How Do Mechs Love?

After I leave the community college…

I drive twenty blocks down Seventeenth Street to the parking lot, usually empty, of the intermediate school in Santa Ana where I tutor.

Typically, I’m at least two and a half hours early because of my seven a.m. macroeconomics class and because I don’t want to cross up and down Seventeenth a million times. So, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, I wait in the parking lot until noon.

Sometimes I stop to grab a sprinkled donut and chocolate milk from the Dunkin’ Donut before the 57 entrance or walk through the labyrinthine Food 4 Less for a twenty ounce and some beef jerky.

Generally, I sit reclined listening to podcasts in my gun-metal grey Ford Explorer. My cousin calls it the Exploder and I don’t necessarily disagree with the nickname. It’s been passed through everyone in my family; now it feels crusty and beat up. If it had a clutch it’d have fallen out by now or would be numb to my touch.

Occasionally, I flip down the back seats and take a nap. It’s uncomfortable having the metal ridge poking me in the ribs as I toss and turn to find some position that will allow me to be taken away to sweet REM bliss. The scratchy carpeting with old coke, beer and food stains grates my arms as I lay down. Often as I finally get to sleep my burgeoning erection jams into the hard surface jolting me awake. I’ve never had sex like this, though my brother calls bullshit because he found a pair of panties in the backseat once. They weren’t mine, in every sense. Probably the fucking asshole forgot they belonged to some highly rouged skank with low standards and halitosis that let him wheedle his way into her. I’ve never been good enough with women to convince one to lose herself to her carnal passions. Or at least not enough to have her consent to let me mount her with her legs straddling a spare tire like gynecological stirrups and me very convincingly attempting to pleasure her as my shins scrape the tire treads.

After I leave my car…

I walk to the very back of the school to a portable situated in the corner where the seventh grade AVID class meets. As I head through the entrance while classes are in session, the place is empty and it is startling to see a school so quiet and barren even if only for the moments before the bells ring. I wait outside the classroom because I’m criminally early to every place that I go to; and the previous period is still stuffed inside the portable placed outside the main buildings to accommodate growing class sizes. AVID, an acronym for Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a program targeted at kids who aren’t future juvenile delinquents or presidents, but have the ability to be either one depending on the attention they receive. As a society we have tendency to ignore the middle for the problems and the gods, but AVID aims to get this ignored section the help they need to fulfill their potential.

When I was in eighth grade, I was in AVID and largely I treated it as a joke, a place to pal around with my buddies. Thus, it was surprising when I decided to continue with the program in high school. However, due to my disposition I was ejected from the program because the teacher felt I was an “intellectual bully” and my involvement hurt the other students because of my loathing of stupidity. As such, I was sent away and it worked out best for all parties. Naturally, one would think that because of my expulsion from the program I’d feel it was useless and a waste of time, but I actually felt it was important and worthwhile. At the very least, that’s what I said in the interview to get the job. The real reason I decided to be an AVID tutor was because it paid 15 dollars an hour.

            After the bell rings…

I listen to the creaking of the plywood ramp, in full compliance of handicap laws, and watch the class before mine run out some students bright eyed, others calling the teacher a joke and saying the class is bullshit. Their faces full of despair and hope ready for Halloween to start.

            We laugh as we run up the stairs clutching our pillow sacks heavy with candy. The patio is dark and the lights are off inside the condo. My friend looks around and says we should go. Nobody is home. My brother whispers, lemme just knock and make sure they aren’t trying to get out of giving kids candy. He knocks, soft at first and then he gives the door a good rapping. No answer. I look around not convinced that they wouldn’t put out some candy, and I see a tiny bowl on their picnic table. Slowly I walk over and yell to them, JACKPOT! I shove my hand into the pot ready for a bounty to find its way into my hungry pillow case. Before I can assert my victory a sensation runs through my hand, and then I yell out, CACTUS!

            My brother and best friend never let me forget that moment on the night of our last year of trick or treating. My life ever since has been a series of jackpots and cactuses.

I’m the first to arrive. At the beginning of the year, there were seven tutors, and now I’m one of the four who still show up. As the year moved forward tutors dropped like wayward travelers in the Serengeti without a canteen. Now there is only me, one girl, and two dudes. Of the four only me and Benji show up regularly, and only me every day.

            We tutor for two classes, the seventh graders and the eighth graders; it’s not hard to figure out which one is better behaved. Although, it’s a coin toss to figure out who is the more receptive to our tutoring, or who is more cognitively inclined. The seventh graders have a sheen to their eyes that is lost from the older ones.

Of the students, only one of them truly intrigues me is a rubia gringa in the eighth grade class. She is the attention of most of the boys in the class because she is cute even with the pockmarks. She is a question mark, a puzzle that I’m trying to solve in my head. Is it her mother who fell for a gringo or her father who fell into the allure of a gringa? Or she simply a white girl whose parents socioeconomically has to live in Santa Ana? All I want to do is protect her from the existential quandary of being something hard to define, and to tell her that if she wants to be indefinable then that’s okay. In the end, all I do is try to force her to care when she is in my tutoring group, and hope she gets the subtext.

The eighth graders are a step away from some shit Santa Ana high school that is too crowded and too underfunded, and everything we try to do with them is at best pulpitting. Plus, many of the boys have their cholo in training going on and the girls are already wearing make-up and push-up bras. All too sexually aware for their age.

The dreams of college they had after visiting Chapman are now dulled from its proximity and remoteness; they still have the gauntlet of high school dividing them from the Ivy League. Some will continue through the program and will end up at a UC or some east coast college. Most of the others will end up prey to their socioeconomic traps. The seventh graders are easier to tutor, but they’re just a summer from becoming the same dulled, listless, unmoving lumps of clay waiting for social promotion to kick in.

After I tutor…

I and a few other tutors sit around grading students’ tutoring sheets, disappointed at the lack of effort and care. We bullshit and complain about the student’s text books. How their teachers have under-prepared them, how they need to take better notes or notes period, and where we’re going to eat after work.

When I grade my last paper, I sit there wondering what I’m doing here and my mind drifts to the lack of difference I’m making. How these kids will forget me in the summer between grades. How getting my Edward J. Olmos on is some weird attempt at role-playing and trying to connect with my inner Chicano, and how my skin betrays that connection. Then I wonder who would play me if a movie was made about my experience here? Probably Tyler Perry in white face.

After the clock strikes three…