George Dancause; Raúl Gonzales

George Dancause

         In the summer of 1984 I had my teacher certificate, but I didn’t have a job, Dean’s list or not. Maybe it was the old guy-with-a-beard rap one more time. I don’t know. Not performing further with Margaret in Curtis’s erotic video started to look like a mistake. I put out applications almost everywhere and fell into a groove driving at Yellow Cab.

          August was almost over and the teaching job offers were not flooding in. Then one evening my ex-girlfriend Marian, who was a teacher, phoned me. She was teaching out in the Edgewood District, and had, over some after-school enchiladas and beers at a West Side roadhouse, heard one of the principals complaining that he still hadn’t staffed one position: a new thing the state was requiring schools to do called in-school suspension (ISS).

          So the next day I brought my cab back to the depot at noon, climbed into my Toyota, and drove out to the deep West Side. The principal, Ricardo Bocanegra, was well enough impressed by my height and burliness. About my glittering references and Dean’s-list honours he showed little interest. He hired me.

          Edgewood Independent School District was dirt poor. I read somewhere that at the time it hired me, it was the fifth poorest school district in the whole United States. Poverty of that magnitude carries with it a skimpy tax base, which meant that at that time teachers in Edgewood got paid less than teachers elsewhere, but I had a job. The demographic at the school that hired me, Wrenn Junior, was about 90% Chicano and 10% African American, or black, as was the phrase back then.

          The idea behind ISS was that kids who got kicked out of class for being disruptive, or got busted for minor crimes in the rest rooms, would all get sent to a special disciplinary classroom in a modular structure standing free from the main school building, rather than be sent home. Sending kids home on suspension was a bad idea, went the reasoning. Suspended kids were being deprived of school, often had homes where they would be unlikely to have responsible adult supervision during the day, and were likely to spend their days doing burglaries, which the community understandably didn’t appreciate.

          My immediate supervisor and colleague in this enterprise was the assistant principal, George Dancause. He was a big, strong, jolly family man with a round head and a ready smile inside his goatee. Bocanegra clearly went for size for his disciplinary staff. George was from some rural county in deep South Texas near the Rio Grande Valley. When I was telling him about a new machete I’d bought as a weapon in my losing war against some bamboo at a house I’d moved into he responded with a tale about how in his home county people call machetes belduques, since in the nineteenth century they’d all come from the Bell & Duke Foundry in Houston. I still have my hyper-sharpened belduque hanging within arm’s reach of this keyboard, just in case.

          We did morning duty together, trying to maintain some sort of order before the bell rang to get things going. My station was inside the school, in the central hall, keeping an eye on the banks of glass doors front and back. George prowled outside. One of our duties was breaking up fights, which were fairly frequent. George was the first responder; I was backup.

Boy fights were easy. We grabbed the would-be combatants, who had been circling each other throwing shadow-boxing jabs and dire imprecations, from behind until they cooled off. The whole business tended to be a showing of peacock feathers. They rarely struggled much in our grasp. Girl fights were an entirely different matter. Girls wanted to kill each other. I can remember George, who must’ve been a good 115-kg-plus and me, no shrimp, wrestling pairs of skinny 12-year-old girls to the ground and they’d still be pulling out handfuls of hair and applying fingernails to faces until we managed, with difficulty, to tear them apart.

George was full of such job-specific wisdom as grabbing kids caught smoking in the Boys’ room by the wrist and taking a big whiff of the tips of their thumb-and-forefinger to determine by smell just what they’d been smoking there. He also told me that most of the misbehaving at school was by the slower students. ‘Kids don’t like people thinking that their dumb,’ he explained. ‘There’s so much more peer-group status in having a reputation for being bad. I mean, Michael Jackson hasn’t made a billion dollars singing, [here he went into falsetto and a little finger-pointing-into-the-air dance step] “I’m dumb! I’m dumb!”’

          When I married the girls’ PE teacher between my first and second year at the school he told me to put a marble into a jar every time we fucked, and after our first wedding anniversary taking one out every time we fucked, adding that the jar would never be empty.

          So much wisdom in an assistant principal of a small intermediate school in a heart-rendingly poor neighbourhood.

Raúl Gonzales

         Since most of my detainees at In-School Suspension were repeat offenders, I got to know many of them fairly well. Some of them were sad and pathetic, some of them were nasty and sociopathic, some were boringly rebellious, and a few were absolutely charming. One of these was a sort of Chicano Bart Simpson — displaying most of the signs of foetal alcohol syndrome — named Raúl Gonzales.

          Raúl was doing the seventh grade for, I think, his second and third times doing the two years that he regularly visited me at ISS, but he was no dimwit. He had a good deal of sly intelligence that he directed into areas that seemed promising to him. Most schoolwork failed to fit into this category. He lived with his older brother Freddie, who was also in seventh grade on the five-year plan, his father, who ran a conjuntos night club, and a series of step-mothers.

          Whereas Raúl was effervescent, charming, and cheeky, Freddie was quiet, polite, and always respectful, at least in front of me. Freddie was definitely dyslexic, which probably made him feel stupid (whether he was or wasn’t), but I don’t think special help for dyslexia was available for kids like Freddie Gonzales back then. The way of the world required Freddie to spend a good deal of time in ISS, too.

          Whereas Raúl drank this and that and smoked this and that, Freddie wanted to be a bantamweight boxer and lived a healthy lifestyle. After school I could often see him doing roadwork, jogging at a good pace along the road.

          One of the school’s English teachers, a former priest named Carroll Ray, found both Raúl and Freddy to be greatly entertaining. After he showed his classes Reefer Madness as an example of a certain type of movie he told me that Raúl had loved it – thought it was wonderful and wanted to see it again. After seeing another of the movies Carroll had shown them Freddy decided to take on the ring name of Little Big Man.

          They told me that what the kids in ISS needed was structure, so I covered the walls with posters repeating over again the same basic four or five rules: QUIET, and YOU MUST WORK, and FACE YOUR OWN DESK, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET BEFORE LUNCH, and ONLY ONE TRIP TO TOILET AFTER LUNCH. The ISS room had its own toilet, in a little cubicle back in the far corner from the only door.

          I can’t be sure, but I think that one day Raúl actually sold some dope to another kid in ISS! On the way to and from the toilet. Slicker’n shit and I didn’t catch him, but I think he did.