Year Ten

A Memoir of Biblical Proportions

            by Jacob Rubin

 

            One day, my friend Joaquin ran up to me holding a Bible. He’s Jewish.

            “Dude, look what I got! I stole it from a hotel room.”

            I looked at it. “Dude, they leave those things there for you to take. Some family does it.”

            “The Gideons, yeah.” He had done his research. “Gavin, Donnie and I have this idea. We’re going to, like, rip up the pages and draw decapitated Jesus and all this crazy fucked-up shit and send it back to them. You wanna?”

            I didn’t. “Sure. Um… when?”

            “Whenever. I don’t know. I’ve got plans for this thing.” Rarely did Joaquin stick with anything. Many of his crazy ideas about rebellion were based on religion, and these were the shortest lasting. I blamed the heavy metal music.

            “Great. Keep me in the loop.” I went to class.

 

            For the ninth and tenth grades, I went to Oakland School for the Arts, located centrally in homicide-ridden downtown Oakland. I have often referred to this place as a cesspool of deceit and unoriginality, but that’s just because I like to use the word “cesspool”. Honestly, it’s just a school that’s being run in all the wrong ways and has sent away more students than it has taken in. The regime has changed significantly since my tenure there, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s still a crapshack of a place.

            Ninth grade sucked. I was in an arts emphasis I didn’t want to be in, and most of my friends complained about the school instead of doing homework. Nothing noteworthy happened during ninth grade, so I’ll ignore it.

            Tenth grade also sucked, but less so. As stated, most of my friends hated the school and therefore left at the end of the year. I had to make new friends, and I fell into the arms of a group of upperclassmen (it was a new school, and we were the second class, so there was only one grade above us) who only sort of knew me the year before and now had more time to respect me as a person besides the awkwardly tall ninth grader who was left of the pissed off Jewish musicians. I was neither pissed off nor a musician. Okay, a little pissed off. Gavin and Joaquin were two of them, both, ironically, pissed off musicians, though Joaquin, a short, shaggy-haired cad with a big schnozz and tight jeans, was there for visual arts. That didn’t stop him from being a ridiculously mad-fast metal drummer. Gavin, who was as tall as Joaquin was short, but had the same dark, neck-length hair that got in his beady eyes, brooded and played guitar.

            For tenth grade, I was allowed to switch out of my previous arts emphasis, Theater Production and Design. TDP (we abbreviated it as that even though we spelled it out was Theater Production and Design. No one knew why, but no one questioned it) would have been cool if I was allowed to, I don’t know, design something. Maybe. They let me switch into Literary Arts, or “Writing”. We weren’t allowed to call it “Writing”. It wasn’t artsy enough. That was where I met Crazy Donnie.

            Crazy Donnie was crazy. He actually might have been a sociopath, if he’s still alive. A late addition to the class, joining in mid-October, his actions at OSA were only borderline vandalism, (smearing gum in the carpets, yelling at people through the windows, throwing rocks at cars) but he was capable of more, and worse. Somehow, he had gotten into the Literary Arts department, though I remember being very underwhelmed by his writing. It may have been that he wrote more than a few stories about me, and in many of them, I was portrayed as a serious doofus. Overall, I didn’t like the kid, but I think he thought we were buddies. He’d always be talking to me during class, often nearly getting me in trouble, but he remained completely oblivious to the squawking teachers. The odds are slim that I’ll ever know what he thought for sure, since he was absolutely, off-the-wall, cannot-be-contained crazy.

            Example. Once I was writing something down during Poetry class. He came over and yanked the pencil out of my hand, then snapped it in half, cackling. (He had a distinct cackle, one that started as one strong laugh, and then dwindled to smaller, rapid-fire giggles.) I didn’t even have to say anything; the look on my face was enough to let him know I was annoyed. His expression of glee switched to anger. “FINE!” he shouted. He stamped in his steel-toed boots across the room to his backpack, where he fished out a handful of various writing implements. “TAKE them!” he cried, and he flung the pens and pencils at me from the other side of the room. Nervously, I scooped up each and every one, and put them in my backpack. I used them until the end of the year. After that, they all mysteriously vanished. Also, Donnie carried an ice pick, and he sure as hell wasn’t using it to chip at ice.

            Remarkably, Joaquin became friends with Donnie, as did Gavin, to a lesser extent. Joaquin understood how reckless Donnie was. There was something Joaquin told me happened when he was at Donnie’s house that stuck with me. I’ll do my best to tell it in his voice.

            “Dude, I was at Donnie’s house yesterday. We were sittin’ around listening to some of that psychobilly shit he’s always talking about and I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is shit.’ I’d brought some of my Maiden albums and I hella wanted to ‘Number of the Beast’, and we were gonna, but I saw my mom parking outside with my sister. Then I turned to fuckin’ tell Donnie my mom was outside, and he had a fuckin’ joint in his mouth. I mean, my mom’s, like, liberal and shit, but she doesn’t, like, like pot. So I’m all ‘Donnie, what the fuck?’ and he’s ignoring me until the doorbell rings. Then he fuckin’ started spazzing out and sprayin’ deodorant all over the place, and he was like, ‘Say it’s incense, man. Say it’s incense.’ I’m all ‘Whatever’ and I opened the door and we left without a fuss or whatever. But dude, the second, the fuckin’ second we get in the car and the doors are closed, my sister says, ‘Wow, it smelled like someone was trying to cover up marijuana in there.’ Man, I fuckin’ dodged a bullet. Oh, and we’re hanging out again on Friday, if you wanna come.”

 

Donnie didn’t hit his peak in his destructive ability until early April. Clue one was an announcement over the loudspeakers.

            “Attention students. All male students please report to the Big Top. Thank you.”

            (Oh, I left out something. See, the entire school was a system of portables in the parking lot across the street from the Oakland Ice Center. Every portable was identical in every way, and if they didn’t have little plaques telling you the room, you wouldn’t find anything. We were forbidden from trying to decorate and distinguish them from each other. But we couldn’t perform in these dinky things, and we needed a stage for performances and all-school meetings, so a crew of incredibly lethargic workers was hired to build a large, white, circus tent on top of a huge asphalt mound they needed for earthquake safety. The entire project took about four months, since there were some union rules that dictated the few days the construction workers were allowed to work. If they had hired roadies, it would have been up in half a day, and we’d have lasers and fireworks. Once complete, it looked like it was “ribbed for her pleasure”. We expected them to call this monstrosity something normal like the “Auditorium”, or the “Performance Center”, but they decided to be whimsical, and they called it the Big Top. It’s a strange place.)

            We were perplexed. What did every male student in the school have in common? Were they going to give us a Powerpoint presentation about our changing bodies? As I walked with Joaquin and Gavin, predictably, we loudly mused our few thoughts on the subject. It took ten seconds before the discussion completely deteriorated into imitations of the principal, Mr. Berry, telling us what erections meant. It was made oh-so-much funnier by the fact that he’s a pretty religious guy, and had the school’s Vocal Music department perform at churches and other Christian events. It was unsecular, sure, but what were we going to do about it?

            By the time all the students had entered the tent, there was a new feeling in the room. We had a required assembly every Wednesday, but this was different from all of those. There was a different sort of energy. There were only dudes. This might not seem huge, but the school is 70 percent female. I always had trouble finding a seat on Wednesdays, but the entire male population of the school only filled four or five rows, and that’s when we were all crammed in the center section. The tent seemed massive. And still, no one had any idea what was going on. That didn’t last long.
            Mr. Berry took the stage after about five minutes of watching us wait. He’s a shortish man; he often commented on my height and cleverly told me multiple times to “knock it off”. His head was encased in an enormous mane of dreadlocks and had a little mustache-beard thing I’ve never been able to classify as being a specific style. The very first thing he said as he took the stage was that the bathroom had been vandalized. It was the bathroom near all the English portables, and arguably the one that receives the most traffic (the English classes were terrible, and people would take the opportunity to go to the bathroom any chance they got). He didn’t go into much detail about what exactly happened, but that didn’t matter to me. I had seen it shortly before the assembly. It was devastated. The sinks were filled to the brim with wet paper towels and toilet paper. One of the walls to the toilet stalls had been knocked over. The divider between the urinals had been ripped off the wall and was on the floor, and it looked like it had been peed on. And the leftmost urinal had a big crack on the bottom, a crack that looked like it was made with a steel-toed boot.

            I tuned in and out for most of the assembly, but I remember Mr. Berry said he would be offering a cash reward for any information if the perpetrator didn’t turn himself in by the end of the week. This wasn’t ethical, sure, but nothing they did at this place was based off ethics. I considered turning Donnie in, but he confessed out of shame, shame I didn’t know he had, at the end of the day. They suspended him for two weeks and made him apologize to the school at his next Wednesday assembly. He did all this willingly, but he never let that little sneer drop from his face. He did what he wanted to do. He proved to the administration and to the whole school that he was a badass’ badass, and he couldn’t be contained. They could do whatever they wanted to him, but he would leave it stronger, smarter, and angrier. If he put even a fifth of this commitment to his schoolwork, he’d be valedictorian, and all the pressure he received from being a social derelict would have been washed away. But he refused, and commenced his little acts of terror, pouring immense amounts of glitter on teacher’s phones and opening up the ceiling to put the crappy school lunches inside, getting away with every single endeavor. I’d never say this to his face, but he was brilliant, and he was danger.

            Something else happened after Donnie came back from his suspension, a few days after his apology. I remember because it was around my birthday. I was planning a small shindig, and Gavin had agreed to bring his foosball table.

            On this particular day, I was sitting in the Newspaper class I had been shoved into, being in the Literary Arts department, trying to think of a story that didn’t suck. That’s when an announcement came on over the loudspeaker. All male students were to report to the Big Top again. No one knew why this time, either.

            We learned quickly. There was no beating around the bush. Mr. Berry was on stage when we entered, and we entered in silence. The bathroom near the administrative offices had been vandalized. I didn’t see this one, as they caught it about an hour after the crime had been done. He told us that pages from the Bible were stuffed in the toilets and sinks, and the toilets were flooding. More pages were spread out on the floor and looked like they had been peed on, but the urine was probably already there. The cover to the Bible was hanging out of the trash can. A cash reward was offered for anyone with any kind of information if no one confessed by the end of the day.

            Once dismissed I looked for Gavin and Joaquin so we could laugh about what kind of a moron would do this so soon after Donnie had come back, but I couldn’t find them. They had already run off to confess.

 

            For the rest of the day, there was no class. Teachers were teaching, students were sitting in their assigned seats, but for us, the small group of Gavin and Joaquin’s friends, there was no class. We just sat around the administrative office and waited for news, talking about what morons everyone was. Jennah, Gavin’s girlfriend, was crying, and everyone else looked pretty sad, but I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t sympathize with these guys. When we heard Mr. Berry was trying his damndest to get them arrested, I got mad, and when police cars showed up on campus, making it seem like he was winning, I got madder, but that wasn’t what I thought I was supposed to feel. I pretty much went through the motions of sympathy, and I thought it would change when we saw Gavin and Joaquin leaving the office, but their parents were right behind them, and they just kept going, giving us a slight glance and a wave, as they went through the gates and away. Jennah burst into tears. I didn’t talk to them for a week. I wasn’t mad at them, I just didn’t have their numbers, and they weren’t getting on AIM, so they might as well have been dead. Oh, and they were suspended, so face time was out of the question.

            There was quite a meeting of the minds when they got back. They had gotten their off-campus lunch privileges taken away, so we had our lunch in a circle by the music portables and ate in almost absolute silence for the first half hour. Eventually, Joaquin decided it was enough and said something.

            “Man, fuck this place.”

            There was a small chorus of “Yeah, yeah, fuck this place,” but this wasn’t the conversation I wanted to have. No one was willing to take a stab at the elephant in the room, so I whipped out my totally non-sexual poking stick and took a jab.

            “Um… so… uh… not that I disrespect your attempt to, um, stick it to the man, but, uh… why?”

            Joaquin snorted, and Gavin burst out laughing. Gavin turned to me, pointing his bagel at me like it was talking for him.

            “We talked about this all week. We have no fucking idea.”

            Joaquin wiped his brow. “I think… I think it was because we were pissed at the administration for what they did to Donnie. We didn’t want them to go, like, without some punishment, you know?”

            “Right,” Gavin replied. “We were thinking… it wasn’t fair, yeah? They made him apologize to the whole fuckin’ school for meaningless shit. Anywhere else, that would have been kept quiet and he’d get his ramming up the ass like he fuckin’ deserves, right? But they had to fuckin’ humiliate him, man. That’s bullshit.”

            “Man, fuck this place.”

            “Yeah. So we were like, let’s kick ‘em in the nuts. Let’s show ‘em not to fuck wit him anymore. Let’s… let’s, like, mock religion. And Joaquin had that Bible in his bag, so…”

            “So we went from there. Seriously, we came up with this idea and did it in about ten minutes. Now I can’t mail it to the Gideons.”

            “Shit, we shoulda taken pictures.”

            “Dude, that woulda been hella tight.”

            “But,” I interjected. “… what did you think that was going to do?”

            “What did we… for Christ’s sake, pay attention.” Gavin set down his bagel and leaned in close. “Dude, you can’t tell yet?” I shook my head. “We’re fucking dumbasses.”

 

            Joaquin and Gavin stopped hanging out with Donnie after that. That period was over. They were no longer as violent or as angry. They were still exponentially angrier than the normal person, but they were doing a lot better. Joaquin went weeks at a time without breaking one of his paintings over his knee because it “sucked”, and Gavin brushed the hair out of his eyes sometimes. I got the feeling Gavin wouldn’t really miss Donnie, since Donnie did attempt to date Gavin’s sister way back when he first came to the school, (she was a freshman) but at least three of Gavin’s other friends had tried to date here, so that probably wasn’t even connected. However, just because they weren’t talking to Donnie didn’t mean he wasn’t talking to them. If he wasn’t in class, he would be harassing Joaquin or Gavin while they tried to work, until he got frustrated that they weren’t paying attention to him, broke something, cackled, and stomped off to the other one. I, thankfully, was immune, since we were in the same class, and to bother me, he’d have to show up. It’s great how these things worked out.

            The rest of the year went by quietly. Donnie came out of the closet, bleached his hair, and started wearing super-tight leopard-spotted pants you could see his testes through. He retracted his statement about five months later, saying he was “trying something”. Joaquin retreated even deeper into the warm arms of death metal, and he wore his Iron Maiden shirt for weeks on end. When he wasn’t talking to anyone, he had his headphones in and was air-drumming. Gavin’s ska-punk (skunk) band, Nick NoFun, released an album that Joaquin did the cover art for. It sold fairly well, considering all recording, CD burning, label-printing, and post-practice smoke-outs were all conducted in the drummer’s basement.

            As for me, on the last day of school, I was elected secretary of the 11^th grade class for the next year. I signed all yearbooks with my new title, and wasn’t as bitter about the coming year, since I would be in a position of power. Two weeks later, I got the dress code information for the next year. No t-shirts, no jeans, no sneakers, nothing with pictures on it, no hats, no sunglasses, no mismatched socks, and no shirts left untucked. That was it. I left without noise. Fuck that place.