Disappearing in Blue

This is a furious post. I needed to write it and some people need to know what it feels like to have things like, you know, schools, fly in the face of reason. But it's more than about schools. It's what it's like to be INCAPABLE of a mid-life crisis because I know too well what my mistakes have been, and how I have failed. It's my confession. Perhaps that's why the Catholics do that -- they tell someone, without an expectation of real solution, just absolution. I don't want forgiveness. I just want to see it in print, to know what I know and what I don't. So, being Jewish, it makes sense that this is half-Confession, half Kol Nidre -- the accounting we do on The Day of Atonement. I'm accounting, but I'm not letting go. I need to read it. To see it, to edit it, to re-visit it. It needs to be public so that it can explain what I cannot. If anything, I wrote this because I cannot explain what I keep trying to.

And before I forget, I know how completely and brazenly I steal from Jonathan Levy's rhythms when I speak and write. The only person I know who has ever explained why I so inhaled them is Michael Chabon in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh where the central character talks about stealing other people's characteristics so that you would never really lose them. Even before this onslaught of things that don't make sense, people had tended to disappear on me and me from them for a lot of different reasons. Unfortunately, this theft is not for me, like it is for Chabon's character, a substitute for being more around the person I've stolen from or being more in whatever my own voice is. It's a comfort and it has become what I call it to people who don't know who I'm really referring to -- my self-adopted step-father's voice. Getting to feel like you had a father when you didn't is an amazing gift and, in this case, it also came with a very late and necessary shot of morality. At around 26. Truthfully, what is "me" is mostly a punk-kid. I do try to let the punk out in an effort to not steal so much. And that's why this is probably not such a great piece of writing....but I am and have been carving my own voice somewhat more and more with a better model than I had before 26. I'm still a lucky kid, in many respects, and I know that, too. I just don't get it -- I have luck where I haven't earned it and disaster where I thought I had been more careful. So, here are "the books."

Sometimes, lately, I have absolutely no interest in having any will over things. I forget appointments, I sleep through things I have been looking forward to for weeks. I can't remember where I put anything. Worse than usual on the latter.

I have tried to do what you are supposed to do, say what you are supposed to say, be where you are supposed to be for most of my life after the age of 26. In graduate school, the reality that what I did was not being filmed for play on prime time or in independent movie houses was brought home to me. Students are who I was when I wanted to be all the things I wanted to be and expected that I could be. It's my job to make that closer to reality. And, people really have schedules, responsibilities and their own tragedies. It was time to say what I meant. To "be the thing" as another friend says.

So I mostly did. And there was a grand logic to things for once. I went to bed at 11, got up at 6, was at my office by 7am. I became what a friend called, "dutiful". Whenever I was needed to be there, that's when I was going to be there...mostly. I took on too much, got lost in a lot of dreaming and didn't often know how much work I really needed to do to accomplish what I had just said I would. But, there was going to be a will for most of the ways I felt I had to create. If I had to write and print out letters at 2am, then that's when it had to be done. I made it work.

But my "tin tooth" to steal from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift was an innate need for there to be some sort of reciprocal feeling in exchange for this. I was good many, many times to try to win affections of many different kinds. I wanted to be good because I loved and wanted to be loved.
The kid my grandmother said "would have a dirty end" had been banished because I was devoted...I was there. I loved somebody and stood behind them, in front of them, next to them --was as near as I thought I could be, let someone amazing "get close" to me. I told the truth, but I tried very much not to hurt anyone. I got better at that. At first, I cared more about being truthful, about the sense something made in my head, than being careful about how and why and when I said things but by the time I was 36 or so I was better at it.

My grandmother cursed me because I fought for my freedom to leave home and not be the appendage of my mother's perversity. She thought I was born to sustain my mother the way she died to do that very thing. On my watch, the new "kid," the girl who found a way to work three jobs to loan people money, the girl who went back and forth and back and forth to help a friend go forward, the girl who said, "you're right, I'm an idea. The word needs to become flesh" and finally made a move...BAD THINGS JUST DIDN'T HAPPEN ON MY WATCH. I got the job, got the extension, got the cash, got whatever, somehow, someway, I always pulled out of trouble. If nothing else, the girl in me surfaced and just pleaded and I got the special paper, the copies in miraculous time, the award for a friend, that piece of research that was elusive, the phone call with the right person. I even found THE PERFECT SCHOOL for the over-aged, under-credited and sometimes zealously overwrought or just over-tired. God laughed at me, but she didn't hurt me. She seemed to be even deciding that, like for Frank O'Hara, the sun would finally talk to me -- I had a love, a soulmate. And then it all ... the mistakes of the toothfilled grinning kid hung like a chain around my neck. Bad mixed metaphor, but that's what it felt/feels like. Like the mark of Cain. It's not "why me?" It's "why now?" It's "why?" And it's still, "You can't be serious, I'm going to wake up, right." But, I can't sleep much to begin with. When I walk into Tilden, gloriously nice as most of the people are, I know it is 2009 and something terrible has happened. It's backwards. I had a soulmate I could talk to, friends I could talk to and a principal who knew me like a mother is supposed to. We didn't buy into bullshit -- collectively. We spoke freely and we acted freely. We. "We". I don't include the last two years of Brooklyn Comprehensive -- or the times I was more of a blithering idiot than usual, generally. Remarkably, for a set of human beings on task to help kids, and in Karen's and my case as two people trying to love, destruction of the individual was very minimal overall. Which is why it absolutely irks me that Karen and the school and my principal -- they all died ON MY WATCH. As an inspired friend said about our school, "Malaika gave us the gift of letting us be ourselves." And Karen gave me that gift at home. I thought being truthful and being loyal meant these things weren't supposed to happen. I'm not being foolish -- it's common sense.

Let me give that some perspective:
I have spent almost 17 years walking through dangerous neighborhoods at dangerous times on dangerous subway lines. Karen worried about this a lot, and sometimes she went to pick me up because of it. But, nevertheless, I sometimes walked through places I'd rather not admit to at 2am, got off at even worse places than where I started, while being short, fat, white, female and obviously carrying an expensive backpack with a laptop in it.

I also believed that, if you really could die just because your engine couldn't get gas at the moment from a clog or you mis-calculated by a gallon because you had a really good dinner and you didn't give this the normal second-thought you would have or you had what you thought you needed and it was wrong -- if a half gallon of gas can be the measure of a person's life-- I never would've believed that letting these confounded cessnas in the air would've been allowed. Period. Think about it. Karen had to wear, and did, a helmet while riding a street-worthy bike through NYC. No one in their right minds would ride a bike whose tires could give out on the drop of a dime for no apparent reason, or could give out for good reason and throw you into the nearest building. No one would buy that bike and ride it through a park. But,we let people go up thousands of feet without airbags and without the contraption that makes the plane into a veritable parachute -- breaking the plane, but saving your life. That makes no sense. Less sense than the fact that I have ridden trains home at 2am from Brooklyn's version of Gaza and lived.

Only in that awful movie, The Unbearable Lightness of Being do people die at a height -- in a moment of true happiness. I'm sorry, I hate that kind of mystical bullshit, too. When you're happy and you know it, you aren't supposed to let the f'ing car flip over. You're supposed to be a little bit more careful about the f'ing gas tank. And for god's sake, people are supposed to rally around a place that helped them when no one else would. They are supposed to say SOMETHING. And we weren't supposed to turn into vile animals -- all of us -- in those last two years, all out of fear and a need to prove points. Everything was still in our hands, all we had to do was say what we meant, tell the truth, "be the thing". And we slipped. I slipped, anyway. That makes me the most reprehensible person in Karen's life and I know it. I know it now because of how badly I have slipped also since she died into a bilious sloth. Not the most profound of the type, but nevertheless, not even remotely close to who I was before Sept 2, 2005. Two different people. And even the better one was, it turns out, awful.

I failed. I failed as a guardian of love, honor and respect. There is no way to deny that. I had a sense something bad was going to happen that night and I didn't say anything. I let the vinegar of a bit of anger and fear of being thought possessive settle onto what I had refined into a pretty good nervous system. I let myself nearly get my FRIENDS in trouble, people I knew since before I was 26, out of reckless despair. How can so much horror creep into something beautiful in a moment? I know, I know, they were having so much fun and so into the event that they missed the bump. That's idiotic. That's irresponsible. And I let it happen. All that night that Karen died Michael and Sharon kept asking me if I wasn't afraid of her crashing. They wouldn't stop. And I thought, "of course she won't crash. She told me the plane can glide for miles. People land planes in baseball fields if they need to...for god's sake she's KAREN. I have loved her too much for anything to possibly happen. " I know. I really DID THINK it could NEVER happen to us because we were too good, too nice and what was it? A little f'ing flight to nowhere.
F-- Kundera and his damned book and the movie. That's what I abhorred, I thought. I was supposed to be way too grounded and practical for that kind of B.S. and it walked right in and stole everything. "Unbearable" is definitely the right word. "Unfathomable." "Vicious."

Precocious, precious, stupid. That's what I was. With the most valuable things in the world. The only reason I am good at keeping my cats alive is that my mother was good at crisis healthcare. Not the everyday living -- she took overall terrible care of maintaining me, but it's little work to do that for Larry and Bernie and they are, in my mind, children to be watched over. My mother was excellent, however, when I was violently ill. She knew how to push through the crowd to get the right doctor then and so, so do I. It's maybe my one skill. How to plead for my cats and my life. Good one. Really useful. So long as my life hinges on a dime like it does nowadays, I guess that's important. I am incapable of being good, perhaps because I haven't got all the skills for it. I MISS THE BUMP. I have Asperger's Syndrome. I get lost in dreams. Maybe I can never love any human at all. My love turned out to be the most worthless thing and I dedicated most of my energies to living by that feeling and being loyal to it. And I was worthless, nonetheless. Worthless.

All of us -- Karen, me, the faculty and students at Brooklyn Comprehensive -- we were good. We had all made mistakes, but we were all making amends. Nothing made sense, nothing has made complete sense since Sept 2, 2005 and, doubly so, since Feb. 2006 when it was announced that Brooklyn Comprehensive would close. You decide to fund a school, you foster it, and when it's clear what needs to be done to take it to greatness, you close it and make a commitment to another school which opens with a violent incident, has a student and faculty strike and will take years to learn what we already knew. I'll take the bet -- in less than 17 years, the DOE will close the school which succeeded us. I give them ten years. By then, the argument will have been made that ALL overage and under-credited students should be doing GED programs virtually through the public libraries. And why not? Once you argue that you shouldn't be offering HS diplomas to the 18-21 year olds, it follows that soon the 16 year olds will also be asked to consider the virtues of just taking a test and saving the DOE the cost of actually re-teaching them.

The faculty at Tilden also have every right to feel outraged about their closing, the ridiculousness of it perhaps, epitomized by my being placed there out of nowhere, from my closing madness into theirs. They were another kind of good school -- they took the stand that the kids they sent to us needed more time. If they hadn't been so bold and stuck to their standards, they would've pushed those kids through without their ever having had the chance BCNHS was able to give them to shape up and really understand their work. It's a good school which DOESN'T graduate kids before they're ready. They ran a good shop. Too good. You're not supposed to be that honest. We could be that honest because we were the MASH unit and the conditions of our patients were already deemed critical. But, like malevolent insurance adjusters, they were supposed to sign off that the half-dead were actually "mostly alive."
You can't get the job of teaching most of the disaffected youth of this city -- of bringing them to TRUE 12th grade reading level -- in four years. Like I said in a previous post, I've worked at schools with 99 percent graduation rates (which were not Specialized High Schools) and they had the same cruddy Regents scores and deplorable SAT scores of the kids that Tilden refused to graduate. Should any student graduate high school with only the skills to achieve 300's in all sections of the SAT? With the minimal passing rates on the Regents? Why? Why push those kids through -- what's the rush to send them out virtually ignorant into "the global marketplace." Remember, you get 200 points on the SAT just for writing your name.... The GED is a 9th grade level test. And it will be hard for these kids to pass that too, en masse.

It will take a Supreme Court case to change this, but it's not my point here. I'm much too sad for a point. My guess is Manhattan Comprehensive will take a case to the Supreme Court if they threaten to close it. God bless Howard Friedman's luck and give him more of it. The sad thing is, the case will be for a 19 year old girl from Chechnya who is sponsored by some major foundation and has been so physically and psychologically wounded in such obvious fashions that not even Clarence Thomas would deny she deserves extra time to finish her high school diploma. The kids we see are equally battered, just not in the language of international warfare. Though I wonder if you can argue that it IS international warfare when our economy is ravaged, our unions are decimated and whoever profits from wherever gets a major upper hand over the futures of kids from East Flatbush. I'm too tired to try to really make this point.

...So, when the things that didn't happen to the nice, lucky kid I had become at 26 started to happen, I started to slowly, well...disappear. Since Tilden's color is blue, lately that's the color I fade into. Only it's colorless -- I have all the blue oxford button down shirts a human being can have in all the shades, but they don't look any different, one from the other. Karen had blue eyes that lit up like lightning and I can see them. And then I close my eyes in total rage against everything, especially me.

Of all prosaic things, I'm angry and I hate...you name it, given the day of the week, the latest news, etc. I take Mike Malloy's "Have I told you how much I hate these people" which he says with gusto about Republicans, to a universal level.

For a while I was listening over and over again to Sweeney Todd. Prosaic, formulaic, but honest -- "so what" creeped right back into my vocabulary the way my favorite English Teacher warned me it would. I am one of those "so what people," Mr. Wozniak. It happened. I had no idea what you meant, but I do now. I warn my students not to be and it's not all the time.

Oh, and by the way, nice, dedicated teachers with a love of beautiful language and music are not supposed to feel they have to kill themselves and then actually do it because they have a horrible disease that was then being ignored by a maniac Republican White House. Whether I was good or not, that was not supposed to happen. Mr. Wozniak was good enough on his own. Do you know what it means to let a fatherless kid follow you around desperately every day, to read the idiot kid's work no matter how stupid, and to call the idiot kid when she's in college and has this sixth sense feeling of being really worried about you and LIE successfully so she only sees later that IT WAS SO OBVIOUS you were saying goodbye in the last letter and postcard? He watched for every bump, except the wall that the plane was about to hit. Like Karen, he just turned the plane to try to get away or, at least, get the passenger away. And I flew out onto the ground, shaken to the brain, but salvageable. It took someone to tell me he committed suicide. I did a good job of fooling myself for about a month. Karen did not commit suicide, but she also missed the bump that affected HER. That one last bump. What is it, hubris? This vicious "lightness of being" crap. Mr. Wozniak needed more of it, we -- Karen and I -- needed a lot less.

I will never believe suicide is painless. How the heck can it be -- your brain is on. I don't blame him. I can't stand a kidney stone let alone what AIDS did before the wonderful world of cocktails to control it. But, what kind of nutty drive was I and the rest of the country on....? That is not a rhetorical question because we're doing it again. And we know it. We're not solving anything...

And what kind of an idiotic country, as it nears the twentieth century, had fools at the helm. Ronald Reagan was a professional fool. A court jester. Literally -- that's what a "B Movie" actor is.

We failed a generation of gay men, but that story has long been told...

What is it I feel...It's just there, like a literal grey film, a residue. The distrust and the destruction of what is hopeful. It lingers. My job this week is to exorcise it. To find a way to live in which it doesn't settle. To begin to, anyway. I can feel it piling up on my nerves like dust, making it harder to feel anything.

As my therapist says, "Who knows" really what anyone or anything will be in the future. And since it's likely to come, best to try to work on making it happy.

I look at my cats who must find me a puzzle -- they understand me completely, but must wonder why I have no fur, why I am so vulnerably built. And I wonder if that is my relationship to god -- I understand some of what she might be, but cannot fully grasp her. There is hope in that. There is hope in the limits of my logic. And I remember Karen yelling at me in the car for having no faith.

If I can just feel it more. Who knows? Is "Who knows?" better than "So what."? I hope so.