Gusto Jones

My sister Georgia wanted to be a nun. I, on the other hand, wanted to eat shit and vomit out my nose. Or so it seemed. Strange then, that Georgia would end up having sex with a criminal on the bathroom floor of a maximum-security prison and I would be teaching middle school students how to be good citizens. Which proves, once and for all, that people can change.

One of my former students (ironically!) happens to reside in a maximum-security prison as I write, and this unpleasant thought reminds me of his disturbing personality mix of childlike enthusiasm and chilling devilry. In fact, we dealt at our little alternative high school with pathologies that would make the professional psychiatrist shiver. Our school was populated by your run-of-the-mill rebellious students who refused to learn and diligently worked at making our lives as miserable as possible. But once in a blue moon a truly driven pupil walked through our doors, whose misbehavior transcended nuisance or malice and rose upward to the level of performance art. They didn't care about the fucking teachers. They were just passing through, on a higher mission, and tolerated us as minor characters in the grand scale of their tumultuous lives. A teacher rarely gets an opportunity to observe a student such as this in captivity, but I experienced one when my life for a brief few weeks ran together with Gusto Jones.

"Who wants to make a piñata!” I trilled cheerily at a group of high school students who had been designated the "party committee". Most of the students sat lethargically at their tables, waiting for the big party plans to unfold before them. A couple of the girls put forth their best effort and actually acknowledged me.

"Can we bring our own music?" a white suburban girl named Mandy challenged.

Nicole, rolling her eyes petulantly and dipping a thin lipstick wand into a tube of shiny pink lip gloss retorted, "We are not listening to your fucking rap music! If we listen to our own music we need to vote on what kind.

"Nicole!" I hissed, already strained at the prospect of a day of party preparations. "Watch your mouth!"

"Can I lay down?" asked an unkempt boy named Nate. "My girlfriend kept me up all night."

Much wrangling and bribing later, the boys tore strips of newspaper and dipped them into thick paste while the girls, with their pretty gel pens made lists of absolutely necessary kinds of candy to put into the paper mache pumpkin piñata that they agreed would be the highlight of the Halloween festivities.

"OK. Games. How about we pass an orange around the circle with our chins?" Shayna wore a tight low-cut shirt announcing that she was a "HOTTIE".

"Cool," said one of the boys, glancing up at Shayna as she scribbled intensely with purple glitter ink.

The boys grew weary of such demanding paper mache duty, and felt a mixture of irritation and admiration at the girls, who had made it perfectly clear that they could not be expected to apply layers of paper mache without surgical gloves.

"This doesn't even look like a pumpkin."

"It has enough fucking layers of paper."

"This sucks."

Sensing the end of their collective attention span, I took control. "GOOD JOB! OK! We'll put the candy in tomorrow, seal up the hole and paint it." As the students loudly pushed their way out the door I saw Gusto Jones standing in the hallway quietly looking past me at the table where the paper mache ball sat heavy and misshapen on wet newspaper.

Gusto didn't stay long in one classroom. His troubles started in preschool, and each subsequent teacher had added to his lengthy student discipline file. Bullying. Stealing. Cursing. Fighting. Skipping. Vandalizing. Insubordination. Uncontrollable. The list of wrongdoings marched with him through elementary, through middle school and into high school. The school psychologists and social workers tried to find redeeming qualities, give him incentives, scare some citizenship into him, but Gusto was far beyond their simple platitudes. He knew that the "Dream, Believe, Achieve" posters hanging in the school halls were bullshit.

Gusto's mother owned the local bar, The Bloated Cow, and her duties there included bringing men home and into her bedroom nightly. Gusto listened to his mother having sex with different men, some nice to him, some indifferent. He was interested in how the sounds varied from one man to the next. He began having sex himself when he was nine years old, which was two years after his father had introduced him to marijuana. Soon he was selling his own Ritalin. He and his friends would crush it up and snuff it. They liked to raid their family medicine cabinets and crush random pills that they snuffed and chased with cough medicine stolen from the local pharmacy. The storeowners were afraid of Gusto and his friends. They recognized a quality in him that was best not messed with, and they rationalized their small losses.

Gusto's father was a Hell's Angel, or so Gusto liked to say. Most of his friends thought he belonged to some lesser, regional gang of bikers. Everyone knew the myth meant a lot to Gusto, and every few years when his father was released from his latest stint behind bars he would show up on his loud machine along with his tattoos, his facial hair and his sober presence. He always took Gusto for a ride, and Gusto felt a confusing mix of pride and rage for days after his dad thundered out of his life again. Gusto began having sex with his mother's friends when he was fourteen and in the eighth grade. Sometimes they would leave him a trinket, some lunch money.

When Gusto stole money from a teacher, keyed her car and threatened to kill her if she went to the police, he was sent to the alternative school, where it was obvious from the beginning that he would be just passing through. Keeping him in my classroom was a full-time job. One brief glance away and he disappeared, and then I would embark on a search party, always finding him with a cigarette at his lips, outside. He had made his own decisions for so long, school was an irritatingly silly containment system. He couldn't make sense of our trite rules. If he was having a nicotine fit, he should be able to go have a cigarette. I tried to give him some leeway. I found rules and formalities generally senseless too. The students called us by our first names here. We knew that most rules were created to control people, and we knew the value of breaking them. He had no interest in academics and found schoolwork totally pointless. After several attempts at finding some writing activity that would engage him, perhaps an art project that could be a starting point, I realized that Gusto was one of those students who had lived as an adult for too long. There would be no going back to school for him. Almost seventeen, he was biding time until his birthday, when he could drop out and be free.

The day of the party found the school in total chaos. Students ran to the bathroom in groups, applied green make-up and black wigs and roamed from room to room carrying their Mountain Dew, admiring one anothers' new identities. Girls giggled in groups, smoking cigarettes, wearing pajamas and pigtails, carrying teddy bears and dolls. Gusto stood at the end of the hall in a close embrace with a girl dressed in a nightie. I watched his hand gently caress her bottom. "Stephanie! Break it up!" You see, even I walked with caution around Gusto Jones.

At the appointed time I gathered a few boys together and we went outside to tie the piñata to a big oak tree next to the school parking lot. One of the boys climbed to the first branch and as he held the rope they negotiated the right height to achieve maximum impact. The pumpkin, like a freak of nature, swayed heavily from the branch in all its malformed glory ("it doesn't even LOOK like a pumpkin") and we gathered everyone together for the main event. It had been decided by the planners, with their gel pens, that the girls would get the first whack. "It wouldn't be fair if boys went first. The girls wouldn't even get a chance."

One-by-one the girls swung a heavy branch at the slowly swaying target, and one-by-one they grew tired and bored and escaped back into the school. Gusto was primed. "I'll do it!" This was no longer a little piñata child's game, but a test of strength. Wanting the other boys to get a turn too, I ordered them to form a line, giving them three whacks each. They all deferred to Gusto, and as he approached his task I saw the determination in his eyes. He gave the thing at least five hard hits before I could stop him. He grudgingly gave the next boy in line a turn and through the line they went, each one hitting three times with all his might, and each time the pumpkin swayed heavily, unfazed.

"Let's just take it down and break it," said Nate.

"Let's get a bat," said Gusto, and soon the boys were tossing a baseball bat back and forth, swinging with all their might, working up a sweat and quickly growing bored. "Tell us when the candy comes out," they said as one-by-one they headed back inside. Gusto and I were left standing under the oak tree, looking at each other. I handed Gusto the bat and he began swinging. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The rope creaked, the pumpkin lurched ever so slightly, but the paper mache held firm. Gusto swung harder, his small muscular body tight and focused, his eyes not leaving the prize. The effort was Herculean, and I wondered whether Gusto had ever even heard of Hercules. Gusto continued his heavy blows, all alone in his labor. The country silence was all around us save the crack of the bat against what seemed to be the cement facade of our Halloween piñata. Gusto paused only once during his endeavor, to remove his wet t-shirt. The sweat ran down his forehead and the colored leaves fell around him as he single-mindedly delivered blow after endless blow. Finally candy began to trickle to the dirty ground. Gusto targeted a couple more hits at the weak spot and candy rained freely, a mountain of Brach's bulk chocolates. Gusto lowered his weapon, glanced down at the bounty and turned and sauntered gracefully into the school.

I stood alone for a moment in the hushed aftermath of his effort, and then the students burst out into the fall sunshine, grabbing up handfuls of candy, stuffing it into their pockets, snatching up the good kinds, until the pile was gone and all that was left was the dirt on the battlefield.

I listened to the voices of the dispossessed as they shuffled back into the building.

"He took all the good kinds."

"Do you have any caramels?"

"This sucks."

"What time is it?"

"That piñata was stupid. It had too many layers."

Gusto Jones went on to do many more amazing deeds, such as committing statutory rape and getting himself thrown in prison, just like his father. But I prefer to remember the man that had the potential of Hercules in his heart, who had the tenacity to move mountains, who was just a little boy named Gusto Jones.