How Did It Get To This?
“Alright everybody, look at the overhead, copy it. Then we’ll talk about it. It’s a preview for next week.” Desks and chairs scraped across the floor as students walked, barreled, or tumbled in for fifth period history. Lunch has ended and the sugar highs from cheap snacks and energy drinks kick in. “Look at the overhead, copy it, you know the drill.” I wandered around the hot, second floor bungalow classroom, repeating myself with slight variations every several seconds for the next wave of students, some yelling, some lost in their own world and every other kind in between.
Students copying notes from an overhead projector worked better than anything I’d tried for the beginning of a class. A lot of academically bad students are happy to copy. It’s a physical activity which requires a minimum of thought, and it produces something of value. It also kept them preoccupied while their heart rates slowed, and they cooled off. October in Los Angeles could still be hot.
Several minutes after the bell rang, Emilio, seated to the right of the projector, was having trouble getting engaged with the task. Instead of copying, he laughed in an exaggerated, horse-braying manner at insults he hurled around the room at other, smaller boys. Emilio stood close to five foot nine inches, one hundred sixty pounds. Shaved head.
“Hey, Emilio,” I said, as I glided toward his desk. “You’re not that funny, and the work we’re doing isn’t that hard. If I cleared some space for you, I just bet you can show us something.” I slid his backpack from in front of him to the side of his desk. But an unzipped flap fell open, spilling about a dozen papers, pencils, and one Sharpie – a tool of the trade for a tagger – onto the floor.
“Ah, shh –"
“You asshole!” he shouted.
He bolted out of his seat, grabbed his backpack, and shoved it into my chest.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Emi -” I got a hold of both his upper arms and walked him backwards toward the rear of the classroom and away from desks. The backpack fell to the floor. I let go of one of his arms and he took a wild swing at me. I caught his arm instead and spun him around so that his back was to me. “Emilio! Stop!”
“I got asthma! Get your fuckin’ hands off me!”
He dug his fingernails into my right hand, jerked an arm free, then swung back over his head and caught me square on the nose and mouth with his fist. He then started stomping wildly, striking my feet a couple of times. White-hot rage jolted through me. I grabbed his free arm and modified my grip. Then I swung my right leg wide to the left and came back hard with it. My right shoe struck the side of his left one, knocking both feet out from under him.
I grabbed his shirt collar with one hand, his belt buckle with the other. He floated sideways. For one long surreal moment, I held him out in front of me, parallel to the floor. A chair tipped over. A sheet of paper fluttered through the air like a dead leaf in autumn.
Time slowed, then stopped. What a picture. How did it get to this?
# # #
I got into teaching because I ran out of time to do anything else. My curse was the inability to focus on what I was good at until it was too late to matter.
I didn’t get serious about acting – our reason for moving to Los Angeles – until Jeneva was pregnant with the twins in 1991. She developed several symptoms of high-risk pregnancies: toxemia, pre-term labor, and discordant fetal growth. She was on strict bed rest for the final three months of the pregnancy and hospitalized the month before the Caesarean. Twins Sheridan and Miranda were born five weeks early. After three weeks in the hospital, we were allowed to take them home. They were normal, healthy, an absolute joy.
Like many former, future, and failed actors, I was a limousine driver. I drove upwards of seventy thousand miles a year. Some guys were grinding close to eighty thousand. The car lease was for three years, with a balloon payment at the end. Then I owned it, free and clear – a late model Lincoln Town car that looked good from a distance. The odometer read close to a quarter million miles. The driver’s seat looked a lot more mashed in than the others. Power windows heaved and groaned from the ravages of time.
The company paid drivers on a 1099 basis, which meant no tax withholdings and giving the illusion of higher income. We were chronically behind with taxes; at our house, April fifteenth meant it was time to file an extension before twelve midnight.
When the kids were in kindergarten, I started competing in a short track speed skating club. Old style speed skating involved two guys skating around a long track and racing the clock more than each other. This new style took place in an area identical in size to a hockey rink. Up to six skaters raced in a counterclockwise direction with hard left turns, body contact, and the occasional wall hit at close to thirty miles per hour. The skate blades were several inches longer than the skate boot, and sharp enough to cut skin.
During a competition one January, I came out of a turn, slipped, and fell. I skidded on my butt toward the cushioned wall with both skate blades leading the way.
The cushions were designed to soften a collision with the wall, but there’s a downside. If there’d been no cushions, my blades would have skipped across the Lexan safety glass. Instead, I hit the cushions blades first, snagging my right leg for a moment while the rest of me slid on by. I felt a click in my right lower leg. Or was it two clicks? Most lower leg injuries are twisted ankles or the foot rolling under while switching directions. That’s bad enough. Mine went in the opposite direction, snapping outward and away from the rest of my leg, not inward. Yet, there was no pain. Adrenaline. I tried to stand up, and my leg buckled. I tried again, stupidly, just to be sure.
The action stopped and the gawkers descended. I waved off an ambulance offer. Several skaters helped me off the ice and out to the car. After practically falling into the front seat, I taught myself to drive without a working right leg, using the left one for both gas and brake pedal.
Veering the Lincoln down our Long Beach street, I decided to back it into our inclined driveway, putting the driver’s side closer to the front porch. The tires squealed as I spun them in reverse, my left leg still getting the feel of the gas pedal. I opened the door, slowly stood up on one leg while bracing myself on the door frame, and then hopped across a few feet of yard and up two steps to the porch.
I called Jeneva. She left work early and ran in the door while I lay on the kitchen floor, thawing out frozen vegetables on my lower leg.
“Oh my God, is it broken? And where are the girls?”
“Nah. They’re over at Kim’s.”
Jeneva drove me to an urgent care clinic for a set of x-rays. A doctor walked in, put the x-rays on a screen, and pointed to both of my lower leg bones. He smiled sympathetically. “Mr. Riley, in your lower leg, you have a tibia – this one. And you have a fibula – this one. I’m afraid you broke both of them. This is a tib-fib fracture.”
I stared at the x-ray. “Where? I don’t see it. Everything’s straight.”
He looked at Jeneva with a what’s-wrong-with-your-husband kind of look. “You see this little abnormality here,” he said, tapping the screen, “and then on this bone, you see a dark spot. It’s fairly easy to fix, but it will involve surgery. We’ll need to wait a week until the swelling subsides.” He explained that if this were thirty years earlier, before routine screw-and-rod fracture surgery, I’d have a cast clear up to my groin – a nice, heavy, smelly plaster cast.
Jeneva wheeled me out to the car and we drove home in silence. Both of us were in a mild shock, deluding ourselves by making plans for the next few days, when the reality was, I’d be off the road for five to six weeks. Because of the relative painlessness of the injury, I still wondered why I couldn’t just wrap it tight and put on a walking cast. Surgery? Crutches? Weeks of recovery? We could go broke. Worse than broke.
An elderly neighbor across the street loaned me a wheelchair for what became my preferred mode of travel within the house. I started experiencing the wish to go to sleep when not even sleepy. Being unconscious put everything off for a few hours. Waking up was dreadful because it started all over again. Bills, phone calls, wheeling laps around the inside of the house, with lots of time to review.
The first thing to go: a 1977 Camaro I’d bought the previous summer. Both front fenders, both doors, and both quarter panels were dented. But it had a roll cage, racing seat, wheels, tires, and a number painted on the sides. For a track ready car, it wasn’t a bad deal. What’s seven hundred and fifty bucks when we’re in the red for fifty grand? As the new owner hauled it away, I reflected on my racing career. It consisted of firing the car up a handful of times and smoking up the back yard.
Sitting in a wheelchair and realizing the Camaro had been a big toy that couldn’t be driven on the road, couldn’t be insured, would cost a set of tires every time it was raced, and nobody else could ever drive it – unless Jeneva got the racing bug – was as if I had an IV stuck in my arm dripping in concentrated doses of clarity of just how stupid I’d been.
Somewhere between the two snaps of my leg and the ruthless phone ringing, the allure of teaching hit. If I’d been a teacher, a paycheck would’ve been deposited into our bank account while I recuperated. Spring break would be just three months away. Two months after that, summer.
