On
July 4 weekend I was the houseparent and one of the rich kids stood on the porch with her round
ginger face looking in through the picture window
with a sparkler crackling in each fist, and I decided to remember that as a
mental snapshot forever. During the “Rock Around the Dock” event, she and a
boy were the only ones not splashing and swimming. She just held onto a
post and let the boy be inappropriate with her underwater, for which they got caught.
When
you get caught at something you have to appear before the whole-school
council in the big room with the sliding glass doors. There are
kleenex boxes everywhere for crying. It’s encouraged that you act out
your feelings for the group. Say a manager is upset. She stands up and starts crying, maybe stomps her
feet. There is a box of kleenex on the chair next to her. The school director might point at it and suggest, “Throw the kleenex box, Roshanna. Throw the kleenex
box.”
Sparkler girl had to kick herself “off campus”
as a consequence for fucking in the swamp. Going off campus until you
earned your way back on just meant that you moved into some faculty’s cinder block studio apartment. One huge new faculty, an ex-pro baller, showed up in a navy Impala with a spray of bullet holes all along both driver-side doors. Sparkler girl
stayed in his room, but then he got fired-fired when she tested pregnant.
The
most handsome faculty was a guy with a dull affect and an attractive,
penis-like face. He chose the most handsome boy, blond with a dull
affect like his own, for special visits in his room. He never got fired
as far as I know. Everyone was so stunned by their handsomeness it
seemed right that they would steal themselves away and be intimate with
respect for their skinny blond privacy.
Getting fired can mean
either you are fired-fired or more often just kicked “off campus.”
Except you already live on campus, so
instead they just stop paying you until you earn your way back
unfired. I wanted to be a team player, so I fired myself for drinking a
six-pack of wine coolers and driving over the median out on the main
highway.
I could still participate in events. On the
next “Rock Around the Dock” day I watched Sparkler girl get run over by
an outboard. Why always her? She was so engaged in life. I was the one
to call for help from the boathouse phone, but I did not get unfired for
that. At
the hospital I could see she had a big chunk out of
her leg from the boat propeller. I asked the nurse if she could have a
Valium but actually wanted one for me. Even when I waited all day and
drove her back with her bandages, and it was a big homecoming, I still did
not get unfired. I sat in the wood paneled gathering room of the girls dorm waiting for
our meeting where clumps of faculty and rich kids would sit petting and
cooing. We would probably talk about how somebody didn’t take
responsibility and cop to their attitude. I was the most arrogant
faculty, for example.
The quietest faculty, who just wanted to
get paid and not make waves, and I took a big aluminum canoe to check out Bird Island. It stank and was covered with white heron and their white
amoniacal shit splatters. It was like a white-frosted green cake with
white flamingo pins sticking out all over it. Then we paddled over to
the Swamp Tree Forest and floated along a channel of clear water like a ride at Disney. There was a high-pitched beeping, and then little
bulging eyes. Baby alligators stared at us among popping water bubbles, floating
on wood, in nests of dry moss. We decided to get out of there. I let the silent faculty paddle me quietly and looked at his back thinking I wish
he could be my brother, plus sex.
That night the
loudest faculty came into my cinder block room for tea. In the group meeting he had
already thrown a huge temper tantrum, which was
appropriate, so he was still getting paid. He was so passionate about
everything. He started getting more and more physical and actually
popped a couple buttons on my shirt. That shocked both of us enough that
he went back down the hall to his studio. Everyone assumed he was gay.
We drove the students in our
personal vehicles to Ft. Lauderdale. The other drivers
noted that I had not been driving long, that it was not yet second
nature to me. I agreed. Later sinking to my ankles at the length of 4-5 station wagons out into the waves, I looked
up and down the long white beach, and I was the only one in the water. I had been watching with
fascination a disturbance half a city block out to sea. It
started as an inflatable raft flapping its borders, but it soon became a giant manta ray thrashing with a shark the size of a Karmann Ghia.
And
now all the students and staff were standing on the beach waving and
pointing and screaming, and they were looking at me. What they were
pointing at was a fin in the water coming towards me. I ran in
slow motion through the thigh-deep waves toward the faculty and rich kids. They
cheered me on, and I was the focus of attention after that all day. The
shark had to make a U-turn back into what you can only assume to be the profound blue chaos of nature. The manta
washed onto the beach white belly up, pee hole gaping, with a jagged, bloody crescent missing from the wing.
Back on campus I asked for a pro re nata of Valium. I had to go to the dutch doors where they kept the meds and
ask every time. Even after I'd let the Tuesday med doc hug me and cradle my feet while chatting, even with the script he gave me, they would not give out whole bottles of meds to
rich kids or staff either. You had to go and ask, and the med dispenser on duty
would try and coo and pet you to distraction. You would have to insist on the
meds and squirm away modestly.
Soon
that got very tired and I couldn’t get paid. I was so young that I
thought they would budge by threat of a lawyer. It was easy to assume
that not being paid would mean that I could not come up with an
attorney. The lady who had told Roshanna to throw the kleenex box told
me that I should probably leave in the middle of the night so as not to
upset the rich kids.
The fattest faculty taught me how
to peel avocados. Her attitude was that it was a huge favor to let
someone in on something everyone else already knows. She reminded me
that I was only a few years older than our students. After a weekend in
Orlando drinking wine coolers and dancing in the bars on Orange Blossom
Trail, I cleared out of the cinder block studio, found Interstate 10
and drove it all the way to Los Angeles. I was the fastest car on the
highway except for Annie Lennox , who happened to pass me in her Targa crossing the Mojave. She actually managed to shoot me an inappropriate glance through all that glass.
by Hoolie
Posts
