

"You'd love it," he says. "To bad we don't have a surf board."

"I know where we can get one," says Craig from the back of the truck. The window between is open to allow the air to circulate. My truck doesn't have air conditioning.

"Where?"

"I'll tell you when we get there."

We arrive in IB and Craig starts telling me, "Turn here, go down that street, up that street, go up that alley, down that alley" kind of thing. We stop in front of a house that has an open garage door. Slung from ropes on the ceiling is a long board. "Park here," says Craig. "We can use that one."

"Can you get it down?" asks Craig. Jason is over six feet tall; the others haven't had their growth spurts yet and are still not a lot taller than I am.

"Yeah, you wait there and catch it." Jason reaches from the back and slowly pushes the board toward Craig. Jason runs around and helps him as the board slides forward. They put it in the back of the truck and we head up the Strand to the beach.

Coronado is NOT a surfing beach, and it's a fairly flat day, but there's enough of a swell that the boys think I might be able to get a ride. Jason shows me how to get the board out behind the breaks and when to get up on it. I've body-surfed enough to understand how to find the spot on the wave that will carry me in. They all stay out there with me, past the breaks, waiting, waiting. I'm blind without my glasses and have learned to gauge when the wave is right by noticing changing relationship between ocean and sky. Perhaps all myopic surfers have the same method, I don't know.

"That one, that one, Martha, that one! Just get on all fours like a dog, OK? You don't have to stand up your first day!"

The wave comes. I turn my back toward it. I feel it begin to swell beneath me. I manage to get up on the board as I've been told and ride the small wave all the way in. I take the board back out.

"How was it? Did you like it?"

"I love it." I was ready to spend the rest of my life like that, but never again that day did a wave of any size approach the Coronado shore. Finally we give up, go in, and dig a hole in the sand, bury Jason to his neck and throw Cheetos at him as he tries to catch them in his mouth.

At the end of the day, back in IB, we wash the board at Jimmy's uncle's house before taking it back to the open garage door and hanging it where we found it.

"Do you know these people, Craig?" I ask, finally.

"Naw. Why?"

Knights and Death

Dusk. Friday. Late spring, a normal Friday. Phone rings, "Can we come down?"

"Sure, of course."

"See you in a few."

I go out onto the front porch to wait. The air has that bright end of sunset red tinge. Standing in the middle of my street and looking southwest, you can see a strip of ocean and the lights of Tijuana, on a clear days you can see the bull ring. My old neighbor, Letha, and I sometimes watched fireworks on Coronado and in Imperial Beach on the Fourth of July from that very vantage point sharing a glass of wine. Thinking of that, I get up from my porch and walk out into the street and look toward the ocean. Fog is fast gathering down there and the bright sunset is swallowed, dusk no longer tinged with gold. I hear a gunshot behind me, and not far. I turn toward the sound and take a few steps up the street. My heart goes cold when I see the boys coming on their bikes. Where’s the shooter? They stop at the corner. I began walking as fast as I can toward them. I hear Jimmy, "Don't let her see, Jason! Stop her!"

I’m scared for the boys. There’s someone with a gun up there. Jimmy, Mikey and Marc stay where they are while Jason rides quickly toward me. I wish they would just come here. We could go inside. The news tells daily of drive-bys. I don’t want them lost to that random killing.

"You wanna see me do a can-can, Martha?" he asks and launches into this complicated trick.

"What happened?" I ask.

"How about a Bunny Hop? Do you wanna' see me do a bunny hop?"

"Jason, what happened?" I now hear sirens in the distance, coming from the fire department a mile up the street.

His response is, "Don't go up there, Martha."

"Is it a body, Jason?"

"Yeah. Some guy was shot."

By then I'm at the corner. The boys try to stand in front of me, shielding me from the sight of a middle-aged Mexican lying face down in the dirt beside a neighbor's driveway.

"Is he dead?" I ask the boys.

No one has ventured any closer than the corner where we stand roughly 30 feet from the body.
We hear screaming and running coming from the alley down which this man had run. A woman's voice, a man's voice. If they're saying anything, I can't understand it. It might not even be words, just crying and screaming; fear, rage and anguish seeking expression.

He's just a man. He's wearing navy blue work pants and a white shirt; the kind of sensible, serious black steel-toed shoes a delivery guy wears to protect his feet. That this simple person would be involved in some deathly drama seems absurd. I stare without really getting what I'm seeing. The boys are worried. I should not see things like this. Their Martha should never see anything so ugly.

I realize this and think that it's my job, as an adult, to shelter the boys, but here they are sheltering me. I decide to let them, and I turn toward home.

"Let's go home," I say. "The cops will be here and it's their business, not ours."

"I wonder what happened?" asks Mikey.

No one answers. Not long before, maybe only a year, someone had broken into Ryan's house and cut up his mother. We learned of this the morning after, when Jimmy went down to get Ryan to go to the jumps. The house was cordoned off with Do Not Enter Crime Scene tape. He came back up the street to get me, to go down there, to get me to go look. It was horrifying, chilling. There was blood on the concrete sidewalk by the front door on the stucco walls and on the door itself. Someone had been hurt badly. Neighbors said that the fire department had taken Ryan's mom away on a gurney. Ryan had stayed with the neighbor for an hour or so until his dad came and got him. We never saw Ryan again.

Our neighborhood is constantly in competition with two others for having the most violent crimes. It's the result of the clashes of cultures and drug gangs (Asian vs. Mexican vs. Black vs. White meth farmers and dealers). It’s the result of people working three jobs to hold a life together, exhausted, frustrated, poor people who want more than they'll ever have -- their desires fed by the outrageous entertainment centers for which they’ve hocked their lives. It's the result of passion and love and cheating and child-stealing and coyote depositing and INS deporting and all the rough unjust moving around of people for one reason or the other. It's the result of despair.

Larry McMurtry wrote about California in the introduction to his book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave.

"...present-day Texas is a very rich subject, particularly for the novelist. Present-day California might be even richer, but California, whether as a subject or a place to live, is almost too taxing. There the confusion is greater, the rivalries of manners more intense: the question is whether anyone can live in California and comprehend it clearly now..."

It's a very good question. My gang of white adolescent boys and I stand on the edges of this violent, multi-ethnic neighborhood some distant sentimental liberal has named the “Urban Village,” and watch it shoot itself, knife itself, beat itself up mostly in relation to race, custom, language, territory, drugs.

"For the Mexicans," says my neighbor Chayo, "it's about territory, not drugs. For the Blacks and Asians it's about territory and drugs." For the Whites? No one knows. Few hang around, only people like me who can’t move; finances hold us here. Where would I get another house in San Diego for $800/month? The white neighbors across the street have lived here since the ‘60’s when it was a beautiful neighborhood. Most of the older Mexicans have lived here that long, too, and attended Hoover High when it was one of the best high schools in San Diego. Old photos of the hood show fancy cars, immaculate lawns and gardens, men in white shirts and fedoras, women in pretty shirt-dresses with aprons. But this Mexican is face down next to the light pole, dead. None of us knows why.

We sit on the curb under the palm tree in my front yard, watching the street. Night falls soft and starlit somewhere, but here the sky is a wild red and blue disco show of police cars and fire engines. No one asks questions, looks for witnesses or talks to neighbors. It seems they simply examine the body, check his I.D. and haul him away. Chances are good he has no I.D., another "Illegal" come up to earn a living where he might actually have that chance. Most of our stories have no better or more meaningful ending than that.