Something I wrote that I'm proud of:

My 8th grade English teacher Mr. Shaw was this gorgeous, young epileptic - the first teacher to give me a boner. He was smart, sensitive and like I said, epileptic, which made him tragic, and therefore, desirable. 

I was mostly alone growing up, under the care of my mother in Jersey. We are Sicilian, and that immigrant working class ethos is a crushing albatross, leading, I think, to most of my family dying by 70. My mother was always working at that time to support us both.

Mr. Shaw taught Lord of the Flies. I don’t remember what the project was, but I made a model of the island where the boys were stranded for his class. It musta looked awful cause I didn’t have a lot of clay or money. 

I asked Mr. Shaw for help so often, in preparation, I can still remember the smell of the lapels on his burgundy jacket – I don’t know how to describe it, other than it smelled like after school. 

I unveiled my island in front of the class. I remember the ocean blue on the model, how excited I was, and I remember looking up to him and seeing a face that wasn’t as warm as after school. He was concerned. Maybe he had a seizure. Maybe he wasn’t himself. 

He looked at me with concern, in front of the class, and asked, “do you have any friends?” I looked down at my island, the ocean blue … I was embarrassed. I said yes. I swallowed. 

Do you have any friends? Mr. Shaw’s implication was that I worked so hard on this project that I must be incredibly lonely. 

I was lonely. I did spend my time creating. I still do. I still battle with how much is the desire to create, and how much to make something that someone will say, “you did good baby, you’re enough, baby, I love YOU.” 

Mr. Shaw’s in everything I write. He’s honest, brutal, inadvertently hurts – and cause the truth seizes him, I have compassion. I love him. 

The thing that haunts me is not his phrase, but his eyes. Maybe I missed the point of the assignment. Maybe he was trying to warn me, with his eyes, with his words, in shaming me, that “It doesn’t matter what you made. Cause you were alone.”

I didn’t learn. Cause I remember the blue.