Moving from a small redneck town in Texas to the relatively bigger and far more diverse town of Oklahoma City, it was not so much a rude awakening as it was one of those confused rousings where you accidentally go to sleep in the late afternoon and when you wake up, you think it’s early next morning but it’s really just 9:17 p.m. and your whole internal clock is psychologically screwed up for the next couple days.
It was late March 1990 and there I was, a small-town boy ready to become a big-city man, thrown into the freezing deep-end of the Classen Fifth Year Center, the school district’s bizarre experiment in lumping all of the city’s fifth graders into one building. Within an eight-hour period on my first day, I met a Vietnamese person for the first time, heard N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police” for the first time, witnessed a gang-related plastic-knifing in the lunchroom for the first time and was called a “faggot” for having a Spider-Man backpack for the first-time.
And while I considered all that just part of a painful new adventure being forced upon me, what really sucked, however, was that I happened to be coming into the curriculum at the end of the third semester, far too late to really participate in anything, be it plucking strings in orchestra or joining up with any sports. All my friendships were tenuous, at best and, as I would soon learn, so was my education, as within mere weeks of barely learning the blood in, blood outs of a stereotypical inner city public school, I was already being sent home on a politically-based four-day vacation as my angry teachers took to the streets.
“Could teachers even do that?” I wondered aloud to no one in particular.