Suburban Days, Summer Rooms
Domestic life. Suburbia. I can only take so much of it for so long before I feel the corners close in around me. The creativity is crimped and I’m asked to do the dishes on a whim. No wonder it’s times like these I feel like the adolescent Nick. Complete freedom and expanse to constraint. That’s often how I felt growing up here in San Diego for the 8 years or so that I lived here. A lonely kid of humble origins who never fully fit into his privileged community. At least that’s what I tend to think. I never fully embraced San Diego, and I’m not sure that it ever fully embraced me.
Sometimes I just wanna swim naked in the backyard, and I do. Shhh…don’t tell my dad or the neighbors. I’m sure they’d be freaked out in a second. But there’s something liberating about having your own quiet slice of suburbia, fenced in and protected by bushes, and then using that space to just be naked. Those have been some of my most enjoyable moments as of late. Doing my back stroke and letting the sun and water wash over me while not having the barrier of stark black underwear obscuring the way nature intended. Not to go too far with this naked thing, but I might live in a nudist colony for a time. Or at least spending more time in nature without clothes. Meanwhile, I’ll keep my nude bathing to a minimum for fear of the police eventually crashing the pool party. Everything is covered here. It feels good to uncover.
When I’m not trouncing naked in my backyard, I enjoy hanging out with high school chicks as I did today. Not in the way of the college guy hanging out in the parking lot to pick up high school chicks way. Well maybe, yeah, except for the college part. I’m done with college, so now seems like a good time to get back in touch with what high school girls are doing. Totally kidding here.
But I paid a visit to Patrick Henry High School today, mainly for a single purpose (aside from the chicks). I wanted to see Mr. Ojeda, the influential English teacher whose words and wisdom still revisit my conscious life, and whose likeness I see when I project myself in the future as an English teacher. I aspire to be like him. He’s a good man, and was a father when I didn’t have one.
I stepped into his room during 5th period (isn’t it weird to remember school being arranged by periods?), and of course it was full of students, mostly doe-eyed girls lined up to have their yearbooks signed by him. I just stood there in the doorway as he wrote feverishly, frantically grasping for sincerity, with a pile of yearbooks on his desk so high that he looked like he was engaged in intense research. This is the life of the celebrity teacher.
At one point he looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, arms folded, smiling at him (cue “Brokeback” theme). His face lit up. He looked older. I crossed the room to Mr. Ojeda, and he greeted me in his warm, understated way. I glanced at the yearbook in which he was writing and joked that he never wrote as much in mine. “I never had much to say,” he said laughing. There was a moment of pause, and the smile ran away from his face as Billy Joel once said. “Nick, I’m afraid I can’t visit with you since I’ll be signing yearbooks for quite awhile.” I was caught a little off-guard by how abruptly he wanted to end things. I hadn’t seen him for 3 years, and he didn’t want to talk for 3 minutes. “Oh okay, well I was thinking of writing you a letter but thought I’d come see you instead. I just finished up Berkeley, and just wanted to thank you again for everything.”
“It goes both ways,” he said.
I then said some bullshit about how I’ll “be around,” and that I’d come see him again in the next couple of days. Total bullshit, and he knew it. I knew it too. I just got nervous and couldn’t think of what to say. I was trying to transition into a smooth departure. I could see he had a little regret that he couldn’t give me his time. His current students take priority. That’s his job. He’s a professional.
I remember Mr. Ojeda once saying to me, when I was a student of his, that he sometimes didn’t know what to do when his old students came to visit him. He said “I feel like I’ve imparted them with all the knowledge and wisdom I have, and it’s like ‘go on, fly.’” I felt like telling him at the time that maybe they just wanted to thank him, or say hey. That’s certainly all I wanted. And I hope I came off as such.
Clearly I’m a little disappointed at the shove-off I got from Mr. Ojeda. But we shared a moment that will last ‘till the end. Haha, sorry. James Blunt quote there. Couldn’t help myself.
But maybe James isn’t too far off the mark. There was still a warmth in Ojeda, he was glad to see me. He also said what any mentor should: go on, fly. I don’t know that I’ll ever see him again. But he’ll go home tonight, thinking of me. He knows what I’ve done for him, and what he’s done for me. He knows my gratitude. And now that he does, I can be on my way.
The visit with Ojeda was followed by a stop in the drama room, the old stomping ground in the days of yore when I was a theater kid. My brother Trevor was there, taking a class, watching a tape of the play they just did. There’s a feeling there that never goes away. There’s ink on the walls from where I wrote in 1999. There’s pictures backstage of the cast of Twelfth Night, with an 18-year-old Nick Marcotte and a 17-year-old Aaron. Old friends and younger faces. It’s a kind gesture for the new generations of kids to keep those pictures up.
Often times, moments of pure reveling and nostalgia collapse under crudeness and dissonance. Just when you think you’re safely down Nostalgia Lane, something drags you back in the rudest way. Take for instance this afternoon’s drama class, when one of Trevor’s “friends” introduces himself as “Baby D” and begins to rant about how all the white people in the room act nice to him, but in their minds clearly want to lynch him. Everything this kid uttered was profane, and not just in the expletive sense. He had some weird, fucked-up reverse racism thing going on in his head. And honestly, dumb high school kid or not, that kind of shit just pisses me off. When he kept repeating “y’all white people just wanna hang niggas,” I just wanted to tell him “man, get your head on straight.” The kid was so confrontational with everything he said, as if the world was really out to get him. At one point he grabbed my arm and pointed out the “Japanese shit” tattooed on it, saying it was “from the devil.” At this point I knew the kid had to have some kind of mild form of retardation.
The whole scene just saddened me. I wasn’t there to preach. But it certainly made me second guess whether I ever wanted to be a teacher. I recalled the kind of ignorance and crudeness I was thrown in with in my days of high school, and just how much high school sucked for that reason. I don’t know that I want to correct that. I don’t know that I’m ready for that. I don’t know that I could ever, as a teacher, change that.
In one week I leave for New York. Couldn’t be more excited. As the day draws near, I grow more excited at the prospect of seeing the city and meeting the special someone who awaits me there. I know we’ll enjoy each other, and the 5 days where we don’t have to think about anything but being there. This will be the Poor Man’s tour of New York, but it’s all good since most of what I want to see won’t cost money. CBGB, which sadly closes down in October. The Five Points, known district of gangs and the worst crime in New York history during the 1800’s. John Lennon’s Dakota, and Strawberry Fields. Anything I’m missing?
I wish you well friends, wherever you are. Whether it be the suburbs of San Diego, the open desert of Arizona, or the urban bliss of the Bay Area. May you live long and swim naked. I hope your summer is full of warm days and adolescent nostalgia. I’ll be thinking of each of you collectively, no doubt.
Hugs with warm summer shoulders,
Nick