THAT’S MY SOUL. WHY DON’T YOU DRAW YOURS?

In 1992, my employer sent me home--to the streets of los angeles--to tour communities torn apart by the riots. I was living in another city, working for a federal housing agency, and flew here to inspect a burned-out strip mall and tend to emergency housing, but my thoughts kept straying to “my kids.” I’d been a teacher 15 years earlier at Miramonte Elementary at East 68th Street and Compton Avenue, today the second-largest primary school in the United States. It was there that I watched the struggle between faith and fate, between art and the rind of reality.

Last summer I drove from LAX to Miramonte on a search I had promised myself years ago. I had never stopped being haunted by memories of young Angelenos swimming up concrete to their hard playing fields. Who among my students had survived? My search was dogged, too, by a kind of teacher’s prayer: Did I make a difference in their lives? Here’s what I found.

Eric the Thumb Sucker

When I returned after 20-plus years, one of the first things that greeted me was the cinder-block wall that girds the Miramonte playground. One orange tree still lolls over that wall, at the approximate spot where teachers lost a foul ball to an incensed Doberman pinscher on the last day of school in 1977. Now the bark is thicker, the oranges fatter, the Doberman gone. And Eric is gone. Eric Dennis, who smashed my car against the cinder-block wall.

Eric was lodged in the toughest Educationally Handicapped class at Miramonte, one of 40 rooms I entered as the school’s writer-in-residence for the 1977-78 year on a grant from the California Arts Council. The classroom seemed like a variation on a maximum-security prison. Most of the kids wandered--or lunged--around freely, the teacher reduced to a cattle prod, at best. In six meetings over the first few weeks, I could barely get someone to sit at a desk, much less write a line of poetry or drama.

At the seventh meeting, the teacher was absent and the substitute was angry. Denise stuffed Cheetos into her mouth; Ernest flashed his large teeth, needling chubby, sensitive Kim. Five times I tried to read a poem; five times it was swallowed in the din. Then I went to the chalkboard and, half out of despair, drew an irregular, closed figure, a blob.

“What’s that?” Ernest shouted.

“That’s my soul,” I replied. “Why don’t you draw yours?”

Pandemonium. Everyone rushed to the board and drew lines, squiggles or perfect boxes, often drawing over each other’s work. The sub slapped a ruler on her desk and accused the students of acting like fools. Then Gloria, a quiet, shy girl, came up to me and whispered, “I’d write a poem, Mr. Poetry Man, if there were less people at the board,” and I sensed a breakthrough.

“Would you speak it to me, Gloria?”

Ready to take dictation, I grabbed an old typewriter and plopped it on a desk. “I Don’t Like My Shape,” she began. “If I had good parents, I would like my shape.” That broke the dam. Soon everyone lined up to speak his or her own poem to me, including Eric Dennis.

Eric was 11 but still sucked his thumb so furiously and continuously that there was a red sore at its base. He had bottomless chocolate eyes and a taciturn expression that bordered on fear, but he blabbered his poem so casually, and with so much apparent personal satisfaction, that it belied its subject: suicide.

. . . . And if my soul won’t stay with me

Until I die,

I’ll kill myself,

And then I’ll cry.

Several days later in the lunchroom, Eric said he wanted to change the ending of his poem to “I’ll cry, and then I’ll kill myself.” I said I liked it better the first way.

“But I can’t cry after I kill myself.”

“Who said?”

“Ernest.”

“Ernest doesn’t know what you are capable of.”

“Can I still cry after I kill myself?”

“Sure.”

“How?”

“Have you ever fallen asleep, had a bad dream, and woke up crying? Well, when you’re dead, you’re asleep, just longer. Maybe you’d cry because you didn’t really want to kill yourself. Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, you were right the first time.”

Eric became one of my favorites--and a powerful writer in that short set of seasons we shared. Though he almost never let a smile last, he stopped sucking his thumb and wrote with exuberance. One day, I launched a love poem exercise in his class, figuring no one knows more about love than one who hasn’t got it, or who had it and saw it go. I added a twist to get the students moving: Imagine yourself a city boy writing to a country girl, or vice versa. Eric--who insisted that his be “City Boy to City Girl”--stunned the class into silence as he shouted in ecstasy at the end:

I’m gonna marry everybody

till they have babies

everybody in California

I love the whole wide world!

And I love my wife

but we can’t have no more kids

cause we don’t have the money

to buy clothes--matter of fact

we don’t have the money to feed

you that well

and we can’t feed horses, cows, dogs,

pigs, elephants--

and I love the whole wide world!

Over the course of the school year, I’d occasionally give kids, Eric among them, a lift home. One afternoon, he spilled chocolate cake all over the back seat of my car. The next day, I asked him to clean it up. He took the keys and, before long, I heard a crash in the parking lot. Sure enough, Eric had given into the temptation of driving a blue Mercury. I flew into a rage--which I immediately regretted, looking into those bottomless, pained eyes. Eric started sucking his thumb again and never wrote another poem. He avoided me and didn’t apologize, even though I repeatedly asked him to write that two-word poem you say when you’ve done something wrong. On the last day of school, he told me he had written it, that it was at his house. “Just say it!” I blurted.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said, and hurried away.

Years later, calling up a half-century of the city’s deceased on a computer at the Hall of Records in Norwalk, I discovered the death--by blunt force trauma--of a 12-year-old boy in Los Angeles on Dec. 30, 1978. It was strangely labeled “accident--fall to curb.” His name was Eric Dennis.

There was no mother’s name on the certificate. The father’s phone number was unlisted. Yet I was pretty sure this was my Eric Dennis.

“I’m sorry, Eric,” I murmured, and walked out.

Julius Caesar is Lonely

He was a bunch-haired clown, strutting his strange, fulminating poems like a budding dictator. He wrote a one-act play about a man on his deathbed surrounded by greedy heirs, and he was the first child ever to read his poems at Beyond Baroque, a literary cafe in Venice.

Israel Andrade, 9, was the one student remembered by all five of the Miramonte teachers I managed to track down.

Joanie Pollock Klein, who logged 10 years teaching kindergarten before retiring to raise her own children, remembered Izzy nearly eating the mike at Beyond Baroque. Steve Schiewe, who put in seven years before taking over the family life insurance business in Beverly Hills, recalled that he sipped espresso that night in Venice to the rhythm of Israel’s paean to loneliness, “Julius Caesar, Romans!” which starts “Ta ta da, da da/A poet said no/music, no song, ta ta, my house is burned . . . Oh Julius Caesar, the fire is going up your wife”).

Izzy’s self-confidence astounded everyone, and he drew applause after each of his poems. “The Cussing Hour” described a traffic jam in which a mother gets a ticket. “Let me tell you cussing/is no place to be.” “Mark Park” used word play to evoke fear: “Mark park, heard a bark in the park/Mark park, walk in the dark.”

Overnight Izzy was transformed from butt of scorn to school hero, imitated by many on the playground who tried to read with his dramatic caesuras.

His biggest triumph came at the end of the school year, when he wrote and starred in “Come to Sun,” one of eight original one-act plays performed before the entire school. Izzy played the father, a “grouchy old man” who, as the play opens, yells from his bed: “Where’s my supper? Don’t you know I’m gonna die?” An angel, invisible to all others, invites the father to “come on” with her. “Why don’t you call me ‘old grouchy man’?” the father asks. Her reply: “You’re not an old grouchy man--inside.”

Israel had found a home in his writing.

As I combed the records at Norwalk and discovered three Israel Andrades who had died over the past half-century, I prayed none of them were Izzy. Mercifully, no one fit his chronology. I gave out a low shout, sensing he had not gone to the sun yet and that he had found a way to express that precious, unlikely interior of his, somewhere, somehow, in the world of grouchy adults.

The Rain, The Rain, The Rain

Avery Metzenheimer must have known something. He graduated from the sixth grade that year already possessing a sense of the routine that lay ahead in adult life:

You get tired

More than a telephone pole getting wired

You’ll get tired, tired, tired.

But he knew how to play, and his poems always had a lilt, a music and a wink.

It was a drought year in California. Avery’s best effort--one of the best poems of the whole year--spoke to that drought, using his fondness for repetition and humanity:

The rain, the rain, the rain

I get not one pain

And the elderly man carrying his cane

You can see the snow

And it will glow

The rain, the rain, the rain

I like to play football in the rain

When I fall I have no pain

Nobody gets hurt

It’s this one boy named dirt

The rain, the rain, the rain

Again I checked the records in Norwalk and believed I had found my student: Avery Metzenheimer appears never to have married, logging some years as a customer service representative before dying at 33 of a sarcoma in the left thigh.

Avery Metzenheimer and Eric Dennis were the only students--out of 400--who asked me on that last day of school if I’d be coming back.

The Great Man Speaks

We watched President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural speech in Adelyn Stovall’s fourth-grade classroom. There was no great joy or excitement, no feeling of being at an event any greater than recess. One boy was slouched, his cheek in hand, his black pick sticking from his hair, like the listing periscope of a submarine. A girl stared with her hazel eyes into a kind of blank present.

But the occasion sparked that day’s poetry lesson, when I asked the children to write a dramatic monologue of a great man speaking to a bush, or a can, or something. Gilbert Aguilar wrote a beaut, titled “The Great Man Speaks to Anything”:

He tells the gun not to kill

The great man tells the rat not to steal

He tells the horses not to die

A great dog tells the cats not to eat rats

He told the elephant not

to eat too many peanuts

He tells the spider, throw your box of web away.

Swimming With Charles

Charles Alva, one of my sixth-graders, loved the water. His soul, he wrote, looked like a “duck’s foot.” He had a few things to say about swimming as well:

I feel like a cup

of water and sometimes I feel like a beach and it feels funny

because people are

swimming in me.

At 1:55 a.m. on March 31, 1994, a Charles Alva was shot in the neck at a parking lot in Paramount. If this was my Charles Alva, as I fear from his vital statistics, then all those people swimming in him were shot, too. This Charles Alva had made it to his junior year of high school before he left. He worked as a parking lot attendant. He left behind a wife and, I believe, a poem about his soul that outlives him, as it will me, and maybe this newspaper. It will remind us that we are refreshing to others if we try. When I swim, I swim with Charles, and those who swam in him. When I take my ticket now at the parking booth, I look in the eyes of the attendant to see who is swimming there.

World War III

Imagine four historical figures looking out over a wasteland in the wake of a nuclear war: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Coretta Scott King and Helen of Troy. Cloyd Milton’s fifth-graders imagined it; a retired Milton told me it was the best class that he had had in 30 years of teaching. The sophistication of their one-act play, “World War III,” still stuns me. It opens with Coretta Scott King:

Coretta: Wars are usually silly things.

Abraham: I agree with you very deeply.

George: Wars hurt people who are not in the wars.

Helen: Who cares about it if people get hurt?

People get hurt. People have to die sometimes.

Helen of Troy is a real Machiavelli, a needler and deflator. She pooh-poohs the others’ piety: “You three say it’s bad to have wars. But why not let them hurt themselves at their own game?” When a Russian stumbles onto the scene, George, Abe and Coretta shoot him, but Helen pouts: “All I want to do is let people fight over me. Not fight over them.”

The play concluded with a haunting exchange on the morality of war between a soldier and Abraham Lincoln’s son. A student backstage blew up a paper bag and crushed it for the sound of a gunshot: Lincoln’s son had shot the soldier and then run offstage, scared, a virtual Cain. The bodies rose slowly as the audience heard “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles.

There was perfect quiet when the music stopped, then thunderous applause. Loretta Jones, a wonderfully self-possessed and wise 11-year-old, took a bow as the chief playwright along with her helpers, Wendy Wells and Wanda Woods. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which covered our extravaganza of one-acts, “Not For Children Only,” mentioned “World War III” honorifically.

Wanda Woods was a poet in her own right: Her best work was titled “Cook”:

When I cook chicken

the grease burns me.

As I hop around the floor

it burns me more.

I went to the doctor.

It’s no help he could do.

It was always inside me

the rest of my life.

The day I died, the day it stopped.

Good Luck Delbert

One dry day toward the end of the school year, I took to a basketball court after class, trying unsuccessfully to dunk on the 8-foot-high basket and attracting a crowd. Delbert Smith, who possessed one of the quickest minds in the school, walked up.

Earlier in the year, Delbert had barely escaped a house fire that killed his mother. From that time on, like Eric Dennis, he periodically sucked his thumb. But he wrote fine poems all year long: “What would we live in if we didn’t have the world?/Who would we play with?”

Delbert took a ball 25 feet out, smiling a wide, crooked-tooth smile.

“I’ll get you an ice cream if you hit that one, Delbert,” I called out.

“Really, Mr. Awfulla?” His dark eyes gleamed.

Delbert, 10, took aim, bent down, shot the ball like children do, from the ankles, and banked it in.

Others wanted to get into the act, and sooner or later they sank theirs, too. I was drawn to try, but after several attempts I had no success.

“Maybe you should just try and bank it in, Mr. Awfulla,” Delbert offered.

“No, Delbert. Everyone has to do it his own way.” I bounced the ball methodically. “All you have to do is take your time, bend easy, let ‘er go cleanly . . . and . . . she’ll fall through . . . sweet!” The ball went through right on the “sweet.”

The kids yipped like puppies and danced around me. Delbert was ecstatic, hugging me, and I made good on my promise down at the corner market.

That late spring day, walking back in the sun, has stayed with me. Nor can I forget the next day, when Delbert rushed toward me and pulled a poem from his pocket:

THE GOOD LUCK SHOT

Good luck does not work

all the time

the basket is high

the wind is low

the shot will miss

try once more

this can’t miss

with a kiss it will

go through the hoop

it’s going it’s going

it’s gone

I confess: After months of searching the streets of South-Central, the Internet, many schools, databases, places of business and worship, even appealing to radio listeners through public service annoucements, I could not physically locate Delbert or any of my other students.

You live ones I did not find--you dead ones I did. You are here in the unshackled work of your youth. You may find me here, as well, in a not completely tame tangle of words, more your student than your teacher now. I am older, but I remember.