Illustration from Razorcake #46 by Brad Beshaw

I read Don Quixote as I gear up for my Hollywood moment: a lunch meeting with an actor and a director to discuss a screenplay that I have written. Since this is a Hollywood moment, I guess I’m not meeting for lunch or getting ready to eat lunch, I’m “doing” lunch. And what had brings me to this parking lot outside of a French deli (really? A French deli?); what has led me to write, of all quixotic things, a screenplay? All of that will have to wait for a while. In the meantime, Don Quixote has to charge into the Spanish plains to defeat the notorious Polish-Turkish-Egyptian army, who have cleverly disguised themselves as sheep.

Don Quixote is a misunderstood figure. He’s been simplified and mythologized in our cultural representations of him. We’ve come to forget the actual character that Cervantes wrote about. He’s kind of a Rip Van Winkle in the sense that, if you read Washington Irving’s story about Rip, you recognize that Rip was a drunk, a deadbeat dad, and a draft dodger who went on a twenty-year bender and made up a crazy story about sleeping for twenty years to cover his ass. But now Rip has turned into a Disney cartoon and a kid’s story and everyone wants to believe his silly alibi about sleeping in the woods for two decades. I like him better as a drunk. Don Quixote is the same way. We all know the story about him seeing windmills on the plain, mistaking them for giants, and charging them atop his swayback nag. The windmills, of course, win. We interpret this act as the all-too-human chase after crazy dreams. We anoint Don Quixote as the patron saint of lost causes and futile endeavors. Look at him: he thinks he’s a knight and there haven’t been knights for centuries; he made his face shield out of cardboard and his lance is just a crooked tree branch. He must be mad. What we forget, though, is that Miguel de Cervantes wrote about a different Don Quixote. In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote is not crazy. Not really.

This is as far as I get in the novel when the actor, Stu Smith, comes up beside my truck. I’ve known Stu since we were kids, since he moved into my neighborhood and instantly became the butt of two jokes. The first joke was about his dad, an aspiring stock broker who rode a moped. Sometimes we’d see him in the morning, us riding our bicycles to school, Stu’s dad, decked out in a suit and tie, riding his moped to the brokerage. Even the briefcase bungeed to the back of his moped was funny. The second joke was about Stu being Jewish. He was known around the neighborhood as Stu the Bufu Jew. I called him that, too, even though I was only ten and had no idea what a bufu was. To be honest, I didn’t even know what a Jew was.

Now when I see Stu, decades of memories float to the surface. Little moments long stored in the recesses of long term memory emerge. Like that time Stu and I were hanging out at a dull high school party and Stu formed a plan to make things better. I followed. We wandered a block away from the party and Stu uprooted a mailbox. I uprooted another. We switched the two out, then sallied on, pulling out mailboxes, swapping them with others, making sure that no house had the right mailbox in front of it for two blocks down Catalina Isles.

Of course it was ridiculous, but it was something to do.

And now Stu is an actor. You don’t know this, but you’ve seen him on TV. He’s one of the tens of thousands of faces you pass as you flip the channels. Sometimes, he’s painting his face and chanting, “Roughing the palate!” in a beer commercial, sometimes he’s flirting with Wanda Sykes in a sitcom, sometimes he’s in a robot costume on the Jimmy Kimmel Show or a banker on a drama destined for cancellation after four episodes or a burn victim or an angel or a golfer. Most of his roles are credited as either an occupation or a number: Heart and Lung Technician, Customer #2. I once rented the movie Rat Race, fast-forwarded until Stu popped onto the screen as a co-pilot, rewinded and watched Stu and the pilot bang heads about fifteen times, laughed like hell each time, then turned off the movie. That was two dollars well spent.

Stu is a big part of why I wrote the screenplay. In the screenplay, the main character is named Stu, nicknamed Stu the Bufu Jew, and he sometimes dresses in a suit and rides a moped.

In real life, Stu stands in front of me as I still have half of my head in Don Quixote and I can’t help wondering about Stu as an actor and me as a screenwriter, and thinking, which one of us is Don Quixote in this scenario? I’m the one living in my head when I write the screenplay. Stu is the one who’s hoping to act it all out, though in a socially acceptable way. Can we both be Don Quixotes? And, if there’s two people living out the delusion, doesn’t that go against the very notion of Quixote’s insanity? After all, the only difference between delusion and reality is corroboration. If Don Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza, had seen giants on the Spanish plain instead of windmills, then Don Quixote wouldn’t have been delusional at all. He would have been a fallen hero.

And what about Sancho Panza, the squire? If he really believes that Quixote is mad, why does Sancho go along with him? Why does he leave his wife and child and ride out onto the Spanish plains with a man who believes himself to be knight, especially when you consider that Sancho knows he’s not going to get paid for all of his efforts? Is Sancho really as stupid as generations of readers have accused him of being?

Stu sees what I’ve been reading. He tells me that, after he acted in his first play, his parents gave him a gift. It was a matching set of Spanish statues, one of Don Quixote, the other of Sancho Panza. This information freaks me out a bit. I don’t say anything. We head to the deli.

The restaurant is perfect for people in the movie business in the sense that it focuses more on image than substance. A ham sandwich is called “jambon de Paris,” a salami sandwich is a “saucisson.” We meet up with the director and he’s a Hollywood insider in the sense that he makes a living off of movies. He’s written several screenplays that have turned into movies starring, well, big stars. He’s also a Hollywood outsider in the sense that he’s recently written and directed an independent film that features no stars, that he funded himself, and that he’s been showing at film festivals all around the country. He’s got a few suggestions for revisions on the screenplay, little things that he knows from making movies and I don’t know because I’ve only written novels, short stories, Razorcake columns, and that type of thing. Overall, though, he likes the screenplay. He likes it enough to offers to direct the movie, even though he knows there’s no money in it and he’s just turned down an offer to direct a movie for the Lifetime network. When the director makes this offer, I look at Stu. It suddenly becomes clear to me which one of us is which.

Maybe I imagine it, but I think I see the flashes of thoughts in Stu’s eyes. Maybe he can actually make this movie. Maybe he knows people who can fund it. Maybe he can actually be the star and not the guy laying on a stretcher, covered in burn-victim makeup. Maybe those aren’t really sheep on the Spanish plain. Maybe he really is taking on the Polish-Turkish-Egyptian army. Maybe he could be a knight.

Before Don Quixote set out on his adventures, he was a hidalgo. Hidalgos were landed gentlemen who, in the early seventeenth century, had no real means of supporting themselves, but social conventions dictated that they could not work or earn money. So Don Quixote was both a member of the nobility and a victim of abject poverty. He was literally starving went he set forth on his first sally. Sancho Panza was socially and economically below Don Quixote. After they set out on their adventures, though, they managed to find big, free meals most nights. They flirted with attractive (and sometimes horribly unattractive) women and fought with rogues; they met interesting people and heard great stories. Insane, stupid, or not, they had a lot of fun. Even if most of their adventures left them battered and bruised, they still ended up leagues above the slow starvation that ate away at them when they stayed home.

When Stu started his acting career, he was coming off of a ten-year stint as a stock broker—a job that ate away at his stomach lining, that pushed him into middle age before he had time to reach his thirtieth birthday. When my first novel came out, I worked as a construction superintendent—a job that made me feel like I was starving even as my weight ballooned.

Now I watch the flickers of maybes in Stu’s eyes. I feel a little like Sancho, sitting on my mule, drinking my wine, not sure yet whether or not I’ll jump in and help out if Don Quixote starts to get his ass kicked again. I reminisce about writing the screenplay and about all the childhood memories it triggered and about how time has let me and Stu take some of the pain of adolescence and turn it into a comedy. I listen to the director tell these dazzling stories about the Hollywood only insiders see. I eat my glorified salami sandwich, and even that tastes pretty fucking good. And, at this point, it doesn’t matter to me whether the movie gets made or not. Insane, stupid, or not, it’s all been pretty fun, leagues above the slow starvation of doing nothing.

Author’s note: This is the fourteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #46.  For more information about the collection, read this post.

Todd Congelliere and some dancers in a makeshift venue in San Pedro

San Pedro is a good place to go when you’re looking for answers. It’s at the end of LA’s craziest freeway, south and central of South Central. It’s a tangled mess of dirty water and industry, glowing even at night in the toxic orange lights of the Port of Los Angeles. In a way, Pedro is America. It’s where the dock workers went on strike a few years ago and the president forced them back to work, arguing that America doesn’t run without the Port of Los Angeles. Of course, no one asked the question: if America really depends so much on these guys, why don’t we give them a raise? America doesn’t really depend on the president. Positions of power here are like the mythical hydra. Cut off Bush’s head and another corporate shill will sprout in his place. Cut off the salary of the Pedro dock worker, and we’re all fucked.

But these weren’t the answers I was looking for when I headed down to Pedro last week.

I went down there for two reasons. First, because Toys That Kill were playing with The Marked Men. A few weeks earlier, Toys That Kill played their record release show. I missed that one. The next day, though, I was hanging out with Razorcake columnist Jim Ruland and writer Roy Kesey. They’d both been to the show. It was the first ever punk show for Roy. He kept talking about it. He told me, “It wasn’t what I expected punk rock to be. No mohawks. No leather.” And: “It was the friendliest mosh pit. Kids would knock the shit out of each other, but stop and help up anyone who fell down.” I knew this about the show. I didn’t have to drive down to see it. Still, to hear Roy talk about it, to hear the amazement in his voice, felt like a clue of some sort. Another clue came from Ruland, when he talked about Toys That Kill playing the anthems of the gutted San Pedro kids. I listened to Roy and Ruland and kicked myself for missing that Toys That Kill show.

I didn’t miss the one with The Marked Men, though. Like I said, I was down there searching for answers. Or at least for a little insight. Because I’m worried about kids today. I’ll explain.

In typical Pedro fashion, venues changed on the day of the show. There was no listing for the show in any of the weeklies or online. The venue switch was publicized strictly by word of mouth. Still, word of mouth spread. Thirty or forty kids were milling around the venue before the first band had even played.

I forgot the first band’s name. They were from Boston. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t that good, either. Halfway through their set, the singer said, “I’m freaking out to be playing in the home of the Minutemen.” I was thinking, no shit; you’re copping more riffs off of Mike Watt than Mike Watt cops. I headed across the street to get a tall boy and brown paper bag to hold it in.

It was about ten o’clock on a Friday night. The local drug store was packed. It was obviously the spot where the locals got their booze. Different groups of kids milled around. I didn’t recognize faces, but I recognized the scenes: the goth girl with her pasty white skin and black eyeliner; the chicano metalhead who looked straight out of 1986; the mohawked punk with his pegged black jeans (who wasn’t headed over to the TTK show, by the way); the sad indie rockers with their Morrissey shirts; the hip hop kids; the dirty hippies; and of course me and the TTK refugees in our black t-shirts and jeans. Nothing new there. Nothing too strange except that I realized that every group of kids I saw was in their early twenties and ever scene they represented—goth, metal, punk, hip hop, indie rock, hippie—was in its twenties or older, too. These kids were dressed in the uniforms that their rebellious parents could’ve worn. And there’s something fundamentally off about that. It made me wonder where the next great youth movement was going to come from or if it would come at all.

Now, I know I’m basing my judgments on these kids solely on their clothes. I know that there’s more to a subculture than their clothes. I also know it seems like I’m looking down on these kids like the grumpy old man saying, “Goddamn it, get your own scene.” That’s not my intention. Because I don’t care. Dress however you want. Rebel however you want.

What concerns me about all these kids, though, is the time period when the fashions of scenes seemed to freeze. The mid-to-late eighties. It was exactly when corporations started to realize how to capitalize on youth movements, how to figure out exactly what the hot new trends were and how to repackage these trends so that it could be the corporations selling these trends back to the kids who started them. Over the past ten years, with the help cool hunting and data mining, this repackaging and co-opting of youth has only gotten quicker and more effective. Even the latest trend to promote independent music, Myspace, was purchase by Newscorp earlier this year. Newscorp (the media giant that owns Twentieth Century Fox and Fox News) paid $580 million for Myspace. They hope to recoup a lot of that money by selling demographic information from Myspace pages to advertisers. Take a second to think about that. Remember that old Jawbreaker line? “Selling kids to other kids.”

This repackaging of trends, this drive to sell our own culture to us, is having exactly the effect that you’d expect. Our music, our scenes, our lives become stagnant and superficial. It can get depressing. So I bought my tall boy and headed back to the show.

The Marked Men were setting up when I got back there. There was no sound man or sound board. Just a P.A. and a guy standing at the front of the stage, fiddling knobs. The venue was less of a venue and more of an abandoned space at the end of a rundown commercial building. Plaster flaked off the walls. The ceiling had holes in it. The floor was bare concrete. No advertisements hung on the wall. There was no doorman, no security. I don’t think anyone was actually working there. The only people dealing with money in the joint were the bands selling merch and the guy passing the hat for the bands. Nothing but the music and the people who came to hear it.

Enter The Marked Men. They’re definitely one of my favorites. When their album On the Outside came out a couple of years ago, it got stuck in my truck’s CD player. No malfunction on the part of the stereo; I just couldn’t bring myself to take the CD out. And since I pretty much only drove that summer when I was driving to the beach to go surfing, that album is etched in my mind as a sign of good things to come. They were touring this time to promote their new album, Fix My Brain. I hadn’t heard the new one yet. From the opening chords of their set, from the pure energy and excitement, from the kids swirling around me, going nuts, I knew The Marked Men were on to more good things to come.

There’s more to The Marked Men, though. They come out of a scene in Denton, Texas, that’s given birth to a few bands whose albums get stuck in my stereo: the Chop Sakis, The Riverboat Gamblers, High Tension Wires, The Reds. Now, granted, a lot of those bands have overlapping members, so the music scene in Denton may be smaller than I imagine. And, granted, The Riverboat Gamblers are on the Warped Tour this summer and, considering their amazing new album and live show, they are poised to be the next big thing, the next trend to be co-opted and sold back to us. That hasn’t happened yet, though. We’re still in that pure time when the Denton bands and their music have developed organically. It’s still a music scene that exists because we love the music, not because someone is trying to sell it to us. In a lot of ways, this was the perfect place to see The Marked Men—a word-of-mouth show in an abandoned commercial space. Nothing for sale but the stuff the bands sell to keep themselves on the road.

Up next was Toys That Kill. TTK is the band I’ve seen play the most in the past five years. Part of this has to do with the bands that TTK bring to town and play with. I guess I have pretty similar tastes in music with these guys. I have to thank them for bringing me shows with Dick Army, The Knockout Pills, Shark Pants, The Fleshies, The Arrivals, Tiltwheel, The Thumbs. The list goes on. Recess Records, the label that TTK singer/guitarist Todd runs, has put out albums by bands that have graced four Razorcake covers.

Most of the reason I’ve seen TTK so much has to do with how much fun it is to be at their shows. They have a following, a core audience that’s always there. I don’t know what to call this group. They’re loyal as deadheads and drunk as dock workers on their days off. I don’t know any of them personally, though I’ve seen them at dozens of shows. It’s enough just to watch them, to feel their energy, to see them singing along to every word of songs that are on an album that was released two weeks earlier.

And again, down here in Pedro we have something that mirrors Denton. We have a living, breathing scene that exists for the music and for the people who love it. It’s not flashy. It’s not what Roy Kesey expected to see at a punk rock show. And it’s not really punk rock in the original sense. It’s grown and evolved miles away from the original movement. The bands aping the old heroes draw yawns. The bands finding new ways to make high energy rock’n’roll etch the signs of good things to come.

So, yes, it’s a little bit of optimism. A show untouched by corporate culture. Anthems for the young and disenfranchised played in a way that they can’t be repackaged and sold back to us. It’s a beautiful thing.

But it’s not that simple.

On the long drive home, across the concrete expanse of LA, I kept thinking about it. Shows like The Marked Men/Toys That Kill one are a beautiful things. They’re connected to larger things, other scenes in other towns that are doing the same type of things. They’re signs of a living, breathing culture that exists because we want it, because we love it, not because someone wants to sell it to us. But when the sweat dries and the excitement wears off and it’s just me in my truck, rolling down another freeway, immersed in the cloned towns that engulf America like the repeating backdrop in a cartoon, I have to wonder if these little oases of culture can ever irrigate this dry society we live in, or is it just a matter of time until someone buys the oasis and sells us the water?

Author’s note: This is the eleventh chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #33.  For more information about the collection, read this post.

Illustration from Razorcake #50 by Brad Beshaw

The Dogtown documentary doomed us.

Don scored us a couple of tickets for an advanced screening. There was a beautiful sense of excitement before the film, hanging out in the morning fog of downtown LA, standing in the very spot where Jon Fante starved and typed and wrote about starving and typing in Ask the Dust. And the documentary was good. A lot of cool, old skating footage, anyway.

That’s what Don and I talked about afterwards: the skating footage. We didn’t talk about the part in the movie when the filmmakers chose to show a map of Los Angeles and put a star on Paul Revere High School, thereby alerting filmgoers everywhere to the exact location of one of LA’s best kept secrets. The fuckers who showed the map were the same fuckers who talked about beating up anyone who gave away their secret skate spots. So be warned, Stacy Peralta: if I ever see you in person, I’m going to punch you in the head. Because, sure enough, the week after Dogtown and the Z Boys was released nationally, an eight-foot high fence was constructed around the Paul Revere parking lot, a twenty-four hour security guard was hired, and signs promising to arrest skateboarders were hung intermittently.

I wasn’t much of a skateboarder prior to moving to LA. I did have a skateboard. It was about forty-five inches long. When I lived in Cocoa Beach, I used it to ride down to the beach and check the waves. Sometimes, I’d ride it to a downtown bar or to the library.

The move to LA changed things considerably. For one thing, I was painfully poor that first year. Todd Taylor and I were trying to get Razorcake off the ground. Nearly every cent we had, we poured into the magazine. Nearly every cent we earned, we turned back into the magazine. One of the strange side effects of this poverty was that I started getting fat. The Mexican joint around the corner sold huge burritos for three dollars. And, when you’re surviving on about thirty bucks a week, six-for-a-dollar packs of Top Ramen seem like a good idea. So, yeah, you gain weight. Skateboarding seemed like a good way to counteract a cheese- and corn tortilla-heavy diet. The problem was, I was too poor to buy skating gear.

Don took care of this.

You may know Don as Donofthedead, a legend of the Razorcake record review section. But Don is more than a guy with fifteen thousand records in a back room in his house. He’s also the unacknowledged skating guru of Razorcake’s early days.

Don solved the problem of my longboard skate. He passed on to me a deck that allowed me to maneuver the high banks of Paul Revere without breaking my neck. I put my big, soft longboard wheels on that deck, and Don again took pity, scoring for me a set of harder, faster wheels. When he saw me fall one too many times, he passed on a set of camouflage knee pads, a little cracked on the left knee but nothing shoe goo couldn’t fix. When he ordered a pair of Vans that were too big for him, he passed them on to me instead returning them. Thus, I was inducted into Team Donofthedead.

In that first year of Razorcake, we skated Paul Revere nearly every weekend. Todd and I did. Don came along most weekends. Various other Razorcakers joined us occasionally. The first time I skated there with Don, he still had a cast on his wrist from a spill he’d taken several weeks earlier. At least I think he did. (If Don’s wife is reading this, then I stand corrected. Don never skated with a cast on his wrist.) Shortly after he got that cast off, he took another spill and broke the other wrist. He wouldn’t admit that it was broken. We had lunch at a noodle shop after the session. Don worked his chopsticks with fingers that were turning blue, just past a wrist that was swelling to three times its normal size.

Paul Revere was a great place to get back into skating. It was basically a parking lot cut into a hill. On three sides of the parking lot, the hill was paved going up about twenty feet. There was also a road coming in from a higher parking lot, so you could roll down the road and gather enough moment to ride up and down the hill as if it were a ten-foot wave. After about twenty yards of this, you ran into another paved, ten-foot high hill that you could roll up, kick turn, roll down, and ride the wave back to the road. It’s hard not to love a place like that. We showed it love in a way antithetical to the image of punk rock skateboarders. We brought push brooms and swept away the stones before skating. We picked up any trash that might be in our way. We left the place a little nicer than we found it. Then, that bastard Stacy Peralta made his self-aggrandizing documentary and Paul Revere was a bust.

Next, we started skating at an abandoned pool out in La Habra called the Jungle Bowl. It was a frequently graffitied spot. Whenever the skateboard wheels hit fresh graffiti, the surface would get slick and you’d slide. Sometimes this was fun. Sometimes, it was painful. We told Razorcake photographer Dan Monick about the spot—an abandoned pool cut into the high-priced hills of the LA suburbs, weeds and new growth taking over when a house had once stood and burned down, everything east to Riverside visible on clear days. Dan wanted to come with us and take photos. The spot was as picturesque as Dan pictured it, and he started snapping right away. Unfortunately for him, he expected Todd and me to be like those X Games skaters. The only time we caught any air, it was accidental and ended with a splat. Not great for photographs. Lucky for Dan, two other skaters showed up midway through the session. One of them was pretty amazing. He performed feats worthy of Dan’s camera.

We skated Jungle Bowl for a few months. I tried and tried without success to get enough momentum to carve above the pool light. I found a line that would get me just below it. Before I could find that new, perfect line, local high school kids started partying out at Jungle Bowl on weekends. Cops started noticing. The property owners repaired the break in the fence. They posted no trespassing signs. The cops added the spot to their regular patrols. Rumors circulated about skaters getting arrested. Jungle Bowl was a bust. We started heading to city skate parks.

Don taught me how to drop in at the San Dimas skate park. He taught me to power slide at the skate park in Whittier.

By this time, Razorcake was up and running a little more regularly. Money wasn’t quite as tight. We had a little leeway with regards to ad space in Razorcake, so we started making trades with Mike at Beer City Skateboards. I got a Duane Peters deck, wide trucks, new wheels, the works. I passed the deck that Don had given me on to Razorcake illustrator Art Fuentes. In that way, he joined Team Donofthedead.

For a while there, it seemed like I was spending a fair amount of time with Team Donofthedead. We hit a number of parks from Pico Rivera to Montalvo. The city of Duarte put in a new park right alongside the 210, and we explored a little less and skated there a little more. We spent a lot of time at the Whittier park, too, because Art lived around the corner from there.

Don was a little less stoked about the parks. He liked the hidden skate spots. One weekend, he and some friends hit an abandoned pool somewhere on the west side. He took a nasty spill and landed on his back. The next weekend, Don and I skated the park in Brea. Don took one spin around the bowl and decided to sit out the rest of the session. I took my turns, but mostly hung out and chatted with Don. He kept talking about the spill he’d taken. His back was still hurting from it. A week later, he had to have back surgery. His skating days were over.

Todd, Art, and I talked about this a few weekends later at Whittier: Todd with Don’s old trucks and wheels under his deck; Art with Don’s old deck and wheels; me with Don’s old knee pads and shoes. It was a sad moment. It was the real beginning of the end.

The skate park in Upland is gnarly. It has a huge half-pipe going into a full pipe and ending in a bowl. You can drop in from the top or roll in from a four-foot-high ledge. I’d been having a good day rolling in from the ledge and riding the half pipe into the full into the bowl and back. Then, this old guy came along and started tearing shit up. He made dropping in from the top look so easy. I couldn’t resist.

Just before dropping in, I said to Art, “I don’t know why I’m trying this. It doesn’t matter if I can do it. It does matter if I break my arm.”

Art smiled.

I dropped in. It worked. I carved up and down the half pipe and thought, damn, this is fucking awesome. I made it into the full pipe with way too much speed. My trucks started wobbling. I tried an ill-advised power slide while about twelve feet up a wall, ended up taking the short cut to the ground and snapping a wrist bone in half.

Before my cast was off, Art blew out his knee at Whittier. Before Art could walk again, Todd broke his leg in two or three places at the park in Glendale. Team Donofthedead was done for.

Now, when I think about the early days of Razorcake, I think a lot about Team Donofthedead. I think about it mostly when I ride home from work and pass the new onramp, where a retention ditch has a road that runs alongside a bank paved into a hill. It looks like another Paul Revere carved alongside the freeway. I sometimes spend the last five miles of my commute imagining Team Donofthedead climbing the fence and riding that ditch in a world where cops won’t kick us out and our bones and tendons are young enough to take the impact.

These days, I mostly go surfing alone. Maybe it’s not quite as fun, but wipeouts are way more forgiving.

Author’s note: This is the sixth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #50.  For more information about the collection, read this post.

Photograph from Razorcake #10 by Dan Monick

With five minutes left to go in class, the principal came on the loudspeaker to tell everyone that a rocket had exploded, releasing a poisonous gas cloud. No one was allowed to leave their classroom until the poisonous cloud passed. So there I was – perhaps the world’s most reluctant junior high school teacher – stuck with thirty-five twelve-year-olds, waiting for a poisonous gas cloud to pass. Since there were only five minutes left in class, all of our classwork for the day was done. Since I was a first-year teacher in a horribly under-funded school, I didn’t have my own classroom. I roamed from one classroom to another during the day, bringing whatever books and supplies I could carry. This meant that, in case of emergency, I had no back-up materials: no games for the kids to play, no books with stories that I could read to the kids, no movies to show. Just to aggravate matters even more, when the poisonous gas cloud showed up, I was teaching in a football coach’s classroom. He had no back-up plan either. He once told me, “When kids get bored and act up in class, just make them do jumping jacks. It tires the little bastards out.”

The only thing I had going for me when the gas cloud floated overhead (and on any other day that I taught junior high, for that matter) was that I was big and mean-looking. I kept my head shaved pretty close to the scalp and I wore Doc Martens to school every day and a few of my students had seen me at an all-ages US Bombs show earlier in the semester, going nuts in the pit and doing shots with Duane Peters, and those students told everyone in the school about it. So I wouldn’t say that the students feared or respected me, but I could occasionally intimidate them.

The principal had said that the gas cloud would pass in forty minutes or so, so I figured I’d just move on to the next day’s assignment. I stood up and told the students to quiet down and open their books. I opened my planning book and glanced down at my lesson plans for the next day. Prepositions. Jesus, I thought, as boring as grammar normally is, this may be the most boring part of it. I launched into the assignment anyway, talking about how a preposition is anything you can do _____ a cloud. You know: in a cloud, underneath a cloud, surrounded by a cloud, etc. – which probably wasn’t the best way to explain it, what with the poisonous gas cloud above us. I talked for a couple of minutes, then asked one student to give me an example of a preposition. He said, “Who cares?”

“No, ‘who cares?’ is an interrogative statement,” I said. “Who can give me an example of a preposition?”

Stacy, a pretty intelligent smartass, raised her hand. I gambled that she might actually be taking a shot at the question and said, “Yes, Stacy?”

“Are we going to die?” Stacy asked.

“You’re getting closer,” I said, undaunted and acting naïve. “‘To’ is a preposition, but not in that sentence. When you say, ‘Are we going to die?’, the ‘to’ in that sentence is half of the verb form, ‘to die’, which is actually an infinitive. Who can use ‘to’ as a preposition?”

Stacy’s friend Kia raised her hand, and though I felt like it was futile, I called on her anyway.

“Are we gonna die, Mr. Carswell?” Kia asked. And when Kia asked the question, it changed everything. Because I knew Stacy was just trying to stir up some shit, but Kia was genuinely scared. And Kia had every right to be scared. There was a poisonous gas cloud floating by outside, and the only thing that separated inside from outside was the quarter-inch-thick glass windows. The windows were shut. They were sort of weather proof. Not a whole lot of poisonous gas could creep in, but still. Some poisons are pretty strong. It doesn’t take a whole lot to fuck you up.

As I thought these thoughts and weighed the options of what type of gas this might have been and how far away the rocket had been when it exploded and how real this danger really was, the absurdity of my whole situation struck me. All of these kids were freaked out by the cloud, and I was trying to teach them about prepositions. I closed my book. “I’ll tell you what,” I said to the class. “Take out a sheet of paper and write about this cloud that’s passing over us. Write about what you think it is, and why you think it’s up there, and what you think of Kennedy Space Center taking chances with your life by sending a rocket full of poisonous gas up into the air above us.”

Most of the kids took out a sheet of paper and started writing. I sat back down at my desk, keeping an eye on the kids and thinking about rockets. At the time, I was living in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which is the town I where I was born. One town over from Cocoa Beach is Merritt Island. That’s where I grew up. And on the north side of Merritt Island is Kennedy Space Center, which is where, among other things, scientists designed the rockets that went to the moon. So I grew up with rockets. They were nothing new to me. When I was a baby, my mom would carry me out to the front yard so we could watch the Apollo rockets head to the moon. As soon as I could walk, I’d go out to the front yard on my own to watch the rockets. After I learned to read, I started reading the newspapers on the day of a launch. I’d memorize the crews’ names and their missions and which rocket it was: Apollo or Skylab or the Columbia Space Shuttle. I’d even read up on the test launches and satellites. I tried to learn about everything that the Space Center fired up in the air. Of course, by the time I was twelve or so and my hormones kicked in, I’d completely lost interest in rockets. And, yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments about rockets just being an extension of men’s penises, or a metaphor for man’s desire to stick his dick into everything, even outer space, but by the time I was in junior high, the only penis I cared about was my own. So I stopped thinking about rockets and stopped going outside to watch them shoot up into the air and started focusing more attention on girls.

I looked across the classroom at my students. About half of them were busy writing on their papers. The other half had given up on the assignment, but they weren’t misbehaving yet. I watched Kia, who was kind of a punker in the sense that she wore black t-shirts a lot and dyed her hair crazy colors and was a free-thinker (well, for a twelve-year-old), but was mostly not a punker in the sense that her favorite band was No Doubt. The combination of her blue hair and the rocket that had just blown up reminded me of Angie Huber, a punker girl who I’d dated for about a week in junior high. Angie’s stepfather, a guy named Fred Haise, had been an astronaut. I only knew this because Angie’s mom always made a big deal about it. She’d always say his first and last name together, even though he was her husband, like everyone should know who Fred Haise was. According to Angie, though, he was just an asshole. The one time I met him, I could see her point. Not that he really did anything all that bad. He just criticized Angie a lot and looked mean when he did it. But Fred Haise had been on the Apollo 13 mission. He was one of the guys who had been in the rocket when they supposedly reported back to Mission Control, “Houston, we have a problem.” Then, of course, they made a Tom Hanks movie about the Apollo 13 mission, but I didn’t see the movie, and I never really did give much of a shit about Fred Haise. I did give a shit about Angie, though. I gave a shit about any girl who was goodly enough to make out with me behind some school busses when we were thirteen. I sat at the front of that classroom and thought about Angie and wondered what ever happened to her and if she still hated her stepdad and what she thought of that Tom Hanks movie.

I couldn’t do this for long, though, because the poisonous gas cloud was still floating over us, and most of my students had given up on their writing assignment. They were gradually working themselves up. It started with a few students talking quietly at their desk. I never did much to stop this, and I was too busy thinking about Angie, anyway, to stop anything. The talking got louder as they tried to hear themselves over the other voices talking. I made idle threats about sending them outside into the poisonous gas cloud if they didn’t shut up. My heart wasn’t into my threat, though, and the kids sensed it. They kept talking, and when it got too loud for them to hear the person who was three seats away and talking to them, they started to leave their seats and walk around. This was the point where, as a teacher, I was supposed to stand up and do something. Shut the kids up and stick them back in their seats. But I didn’t do anything. I’d always stopped them before they got to this point, and I was curious to see how far they would go. Pretty soon, more than half of my students were out of their seats and walking around, chatting with each other. Their voices echoed off the concrete walls of the classroom, and it almost seemed like a party. A few students even walked up to my desk to chat with me. I asked them if they’d seen Apollo 13. They said that they had, so I told them about Angie Huber.

“Which one was Fred Haise?” Laura – one of my pets – asked me. “Was he Tom Hanks or Kevin Bacon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see the movie.”

“I think he was the other guy,” said Travis, another of my students. “I think Fred Haise was the funny looking one.”

“The one with the wife and the little baby?” Laura asked.

“I think so. Maybe not,” Travis said, and he was about to explain why Fred Haise might not have been the funny looking one when two kids started fighting in the back of the classroom.

I watched the two kids go at it, but didn’t do anything. Laura pointed out the obvious by saying, “Mr. Carswell, Billy and Glenton are fighting.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. I thought about getting out of my seat, walking across the room, and breaking up the fight, but decided instead to let it go. Billy had been asking to get his ass kicked for the past couple of weeks, and Glenton’s mom was a hooker. I figured it would do Billy some good to be humbled and it would do Glenton some good to let out some of his rage. Besides that, there was a fucking poisonous gas cloud outside. Deep down inside, I felt like all bets were off. I felt like, if society’s gotten to the point where Kennedy Space Center is sending poisonous gas into outer space in one of those great, big, explosive hunks of metal that they call a rocket, and if that explodes and that gas floats over me and the junior high school where I teach, and if the best thing they can do after sending that gas cloud over my hometown is to say, “Uh, you guys need to stay inside for a half hour until it passes,” then, obviously, this society has no rules. So fuck it all. Let ‘em fight.

The kids gathered around the fight, but no one stepped in to break it up. Glenton wrestled Billy to the ground and his fists rained down on Billy’s face. Billy managed to cover his face with his forearms. Glenton whaled on Billy’s forearms and ears and the side of Billy’s head. A few girls told me that I had to stop the fight. One girl started crying. Some of the boys cheered for Glenton or encouraged Billy. Most of the boys just watched. They seemed hesitant, as if they didn’t know whether or not they should stop the fight. Still, I did nothing. I let them fight. Part of me thought that surely another teacher would hear the commotion, rush into my classroom, and break up the fight. But, of course, that couldn’t happen because no teachers could leave their rooms and come into mine because there was a poisonous gas cloud floating through the halls.

Then, something strange happened. It was almost like a realization spread across the room. I think it started with Glenton. I think Glenton was on top of Billy, pounding his fists into Billy’s head and getting really tired when Glenton realized that I wasn’t going to stop the fight. And if I wasn’t going to stop it, no one was. And if no one was going to stop the fight, what was gonna happen now that he was too tired to punch Billy anymore? What was Billy gonna do? And if no one breaks up a fight, how does the fight end? I think Glenton realized this because he stopped punching Billy, got up, walked to his desk, and sat down. Billy stood up, too. His face was bright red and his hair and back were covered with dirt and debris. A paper clip clung to his cheek. He didn’t go anywhere for a few seconds. He just stood there, taking deep breaths. Then he, too, went back to his seat and sat down. The rest of the kids just stood around, not talking, not doing anything. Just standing there. Gradually, they all sat down, too. I can’t really explain it. Maybe they reached the end of their rebellion, and they had nowhere to go but back to the beginning. Or maybe I scared them by not breaking up the fight. Maybe they realized that, with the freedom to do whatever you want comes the responsibility to respect others, or else those others might kick your ass. Or maybe the fight just wore them all out like so many jumping jacks.

When they were all in their seats, Kia raised her hand again and finally asked the question they all should’ve asked right from the beginning. She said, “Mr. Carswell, if it’s so dangerous to everyone, why do they put poisonous gas in rockets?”

“Because the people at the Space Center – and the US government, too – take a lot of chances with our lives,” I said.

Kia nodded. She seemed to want to ask me more, but she didn’t. Justin picked up where she left off and said, “What do you mean?”

“Kennedy Space Center does all kinds of crazy stuff,” I said. “Have you guys ever heard of the Cassini Space Probes?” A few students shook their heads, so I explained that it was a rocket with plutonium in it. The class didn’t know what plutonium was, so I told them that it’s a radioactive substance. I also explained how dangerous it was for KSC to put a radioactive substance in a metal container on top of tons of very explosive fuel, then to set that fuel on fire. I explained how it was very different from, say, launching a nuclear missile, but the mechanics of the Cassini Space Probe and the mechanics of a nuclear bomb weren’t all that different.

Another student raised her hand. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought the Space Center just made the shuttle and stuff?”

“Oh no,” I told her. “Mostly what the Space Center makes is bombs.” This seemed to interest the kids even more than Glenton and Billy’s fight did, so I decided to go on that tangent. I told them that rockets were first made by the Nazis in World War Two so that they could kill a lot of people from a long way away. And that the top two Nazi scientists who developed the rocket bombs, Werner Von Braun and Dieter Huzel, came to America after World War Two and headed up the space program. I told them about all the different weapons they developed out at the Space Center, like various Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, nuclear submarines, and the SCUD missiles that the US Army used to kill a bunch of non-violent Iraqi civilians. And I just kept going. I was all worked up, partly because of that damn poisonous gas cloud, and partly because I hated the whole idea of the Space Center. It killed me that I had only two real employment opportunities in my hometown. I could either take a shitty job in an under-funded school, making lousy money and struggling to teach thirty-five twelve-year-olds about prepositions; or I could go out to the Space Center, where I would get paid twice as much to develop more efficient ways to kill as many people as possible from as far away as possible.

I knew that most of my students’ parents worked for the Space Center, and that I’d probably get into a lot of trouble when these kids went home and told their parents what I’d said in class. But I didn’t care. I figured that people who dump a poisonous gas cloud on their kids’ heads don’t have a lot of room to complain. So I went on and on about the problems with bombs and rockets and missile defense programs, and, for once, my students really listened to me. Not one single student talked while I talked. No one passed notes or kicked the kid in front of him or put trash from a spiral notebook into a young girl’s hair. They just sat there and listened and actually learned something useful.

Finally, the principal came back on the loudspeaker and told us that the poisonous gas cloud had passed. We were all allowed to leave our classrooms and go outside. I stopped talking and a few of my students actually groaned because they wanted to hear me slander the Space Center even more. I packed up my stuff, too, and got ready to head off to my next classroom and to teach my next group of kids. As I did this, I watched my students file out. And I thought, damn, these kids would be good students if the Space Center threatened to kill them every day of their lives.

Author’s note: This is the fifth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote.  It originally ran in Razorcake #10.  For more information about the collection, read this post.