“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

“Police cruisers,” I say, taking in the block. “A whole shit load.”

We’ve been tracking each other since Penn Station, this voice and I, for precautionary reasons I’m told, and this is where it ends: Thin Blue Lines everywhere.

Now this voice is raspy and a little but harsh. I swear, sometimes it’s as though I’m speaking directly to danger, which is partly why I’ve called. I can hear giggles on her end of the line, my guide telling me not to worry. “Just the local precinct, Boo, some of our best customers. Now jus’ turn the corner an’ we’re two doors down. Press the butt’n when you get here. I’ll buzz you in.”

As I follow her instructions down to the very last splotch of gum on the sidewalk, I can’t help agonizing over being so predictable with my brothel selection. I could have been spanked up in Harlem. I could have been nailed to a cross in Chelsea. Decadent, depraved, and hopeless is what I was hoping for.

Instead, I went with CLEAN, SAFE, DISCREET. DELICIOUS PENTHOUSE PETS WITH WINDOW VIEW OF THE SKATING RINK. Yet once inside it’s apparent that other than fully functioning female parts (of which I’m still not completely certain) these women do not resemble Penthouse Pets in any figment of a troubled man’s imagination. And unless they plan on tossing my charred remains from the roof of this building, there’s not much chance of getting that view of the skating rink either.

It’s a dark, two bedroom apartment. I start getting that pins and needles feeling right away, still young enough to believe in secret identities, the super-hero-in-training that inhabits male souls. The old Spidey senses start to tingle. I’m reaching for utility belts that aren’t there and peering around corners for traces of Kryptonite. I’m scared, not horny, and I’ll need every shred of make-believe I own to get me through this.

As far as I can tell there are two women here, the one who opens the door, allowing me to enter, and the one on the couch ignoring me. The one on the couch is white, clammy, and cadaverous. She’s obviously been chain smoking for awhile and is grinding out another butt into an overflowing tray atop a glass coffee table. She’s wearing a sweat-suit as gray as her flesh and has long, dishwater blond hair streaming down her shoulders. I’m assuming she’s off duty. I’m praying to Baby Jesus, as well as Allah that she’s off duty. She leans forward to light up again and I quickly look away.

The woman who opened the door is on my right, hand still poised on the knob. She sounds like the woman who guided me in, but any witty repartee we shared earlier has vanished. It’s obvious we’ve never spoken before in our lives. In heels she’s around my height, just under six feet, and the red dress she’s wearing does absolutely nothing for her, hugging her small breasts to her chest then down to a pear shaped bottom. With the television light twitching off her face, it’s tough to say whether she’s black, white, or Latina.

My first baby steps forward and the hardwood floors begin to creak. She gestures to the unfortunate smoke cloud across the room, tells me to have a seat, get comfortable, this may take awhile. I’d like to know how far along we are in the process, as though the sounds of company policy and operating procedures might lend some sense to this. I’d like a comforting woman’s voice to explain things.

“So- how much do I get,” I blurt. “And what’s it gonna cost?”

My voice sounds nervous and shaky, very unsuper-hero-like. It’s obvious I’ve broken some kind of code by speaking out of turn. Red Dress scans me quickly then glances over a shoulder in the direction of what I imagine used to be a kitchen. It’s a large, separate cubicle with small openings cut into the walls like a machine-gun nest. I can tell by the way she keeps looking back that she’s waiting for instructions, as if the holes might suddenly start to speak. There’s someone back there, behind that wall, standing in the dark.

She’s got herself an ace.

It’s good to have an ace.

“You get our company, of course, baybee,” she eventually says, shutting the door hard, bolting it shut behind me. “Now, please, go and have a seat.”

The woman on the couch is watching porn, the post-millennium kind, everyone tan, everyone fit enough to be the trainer at the local gym. That incredibly lucky pizza boy of the Seventies has vanished. Now the cameraman’s in on it. We see what he sees, travel with him on his adventures. It’s also cable porn so nothing too graphic is visible. The camera shows heads bobbing into unseen genitals and intercourse is really just an awkward way of pushing someone across a bed. Normally, I view porn in ten to twelve minute intervals. The prospect of sitting fully clothed, watching this stuff as though it were a real film with characters to root for and a plot to unravel, is mind numbing. So after ten minutes of silence I’m convinced the woman on the other end of the couch is made of straw, a smoking head propped atop a sweat-suit stuffed with hay, like that thing the neighbors drag out every year at Halloween.

She must see me eyeing the remote, but never says a word. I look down again, back to her, lift my eyebrows, comment on the porn, “Hey, she’s pretty,” then end up peering down at the coffee table to stare at the glass. At some point she must have raised her cigarette for a good toke because there are streams of smoke disbanding into the projecting light of the TV, but I never actually see her do it.

There’s some muffled conversation coming from the other end of the apartment. I strain to hear, listening for key words like, “stab, kill, toss body in weeds off The Belt,” but come away with nothing. Rising from the couch, I contemplate some dingy curtains hanging from the ceiling behind the TV. I want to make sure there’s an actual window back there in case I have to jump and not some brick wall with Rod Serling waiting for his cue.

I tug on a stream of it. It’s softer than I thought, but dusty and reeking of smoke. There are two small burn marks at its center, staring back at me like ghost’s eyes.

“Would you leave that alone, please, and come sit down?”

Who said that? I reel around, peeking over a shoulder, then recheck the curtains to see if Serling wants a piece of me. It must I’ve been her, but she never flinches, and her face shows no indication of having just spoken.

I head back to the couch smiling. “Hey, pretty neat the way you throw your voice like that.” I grab the remote then sit back down. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’m changing the fucking channel. Bravo!’s running Actor’s Studio repeats all week long and Gwyneth’s up next. You’re gonna love this. Trust me.

Plumes of smoke fan across the table as I find my program then gesture at the tube. “Hey, look at Gwyn. Ain’t she pretty? Our generation’s Grace Kelly if she wanted it. Good head on her shoulders, too. Just like you.”

More smoke.

I settle into the couch, watch the end of the interview. Guy with the beard and blue cards wants to know what Gwyneth’s favorite curse word is.

Balls.

Her favorite curse word is “Balls.”

Red Dress clip clops down the hall on stiff heels, her thighs swishing together like helicopter blades. “Sir,” she says, “we’re ready for you now.”

My head jerks at the sound of her. I’d actually forgotten why I’d come. I place the remote back on the table, thinking, Balls, balls, balls... I spring from the couch, bending forward at the waist. The woman looks right through me, smoke pouring from her mouth and nostrils.

“So..," I begin, “thank you for frightening the shit outta me, but other horrors await down that hall.”

She slowly leans forward then does something remarkable. She tells me to go fuck myself, right hand feeding her mouth the cigarette as she speaks. There’s some semblance of a grin on her squiggly lips as she does this, face all done up with TV light like some low budget Jolly Roger.

“Sir!” Red Dress booms, tearing me from the burning side-show before me. “Must everything be said to you twice?”

We start across the room. The volume on the tube cranks up instantly, Gwyneth’s sweet nasal rasp giving way to robotic porn once more. I’m led into a room at the back of the hall, but it’s really just another holding cell. Its interior is sparse and dim. A reddish tint illuminates from a lamp with no shade, giving my skin a bloody shine when I pass a hand over it. There’s a window opposite the door covered with the same hard plastic on a shower stall, making the city outside all blurry and mottled with light.

The bed is empty and sagging, but covered with clean blue sheets. The thought of them touching my skin makes me itch. Minutes go by and I’m wondering what the holdup could be. This can’t be good for either of us. Red Dress looks surprised to see me when I peek out the door, but with her eyebrows shaved then tattooed back into place like a pair of bat’s wings, I really have no indication how she feels.

I could present her with a beautiful array of diamonds. That’s the look I’d get.

I could flash her at church. Same look.

I could be this incredible pain in the ass causing trouble in a whorehouse and never really know the consequences until it’s too late.

“Sir, if you can’t wait patiently, and if I have to speak to you again...” She never finishes her sentence, just points me down the hall and sends me to my room.

I turn away, head bowed, dejected. I’ve made my whore angry and the room’s funky lighting is starting to give me a headache. I’m back at the window, staring into the shower stall, silently cursing the magazine that gave this place a four and a half pecker rating. No chance of me ever getting naked here nor will one of my shiny credit cards be leaving my wallet this evening. My clothes are already starting to thank me, nestling against my skin the way a house settles into its foundation. I better explain the bad news.

“What the fuck? Didn’t I say..? Look, you brain damaged or somethin’?”

“I’m sorry, miss. I’m not feeling very wanted around here so I guess, I guess we won’t be having sex tonight.”

“What?”

“Uh, what I’m trying to say is, I’m sure you have a lovely vagina. I just won’t be paying you to stick my penis into it.”

I start down the hall, passing a small bathroom on the right. I’m angling for the exit when Red Dress steps in my way, flexing her legs in this dangerous, Tina Turner Rollin’ Down the River sort of way. It seems like she’s about to leap forward, checking me into a wall. I brace for impact.

“Look, Boo,” she says, gently cupping a hand to my right shoulder. “We jus’ bein’ cautious, is all.” She’s patting my sleeve, guiding me back down the hall. She smells clean, but smoky. I think she may be wearing a wig, but only glance it at once, resting stiff and shoe polish perfect atop her head. She tells me these are just precautions, that since I’m new and don’t particularly fit any one category, I should view these hesitations as a compliment considering what usually slinks through that door.

We just takin’ it slow, Boo,” she assures me, tickling the nape of my neck with long, curlicue fingernails. I like it when she calls me Boo, as if I’m some kind of ghost who could vanish whenever he felt like it. I start thinking, yeah, maybe... Maybe I could stick around a while. “Beatriz,” this loud, gurgling voice suddenly rattles from behind a wall. “Don’ baby ‘em! Let the nigga go if he wan’ go.”

It’s a deep voice, one that could use a good throat clearing. I picture its vocal cords layered in flesh, packed with cords of muscle, a voice that might play outside linebacker for the Jets, a voice that could do some harm.

“Who was that?”

“Cy.”

“Who is Cy?”

“Cy is I, muthafucka, and you gettin’ close. You gettin’ real close.”

Why did he have to say it like that?

Pride. If it’s not lust then pride or some other deadly sin just waiting around the corner, a pleasure, really, this masculine energy, always having to make no one steals it and leaves you with nothing.

“Close?” I’m saying, mocking Cy outside his cell. “Close to what... Muthafucka?”

‘Muthafuckas’ start ricocheting off the walls, his, mine, hers, but the Jolly Roger in the other room is pretty much still quiet. I slap Beatriz’ hand off me, accidentally knocking her into the open bathroom.

“Close?” I keep shouting, searching for an angle. “Close to the trigger of this Glock? Is that how close I am, Cy?” I start flapping down the hall like there’s something inside my coat.

Beatriz recovers quickly, the great ones always do. She kicks off her pumps, throwing each one at my face. She’s headed my way and crouching down low for leverage. She won’t be calling me Boo anymore either. “Oh no you di’ent,” she says, “No you just did not!”

Her momentum sends us crashing into the wall next to the exit. She’s clawing my face with those corn chip fingernails of hers, letting loose a stream of curses normally reserved for comic book strips- exclamation points, dollar signs, and asterisks. Her free hand starts searching my waist, patting me down, feeling me up. “Cy!” she screams at the kitchen wall. “Dis bitch ain’t got no gun! Cyrus, get da fuck out here!”

I’d really prefer not to meet Cyrus, and I tell him so. Beatriz is currently riding my back, forearms locked around my throat, so my words come out sort of hoarse and raspy.

“No, ah, Cy, really. You don’ need to come out here. I was just on my way out. I swear.”

I’m determined not to go down, reeling back and forth while Beatriz digs her feet into my haunches.

“The door, Cyyyyyy,” I slur, “All I want is the door.” I can feel the veins in my neck start to bulge, the blood racing to my temples. Taking two steps forward then a hard one back, I slam Beatriz against the bolted doorway. The air rushes out of her and I’m hoping the fight has left with it. She sort of clings to me like a bear skin rug after this. I flip her off, her mean little body skidding down the hall.

I’m collapsed at the waist and gasping. Beatriz is actually threatening to get up, but I jerk forward, like maybe I’ll plant a boot in an eyebrow if she does. She stays put, but a long scraping noise can be heard inside the kitchen area, the sound of something heavy shifting in its seat.

“Son, I come out there, you don’t see the light a day,” Cyrus tells me, relaxed, the height of restraint. An eerie second passes where I consider his words, him callin’ me son, and the importance of the light of day.

So I’m standing here, sweating and bleeding in one of Manhattan’s finest whore houses, when it hits me how wonderful it might be to one day hear a tiny voice say something like, “Granpappy, tell us the one about the whore with the crazy eyebrows, pleeeaaase!”

Okay. The light of day. Why not?

I tell Cyrus that I understand exactly what he means. “Please, sir, really, all I’m looking to do is leave.” I’m waving to the blank wall as if he was standing right in front of it. “No hard feelings ‘bout all those ‘motherfuckers’ and everything...”

Cyrus starts to chuckle, a cross between an asthmatic’s wheeze and a ghoulish howl. He tells me how lucky I am that he’s in a good mood tonight, then says, “Boy, you so crazy, you make crazy crazy...” He laughs some more then thankfully gets bored with the whole mess.

“Beatriz... Show dis man the door.”

“Yeah, Beatriz,” I whisper once she’s up and fumbling with the lock. “Show this man the muthafuckin’ door.” Beatriz promises to cut me to ribbons should we ever meet again then swings the door wide open. I can almost see the stairs from where I’m standing. I slip past her, stopping abruptly at the threshold to say my goodbye:

“Hey, change that fucking channel back to Bravo!”

No answer, nothing, until one bony digit rises up over the precipice of the couch like a last fuck you from the grave. It hovers for a second, glowing in the unnatural TV light, then slowly sinks back into the couch. Beatriz, of course, looks completely astonished. We both watch in stunned silence then regard each other with contempt. The door slams shut just shy of my nose. I can hear ol’ Bea fumbling with the locks once again, muttering something about somebody being a total fucking asshole.

My first steps for the stairs, the street, the rest of my life, this painful stitch surfacing below the ribs. I check my face for scratches, fingers tapping out some Morse code gibberish on a cheek. All things considered, I think it went pretty well back there.

I limp through Penn Station, ice cream cone in one hand, slice of pizza in the other, clots of dried blood dotting my neck. I stare up at the board and wait for my gate with the rest of demented Long Island. This homeless guy near me is rousted from sleep by a cop. He’s barefoot and bleary eyed, tendrils of hair sweeping his face when he looks up. The cop behind him is just a slouch shouldered entity performing a task. I hand the guy my pizza when he stands because all I really want is the ice cream. He takes it in stride, as if we’d planned it, like it was my job to feed him and he was going to pass the crust to someone else. I can feel him eying my fucked up appearance as he moves past. He takes a few more steps then stops. “Young man,” he says, “I’ve seen you before and often wondered what happens when you come to my city..?”

He turns toward the escalator on flat feet, folding the slice up to his face, and then disappears around a corner. I chomp into my cone, cream dribbling down my chin. The sugar does its thing, revving me back up, settling me down. My number comes up on the board. I shamble to the gate, dissolving down the steps like the ice cream in my throat.

JB McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, $pread Magazine, and the Southampton Review, with nonfiction in The New York Times, Newsday, The Long Island Press, City Limits Weekly, and Family Circle.
 

Everybody loves to gamble,” says Peter Dunn, a professor of Criminal Justice at the Katharine Gibbs School and retired NYPD lieutenant. According to Dunn, the level of interest an illegal gambling activity generates from the law is based upon its organization. “We weren’t concerned with the office Super Bowl pool or the five doctors who got together to play a few hands,” he says, recalling his years working vice in Manhattan South. “Our primary concern was any organized game where the house took a percentage. Some guys, if they’re smart, can get away with it for awhile. But sooner or later, everybody gets popped.”

My contact at the casino in Queens isn’t old enough to buy beer, yet he’s been sinking and swimming in The River for over a year. He wears an ace of spades charm around his neck and has been counting the days until his twenty-first birthday since he was sixteen. “I just can’t wait to get to Vegas,” he says, toting the latest poker bible around and quoting random passages. “It’s a game of skill,” he insists. “I could make a living off this if I didn’t have to go to school.”

‘Ace’ just completed finals at an area college and was willing to take me to watch a tournament. He said they’d have a few games running at once and that there would be no problem getting in. If there was then a guy named Pretzels would tell us. Pretzels ran the house at The River and worked the door. Pretzels was a problem solver and I couldn’t wait to meet him. I was actually en route to the place when I got the call from Ace. “No good,” he’d said. The casino was dark and no one was returning calls. “They must have been shut down. Sorry.” Ace said he’d try to find another game, but I haven’t heard back from him. I decided to take the drive anyway.

The River was situated among a row of interlocked storefronts tucked neatly behind an upscale Italian restaurant and a strip mall. Other than the quizzical FISH marking on the mailbox, there was nothing to distinguish the place as a den of iniquity. Completely hidden from the workaday world of Queens yet right out there in the open, it was perfect. The River had it all and I wanted it back. I needed to see how a tournament was run. I wanted to see how Ace handled his action, picturing him as a character from that old Scott Baio, Jody Foster movie, Bugsy Malone, where the kids all dressed and spoke like old-time gangsters, shooting cream pies at each other. I wanted Pretzels to size me up. I wanted to make him a star. But without Pretzels and Ace, all I had was a door and a mailbox.

I started to see the city as a map with an enormous deck of cards flexing over it, waiting to burst across five boroughs, one enormous hand of fifty-two pick up with me chasing down the cards. Then I got an idea.

It didn’t take long before I stumbled on the right website. Once there, I simply picked the state; NYC popped up within the New York listings then I was on my own. Each location contained a box for sponsors to describe the level of play at an upcoming tournament and what the buy-in was to enter. Buy-ins ranged from $100 to $1000. It’s typical for subcultures to absorb innocuous, every day words into their jargon to put minds at rest. Many of the locations described their atmosphere as ‘friendly,’ which meant I could probably visit their club or tournament with an excellent chance of not being robbed or murdered.

I made several picks based on proximity to home and a desired buy-in range ($300-$500). Having no immediate urge to see the trunk of an El Dorado from the fetal position, I steered clear of the contact who called himself ‘Goodfella,’ then admitted total beginner status to everyone. At this time, two popular Manhattan poker clubs had just been raided and closed so my first week of trolling brought little results. I needed to sweeten the bait, stating how I had no problem with losing just as long as I learned a little something. I had a half dozen games to choose from by the end of the day.

The clock on the wall says eight-thirty, but the time here is always NOW. I’m somewhere in the heart of Queens seated at a poker table in somebody’s basement. There are precautions and alerts the body goes through whenever entering the unknown. I’m absorbing my new surroundings, still waiting for the goose flesh to settle. The internet may be an extremely helpful tool, but it will always be a bit creepy. One minute you’re on your way to play poker with total strangers, the next you’re hanging up side down in someone’s dungeon. Upon entering I was not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. The inside was decorated like any other basement in Queens, wood paneling on the walls and support pillars, a pool table opposite the wet bar, with pictures of Marilyn, Elvis, and Dean swooning and sneering from every conceivable angle. I could have had my first kiss in this basement. I could have gotten drunk here in high school.

“Relax,” the dealer opposite me says. “We play a friendly game here.”

Of course.

The dealer is a big guy in his early forties who we’ll call Mike. This is Mike’s house, Mike’s basement, and everyone here is his guest. Mike runs the game from his wheelchair and pays himself five percent of every hand played–all night long. His guests, in return, get to play poker until their money runs out, drink as much beer and coffee as they like, or wait until Mike’s wife serves her chicken parmigiana in catering tins warmed over a Sterno flame.

I pay my buy-in to the dealer and he slides me my chips. The chips themselves are a minor miracle in seduction. I just handed Mike grocery, gas, and rent money, but now I’ve got all these wonderful chips stacked before me and anything is possible. There are seven other guys at the table thinking the same thing, only they’re totally serious about their chances. The conversation revolves around the evening’s possibilities, all possibilities of the past, and any possibility in the near future. There are tales of going bust in Atlantic City, beatings taken at Foxwoods, and last minute winnings in Vegas, baby, Vegas. Someone mentions the remote chance of a casino being built on the Island’s East End by the Shinnecock Indian Reservation and the room falls silent with possibility.

“Hey, you gettin’ a job for the summer or what?” a heavyset lifer asks the fresh faced twenty-something to my right.

“Me?” he says. “A job? Why would I do that when I can be checkin’ and raisin’ people all summer long?” Laughter spreads across the table like a free round of chips, the type of guffaws shared by people with similar addictions. A cell phone goes off three heads to my right. A deeply tanned guy in his early thirties answers, tucking his chin into the phone and turning from the table.

“Yeah,” I hear him say. “You knew this is where I’d be…I told ya I was workin’ tonight.”

It’s probably time to admit that I’ve never played a true hand of poker in my life. I showed up here looking for a story and have more interest in the players than the game. My subjects, however, are into winning money, my money, the way I’m into stories. I’ll get what I want eventually–and so will they.

There is one thing that I did do in preparation for my first card game. I created a poker starter kit for myself. Since my knowledge of the game began at zero I went with the obvious choices. I bought a copy of Poker for Dummies, rented Rounders with Matt Damon, then stumbled upon a decent memoir/how-to book on the underground game called Poker Nation by Andy Bellin. My kit was heavy on atmosphere, but details on the actual game were still whizzing past me. Damon loses the girl, but comes to terms with what he is, a card fiend, then heads out West for The World Series of Poker. Bellin introduced me to the underground life and taught me some important jargon, and chapter one of Poker for Dummies is just plain hysterical:

“Poker has always been a microcosm of all we admire about American virtue…Call it the American Dream–the belief that hard work and virtue will triumph…It is an immigrant’s song, a mantra of hope; it is an anthem for everyone.”

Back in Mike’s basement, the first hand is about to begin. I’m peering around the room, taking in all these proud Americans, the sons of immigrants reaching for their slice of freedom pie and realize the true hunger of the place. Mike shuffles the deck and lays down the button.

My first two cards come sliding toward me. I have two pair of something or other, but I’m not sure where it falls in rank. There’s a crumpled piece of paper in my pocket that lists the hands from lowest to highest, but I don’t dare pull it out. Mike quickly realizes my ineptitude by the way I hold my cards right out in the open like some Hollywood cowboy. He picks up on my ignorance by the way I repeat the phrase, “hit me,” like Danny Devito’s character during the poker scene in Cuckoo’s Nest. Mike understands poker like a second language and he silently agrees to become my interpreter. He lets me know when I’m up, and when it’s time to check, raise, or fold. After each hand’s been played, he tells me whether I made the right choice or not. Through some fluke of nature, I end up winning the first two hands. Then the razzing begins:

“What kinda beginner’s luck is this?”

“He ain’t no beginner. This guy knows exactly what he’s doin’.”

“I know. I think I seen him at Binion’s last week.” (hardcore, no frills casino in Las Vegas).

“He’s probably a mechanic.” (slang for professional cheat).

“Yeah or he’s workin’ undercover for the bunko squad!”.

“Hey, what exactly do you do?”

I identify myself as an English teacher and the table immediately does its best to mind its grammar and syntax. When one of the younger players, who had been shoveling chicken and pasta down in between hands, announces with a full mouth, “Yo, these freakin’ meatballs are retarded!” another player looks him over. “Is that supposed to mean good?” The kid wipes his mouth and nods. “Well, maybe you could speak English from now on so the teacher over here doesn’t have to shoot himself.”

I’m learning the game, making fast money, and winning new friends. I start to relax, settle into my seat, then proceed to lose $350 in approximately one hour and ten minutes. My chips disappeared at a steady rate, the other players’ stacks grew high, and Mike clinked another five percent for himself after every single round. I took my beating quietly, thanked the table for the evening, then left Mike’s basement for good.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own. I had shown very little patience, even with Mike’s guidance, and often stayed in the action just for the excitement despite having junk cards. There’s a cherished quote that veteran players often repeat. It was used in the movies I watched and the books I read, and goes something like this: If you look around the table and can’t figure out who the sucker is then the sucker is you. But what do you call someone who volunteers for the job? I’d kissed that money goodbye long before I ever stepped through Mike’s door. It was story money, a well spent investment. Mike, for his part, turned out to be a very good host. He was good at his work and seemed genuinely pained after I’d been wiped out. So much of the night revolved around men trying to win something, reaching for some kind of victory until it became an obsession. I wonder if Mike or any of the others could understand a guy who set himself up on purpose, someone who actually wanted to lose. I wonder if their psyches would even let them entertain the notion. “Well,” they’d probably say, studying my empty seat, “every deck has at least one joker…Who’s in?”

JB McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, Confrontation, $pread Magazine, and The Southampton Review, with nonfiction in The New York Times, Newsday, City Limits Weekly, and Family Circle.

The only thing different about this year at Jamaica is the number of students the Department of Education will allow the school to teach. I’ve just been excessed from the regular faculty so I won’t be teaching the classics this year. I am now on Absent Teacher Reserve status, basically a substitute in my own building, and until I find myself a new school, the city will view me as a burden and a hanger-on. I should have ‘my classroom’ cleaned out by the end of the day.

Four years ago I was an adjunct instructor at Southampton College, teaching writing and literature to incoming freshmen, when slowly and then quite suddenly Long Island University halted the flow of students to its Southampton campus and shut the place down. LIU’s departure was swift and unnerving, like something out of Broadway’s Miss Saigon. The only thing missing was the choppers floating overhead before leaving us all behind.

I remember wandering the uncut grounds when it was over, peeking into the shuttered windows of my old classroom before security asked me to leave. We always assume that institutions will outlive us, that hospitals, schools, or places of worship are meaningful and untouchable. Whenever bureaucracy steps in with its procedures and quotas it just seems wrong and unnatural, like snuffing out a flame at someone’s memorial vigil.

The college left me one gift though. Those freshmen classes that tenured professors wanted no part of had been mine and many of the students were products of New York City. Growing up in Suffolk County, the city kid was a myth, something to read about in the paper or watch on a movie screen. My students were bright and charming and a pleasure to teach. That spring I crashed a Teach NYC job fair at the Brooklyn Marriot and had three offers in fifteen minutes.

I recall one school in particular that tried to woo me. I hadn’t even wandered into their vicinity before two attractive reps were waving me toward their booth like sirens. Come check out our brand new school, they said, only 150 students, and state of the art Dell computers provided by the Gates Foundation. It sounded too good to be true and was way up in the Bronx, clearly out of my commuting range, so I passed.

Had I shown up for the interview, I would have discovered that there was nothing new about the place. The ‘campus’ would have consisted of one or two hallways inside of some pre-existing, eighty year old building with imaginary borders instituted. Essentially, one of the DOE’s College Board ‘Boutique Schools.’ And perhaps their students would have been using brand new Dell equipment with smaller class sizes, but what about the others who went to school in the same building? How could these ‘boutique’ students have so many advantages within the same system? Did the Gates Foundation know their generosity was being handled in such a way? It appeared that a form of educational apartheid was being practiced. I shrugged it off, though, and interviewed at Jamaica, not realizing that I had just glimpsed the future.

When I arrived at Jamaica High School for the first time I was dumbstruck by its stature, the bell tower, cement pillars, and classic brickwork, those enormous wings stretching atop Gothic Drive like some majestic bird. The auditorium had these gorgeous chandeliers that custodians maintained with a sixty foot pole. The library hall was covered with black and white photos of the school’s past, students posing in letterman sweaters and slicked back hair like movie stars. Jamaica’s website even boasted Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Beamon as two of its famous alumni. I pictured the future auteur daydreaming out a window, while the future Olympian bounded up the steps to class. The place looked like something out of a movie, which made sense because three films were shot there in my first two years. Clearly, this was the stability and community that I’d been seeking, just layer upon layer of New York City history.

My classroom is almost bare now. Everything has been pulled from the walls, student essays and inspirational posters, even a playbill of a performance called Jamaica, Farewell, about a woman’s desire to emigrate to America. Fitting that it’s one of the last things in my hands as I prepare to leave. Just a few short story collections to return to the book room then poof. Like I was never even here.

Unlike Long Island University’s withdrawal from Southampton College, the Department of Education’s abandonment of Jamaica High School was a carefully drawn out and demoralizing process. The first step was to pressure the former principal into instituting a zero tolerance policy in the building. The occasional fight was now an assault charge. Cell phone disappearances were reported as thefts. The building’s crime statistics exploded and Jamaica was branded an Impact school, one of the city’s most dangerous. This label brought constant NYPD presence in the building, everyday scanning with metal detectors, as well as camera surveillance in the hallways.

During this time, Far Rockaway High School was completing its own death throes orchestrated by the DOE. It was the usual routine: the school was marked as dangerous then shut down and completely restructured. Many of their students were then shunted to Jamaica, as well as teachers and administrators. Because security’s main concern was securing the lobby, large cavernous sections of the building were left unattended. There were puddles of urine in the stairways by first period and poker games on the steps in the afternoon. Any complaint made by faculty to a safety agent was met with stony indifference.

In just a year the atmosphere of the building had changed dramatically. We quickly evolved into the kind of school the DOE wanted us to become: undesirable. After the NYPD moved in and enrollment started to drop, the Far Rockaway staff now working at Jamaica took on the role of soothsayers. This is it, they would say. This is how it starts… They’re coming for Jamaica next. We laughed them off as ridiculous, a bunch of Chicken Littles telling us the sky was falling. Why in the world would our own system deliberately sabotage us? But they were absolutely right.

Jamaica’s feeder middle schools then advised their students to go elsewhere, which led to budget cuts, and excessed teachers. Words like ‘warehouse’ were used by DOE officials to describe the building, while other teachers from nearby schools would casually enquire on the subway, Are they done shutting you down yet?

The truly galling aspect was the role the DOE played throughout this entire process, pulling all the proverbial strings then acting like some innocent bystander with blood on its hands. It’s reminiscent of the way Don King promotes heavyweight title bouts, stirring up controversy then stepping aside to chuckle, Only in America.

Look at this beautiful building that you’re unable to fill, DOE officials eventually said without a trace of irony. You leave us no choice but to restructure. The next twist of the knife was the surreal experience of having our new principal introduce an even newer one- of the same building. The shell shocked-faculty just sat there, a tiny trickle of applause out of habit. The rest simply folded their arms and stared. There’s no reason why we can’t coexist under the same roof, said the newer principal, yet weeks later officials from her school interrupted Jamaica’s classrooms during instruction. Even though they wouldn’t open their doors, which were actually our doors, until the fall of ‘08, they couldn’t wait to measure for all those brand new computers of theirs. Here’s your hat, what your hurry? was an expression that came to mind, but maybe I was just being paranoid.

Throughout this lengthy ordeal, the Department of Ed never actually stated its intentions. It was obvious to everyone involved that a precise script was being followed, but because no one admitted that our building was marked for death, the immediate impulse was to try to rescue it. This past year Jamaica did everything it could to stay alive, reaching out to politicians and media, visiting middle schools, printing out t-shirts. There was even a face to face plea with the chancellor himself.

On April 14, Jamaica faculty and friends arrived to the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) meeting at Frank Sinatra High School to essentially ask Chancellor Klein for clemency, or at least a temporary stay of execution for Jamaica. In actuality, Frank Sinatra High School turned out to be two floors of a nondescript office building, the exact type of environment Jamaica was struggling not to become (Imagine the look on Ol’ Blue Eyes if he ever knew the truth about the school named in his honor). Astonishingly, the building claimed to house three other high schools, just press an elevator button in the lobby and there you are. Citizens of New York, beware of fetching that morning cup of coffee. You may discover that overnight the Department of Ed has set up a few desks, plugged in some computers, and is referring to your kitchen as a brand new, state of the art, smaller learning community.

As meeting time approached Jamaica personnel drifted into the building’s lobby. There were many of us so it took some time to wait for available elevators. No one quite knew what to expect. The buzzing exhilaration of seeing colleagues outside the workplace was swirling about. The last thing anyone anticipated was an appearance by a rock star, but that’s exactly what we got.

First came the whispers and head turns, giving way to an eerie silence as this strange force of nature moved past us toward the elevators. I remember taking a tentative step forward when an open palm immediately stiff armed me right back into place, a disembodied voice saying, PLEASE STEP BACK… Did I get off at the wrong stop? Maybe I was really in Times Square, staring up at the Mtv windows. No. It was just the chancellor of schools and his entourage making their way to the PEP meeting.

There was no acknowledgment of any kind. No Good afternoon, folks, no See ya upstairs, just the ding of the first floor and the chancellor and his people commandeering the first available elevator. The only thing missing was the Darth Vader theme music as we stood in the lobby watching them go. And with that, any notion of being on the same team as the DOE, separate entities united for a common goal, was completely obliterated.

Once inside the Frank Sinatra auditorium, Jamaica parents, students, and faculty got in line and waited their turn to speak behind a contingent of school psychologists who felt burdened by too much paperwork. The psychologists pleaded their case for over an hour, and they had every right to do so. By the time they were through, though, it was apparent that these PEP meetings were nothing more than gripe sessions for school employees, an opportunity to vent disappointments and frustrations, one person right after another, while the chancellor and his staff did everything in their power not to look bored and hungry. I got the impression that if I grabbed hold of a microphone and asked if there was any way of bringing the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, no one on the panel would have batted an eye.

Overall, Jamaica High School represented itself well. We didn’t come close to saving the building from restructuring and budget cuts, but it was a touching show of solidarity.

All that’s left is to stack these last remaining books and my connection to Jamaica as a full-time faculty member is through. There are countless ways of gauging history on this campus, but this English department book room is a time capsule in itself. The old wooden shelves that house the books are covered in graffiti. Each mark looks like it was done just an hour ago, scribbles done quickly so a teacher wouldn’t see. There’s an entry done weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked. There’s one for the year Kennedy was assassinated. If you stand still you can almost hear the kid breathing as he stretches beneath a shelf to leave his mark. Imagine the chain rattling that takes place inside this room every time a student is frisked at the front door or a surveillance camera is secured to an eighty year old wall. But I digress… I leave my own mark and the year I was here just above a stack of Huck Finns then shut the door behind me.

About eight weeks after attending the PEP meeting I was handed an envelope in a crowded hallway between classes: Please be advised that you have been placed in excess in our school. I sincerely regret the need for this action and thank you for the professional blah, blah, blah… With nothing but rumors and a strict DOE quota, the building was fortunate to get an incoming freshman class at all. We were unable to bring in enough students to sustain our budget and envelopes were delivered to faculty and staff all over the building. Quite frankly, it was a blood bath. So the t-shirts didn’t work and neither did the cardboard boat race. The same goes for attending PEP meetings, and of course, the writing of essays. You see, the funny thing about Absolute Power, it tends to have deaf ears and sharp claws.

And what exactly is the mayor’s take on this rash of teachers placed on Absent Teacher Reserve, an unfortunate trend that he helped create? “We are spending tens of millions of dollars, which we are struggling to come up with, and the taxpayer [money] would be better spent on the classroom [than] on supporting these teachers,” was his last official quote on the subject. Interesting. He and his First Lieutenant Klein labeled my building dangerous in order to free up space for some educational experiment then would like nothing more than to simply scrape away the excess once it’s through. I rearranged my life for this job. Just four short years later it’s as though the Department of Ed is inviting me to flee to the suburbs the way the city’s cops do.

As I complete this goodbye note, the mayor and his chancellor are beaming in all the newspapers. Apparently, the city’s charter schools have performed well on New York State achievement exams so the air is ripe for high fives all around. One paper even described the two men as “crowing” with enthusiasm. Please note, NYC, that there is nothing human about numbers, especially numbers that can be cooked so easily. When you see these men rejoicing in the press, it’s not for the sake of your children. It’s simply because everything is going according to plan. When the mayor took over the city’s schools and formed the DOE, he and Chancellor Klein vowed to teach those civil servants a thing or two about the real world, invoking practices like corporate downsizing, layoffs, and full-scale restructuring. That pesky union may have frustrated them at first, and the concept of tenure baffled them, but they were determined to find a way around this.

Their aim was to run education like a business or run it into the ground. So what if a few hundred teachers were treated like refugees when their historic buildings were chop shopped and closed under false pretenses, forced to wander job fairs with resumes in tow. So what if your child and thousands like him were deemed dangerous, scanned and frisked each morning so that space could be made for these charter and boutique schools. As with any business, the bottom line was all that mattered, and the bottom line came in the form of standardized test scores. For if these numbers were to somehow go up, even just a little, that would be the stuff of dreams. With all those digits falling into place, folks might forget all about the DOE’s union busting, as well as its dehumanization of minority students. Once those magical scores hit the newsstands, well, it’s what press conferences are made of. Smile for the cameras, gentlemen.

Incidentally, now that the first academy is on its way, guess which building was just taken off the Impact list of most dangerous schools? It turns out Jamaica wasn’t so dangerous after all, or perhaps it wasn’t good business to open a boutique academy inside an allegedly unsafe building so our scarlet letter was removed.

But what about the student who just spent two and a half years getting frisked each morning, the one who quietly went along with the DOE’s ruse because he had no choice? Maybe he grew up in a home that didn’t trust law enforcement to begin with. Now he was greeted by it every morning, the police van barking orders on the loudspeaker as he approached the building, the long winter lines waiting to get in- Hey, what’s that on your backpack? Gang colors? No just a flag from home. Well, get rid of it.

Perhaps during this time tragedy struck less than a mile away from his school, at some creep joint called Kahlua, and this kid thought, Hey, what else is new? Same old, same old. And the next day at school he was scanned and frisked and the day after that and the one after that until, Hey, don’t you guys know me by now? Step to the side, please… Lay your backpack on the table, and remove your belt…

After a while he came to the conclusion that maybe there were really two cities: Us and Them. Then he found this really cool t-shirt that said exactly how he felt, a parody of the Warner Brothers’ WB logo: If you see a cop, Warn-a-Brotha…. Get it? He started putting pro-Sean Bell stickers all over his school after that, on textbooks, windowsills, and radiators that said something to the effect that the city itself was the one who was really guilty.

Then maybe, when no one was looking, the kid took a nice long whiz on the staircase each morning to show his disgust for the disgust his city showed him every time he entered his school building. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with this whole damn place. Then he graduated- another member of NYC’s walking wounded, another generation of cop hater.

Where I grew up, in all white, suburban high school on Long Island, the only law enforcement I ever saw in the building was on Career Day. In fact, if I dust off the photo of my high school football team, I can easily spot over a dozen future cops, troopers, and deputies. It’s as if one community is telling its young, This is what you can be one day, while the other says, This is who’s keeping an eye on you- constantly. Only the mayor and his chancellor of schools can explain why such strong arm tactics are necessary to create space for their precious boutique academies.

With the windows closed and the walls completely bare, my classroom no longer looks the same. It’s just some hot, foreign place with no trace of me left. But for anyone still interested, the lessons of the day are as follows: George shoots Lennie because he loved him and because you never let someone else do your dirty work for you. Gatsby turned out all right in the end, it’s what preyed on Gatsby that we must be aware of, and no matter where we are in American history, it will always be a sin to kill a mockingbird.

The only other item left is in the right hand drawer of what used to be my desk, a DVD of the last film shot here, We Own the Night. By the time Jamaica High School makes its cameo the mobsters have all been killed and the two stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, are licking their wounds after the big shootout. The camera pulls back to reveal our lobby, minus the portable metal detectors, of course. Inside, our auditorium doubles for a NYPD award ceremony, which unfortunately makes a kind of demented sense. There’s those beautiful chandeliers hanging overhead, illuminating a sea of movie cops. There hasn’t been a play on that stage in over two years. Our auditorium is nothing more than a weigh station for kids to adjust their backpacks and belts after morning scanning, yet there’s Phoenix and Wahlberg at the podium, looking brave and heroic. The wonders of movie magic, I guess…

“Hey, Mister–” a voice will call down the hallway just minutes before the test. “Who wrote about those mice and men? George Steinbrenner, right?”

Due to the No Child Left Behind rule, everyone takes the exam during junior year regardless of their proficiency in English. The student who’s been in the system since kindergarten takes it, as well as the child who recently arrived to America and whose second, third, or fourth language might be English. Whether they have designs on going to college after graduation or going on to become mechanics and electricians, they are going to sit for that exam.

The more students a school gets to pass, the better the school looks. As a result, many schools have pushed up the date for students to take the test. Rather than taking it for the first time in June, why not usher them in five months early and see what happens? If they pass, great, if not, get ready for round two. Better still, let’s start grading the teachers on the results.

The Department of Education has been conducting a secret pilot program where 2,500 teachers at 140 city public schools are being measured without their knowledge on student performance on standardized tests. Sadly, the local media has weighed in with typical comments and clichés regarding the teaching profession. “Imagine teachers treated like other professionals–having their performance monitored and quantified,” writes Adam Brodsky in an op/ed piece for the Post. In his late January article, Mr. Brodsky even cites Tom Brady of the New England Patriots as a good lesson to all of us regarding the power of impressive statistics. But the city recently discovered, in the most stunning way imaginable, that gaudy, blown-up stats aren’t everything.

Despite his condescending attitude toward teachers, Brodsky still raises a good point. So let’s ‘monitor ‘and ‘quantify’ some of my students on their recent performance on the English Regents exam then determine my net worth once we’re through. Out of five classes taught this past semester, I had one class of juniors, three groups of sophomores, and one senior elective. The juniors were an interesting bunch, bright, friendly, and respectful, one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve ever taught.

But before we can examine their performance on the test, as well as my accountability, we need to establish setting. My building was falsely labeled as an Impact School last year, which means it is now regarded as one of the most dangerous schools in the city. Coincidentally, before the DOE can get its hands on a building and chop it up into ‘smaller learning communities,’ it must first get it labeled as dangerous.

Once a school is branded as Impact, a script is then followed to shut the place down, and Phase I is complete. Security is intensified. Letters are sent home to parents, notifying them that their child may transfer out of a ‘dangerous’ building if he or she chooses, and incoming freshman opt to go elsewhere when it’s time to select a school. The faculty is left to shrug and wonder where all these dangerous kids are hiding, but come away with nothing. The school’s hallways then begin to shrink, teachers are excessed, and the budget is cut. The atmosphere becomes bleak, like something out of an old Western. It’s time to shoot the horses and circle the wagons because rations are low and the enemy’s closing in.

Yet the DOE machine keeps rolling. During Regents week, my school was notified that a ‘new’ school will exist inside of our eighty year old building next year (Phase II complete). It will be the same building, the same amount of kids, just with an imaginary border put into place, a brilliant new version of divide and conquer.

One of my colleagues recently began her graduate school semester. When she introduced herself and her school, the DOE official moonlighting as an instructor explained that she was familiar with the building and that the school’s fate had already been decided. “Jamaica High School is a warehouse,” she said. She then advised the teacher to stop battling the DOE, to comply with the inevitable, or transfer out.

A warehouse. Any adult who’s witnessed children passing through metal detectors each morning then frisked with scanning wands, not because they’re dangerous, but for political reasons, knows what an absolutely disgraceful remark this is.

Let’s return now to my classroom of juniors and Mr. Brodsky’s pomposity: “…Why not make teachers prove their worth?” Very well, but shouldn’t instructors be given an equal playing field before they’re forced to compete? Do Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Tech, or Bronx Science, three of the finest specialized schools in the city, have Jamaica’s problems to contend with? They have waiting lists to get in, while Jamaica struggles with a two year long DOE choke hold. Whose test scores do you think will be more impressive?

As I scan the list of results I find that my class ran the gamut, lots of highs and lows. Some overslept and missed the exam, while others arrived early and pulled off stunning victories. Jamal got his 97, but Forrest received a 51.

As much as I would like to take credit for Jamal’s grade, the truth is that he’s a self-starter who sits up front, takes notes, and never misses class. Forrest, however, disappeared into the West Indies around holiday time: “Going to my country, bye.” He was gone for nearly six weeks, missing all of his Regents preparation. I’m sure he was visiting family he hadn’t seen in a while, but should his extended vacation have any bearing on my teaching career? Of course not.

There’s also no need to congratulate myself when Clarissa scores a high 86. She’s quiet, attentive, and likes to read. I did my job each day and she did hers. Or Victor who managed to get himself suspended for three weeks then recorded a 47. All four of these kids were in the same class and all four of them are responsible for their test scores. Not their teacher.

When it comes time to give Jamal’s family a call to congratulate them on their son’s success, I find out that he lives in a group home. I’m taken aback on the phone. I expected to speak to the man Jamal identified as his father on parent/teacher night, but he was really just the counselor on duty.

There’s no way to explain Jamal. He defies DOE logic and statistics. He left his group home each morning, reported to his ‘persistently dangerous high school,’ where he was scanned, frisked and instructed to readjust his belt in the auditorium, then sat down to record one of the highest scores in the state. The kid’s a winner, a true New York Giant, and I would love to bask in his glory or dance in his victory parade, but I’m nothing more than a fan.

* All students appear in this essay under pseudonyms.

Jb McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, Confrontation, $pread Magazine, and the Southampton Review, with nonfiction in the New York Times, the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program Report, and City Limits. He recently received an IPPIE award from the Independent Press Association for best editorial, and teaches writing and literature in the NYC public school system.

Lunchtime. I find my way into one of the faculty men’s rooms, a police officer’s cap resting on a windowsill, its owner inside one of the stalls, making and taking phone calls like the commissioner himself. In the library, where I go to grade papers, yet another officer. I ignore him, he ignores me, two separate entities here for completely different reasons. I grade my quizzes. He makes his phone calls. Apparently that big sign on the door with the red slash across a cell phone no longer applies. I leave a bit early to beat the rush, an officer on the second floor sees me and bows into a wall, as if in prayer, only he calls the wall, “Sweetie,” so I assume he’s not speaking to his respective deity.

It’s not so much the constant cell phone use, the squinting, dirty looks as I enter a corridor, or the fact that no one notified the faculty of a police presence in the building. It’s those Glocks in their holsters, the “hand cannons” at their hips. It simply looks obscene in the halls outside my classroom. This is supposed to be a sanctuary. Any literature teacher in the city will tell you, a few well placed props changes the entire setting of a location. I wouldn’t dream of teaching a lesson on Macbeth from the backseat of a squad car. What in the world are these people doing with loaded weapons in our halls? It’s just no way for a kid to go to school.

Last semester I had an opportunity to experience what the students go through. While snapping photos of the building to display in the school’s literary magazine, I inadvertently stepped off campus. An NYPD van immediately rolled up and demanded identification. I didn’t have any. Then who was I? Terms like “pedophile” and “terrorist” were used as casually as one might order up, say, a box of doughnuts. Terms like “overkill” and “police state” were hurled back at them. The conversation went downhill from there.

Yet this is the way that many of the city’s teenagers attend high school each day. Instead of using the auditorium for assemblies and school plays, it’s been turned into a weigh station for students to adjust their backpacks and redo their belts after removing them for the metal detectors twice a week. Maybe this type of indignity is worth the trouble at the airport, on your way to vacation in the islands, but to gym class? My first year in the building the assistant principal of security would prove to the students how effective the scanners were by pressing one against the fillings in his teeth. Definitely a yearbook moment, boys and girls.

You see, once a building has been labeled an “Impact School” the police arrive. Once the police arrive, negative publicity ensues. Negative publicity results in a failure to attract good students and low test scores are right around the corner. Low test scores simply mean that your school building is doomed. In order to avoid this nightmare, many schools fail to report the petty crimes in their buildings. My building, however, was recently praised for a policy of ‘zero tolerance’, everything from cell phone theft to verbal harassment was reported in good faith. Nothing was swept under the proverbial rug, and now the place is surrounded. Catch-22, anyone? The end of the day. My girlfriend, who also teaches in the building, likes to give me the day’s news. Since the matter has never been addressed by administration, all the faculty has to go on is hearsay, nothing more than ridiculous trench coat meetings in hallways outside of classrooms. She tells me that police guns were pulled on two students today. “ ‘If I tell you to do something, you better do it,’ ” was the cop’s explanation before bragging how, in a separate incident, a Muslim student attempted to enter the building using another student’s i.d. and the terrorist unit was called in. Then the officer asked my girlfriend out to dinner. “Well, did you feel a whole lot safer afterwards?” is all I have to say.

This fall, to pound the student body’s collective esteem further into the ground, a Daily News sports reporter covered one of our home football games. The article made its way throughout the school, passed from hand to student hand until a tattered copy reached my desk. For some reason, the reporter’s article got personal. He ridiculed our field, mocked the students who showed up to watch, even jeered the parents who cooked the hot dogs. He questioned our school’s heart, never bothering to wonder if other factors for a lackluster season might be at play. Though, in the reporter’s quest to deride the school, he got our nickname incorrect. For the record, we are the Beavers, sir, the Fightin’ Beavers, and don’t you forget it.

All it takes is for one student to have a bad morning, to carry that burden to school with him and then to act out on it, something that occurs in countless variations throughout schools nationwide. Instead of a routine suspension and a call to Mom, Dad, or even Grandmama, with the NYPD presence inside a school the end result could be a world of hurt that no one ever imagined.

On our way out of the building, we pass one of the flyers some of the students have taped to the walls in an effort to win back their school. It shows a graphic with a pair of young hands gripping steel bars. This is not a penitentiary, it says. We are students, not inmates… If tales of danger are truly what you seek, dear reader, I’m writing this essay during the first semester of my tenure year. Now that is truly frightening.

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JB McGeever teaches writing and literature in a public high school in New York City.