A Gang Fight Canceled The Talent Show

The Yin and Yang of teaching in inner city public schools.

Hotel Room Showdown

Crunch

Her fist flew into the side of her cheek, and it was officially on. Hands in hair, thrashing, crashing, and breaking. Finally letting the rage boil over into actually doing something about this bitch.

There was a group of girls screaming around them, telling them to stop, that they didn’t need to do this. But they also had their phones out, recording the fight. Vocalizing rational thought, but showing they loved the bloodlust as much as anybody. They were going to review the tape.

So the tape better be good.

Her fists smashed into the girl over and over again. The girl was smaller, and vicious in her own way, raining 4 punches for every single one of hers, but at the end of the day, mass matters. She outweighed the girl by at least 50 pounds, and every hit she landed shoved the girl around the room.

One of her blows landed the girl on the bed. She grabbed her hoodie with one hand, and started pummeling her with the other. It felt good. It felt right. She meant to continue, to finish the job, but then one of the girls who wasn’t recording stepped in the way. Dragged her off. Told her it was over. For a moment she was going to hit her too. Then she snapped out of it. Stepped back, and let that bitch lie there.

The work was done.

Somehow, the fight was kept secret. When the school returned from the college trip, all the adults said it was chill. That kids benefitted from seeing the campus. It let them imagine their possible futures. The kids were rowdy in the hotel rooms, but just hanging out for the most part. No one suspected an after-hours brawl occurred in one of the rooms.

Then the video dropped.

By Monday morning, every kid in the school had seen the fight. The parents got involved. The mother of the girl who got thrashed pushed charges on the school. Teachers didn’t see their principal for a week as he dealt with legal. Both girls got suspended.

One point to violence.

The Serve

There’s a girl in the senior class who’s a bit odd. She’s either sincerely aloof, or just the tiniest bit autistic, no one can quite tell. Her hair is always frazzled. She wears jeans and a sweat shirt. She’s usually surprised whenever the P.E. teacher goes for a fist pound. Like, oh. You want to bump fists with me? You got it!

She’s delightful.

She is also casually athletic.

The sport doesn’t seem to matter. Without any bragging, or beating her chest, she outperforms every girl without seeming to try. She just has the skills. Solid catching and throwing. Materializing in the right spot on the court before the defense recognizes she’s there. She’s so nonchalant with her athleticism it took team captains over three months before they realized they needed to pick her first.

Her superpower is simple. She doesn’t care what others think. Or rather, it’s almost as if she doesn’t know how to care what others think. In volleyball, the serve is a moment of extreme pressure. Everyone yells “QUIET ON THE SERVE!” The gym goes quiet, and the crowd focuses on the server. Does she hit it over the net? Does she ace the other team? Or is it another out of bounds shot? Most kids crumble from the attention.

But the girl we’ll call Kaylee doesn’t seem to recognize anyone’s looking at her in the first place. Two weeks ago our team was down in a home game 23 to 15. Kaylee rotated into the serve. First she served overhand. Then she served underhand. Sometimes she served from the left side of the court, sometimes the right. It was like she was a curious rookie trying to figure out which spot worked for her the best.

The thing was, they all did. Every serve turned into an ace. After each serve the crowd cheered louder and louder. By the time the score was 23-23, every eye in the gym was on her. She still didn’t seem to recognize the gravity of the situation. She was still experimenting with which way to serve. If the game wasn’t on the line it would have been comical.

When she breaks the tie, and proceeds to hammer home a right-side-of-court overhand serve for the win, the crowd charges the court. She blinks in surprise.

Then she smiles and starts cheering with her team as they jump up and down all around her.

One point to the good stuff.

Talent Show

The school is abuzz. For three weeks students have been practicing performances for the talent show. Kids have been stealing peaks of the practices. Word on the street is the school is in for a treat. 7th and 8th period off on a Friday, and a chance to big-up friends for taking a chance. Good stuff on the way.

One of the P.E. teacher’s weightlifters has been skipping workouts in order to practice dancing like MJ. The teacher is furious… and completely understanding. He yells at his student for missing practice in front of the other weightlifters to make sure everyone knows this is unacceptable behavior, and then quietly tells him to make up his lifts during lunch time. The entire club looks forward to cheering him on… or if he flops, teasing him for the rest of his life. In either case, it’s going to be fun.

Unfortunately, the gangs that proliferate the school have other plans. During lunchtime in the cafeteria on the day of the talent show, one gang member starts jawing at another gang member. Small japes turn into shit-talk. Shit-talk turns into threats. Other gang members stand up with their friends and start squaring their shoulders. Violent escalation is like exponential energy. Once it takes off, there’s no knowing how far it will spread, and how many people will get hurt.

Thankfully no one gets hurt. NYPD swoops in before the fireworks can start, and the adults separate the boys before anyone can throw a punch. A knife is found on one of them. Everyone involved gets suspended… and the talent show gets canceled. Security decides having the entire school in one room after the incident is a bad idea.

When the P.E. teacher walks into the weight room during 8th period, he finds his dancing weightlifter in there sitting on a bench, head in his hands.

The kid says, “It’s such bullshit. It’s such bullshit.”

The teacher nods and says, “It is.”

The teacher knows there’s no fixing this, so he just goes up to his student and gives him a hug. Sometimes all a teacher can do is sit in the mud and share the weight.

Two points to violence

The Lift

They’d seen him do it before. Put over 400lbs on the bar and rip it from the floor. He’d done it for multiple sets of five. Weight that grown men couldn’t budge was tossed around like deflated balloons after graduation. He had broken the school record long ago. In fact, the first time he broke it, he had done it for a set of five, and it still looked like a warm-up set.

…But surely 500lbs would do something. Slow him down at least. The amount of plates on the hexagonal shaped bar was nonsensical. It looked like someone was sketching out a workout routine for a Hercules comic strip, not an actual bar that a high school boy was about to lift. The weightlifting team sat on benches surrounding the bar, waiting to see if the impossible could happen.

A kid we’ll call Gary, standing at 5’10 190lbs stands in the middle of the bar and performs a brace. Flexing his quads and glutes while exhaling all his breath so he can flex as much musculature around his spine to protect his nervous system. Just like his coach has taught him to do for the past two years.

The room goes quiet. Gary finishes establishing his brace, leans over and grips the bar. His hands are callused from years of lifting. The knurling feels comfortable and familiar, like a knight drawing his favorite sword.

He takes one last breath, holds it, and shoves the earth down. Like it has every time he’s touched the bar, the weight flies up and he stands tall without much effort. 17 years old. 500lbs. Well over double bodyweight. Barely an inconvenience. The weightlifters clap and cheer, but they know there’s more to come.

“That’s it…” the weightlifting coach grumbles. He doesn’t even bother to tell Gary what he’s about to lift. The coach just puts every available plate he can find on the bar. He loads the bar until there’s no space on the stainless steel. There’s not even enough room for a clip to keep the weight there. This will only work for one repetition.

But for one-rep max day, one repetition is all that’s necessary.

The kids are pointing at the bar, exclaiming how there’s no more room for any extra weight. This is it. Gary lifts this, and he breaks weightlifting. 525lbs on the bar. The coach just sits back and realizes he’s going to have to buy a bigger trap-bar for next year.

Once again the room goes silent. Gary braces, and has an almost calm look on his face. Like Goku gathering energy for a spirit bomb. He grips the bar and grits his teeth. For what seems like the first time in his life he actually experiences some strain. But once he cracks the bar an inch off the ground there’s no question. He’s going to stand up.

Once again he puts gravity to shame.

He stands tall and the weightlifters start clapping and rushing him. Clapping him on the back. Punching him. Hugging him. Yelling. Screaming. Celebrating. Gary has established himself as the strongest kid the UASGC weightlifting club has ever seen.

The coach wonders if he’ll ever see another kid like him.

Two points to the good stuff.

Hair Cut

“I just fucked up your girlfriend.”

A girl we’ll call MJ goes to check on her girlfriend, while the girl who just spoke looks smugly on. MJ cradles her girl’s head as she slowly comes awake. “You okay?” MJ asks. She knows she’s not, but the girl nods anyway. It’s enough.

MJ gently pats her girl on the shoulder and stands up casually as if nothing has happened. The smug girl we’ll call Samantha turns around to walk away. Poor choice. MJ is on her in a flash. She grabs a clump of Samantha’s hair and proceeds to wrench her head around as her other hand puts body shots into the girl’s kidney.

Samantha struggles and they tumble through a classroom door frame. MJ still has the girl’s hair and starts slamming her face into the classroom door. Her skull makes contact with oak wood three times before a teacher can muffle the next blow. Blood gushes from the girl’s nose.

As the teacher wrestles MJ and Samantha onto the floor, two other teachers run to assist. They try to separate the two girls but they can’t pry MJ’s hands out of the girl’s hair.

“MJ, let go.”

“No.”

“MJ, you won. Let it be.”

“No.”

It takes a full five minutes for three teachers to hold both of them down while a security guard pries one finger at a time out of Samantha’s hair. When they finally separate the two, the history class has to move to another classroom because the janitors need some time to clean up the blood.

The fight happens on the first day of teacher appreciation week. The administration bought a bunch of food, pernil and spiced rice from the local bodega, but they can’t attend the buffet because they now have to deal with parents and security officers. The teachers involved sit around the table looking dazed. No one feels like celebrating much. One might say the appreciation falls a little short, despite solid effort.

After ten or so minutes the teachers just decide to go home.

Three points to violence.

Navel Gaze

A P.E. teacher sits in his office and stares at the wall. It’s full of pictures of kids from past years. Mostly of weightlifters and students who left an impact on him. His mind floats through the events of the past two weeks. He still can’t quite believe that it’s only been two weeks.

How can so much joy, sorrow, and violence get tucked into such a small amount of time? He thinks to himself that if any one of these events happened in a small suburban school, it’d be the talk of the town for the next year. Here, in Harlem, it’s just a Tuesday. He supposes it’s why at a short 9 years of service, there’s only one teacher that has stayed in the school longer than he has.

So why do it? Why continue? He knows he has the experience to apply to any school he wants to. He could be teaching kids who are eager to listen, or at least kids who have parents that would encourage them to listen. He could be in a place with windows. He could teach in a gym that he wouldn’t have to share with a charter school full of screaming cursing elementary children. Perhaps he could come home a little less emotionally exhausted. At the very least he wouldn’t have to worry about kids hiding knives underneath their hoodies.

He always asks himself these questions. Why not leave? He doesn’t really have a good answer. At least… not any decent rational answer that would make sense. All he knows is that he likes it. He can’t help but feel he’s making a proper dent in the universe. Perhaps he could make the same kind of impact in a place like Greenwich, or New Canaan, or hell, even Scarsdale, but he kind of doubts it. He knows he’d enjoy the pay raise, but at the end of the day, he likes knowing that if the reaper came a little early to collect his debt, he could confidently say he played a solid hand of life.

A couple kids’ lives are better off for knowing him. It feels good to think it. Of course, that line of thought could be full of shit. Could be the kids who leave the school forget who he is the moment they walk out the doors… but his gut tells him different. The graduates who come back to visit tell him different.

But then there’s the kids who did know him, and went to prison anyway. Over ten of them in Rikers Prison for murder. When he heard that story the first time, he couldn’t believe it. What? Murder? But he was just a kid. A trash-talking, annoying, somewhat fiery kid. Now he’s in prison? For murder? How?

When he hears the same story for the tenth time, he shrugs and just says, “you never know.”

So maybe the cosmic scales just balance out. For every Gary who lifts the world, there’s another kid who sinks it. Maybe for every good connection the P.E. teacher makes with a kid, there’s another kid who hates his guts for the attention he didn’t manage to give them. Perhaps there’s no escaping the Yin and Yang of life.

But still.

It feels good to try. It feels good to do something hard. He likes to think that the mindset counts for something. A point to the good stuff. A weak point, but a point nonetheless.

So the scoreboard for the past two weeks stands as follows: 3 to 3

Three points to the good stuff.

Three points to the violence.

Tie game.

Til tomorrow.

The P.E. teacher will see what it brings.

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*4 years ago, I read Kevin Kelly’s article, “1000 True Fans.” The gist of it goes like this. Create a following of people who become fans of what you do. Be so damn good at what you do that people want to give you money so you continue doing it.

Here’s what I do. I teach, and I write stories about it.

If you’re in the position where you don’t mind becoming a paid subscriber, I hope you consider it… though if your initial reaction to that is, “fuck off, I’m just here to read,” then rock on.

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