Tag: Half Nelson

By 2006 it felt like I had explored the whole home court advantage thing to it’s logical conclusion and I was more than ready to leave again. It wouldn’t be the last time I would end up living in San Diego or at my parents’ house but it was probably the most productive. For the first time in my life I was in an actual band that played actual shows and had actual songs – two bands technically although the song part wasn’t really true for Guest Toothbrush. As exciting as all that was I was impatient to collect my diploma and get the fuck out of Dodge.

It was without a doubt the busiest period of my adult life. I’ve already mentioned the two bands – I was also going to college full time, working in public schools full time, selling concessions at baseball games, running a cassette label, participating in a relationship and using hard drugs intravenously. That last one is known for being so demanding that it pushes all other pursuits and responsibilities from a person’s life. That wasn’t the case for me – I graduated summa cum laude, fulfilled the obligations of my jobs and made it to all the shows, although I was higher than I should have been for a couple of them.

It was actually during this period that I experienced acute opiate withdrawal for the first time in my life. I had jumped in the van with a band called Business Lady to go to a show at The Smell in Los Angeles. There’s not many liquor stores in the Skid Row area and I ended up grabbing some sake that I mixed with Squirt in Little Tokyo. I remember it tasting especially foul and carrying it around all night until the soda part was flat – this created considerable confusion as to what was actually wrong with me.

On the ride back to San Diego I needed my friends to pull off to the shoulder of the 5 Freeway so I could vomit. I assumed that my miscegenated cocktail was merely disagreeing with me but after being dropped off at the City Heights apartment I shared with my girlfriend I never stopped puking. I also was sweating, had diarrhea and once I started to feel dehydrated any attempt to swallow water made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach until I puked it up again.

I called my dad to come get me. He had served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and knew what was going on the moment he set eyes on me. It wasn’t just my first time getting dopesick, in my six years of on and off use I had never really seen anyone else get dopesick either. People talked about it all the time but we lived along the U.S./Mexico border and they always seemed to find what they needed before things reached this point. It had been three days since I last used and I had been using at least every three days for a couple years or so. Not that it was mechanically every third day or anything like that – it just wasn’t every day but I didn’t really go past three days without using either.

I should mention that I have never heard or read of somebody getting a “three day” habit like this and would probably say that it wasn’t a thing if I hadn’t actually experienced it myself. It sounds bizarre and hard to believe. There’s an almost Biblical quality to it:

“And verily on the third day he was dopesicke…”

My father was in treatment for Stage Four Lung Cancer and had a lot of morphine in various forms and preparations around the house. There were these little white immediate release ones he was okay with me taking some of because they gave him way more of them than he ever ended up using. I would take them from time to time but I preferred the street drugs. I tried to swallow some to fight the withdrawal but immediately vomited them back up with this weird rubbery texture that was most likely the early stages of vomiting up my stomach lining.

Of course I know now that there are multiple ways I could have ingested the morphine while bypassing the vomit reflex but it wasn’t something I was aware of at the time. I tried smoking some marijuana and soaking in a hot bath and while it felt a little better I was still rejecting fluids and starting to become dangerously dehydrated. Dehydration is the only way for somebody to die as a direct result of opiate withdrawal – it happens from time to time in jails and prisons when a withdrawing addict is just locked in a room with no form of oversight or medical care. It’s hard to imagine a more agonizing way to die.

We decided that I needed to go to a hospital and the medical insurance for my job covered an Urgent Care on Banker’s Hill. The Doctor said that they could try anti nausea medications but he didn’t think they would work and tried to put me on IV fluids. I’m a tough stick under optimal conditions, I already was before becoming an IV user and that certainly hasn’t improved the situation, for hours I was painfully probed by failing phlebotomists. I begged to try the anti nausea stuff the first time it was mentioned and constantly to all the nurses and every subsequent time the doctor came by to check on me.

After it had been a few hours and nobody had been able to get an IV placed he finally agreed to actually try it. It was administered via an intramuscular injection and, true to its name, immediately cured my nausea to the extent that I was able to hold down water and begin rehydrating myself. I tried to talk to the doctor about the importance of listening to his patients and always attempting less invasive procedures before embarking on the more invasive ones.

He regarded me with brown eyes that were bright with intelligence but completely devoid of any sign of empathy and calmly asked me when exactly I had become a Physician.

If I let myself get started on that topic this piece would end up getting even more derailed than it already has been so let’s leave things at acknowledging that his attitude was both familiar to me and one of my least favorite features of the Medical-Industrial Complex.

I went back home and some friends brought me over a piece of a Suboxone which I had never seen before. It was before the strips when they came in orange tablets shaped like stop signs. I dissolved the little piece in my mouth and felt a little better. By now it was a whole new day but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try to get more heroin. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t physically addicted to it. I continued to use it but less often so I wouldn’t get sick again. It was many years before I would experience withdrawal again.

I was working at the same High School I had attended and graduated from (always fun for a Nostalgia Buff with a photographic memory) but it was no longer the same High School. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had generously donated their expertise and capital to transform it through a program they referred to as the Small Schools Initiative. It would be rebranded as The San Diego High School Educational Complex which contained six subaltern schools with separate names, themes and student and teacher populations.

The theory was that large schools were allowing students to “slip through the cracks” because teachers and administrators were responsible for too many individual students to notice and intervene when one was struggling. The literature going around during this process was full of warm and cozy references to small towns, families and smaller groups of people where everybody looks out for each other and knows everybody by their first name and whatever other “aw shucks!” bullshit they were peddling us. I’m not even sure if the conversion improved things for the school as a whole but for the students I worked with, the struggling low income inner city kids, it absolutely made things worse.

The big thing is that San Diego High has always been at least two different schools living in a single body. It is the destination school for all of the students living around San Diego’s urban core – especially the largely Hispanic communities around the shipyards in what is called South East San Diego or “Shelltown”. It is also the prestigious destination for students who are interested in the International Baccalaureate program like I was and want to earn college credits while taking classes that are structured more like the University model. It has always felt segregated in terms of which groups of students the school wants to funnel its resources into – which students it is proudly displaying and which ones it would rather hide.

The Small Schools Initiative took the existing segregation and made it official. All of the largely White and Asian students in the IB program were in the newly named School of International Studies along with all the best teachers and programs. The inner city poverty kids were spread between several other new schools including one that was explicitly targeted to prepare its students to work in the service industry and one that was essentially the ESL school. The Performing Arts school became the “Black” school because it had a reputation for being the easiest.

Of course any student could enroll in any school but the official rebranding served to reinforce the already ubiquitous feelings that neighborhood, race and income bracket could almost completely define a child’s future destiny. My Tenth Grade History Teacher, Kenneth Williams, must have had similar feelings to some degree. His History Class had been associated with the IB program but he ended up working within the Performing Arts school most likely to not abandon the students of his own demographic.

I wish I had explicitly spoken with him on this subject, it looks like he passed away in 2019. I came by his classroom a few times to lend him my VHS copy of the animated film Kirikou and the Sorceress so that he could share it with one of his classes. I also ran into him on the BART way back in 1999, one of his children must have been graduating from Berkeley and he was dressed in an academic robe for the ceremony. My house-mate Chris was staring after him in mute wonder following our brief but friendly exchange:

“Was that Sun Ra?”

The other huge problem was that each of these individual schools needed to have a Principal, Vice-Principal and other Administrators. These positions are higher paid than teachers but the budget would have largely been the same. In practice this would lead to one unavoidable conclusion – larger class sizes. Sure the students were now separated into little clusters where they always saw the same teachers, counselors, etc. but when it came time to actually learn anything they were getting even less individual attention.

I worked there for a total of three years: one before and two after the Small Schools program was introduced. In my final year I worked in the Special Education Office as an assistant to what was essentially an employment counselor. The new head of Special Ed. was Elizabeth Ballard: a big hair and facelift Southern Woman archetype who was intensely emotionally abusive to nearly all of her underlings. Me and my superior didn’t get it because we had the basic self confidence that comes with being young, attractive men in this particular field. The women and older men got it bad, especially the spazzy idiosyncratic types that are generally drawn to Special Education.

I guess it wasn’t that different from my family of origin.

We technically served all six schools and the entire campus but I can’t remember meeting anyone at International Studies that had an IEP. I did a lot of clerical stuff and would pull individual students out of class to conduct a PCP or Person Centered Plan. The cholo kids were always incredulous that it was actually called that and thought I was fucking with them until they saw it on the paper. Among other questions this included the often difficult – What do you want to be when you grow up?

I remember one specific interview when this triggered a long, meandering response:

“Maybe I would be one of those…. What do you call a person who…. You know where they work with the…”

After a couple of minutes of this I put the question to him bluntly:

“You’re not actually thinking of anything are you?”

He admitted that he wasn’t and was trying to spur me into just finishing the sentence for him with whatever I wanted to hear. I told him that this approach wasn’t going to work with me and we switched to a questionnaire that was supposed to give us some general idea of his career aptitude. I think it was multiple choice. He didn’t end up with a concrete idea of what he wanted to occupy the rest of his life and earn a place in the world with. Most of them didn’t.

The funner part of my job came when I was supposed to track down local businesses that might be interested in hiring high school students for part time jobs. My girlfriend had already found a part time job for us selling concessions at the Charger’s games in the newly constructed Petco Park. She was into working a stand for minimum wage but I was immediately attracted to what our superiors referred to as “The Dark Side”: Vending. Walking up and down the stands to sell overpriced food and beverages for a percentage of the earnings as an independent contractor. I got to practice my carny bark:

“CAW-TON CANDY HEEYAH!”

The cool thing about this job was that it was essentially self regulating. The company was willing to hire anybody because they only needed to be paid a portion of the profits they already produced. If someone wasn’t good at it they would generally realize that they were wasting time and energy and just quit. I could pretty much get a job for anybody who wanted one as long as they were passing all of their classes and could line up the necessary paperwork.

Some of the kids were wasting their time but it gave them a sense of hierarchy and structure outside of school, had them practicing some math skills and got them into free baseball games. These would be the ones who continued to call me Mr. Winningham even though we were wearing the same uniform and were essentially equals. Some of the other ones were born hustlers that I was happy to have brought the relatively wholesome opportunity to. One of them got himself hired to an hourly position within the vending room and clicked right into the system of slipping Vendors extra product behind the company’s back to split the profits.

I’ve mentioned the City College Free Style Rap Battle in other pieces but I want to go over it in greater detail here. I had been doing this thing during lunch at work called “Four Track Club” where I brought a cassette four track, some microphones, a bass and a drum machine into the counseling office. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t have been my drum machine because I didn’t own one yet. It would have belonged to Raquel, my band-mate in the rap group Hood Ri¢h that started out as Sex Affection.

She probably got uncomfortable with me always carrying her drum machine around and that would have been why I had to stop doing it. I mean it makes sense – I was into drugs so the contents of my backpack often wound up in sketchy situations. Anyway the Club attracted the budding noise boys and the budding rapper boys which was interesting because they wouldn’t have usually hung out together. The noise boys would make a beat and me the rapper boys would do a quick cypher.

I never got around to mixing down the sessions and eventually I lost the tapes.

Years later I ran into one of the rap boys at Twelfth and Imperial and he recited one of my freestyles back to me – word for word. Soon after me and one of the noise boys, Andy, had a band called Guest Toothbrush, it was just bass and drums improv jams punctuated by me telling some of my favorite Bible stories in a modern, urban vernacular. I put out the first tape for his pretty good ambient guitar project The Dead White on my label. It got a little bit of press and Thurston Moore called him using a text to speech generator. I guess it could have been anyone but I’m sure it was him – insulating himself from ever being genuine even as he kind of cared about something – this kid’s tape.

The movie Half Nelson where Ryan Gosling plays a young teacher who smokes crack was out and it felt like it was vaguely based on my life but all the details were different. Me and Andy were playing some shows in bars and punk houses that I set up and I just felt like: kids aren’t stupid, there’s no way he doesn’t know anything about my hard drug use or nobody’s brought it up. One day I just told him that I didn’t want to be one of the grownups that doesn’t trust him or acts like he’s stupid or whatever so if he wanted to talk about it we could talk about it. He said we didn’t need to but he’d kind of heard that I messed with opium.

I didn’t bother to correct him.

Anyway let’s get back to the rap battle. It was at City College, I can’t remember who would have set it up like a radio station or something. It started during lunch so I was on break from work and signed up thinking I would probably be eliminated and make it back to work on time. The other finalist rapper actually went to San Diego High as a student but I didn’t work with him – he was a well-to-do Black kid who was enrolled in the IB Program and went to International Studies. We both kept winning our matchups so eventually I was ditching work and he was ditching school and it was gonna have to go to one of us.

I would have still been going by the rap name Gypsy Feelings that I never really did anything better than this battle with. Eventually Erin Allen would record some weak freestyles in a studio for a split tape where I never actually shifted into gear. The whole situation was confusing, I felt like it was only happening at the time because his then girlfriend Sarah from Sixteen Bitch Pileup had seen me rap somewhere and been super into it. That’s stupid though, Erin must have dug it too and just expressed it differently.

The crowd at City College was freaking out a bit because of how I looked. I was wearing like brown polyester slacks, a striped button up, nice leather shoes and had a grown out shag haircut and a mustache. My rhymes were automatically at least 40% more hype because they didn’t think I looked like a rapper. Maybe the margin was higher than that.

A lot of the competitors weren’t really much of rappers at all but eventually I went up against some real ones. I was using some cheap shots like going up against a heavier guy:

“You’re built like a bear I’m built like a sea otter. It’d take two of me and one of you to teeter-totter!”

But I mean it’s Battle Rap. That’s all you really can do, knock how the other rapper looks unless you heard something distinctive in their delivery style to knock them on. Every verse against me would have been some variation on “old out-of-touch ‘70s Hippy Guy”. I was twenty six which isn’t even that old but I was older than the rest of the rappers or most of them.

So Chris, the kid who did win, was pretty good. I think no matter what he should have won. The prize was like fifty dollars anyway, what do I need with that? A High School kid needs that. I’m just a little bummed out about how he won. I guess in the World of Battle Rap it’s almost a cliche:

“roughnecks from Vegan Mexican Restaurant start a brawl and knock over lemonade cart giving your opponent more time to write his verse and the judges call it quickly to avoid more drama”

You look at the big names in the genre and who hasn’t this happened to?

We were supposed to get a rematch months later when this kid Caesar was able to set up a mic and PA on the quad back at the High School. It was getting close to the time of the school’s annual unofficial “Blacks vs Mexicans” brawl that goes back to my time as a student and probably farther than that. Everyone at the school was on high alert. Caesar was knocking Chris for trying to act hard when he was actually a suburban rich kid and doing well in school. He dropped the last line:

“You ain’t nothing but an IB Drama Club geek!”

One of Chris’s rap buddies took umbrage at this line and jumped on stage to try to fight Caesar. The whole thing was so stupid, I mean Kanye went to college and Tupac was in Drama Club, there was really nothing there to catch feelings over. So me and Chris never got our rematch. A few days later I was clowning on the hothead who had messed up the battle:

“Looks like you’re in the Drama Club now!”

He denied it vehemently and said that as a teacher I had access to the list of every student’s clubs and activities. Man, I needed to get away from these kids and get on with my life.

He didn’t even get the damn joke