Notes from Oaktown III: Da Kids

My first day training with ARC, I felt like an atheist walking into a church for the first time. I didn't really know what to expect. I was in an anonymous building in downtown Oakland, the whole floor was vacant, the whole place smelled like freon. I was early so I waited for everyone to show up. the first to walk in was this old woman pulling a wire frame carry along behind filled with news paper clipping and books with frayed pages, walking with a limp. She had those long willowy jowls that make rowdy kids walk in the street when they see them dangling from an elderly chin of someone walking down the sidewalk. She told me that this was her ninth tutoring job, then she told me a story about a old black matriarch from Memphis who helped save black people from themselves by teaching them how to knit.

A few minutes later people started flooding in, all twenty minutes late and smiling and I felt a little jealous even after hearing that special little story. A guy came in carrying a fixie on his shoulder like a soldier carrying a riffle, behind him were three people: a girl and two guys, one thin and two heavy set (feel free to divide these attributes as you see fit on your own) all speaking Spanglish at a rate so fast that my socalian ear had no chance of catching up with them. A girl who smelled of wheat germ, sat down next me because, I was happy when she sat down, even though I hate the mealy weird taste, I like the smell of wheat germ. Another guy with a star wars Rebel tattoo sat down next to me and we began to chat.

Then the indoctrination started.


I. Breaking down

You want to destroy the candidates illusions of purpose and individuality One sentence I remember is "your not here to save these kids." and I kept thinking from what from who there parents? There teachers? Each other? I asked and got no answer the speaker went on

II."The teachers will not like you"

and I started to wonder why? Where just extra help right? Trying to assist these people and these kids to do there best. She went on.

III. Don't have any illusions

of course the illusions started flooding in right after she said that.I saw me, Me reaching a kid who needed help talking to a parent about why there weren't great report cards coming home, learning all the kids names really impossible stuff . Then I started having allusions why did she have to mention that twice why weren't any educational professional involved in this besides the ones pushing paper on the floor above us

IV. I don't really like No child Left behind either but.....

I had no idea we were even part NCLB until she said that. It wasn't in the advertisement on craigslist.com where, I guessed, most of the candidates in the room were drawn from.


On My first day as a tutor I was there before my sight coordinator. I was angry until I met with the coordinator. She had just come from another teaching job. She looked tired but pleasant so I helped her carry her work books into the school. I replacing a girl who had to leave after a familial tragedy. To the teacher's we are scabs. I can understand. What ever learning inconsistencies the testers at ARC finds reflects negatively on their whole, under funded, overpopulated classes. Their unions can do little to help. And there I am, the I am "tutor", the spy. The system sets us at odds.

These are my kids: D is a brilliant boy who knows it. He is rambunctious and distracting, mostly to me. English, is his second language but he handles it well enough to keep me entertained. He read my tattoo phonetically and the thing is in Latin. Then there is O and B, or Ohmidah and Berumazadahn, I like saying there names but I don't think they like hearing come out of my mouth. They're sisters and O has been helping B pretend to speaking English probably the whole time they've been in school; It's really very clever: O understands things quicker, but she's younger and teachers always expect her to try to get the answer from her older sister B, B is older and she actually has a tougher time learning English because of this fact. So really while O is "asking"B for the answers, B is actually getting the answers from O, leaving T(eachers) convinced that B grasps everything she's supposed to have learned. Then there's Rio who reminds me of myself. He was kicked out of the program because Rio can't read and has disciplinary issues.

You see Rio was never really taught to read but he has learned to use the same trick as O and B by himself.


Rio sees a new word.


Rio does not remember his old words and the sounds they make.


Rio gets frustrated and throws a fit, or leaves the room.


The first time I decided not to follow the ARC program, implemented based on the no child left behind protocol and requirements, I had Rio read to me while the other kids did their own reading and memorization work, Rio read perfectly spoke well and got most my questions about what she had just read correct. The next week I came to tutor he was gone.

Notes from Oaktown II

Did you know that Batman has detailed plans to kill every member of the Justice League?


Up the street from my house there's as truck parked near place named Hippie-crack park. A few days ago I saw a man with a heavy duty hikers back-pack carrying his daughter into the park and for a second fear scratched at the top of my head and I wondered about what the little girl would find behind a bench or under the perpetual piles of autumn leaves, those leaves that seem to find their way into my house, into the liquor store three house down from me, leaves the liquor store clerk's brother is constantly sweeping out onto the sidewalk while he yells at his older sibling in Farsi, leaves that I 'd seen everyday since I had moved to Oakland; perpetual autumn leaves. But when I saw the little girl walking toward the pile of moldering vegetation, in my mind I just saw her little hands gripping busted glass bulbs with speed residue settle at the bottom of them, of crack pipes with teeth jammed in them, discarded condoms, and copies of US Weekly and People; all I could think of was this little girl getting her little hands on theses, destructive, mind numbing things. I turned off my headphones and started to let the father know that his daughter was probably walking into her first case of herpes when I heard someone say, "What you worrying about dere young man?" Even though I had pretty much trained myself to tune out people on MLK I turned around to see who was talking to me.



Did you know Superman started out as a bald villain?

When I looked to the voice I saw skinny, short man with burnt brown skin and ashy white buds of dry skin for elbows. He was wearing boxy strange looking sun glasses, leaning out of his plain white utility truck with a cigarette dangling from his lip, flaking a perpetual stream of ash onto his wife beater. I tensed up when I realized I knew his face. I said "excuse me?" then he said
"I see you looking over at the park. If you had something stashed over there.. well if it's what I think it was I dumped in a garbage can and I ain't telling you where it is.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Your shit boy... the crack." He said.
I explained to him that I was trying to keep the little girl from catching flesh rot from all the crap that the crack-heads left in the park.
Really it wasn't much of a park; just a full asphalt basketball court, benches, and a sign that read MARCUS GARVEY PARK. Then he said.

"Let her daddy worry over her... I cleaned that place out yesterday anyway."
I asked him if he'd found anything interesting. People in my neighborhood, crack-heads homeless folks, broke hipsters, anarchist and hippie drifters are a part of Oakland's ecology. When someone moves or loses their place, any or all of these people swoop into to the place and assist in the decay of the former lodgers presence. Their stuff shows up in the park a lot of times. The man with the truck, whose name was "Freak Frank", who I had seen parked all over my adopted neighborhood, invited me to look inside his truck

Did you know that Batman was an alcoholic?

Now by then I had seen Freak Frank around the neighborhood like fifty time, yelling at crack-heads, being hassled by cops, or maybe leaning out of his window smoking a cigarette, surveying the sidewalk from his trucks window. He lived in the truck. On top of the truck was an igloo dog house and behind that solar panels but the truck was all a sort of grubby looking matte white. When he opened the back of the truck I finally caught a look at what was inside. The walls were covered in crap, brick-a-brack, and miscellanea; broken Power Rangers, tattered a Cal Berkeley T-shirts, a certificate for completion of an electricians program, burnt novels, weird looking things in jars, broken cellphones, shattered VCR's and VHS tapes; nothing I wanted, but what I noticed was that there was not sign of drug paraphernalia; not a pipe or screen or a roach. Frank was stone sober as far as I could tell.
"You cleaned this all out of the park?"
"Boy there ain't just one park out here. Besides I can't stay around one place. Gotta keep moving, they won't let a man stay still."
The name on the certificate was Franks and I'm pretty sure he wasn't a forger so I was guessing that the California seal wasn't fake.

Did you know that Ant-man nearly beat his wife to death?

"Why?" I asked
"Why what boy?" I was really getting tired of this boy shit but I pressed
"Why do you chase of the druggies? Pick up their crap and dump it all?"
"Cause all those motherfuckas want is to use stuff up and mess things up. And white folks already think that's all we do."
He had a point. I kind of understood what he was saying. I mean I scare people without even trying and sometimes it gets on my nerves.
White-guilt+Black rage=Black fear, Fear of Blacks.
But Oakland isn't Gotham or Metropolis or Bludhaven heroes get killed here. Of course Frank was crazy. After I had taken a look at all things I didn't want in the back of his truck, he handed me a pamphlet on solar energy, even though I told him I lived in an apartment. He said it didn't matter and that he would set it up. I told him that was O.K. when I realized there were solar panels of the roof of his truck but no wires or grounders or generators just a lot of shit found in parks and vacant houses around Oakland.

Notes from Oaktown I

I live on Martin Luther King in Oakland California and I am an negroid. I don't use this term around the people in my neighborhood because I do enjoy walking home without getting my face stomped in by the boys at Your Muslim Bakery the occasional Black Israelite and your random and insane 5 percenter (they are so crazed that I had to ad the word into my open office spell check memory... they've made up a word and now my work has to suffer for it...bastards.) but I will bust it out when I'm talking to the occasional guilty white intellectual near and around Berkeley and San Francisco, but it is nice to be in a place where there is even an illusory line to keep my racial social experimentation in check .

But somewhere around the edges things are slipping. Now I will say that I have no problem with people being peaceable, as long as it doesn't fuck up my ability to mock other people; the other day I watched as two families; a mother and her two large sons and three bigger daughters on one side of the street and on the other side three big guys and a very loud woman they called "gran ma ma", they were all fresh from the church three blocks down the street, some of the boys were still wearing their pleated slacks and the girls were busy taking down their hair extensions.

As I walked by them on my way to work I saw one of the women drop and flash her ass obviously trying to draw the debate to a close with the heavy gelatinous rebuttal.

Someone once told me that the average dog is only about three free meal away from becoming a wolf and the average cat one meal from becoming a bitchy lynx. So how far away is your doctor from using sharpened stone to lance your boils? From pissing on the wall of his hospital to establish his mating rights to all the females in the candy striper pool?

Religion, Hood-wealth, respect, and drugs are pumped in to the streets of Oakland and a hundred other of her twisted sister cities. They ruin on tragedy and justified pity. People (and you know who you are) need something to pity and some people need to fall.

Or at least that's what I tell myself
Some times when I pass a shack and ramble church I think of Jim Jones and when I see the crack-heads smiling on the porch and hear the people
People are primal because we are the ones who came up with the word its the shadow we run from.

Cats don't worry about going feral

They just go feral and some even enjoy the ride