Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  Early on, I developed ways of dealing with the story I was living in that did not seem to mirror the stories I saw on television or experienced at the homes of friends.

  One way to get out of my story was to get into another story, like the stories of Stephen King, which I desperately wanted to jump inside and live in, especially the scariest ones. Another way was to do the things my grandmother told me to do, in order for God to hear our pleas to keep my mother from drinking and my parents from fighting.

  In the shadowy duplex that my grandmother lived in, the Bible was King. The Bible was like the American flag in that you could never let it touch the ground. The solemn black book held a sacred space on her crowded little armchair table in the living room. My grandmother’s house, as I got older, became less a place of tea parties and pancakes with milky coffee as a treat, and more a place of watching scary movies and memorizing psalms.

  My grandmother loved a Christian song and wanted me to learn it well enough to sing it to her. In exchange I got an oversized Michael Jackson “Thriller” button. My grandmother wanted me to recite a psalm by heart. In exchange I got a record, or more commonly as I got older, cassette tapes until those made way for compact discs. I said the psalm inside nightmares I was trapped in, so that the Lord would release me. And it worked for years.

  My grandmother read her Bible every day, in Spanish, aloud, but only loud enough so that I heard mumblings, the Jesus Cristo refrain more enunciated than anything else. She gave me a Bible of my own, which I kept at her house. I looked at it from time to time, read it with all of its begatbegatbegat. My grandmother wanted me to read the book cover to cover, and I whined and kicked my chair, because it was so boring, I didn’t even get it. Somehow I was coerced into a Bible correspondence course at age eleven, with the expectation that the more I did in God’s name, the more he might listen to me, to us, working in His name, praying for an end to my mother’s alcoholism.

  So: I filled out a perforated slip of paper from a Christian magazine with my grandmother’s address, and soon, slim paper booklets arrived with lessons and question and answer sheets. The booklets always arrived from southern states, places that seemed exotic. Multiple choice questions regarding the finer points of the Book of Revelation lurked in my head at night after I signed my name and sealed the envelope to send back my answers. I conjured up images of the booklet covers we received in the mailbox: the whore of Babylon riding a many-headed beast, an amalgamation of several animals I’d seen behind fences at the zoo. I fell asleep thinking of the whore’s tight scarlet outfit, her crown, the staff she held in an upright hand as the beast underneath reared on its hind legs. I mailed in my answer sheets, got graded by nameless people or a sterile, central computer. I only scored average. There were no records or toys like my grandmother gave me when I memorized a song or a psalm.

  At thirteen, I put an end to Bible correspondence courses. God hadn’t listened. In fact, I didn’t think he paid the slightest bit of attention.

  I started to listen less to my grandmother’s admonishments about how God felt about how I behaved. I felt watched because she reminded me that He was watching me every moment. Something about who I was when I was in her house and who I was inside myself suddenly did not seem to fit. None of my friends understood why I would give myself over to a hobby like Bible study. No one knew I was asking for favors, wishes, rescue.

  In order to match up the unwieldy planes of my life, I decided to do some careful sorting.

  In order to listen to the music I wanted to listen to that my grandmother deemed satanic, I had to tune her out.

  In order to touch myself quietly and not think about God watching me, I had to set aside the pencils and white paper tests and give myself over to whatever it was that had a hold on me (and it didn’t feel satanic, never).

  To stay abreast of new videos on MTV, homework, and extra-credit assignments, I needed to let go of the Bible study.

  To stay afloat in my parent’s house as the undertow threatened to pull me under, to a place where I screamed and cried into pillows so I didn’t have to listen to them fighting, I had to let go of Bible study.

  In fact, I wanted to let go with a strong, fine flourish; a flick of my wrist, to send the tests soaring up and away.

  Sometimes, though, I still listened for an answer to my dilemmas. When my parents’ house was quiet, when one of them was passed out on a couch, or I heard a door slam announcing a new silence, I listened.

  I heard nothing.

  1985–1986

  When I was in sixth grade, I begged my father to let me attend Oakcrest Junior High.

  I’d gone to Oakcrest since preschool. I wanted to join my friends planning to attend the junior high of the same name, located a bit off of my parents’ radar. My father, who still drove me to school in sixth grade, concerned himself with the extra minutes added to his commute. He would have to backtrack to get to work each morning. The commute to junior high meant longer distances between us.

  One Saturday, we drove from our house to the junior high campus and then to his workplace. He timed the minutes as they changed on the console of his white Buick Riviera. I sat with my hands folded in my lap as he drove, fearful it would take too long, but certain that any other school was not really an option.

  “Public school?” my father bellowed the one time I’d mentioned it. “They’d eat you alive.” I tried to picture who or what would “eat me alive.” I imagined beatings from bullies and other consequences of being one of the smart ones in class, images I got from after school specials on TV.

  My father won out to some degree when he made me fear public school, but I won as well. The trip to Oakcrest Junior High added only ten extra minutes to his commute.

  I enrolled in seventh grade at Oakcrest and was introduced to the petite principal who casually informed students that she moonlighted as an aerobics instructor. The campus was small, unadorned. The cement yards were surrounded by ivy-heavy fences that separated us from the apartments and houses surrounding the campus. A bungalow classroom sat like an afterthought amidst the cement courts. The main classrooms were on either side of a narrow courtyard. The main office was an A-frame house that reminded me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The one set of tiled bathrooms did double duty as locker rooms, complete with a dark inner chamber of group showers. The boys’ and girls’ bathrooms were separated by one heavy wall. Our voices echoed from one bathroom to the next with an eerie dungeon-like quality.

  ✵

  My first intrigue when I approached the campus teeming with students in this small cement space: male teachers. Second intrigue: older students, female, who looked like high school seniors and not the ninth graders that they were, strolling about wearing high-end, brand-name clothes, jewelry, and haughty expressions on heavily lipsticked and rouged faces.

  Then, too, there were the negotiations for attention, popularity, and status that had been more submerged in elementary school. Junior high seemed to pulse with the need.

  Something different pulsed in me, too. I began collecting little plastic cases that contained gray and black and heather-colored eye shadows. Tiny little brushes accompanied the squares of luminescent powder. I hid these, and the tube of white lipstick and black eyeliner pencil, in my book bag. When I left my father’s car, my face had just one coat of foundation; by homeroom, I had a smooth line of black around my eyes and a heavy coat of metallic gray shadow on my eyelids. I learned my make-up routines from Veronica and Abigail.

  On campus, my classmates and I could be found in Mr. Connell’s homeroom: We don’t need no education! and Hey, Teacher, leave us kids alone!, the Pink Floyd refrains we boomed in unison to Mr. Connell’s delight. This act did not catch on with other teachers, so we kept it within the confines of homeroom. Our class traveled together from homeroom to math to art to biology to English on the tiny campus, the smallest school I would ever attend.


  Between classes, we could be found lolling around the aluminum benches or tussling against the catering trucks. On rare rainy days, we were stuck inside the humid classrooms after school, waiting for annoyed parents who had fought traffic to retrieve us.

  As my parents became more volatile, I became more oblivious to the dramas of my fellow students. I now had dramas of my own, all of which required secrecy and a fair share of acting. Everything at home was normal. Everything was fine. With Mr. Ivers in my life now, I felt strangely outside of things, but the new places I found inside myself were suddenly starting to feel unpredictable, explosive, alive.

  NOVEMBER

  1986

  On Monday, after that first monumental phone call, I looked more closely at Mr. Ivers.

  His hair was black, a true, jet black, with an occasional auburn strand in the midst of its soft, natural curl. He was jovial, always joking. His laugh commonly peppered his conversations, his classroom lectures. His hazel eyes, which sometimes cast a strong greenish glint, were small. His glasses resembled an aviator’s, only with clear lenses. I wondered how old someone had to be in order to wear such unattractive, bland frames. The thought made me touch my own glasses, mottled brown, square frames, which I chose (to my mother’s dismay) because they resembled the frames James Dean wore in the poster I taped to the wall of my bedroom. (“Those are men’s frames!” she cried.)

  Mr. Ivers had pale features that turned ruddy, a harsh blush I would later learn became more pronounced when he had a few beers, or a snort of cocaine, or when he was angry. Later, when he grew out his facial hair, it was predominantly red, and tickled my enamored imagination as well as parts of my skin. There was the distinct cleft in his chin, which I latched onto, recognizing it as a feature many women remarked upon in men. The gap in his top two front teeth was the clincher for me, and would later become one standard by which I found people distinctly attractive.

  But I was not in love with Mr. Ivers’s appearance.

  At thirteen, I thought I was attracted to blondes with blue or green eyes. I assumed that my first crushes figured into the equation: first kiss with a boy was James Keller, a fast little runner boy who had a dirty blonde head of hair; first (prohibited, dangerous, electric) kiss with a girl was Abigail, friend since kindergarten, first language German, blonde, who kept her green eyes open the entire time.

  I secretly eyed Mr. Ivers’s ties, though his whole look was something I deemed too formal. I could do without the cardigan sweaters that reminded me of old men. The sweaters matched his shirts and slacks perfectly, and at school he was never without one, even on the hot days. His occasional light pink button-up shirts were a subject of ridicule behind his back—my classmates called the colors “so gay!” and I was too uncertain to challenge such a judgment.

  Instead, I stared at the knot of his tie and then returned his gaze, wondering if he was able to discern my secret impulse to remove it.

  Instead, this secret lingered, smoldering, until two years later when I got the courage to share it with him. Until then, I busied myself with scenes that had no endings in my fantasies: letting my thumb and forefinger run down the broad, silky length of the tie, slowly, feeling my fingertip on the other side, slowly undoing the knot. The image dissolved.

  After school, as my classmates and I waited for parents to pick us up, his attire changed dramatically. My attraction ebbed when he reappeared wearing sweatpants, a wrinkled t-shirt, and a baseball cap. The saving grace was that I could let my eyes glance over the front of his sweats, wondering about the state of his penis, trying to imagine exactly what it looked like, then giving up because I had no other image to compare it to.

  I was not my full height at thirteen, and Mr. Ivers, though not tall, seemed to tower satisfyingly next to me. His frame was stocky; his thick, pale skin sprouted black hairs. He exuded a masculine energy that framed me in a more feminine light, something I grappled with as my hips expanded, my breasts filled out. I wanted to stand beside him, or better yet, in front of him, just close enough to hook up with the energy flow, the unspoken promise of sex, with someone bigger, heavier, more solid than I felt myself to be.

  NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION:

  ANY GIVEN DAY

  I open the L.A. Times website and on the first page of the L.A. Now blog, the headline “Married Teachers Guilty of Having Group Sex with Students” greets me. The headline will vary depending on the day, but they continue, an ongoing litany.

  It is as simple as typing “teacher guilty” into a news outlet’s search field. A stream of articles featuring teachers suspected or convicted of preying on their students appears. Often, they rise to the top, becoming interesting news, even as these stories become more common.

  It is any given day.

  Scandals rock the Los Angeles Unified School District. Sometimes the difference between this school year and last is that on their first day of a new school year, students are welcomed by more than just their teachers. Psychiatric social workers might be present, as well as school police and news vans.

  There is a special language to learn when discussing these matters.

  “Lewd conduct” is interchangeable with “lewd and lascivious conduct” which is interchangeable with “lewd acts.” The word “lewd” seems to carry an incomprehensible weight in these phrases.

  In my own circumstances, it would be years before I could find the words that would fit my experience.

  I scan the news stories and waste little time on the photos, usually mug shots with a dark gray wall behind the subject. Sometimes, the subject is even smiling, or attempting to lift the corners of their mouths. There’s really nothing I ever see that would make these subjects stand out if I saw them at an amusement park, a grocery store, or a classroom.

  I did find myself intrigued by one recent news story, though. My mother thought to bring it up to me.

  In this story, a male teacher leaves his family, resigns from his job, and shacks up with a former student. They maintain that they are in love, and that nothing untoward occurred until the student was a legal adult—eighteen years of age, the magic number. This becomes a national headline in March 2012. One month later, the now former teacher is arrested for having sexual relations with an entirely different student, who was seventeen years old. His eighteen-year-old girlfriend leaves him. A month later, she returns to him, even though he’s out on bail and due back in court, charged with sex with a minor.

  I have so much to say to these girls.

  And then I have nothing to say.

  I want to walk arm in arm with them, look them in the eyes, listen to them. And then I want to stand silent, still, away, observing their decisions, if you can call them that.

  Nearing forty, a part of me just doesn’t get it anymore.

  Another part of me gets it. Like, viscerally.

  It is any given day.

  In one dark corner of my own history, I had fantasies fueled by my teacher, too.

  These fantasies involved packing everything we owned and moving to Montana—his idea, since I had no concept of Montana. I had only been as far as Washington State. We were waiting for the magic number to fall into place, the numbers one and eight taking on ridiculous meanings all their own.

  I learned later—years after I had turned eighteen—that my former teacher had misdeeds with other underage girls.

  I open a website. I watch the news. I listen to the radio and hear another tragic display of power dynamics at their worst.

  It is any given day.

  NOVEMBER

  1986

  A week passed.

  A week where my stomach felt light and empty whenever I stepped foot into English class. Two weeks. Three.

  One night on the phone, Mr. Ivers asked me for a note from my parents that would sanction our phone calls.

  My stomach contracted. I held the telephone
receiver away from my mouth so he wouldn’t hear my intake of breath.

  “Okay,” I said, scrambling to think of something to follow up with. I willed my voice to sound even. “But my mom already knows we talk on the phone, and that it has to do with school.” The lie felt sticky and fell to pieces in my mouth, like gum chewed for hours.

  “Just get me the note,” he said, before turning the conversation back to basketball, teaching English, or the way my mouth made him weak with desire as he sat behind his desk every day.

  When we hung up, I looked at the floor, deciding how to come up with a note.

  There was no question: I would ask my mother and not my father for the note. I knew I could explain to my mom that this teacher was kind, and helpful, and loved my writing, and that there was absolutely nothing abnormal about talking to him on the phone.

  “He talks like we do,” I said to her finally. “He knows how kids like me feel.”

  She wrote the note, eyeing me with her cloudy brown eyes. She went back to sipping her orange soda and vodka.

  I tiptoed back to my bedroom, as I tiptoed throughout the house all the time.

  I picked up the cream-colored Princess phone gingerly, as if it might break into a million pieces.

  ✵

  In the yellow legal pad, I wrote.

  “Never, ever write anything down about us,” Mr. Ivers had cooed into my ear. “You can’t tell a soul. I don’t care who you trust. I’m totally fucking-A serious.”

  I agreed, and turned the yellow legal pad over on the bed to avoid staring at the sheets of written-on paper.

  I complained about my alleged best friend Abigail, about the boys at school, and about my parents and their unraveling. Their divorce was around the corner though the word itself was not yet spoken.