ski mask 2

yesterday i wrote about ski mask man, a strange guy i saw on my walk to work. he stuck in my mind and i mentioned him in class yesterday. the kids are working on historical fiction pieces and they're struggling with creating characters. we've come up with historical events to center the stories and now they're fixing a main character to lead everyone else through the stories they're writing. it is tough because they don't like to think and they come up with elaborate ways to avoid it. so yesterday i tossed out the story of ski mask guy because i wanted them to get that he was strange. a ski mask in may is different from a ski mask in january. i wanted them to understand detail and how to create something interesting and believable. they got it. they were also fascinated. ski mask man is the sort of person they'd see if they weren't on phones/ipods/whatever every second of the day. he's out there all over the place.

then today i was telling them about backstory. about flashbacks. i was hoping they'd get that they can't just create a character and make only the part they're writing exist. they need to get an idea in their heads of a whole person. what's his favorite food? what sort of soap does she use? what's his biggest secret? we do exercises like these all the time so today i asked them to write a memory for their characters- a scary memory from when the character was five. it seemed pretty straightforward but i started smelling smoke and i could see them beginning to melt.

you should probably know that i've been teaching more than 15 years and am a bit of a control freak in the classroom. i hate chatter when people should be writing and i hate people asking to go to the bathroom when i'm talking. i have issues. when i give an assignment that requires people to have done a prior assignment (say, one that was due two days ago), i find it difficult to be interested when students say things like, "uh, i don't have a character yet," because we've been working IN CLASS AS A GROUP on these stinking characters for more than a week. sometimes when something like that happens i just stare blankly for a bit, trying to take in what i'm hearing, that people would deliberately screw themselves over and annoy me.

however, as i'm getting older, i'm slowly learning to turn situations like that into something that can make me happy. at that point, when i'm annoyed and all, i'm not so interested in their happiness, but mine is still pretty important. so out of tiredness and frustration and boredom i said, "hey, you guys remember ski mask man from yesterday?" everyone did. there were murmurs and comments about his oddness. they are afraid of him. they hate him. they love him. and all they know is that he wore a ski mask yesterday. good sign. so i pushed a bit. "think about him. write a memory for him. what happened to him when he was nine? something scary. what was it?" and they went. no confusion. no problem. they KNEW about ski mask man. they knew. as they wrote frantically i asked why this was so much easier. it just is, they said. i asked why this memory would be important to ski mask man's story if he has one (he does now) and one child raised his hand. "this memory tells why he wears the mask!" of course. that's what flashbacks are all about. revealing the secret motivation behind whatever is going on today. or yesterday in our case.

so here's what i learned about ski mask man. something terrible happened when he was nine. maybe there was a fire or maybe there was a knife, but his face didn't survive intact. or maybe an abusive father told him he was ugly so many times he believed it. or maybe his father robbed a store with the child in tow and something happened. whatever the specifics, ski mask man's mom was m.i.a. and more often than not, dad contributed to his suffering. dad actively worked on whatever it was that got this guy in a mask. you think i am reading too much into this. there were twenty separate stories and not a single one veered away from this formula. they were proud of their stories. they love to write and they have a better sense of the way dramatic narrative works than you'd think. i thought about ski mask man all day. i found myself hoping for the fire.

when i got home i had to go to the check cashing place. for those of you who have never been to a check cashing place, it is where class is established. it is where people do their banking when banks don't care for them. we go there because our landlord insists on being paid in money orders and there's no other place in the neighborhood to buy money orders. there are three places advertising that they sell money orders, but i made the mistake of asking in those places and was told no. so i go to the check cashing store. it is, oddly enough, just past the place where i saw ski mask man yesterday. right next door.

as i walked i noticed a ruckus across the street. my neighborhood is quiet and i hadn't seen anything like this since i lived in syracuse. there were lots of crackheads where i used to live and the cops were always stopping by, doing nothing, "dispersing" crowds. but not here. this neighborhood is quiet and peaceful and normal with the exception of ski mask man, so i got distracted watching across the street from where i was, a block from the check cashing place, as a woman screamed and pointed at a man standing on the stoop of a bodega. it reminded me of all sorts of summer evenings in syracuse when a loud woman with a knife or bat or stick or bottle would be standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by people trying to calm her down or egg her on. when things got really loud i started walking again. thirty seconds to the check cashing place. a minute or two at the counter while the man printed the money order. back out onto the sidewalk.

and there, a block away, sat three police cars with lights on and an ambulance. the crowd had grown and most of the people there now hadn't been there to witness whatever called the ambulance. they were just there to witness the current spectacle of cops, hands over holsters, milling through the crowd trying to figure out what happened, what the woman had done. the woman's children were with her, a girl about 8 and a boy much younger, 4 or 5. everyone was talking and nobody was saying anything.

tomorrow i will tell my class about this and they will write stories telling me what happened. then i'll know.