At lunch that day, I let Jessica in on some of my more admirable qualities. I let her know about how I’d started my career as a special education teacher on Maui. How, within a couple of years, I came know to the bureaucracy of the Hawaii school system and I began to understand some of the federal legislation requiring special education. I began to see that, at least at remote Hana school where I first taught, we weren’t even close to being in compliance with those laws. I saw students in need of services that weren’t available. I found myself with a caseload of students so diverse in age and disability that I had to focus on the students with the most severe needs leaving little time for others who also had difficulties. I began thinking about all this and I decided to go to law school to help children access the services they were entitled to. So I moved to Honolulu, and enrolled in law school. The Hawaii DOE’s system for educating students with disabilities was broken and I was going to help fix it.
I stayed with the DOE during most of law school and the day I met Jessica I was a Resource Teacher working for Honolulu District. It was my job, among other things, to help other teachers, school principals and parents to understand the rights and responsibilities of the parents and children as well as those of the schools and their employees when it came to developing special education programs.
After lunch, I ran out to my car and finished off the last of the wine. I didn’t get a chance to speak with Jessica again that day. By the end of the seminar I was feeling sick and could only think about getting to a liquor store. It would be a few years before I would see her again.
I managed to pick up a bottle of Smirnoff and a quart of grapefruit juice on the way home. At the time I was living in Julia’s house. It was a spacious, Brady Bunch era house in a neighborhood of expensive homes. Maunawili sits above Kailua town, nestled under towering, mist shrouded mountains, streaked with waterfalls. It rained most days in Maunawili and peacocks roamed the neighborhood.
I’d met Julia in law school. We became close friends after she invited me to join a study group during our first semester. During the course of those years we did little studying, but we hung out together in a platonic way each of us in turn helping the other through painful divorces. After we had both graduated, Julia had nothing keeping her in Hawaii. She decided to move to the Bay area and invited me to stay in her house for an extremely discounted rent. She asked only that I look after the property and find a roommate who would pay a larger portion of rent.
In no way did I deserve her kindness. In the years to come I would become an unreliable tenant and a reliable fuck-up. I had already borrowed money from her that I still hadn't paid; I would be late with the rent and eventually stop paying. Even after I was no longer welcomed in the house, I would break in through the window to drink and pass out in my old bed.
All this was still to come.
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