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Passages from the following were read at Cirque de Thé, an event on 9/10/10 in Northampton, Massachusetts celebrating the release of the Fall 2010 issue of Meat For Tea, a Pioneer Valley-based literary journal. A version of my short (but ever-lengthening) story "Raza" appears in the Fall issue of the journal.
Raza is a retelling of the story, or stories, my student Javon told me over the course of the last school year.
Javon became my student after he had stabbed his girlfriend in the stomach at a party, and a restraining order was subsequently placed on him. It wasn’t clear if it was after the stabbing or after the restraining order, that he was officially barred from regular classes at school. The only other information I had about Javon, besides his criminal record, was his IQ. The number they gave me put Javon’s intelligence somewhere between that of a chia pet and that of John Stuart Mill.
I’d rather know a student’s pulse rate, but that’s just me.
Javon and I met every morning in a small room on the top floor of the old deconsecrated jail. I call it deconsecrated because eleven years ago it had been closed down and left to die, and a new, modern-looking facility had been opened about three miles away, near the Berkshire Mall. To an outsider, it had none of the charm of the old redbrick jail. The new jail, as it was known, was a sprawling cinder block and concertina wire job, and perhaps its proximity to the Berkshire Mall and the nearby concrete farm made it look like a hostile one story stepchild of both. The old jail was re-opened with the acronym Youth Offender Program about eight years ago.
There used to be hangings at the old jail, during the Civil War era. I took pride in telling Javon this, in hopes that I would be able to control him through, well, the threat of execution, the threat of the old noose.
Javon didn’t really act out much, though, but he was fond of licking everything in sight – lead paint peeling off the wall near where he sat, the potted soil and the apical bud of the half dead mint plant I brought in as a science experiment that would, like the old jail, die a slow death of its own – I mean the experiment, not the plant, because the plant is still alive as I tell you this. Javon named the mint plant Javon, and when I look at it out there, by my very nice front door which does NOT contribute to any of my middle class guilt, I think, “hello Javon.”
Right. So Javon licked everything in sight–I won’t describe his tongue here but it was flame like and very pink against his skin which was the color of you know what if you must know. I countered that very alive flicking pink tongue with stories about the old jail, the building we were in at the very moment. A building which still smelled like mop water under the other tutors’ honeysuckle perfume and dried cakes of watercolor paint in the art room where a sign said you were NOT allowed to build a bong or draw gang signs or fashion anything hate related. In fact the only thing you were allowed to paint was Escher type of shit, stairways that went nowhere, or green lump hills that told of nowhere.
After a couple of weeks worth of these two hour tutoring sessions, forty minutes each of reading, geometry, and earth science, we were comfortable enough together to openly talk about things other than angles, photosynthesis, and Paul Revere’s ride by Longfellow – which Javon said was stupid to read because if anyone knocked on anyone’s door in the middle of the night today, you know what they’d get.
Around this time somehow the subject of Black Sabbath came up. I probably brought it up, and it was definitely me who said I wanted to form a Black Sabbath cover band, but have it be klezmer, and the band would be called Shabbat. Eventually the band name would disintegrate into Shazbat. Javon didn’t know what either of those Yiddish words meant, and I felt again the embarrassing divide between the new human being, and the one who gets shazbat and whatever flotsam of references that matter not to the new human being.
Of course I never started that band, because the best I can do for any band is sing, and Black Shazbat would be an instrumental act.
The good news was that Javon had an old clarinet from middle school band, and he said it was partially fucked up but still worked, and could make sounds. At my urging, he brought the clarinet to the old jail, the old jail, which we now referred to as the YOP, or Youth Offender Program. There was, and is, something offensive about the acronym YOP.
So Javon finally remembered to bring the clarinet to the YOP. True enough, it was fucked up. It looked like some of the silver parts had been stripped off. The clarinet made some blatting fart geese sounds, and it sounded so good, other tutors came in to the hallway to hear what we were doing in our too small room with the peeling lead paint and licked surfaces. We got through a few bars of “The Wizard,” and left it at that. I admit I also tried to play Javon’s clarinet, even after he put his pink flamelike tongue against the dried out saliva soaked reed.
These kinds of fun exercises in pedagogy and tutor tutee trust eventually lead us to the stories Javon told me. These stories were about Kelsie, the girlfriend he stabbed, and Raza, the scary Spanish girl with the waterfall hair (his words, not mine) and the weird knowing. Also his words. Raza moved to the West Side of Pittsfield from South Florida, Javon said, and with her, she brought news about something called “The Cloud.”
He described The Cloud as a ball of really bad pollution that messed up (his words) Florida and was roiling (my words) up to Massachusetts, fucking up (his words) everything in its wake. I was like, Ok, Javon. Enough. Back to Longfellow, back to pi. Javon told me about Raza’s story concerning one of the symptoms of Cloud infection. Something called the “tos marron,” or brown cough.
I wrote that “The cloud was a slow bomb, a creep, and instead of incendiary – Kelsie’s new favorite word – it was pulmonary. A pulmonary event, they said, that began with a dry, nagging cough and evolved into a gasping, retching heave that squirted a palateful of arterial blood, alveoli, and tarry matter into your mouth. Javon also said Raza and her family left Florida when they woke up one morning and their front lawn, and the whole street, was three deep covered in dead or almost dead white birds. Egrets, I guessed.
Javon said Raza was a runner, and she said the future belonged to runners, because in the future we will have to go everywhere like everyone did for thousands of years before cars and bikes. This interested me, because I am a runner too, and I share Raza’s belief.
It occurred to me, later on, that Javon was lying to me about the existences of Raza, The Cloud, and Kelsie. It was hard for me to believe that Kelsie was essentially spineless and she needed to get cut.
It occurred to me that I could write a book called “Lies my students told me,” but on second and third thought that title and subject aren’t nearly as interesting, or as voluminous, or as destructive, as the already extant “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”
Ergo, I consigned “Lies my students told me” to my imaginary pile of other books that never were, and never will be, like “White women of no distinction,” or “Little Elvis,” about an imaginary meeting between Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac in 1960s Lowell; or the heavily umlautted “City of Sin,” about the amazingly so bad it was good Motley Crue /Y&T outdoor concert at the Lynn Manning Bowl in August 1985, where my spiderweb makeup melted, my thighs chafed, the guy I sat with was on acid but out of jail, and I was paranoid because we chewed and screwed on the Pike and my roommate told me “the hamburger police was gonna get us.” She added to my paranoia by describing a cop car speeding after us, with its hamburger bubble spinning, yodeling, and flashing blue and red.
There was also the as of yet untitled book about the Summer of 1990 endured in Northampton, Massachusetts. That book actually doesn’t belong in the imaginary pile, because I started it, well, ripped it off verbatim from my diary entries, and sold it to a now defunct women’s magazine in the UK. But it got all screwed up because they had to Anglify it for their audience. You know, “greasy one dollar bills” became “wadded five pound notes,” “the cottage in the Berkshires” became a “house in Berkshire.”
It was just wrong. I was, however, paid in pound sterling, which seemed more interesting 13 years ago than it does now.
It occurred to me that the relationship shared between me and Javon was more about me, more about what I needed to learn. I felt like I had subjected Javon to a lot of crap he didn’t need, like Black Sabbath, middle class Judaica, my own discomfort, my own failure. Then again, he subjected me to Raza, to the Cloud, to la tos marron, to licking everything, to Javon the still growing mint plant, and to his own busted up but admittedly entertaining take on klezmer.
It occurred to me that storytellers are always trying to sell someone out, and that’s what Javon was doing to Raza and Kelsie. And possibly to me.
Then I figured that neither Javon, nor I, could make this stuff up. Hence, Raza, the emissary of the coming race, and Javon, her watcher, her dramaturgist, her stalker to be.
