Transcription
This favorite book is *The Catcher in the Rye*. Such an English teacher, am I right? Mr. Gonzales is a type of teacher who has a couch, a mini-fridge, and a microwave for us to use in his classroom. He's the type of person who gives you money to buy him Burgerville, but he lets you keep the change. Gonzo, as we lovingly call him, is a half-deaf, goofy, dad joke-telling stump of a man, more smile than a hair, all engine and throttle. But by request from the man himself, to make him look thinner and younger in this poem, from now on, please picture a young, rippling Brad Pitt from *Fight Club* physique on a not-50-year-old Mexican high school teacher who couldn't weigh more than 150 pounds and who has biceps that go on for days. We're talking cartoon calendar pages off the wall days.
Patrick Gonzalez taught me the dashes in Dickinson, the grace in Jane Austen, the twisted madness of Hamlet's. He also taught me how to use a semicolon properly, so he's pretty good. And as my senior English teacher, he also taught me that I couldn't [ __ ] an essay the night before, or at least that I shouldn't. And then, applying for college is not like applying for a job; it actually is a job. Basically, he kicked my ass. And as a high school student on the cusp of freedom and adulthood, I was annoyed and grateful because Mr. Gonzales gave me more than just tools to close-read a dense passage; he taught me how to be real. He taught me how to write with conviction, with diction. He told me to staple my feet and he stayed and he studied my wandering bamboo legs, told me the tree pens like baseball bats, swing for the fences. He gave me understanding that what I had to say was worth its weight in Jupiter-level gravity. Then he taught me how to argue, how to defend every stance I've got with every nail and tooth. Gonzo, maybe I repeat myself, that anything can be won. You throw the kitchen sink and you go for broke. For once in my life, my sentences did not feel bankrupt. I had this wonderful golden credit line behind me.
Mr. Gonzales had a policy in his class that you could make up any at any time of the year. He didn't care that you filled it outright; he cared that you understood it. He never gave up on any of his students. He has that down in curriculum, down in contract, and he never gave up on me because before him, my mouth was weighed down with this ironclad rigidity. Every small thing I wanted to say sank deep past every small insecurity that I imagined Atlas couldn't carry. I came face to acne-riddled face about how lonely I was. I couldn't even talk to myself because I loathe how I spoke. Silence became my new favorite thing to read, and self-deprecation became bookmarks tucked inside pages that yearned to be edited. What started happening was that the things he's ever said started a pile-up, first in my mind where love letters filed into file cabinets along with notes to pass in class behind the teacher's back started a backlog. The catalog of awkward family interactions, sorry to stack up, darts-shaped paper airplanes started whizzing into my stomach, each flight carrying the same message of, "You are just a [ __ ]." My body was a walking library, and I felt each shelf was lined with banned books, as it was just a matter of when I would be burned down to the ground.
But he knocked gently, grabbed the book. He cleared the floors with crumpled verses and torn manuscripts and found this writer alone in the back, horrified, and with hands cramped from an endless march of syllables. He told me this: "This is worth reading." We found the pythons wrapped around my voice box, and then we blew the dust off the old records. I read my silence to myself at first, tweaking and twisting every note, and so I could finally figure out how to call out this thunderous nothing that I clutched in my hollowness. Then I began earning out the wrinkles in my speech that late that was left behind when my voice lay dormant and crumpled. When you start to wear the words on your sleeves, people begin to take notice. After constant reading and rereading, and writing and rewriting, and with the help of a handy editor, I was ready to dance. I started to organize my texts and turn them into musical scores. We burned the roof down and turned up the dance floor. At this point in my life, my poems became vinyl. My noise went from static to still be surround. For once in my life, the things I that sounded beautiful, and I always got a standing ovation in our core requests, every time, from behind that little teacher's desk. Which is funny because Gonzo is half-deaf.
He taught me how to tie a tie. He taught me how to choose my words wisely. He taught me to lace up my dancing shoes. Learning from him is like learning from a wise old oak tree whose favorite food is baby back ribs and beer. I'm starting to speak a little bit louder now. It doesn't have to be more; it just has to be now. It's a little bit slower so I can catch every word about to jump out of my mouth like mistakes. They're a sensitive inside of my jaws that are capable of snatching back lost years of adolescence. He is the person that I needed when I was younger, and he is the person that I want to be when I am older. There are, and I look around and see the snakes of "don't say a word" coiled around throats. I see the books towering inside you, have pages fluttering inside of your eyes. There is still the low hum of airplanes circling around your heart. Also, Tamra, you cannot amount to anything. You do not matter. You are just a [ __ ].
So now I'm starting to learn to value stories and ideas and dreams like he did. I'm holding hammers so I can forge us into platinum. And when you, when you look at these letters that are flying towards you, just remember that hell is having to have every single one of these letters read to you and without ever letting pen put pen to page and edit what is wrong with these letters. And there is so much wrong with them. So go ahead, grab your pencils, charm the serpent's grass tablets, and chisel away every word except the last. And if you, and with that, you will remember that you can be anything. You have stories that matter. And when you get lost, when you worry that your map is faulty, that your GPS is leading you astray, you look at your last note and remember that we are all going up.