The club’s mission was to help out in the urban community, and I was assigned to work at a homework center in downtown DC.
My job was technically to help kids with their homework, which sounds nice, but in reality I spent all my time trying to keep order in the room. Someone else would have been better suited to the job; I imagined a big lovable-but-strict teddy bear of a guy, like the physical therapist character who looks like Sinbad in Regarding Henry.
At the homework center, I did, however, make a nice connection with a fifth grader in the group named Ricky. So I was thrilled when Ricky’s parents asked me to tutor him outside the program. He was getting old for the group, so they offered to pay me the $35 a week that they had been paying the center if I would come to their house and tutor Ricky after school three days a week.
Ricky and his family lived in a two-room apartment in DC. Not two bedrooms, but two rooms. His mother worked as a house cleaner, and his father was a huge man with giant hands who came home from work every day in a tux. I was convinced that he was low-level muscle for a local crime boss, but I think in reality he drove a limo or maybe bussed dishes in a fancy restaurant.
Ricky was a D student and had been labeled by his school a bad kid and future drug user. They had basically written him off.
Ricky had simply been caught between two languages: his family and community spoke Spanish, but he learned English at school. No one at home was able to help him with his homework, and he felt lost in school. Who doesn’t goof off when they feel lost, frustrated, and trapped? But once he had help with his homework, Ricky worked tirelessly, and his grades soared. I actually became worried that he was caring too much — in fact, he started reminding me quite a bit of myself.
Ricky and I spent many hours together each week. Sometimes on my days off, he’d call with a homework crisis, and I’d stop by for twenty minutes or we’d work together over the phone. Some days I just stopped by for no reason, and we’d hang out.
Ricky and his family were so proud of him, and so appreciative of me. His mom and dad loved me the way only a parent can love a complete stranger who helps their child. They treated me like family. I appreciated the $35 a week, and just as much I loved the homemade paella. A home-cooked meal is priceless to a college student on a meal plan, and even more priceless to a college student on the daily ramen noodles and mac ’n’ cheese of a non–meal plan.
Here’s how much Ricky’s mom loved me: She regularly committed for me the unpardonable sin of cooking paella without pork or beef, and without even understanding why this was necessary. She just went on faith. She’d cook their paella on the traditional paella pan that covers four burners, and on a very sad and lonely electric chafing dish she’d cook my anemic meat-free paella.
My vegetarian desires vexed Ricky’s mom to no end, but she simply acquiesced. The pork she easily wrote off to my religion (“Oh, es Judeo.”) — I believe that I was the first red-blooded, curly-haired, prominent-nosed, honest-to-goodness Jew to enter their home. Ricky’s dad once reassured me, “My boss is Whooish, and he’s very nice too.”
So while Ricky’s mom could rationalize my pork ban, she had absolutely no context for understanding my beef abstinence. I think she really worried about me.
The language and culture gap between Ricky’s parents and me caused many funny blips. One day I had a cold, and Ricky’s mom kept asking me if I was constipated. I assumed she was very nosy or at least very, very holistic, acknowledging the connection between healthy bowel movements and overall well-being. However, in Spanish, “Do you have a cold?” sounds like “¿Estás constipada?” This misunderstanding was not as bad as when in Spain, years later, in my rusty Spanish, I accidentally asked a bartender at a tapas bar for his penis (“¿Puedo tener su polla?”), when all I wanted was the chicken special (“¿Puedo tener su pollo?”). That lowercase o can keep you out of jail.
Ricky and I worked together for three years, from fifth through seventh. And at the end of sixth grade, after he had been tutored for two years, Ricky was honored as one of the twenty-five most improved Hispanic students in all of DC. At a formal ceremony, he received a savings bond, a personally signed certificate, and a hug from Washington, DC, mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon.
Ricky was no longer a D student or a “drug risk.” On the contrary, he was a straight-A student, a role model, and a class leader.
Ricky went on to great success in middle and high school. Unfortunately, a few years later we lost touch when he moved back to Spain. If you have exceptional Google skills, maybe you can help me find him. I’d love to get back in touch. Trouble is, every third male in Spain is named Ricardo García, and one particularly prominent Flamenco guitarist dominates the first few pages of hits.
My experience with Ricky sold me on teaching. I saw that I had the ability to help children. Plus, working with Ricky felt easy and natural, as if I was built to do it. So when I approached the job search during senior year at Georgetown, I decided to teach.
Being a member of the Georgetown University School of Business Administration senior class, but not planning an illustrious career with Arthur Andersen Consulting (wink, wink), put me in a funny situation. Suddenly, for me, all those mixers and dinners and cocktail hours where students networked with corporate recruiters were not sweaty, nerve-racking events, but free eats.
Honestly, I may have been a bit of an ass. I don’t know why, perhaps I was delighted to be free of their corporate grip, or maybe I thought I was a bit superior to everyone else in business school, but I’d show up à la Don Johnson in a T-shirt and sport coat. The simple absence of the collared shirt totally changes the outfit and its message at a corporate mixer. Wearing a collared shirt says, “I conform,” or at least “I respect you,” whereas not wearing it simply says, “Fuck you.” I also laughed a bit too loudly and ate food from the buffet like Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places. I was even known to wear leather sandals.
If this had been a movie, every recruiter would have been awed by my impertinence and brio and would have begged me to interview. But in reality recruiters probably didn’t notice my shenanigans, or if they did, they were probably just annoyed. I was like a drunk person who sees himself as impressive, charming, and witty, but to others just looks like a sweaty Kanye West stealing the mic from Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
I sent out résumés to every private school in northeastern New Jersey (I did not have a teaching certificate, so I could teach only at private schools). I interviewed with a few math departments and secured a position teaching algebra and geometry in Morristown, New Jersey. The apartment Larry and I found in Jersey City was twenty-five minutes away.
In Jersey City I found yoga classes being offered at the gym right in my apartment complex. The teacher, Janice, taught a toned-down form of Iyengar yoga, the same style I had practiced during sophomore year of college. This style focuses greatly on correct alignment. Put it this way: in his classic book, Light on Yoga, B. K. S. Iyengar includes five hundred pages of instruction and six hundred photographs.
Plus, Mr. Iyengar ranks the difficulty level of every posture. When I first read this book I was flummoxed to discover that the triangle posture, which I found difficult enough, earned a mere three out of a possible sixty, ahead of only a small handful of postures, such as mountain, the one where you stand with your arms overhead, as in, “Touchdown!”
I’m sure you’re wondering what Mr. Iyengar ranks as the most difficult yoga posture. It’s not the iconic leg-behind-your-head pose (called eka pada sirsasana, by the way) made famous by Yogi Kudu on TV’s That’s Incredible.*
To