Why I wrote Homeboyz…

As many know, I am an inner-city high school teacher in Los Angeles at Lynwood High. It goes without saying that I love my kids and love being an English teacher but Los Angeles is a city plagued by teen violence and many, many, many of my students live in a community that is poisoned by gangs, guns and drugs.

Students at our school have been shot. Murdered. Killed. And tragically, violent teenage death has become so common in urban America (especially when it comes to minorities killing other minorities; there are virtually no white students at my school) that when this sort of monstrosity happens, it doesn’t even make the newspapers.

Owch!

Worse, it feels as if there is an entire segment of the media that profits off of selling young kids the idea that gangs are cool, sexy, fun and adventurous. They’re not. Gangs are violent, anti-social and deeply hurtful to many, many people – and no one gets hurt more so than the young kids who get caught up in these street gangs. Therefore, when I see major record companies and multi-media conglomerates “selling the gangsta lifestyle” to our nation’s kids in order to make a buck, I get angry and frustrated.

The fact is, becoming embroiled in gangs – real gangs, not wanna-be stuff but real gangs – ends up one of pretty much two ways for young people. Kids go to jail or kids go to the cemetery. Of course, in music videos and the such, it all looks like a pumpin’ party. But go visit Juvenile Hall or prison – I have, many times – and you will see that the reality is an entirely different story.

It was this idea that was the spark which inspired me to write Homeboyz. I wanted to do a book that stripped away the false romance, that peeled away the pretend glamour, that didn’t buy into the bullshit that gangs were a just a life of non-stop partying.

Homeboyz is raw. Homeboyz is gritty. Homeboyz is a tragedy.

And Homeboyz has also been my most popular book. It’s won awards, it’s turned on thousands of readers, it’s got people talking about turning it into a feature length movie.

But probably, the thing that is most rewarding to me is that Homeboyz has been “that” book, the one that teachers everywhere have given to kids who swear they don’t like to read.

I’ve got boatloads of emails from people all across the country telling me the same story over and over.

I’ve got this boy (it’s inevitably a boy) and he wouldn’t read a thing. But he read Homeboyz and loved it! It’s the first book he has ever read cover to cover.

That to me, is just flat out awesome! Homeboyz has achieved cult-like status in certain circles, a fact which makes me really proud.

For those of us with students who don’t think they’d ever want to consider a career in writing, this article might be an arrow in your quiver to help inflate a student’s sense of why knowing how to properly punctuate a sentence is a skill that they might want to have in their professional, job hunting arsenal.

After all, who’s going to want to read reviews about sensie bud from a person that doesn’t even know how to correctly incorporate a lucid and illuminating appositive phrase?

That’s right, a new day is here with new, 21rst century jobs out there for the taking and as marijuana clinics boom all over the country we now find ourselves in need of weed connoisseurs.

The day of the critic has arrived. Don’t laugh, because just as cars need reviewing, restaurants need reviewing and wine needs reviewing so do the multitude of different styles and offerings of the wacky tabacky!

Wanted: Pot Critic

Experience Required:

• lots of smoking
• lots of toking
• having visited lots of laser light shows while blazing out of your mind on Thai Stick a plus.

Skills Required:

• joint rolling
• bong loading
• pipe stuffing
• able to self-edit manuscripts because your bosses will probably be too high to actually read what you write.

Hours:

• whenever, dude

Okay, I jest. But the thing is, the city of Los Angeles has seen an explosion in “medical dispensaries” this year and they have become so popular that there is a very real job out there to be a Bud Critic. (Read this article and be amazed: 966 clinics are now open in L.A.) I mean from what I have heard some of this pot will hit you like an elephant gun and some will simply give you a “mild, light buzz, you can still remain semi-coherent” buzz. Users want to know what’s what and what to expect.

Imagine not knowing the difference between having two beers and having two shots of Arkansas moonshine. This is where the erudite dope folk come in. They will have sampled the goods, smoked the various strains, and done their “get high as a friggin’ kite homework” in order to be a guide, a judge and a navigator for other users journeying through this very green forest.

Do we turn our noses up at wine critics? Will weed experts be welcomed into society with the same open arms? Will there be a stigma to be a stoner or is this just a new brand of cultural connoisseur?

Either way, the job requires a person to be able to write… and do it well.

And really, look at those hours.

As Joseph Campbell once famously said, “Follow your passion!”
As the military once famously said,” “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”
Or, as Cheech and Chong once famously said, “Hey man, how am I drivin?… I think we’re parked man.”

(BTW, that pic above shows a map — as identified by little red marijuana leafs — where all the pot clinics in L.A. currently are open. The explosion is so large that there are now two of them within walking distance of my house… each open less than a year. Can’t say I’m the biggest fan at all of the ubiquity but then again, I never even bother to count the bars. Fodder for another post, I guess.)

Today is my first day of summer vacation. My school was one of the last to close in the state of California which means that I am fried, frazzled and freakin’ spent.

On one hand that’s good because to me it means I left it all on the table. I gave sweat, blood and tears this year. I also laughed a lot. And as I reflect upon my recent blog posts, I realize far too much of the joy of what I do day in and day out is NOT evident in my writing.

That’s sad. Therefore, I decided to insert a fart joke right here.

Fart joke.

See, they always work. (I really shouldn’t be giving away the keys to my writing techniques but hey, I have more… like booger picking references and belly button lint allusions.)

But alas, I digress.

It’s SO HARD to keep a sense of joy about things these days when so much of the news about schools is so raw and salty. Though I am still pretty young (I graduated high school in 1985… you do the math) I have never seen the mood so dour. And it’s cause of our finances.

The economic meltdown has come to town. I mean no one has ever really held up the city of Los Angeles as a pillar of educational excellence (pockets, yes — on a large scale, no.) But when I see headlines like these in the L.A. Times, I just want to bury my head under the covers and pretend that the implications of this decimation to our school funding isn’t going to screw over tens of thousands of kids in the next few years. Not just a few, but tens of thousands of students are going to be negatively impacted in a very direct, very severe manner.

So trying to put a smile on my face — and the face of others — feels a little Pollyannish.

On the other hand, I am supremely optimistic because our schools are long overdue for immense change and I think that this destruction of the dysfunctional status quo can be the impetus to bringing in a host of new ideas, new energy and new opportunities. People are going to be forced to do things differently — and that excites me. And there are very few sacred cows right now that aren’t being severely scrutinized. From the Dept. of Ed having a “rename NCLB” contest because of its abject failure in so many regards to the Governator showing the hangman’s noose to the dead tree textbook publishers to unions having their feet held to the fire for trying so hard to protest the weakest links in the teaching chain at the expense of the professional reputation of the rest of us, so much good stuff is happening under foot right now.

And so, summer begins. Maybe I’ll take a break. A break from blogging. A break from writing new books. A break from developing new curriculum materials to help reinvent some of the fossilized, static, outdated materials currently being peddled to us in our modern-day classrooms. Maybe I’ll take a break from thinking of ways I can be of service to this field I so dearly love.

Then again, maybe not. When you avocation and your vocation are the same thing, you’re a lucky son of a gun.

And that’s why I have no problem making — and smiling at — fart jokes. We need them, now more than ever.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppppppppppp!