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JeffsLife
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Easy Rider

 

I get the idea one early evening, when Alex is darting into the kitchen for a bowl of pretzels, to ask him. “Alex, do you miss the school bus?”

 

He carefully takes off the iPad headphones to hear (reminding me of Ned) yet another thing his father is asking. “Do you miss the school bus?”

 

Quick shake. “Nooooo!”

 

Maybe he didn’t understand. He is autistic, after all. “School bus?”

 

“Noooo!”

 

“Do you like the subway?”

 

“Subway!"

 

Oh shit. Actually, a month into the strike of bus drivers and matrons (most of whom serve kids with special needs), Alex is become a pretty good rider. He more or less stands when he should and sits when he should, although when there are no seats on the 6 train – and there sometimes aren’t – Alex seems to have a hard time remembering to hold on to the pole, and often bends and twists while making faces at his reflection in the glass of the subway car doors. Alex usually walks with his hands, for some reason, clamped over his eyes. I escape the subway car at 23rd Street every day feeling like I’ve finished some kind of small mission.

 

 “Alex, do you know what street you get off at?” He doesn’t. Never.

 

This week the city began taking fresh bids for bus companies. The strikers say they’re starting to suffer personally and economically. (Many speaking in the media claim they also miss the kids on their routes, many of whom they’ve known for years; all I can say is that in almost a decade in the hands of the NYC Department of Education, Alex, 14, has rarely had a single bus, driver and matron for an entire school year).

 

When the strike started, about a third of special-needs students in the NYC were absent from class. Parents riding the thinning line of the middle class, it seemed, couldn’t swing it with bosses. But now, “Attendance is up,” says Alex’s unit teacher. “I guess parents are figuring out ways to make it work.”

 

Alex and I usually take the Third Avenue Limited in the afternoons; this city bus  stops about every 10 blocks and is the first method of public transit we encounter headed west on the street his school is on. While I swipe the Metrocards the DOE gave us, Alex bolts toward the back of the bus to find a double seat for us. On these rides that are suddenly a part of life, Alex says things like “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Look at that beautiful cake.” He says these things in a voice that carries across the passengers.

 

The cake thing is from a “Sesame Street” on YouTube. “David’s coming! Ipad!”

 

David is the young man we pay to spend time with Alex. David is picking Alex up from school tomorrow afternoon. “iPad” is of course the device that Alex spends a lot of time with. “Elevator!” That’s the first button he’ll press when we get home. They all mean something to me but I’m sure they don’t to the other people on the hard plastic city bus seats. I shouldn’t care and I really don’t, and yes you do always have to ride NYC public transit with your shields up. Riding it with Alex, though, makes me a little too eager to use my phasers, too.

 

The bus often waits through lights, and waits at intersections that are green for the city bus ahead to pull out. I roll my eyes. Alex mutters:

 

“Baa baa, black sheep… Look at that bu-ti-fu cake.”

 

Why haven’t teachers spoken out more about the one-third? How did families like mine and kids like Alex become numbers despite decades of society telling itself it cares? I guess money’s on the line, the cracks are widening. Good thing that Alex is learning how to ride the subway and the bus.


Posted by Jeff Stimpson at 7:49 PM EST
Updated: Tuesday, 12 February 2013 7:53 PM EST
Monday, 4 February 2013
Strike 5

Alex says bye to everyone in his school. “Bye!” he fires into one classroom. “Bye!” he fires into another and another. “Bye, Alex,” they say back. “Bye! Bye!” he says into what seems to be an empty classroom on the way to the elevator, his arm fat in his down coat and the zippers of his yellow schoolbag jiggling.

“Bye!”

This is the third week of the school bus drivers’ strike in New York. Alex and I are headed to Third Avenue, where often a Limited bus (a city bus that only stops every 10 blocks or so) will be waiting. We know this schedule now. Once Alex wanted to take the subway. A couple of times we’ve blown for a cab because I just can’t take this some days.

“Jeff, it’s Julie,” says my sister-in-law on my cell phone about a half-hour later. “Rob and I are in Midtown with the car. Do you need any help?” She’s been offering since the strike started; grandpa has, too.

“I don’t think so today, Julie. We’re on the Third Avenue bus and all set. But maybe later in the week.”

Yes, later in the week. NYC public school teachers joined the drivers on the picket lines over Super Bowl weekend. On Friday, national labor honchos said the strike was legal. On the weekend the only thing the news-outlet sites said was, “Negotiations between the union and bus companies are set to pick up again Tuesday.”

“You look and look and there’s no news about this,” Aunt Julie has said. Alex went with us to Aunt Julie and Uncle Rob’s for the Super Bowl, which was also a family multi-birthday party. While none of us was looking, Alex ripped open presents and scattered the cash in cards over the floor. 

On that Third Avenue bus I get the feeling that the conditions of this strike are becoming commonplace for New York City mass transit. Alex bolts to the back of the bus while I swipe our fare cards (the NYC Department of Education has issued both of us some free ones that work even on the weekends, so there’s a point for the DOE in my book). Alex always takes the same seat, except one day when someone was sitting in that seat and Alex quietly took another.

Usually there’s no one like Alex on the bus, but today I see another teen about halfway up the bus. He’s wearing a red jacket and slaps himself in the face and screeches a little. (At first I think the screeching is from some high school girls near him, then I see it’s him. Then I see they aren’t making fun of him.) I see a man with grey hair across the aisle from the young man in the red jacket; I see the man’s mouth moving. I’m sure people see my mouth moving when I’m sitting with Alex, and I’m sure they don’t see Alex’s mouth moving in response.

The man with the grey hair and the boy in the red jacket get off at one of the bus stops. Out the window I see the man whip on sunglasses and take the boy’s hand.

Another young man gets on and comes to the back of the bus where we are. I see some sort of ID tag dangling from his neck. It isn’t five blocks on the bus before I see, out of the corner of my eye, his palm waving and waving at me.  “Excuse me, sir, excuse me, sir. Is it illegal to shove someone off the bus?” Isn’t this young man lucky that he picked me to ask that question, me with a kid like Alex?

“Well I don’t know. Maybe you should ask the driver.”

“Ask the driver?”

“Ask the driver.”

He shoots up and heads toward the front of the bus. “Not while the bus is in motion,” I tell him. “Don’t ask the driver anything.” On the way to the front of the bus he turns and faces a girl I can only see from the back; she has thick dark hair swept back in some kind of sexy clip. “Hi,” he says to her, extending his hand. She extends her hand and shakes. I can’t even see her face and never would I have had the nerve to ask to shake her hand.


Posted by Jeff Stimpson at 5:31 PM EST
Updated: Monday, 4 February 2013 5:36 PM EST
Saturday, 2 February 2013
RG3

 

He went down in piece by piece. First a Falcon bent his head in a funny way weeks ago. He came back and threw touchdowns and made Ned and me jump in our bar seats. "Dad," said Ned, "high five!" Then a Raven hit Griffin on a slide and made his yellow-stockinged leg twitch funny like a tree limb in a stiff wind. Then Robert Griffin himself send the final message, sprinting out of bounds during his first playoff game, a yard or two from the Seahawks' end zone, and he took off his own helmet and everyone except his coach knew the magical first year was over.

 

About a year ago Ned got wound up to play football -- real, helmeted concussion-oriented football -- and late last summer I said maybe he and I would head to FedEx Field this year. Sure, I said, train down, hotel in suburban D.C., tickets to FedEx off Craigslist.

 

There was a plan that evaporated like many plans in my life since becoming a dad. Okay, Ned. So after Hebrew school next Sunday let's say we head to Dorreans. It’s spelled “Dorrian’s”, and some might remember it as the place Robert Chambers met Jennifer Levin that night of the 1986 rough-sex murder in Central Park. Bum rap for the bar, because these days it’s a hell of a place to bring your 12-year-old whose religious school is just a few blocks away and who may or may not just be following a pro football team just because his dad does.

 

Robert Griffin III (RG3) was the rookie sensation quarterback of the Washington Redskins this year. He played high school ball at Copperas Cove, Texas. If you go on that school’s site and click “Athletics,” you can custom-make a T shirt for Ned in yellow and maroon with the number 10 on the back with “Griffin III” on top of it. (I do this for him.) RG3 could run as far as he could pass, at least until his knee bent like a limb. And he could pass far. On Thanksgiving (at Dallas, 4 p.m., FOX), Ned’s grandfather said he hadn’t seen RG 3 yet. “You’re in for a treat,” I said.

 

He was: RG3 still moved over a football field then the way water runs over rocks in a stream.

 

“Are you showing the Steelers game?” I say at Dorrian’s, being the dad who brings his kid to bars and who hopes his kid notices that real fans of an NFL team designate individual games by the name of the opposing team. They show us to the corner table where Ned and I, in the weeks ahead, will sit to watch the Steelers, Panthers, the Eagles’ game. Here we’ll sit. “Ned, want a Sprite?”

 

He does, week after week. He cheers with me and we high five. This bar plays “Hail to the Redskins!” in this place after each Washington touchdown. After the Steelers and Panthers games, they play the song a lot. Ned and I take three weeks off from Dorrian’s during the Cowboys, Giants and Ravens games – locally shown in the case of the first two, and we were puking the third. The third game, it will turn out, will be the key to the rest of our time at Dorrian’s as that’s when RG3’s knee did the tree limb thing.

 

Ned sits silent as RG3 folds up. I sit silent too.

 

I miss RG now, on the eve of the Super Bowl. Now we – are Ned and I a “we”? – wait in another off season that feels like temporary death, the fans who have control over what these rich young men do. No control even as I’ve brought my kid into the grown-up dark of the bar to sip a Sprite and cheer cheer cheer. 


Posted by Jeff Stimpson at 9:13 PM EST
Updated: Saturday, 2 February 2013 9:15 PM EST
Friday, 25 January 2013
Strike 4


This schoolbus strike in New York is starting to set like cement. The schools have given me subway fare cards for me and Alex. Sometimes Alex’s teachers even bring the sign-in book down to the cafeteria, where Alex’s class assembles each morning after what should have been the buses should have dropped him off.

“Bye, daddy!”

“Bye, Alex!”

The latest: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is arranging a meeting between the companies and union leaders Monday at Gracie Mansion … The strike is now in its second week ... The New York office of the National Labor Relations Board has finished a review of a complaint brought by the bus companies ... The companies had complained the strike is illegal ... The conclusion of the New York office has not been revealed, but the findings have been passed to the Washington headquarters, where a ruling is expected in the next few days ... A federal judge would still have to issue an injunction to order workers back on the job even if the board sides with the bus companies.

Where, I guess, is the voice of people like me, my family and Alex? News outlets have reported on kids travelling hours to school, how a third of the some 50,000 schoolkids with special needs in New York are just skipping class, how tires of buses that continue to roll have been slashed. According to the NYC Department of Education, 91.6 percent of students attended class one recent day. Special needs schools had an attendance rate of only 65.1 percent – which continues to be about 20 percentage points down from the regular attendance rate. 

Mostly, though, New York has been in love this week with a cold snap, the coldest weather to hit the city in 17 years. Lots of photos of people with scarves wrapped around their cheeks, lots of snapshots of frosty breath. Few stories connecting the two events. No photos of the color of Alex’s nose by the time he walks with me in 5-degree wind chill the four blocks to the subway. Alex won’t wear gloves, and he won’t put up the hood of the nice down jacket Jill went out of her way to mail-order for him, all the while worried he’d be too hot in it on the bus.

In the cafeteria one morning, the teacher finally finds the sign-in book. I ask her if there’s any word, ask if it’s true that a third of kids like Alex are just skipping school. She sort of nods. “What about the federal mandate that these kids have to be educated?” She sort of nods, and I mention that somebody might get sued over this. The city wants to put up for bid the busing contracts, claiming too much is spent on busing in this city. The drivers want job protection for the senior drivers and matrons should some bus company come in with a low bid. A judge had ruled such protection is illegal. “They’re trying to protect their rights,” the teacher says. I get the feeling this strike is, to her, a major way to fulfill one of her own mandates – get parents into the school to talk to them face to face.

Alex usually falls asleep on the subway – mostly because he’s up a lot of the night – and the other day he refused to sit down when a seat was empty. He likes to stand by the door of the subway car that opens at every stop. Some people are nice about it (one woman offered her seat to Alex). Most others are just subway riders, looking away from yet another person who really shouldn’t be on the subway.

“Alex,” one of his teachers asks one afternoon when I come to pick him up, “what train do you take?”

“Train,” he says.

Who speaks for us? No one so far, and that feels permanent as cement. “Hospitals don’t close when nurses strike,” Jill says. “Where’s the backup? Strikes happen,” says my editor.

The people who are trying to decide this mess aren’t trying to settle the seniority rights of people who fix potholes. The leadership of all sides in this debate should do one of two things: Impregnate the discussion with the importance of the pain they’re causing families that have already suffered a loss; or stop whispering themselves to sleep at night with thoughts of how they really do care about the disadvantaged.


Posted by Jeff Stimpson at 6:36 PM EST
Updated: Friday, 25 January 2013 6:37 PM EST
Friday, 18 January 2013
Strike 3

On the cattlecar 6 train I feel a tap on my shoulder while Alex and I stand gripping the posts. I turn around and see a woman beckoning from her seat across the aisle.

“Sir, do you want a seat for your son?” Alex takes it and the lady stands beside me in the cattlecar, holding a pole. “I don’t know how you do it,” she says. I sort of want to hear that and sort of don’t. “At least we’re on the same subway line,” I say. “I’ve heard some parents have a commute of two hours or so from The Bronx.”

New York is in the third day of its strike by schoobus drivers. The city, I guess it is, wants to put out to bid the costs of driving kids like Alex to school, claiming they can save a lot of money. The drivers want something put in the contract that says their most experienced drivers will have their jobs protected from new, cheaper drivers. 

“No end in sight I take it?” Jill says.

No. The stories run about the parents who have to drop their kids off at school about 300 seconds before they’re supposed to be at work. Many of the parents claim they have new jobs or jobs where the bosses really don’t care about employees’ problems. No doubt some have jobs where they were scared to mention on the interview that they even had a kid with special needs. I know they do, because I’ve had those interviews, too.

“Have a nice day,” I tell the lady on the 6 train. 

“Have a nice day,” she says.

The two sides bicker. The stories run in the papers and online about the struggle that parents – and their kids with autism, Down’s Syndrome, and a host of other conditions that society tells itself it cares about – have every morning and afternoon these days. One mom tells how her child disintegrates on the bus now, on just the third morning, probably wondering in her close world why her yellow bus hasn’t come. The stories talk about fits on the city buses, about people staring, about the shame you can know when you’re caught in a situation where many people are speaking but you begin to see that no one is speaking for you, and maybe never will.

The mayor of New York speaks. A lot. “I know one thing,” he says. “I know the strike won’t continue past June because that’s the end of the school year.” It is? I’m lucky. I have the time to take my kid like Alex to school. Not all parents do. Not parents have a side in an argument where they really, really need one.



Posted by Jeff Stimpson at 7:51 PM EST
Updated: Friday, 18 January 2013 7:51 PM EST

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