I never quite understood what people meant when they said "you can never go home again." To me, it sounded less like a time-tested adage and more like an excuse foster-children used to decline invitations to their high school reunions. Sure you can go home! Just hop on a plane and go see your mom. That's what I've always done. Over the past several months, I have been disabused of this simplistic notion.
I grew up in Alameda, California. It's a small island town, geographically speaking, nestled against Oakland in the San Francisco Bay. When I was young it had a distinctive small town feel despite having 75,000 residents. It has a Norman Rockwellian Main Street (ours was Park St.) whose merchants host an art & wine fair each summer that draws thousands over the course of a traditionally very warm weekend. It has a cross-town rivalry between the two public high schools even though the schools reside on the same street and have students who have played soccer, Little League, and Rec League with and against each other since they were 9 years old. Unlike certain Orange County hamlets or Virginia coastal towns, Alameda does not boast a laundry list of famous citizens: only a few (Willie Stargell, Mrs. Fields, Jason Kidd, Jimmy Rollins, Dontrelle Willis, Simon Rex) of whom they are immensely proud. Mostly.
I remember growing up, playing wiffle ball in the street with the neighborhood kids until enough parents called their children into dinner that it was no longer even feasible to play a competitive game of Home Run Derby or Strikeout. During the summer we played well into primetime TV hours. There were rotating sleepovers at all the neighborhood kids' houses and all of us freely walked to the corner store, to the park, to each others houses without a care in the world.
In middle school and high school I distinctly recall the students being incredibly normal. Not average--I went to school with a number of incredibly bright people--but normal. Sure, we had our share of the "special" kids but even they seemed on the unremarkable side of retarded.
There was Miles who sported thick brown plastic-framed glasses, a horrible spittle problem, and a mop of brown foppish hair that has seemingly become the trademark of preppy, 20-something guys from schools in the SEC. I take great pleasure in bumping into groups of these popped-collar idiots at bars in Washington, D.C. and recalling to myself that they're biting their hairstyle from a functionally-retarded 7th grader who spit on himself a lot 15 years ago.
Miles was retard-strong, but used his retard strength judiciously. Kids teased him as kids are known to do, but he typically only responded with high-pitched screeches, flailing rubbery arms, and plaintive whimpers. If he saw you starting to pick on Regina, however, he came charging over like The Incredible Hulktard. Screeches and whimpers turned into guttural bellowing and projectile spittling. Flailing, non-jointed tard windmills morphed into purposeful, iron-fisted clubs of fury.
They say crazy people and retarded people are the two types of people with whom you never want to fight unless you are willing to do absolutely anything to win. One group is capable of anything; the other is uncommonly strong when provoked.
Picking on Regina turned Miles into a lethal combination of both.
Regina was the specialest of the special kids. She had a severe hairlip that exposed her discolored gums and food-crusted horse teeth. Her glasses were newer and more stylish than Miles', but they couldn't make up for the sweatpants and sweatshirt she wore to school each day. They came in three colors (pink, purple, and gray) and she did her best to mix and match them over the course of the school year. Yes, a pink sweatshirt goes with gray sweatpants, but that's little consolation when the girl inside them is spazzing out behind you because you got the last Whatchamacallit at the snack bar.
Candy bar incidents aside, Regina was the smiling, gleeful kind of spaz that inspired kids to her side when someone's teasing went from playful and light-hearted to malicious and threatening. I defended her on more than one occasion and, due in part to her general good nature, I split my Whatchamacallit with her that day she flipped out in line behind me.
Regina was the kind of girl who lends truth to the cliché that true beauty is on the inside. I'm sure Miles saw that too in his own special way, although knowing Miles as I did, he probably wanted to fuck the shit out of her as well (It's worth noting that Miles developed into a publicly masturbating pervert during high school).
Kenneth "Don't Call me Ken, My Name is Kenneth" Chiu was our other special kid. He was a tall Chinese boy with skin like Edward James Olmos and short, wiry Asian hair all cut to one length. It was our luck, and probably his great misfortune, that Rain Man came out during 6th grade because anyone who saw it made an immediate connection between Raymond Babbitt and Kenneth "Don't Call me Ken, My Name is Kenneth" Chiu. They were both fastidious, seemingly nervous all the time, and amazing with numbers.
We had advanced math together the year after the film's release and I would make a point of getting to class early so I could sit next to Kenneth for a few extra minutes and ask him to multiply 3-digit numbers in his head. It was the same every day for at least a month and a half.
A few of us would crowd around Kenneth and he would look up from his books and ask "what's up guys" with his big special-ed grin. He'd look up to find 3 or 4 or 5 of us with matching special-ed grins of our own. 874 x 133? Boom, he's got it. 999 x 888? No problem. We'd register our amazement with shouts and pats on his back and awkward Hi-Fives.
Then we'd throw him a curveball.
751 x 333? Nope. Wow, Kenneth you got one wrong! I guess you're slippin' a little. He would insist he got it right, but we would insist with equal vigor that he was wrong because we had the answer on the calculator in front of us. Kenneth would do the calculation again in his head, this time at the speed of sound rather than his typical speed of light.
Again, nope. Don't worry about it Kenneth. You can't get all of them right. Math is hard. That's when Kenneth's voice would get reeeeeeeeal high-pitched and he would start shouting:
"I'M NOT YOUR STUPID TOY GUYS! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE I WANT TO DO MY PROBLEMS!!!!"
Poor Kenneth. Of course he got it right. We were just fucking with him, pretending he got it wrong. We fucked with him just long enough to coax out his trademark shrill admonitions just as the teacher walked in to start class.
These were our special kids and, like a bad episode of Life Goes On, we actually liked them...all the way up through high school. We ate lunch near them, we graduated with them. They were good kids. They were cool...as drooling, sweatpants-wearing savants go. But much like most other aspects of my high school, things have changed with the special kids.
I drove past my high school for the first time in a few years one morning this past December while visiting over my Christmas break. It was early, mid-week, right before the high school would break for their winter recess and the big 4-lane street on which my school sits was congested with traffic. Juniors and seniors were trying to parallel park, freshman and sophomore parents were double-parking to drop their kids off, and frustrated motorists like me were just trying to dance our way through the gauntlet in order to get to the other side of town.
Were it not for the congestion, however, I probably wouldn't have spotted the caravan of short buses parked in front of the main entrance offloading an army of drooling, expressionless, wheelchair-bound mongoloids through a special entrance to, what I can only assume, was the Special Ed room. When did we get a Special-Ed room? And when did we become a holding pen for the town's genetically inferior!?!
As I crept through the maze of idling and slow-moving cars, I noticed that off the Special ed Room there appeared to be a small walled-in playground with a large plastic play structure painted in primary colors. The thing had steps and monkey bars and a second story that required motor skills a group of retards who steered with their chins surely lacked. The play structure couldn't have been for their recreation. There are only so many things one can accomplish between sessions of recognizing shapes and remembering not to shit one's pants, and scaling a 2-story plastic jungle gym is not one of them.
As I passed the mini-playground, I caught a glimpse of a small child--a toddler--beginning his descent down the yellow twisty-slide. A toddler? What the hell was a toddler doing at my high school? HOLY SHIT! Do we actually have a day care center for the children of students??!
Yes. Yes we do. In my entire four years at that high school, we had one teen pregnancy and she rightfully left school out of shame and finished up with her G.E.D. at the town's continuation school.
[If you don't know what a continuation school is, it's the school comprised of bungalow trailers where the student population (bangers, mothers, addicts, and convicts) smoke in class and come-and-go as they please. The bungalows are covered in school-sponsored graffiti art and are scattered across some empty lot in a less-trafficked section of town. If you get expelled, this is where you go.]
Now, 10 years after high school graduation, my alma mater has dealt with enough teen pregnancy in the intervening period to warrant the construction and staffing of an entire daycare facility.
I was having trouble reconciling my past experiences with the current state of affairs until I noticed that the entire campus was ringed by a 9-foot wrought iron fence with curved spikes at the top that pointed inward. No wonder we have a daycare center; the students are a bunch of animals.
When I was in high school we had an "open" campus. Literally. There were no fences, no gates, and you could go off campus at breaks and at lunch. Now the place looked more like a minimum security correctional facility than a National Blue Ribbon award winning high school.
None of this made sense to me. My mother's lived here this entire time and I feel like she would have told me if Alameda was being overrun by poverty (white trash) and blight (minorities). When I got home that afternoon I made a point of opening the local paper and reading the police blotter. Nothing out of the ordinary. Break-in here, shoplifting there. No felonies to speak of.
I asked around during the remainder of my winter break and, according to many, Alameda had turned into "Little Oakland" overnight. [That's old white person code for "the blacks and Mexicans have started moving to Alameda."] I checked the stats and, of course, the xenophobic white people on the east end of town (where I'm from) were wrong. There's been no appreciable increase in the percentage of black or Hispanic residents over the last 10 years. There has been a significant and disproportionate increase in the Asian population, however.
At first blush, this does not seem like the kind of demographic shift about which a city council is going to call an emergency meeting. Asians are good at math and dry-cleaning and cooking tasty entrees at low, low prices. The Asian kids I dealt with in high school were the type that aspired to the Ivy League and programmed cheat sheets into their TI-85s. They were the benchmark by which the white kids judged their fitness for various institutions of higher learning.
These were not your stereotypically hard-working, came-over-in-a-shipping-container Asians. They were the types that are good at tricking out Honda Preludes, playing Pai Gow at card houses, and forming criminal syndicates. Anyone who's seen Lethal Weapon 4 or watched enough T.J. Hooker episodes knows what I'm talking about.
The toddlers in the walled-in playground were not the offspring of illegal Hispanics or parentless blacks like the old, white east-enders would have you believe; they were little yellow rice babies born to 2nd and 3rd generation Asian-American girls who had cast off the strictures of their parents' native culture and its associated work ethic for fast money, faster cars, and home versions of Dance, Dance, Revolution.
The tall, wrought-iron fence was there to protect the outside world from the students, not the other way around. The curved spikes on the fence faced inward to keep the marauding cliques of home-invading Asians contained for as long as was legally permissible by California state law.
This was a sea change in the youth of Alameda for which I was not prepared. Of course it didn't happen over night. Like most social, cultural, and economic changes that feel like they burst onto the scene out of nowhere, it really just happened gradually over 10 or 15 years. It proceeded unremarkably and unnoticed until one day someone like me gets passed on his way home to visit his mom by a couple of tricked-out CRXs doing 110 miles per hour on a one-way street.
It's not just the difference between 16yr olds today and 16yr olds in 1994 that make Alameda v.'06 seem so foreign from the Alameda I knew before cell phones. The character of the entire place has changed and I suppose that's to be expected; as, with time and growth comes change. The inevitability of change, however, does not necessarily mean you are ready for, or more importantly, willing to, accept it. But until you are, the old adage still rings true: you really can't ever go home again.
And that is something I've been dealing with during my visit this past week as I cruised around town with my dog, Buttercup, visiting old haunts and old friends...
Posted by nils at 5:13 PM