In 1976, I had a brutal second grade teacher. But before we get to her, let me set the scene.

P.S. 100 was located 3 blocks away from my home on Ocean Parkway, which was the dividing line between Brighton Beach proper and West Brighton. The school was  smack dab in the lower middle-class, white, secular Jewish ghetto known as Trump Village. 

The school, a relatively small, 4-story pink-bricked monument to elementary school education, was a remnant of a neighborhood that was lost  when Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s dad, decided to redevelop the area in the early 1960s. Located between West 2nd Street and West 3rd Street, it remained from the old neighborhood grid that was otherwise wiped away with the creation of the new mega-block layout that Trump Village required.

The seven buildings of Trump Village stood as monuments to middle class American aspirations. Each orange brick building topped out at 23 stories, their bland design only slightly ameliorated by designer/architect Morris Lapidus’ modest attempts at mid-century Florida chic. While Lapidus is best known for designing Miami Beach hotels, including such stunners as The Fontainebleau Hotel , little of that garish sophistication grace his utilitarian Trump Village buildings. Instead, Fred Trump’s development was housing in the tradition of the mega blocks that Robert Moses dreamed of: bland, cookie cutter, human storage towers filled with working class families looking to move up the social ladder.

Nobody ever used the  playgrounds in Trump Village. Yeah, those playgrounds were “stylish” with modern takes on such staples as monkey bars, turtles and horses that you could climb on. But nobody really played on them. And rarely did the elders of Trump Village sit on the wooden benches that ringed the grounds; this was a stark contrast to my 4-story tenement walkup life where elders (aka yentas) sat and gossiped in front of their buildings every day.

Such is the reality of a housing complex that consists of 23 stories, accessible mainly by elevator. People who lived there chose to keep to themselves, getting the occasional fresh air from the dozens of the apartments’ private terraces that spotted the exteriors of the buildings.

Anyway, enough about the territory, let’s get to the meat of this story!

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I was barely 8 years old when one day, as  I was playing with one of the other oddball children in the class — who happened to be a black kid — my teacher freaked out.

When I say “oddball,” I mean the school was predominantly filled with white, lower middle-class, secular Jewish kids from Trump Village and not “freaks” like me: a white Jewish kid who came from a poor immigrant family living in a Brighton Beach tenement. Or a black kid who was poor and lived in Coney Island, like the kid I was playing with that day. Heck, I don’t know if our teacher was freaking out because I was a white kid playing with a black kid or because we wouldn’t just sit down and be quiet.

It was the end of the day and we were all waiting to be sent home and running around desks. Horsing around. Smiling and laughing. And then suddenly the teacher screamed, grabbed us both by the ear and tossed us like bags of sand into the giant wooden wall closet.

It was one of those shallow classroom closets with sliding doors where the kids hung their stuff. It was mostly empty, since it was nearly the end of the school day and everyone had their belongings at their desks already.

The right side of my head smacked hard on the wood that held the coat hooks and just inches away from a metal jacket hook. My hands managed to brace the rest of my body against the plaster wall, slowing me down a bit but not much. The black kid I was playing with landed a few feet down from me in the closet. He was facing me when he landed and seemed to hit his head the same way I did.

We both started screaming and crying, but the teacher quickly slid the door closed to muffle our cries. It was dark with just a little light from the outside coming in. The other students outside were quiet with only the occasional noise of shuffling or coughing. She kept us locked in the closet until school ended several minutes later and then let us out as if nothing unusual had happened.

I told my parents about this when I got home, and they complained to the school. And the “reward” for complaining was not having the teacher reprimanded or fired but rather the administration of the school saying I was mis-zoned for P.S. 100. Meaning they were kicking me out. I was officially sent to P.S. 253 for 3rd grade.

P.S. 253 was supposedly the “bad” school in the core of Brighton Beach and where all the non-Trump Village kids went. But at least it was in my immediate, immigrant-filled, mixed, working-class, tenement-filled neighborhood. And everyone there was an “oddball” in some way, so at least I had a chance of fitting in.

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Jack Szwergold is a skilled web developer who has worked for Artforum and the Guggenheim Museum. He founded the Onion’s website in 1996 and currently works for the New School.