Author: R

I remember when was fourteen years old or so I used to accompany my mother to do grocery shopping at a not-so-nearby Pathmark about two towns away from where we lived. The store was located in Levittown, and we lived in Hempstead, NY.  There were no decent supermarkets in Hempstead at the time so we had to bus it to other towns to get things for the house.

I used to love going with my mother shopping because I got to pick out a treat or two while going up-and-down the isles. Topeka Pudding used to be my favorite. Since I collected soda cans and beer bottles during the week I also had coins at the ready should there be any good arcade machines in or near the store.

On one occasion after grocery shopping we decided to go to KFC to buy some chicken for the family to have lunch when we got back home.  It was Saturday. Since we were carrying grocery bags and were subject to the bus’ timetable, we could not venture too far away from the supermarket parking lot. Luckily there was a KFC right across the lot.

There was a huge line when we got to the KFC. It must have been fifteen people there waiting for service, as well as many cars lined up on the drive-up window. It was pretty crowded. As we’re standing there I noticed this “now hiring” sign near the cash register. I have worked since I was eight years old in some way or another to earn extra coins to feed my gaming habits – and because we were a pretty cash-strapped family since I can remember – so my mother was not surprised or shocked when I told her I was interested in asking about a job there. I left her standing in line while I made my way up to the cash register to ask for a job application.

The guy at the cash register was from either India or Pakistan or a neighboring country in that region of the world. I could tell by his accent. He wore a messed up mustache and thick glasses. He must have been in his late forties because his curly hair was mostly grey. He was going nuts behind the counter trying to get people out the door. He kept on going back to the kitchen, screaming orders and coming back to the counter to apologize to waiting – and anxious – customers.  I waited for him to notice me while I stood there looking at the craziness of him going back-and-forth to the back, tending to the drive-up window, apologizing to the counter customers and trying to keep his apron clean while tossing pieces of fried chicken into small colorful cardboard boxes and/or buckets.

“What’s up kid?” he asked in his thick accent when he finally noticed me. I went straight to it knowing he was in a bit of a bind. “Hey man, can I have a job application, please”, I responded while pointing at the “now hiring” sing behind the counter. “Hmmm” came the response, as he looked me over quickly. “Can you speak English?” he asked. “Of course”, I said. “How ‘bout Salvadorian?”, he asked. I didn’t know if it was a trick question or if he was just messing with me. “That too”, I said finally. “Good” he said. He turned around, fiddled with a couple of boxes and fetched a white apron from one of them. Without missing a beat he turned to me and threw the apron at my chest and said, “you’re hired”. He quickly followed with “now go in the back and tell that Salvadorean that I need original thigh, keel and breasts, as fast as he can make it”. With that he turned to the counter customers and continued to smile, apologize and take more orders.

I didn’t know what to do. I was holding the apron, and was smiling because all-of-a-sudden I had a real job, but I had not clue what the job was.  I went to the back of the line where my mother was standing with all the grocery bags next to her feet and told her the good news. “Good”, she said, “now go back there and do a good job”. That was it. I turned around and went to the counter again. The guy behind the counter just looked at me and pointed to the swinging door that led to the kitchen behind the counter area.

I was taken aback a little bit when I stepped into the kitchen.  There was this guy in his late twenties or early thirties sitting on an overturned bucket, legs wide open, wearing all white, with mounds of floured chicken all over the floor. He was holding a couple of pieces of chicken on his hand while he looked up at me and quickly asked (in Spanish) “what the hell does the Indian want?” He was flouring chicken as fast as he could so that he could then drown it in the hot oil in the frying vats behind him. The place was a wreck. I told him what the Indian had ordered me to tell him and he started teaching me about what kind of flour is used for “Original” versus “Crispy” recipe chicken. I got the hang of it fast, and before you knew it we had the tray-rack that passed chicken over to the person on the counter for serving full. That was a fun day!

The Salvadorean did not speak a word of Enlgish, and the Indian did not speak a word of Spanish. I have no clue how they communicated, but the Salvadorean told me that they used the universal language of signs. The Indian did a lot of pointing while the Salvadorean did an awful lot of smiling, saying “yes”, and nodding. He never understood anything the Indian ever said, he told me, but that is how they got the job done.

About two weeks after I started working I realized I had not been paid, and I went to the back office to ask the Indian. At the time I had no clue how much I would be paid, when or anything else. When I got to the office the Indian was there filling out paperwork and making orders for frozen chicken and such. I came in quietly and asked about my paycheck. He asked how long I had been working there and I told him it had been two weeks. As soon as I got out of school I would jump in a bus and got right to work until about 11pm. On the weekends I was there from early on until nearly midnight. We added up my hours and he was surprised I had racked up so many without complaining. After adding it all up, he finally looked at me in the eyes and asked me my age. “Fourteen”, I said proudly. “Shit” he said while looking down as his paperwork. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do kid.” He said. He told me that if any inspector ever came into the back to ask questions that I had to act as if I didn’t know how to speak English. If the inspector spoke Spanish I was to tell him/her that I was eighteen years old. Sure, I was tall, but passing for eighteen would have been a miracle. I nodded. He told me he needed to compute my hours and that I would have a check for the two weeks’ work the next day. I was so happy to get paid so much for the two weeks the next day.

I worked at KFC with the Indian and the Salvadorean for the entirety of that summer. Eventually a Jamaican and a pretty white-skin red-haired girl who would hide out in the bathroom with the Jamaican to have sex when business was slow joined us. The Salvadorean and I traded stories about El Salvador and made fun of the drive-up customers when we were bored. He would tell me about the different parts of the chicken and why the keel was the best part because of the soft cartilage in the middle to chew on. I got to take all sorts of KFC eats back home every night. After I stopped working there I think it took us a few years before we ever set foot in a KFC again.

I learned that the Indian was not such a bad character. The Jamaican and the Salvadorean were both illegally in the country, and I was not supposed to even be working given my age, but he found ways to get around that to help us out.

I am totally advert to seeing children being slapped or beaten. Verbally or physically.

When I was 6yrs old my mother had to make the difficult decision to leave me behind while she sought to make her way illegally north into the US. We were living in a small “mesón” – row of rooms where families lived and shared a common courtyard and outside letrines. We were in El Puerto de La Libertad, El Salvador. It was during the time when El Salvador was engulfed in the worst part of a decade-old civil war. You can imagine the situation being so bad that she felt the best option was to leave her children and head into the unknown. One older brother was already living and working in NY, so she had a heading.

I was left under the care of an older sister. I have 3 brothers and 4 sisters. The 2 older sisters lived relatively close to each other in El Puerto de La Libertad. I lived with one of them. My father was never around when I was born so I just saw the man who was my biological father a couple of times in my life. So there I was, in the care of an older sister, father/motherless and, surely, behaving as bad as any 6-yr old would in that situation. The beatings did not take long to become routine. It got to a point that I behaved so badly that the sister I was under the care of had to enlist the help of the boyfriend of the other, also older, sister to beat the crap out of me. He was an army man, so they felt he was better qualified to turn me into a man. This went on for years, and all I can remember is how much I wanted to join to guerrillas so that I would have access to weapons. Crappy thought, I know.

Years later when I was already living in NY and reunited with my family, I remember I still behaved badly. My mother would beat me because I used to wet the bed up to when I was 13 years old or so. I did not do so well in school and was an all-around lazy student. By that time I was immune to the beatings. I was immune to the verbal attacks at school. Even when bullied, it didn’t affect me much.

The one experience that I do remember vividly to this day, and one that taught me the lessons all the beatings that came before it were supposed to. It involved one of my older brothers.

In school I fell in love with this one girl. I barely knew her name – one which I can’t recall now – but I was sure she was the one. Tall, thin, beautiful face and a nice smile. Of course I was too chicken to speak to her, so she did not know I existed. But I was determined to get her attention and win her love.

My older brother had just purchased yet another used car, but this one was really cool. It had tinted windows, was sporty, and even had one of those leather “bras” that runs across the front of the car and makes it look like it’s wearing the mask of Zorro. My brother would usually get home in the afternoon and lay on the sofa to take a nap. I was the official valet of the household and would always jump at the chance to go and park someone’s car in a better spot closer to the house. So it was no surprise to my brother that I would take his keys when he came in and laid down on the sofa. I took the keys, left the house and literally stole his car. The girl I was in love with lived more than an hour’s drive away, in one of the worst neighborhoods of NYC. I drove there; I didn’t care.

When I got to the girl’s block I decided to go around and park the car far enough that she did not spot me right away. I wanted to surprise her. Of course she lived in a massive co-op building. There was no way she was going to spot me from where she lived. As I was driving around the block, all of a sudden the car shut down. I had barely enough momentum to get the car to the side of the street so that it would not be blocking traffic. I tried to restart it and nothing. I was sure there was gas in it, so it was not a lack of gas that made it shut down. I tried and tried, and nothing. I popped the hood, and could not see a lose wire, anything smoking, or any other visual signal that indicated a fault on the engine. After tinkering around for about an hour with no success I got the courage to walk up to the girl’s apartment and say hello – and to ask for money because I knew I had to make my way back home and I did not have a cent on me. I went up the girl’s apartment and she was surprised to see me there. After the shock wore off I told her about my predicament and she gave me enough coins to get my butt into a city bus and go back home.

I must have been gone for 4 hours by the time I got home. One of my older sisters – not the same as in El Salvador – and my older brother (owner of the car) were home. My mother was home as well. She let me have it as soon as I walked into the house. After I told them where the car was my brother told me to join him for the ride so that we could go and rescue the car. He asked to borrow my sister’s car. I was certain he was going to dismember me as soon as we got into the car. He did not. We got into the car and started driving. He did not say a word. I led the way telling him where to turn. At one point during the ride he joked about a funny-dressed city girl we passed along the way. I just kept on waiting for the punches to start. Nothing.

When we arrived at the spot where I had left his sporty car it was already evening. There were all sorts of neighborhood noises, sires, traffic and even pot smell in the air. There were a lot of Jamaican men outside of their buildings just listening to music and smoking. My brother looked around, looked at me and smiled. Not a word. He popped open the hood and after a small wiggle of a cable the car started right up. “There’s a lose wire to the starter motor. Gotta get that fixed” he said. That was it. He got back into my sister’s borrowed car and told me to follow him home in his sporty car.

He never said a word about that incident. That sole episode sticks to me as the best lesson anyone has ever given me. Of course I’ve gone out and done worse things after that, but his response to the whole situation, as if telling me “I get it, I’ve done stupid things over girls, too”, made a huge impression on me. I think if he would have beat the crap out of me I would remember it, but not much more than any other beating I’ve received before.

This is what I do with students who misbehave when in my classroom. I let them know I care, and that in some way or another I’ve been there, in their shoes. I listen. I try to find out why they are doing what they are doing. I give them a second chance. I don’t send them to the principal’s office unless they have really gone out of their way to get me aggravated  Usually I speak with them. I always tell them we all make mistakes, and that we can all learn from them. But I never attack them for acting like and being kids. God knows I was one, and one of the worst.

Whenever kids act up, cream, speak too loudly, run around like crazy, think about what it was like being a kid for you. They are still learning limits, their own capacity, and discovering a whole gamut of new emotions and feelings. No wonder they do so many things without first thinking about the effects on other people. Our jobs as adults is to pull them aside, and in private have a conversation with them about what is right and appropriate in the setting they are in.

Speak to kids.