Catch a Falling Star

I have told you before that I am blessed with the mental quirk known as synesthesia. I get sensory impressions of things that they can’t possibly have, but my brain imposes them anyway. For instance, today is a Thursday, so it is a yellow-ochre day. You can’t actually see the colors of a day or a month, but I do. I have very strong impressions with crossed-up sensory input. Mondays are teal blue, except in the month of September which is sky blue, so they become a darker blue or indigo-color day every week. And this weird mental mini-illness also applies to fiction.

For example, the character of Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird comes across to me as a beige character. He represents a hero who struggles to do what is essentially right in a difficult situation. He faces raising Scout and her older brother Gem in a time and place where racism and vindictiveness are often dominant, and fairness and a sense of equity is often lost in the face of those problems. Hence, I believe that if he was some kind of pure, saintly character, he would be pure white as a character. But he has to make compromises. He has to shoot the rabid dog. He has to accept food and other goods in lieu of fees from people who can’t otherwise pay a lawyer for legal help. He has to defend a black man from wrongful rape charges as a public defender. But he is definitely a good man. He understands and accepts the shortcomings of a damaged soul like Boo Radley. He defends Tom Robinson, the black man, as an equal, even as a friend. He has to defeat the Ewells in court, but he understands and feels sympathy for abused Mayella Ewell.

Atticus Finch is beige in color because he is a character of firm principles who is not perfect, and slightly browned by the compromises of a regular hard life.

Captain Ahab, from the novel Moby-Dick, is a very different character, though he is played here by the same actor, Gregory Peck. Ahab is a dark navy-blue character. Navy blue is a color associated with the sea and the Navy (well, duh!), but also represents the depths of the ocean, the darkness that can fill the deepest corners of the obsessive mind. It is not quite a black villainous color, but definitely darker than what is needed. Ahab is a main character in his story, but definitely not a hero. He is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare, which is also a navy-blue thing. He is a storm-cloud threatening to sink his own ship, which he eventually does, and also a navy-blue thing.

Captain Keith Mallory, the anchoring main character in the plot of Alistair Maclean’s novel The Guns of Navarone, is a Kelly green character.

Now, that, of course, is not a mere Irish association, although Mallory is probably an Irish name. The color, for me, smacks of military discipline, resilience, irrepressible life and hope, and responsibility. Captain Mallory is not the leader of the commando raid on the impossibly secure anti-ship gun site on the island of Navarone, but leadership is thrust upon him when Major Franklin is injured climbing the cliff towards the guns. He is forced to adapt and make incredibly hard choices, leaving Franklin behind to be cured of gangrene by the enemy while in possession of false information that Mallory intentionally made him believe, knowing it would be tortured out of him. He also must decide to execute the resistance girl who had been helping the commandos until it was revealed she was a plant and actually helping the Germans. He is a Kelly green character of life and hope because he finds a way to succeed in the mission and brings most of the group out of it alive, having struck a major blow to the Germans.

This essay is not about Gregory Peck, though he is in all the pictures. I am merely using him to illustrate the idea that characters in fiction have different colors for me. He is a very good actor to be able to change color so easily. But the colors represent for me the kinds and qualities of the characters. I know it is not an entirely rational thing. But like the synesthesia effects on the days of the week, the colors perceived by my irrational Mickey-brain for fictional characters mean something to me, and I am attempting to explain in the best way that an irrational Mickey can.

I have been complaining for a while now about not being able to concentrate on writing the way I was before and during the pandemic.

My father died of Parkinson’s Disease. And I have been exhibiting many of the same symptoms that he had. So, is that what it is? Am I going to become a shuffling old bearded coot, angry about everything, seeing things that aren’t really there, and slowly losing my hold on reality?

But it probably isn’t that. I probably have those symptoms because I worry about it too much. Honestly, I had Covid, the Omicron Variant, twice in 2022. Nobody knows what the long term effects of it are.

Probably Cootism.

I face being a really old and possibly crazy old coot, someone who yells at people and some dogs to get off my lawn… even though it is actually my wife’s lawn. She owns the house. And then I will probably be one of those coots who forgets to wear pants before walking the dog. And when the police bring me home, my wife will claim she doesn’t know who I am. And without my pants, I will not have my wallet and my driver’s license.

And I will probably get angrier and angrier until I am not just snorting in anger at the dog, but the postlady, the neighbors, and the policemen who bring me home with no pants on. Not much danger I will begin watching FOX News or vote for Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney (rhymes with “Full of baloney.”) And that’s because I don’t have cable. I will have to be radicalized over YouTube and Instagram. I am already practicing my coot-dancing in case I am discovered on Facebook. I can dance better than that old coot who dropped his cane and went viral with his boogying.

Yep, definitely a bad case of Cootism!

What I am telling you now is a secret I have carried with me for at least 8 years. I have gone deeper into helping kids than most teachers do. I became experienced in helping kids with suicidal depression. Four different kids didn’t kill themselves because I found a way to help them. Two of them I sat in the emergency room with. Two kids, three emergency room visits, three hospital stays complete with regular visits by me. Another kid, a long night on the phone because he called me instead of the suicide hotline. That could have ended in the hospital too, but he made me promises and then kept them because he didn’t have a father and his mother neglected him, but I was willing to talk all night one Friday night. And another one was headed for suicide because her mother had committed suicide, and this I knew from the school counselor, but she had no hope and no connection to the world, and this I found out when she screamed it at me in the classroom, and then explained it to me in private conversation later in the classroom when no one else was there to hear. And I told her the stories of the ones I had helped. And she said, “If I had known them, I would’ve been their friend.” And sometimes the ability to cry in front of someone who understands is all it takes to save a life.

But this post is not an ego boost. I am not bragging. I am not batting a thousand. This is a crying post.

Up until this point I have not told you any names. Those kids have a right to keep their secrets, or tell their stories themselves when appropriate. But I will tell you Ruben’s name. He deserves to be remembered.

Ruben was a small eighth grader. He was rail thin and not very imposing. But Vernon was a gold-glove boxer, not a huge kid, but he had champion-sized muscles. And he bullied Ruben relentlessly. Ruben was in the same grade as his younger sister, a result of failing a lower grade. Vernon made numerous comments to make him feel stupid. And because Ruben was not athletic, Vernon pushed him around and told him he was gay.

“I will tell the principal what he has been doing to you in my class if you will back me up and tell the principal too,” I told Ruben after class.

“No. Don’t tell the principal nothing. You can’t fight my battles for me.” He made me promise not to tell the principal. I didn’t know at the time what a mistake that was.

The next year his sister told me that he had gone back to the barrio in San Antonio. He joined a gang. They were called the Town Freaks. They would later become the Latin Kings, an extension of the LA gang known as the Bloods. It made me sad. But it was not the end of the story.

Later that year I heard a news report from San Antonio. Eight members of the Town Freaks had stolen a pickup truck and taken it for a joyride. The police had chased them, the chase ending in the pickup crashing and rolling over in the ditch. All six of the kids in the back of the truck were killed. You know already how this story ends, don’t you. The name of the last kid killed they read out on the news was Ruben Vela.

I have cried for Ruben at least once every year since 1982. He was the first child I lost. And he was the one that made me committed to never let that happen again. Somehow I had to learn how to save a kid.

Of course, there was another loss as time went by. Suicidal depression can take them even after you think they’ve beaten it. I can’t tell you J.J.’s story now or I will not sleep tonight. But I was more of a surrogate father to that boy than most of the others I ever mentored or helped. And he ended himself by getting drunk, racing the train to the crossing, and then losing the race. He left behind a young wife and two little daughters… and a teacher who feels like a loser because one loss overshadows all the other wins.

I am not a hero. I would give anything not to have this particular story to tell about being a teacher stupid enough to give a damn. But when faced with the dark night of the soul, no matter whose soul it is, the only thing you can do is stand up and face the dragon. And you are likely to get burned. But what other choice is there? There’s only so much crying you can live with, and beyond that, your head dries up and turns to dust.