‘Loser?’

ESL is English as a Second Language.

It’s English for people who do not speak English. Teaching it is a simple job. It works like this: You go into the room and you throw something at them. If that does not work, you throw something else. That is the job. That is how Tony did it. Tony was my mentor.

Tony was an Italian, born in France, who studied English in Yugoslavia. He spoke English with a Serbo-Croatian accent, like Dr. Frankenstein. He spoke seven languages: French, Italian, English, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Russian and Spanish. He was 43. He was an actor, a writer, a painter, a magician and, as a youth, had served briefly as an undertaker’s apprentice. He said they returned to the graves a few days after the service and reinterred the stiffs in wooden coffins and rehabbed the retrieved caskets for resale.

Tony had been married three times and had grown kids wandering around Europe. His wife then was Salvadoran. She was 20, an ex-student.

He said, “It works in this way. You can boink a student. But you can’t boink your own student. They must be out of your class first.”

I said, “I have it.”

I sat in on his class from time to time when I was breaking in. It was better than the movies. He would hit his students with a few verb conjugations, followed by a card trick, followed by some dictation. There was a girlfriend story; he spoke of the adverb, drew cartoons on the blackboard, related a child-rearing episode and wrapped with a Spanish proverb: “To be so poor you do not even have a place on the ground to fall down when you die.”

This was not teaching. It was performance. And it occurred every night, five nights a week, for four hours. He said to me, “Every time I finish teaching one of these classes, I say to myself, ‘Did I really do that?’ ”

Tony had a philosophy. He said: Teaching is energy. You must keep them awake. These people have hard lives. They do not come here to learn English. They are here to get out of the house for a few hours.

We taught at a place on Washington Boulevard near Hoover Street. There are neighborhoods labeled “Beverly Hills adjacent.” This was “Pico-Union adjacent.” It was a neighborhood of torched cars and derelict apartment buildings and heavily fortified houses with concrete block walls bristling with razor wire and guard dogs roaming the front yard.

It is amazing where you can find a few laughs.

How does an English major who started out as an advertising copywriter and followed that one up with 22 years in the construction biz find himself, at age 55, hammering Mexicans with verb conjugations? It is a long story. The short version is: My construction business went into the tank and I needed a job.

So there I was teaching with Tony and Dennis, the failed stockbroker, who was being sued for $400,000, and N’dugo with the master’s in political science, whose father was an exiled king of some African tribe in Ghana, and Maria, who was an architect from Buenos Aires, and Carolyn, a Blanche DuBois type, who had a husband at home on disability suffering from malaise.

You get the idea.

But, as I say, there were laughs.

My first class went like this: I entered the room and wrote my name on the board and said I was from Buffalo. There was a map of the United States pinned to the wall. I nailed Buffalo down for them.

They said: “Boofalo?”

I said: “No, Buffalo.”

They asked about the name: Spiegelman.

I said, “My father is Jewish--jud’o--my mother is Italian.” I qualified this: “She is Sicilian.” There was a map of the world pinned to the wall. I mentioned the word “geography.” You have the United States and South America and Africa and the continent of Europe, with the country of Italy sticking out into the Mediterranean Sea. There, at the toe of the boot, is the island of Sicily.

I said, “Have you seen ‘The Godfather?’ ”

Of course.

I said, “What is the difference between an Italian and a Sicilian, and how do you determine which is which? There is a simple test.”

I invited two students to the front--Guillermo and Rosa.

I said, “You have two people here. One is Italian and one is Sicilian. But you do not know which is which. You find out in this way. You pick up a stone--a piedra.” I bent down and picked up an imaginary stone. With my other hand, I gripped the back of Guillermo’s head.

I said, “Now you take the stone and smash it against this person’s head as hard as you can!”

I mimed doing this. They gasped.

I said, “If the stone breaks--that is the Sicilian.”

I looked at them.

Claro. They laughed. It was testarudo--stone-headed. The concept exists in every language. This is called an ESL moment. You get one every day--guaranteed. That was the first class.

The second class went like this: I am up there going back and forth with them, and the subject of sex came up and the word “orgasm” formed on my tongue and released itself into the room, where it resonated briefly in the air.

A young woman of 20 years--Immaculata--raised her hand.

She said, “Teacher, I do not know this word.”

I had a wonderful student in this class. She was from Mexico City. She was a doctor--an internist. I’ll call her Dr. Elena Diaz.

I said, “Elena, come here, please, and explain this word, in Spanish.” This she did. She explained it with a vengeance. She spoke for 10 minutes. The physiology of the female sexual response was revealed with a rousing--and arousing--bravura appetite. I caught a few words, such as estornudo (sneeze) and babear (drool). Meanwhile, what was Immaculata thinking? I have no idea. She sat there calmly drinking it in.

Maria finished and returned to her seat.

I had three guys in this class: Hector, Pedro, Rubio.

I said: Hay voluntarios?

We taught along. We took our breaks at the coffee truck or the pupuseria across the street, and there were birthday parties and Halloween parties and Christmas parties and Day of the Dead parties and farewell parties and baby showers and field trips to the library and the museum and the Farmers Market, and there was food, food, food.

One day I entered the classroom following a break and saw the room had been decorated with streamers and balloons and a happy birthday sign, and there was a table stacked with presents and two cakes. I had been at the school three weeks. In 22 years in the construction business, no one had ever thrown a birthday party for me.

We taught along. The job was not bad. I liked the job. But I had a question. I was 55, teaching English for $12 an hour, and there were no bennies by way of pension or health insurance or sick leave or paid vacations, and my question, which I addressed to Tony, was: “Is this a job for losers?”

Tony said, “Yes.”

The day after I asked this question, I drove to the job and the gates were locked and there were 200 teachers and students gathered in front in an agitated state.

Que paso?

No one knew. We knew we were owed two weeks’ salary. A week later, the check from the previous pay period bounced. A story then popped up on the noticias on Channel 52. The company that was administering the ESL program was funded by something called a Pell Grant--federal money. The story reported discrepancies relating to the administration of these funds, as in misappropriation of.

I was back on the street. I did some substitute teaching here and there and latched onto an ESL place that catered to Asians, mostly Koreans. I liked the Koreans. They were smart, motivated and funny. I plugged along with this class. I had these two young women. They sat up front, next to my desk. They were chums, tight. They had energy--that chipper quality. They were constantly hugging and kissing and pinching and poking and giggling and cracking each other up. It was cute. I liked these two. They laughed at my jokes.

There is a look you get as a teacher. It is a look you only get one other time in your life--when someone is in love with you. It is a look of trust and intense pleasure. One day, one of the two cute girls cornered me and said, “My girlfriend really likes you.” I thought about this. It was not bad. I was in my 50s. This girl was 26. In the construction business, a girl like this would have crossed the street to avoid me.

I taught along, and one day I arrived at work and the doors were locked and there were the students and teachers shuffling feebly about in a disturbed way.

I had to rethink this ESL thing.

Next stop: L.A. Unified. I took something called the CBEST (California Basic Educational Skills Test). I passed by the narrowest of margins and sent my resume around. I broke in as a sub at L.A. High and some months later was given a regular class. This was more like it. The job was the same but the money was different: $38 an hour. It is a big difference. It is called self-esteem. You do not feel like a chump. Also: The checks tended not to bounce.

At Unified, I taught with Balali, an Iranian, with Steve, who is Filipino, and Jerry, a Korean. We got together on Thursday nights after class to eat Thai food. The conversation was limited. There were three subjects: women, ultimate fighting and the Lakers.

Jerry’s first question to me was: “Who would you like to see in Playboy that you have never seen in Playboy?”

This is where your tax dollars are going.

And there you have it. I am teaching ESL. It is not what I started out to do. (What did I start out to do?) But it suits me. I like being up there in front of them.

Dennis, the failed stockbroker, put it this way: “These people do not speak English, but my communication with them is 100%. Whereas with both my ex-wives, who spoke perfect English, there was no communication.”

The other day a friend asked how the job was going. I said, “This happened last night, the single nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. The word ‘melt’ came up. I explained the melting process--the reduction of a substance to liquid form. I asked them to put a sentence together using the word. I went around the room and came to Mr. Kyu, who has written 13 books about Jesus. Mr. Kyu’s sentence: ‘Your teaching makes me melt.’ ”