"FOURTEEN" PART SEVEN: IT'S OVER/SUMMER BREEZE

IT'S OVER/SUMMER BREEZE

     The 1982/1983 school year finally crept to a close. It was a disappointment where everything, even the most trivial, felt tainted. Craig’s obsession with constant screenings of “Animal House” with Thomas Redfield and a few other friends became a eulogy for John Belushi. And like most 14 year old boys of 1983, he was anxiously awaiting the release of “Return Of The Jedi”.  Most humiliating was his punishment for receiving poor grades during the year-Thelonious and Exine banned him from seeing the holy grail of 1983 until a point where it almost didn’t make a difference anymore. Broken down and at a loss for…anything, Craig Hughes sat at home for a week at the beginning of summer vacation watching television and not much else while his parents finished their school sessions.

     One morning, the phone rang and Craig was surprised to hear the grave, heavy and unforgiving voice of his father on the other end.

     “Craig, you realize that aside from French, you failed all of your classes this year…”

     “Dad, I didn’t fail. Those were ‘Unsatisfactories’,” Craig tried pathetically.

     “You failed everything but French this year,” Thelonious reiterated with that Hughes finality.

      It was of no use to argue or reason this time as the reciprocated waves of disappointment and feelings of father/son failure traveled through telephone wires. Craig tuned his father out while Thelonious again spoke to him of the seriousness of the situation, his obviously cursed high school years and the final downfall of not being accepted to college and damned if he and his mother would continue to pay as much as they were in tuition for him to fail. Craig had heard it all before and placing his “apathy filters” up lessened some of the sting. Craig did snap to attention when his father surprisingly asked him, “Would you like to have a job this summer?”

     “A job? Doing what?”

     “There’s a school in Bridgeport that needs classroom assistants for summer school,” Thelonious explained. “I think it would be good for you and if anything, it’ll get you out of the house and away from sitting in front of the television all summer.”

     And so it went. That summer, Craig Hughes received a Social Security Number and a summer employed as a third grade classroom assistant in the Bridgeport community, an area known for its racial tension between blacks and whites and quite possibly the site of a recent nighttime beating of a black youth on an outdoor basketball court. The summer, for the most part, went well at the school. The predominately white staff and principal were self-consciously kind to Craig, while the kids in the class were open and unfiltered. Craig developed a few friendships with the other teenage classroom assistants. While more time was spent with Hispanic teens, Craig was joined in his classroom with a wiry, sharp white teen named Michael Farmer. Craig and Michael got along well enough but there was a tentativeness to their relationship as if each one was sizing the other up, unsure of the other’s intent. Before they knew it, they became friends and one day, near the end of the summer, while shooting basketball in the gymnasium, Michael turned to Craig and said, “You know, I didn’t think I was gonna like you.”

     “Yeah! I didn’t think I was gonna like you either,” Craig replied.

     Ahh…a possible sense of relief. A break in the sea of racial tension. That even in the segregated Bridgeport area of Chicago, two teens can cross the racial divide towards a sense of harmony.

     “Craig, you’re kinda like a white guy in a black guy’s body,” Michael announced to Craig’s shock.

     “I’m black all the way through man,” Craig stated, growing tense.

     “I know that, man. I was just…” Michael faded.

     They ceased to speak yet Michael tossed Craig the ball to take the next shot. Craig took Michael’s statement in stride. As they continued to shoot baskets, Craig realized that Michael didn’t mean any harm, he just didn’t know better. Craig also realized that he quite possibly was the first black kid Michael had ever spent any extensive time with and it amazed him to gain the understanding that he could know more about Michael than he could ever hope to gain about him. 

     Yet, it wasn’t the racial misunderstandings that troubled Craig. It was, once again, the sense of displacement that ate away at him. Already, with his neighborhood and school, he was neither here nor there. Now, he was stationed in an area in which he truly didn’t belong and no matter how gracious the staff of the school appeared to be, he wasn’t wanted anyway. This cruel reality filled him with the fear that he would be eternally trapped in some frightening limbo or “Star Trek” based anti-matter, molecules everywhere and nowhere, belonging to no one.

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