The Crush
It’s 1983. I am in kindergarten. As we pull into the driveway in the Civic, I confess to my mother that I have a crush on Kim J. from my class.
Moms says we should invite her over “for milk and cookies.”
Even as a literal kindergartener I know this is embarrassing.
Also, she is insane. We live *in a mobile home* and she teaches ESL at the community college at night. My dad helps campesinos develop farmworker cooperatives so they can become owners instead of indentured servants. Sometimes he gets paid in flats of strawberries.
Kim J.’s family, on the other hand, OWNS strawberry fields in the Salinas Valley. They are “growers.” Because my parents fell in love with language and art and scholarship and worked their asses off to go to college, we are now a highly-educated family with some hippie-intellectual-leftist privilege and are definitely not ourselves “pickers,” but we are, in our way, *the people of the pickers.*
Moms clearly doesn’t get it. Kim J. is a goddess. She *cannot* be invited to our mobile home for milk and cookies.
I nod and smile condescendingly and promise myself never to let my mother hear me talk about Kim J. ever again.
The Sweatshirt
It’s 1992 or ’93. I’m in ninth grade back in California, but because I’ve lived in Latin America for three years, my Spanish is too good for freshman Spanish, so I take Spanish in a class of all juniors and seniors. This means that every day I have to up my game to try to hang with cooler older cats. The coolest cat in the room has the ostensibly uncool name of Abe, which, coolness being what it is, he makes very cool.
Abe’s public persona rests at the nexus of natural fineness, laconic utterances in a raspy voice, lofty disdain for everyone and everything that is not Abe, and being renowned as a goddamn fashion icon. Gorgeous young women drape themselves on Abe. Abe is not gang-affiliated, but he projects an air of unfuckwithableness that pretty closely resembles that of the real gangsters to whom he is somehow vaguely adjacent. When he comes to class, which happens maybe a few times a week, he strolls in with nothing, not a textbook or a notebook or a pencil or a pen. It is impossible to imagine Abe doing an assignment. Wherever he goes, he does nothing at all: just sort of tilts his head back and surveys the world. He has reached what seems to be the pinnacle of life in that place at that time.
One day I am wearing my favorite sweatshirt. It is the coolest article of clothing I own: a Starter crewneck, with plush, clean lines, in a color that no one has ever seen before, an indescribable silvery-greenish mustard. It is unequivocally fresh. It is my cold-weather gear (we don’t get very cold weather), so I wear it often in January and February.
I enter the trailer where junior Spanish class is taught by Mrs. Something-or-other, a short, spirited, shit-talking middle-aged lady with a Jersey accent. Because I am the baby of the class, she spoils me a little and lets me get away with stuff.
Today I’m late. The class all seems to be here already. Somehow—maybe because he does everything hell of slowly—Abe is late too and is standing right in front of me when I go through the door, even though I have no memory of seeing him on the ramp.
All eyes are on us. Mrs. S is probably going to talk some humorous shit to us both. (Miraculously, she is immune to Abe’s charms.)
Before she can say anything and for no reason I can discern, Abe turns around and visibly registers my existence for the first time in my life. I can tell that Abe is about to say something witty that puts us on the same team, the tardy-and-indifferent team. Abe and I are about to be aces. My social life is about to improve.
“Don’t you ever wear anything else?” he rasps, eyes not on me but on the dopest thing I own.
It is, in that world, a classic example of deft, mildly savage, low-hanging-fruit public shaming for sport.
(It occurs to me now that he should have lost a little social capital for even knowing I existed, and for paying enough attention to notice that I wore the same sweatshirt again and again. But. He didn’t.)
The room erupts lightly with admiration for Abe’s deftness at picking apart a younger, weaker person.
To their eternal credit, the two older guys I sit closest to, Juan (RIP, died ’94 or ’95 in a car wreck) and Eric (today findable online as a county corrections officer) stand up for me, saying things like
“Shut the fuck up, Abe,” and
“It’s a dope sweatshirt. I’d wear it too, dog.”
(Their defense of me seems, at this distance of years, incredibly poignant and generous.)
Abe saunters off, his vibes immaculate.
It’s striking to me that today, according to the California Department of Education, 93% of the student body at that school qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. I’m guessing it was about the same in ’92. But among poor kids in a poor community, somehow making yourself freshly-dressed—making yourself not-poor—becomes essential.
Writing this now, it all seems hilariously trivial and pathetic—that was a big moment for me in ninth grade?!? But it was.
The Dinosaur
Speaking of Kim….
It’s 1980-something. We are taking a field trip to the Planetarium in San Francisco. (I assume this is the California Academy of Sciences, but we called it *The Planetarium.*)
It’s weird: my dad never does stuff like this, but he signs up to be a parent driver.
OK cool but *Kim J.* is assigned to my car! I get to spend the whole ride sitting next to her in the backseat of our Civic!
I don’t remember much else about that trip, but when everyone else goes off to buy souvenirs at the gift shop (I don’t know why everyone had loot for the gift shop, but they did), I have *nothing.*
Pops is like “Umm hell no.”
It is palpable that we do not have money for a two-dollar trinket.
In the car, Kim J. very sweetly and shyly hands me something. She saw my little moment of class-shame and has secretly bought me, like, a plastic heat-activated (remember hypercolor shirts? like that, but plastic) souvenir disc, smaller than a coaster. It has a triceratops on it. You rub it and it turns bright yellow and orange and green. Then when it cools it turns dark.
I keep that fucking triceratops for years and years.
The Swatch
It’s 1991. My mom is still alive. But unbeknownst to us all, she is dying and will die in just a few months.
We live in Tegucigalpa, where we are, relative to the kid I see chewing a dirty wad of gum he picked off the asphalt in the middle of the boulevard and popped in his mouth, filthy rich.
And relative to the children of generals and doctors and business tycoons I attend school with at the American School, we are among the vanishingly small middle class of Honduras.
Last day of seventh grade, the homie Sean and I decide to walk home, through one of the most impoverished cities in the Western Hemisphere, instead of taking the bus. I am not sure what we are thinking. We are soft American kids. We are easy targets. We are… idiots? The rich kids we go to school with would never do something stupid like this. Some of them have chauffeurs.
We descend through the bowl-shaped city, from the heights of the American School, along the busy boulevards, to the edge of the quiet affluent neighborhoods where we live.
Sean says we’re being followed. I say he’s being paranoid (because he’s from New York). I say we’re almost home and I don’t want to waste money on a cab. I have forty lempiras, which feels like Big Money to me. (It’s, what, six or seven dollars.) He insists we take a taxi anyway. We hail a cab to his house in I think Colonia Rubén Darío. I don’t want to pay for the rest of the way to my house, so I get out there, just a short walk to my house in Colonia Palermo.
Long story short, an older guy, sixteen, seventeen, was indeed following us. Has indeed chased the cab. Does indeed step out with dramatic flair from behind a corner wall dun-dun-dunnnn. Does indeed make an easy target of me. After some cordial palaver, does indeed knock me back against the brick wall and put a rusty screwdriver to my neck and tell me he wants everything I’ve got.
I tell him I’ve got nothing. (That’s forty lemps, bro! That’s all my cash! I’m not giving this guy all my cash!)
He tells me to turn out my pockets. I do, but I successfully palm the money. (Slick, bro!) I tell him it’s the last day of school and I blew all my cash on a nice lunch.
I stuff my pockets back in and deposit the money back in my pocket.
He is visibly pissed. He’s looking around with some trepidation. He’s come all this way, chasing the damn taxi, putting himself at risk to rob some rich kid in broad daylight in a rich-people neighborhood. He needs to boogie pretty quick here.
He sees I’m wearing a watch. Tells me to take it off. I hesitate: it’s a Swatch, bro! The cheapest one, simple and black, but still tight as hell! It cost forty dollars! I got it for my birthday.
He knocks me back again. I take off the watch and hand it to him. He runs off.
I walk the remaining few blocks home. I’m fine.
My mom greets me brightly when I get in: “Hi, honey! How was the last day of school?”
I burst into tears.
SO GOOD.