The Nobody Who Became a Writer

My school experience as a child was the pits and not from peaches. My ‘wealthy’ cousins began the tumultuous experience, and the drunk, insensitive, and completely obscene ‘teacher’ perpetuated it, and other classmates cheered them on; I tried to ignore the ride and just kept going like a darn Duracell battery that everyone thought would never burn out, and it didn’t.

I was well aware I wanted to learn but couldn’t; I wondered how others could solve math problems so easily, and I couldn’t. I wondered how many students could memorize a poem and recite it with such grace and eloquence, they made my skin shiver, and when I had to recite one, I’d freeze, forget, or stumble over words.

When we had reading competitions in the classroom, I was afraid to even try, but I remember this particular shy boy who read in front of the class like nobody’s business, and I told myself it was because he read many comic books or magazines, something my family couldn’t afford to buy for us.

All comic book readers exchanged with others, and that left my siblings and I out of the reading club. Other students had fairy tale books that they also exchanged, but we had nothing but our harsh reality of poverty; there were no fairies, kingdoms, or princes, princesses in our world.

I’m sure I couldn’t learn because I was usually hungry and or sick; I suffered from a severe case of childhood anemia and also got horrible headaches. One of my teachers started feeding me scrambled eggs for lunch, I think, and it was the best meal of scrambled eggs I’d eat; it was a ‘subtle’ way the teacher told me she cared and wanted to help me in more ways than she realized.

But I was still everybody’s doormat, punching bag, and the laughing stock of the school for being poor, vulgar, and dumb; I guess some things never change.

The few things I still remember from my childhood school experience are a couple of songs and reading poetry (Federico Garcia Lorca), history to my dad, and listening to him talk about Karl Marx and Charles Darwin; anything else is just a blur.

I did enjoy listening to my dad’s life as a child when the wolves roamed the outskirts of town, coyotes ate all the fowl, and the time of the Cristeros. I learned more from dad and nature than I did from school and teachers, and neither dad nor Nature showered me with insults.

The only thing I remember being good at was memorizing times tables and countries and capitals for each continent; now I sometimes forget the capital of my own state.

I graduated from elementary school ‘de puro pansazo’ like we say in Spanish when somebody barely makes the grades; many didn’t even make it to third grade, and some geniuses decided to cut the legal age to still be in elementary school to 15 or under; that left many students out of school who were smart and wanted to be in school. I obviously hated school but would rather put up with the poisonous environment than be left in limbo; I even begged my mother to let me stay in school and felt badly for my sister whose place I felt I was taking away.

I think after that I felt more motivated to try harder in school, and it apparently made a difference, but I never thought about school beyond elementary, much less becoming a teacher or writer; those thoughts were not even part of my existence.

I do recall writing short verses or ‘love’ letters that never went anywhere.

The insults didn’t stop, but the ladder kept getting higher, and that was just fine with me; I could climb it one wrung at a time.