All Over the Place: I’m the Security Guy

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

When the principal asks me to help out after school and be the security guy, I do it.
    A large group of children start walking down the street. I can always smell a fight. I start following them. Hey, I’m the security guy.
    “Mr. Brownstein,” they ask, “why are you following us?”
    “I want to watch a fight,” I answer, and they laugh—but it doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to follow them until the fight begins or dissipates on its own.
    It takes three blocks. Then the fighters go their separate ways. But I do get to give a lesson. You don’t bother a child who is mourning the death of her mother and father by telling her how stupid they are and how stupid they look. It makes no sense at all. So the boy apologized and said he didn’t know. Not that that’s a valid excuse. And she refuses to accept it, but I know her and I figure she wouldn’t.
    The fight that never begins ends and I walk back to school only to be confronted by two police cars who have responded to a call by a parent. She claims one of the staff members of the school got in her son’s face and threatened to do severe bodily harm to him. I was there. The staff member never even came close to her child.
    Oh, she ranted and raved—but only against the school and the establishment and the failings of her own grandchild.
    I tell the police this and they take down information and drop the entire investigation, but the look the parent gives me on the way out the door is so terrible, it has the power to knock down ten terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.
    But I’m used to those looks. So I do the only thing I can do. I smile.

Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.