I have written books for years that of course never saw the light of day. But the following are samples of work that, we expect, will be published in 2007 and 2008. Again, all are under copyright.
ELEMENTS OF SMILE ( a child-rearing primer on the order of Strunk and White's Elements of Style)
BABY BORN BIG IN THE HAPPY BIG SMALL WORLD
(An eight year old's advice on growing up and showing love, in verse)
"AFTER THE BOMB," A chapter from THE MATTER WITH THEM (Nonfiction: Kids in trouble and how they got that way)
Elements of Smile, ©2007 (back to top)
TEENS
Girls Who Hate Themselves...
are conceited.
Which has nothing to do with liking themselves. In fact, while we’re on the subject, defer to this loose rule of thumb in matters of the heart, trust and communication: everything tends to be the opposite of what it appears. Conceit and egoism are nothing but insecurity. The “quiet type” can often enough be a potential danger to him or her self and others, all the way to suicide. The plain spoken, blunt, no bullshit person is often kind. We all hurt. Big deal. We need others to think we don’t hurt and are hurt when they do.
Fill in your own dichotomy.
The point is, girls who hate themselves privately and usually unconsciously want to be liked for thinking of themselves as nothing. When that doesn’t work, they have trapped themselves and the only choice is to be suitably tragic.
Overwhelmingly, mothers are to blame, as you might already have suspected. I’m certainly not suggesting we invoke the good old days - when it was legal to beat your wife and women were better seen than heard - but today, these many years since the quaint concept of a young woman practicing a becoming modesty and virtuous conduct, common etiquette and so on, their misguided mothers exhibit timidity and self-conscious inadequacy at a time when their girls need principle and strength out of them.
Often, girls today report creeping hopelessness about their mothers ever showing some maturity or express outright disdain for their mothers’ selfish predisopositions. Though I am not generalizing about female adults uniformly becoming pole-dancing, tarted up gum-popping goofballs, it’s a plain fact that too many are little more than superannuated teens themselves, and encourage or construct living versions of their childhood Barbies by grooming their daughters to be self-obsessed even before their delicate selves have had a chance to form. These girls are schooled and loyally aspire to perfect their outer shells, joyfully decorating until one day, delicate blown glass figurines, they implode because they have not filled that inner chasm. With any luck, they can survive by joining their fellow novelty daughters at school and acculturating a healthy hatred for their clueless mothers, but in most cases they will either want to die or mate, quickly and with scarce distinction. Almost any man will do, as long as he can assign them a value.
Certainly not limited to women alone, this is behavior emblematic of a narcissistic culture that annihilates critical thought in the name of a commodified landscape that disparages work, discipline, conviction, or character as so yesterday.
But remember, I am only referring in this case to the kids with good looks, breeding, money and friends. The other girls, the majority, emulate this hollow charade, which parents have a solemn obligation to mediate, not incite, and their childrens’ neuroses has become a publishing franchise. Shame on you if you’re perpetrating it without properly protecting your children.
Yet I have also not mentioned the ill-equipped, over-matched and unself-aware little boys who may feel lucky enough to date Barbie-the-Time-Bomb.
Add into the bargain you, dad.
Overmatched, too, he is customarily forgiven his responsibilities on some bankrupt cultural chestnut out of Life of Riley or Father of the Bride that implies raising a girl is a mystery to comically well-meaning fathers who are putty in their calculating daughters’ hands. Of course you dads seize on that, to the great peril of your offspring, opening the door for Mommy Dearest. In fact, your wife may very well love you primarily because of her own self-loathing. The sum effect though, which is all we’re concerned about (because you forfeited your options when you decided to have children), is to damage your kids.
Boys Who Hate Themselves
prey on girls who desire to fix them.
And most boys hate themselves again, in that strange conundrum that is incidental parental intention, because they are taught to like themselves for merely being, which ends up being a lot of nothing - save the arcane modern virtue in aspiring to abject laziness, carefree violence and remorseless turpitude.
BABY BORN BIG IN THE HAPPY BIG SMALL WORLD
© Timothy Jeffrey, 2006 (back to top)
There are children somewhere, some say, it is said
Born big as buses, or as elephants get.
They sleep on a barn roof or in pens by the cows,
one foot out a window, head stuck in the mow.
Yet, light as balloons, they breathe pretty music
and laugh happy tunes but forget how they do it,
floating careless overhead like cloud-shaped wonders
unaware of the lightning, rough wind, or the thunder.
And their parents tie strings to their waists in that sky
And walk them to school, weight them down, kiss goodbye.
Their teachers are kind (No child ever is bad);
Teaching each how to spell, how to sing, and to add.
Later pages...
And Acorn discovered she was now a big girl
and hers was again a happy big small world
where she protected her parents as they, too
guided her with advice as your parents do you.
So Acorn's days passed the way days always will
working her farm, where she planted and tilled,
helping her neighbors, friends, even strangers with theirs,
as her parents advised and spoke in her ears.
After The Bomb
©Timothy Jeffrey (back to top)
When I arrive in the morning a message is waiting. In seconds, I have made it down the long hallway to the classroom.
The air as I swing open the door is pungent, a humid cloying odor cut with chalk dust. A brawl has taken place: desks are kicked aside, pieces of a broken vase made by a student inmate lay scattered near the wall of windows. Papers, books, folders, an eraser, the odd tennis shoe strewn in roughly radiating arcs from the epicenter of the blast: a youngster on his back on the floor, arms and legs akimbo. On each outstretched limb rests a boy about the same age, on hands and knees, pinning him firmly.
Those kids remaining, seven of them, assigned to live together in an artificial family unit, hunker over him. Still now, they appear flushed and slightly shaken. Whispering stops as I enter. It appears that the Last Supper and the agony of the crucifixion have been captured simultaneously.
“Now,” the boy says from his position, helpless as a starfish, “Oh yeah, now y’all be st-toppin talk tha-thatthatsshhhhiit.’ The stutter worsens when he rattles off particular unkindnesses, paid him sneakily, by those pretending now to be concerned. He names several. They have stolen articles of his, they have threatened him.
With one exception, all are fifteen or under.
Perez, struggling to free himself from the four holding him down, is eighteen. All bones, he looks twelve. His hard eyes flick, frightened, about the room as he rants: a baby bird fallen from the nest. He is blue-black, rutted and carved like someone actually out of the tribes, an induration about the tight skin of his face. His hair is thick, tufted, gray with dust right now. He doesn’t take care of himself.
He has been in correctional institutions like this, foster homes, emergency shelters and halfway houses for thirteen years. There was no place left but here. After this, the system would deem him an “adult.” When he was nineteen, they would find adult foster care placement, or prison. Faced with leaving us and returning to frightful, hopeless environments and families, kids here not unusually grow violent with their peers, thereby forcing us to repossess their freedom and ensuring themselves of three squares a day and a bed and safety. Though it would have been hard to accord Perez enough sophistication that he would have calculated such a thing.
From the first, Perez Immanual Sims seemed even to those of us charged with his care to be, quite conceivably, deranged. The walking wounded. Upon seeing him at first in what I would come to know as a typical daily tirade–his face a bunched black fist, eyes like volcanic glass–I thought Wolf Boy.
“In a cancer ward,” another staff comforted me, “you’re going to lose some.” He meant Perez.
The team of professionals with Perez needed comforting. He was a colossal challenge. We were to babysit him, in essence, until his nineteenth birthday, at which time his community worker would find him a home, and a job, in Detroit. By the morning of his birthday, Perez was to be turned back to the world, ready or not. Very little had been entertained about therapy of any kind. The damage, so went the argument, was done.
They might have been much younger than him, but the others had no problem using him. They used him to hide stolen objects, to do the stealing, to cheat for them in school– so that Perez was in a low grade boil continually, trapped as he had always been between getting accepted by them and getting caught by us, the quintessential sap. Perez was slow but he wasn’t unaware of his shortcomings, and the most disabling fault on the street, he had to know, is a conspicuous weakness: so he traded his willingness for the safety of invisibility. He joined the team.
“What you l-l-lookin at?” he hollers at me.
Quiet follows. Everyone waits. I sit down, nod to the teacher that she can go if she has something else to do for the moment. She lets herself out, the door clicks once. Nothing makes you feel more helpless than a kid so self destructive he continually outmaneuvers every better effort to help him, and here he lay in the embrace of his torturers. The field is lousy with do-gooders convinced that expressing their heartfelt frustration will turn the kid around. A kid like Perez just needs to know someone cares. I put a look on my face that suggests I’ve had a better time cleaning urinals.
He promises, after an hour or so, to be good. The instructed fundamental once the instigator calms himself is to commit somehow to better behavior before being allowed to get up. Not excuses, apologies or promises, but alternative plans to control one’s behavior. This usually means he sets out ways his group can test his patience –maybe he should sit out of the basketball game tonight and help someone wash windows, say– in a constructive way. It’s otherwise too easy to play a humble, get up, hit somebody again. Lying there, Perez appears calm, reasonably. He asks for permission to be let up.
Several turn their faces toward me. They are children. You have to remind yourself. Some are so sophisticated and charming, even inspired, it’s easy to forget. They’re expected, by adults like me, to help each other. They think I have magical powers of restraint. I must, because half the time I’d rather bang them around. Perez, too, even him. They think I’m a psychologist, (though my degree is in English), a shaman who sees.
Features as gravely petulant as before, Perez stares belligerently at a water stain straight up in the acoustic ceiling. Trying not to pay attention to me, to the fact of my authority that determines his fate. Grownups have always decided him.
“Unless I missed something,” I say, “I didn’t hear anything about how he was going to control himself.”
Already he is bellowing. With this instrument or that, he is going to break my head. He’s going to cap me with a .357 Magnum. Perez doesn’t like me at present.
Perez lurches, bucks; several boys leap back on, ride him like a wave.
After a couple of hours of this, having made myself fairly sure his hot, dirty and sweaty cohorts are reasonably tired with the mess they’ve made for themselves in goading a lame, I call in another group of guys to hold Perez down. My group is sent on with a staff who is instructed to work them like dogs. He won’t though. He’s young, just out of college and this is his first real job. He has a sunlamp tan and he thinks like the kids do, that I’m too strict. He has shoes they always tell him they admire. They ask the cost, which he discloses willingly. If he was in their neighborhood they would strip him like an old Desoto. A couple might stab him.
Once Perez is free of his “brothers”, he calms, seriously makes a plan to control himself. He is careful, contrite. He is allowed up, sits in a desk.
I call the group back. Once they arrive and sit around Perez, I conduct an hour session for the group on karma, putting the bad out and getting it back; threaten a couple. This is a crowd pleaser. Some have been taught the Bible and they are all Rambo fans. Perez puts his head down. They want shaman, they get. I have them role-play the manner in which they could treat Perez better. Finally, I suggest they think about all this and try to have a better day. A lot of the job is a matter of outlasting them, braving the storm, setting a sound principle example. They get up to go.
Perez is asleep.
* * * * * * * * * * *
In the ensuing months we hold meetings with his social worker, to prepare for his eventual release. Our abiding interest had been in teaching him domestic skills like keeping himself clean, learning to cook, managing money. Maybe he could marry money, one of the team suggests wryly.
Quick way to devalue currency, quips another.
If anything, the scenes of violence have increased. The more Perez embarrasses himself, the more we appear to him protectors of the culpable and not him; and the louder and more frenetic his outbursts become. A borderline “with paranoid characteristics”, the psychologicals on him indicated. We took some of the guys go-carting once and Perez three times blew out tire stacks when, leading us, he’d driven completely turned around to watch us,–unable to control his vehicle for fear of attack from the rear.
He needs something to hope for. After a time, a kid becomes “institutionalized”, or severely dependent –almost completely refusing to do anything for himself. A kid like Perez will create havoc-out of resistance to incarceration as much as he is doing it so that he can remain in constant care
The worker says she is looking for placements. But at his age, Perez falls through the child care cracks. Too old for even state institutions or any other group programs, too young (and not necessarily eligible) for adult foster care, unwelcome in several city programs he has previously passed through, too intellectually limited for others. Too dependent and troublesome to gain acceptance with foster parents locally, yet not crazy enough to make the grade in psychiatrics anywhere. I don’t like the worker who, though she is Black, wears baubles and French powders and communicates an affected distaste for the boy, maybe culturally embarrassed.
We bring Perez in. He prepares in his face a peace approximating a kind of adult reserve, meant to match our own. He slips deep into his chair, then sits up as an afterthought. He licks his lips.
“Ba-but though,” he stutters when the subject of our difficulty is brought up. “Y’all say y’ga-gonna f-f-find me somethin. Y’say it...”
Though he trusts no one, he doesn’t want to insult us. In failure (such as we learn it) Perez always found a meal somehow –from a drug sale, a hustle, a small job done for someone, people feeling for you enough that they’d take you in...And Perez had a code: He would not spare change anyone, stick anybody up, beg, stay in shelters, or pickpocket. He didn’t break and enter “like my early days,” as if a seasoned hand at nineteen. Which he was.
“Wa-w-well. I...I, oun’t know...” And he takes a deep breath to swallow the stutter. He’d learned to get things from the system by such announcements of doubt. His bane and advantage, perhaps, as what he guilt-tripped out of social workers would never replace the familial stability he’d been deprived. Monthly company and a free lunch in place of comforting arms and the warm breath of a parent that won’t come when you wake in the night. Gone, for Perez. Forever.
Truth was, he’d survived until now –in the most liberal use of the word. From all we could gather there had been periods when he’d vanished from the system, then popped up again, in a neglect hearing, in a shelter,the broken-eared pup with a limp and foreign substances clotting his hair. Always surfaced, maybe with no offenses tied to him, but always lost. Always a little more scared.
After the bomb, a partner had remarked once, there would only be rats and cockroaches, and Perez.
I sat behind my desk, playing the prospective employer. “Like ah..” He pushes his tongue into the upper palate, which sets up a momentary vibration.
The tremor will lock his face full against the stutter, will close his eyes an instant. His mouth opens on nothing. Then, in a rush:
“Waa-waantajob...”
He never stuttered, never flinched or displayed the slightest wrinkle when he lied or goofed you. To be honest apoplexed him however, and knowing he would have to go through job interviews like the ones I rehearsed with him was worse. And that he had to ask whities...
Too much.
“Y-you want me to be somebody y-you wa-want,” Perez told me during the rehearsal, frustrated with his failures; someone should save him this discomfort. “But though, I...I c-cain’t be that.”
I wondered. Did I want that? He had by that time become my student, I suppose, in lieu of any other concerted attempt to “work with him,” a bit of social workers having a lot more to do with objectives management and casework niceties than with any genuine faith in the subject’s ability to achieve. And he had begun to improve. But in my eyes? Or in his own estimation? I could not say. A relationship, glancing as the approvingly shy regard he allowed me at our passing in a hall, was coming. I was sticking it out with him.
So Perez became more frightened, and more troublesome. Cruelly, he abused and antagonized anyone who, just having had a visit with their family, showed any private misery. He goaded them into fights. He told them a sister was ugly. He made them pay for having families.
His mother, in Detroit, was a drug addicted prostitute. He told the others only that she was in Detroit. That was all, she stay in Detroit. Okay? Don’t be your business what she do.
Detroit was home, if any place in his life could be termed that. He’d been used by every one who needed a decoy, a thief, a seller. He let pieces of that go, but you had to listen close.
“Tell you what,” he would say, correcting a peer’s unkindnesses –during a time when he had decided to experiment with acting his age. “You acts like that on the street somebody waste y’ass. You think I’m a kid you; they make you do things you don’t wanna do. Y-yo-you can’t s-s-say you ain’t wanna do it neither. Cap y’all. B-be scandalous. Th-thass a fack.” His eyes wandered to me. He was trying.
Perez even appeared proud. He was giving someone advice. He’d lived through something which made him an authority.
The worker called with a placement in Detroit.
A halfway house, I told Perez when I had been apprised. But in my relief and in that certain delight at being the one to pass good news–except for family visitations or calls from home a commodity in short supply to any of them– I had not anticipated his look. Perez, alone with me, took a long moment. Oh yeah? was his quiet reply. But he wasn’t done, and he finally fixed me a second. Put his head to one side.
He looked clearer than I’d ever seen him, almost grown-up in his apparent discomfort, as if he especially didn’t wish to hurt me. “C-can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t go back there.”
What...?
“Been had all that so long...” he shook it out of his head, whatever he wasn’t going to finish with. “Mightsw-well pa-put me in jail.”
It was a matter of days before his birthday.
I was furious. “That’s the way it goes,” I said, and I would have rather grabbed him by the hair, now much better groomed, and dragged him to Detroit myself. “You want to get put in jail, do it when you get down there, goddamn it; you’re going if I have to shoot you out of a canon.”
The halfway house went out of business, another victim of funding crunches. Just like that. The ATT recording about “this number” no longer being in service; then confirmation from social services.
I took Perez to live with me.
I tend to be impulsive, never more so that when I feel stalled by people whose inaction– despite its obvious impact on someone’s life– has sound procedural basis. My recourse has been inevitably to prove them wrong, storm the gates and, the moral tyrant ever railing, commit hari-kari. There. What do you think of that?
They liked it.
Charlie and Rainman, someone said. I was doing a great thing; a couple told me this privately. Because it so rarely happens that gestures of kindness to these kids end up in anything but disaster, the praise and encouragement had their requisite measure of neighborly counsel, and not a little of it disparaging.
When I was soon to go on vacation, asked one of my colleagues, “you gonna put Perez in the kennel?”
They were disenchanted with me, some of them. Friends, but too aware of the futility in trying to save somebody to offer more than grave warnings.
The consequence of an impulsive nature like mine is an equally idiotic persistence, after the fact of indiscretion, to make it fit. Because, after all, there were sensible reasons for this–even if not a one occurred to me before I was obliged to conjure them.
Hadn’t Perez once lived in Ann Arbor? Remembered its streets from when he’d been in a group home and gone through its schools, figuratively speaking. In Ann Arbor, Perez still had friends, or “associates’ as he and any street kid will refer to their circle to distinguish between physical proximity and the depths of their character they still have the power to conceal from even those closest to them. (When you’re really tight, somebody is escalated to “m’boy” –a secure repository of some intermediate secrets with which you have tested his loyalty.) Perez felt safe. He was close enough to Detroit to visit his sister without becoming ensnarled in the city’s culture. There were jobs in Ann Arbor.
And he had me.
Ann Arbor, though in recent history became a high tech center, had always been a swank cosmopolitan cultural hub, anyway, that still maintained its small town mentality. The joke goes that even winos have to apply and wait their turns to bum the streets, so exclusive and refined must be their panhandling, their circle of movement, their numbers overall. The poor, the rowdy, the gamers, the regularly detained were predominantly black and usually from the north side section of several blocks bordering fashionable rehabs and an open air farmers’ market on newly-stripped, brick block lanes. The most famous of the floaters, an elderly black named “Shaky Jake,” was nonetheless a self-employed musical stylist on the corners who could be seen any time of day, toting his sorry guitar case, adorned in a mismatch of second hand coats and pants and screaming socks –or spats– to the next sidewalk stand. Everybody knew Jake, the quintessential local eccentric, replete with buttons and bizarre big-brimmed hat.
Perez was easy play, having in fact known a few of “the boys” from the old days. They were the jam, what was happening; they were moving some small time products to the affluent youngsters at the college and brought a whole preteen entourage of skate-boarding, match-chewing would-be cools and other punks to the after hours streets till Saturday nights had come to look and sound like a Detroit block party. Perez wasn’t going to be in play, if I could help it.
He gave me a listen. We were in my living room which, with the couch bed pulled out, would be his bedroom. I ran through the rules.
He said: “I got a clear understanding,” which always meant he hadn’t quite. I told him to run back through the list.
“Aw-awright. Awright, see..like, yeah, okay...” he thought hard. His pimply features made him appear old as Shakey Jake, careworn. “I d-don’t I-let nobody come over if y-you ain’t here. Le’see..takes a bath ev-every day.” He concentrated on me, as if it were written on my forehead. “Eat veg’bles.”
“Vegetables.”
“Yeah, vegetables, right?”
I nodded.
&nbs
