The Strike Is Over

I ran into a neighbor the other day, a former teacher who does well as a private tutor, and he asked me how it was doing.

 

“Good. Bus strike is over.”

 

“Oh yeah,” he said. “That.”

 

The last day of the strike was what would have been the third day of spring break, except that Hurricane Sandy – oh yeah, that – imprisoned the boys in our apartment for a week of no school in early November. The NYC Department of Education (DOE) had to make up for that, so they cut the normally week-long February break to two days. The boys were set to return to school, buses or no, on Wednesday, February 20.

 

The strike eavporated on the afternoon of Friday, February 15. I got home with Alex off the Third Avenue bus at about 3:30 and checked one of the local news sites to see that the union had received promises from the candidates that the next (likely) mayor of New York will pay attention to their demands (some job protection for the most senior drivers and matrons). By seven, it was over. The fall of the Alamo must have been like that – breathtaking and quick if you were there to see it and there to be affected.

 

(During the strike, the DOE issued Metrocards to parents and kids like Alex. They gave one to me that expired on Wednesday, February 20. Everyone I’ve mentioned that to agrees that it’s a weird coincidence.)

 

I always got Alex in, but a third of special-needs students in New York were out of school for as much as a month, their parents unable to get them to school. Now we move on. From something called the Office of School Support comes a memo that says, “Schools are currently collecting information on students affected by the strike and making a determination regarding what, if any additional instructional support and/or related services are required to make up for school time missed during the strike. The following steps should be followed once a school notifies the network that instructional support and/or related service(s) are required.

 

“If no DOE teacher or provider is available, or adding services to the student’ s program would be programmatically or educationally inadvisable, the network should provide the parent with make-up instruction and/or related services by manually issuing authorizations for SETSS (P-3s) and Related Services Authorizations (RSAs) as appropriate. All manual RSAs and P-3s provided for this purpose must be issued as follows …”

 

I also got a letter from the NYC Office of Pupil Transportation that they might soon approve one my $19 cab fares that I rang up one afternoon with Alex, because on that afternoon on the sidewalk I pretended to be kind of rich and just raised my arm for a taxi because I was tired of people trying to not stare at Alex on the Third Avenue bus.

 

Will they pay? Hope so, because I’m about to shoot myself in my SETSS and/or the P-3. On the first afternoon when his bus was rolling again and disgorged Alex right on time at 3:30 p.m., I handed the woman (see “matron”) two $10 Duane Reade gift cards. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted,” I said to her. “I wish it could be more.” True. True too that I was glad to gather Alex off that yellow bus without having to ride the stares of the Third Avenue bus.  

Unplugged

 

When the battery of Alex’s iPad runs low an image comes on the screen that I’m sure I’ll see in my own mind in my last moments: a dark battery shape with a single thin red stripe, and beneath it all a lightning bolt that seems to say, “Just a little more time, please.”

 

“Daddy! iPad!”

 

“Alex, you’ve got to plug it in. It is dead. You’ve got to plug it in.”

 

“Got to plug it in,” he says, “plug it in.”

 

All he has to do is sit there and give up the privilege of walking around with the damned thing. Alex isn’t feeling well – hot and sniffly – so he’s just sitting there anyway. Sniffly is also why Alex has been sitting there with the iPad all day until the screen goes dark and the little red stripe appears.

 

The iPad, like so many of Jobs’s creations, sucks juice through two pieces of white plastic, one a white cord and the other a square box. I plug the end of the white cord into the iPad while Alex sits on the couch. He pulls it out because it doesn’t belong. Steve Jobs never in his life had a day like many Alex has had.

 

“You have to plug it in!”

 

“Daddy? Daddy!”

 

“Hey Ned, can you take a break from whatever you’re doing and show him? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

 

“Why would he listen to me? Fine – I’ll just drop everything and help Alex!”

 

We’ve sheathed Alex’s iPad (interesting that MS Word keeps automatically changing “iPad” to “Ipad”) in a hard case of black plastic called The Defender, and when you want to plug the iPad or Ipad into juice you slide off a piece of the back section to expose the hole where you insert the jack.

 

Alex is 14 now, and though I could say to him “Expose the hole where you insert the jack,” I just tell him again that the thing has to be plugged in and turned off for a while to charge.

 

“Daddy daddy!”

 

“I’ll be right there, Alex.” I feel like another dad in another family would make sense of this and make it work. Alex comes up to me with the piece of the black plastic back cover still on.

 

“Daddy!”

 

“You have to plug it in, Alex. Watch TV for half an hour while it charges. It’s just half an hour. I can’t change the laws of physics, Alex.” This is my offer to pollute my household for thirty minutes with the noise of Elmo.

 

Alex returns to the couch. I show him how the hard thing at the end of white cord slides into the hole. He unplugs it again within seconds. You would’ve thought they’d taught him about this at his school, where they have an iPad.

 

“Maybe they have two,” says Ned. We don’t. Sometimes I want to give up and just think that it’s Alex and the way he wants things.

 

“Daddy, iPad!”

 

“Plug it in! You know what to do.”

 

The red stripe turns green. Oh yes oh yes thank you, let me suck the power. Let us all suck the power.

 

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.

Strike 5

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.