The Thing You're Good At

by Lesley Choyce

  “I’ve been watching, just like you said. But they all seem pretty much the same to me.”

  Oscar laughed. “That’s just ’cause you’re so young. When you get older you’ll have perspective.”

  “Right. So you want me to scout for you today?”

  Oscar’s broad smile always cheered me up. “Absolutely, my man. Last time you did that for me, my earnings increased by 45 percent.”

  I wasn’t sure how he’d calculated that, but I was happy to help out. Scouting meant that I’d head off in some direction, looking for good trash. Usually I walked, but today I felt like running. I’m not much of a runner, but sometimes it feels good. “I’ll catch up with you in twenty minutes,” I said, trotting off toward Jenkins Street. I had a hunch there’d be more bottles and cans there.

  I ran past a couple of guys sitting on the front steps of an apartment building. “What you running for?” one of them asked me.

  “Just running,” I said, as politely as I could.

  “Damn,” the guy said. “No one is just running.” I just kept going.

  I found what I was hoping for in some big bins behind an old brick apartment building. The dumpster wasn’t locked like a lot of them were these days. Inside was the mother lode.

  I ran back and found Oscar still on Duskie. I was pretty excited to tell him what I’d found.

  “Let’s head on over there then,” he said. “Jacob, you are nothing but good luck for me.”

  Once we got back to the dumpster, I climbed up into it and started tossing cans and bottles out to Oscar, who caught them with great flair. Before long his cart was overflowing. We’d scored at least a dozen wine bottles. Suddenly the back door of the apartment building opened, and someone started yelling at us.

  “Get out of here, you two! Get the hell out, or I’m calling the cops.”

  I scrambled out of the dumpster. The guy from the apartment building picked up a rock and threw it at us. It clanged loudly against the trash bin.

  Oscar nodded to the guy and told me to stay behind him as we rolled the full cart back toward the street. Oscar didn’t seem particularly worried. But then, he wasn’t much of a worrier. As we headed off to the depot he said, “You see, Jacob, what you had back there was a man who missed an opportunity.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Well, what he saw was a couple of trash pickers, and he decided we were up to no good. He lashed out like that because he couldn’t see the truth of the situation. He missed a great opportunity too. He missed the chance to get to know two fine gentlemen with some insight into life’s hard lessons.”

  “I’m not sure I ever considered myself a gentleman,” I said. “And I don’t think I have any insight into life’s hard lessons.”

  “Well, that’s where you’d be wrong, my friend. You have far more insight than you know.”

  Chapter Five

  School. What kid really wants to talk about what happens at school? You go there, you put in your time. You try to keep your head down so you don’t get noticed. You try to stay out of the way of people like Leo and Toe. You sit in the back of the room so you don’t get called on in class as much. You get tired of the way some kids look at you. If you are lucky, you find someone in the cafeteria to eat your crappy baloney sandwich with.

  That someone for me was Maria. Don’t think Maria was, like, my girlfriend or anything. We were just comfortable with each other. Sometimes Maria didn’t have any lunch, so I’d give her half of mine.

  Maria had long dark hair that she’d let hang down in front of her face sometimes, like she was hiding behind it. She liked to wear a baggy, oversized hoodie, and she’d tuck her hands up into the sleeves. If anybody gave her a hard time about the way she looked, she didn’t react visibly. It was like she pretended not to hear. But I knew the words hurt her. I think she actually had a powerful quiet spirit, and I admired that. I knew things were pretty tough for her at home, and school wasn’t much better.

  And then this funny thing happened at school. Mr. Clemson, our history teacher, had to take some time off because of something that happened in the principal’s office. Though nobody knew for sure, rumors were going around that he’d freaked out and started yelling at Mrs. Warren, our principal. They called it stress leave, but who knows.

  That wasn’t the funny part. Funny as in good, by the way. Mr. Clemson was replaced by a new guy, Mr. Lotz. Jim Lotz. He was, like, just out of college or something, and the complete opposite of Clemson. Clemson was old. Lotz was young. Clemson, I think, hated all of us. Lotz seemed to like us. Clemson was tall and skinny, while Lotz was built like a football player—big and stocky.

  Clemson had never told a joke. I never once saw him laugh. But Lotz told jokes all the time, even though they were lame. On his first day in our Modern History class, in the middle of introducing himself, he paused and said, “I’m reading a book about antigravity. It’s impossible to put down.”

  We didn’t get it. No one laughed. He tried again.

  “I can’t believe I got fired from the calendar factory,” he said. “All I did was take a day off.”

  I smiled. So did Maria. The rest of the kids just stared at him like he was a lunatic. But he didn’t give up.

  “I wasn’t originally going to get a brain transplant,” Lotz continued, having a hard time keeping a straight face, “but then I changed my mind.”

  Some kids groaned. I laughed out loud. Man, I hadn’t laughed in a long time.

  Clemson never went off topic. He was all about the textbook. But Lotz loved to tell stories. Pretty soon kids figured out they could easily distract Lotz and get him to ramble about his life or talk about what he called his “personal philosophy.” We started calling him Lotz of Stories. Or Lotz of Ideas. He admitted to us that this was his first teaching job. You could tell he hadn’t grown up poor like many of us. Some kids referred to him as “shiny” because he was like something shiny and new that hadn’t gotten dirty yet or worn out. On that first day he declared he hated the textbook we were using, that it was only one version of history and that this version sucked. Yeah, he used that word. Then he threw it in the trash can.

  That really got our attention.

  Lotz was a younger version of Oscar in a way. A young Oscar with a college education, better clothes and no shopping cart.

  Kids gave Mr. Lotz a hard time at first, partly because he was shiny and new and partly because they didn’t know what to do with a teacher like him, who seemed way too happy to be here teaching us.

  Right after the trash-can incident, Toe stood up and said, “Who da fuck do you think you are? You think you know more about history than what’s in that book?” This, as you can imagine, seemed like a really weird thing for Toe to do, but Toe’s special passion in life was giving teachers a hard time. That is, when he wasn’t harassing other students. But Lotz had thrown Toe off his game, I think.

  Mr. Lotz just smiled. “Well, maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. That’s not for me to say. That’s for you to judge. And you’re right to challenge me. That’s good. I like to be challenged. That’s what’s going to make this class interesting. Anyone else care to add to this discussion?”

  But no one raised their hands. No one quite knew how to cope with a teacher who didn’t yell at you or send you to Mrs. Warren’s office for disrupting the class.

  And so school started to seem a little different. My hair kept getting longer, and now I had Mr. Lotz’s class to look forward to. As the days went by it seemed like there was more and more personal philosophy and less and less modern history.

  “Jake,” Mr. Lotz said after class one day, “I’ve been watching you. You don’t talk much, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “But I can see that you’re listening,” he said. “And, more important, I can see that you’re thinking. What do you think about?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “I guess I just think about some of the things you’ve been saying.”

  “Very
cool,” he said, nodding. “Very cool indeed. So, Jake. Have you ever heard of the term self-actualization?”

  Only someone as shiny and fresh out of college as him would have used a word like that in a conversation with the likes of me.

  “Self what?”

  “Self-actualization. It’s a word used to describe the process of reaching your full potential.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “So you’ve never heard either of your parents use that word?”

  I almost broke out laughing. I imagined my father coming home from work one evening and saying, “Down at the Shit Shack, me and some of the kitchen staff were thinking we needed a bit more self-actualization around here.”

  “Hello, Jake. Are you still there?”

  “Sorry. Answer is no. My father has never used that word, and my mother, well, she’s long gone.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No worries.”

  Mr. Lotz wrote the word down on a yellow sticky note and handed it to me. “Here, this is for you. I want you to look it up next time you’re at a computer. And keep it on you. Words have power. This is your word.”

  Just then kids for the next class started streaming in, and that was the end of that.

  Chapter Six

  I walked Maria home that afternoon. It was the first time I’d done that in a long while. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being with me. I just think she didn’t want anyone, even me, to see where she lived.

  I was telling her about the conversation I’d had with Mr. Lotz when she started to cry.

  I think I’d seen Maria cry only one time before, and it was years ago. I never knew what she was crying about back then, and when I asked she just ran away from me.

  This time was different.

  “Wanna talk about it?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she answered. Which I totally understood. Whenever anyone asked me to talk about my problems or myself, I said the same thing. But Maria kept crying.

  So I did something I had never done before. I put my arm around her. I almost expected her to push me away. But she didn’t. She leaned into me and sobbed. I could feel her body shaking, and her tears soaked my shirt. I never even knew someone could cry that much.

  We were in the middle of the sidewalk in front of her ragged-ass apartment building. People had to walk around us, and they were giving me dirty looks, like I was the one who had made this girl cry. People had been giving me dirty looks most of my life, so I was used to it. So we just stood there.

  When she finally stopped crying, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

  She nodded toward the front door of her building. “I don’t want to go in.”

  “Why?”

  “No one will be there. Just me. And I hate this place.”

  “I’ll go in with you,” I said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t have an answer. She shrugged, took a deep breath and led me into her building.

  The front door wasn’t locked, and the hallway was littered with old chip bags, cans and bottles and some stacked-up cardboard boxes. The stairs creaked as we walked up to the third floor. The hallway wasn’t much better, and I could see rat poop along the baseboard.

  Maria opened a door without using a key. “The lock’s broke,” she said. “My dad says there’s no point in fixing it. We won’t be here very long.”

  I just nodded. There were more cardboard boxes inside, stacked against the walls.

  “And there’s not much worth stealing, I guess,” she added.

  I sat down on a ripped-up vinyl sofa that looked like something you’d see left by the side of the road. Maria looked embarrassed.

  My wet shirt was giving me the chills. As I tried to pull it away from my skin, Maria said, “Sorry about that. I don’t usually cry. Well, not in front of anyone.”

  “You can cry in front of me any time you want,” I said. Silly thing to say.

  “I’ll remember that,” Maria said. “I’ll get you a towel. You want something to drink? Coke or something?”

  “Sure.”

  Maria walked into the tiny kitchen and opened the most beat-up refrigerator I’d seen in my life. She took out a big plastic bottle of cola and poured me a glass.

  I smiled and took a sip. It was cold and flat. “Um. Good. Thanks,” I said.

  Maria wasn’t drinking anything. She sat down beside me on the vinyl couch and became real quiet. She cleared her throat. “Jake, I have something I have to tell you.”

  I tried to take another sip of the flat cola, but it was like my throat muscles wouldn’t work. This something-I-have-to-tell-you thing sounded important and, to be truthful, kind of scary. Although my throat wasn’t working, my brain was in overdrive. Holy crap, what was she about to say? Was she gonna say she was in love with me? Was she going to say she was pregnant by some guy? Was she going to tell me she was suicidal? I was afraid to hear what would come next. It could be something good or bad, really good or really bad, and whatever it was I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  “Jake, see those boxes?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We haven’t even unpacked. Like I said, I think we are going to have to move again. And I don’t think it will be anywhere nearby. I may never see you again.”

  My brain kind of went numb right then. Maria was a big part of what little bit of good I had going.

  I set the glass down on the table in front of me. “I don’t want you to go,” I said. And then I added something stupid. “Who would I hang out with at school?”

  Maria looked down at the glass on the table. “You’d find someone else,” she said. “I know you’ll be okay.”

  “Why do you have to move?” I asked.

  “My parents…you know how they’re always changing jobs? It’s because they always have to work off the record. You know, under the table.”

  “How come?”

  “Because they’re in the country illegally.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked. “I thought there were lots of people like that.”

  “Yeah, there are. But things are changing. The government’s starting to crack down. My parents could get arrested and deported.”

  “Deported? Like, kicked out of the country?”

  “Yeah. That’s why we keep moving. But lately we’ve heard of others being arrested and being held in detention centers. It’s getting pretty bad. So my parents are thinking of leaving the country before things get worse.”

  “But what about you? Why do you have to go?”

  Maria looked at me in surprise. “They’re my parents, that’s why.”

  “Oh.” I was only thinking about me, not Maria and her family’s problem. I was thinking I was about to lose one of my only friends.

  “There must be something they can do,” I said. “Can’t they talk to someone and straighten things out? Fill out some papers or something? Get one of those free lawyers?”

  “They think if they go to the government for anything, they’ll be in trouble. They’re scared now. We’ve seen it happen to others, some of the people they were working with.”

  This wasn’t right. There had to be a way. Maria and her parents had as much right to live here as I did.

  “Hey, weren’t you born here?” I asked.

  “Yes. I was born right here in the city.”

  “Then you do have a right to stay. You can’t kick out a kid who was born here and has lived her whole life here. In a couple of years you’ll graduate and get a job and be like everybody else. Nobody can make you leave.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. But anyway, I have to go where my parents go.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then I’ll help you figure something out,” I said, sounding like I knew what the hell I was talking about. But I was just bluffing.

  She
touched the spot on my shirt where her tears had dried and said nothing at all.

  Chapter Seven

  Maria’s parents arrived home about ten minutes later, and they didn’t seem at all happy to see me in the house. Her mother seemed a little frightened, and her father looked me up and down like I’d just said something really nasty.

  “You remember Jake,” Maria said.

  Both parents tried to smile, but they didn’t quite succeed.

  “I better go,” I said. “Bye, Maria.” And I left.

  I didn’t feel like going home after that. I knew Oscar was in another part of town, collecting his bottles and cans. I didn’t know where else to go, so I decided to just hang out at the library on Fourteenth Street. I sat down at one of the public computers. I hardly even knew how to use it. Guess what? There’d never been a computer in my house. Not even video games. We had an old TV, thatʼs all. And three channels.

  I watched the other kids on computers. Some were playing games, some were looking at different websites. I stared at the Google page and didn’t even know where to begin. I pulled out the piece of paper Mr. Lotz had given me. I typed in the letters.

  Self-actualization, I read. Achieving a person’s full potential and becoming a complete person; to understand oneself as an independent, creative, fulfilled person.

  I almost laughed out loud. I didn’t think I really even understood the words. To me, it sounded totally like one of those bullshit things I’d read somewhere before, the kind of thing that would apply to some happy person somewhere on the planet but not to anyone in my neighborhood.

  I clicked on the word Images and saw photos of athletic-looking people standing on beaches or on mountaintops with their arms outstretched. The sun was shining, and it made me think they all must live in some fantasy world somewhere or just in someone’s imagination. There were images of pyramids too, and I didn’t get that.

  None of it had any real meaning to me. I typed in another word. Deportation. That took me to some news articles and speeches by politicians. None of what I read helped. The news was all bad. People who were in the country illegally could be deported at any time. The government was stepping up its program in a lot of cities, including mine.