Mr. Slimeball

It occurs to me that I have not yet taken the time to introduce you to the insanity that was my high school. I foresee that it will be the subject of many stories to come, so let me begin by painting for you a portrait of my first high school principal, Mr. Slimeball.

What I did not know going in to high school, although apparently my parents did, was that the newly appointed Slimeball was a devout follower of Louis Farrakhan. While I couldn't give a toss about his religious views, the fact was that he seemed to despise anyone not black, and this is something of a problem in a school which is 58% Hispanic and 2% white (with a few Asians mixed in), especially when, because of the fact that we were in a ghetto, that 2% are pretty much exclusively in the magnet program. The magnet program, by the way, was maybe half Caucasian, but that other 50% didn't stop us from being seen as exclusively white.

Naturally, there were conflicts from the start between my program and the principal. He would cut our funding, rearrange our teachers, and screw with our records. He put his mistress in a position of power over the magnet program, and she had no love for us either in her crazy little head. Her daughter was caught fucking some boy in a stairwell, and this lady's reaction was to get in a public screaming match with her daughter and chase her across the parking lot, beating her with a shoe. When a teacher should have been fired, Slimeball spent his oily words on keeping her around and making sure the Board, headed by his mama, wouldn't allow her to be removed. He did drive off one of the primary drivers of the program who should have been around for years to come.

It was well known that he would take every opportunity to use the funds the school received for him to spend on teacher workshops or conferences or whatever improvements he could get away with taking to vacation with his mistress. He wasn't always very bright about it, either, since one time the two of them stayed at the same hotel as a bunch of magnet kids on a field trip.

When he finally replaced his mistress as magnet counselor (maybe due to complaints, maybe he tired of her, maybe because his daughter was starting school and he didn't want to put his own daughter in her charge, or maybe his wife found out), the woman he got was even more of a racist nutjob. It all came to a crux when she sent an email, obviously meant only for Slimeball's eyes but mistakenly CCed to several of the magnet parents it was about, calling the magnet parents blue-eyed devils and using the most horrid grammar I've ever encountered (and I am a proofreader!). Incidentally, the people she called blue-eyed devils? Three Jews, a man from Africa, and a woman from China. They considered getting letter jackets.

I am skipping a number of things, but you get the idea of how he treated the magnet program. On to how he treated the Hispanic kids. You remember, the majority of the population of the school? He embezzled nearly all the funding for the ESL program, which in that neighborhood was an absolute necessity. He hired exclusively black underlings and gave them all the idea that because they were black and in power that they were superior. I don't know how many times I saw a black kid get away with something and blame it on a Hispanic kid with no retribution. He treated them with utter contempt, and encouraged it in those around him.

Naturally, the magnet parents opposed him every step of the way. They started by protesting to him, making it known that they saw what was going on. Eventually, they took it to the School Board, one of the largest in the country, and to the press. The biggest newspaper in a very big city ran a story on Slimeball the slimeball. And still, because his mama was on the board, he was never removed. In order to shut us up, the board decided to give the magnet program its own campus. Fine, we agreed, but what about the poor Hispanic kids? Well, what about them. Eventually Slimeball was promoted off the campus and into an administration position as 'punishment'. That's right, promoted.

At my graduation from the newly formed school, a tiny, underfunded affair practically designed to anger anyone with anger left to spend (in a church, presided by a board member who was firmly in Slimeball's pocket), the thing that, to my mind, was the absolute slimiest of all the slimy things I'd seen him do happened. Maybe because it directly involved me. As we waited for the ceremony to start, grumbling at our disgustingly patriotic graduation robes and absurd situation, who should show up but Mr. Slimeball himself. You could have cut the silence with a knife. Up he walks to me, and forcibly takes my hand, and shaking it, says, "Congratulations." And then he tried to chat with me. I washed my hand like an OCD hard case for a week.

Weave

I went to an inner city public school with a magnet program. The proportions of the school were something like as follows: 54% Hispanic, 40% Black, 5% White and 1% Asian. As you might guess, the 5% were all in the magnet program. This did not mean that all the White kids were better off than the rest; it meant that the neighborhood around the school was predominantly Black and Hispanic. However, this was often interpreted as some kind of holier-than-thou racism. I never quite understood it.

As one of the minority, I was from time to time subjected to contempt, anger, and ridicule. Some were more subtle than others. But one of the strangest I can recall happened late in the spring of my junior year.

I was heading home at the end of an unusually pleasant (weather-wise) day. My car was parked in the back lot, past a number of buildings that only held classes for students who were not in the magnet program. As it was a nice day out, I had let my hair down for once. My hair, for those of you who don't know, is a giant mass of frizzy, curly, auburn tangles that, when well treated, goes down about to my waist. Most of the time it is either too hot out or too much of a pain to let down.

As I walked past the last of the buildings towards the parking lot, I passed a group of girls from the regular program sitting on some stairs. I didn't know them, and they seemed engrossed in their conversation, so I walked by without thinking too much about it. Suddenly, I felt a great pain in my scalp, stepped backwards and whirled, ready to face my attacker.

One of the girls had gotten up, reached out, and grabbed a large hank of my hair towards the bottom. She immediately let go and backed away as I turned, saying only, "Nice hair."

I contemplated the situation for a stunned moment, deciding to let it go. "Thanks. Don't ever do that again." I walked away hoping they wouldn't follow me. They didn't.

Hours later, I realized that she hadn't meant to hurt me- she'd thought I was wearing weave and wanted to tear it out and make fun of me. The preposterousness of the whole event boggles me to this day.