The large brick buildings were tossed at the base of Catherine Street like undelivered packages. Near the East River it was called Catherine Slip, but there was no hint nor the slightest resonance to reprise the charms of streams and trees. The FDR Drive lay between the streets and the East River, blocking off any consciousness of water nearby; the buildings could have been anywhere, and thus felt like they were nowhere. Short young trees lined concrete walkways, each with two poles on either side and wires from the poles to hold it up, only the trees were all leafless and barkless, mottled gray and brown. Once planted, forever dead. Dark green benches bordered the walkways, most missing wooden slats, revealing concrete curved supports sprouting big rusted screws that impaled the prospects of sitting and society alike.

The gutted benches were nothing like the well tended parks near his boyhood Brooklyn home, or the cosseted paths and well-kept buildings of the New England campus he had graduated from just two months ago, far more distant in experience than time.

There had to be a good reason he was here, Zach thought.  He buffered his memory with thoughts of his award winning paper in his poli phil class, about the powers of education, the moral and principled necessity to make teaching better.  He had read, cover-to-cover even, Our Children are Dying, studied The Crisis in the Classroom, and Death at an Early Age. He was imbued with the literature and the precepts, the philosophy and the understanding. He embodied non-violence, acknowledged that truths rested in many places, supported the rights of the community, was prepared to challenge the destructive socialization process the schools propagated. He would love the children, and he was ready to make things right. The world would get better, because it had to. Issues of race, poverty, oppression would vanish with his ascendancy, his time would affect all time. He would process this experience with all experience, to create words that would crack the condition of the world to reveal the undiscovered palace of his generation.

But the same unyielding pressure of the Vietnam draft that kept him in college through multiple semesters when all he wanted to do was drop out, hitchhike to LA or decamp in a stoner's East Village pad, now pinioned him to this place, part of the program of a Peace Corps-like teacher training program that demanded its participants live in the communi-tee where they taught, bridge the increasing gap between the cultures of teachers and their students.  And not incidentally provide a deferment from draft eligibility.  For all the talk about it coming from within, freedom was a state the world could convey, and the world could withhold.

He nearly tripped on the gutted cement walkway, the need for repair everywhere around him.  There had to be a good reason, he thought.  Surely life didn't go arbitrary so early in one's passage.

He was here, then, this summer of 1968, because it was in the program, to live and teach in a community supposedly ripe for change, or be drafted to fight in Vietnam, which involved neither teaching nor necessarily living.

As they got to the front doors, two black teenage girls promenaded past them, took a look, and laughed.

“Sweat, where they think they at?” one of them said as they walked away. Wicko and Zack looked at each other, conveying this was a time to say as little as possible.

They were destined for apartment 23-K. They pushed open heavy brown metal entrance doors and walked towards the two elevators. One was for odd floors, the other for even. The hallway crunched underneath, gritty with candy wrappers, potato chip residue, small empty brown bags that wrapped beer from delis to comply with arcane New York law, a pile of broken dull green glass in one corner.

“Nice,” said Wicko. To the right was a staircase. Footsteps pounded from behind the closed door, but nobody appeared, only the menacing reverberation. He pushed the elevator buttons again.

“You think if the even one comes, we could take it and walk down?” Zack said.

Wicko looked at Zack as if one of them was stoned but he wasn’t sure which; they were not in a land of ordinary logic. Wicko’s deeply dimpled chin moved side to side when he was in thought. “Maybe not today.”

The even elevator arrived. A young full-bodied Puerto Rican girl wearing a dark jacket and short skirt hopped off, followed by an older black woman wearing a bonnet. They looked at the boys with discreet double takes, then kept on walking, raising their heads a little higher.

Zack squeaked a “Hi,” but wasn’t sure if he said it loud enough to be heard. No response.

Four young black kids slammed through the front doors and into the open elevator, laughing and punching a lot of buttons with the backs of their hands all at the same time. The door closed. They were alone in the silent hallway. Surrounded by an aroma of dead meat and old piss.

Scrawls with names and numbers and convoluted messages of mockery and revolution mottled the light green walls. No hearts with arrows through them, but there were several daggers with initials.

The odd elevator came, its emptiness disconcerting.

“Okay,” Wicko said, “onward and upward.” They got in, pressed twenty-three. A sticky veneer covered the button.

On the ninth floor, the elevator stopped, the door opened, Zack’s heart sped up from the unexpected pause. A tall black kid stood there wearing a dark blue watch cap, thick black leather jacket and dirty brown pants. “Hey man, this goin' down?” he asked, his hand describing a downward curve in front of him.

They shook their heads, said, louder and more jovial than required, “Nope, we’re on the way up.”

“Shee-it,” he said, “this damn sucker take forever.” He was all long arms and legs, none of the parts looked connected, but he walked into the car with a coherent rolling gait, brushing up against their luggage. He looked down, then up at the two of them, opened his mouth, shut it, and poked the first floor button several times.

The elevator door had a tiny window with crisscrossed wire bars embedded in the glass. As they passed an odd floor, the light coming in cast the pattern of the bars along the car, on their bodies and faces. The pattern would disappear as they passed an even floor, the window revealing a gray striated concrete wall. The thin bars grew into iron rods, about to be locked. There seemed no air in the hot small box. Wicko already looked desperate, sweat seeped into Zack’s eyes. It felt like the elevator moved more slowly the higher they got. By the time they reached twenty-three all Zack wanted was out. Story of his life. He quickly pushed open the outer door, then carefully pulled his luggage around so as not to hit the black kid in the leg, muttered, “See ya,” on the way out.

“Yeah, be seein' ya.” He sounded skeptical.

Zack hadn’t known what to expect, but the dark hallway with dull brown doors set into dirty beige walls, bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling, most out, was not how he wanted to spend his summer vacation. He looked at Wicko, who might have been thinking about the showers in Aunt Magda’s uptown apartment, which had multiple heads on the side, an enveloping experience, his chin moving furiously. They walked to the right, then had to retrace to the left to find 23-K. They looked at each other like one last time before vaulting out of the foxhole. Zack pushed the bell inset into the center of the door beneath the peephole.

Nothing. Not a sound.

He pushed again. There was a barely audible click. No bell, no chime. Wicko tapped the door lightly, then, when nothing happened, hit it harder, then harder still. Zack glanced up and down the hallway.

“Take it easy,” called a woman’s deep voice from within, “it ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

The door opened. They faced a woman Zack assumed was Mrs. Lawrence. She was ebony black; her face might have been pretty but looked overwhelmed, raw, tired. He couldn’t tell how old she was, could have been thirty or fifty. She stood a little taller, said, “You mus’ be them boys comin’ to live here.”

“That’s right. Mrs. Lawrence.” Zack flashed the smile that had charmed more mothers of girls he dated than the girls themselves. She stared at him. They shook hands, oddly formal, half in the apartment, half out the door.

“You all come on in,” she said. They hoisted their bags, and followed her into their new home.

There was a big couch covered in yellowed plastic, five gray metal folding chairs, a thick wooden television console in a corner, a low veneered coffee table in front of the couch. The walls were cinderblocks painted beige, same paint as the hallways; that really got to Zack, he felt he shouldn’t stare, like avoiding someone with a disfigured face, which made it harder to turn away. Above a bridge table with plates neatly set on it were pictures of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Jesus. On the other wall a painting with thickly layered oils of a tall man dressed in a tribal African outfit, dark blues and greens, stared straight ahead with piercing eyes, brandishing a long stick or spear, a red glow around his body. The room was warmer than the day outside, spotlessly clean, filled with a pungent aroma emanating from the tiny kitchen, propelled by something bubbling in a large pot.

“So,” Wicko said, “we’re here.”

“Yes you are,” said Mrs. Lawrence. 

It was excruciating, like trying to talk to the blind date Zack had freshman year after learning she was for Goldwater. Just before the pain of staring at each other got unbearable, a couple of kids rushed in. Relief.

“Hey,” Zack said, “how ya doin’? My name’s Alexander, Alexander Zacharias, they call me Zack, and this is Harry Wicowitz.”

The girl, who looked to be around seven, stared up at him with big round eyes under tight cornrows. “Wico-whats?” She looked serious.

“Close enough,” said Harry, his deep infectious laugh got the girl laughing too. “And what’s your name?”

“This here’s Eve-lyn,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “and this,” pointing to the boy, who was around eleven, “is Le-roy. My name is Jacqueline.” She pronounced it the French way, with two syllables. They said hello all around, then Jacques-leen, as she insisted they call her, showed them into one of the two bedrooms that were on either side of the living room.

The room was also walled with cinderblocks, painted light green. There was one window, its upper and lower section separated by thin metal strips red with rust, the most colorful feature of the room. Rather than add light, it accentuated the darkness. Two narrow short single beds filled the room, each covered with a sheet crisply folded under an army style blanket, one dark green, the other charcoal gray, both tattered at their edges but lying flat and taut, smelling of detergent. They dropped their bags, sat on the beds, which were soft but not too droopy. It was even hotter than the other room, the walls closer, the ceiling lower. They’d joined the club, gotten to the next phase in the teacher training program started by ex-Peace Corps people, oriented to the community, the next step on this barely-chosen path. Why was it, he wondered, that whenever he got somewhere, he wanted to be somewhere else? In physics he’d been more theoretical than lab; he wished the same could apply to experiential education.

“You ever sleep with Sarah Delaney?” Zack asked. Sarah was also in their program, even if she didn’t need draft deferral, Radcliffe to Wicko’s Harvard, always looked like she was just out of bed, hair tousled, a dark ring under her eyes, sexy without being beautiful. He’d been curious, and this seemed a moment that stripped down to just truth.

Wicko shrugged. Zack nodded. They walked back into the living room.

Mr. Lawrence came in the front door, a Daily News under his arm. He seemed to be in his late thirties, a strong solid body but a creased face made him look older. Zack thought how so many black men’s faces seemed to allude to stories in which humor fought pain. Hard stories that yielded wisdom but obliged a price. He wore a t-shirt, the kind Zack connected with his father’s generation, thin lines around the shoulders, armpits hanging out. Only Mr. Lawrence’s arms were large and powerful looking, he looked good in that shirt, while Zack would have looked like the ninety-seven pound weakling in the Joe Weider ads his brother kept in their Brooklyn room surrounded by his weights.

“How you all doin’? My name is Charles, Charles Lawrence, welcome to our house.” He smiled, they shook hands, sat. The Lawrences had learned about the stipend program to house prospective teachers for the summer through a friend on the community school board, Annabel Washington.

Wicko voiced Zack’s question, “Ah, where are the kids going to sleep?”

“Ev-lyn, she going to sleep in our room, and Le-roy, he sleep on the couch,” Jacqueline said.

When they protested, Mr. Lawrence interrupted them. “Don’t you worry about nothin’, this gonna be fine.” Until then, Zack had assumed they would be getting like the guest bedroom somewhere; the absurdity of his assumption slapped him.

“But we don’t like putting you out like this,” he said.

“Hey, we can use the bread,” Charles said.

They invited them to dinner, which was part of the package, but they’d made other plans, promised to stay tomorrow. Zack felt like they were practicing cocktail rituals at the afternoon country club, false and arch. He couldn’t swim towards the future nor float in the present, but it was just for a few weeks.

And hey, they could use the bread.

Charles and Jacqueline Lawrence said little, but Zack saw their struggle to keep dignity and perspective. Each day extracted a price, leaving Zack to wonder how deep their reservoirs of acceptance could be, how the nation would survive when they dried up. The twenty-seven barren floors of the Alfred E. Smith Projects desiccated the possibility of tradition or connection, made mockery of communi-tee, to commit to any one else was a luxury of energy and resource no one could afford. Leroy was a constant whirl of motion, crumbling scraps of paper and tossing them in anything that resembled a hoop: the waste basket, the sink, Zack’s arms if he circled them in front of his chest with his chest as the backboard; Evelyn already taking from her mother’s wardrobe once-bright skirts and printed blouses, arriving for dinner in a mix of colors and patterns with little connection to each other but as cheerful and moving as her watchful, bright eyes. Zack enjoyed talking with them, but the world around them was another collection of patterns they couldn’t connect. As they got older there were no broader horizons, only deeper holes.

At dinner the six of them crowded around the bridge table, the kids sharing a chair. Jacqueline offered helpings of the day’s thick brown stew, filled with potatoes, carrots, and a meat Zack couldn’t identify. “This ham hocks, the way my mamma made them.” When she smiled she looked more than years younger.

Zack didn’t think it was a good time to try his “Sorry, but this isn’t kosher” routine that had enabled him to avoid the exotic foods in his friend’s kitchens growing up, Lebanese and Greek, Italian and Syrian, , so he took a forkful and loaded it down. He’d never eaten anything like it; it tasted thick, swarthy, intense, smelled like earth just after the rain. The portions weren’t large; he kept swallowing until his plate was finished, worth it to see Jacqueline smile again. How beautiful she must have been.

He looked at the pictures of JFK, MLK, and JC. He finally got up the nerve to ask her, “What about a picture of Bobby Kennedy, Mrs. Lawrence?”

She looked at the wall, then at him, a sheen of tears coated her eye. “They ain’t no more room on the wall as for people that’s gone,” she said.

They never asked for seconds, and while the tastes of ham hocks or chicken with rice and collards were good, they were never enough, so most nights after dinner they would say they were going to meet some friends, or imply important meetings, and head to Mott Street in Chinatown where, for a few dollars at Wo Hop Kee, they could get all the pork with black bean sauce and curried noodles with chicken they wanted.

Zack had little direct experience with blacks. His grade school was near an orphanage; many of those kids were black, but they were invariably shunted into Class 3-5 or 4-4, not his top track 1-1 up to 6-1. They were planets in different orbits that rarely intersected, separated even in the lunchtime schoolyard or the gym, and when they did connect it was usually a collision, with neither group quite understanding why. A Brooklyn taunt was “fight, fight, nigger and a white, come on, Alex, beat that white.” They repeated it without a thought.

Hayden College in Massachusetts had five black guys in a class of three hundred. He knew a couple, in the way that he knew and was known by almost everybody through his acting in school productions, but that was guys sharing similar experiences not too hung up on how they had gotten there. Now they were coming at him in all directions: on the streets of the Village; Mr. Spencer in the teacher training course; a founder of their program; the Lawrences, living life on the other side of the world, the local kids older in some ways than he was, uttering words without understanding, absorbing information they could transcribe but not translate, drowned numb. He grew up imbued with the notion that one could do what one wanted to do, just set your mind to it, but living the life of the Lawrences, mired amidst bare concrete walls and puke beige hallways, elevators that looked like cages and the endless, bottomless filth of the projects, was a collection of circumstances that desiccated potential, easily separated you from the notion of possibility, of clean places with functioning amenities that could serve as a base to launch. He and Wicko could get out when they wanted, to streets and restaurants alive with options, to Aunt Magda’s and her multi-headed shower and his girlfriend Donna summering on 84th  Street, yet even so they could feel the oppression, how ambition and hope could be squeezed out of the soul. The guys knew that Jacqueline sensed the treachery, felt the betrayal, but had no weapons to fight it.

Evenings at the Lawrences were sweltering. They had no air conditioning, no one in the building did. He felt like he was brushing up against the cinderblocks’ harsh surface even when he was distant from them. He carried assumptions of opportunity, but the Lawrences didn’t have a parallel track, or trick, they couldn’t jump off the bus at will, they lived where they lived how they lived and that was the only world in which they’d live. The room shrank, abraded him, stifling, a cell, a cage, a trap. They bought a fan, which oscillated back and forth, the interval too long to keep up with their sweat. Even with the fan, there was a stillness to the air, their rooms, the projects. The same dead air they left in the morning greeted them when they returned.

They lay in their beds, never sleeping well. The wait for the elevators was always too long. Once in, you only wanted to get out. The tiny windows with their little crossed bars, trapped with a dank smell of confinement. Unable to sleep, they comforted each other with talk of righteous involvement, existential learning and virtuous commitment to the communi-tee, words better suited to daytime in the program storefront than the hot damp nights when they would often get up several times, to get a Carvel, or another Young Sing mai fun at Wo Hop Kee, or granita di limone at Ferrara’s, but finally all the places were closed, even the bars and their shelves of relief, so they had to head back to Al Smith and his buildings for another fitful night.

He thought he was ready for it, for the home front battle. But it was hot, full of pent-up tears and too cemented with misery to shred. He couldn’t walk out this door, or the home-tour soldier could end up being the jungle-tour-bullets-flying-at-you soldier. Converting the good guy effort to save domestic children into the slaughter of foreign ones, for no good reason other than the hubris of tight-lipped men willing to send the nation’s children to their death. You could get a lot more than you bargained for with this experiential education. 

What did it mean to fail a course, when the classroom was other people’s lives?