Crack Cocaine & a Bullet to the Brain

I woke up early this morning replaying over and over again in my head snippets of conversations that I had last night up in the Santa Monica mountains with some of my new students. As you may or may not know, I run a charter high school in inner-city Los Angeles for students who dropped out or have been kicked out of their traditional high schools. Part of each student’s enrollment into the school involves a week-long camping trip into the local mountains where they get a chance to get away from it all, bond with each other, and begin to take the first steps down a new path that will lead to hope and wholeness for each of them. I find that I also learn more than I could ever imagine about them in the short time I spend with them during that trip. I help facilitate the activities for one of the nights up in the mountains, and my particular lesson plan involves a lot of personal introspection and sharing. Normally, I do this on the first night but this time I did it on Wednesday night. As a result, I think my young charges had already bonded together and this allowed for a deeper level of sharing. They usually share some particularly intimate details about their lives but last night the small group that I was in was probably the most painful I've ever experienced.

By the end of the night, I have the young people broken up into small groups, where they share their “life maps.” I was in a group with about 10 students. There was a girl named Crystal [names have been changed] sitting across from me. She seemed detached and emotionless as she shared about her life. “I went to Kennedy High School...I never knew my father...I dropped out...”—she shared as if rattling off mundane details, making no distinction between one topic from the next—“...my mother passed away last month on November 7th.” The gravity of that last comment, shared in the same report-style monotone, was belied by the tears that welled up in her eyes. So now she is all alone in this world, parentless at 18. I didn't know what to say, there was nothing I could say, but I surreptitiously scribbled down a note so that I wouldn't forget to follow up with our school counselor.

We moved on to the next student. Olga was very pale. She had herself covered up in a big sweatshirt so I couldn't really see her body type but her face looked gaunt and her hands were bony. She seemed wispy and ghostlike; she spoke in a barely audible whisper. “I grew up in L.A. ... I went to Berendo ... I dropped out in the 10th grade ...” She paused, “This is hard,” there was an uncomfortable silence. “Then I began using crack...” At this last comment, her head dropped. The group was silent. There were tears coming out of Olga's eyes but no sounds whatsoever. A student next to her put his arm on her shoulder. Two of the girls left the room and returned with some tissue for her. There was still silence. Her face was in her hands and her fingers were rubbing against her temples, as if trying to drive the pain out of her head like one would do when experiencing a migraine. Olga stayed in this position for the next half-hour and did not move nor make a sound.

Latoya, one of the girls who had went out to get a tissue, spoke up. “I know life is hard, you guys,” she began with, and then proceeded to tell us about her life. She kept her composure until she shared that at eight years old, she was molested by her step-father. “This went on for eight years.” Her voice had now lowered to a hush and then she stopped, unable to go on. The girl next to her (named Monique)—who had earlier shared that she had run away from home, had been a “stripper,” and had spent time in jail before finally “getting into the Bible” and deciding to change her life—blurted out, “I was molested by my cousin when I was six years old. It's not right to be six and to always be thinking about having sex. I told my mom but she wouldn't believe me; she said I was lying. But he gave me gonorrhea.” Besides Latoya, Monique, and Olga, there were now two or three other girls crying, as if silently confessing they had experienced something similar. There was more dead, uncomfortable silence. I tried to pitch in with something encouraging, but my words felt empty and inadequate.

At this point, Jermaine, one of the jokesters in the group, tried his hand at providing comfort and encouragement. “I feel your pain,” he said with uncharacteristic seriousness. He went on to share about how he was born in jail; his mother is serving a sentence of 25 years and is still in jail. He talked about the series of failures he has experienced. He said, however, that he has been “doing good” for eight months now and this is the longest he has ever stayed out of trouble for one time. Despite this success, he shared that his brother was recently sentenced to life in prison. Then he made an odd statement, “Sometimes I just wish I was sentenced to life in prison.” I peered intently at him trying to decipher what he meant. He went on, “Sometimes I just want to put a bullet into my brain and end it all. I think about it a lot.” Inside I was panicking but outside I remained calm. I did not have the words to provide any modicum of healing. There seemed to be a sense of hopelessness in the air. It was as if the young people were saying, “My life is so broken and messed up, I will never ever be fixed.” I tried to encourage them that they were all on the right path and that there were people here who cared about them and that the past does not necessarily equal the future...but it was all for show; the future may be unwritten but the past is forever, and nothing I could say would change that. I felt empty inside but I still tried to smile warmly, as if it would all be okay, and then we adjourned for the evening.

Afterwards I compared notes with some of my staff who were also up there. They, too, were both a little shell-shocked. It seemed like each group had a similar experience. Earlier that night, I had the students write a journal entry about what “personal baggage” they needed to leave at the door of the school. We looked these over. One student—Jose Ramirez—wrote about his drug addiction, “What started out as a pleasurable habit has now turned in to a living hell.” There were a couple others who had revealed addictions: Martin Diaz and Jessica. One of my teachers mentioned that another student—Raul—had mentioned suicide. And so, as I said, I drove down the mountain deeply disturbed by what I had heard, and then I woke up early this morning with the same thoughts on my mind.

Dreams of Surrogacy and Sacredness

I was sick recently and, as a result (I think), I had some very unusual dreams. In fact, over the course of one week, I had three dreams in particular that really stood out. All seemed to involve my students in some way, sharing a common theme.

The setting for the first dream was the Arizona desert. My wife and I were living in a house with a bunch of the students from Watts. We were living a commune-like existence, and my wife and I were kind of like the parent-figures. It was 4:30am and I was standing out on the driveway with some of the students. We were gazing up into the sky at some shooting stars. One of my students—Naliesha, I think—fearfully asked me, “Are they [the meteors] going to hit the ground?” “No,” I reassured her, “Most of them are just made up of small dust and ice particles. They will burn up in the atmosphere long before they reach us. You don’t need to worry.” I continued scanning the horizon for shooting stars when suddenly, out of the east, emerged this gigantic meteor. It hurtled across the sky at a low altitude; its immense girth, glowing hot like an ember, slowly rotated before my eyes. It was so close that I could clearly see details upon its surface, which was covered with flaming, scraggly, rocky points, still raw and sharp from the lack of smoothing friction in outer space. It streaked over our heads with the deep rumbling sound of a Concorde jet, and I whispered to myself, “Oh my God, it’s going to hit!” My eyes continued to trail its downward arc while my body was paralyzed. Off in the distance, at least some several miles I saw it make impact. A mushroom cloud exploded and I told all the students to run into the house. “Get down!” I yelled to them, and we assumed the classic hands-clasped-over-the-back-of-the-head earthquake stance. I didn’t know whether the impact wave would completely obliterate the house, and us, or not. Soon the earth began to rumble and shake. The quaking became more and more violent, but it was not enough to tear the house apart, and then it subsided. I was relieved to find that everyone was safe.

The second dream took place in a wooded area near Belmont High School (I know no such place exists, but this is my dream world). I was walking along near a group of young people, but I was not with the group. I recognized one of them as a student of mine named Brenda. She was with a group of boys. They were all gang bangers; I didn’t know any of them. I stayed within earshot of the group, just far enough away not to be conspicuous. I could overhear their conversation. They were trying to get Brenda to murder someone. It was as if they were “jumping her in” to the gang. They picked out the victim, who was within sight about 20 yards downhill. They passed her the gun and I could tell that she did not want to do this deed. However, she also wanted their approval, desperately. They were fervently whispering to her, “Do it! Do it, Mija! Shoot her!” I was paralyzed by indecisiveness. I knew it was my role to intervene, to save the innocent woman whom the gang had selected for death, to save Brenda from the gang’s evil influence, but I knew then that the gun would likely be turned on me. I was stuck between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, and I chose the former. And I was ashamed.

In my third dream I, again, was with a group of students (some were my own while some were not). I had been selected to participate in a radical new form of therapy called “surrogacy counseling.” [In real life, I’ve never heard of what I am about to describe to you although such a thing might exist.] The clients were all young people who had lost a loved one (i.e., their loved one had died). Each client was paired with a surrogate counselor, usually someone whom they knew before and felt close to and/or could trust. I was paired with one of my Watts students named Aidee. Aidee married young, as a teenager, but her husband had been killed in a drive-by. The surrogate counselor’s role was to fill in as the deceased loved one so that closure could take place. The group’s facilitator took us through a series of activities that progressively drew the group closer and allowed us to open up. The session culminated with Aidee and I standing and talking, face to face. “Why did you leave me?” she sobbed, “Why did you have to die?” “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry.” We both hugged and tears were streaming down both of our faces. I intensely felt her pain; psychologically, I had transformed into her lost loved one; I was deeply, deeply sorry.

The way I interpret all of these dreams is that we are the surrogate fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters for the youth in our programs. Their lives are laid before us, vulnerable, wounded, in mortal danger. Our lives are expiable healing forces to be poured out upon them. In my heart, I feel like ours is a sacred role. I am reminded of the New Testament passage in Matthew 25 where Jesus says to his disciples, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.” Then the disciples incredulously ask him, “When did we see you hungry and gave you something to eat? When did we see you thirsty and gave you something to drink?” And Jesus answers them, “Whenever you have done this for the least of these, you have done it to me.”