Abuse of all types were rampant in this school. Kids always seemed to come to school in a sort of post-traumatic haze. They rocked back and forth and moaned, or got angry at chairs and desks, broke them to pieces right there in the class. They stabbed each other will pencils for fun, stumbling across the room and tripping so as to make it look like an accident when Khalid or Shabazz received a pencil to the neck.

Fornication was the norm too. Girls liked to entice boys into closets for a quickie. One kindergarten student had been caught molesting his peers during nap time, not once, but three times. The school discussed these issues with the grandparents, but to no avail. Finally they requested that the grandparents find a new school, and the boy was moved. 

Reagan’s drug-free schools zones do not exist in Detroit. The security guard of the school, known as C, told me, as we drank a bottle of booze in his office, that if I needed any Oxycontin, or any other heroin derivatives, or if I needed cocain, crack or weed, that he was well-connected.

We drank in C’s office a lot, me and several other teachers, the maintenance men, security guards, parents, etc. We’d get a bottle of something at the liquor store next door, and pass it around until it was time to go next door to the strip-club, where students’ moms worked.

One teacher was first cousin to a guy I knew from Battle Creek. I knew his cousin from Battle Creek because one night at a bar, while drunk, he’d told me I was a fag, and a foreigner, and threatened to kill me, before he ran out of the bar and down the street, ripping his clothes off. Turns out this is a family trait, and after about his first drink, Ike would start breaking stuff just like my students. He’d pace around the room with balled fists and eyes on fire, kicking at inanimate objects, starting fights with whatever type of technology was in his way. The robotics instructor, the massive ex-marine techie, I’ll call Mr. Right, took care of this problem by drawing a bulls-eye on a cinder block wall. For the next hour or so Ike would ram into it. For this, I dubbed him the rhino, because he had a huge red horn on his head, and used it.

I had some times with Ike. One night, after passing the bottle around outside a strip-club, I told my coworkers that I wanted to see some more of the ghetto. C said they should take me to a spot called “The Tropical Island.” I said okay, and got in the car with Ike, while the others piled into C’s van. Ike decided that before we went to the Tropical Island, he would go see his white “baby-mama,” over in Royal Oak. That took us a couple hours. Turns out he was stalking her, and so we had to go to several places before we found her. Then he beat on the door and begged her to open it, while she screamed she’d been beaten enough by him, and he should learn how to sober up.

 Then he took me to his grandma’s house. He was so drunk that he told me I was what his grandma called a, “soul-brother,” which is a white man that’s not scared or uncomfortable around a bunch of black people, I’m guessing. His grandma didn’t think I was a soul-brother. She thought I was one of his dumb drunk buddies, and she told us to get the hell out since we were drunk. I went to the bathroom before leaving, and when I got outside to the car he was nowhere in sight. I was alone in the Detroit ghetto. But I knew he must be around here somewhere.

Across the street I could see people in a car, and there was smoke coming out of it. I assumed he was in there, went across the street to the car and looked inside, and he was in there. He was so drunk he was talking like he was Marcus Garvey, or Peter Tosh, and come to find out they had a huge joint passing around. Thankfully Ike declined, because if he did then he’d probably have puked all over us. The guys in the car scooted over and I hopped in the back. One of them asked me, “Man, aren’t you scared I got a gun?” I answered, “You do, don’t you?” He said, “Yeah, but aren’t you scared I’m gonna shoot you?” I said, “Only if I give you a reason to.” He laughed, shook his head and said, “I know that’s right!” 

After that we sat there listening to some rapper I didn’t know, while they all lectured Ike on his alcohol issues, “I mean sure, we smoke weed, and cigarettes, but it don’t make us act like a fucking asshole! Man! When you gonna to stop drinkin’ Ike!”

Finally I got Ike to the Tropical Island. This place was not just black, it was Haitian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, it was tropical. The girls were all dressed in spandex body suits, and about five of them were spread-legged, on their backs, rubbing their crotches together on the dance floor. Ike, after tossing his coat to security, and allowing them to wave the metal detector around him, dove into the humping girls, tearing off his tie and swinging it around like he was a stripper. He tossed his business suit on the floor and jumped around in his boxers, begging them to sit on his face. But they denied him access.

They didn’t deny me access. One came up and rubbed her lovely large butt in my groin. I was suddenly not in the mood. Not because she wasn’t gorgeous, not because I didn’t want to squeeze and hug her, not because it wasn’t temptation wasn’t to my fortune, but because it seemed to me there was a roomful of rude-boys staring at me like they’d not been frisked, not been put under the metal-detector, but knew that I had. I politely declined her advances, and set myself in a dark corner, protected on three sides. I looked around for escape routes, made sure I could get to the door, get to a chair, to swing, kick or throw. I placed tables in strategic locations and planted myself.

A little soccer-player looking guy came up and said something to me in patois, or creole or whatever dialect it was. I apologized and said I didn’t understand. He bugged his eyes out at me all crazy and sneered. Then he turned around and looked at a bunch of his friends, nodding his head. Maybe I was paranoid but it seemed like they kind of spread out around the room to the darker corners, where all I could see was there eyes, shining in the glow of their cigarettes. I imagined that it was some sort of battle formation, fanning out to surround me, the buffalo’s horns, I think is what Shaka’s Zulus called it.

I felt icy, and in a hurry, and I tugged at Ike, but he was so into this voodoo sex-trance trip, dancing around the girls in his skivvies, that he was hard to budge. Finally I got him out, and I drove, right out of there and right back to his grandma’s, where I crashed on the couch.

Nothing against his grandma, but somebody’d been groping around at the foot of the couch early in the morning before dawn, right about where I’d left my wallet. I’d been too polite to open my eyes at the time. Later, when I’d checked my wallet, I found it’d been cleaned of all its cash.

 Everyone gets ripped off in Detroit. There were break-in inside the school all the time, because dumb white teachers from the suburbs, such as myself, would leave money or valuables in their room. There were cameras in all of the rooms, but they were shut off before the break-ins, and then turned back on after the break-ins. Where was C during this time? He was in his office, where the camera monitors were located, where there was access to turning them on and off.

Filed under: Asia America, detroit, gonzo journalism, kwame kilpatrick, teaching in america, Travel Vignettes and Advice, travel writing