11-20-98 F 11:45 AM
I'm at the Chinese place by school.  I was cruising today.  I just read the newspaper while my kids read their library books.  Then we wrote essays on sportsmanship while I did the crossword. Now I'm teaching night school, though. I smoked a little before class tonight.  I left for work about fifteen minutes later than usual, but it seemed hours darker.  Lately, I've been gliding to school the mile and along Pico with my nose in a book, but this time I did not read while I walked, and it seemed to take hours.  A toothless, negro bum in a Cubs hat sidled up to me on the corner at Crenshaw, muttering and mumbling, "You a teacher.  They know.  Everybody round here know that..,"  The light turned green.  I left him a penny and kept walking.  When I finally got to class, McKey was in there.  I mentioned Into Thin Air, and he went into a forty-five minute Everest monologue.  I sat down and tuned in and out.  Eventually there came a knock at the door.  I thought I would be letting students in, but I opened the door and there stood a wide-eyed, skinny-ass, white freak in a tie, queer as they come, smiling like a tripper, and babbling rapidly.  Space Invader--he seemed to want to talk directly to my chin, close enough to lick it, and my instinct was to release a right uppercut.  It was Sheryl's sub, but he may also have been one of Dale's and Nicholas' queer spies from admin.  I'd had a tie on that day, but had removed it on Pico, fearing it called attention to a potential mugging, but when the queer spy freak started asking questions about what I was teaching and how, I wished I'd had the tie.  I had the strongest urge to beat him to death. He had to be some kind of Dahmer.  I checked the urge and finally managed to get him in his room with the door closed and me in my room with my door closed.  But I was badly shaken.  My mouth was dry.  I could barely think straight.  My students were on to me.  A few giggled.  Surely my eyes had gone a glassy red.  "Co cai ee nay," I heard one say.  My fingers twitched.  I wrote the vocabulary on the board, choking on chalk dust.  I heard strange shrieks from the room next door.  Occasionally, the door would open a crack, and I could see the freak's wide eye spying in on me.  Eight thirty came mercifully, but it brought no relief.  I escaped the school only to land in similarly dire straits.  Shirelle waited for me in her car, somber, diamonds and babies on her mind, inconsolable.  I took her to Miceli's and paid for a seventy-dollar dinner through which she complained about all the things which make her unhappy.