For five weeks every summer I and ten or twelve other ambitious and underpaid twenty-somethings coordinate a group of between sixty and seventy adolescents from wealthy American families who have been sent away, most of them against their will, for the summer. Their interests focus on drinking and having sex with each other. We, on the other hand, try to use psychological ploys against them. We explain to them that one of the great things about our program is just how few rules there really are, and, by extension, how much freedom our students therefore have. The rules are simple: Drinking, smoking, and drug use are not permitted, and if you are caught doing any of the above you will be sent home to your parents who, since they sent you away in the first place, clearly do not want you around for the summer; leaving the premises of our respective campuses in Madrid and Barcelona after dark without a staff chaperone is absolutely forbidden and if you are caught doing that you will be yelled at and your parents will be notified, and we will threaten to send you home to them, but you probably will not be sent home; and girls and boys may not be in one another's rooms, alone or with other girls and boys, at any time, day or night, light or dark.

"Other than that," we tell them, "you're completely free to do anything you want."

They're not as susceptible as we would like them to be. Usually, they are quick to point out that there's really nothing else that they particularly want to do.

We encourage them to take the energy that they would otherwise have put into drinking, smoking, using drugs, and having sex, and instead put it toward learning about Spanish culture. Because we, the staff members, all love Spanish culture. That's why we take this poorly-paid job trying to prevent kids, most of whom we like, from doing the things that, a.) they want to be doing, and b.) we, too, would have wanted to be doing at their age, or wish that we had been doing at their age, or wish that we were doing now, and c.) in all honesty, we don't see anything wrong with doing.

I am not a moral or ethical agent during the course of my summer employment, nor do I make any arguments for the moral or ethical validity of the rules. The rules come from above. Also, from above, comes the recommendation that we never admit to the students that we disagree with the rules. The students, we are told, will see such an admission as a sign of weakness and more importantly as a sign of vulnerability. If they see us as vulnerable, they will exploit us. I am not worried about being exploited by high school students. I'm already exploited by my employer.

When the students ask for my opinion about the rules, I explain to them that my interest in enforcing the rules corresponds directly to my interest in keeping my summer job. If I lose my summer job, I tell them, I won't be able to come to Spain next summer. And if I, when I go back to the States this fall, do not have a trip to Spain to look forward to next summer, my life will open up in front of me like a desert without an oasis, it will spread out like a vast expanse, like an endless and dimensionless space, like a space without depth or perspective, and I will not be able to tolerate it. We've all had the experience, I tell them, of laying in our beds at night, lights off, parents asleep in the other room, or doing God only knows what in the other room, and suddenly it comes to us that space, the universe, as it were, extends infinitely in every direction. It is everywhere and forever, and the thought overwhelms us, it exhausts us of our capacity to remain within ourselves, we suffer the sudden impulse to leap out of bed, run madly in every direction pulling at our hair or engaging in some less familiar or encoded form of lamentation, to gallop into our parents' room in despair begging they who begot us and thus condemned us to this infinity to save us from it, but we cannot, because God only knows what they're up to in that room, and we're not God and therefore we do not know, and if, as it turns out, they're having sex in there, well, that might be the only thing more intolerable than a sudden awareness that space, the universe, is infinite and eternal.

In any event, I explain to them, excepting the part where the parents are potentially having sex in the other room -- at twenty-eight, I no longer live with my parents -- without my summer trip to Spain my life would look like that to me. Endless and without depth or dimension. And hopeless, as everything without depth or dimension is. My summer trips to Spain are the walls and corners in the endless expanse of the universe of my life. More importantly, they are respite from the interminable petulance of the United States. Of course, I keep coming back to the United States, and the more patriotic among them tend to point that out to me. If you hate it so much, why do you keep going back? It's a good question. Perhaps I, like James Baldwin, have discovered that no matter how disagreeable you find certain aspects of yourself, it does you no good to try to escape them: that every attempt at escape simply brings you "full circle," as Baldwin promises in "The Discovery Of What It Means To Be An American," right back to the self you were trying to escape in the first place. Perhaps, like Baldwin, I've discovered that I am more American away from America than I am in America, where I am simply myself, and that therefore despite the weak-kneed need for the occasional geographical displacement, nowhere can I better escape the fact of my nationality than here, in the nation that bequeathed it upon me.

More likely, the explanation is partly economic and entirely banal. What kind of work would I do as an illegal immigrant in Spain? The work I've already done as an illegal immigrant in Spain: teaching English to Spanish businessmen. I lived in Spain from August of 1998 to May of 1999, and made my living teaching English to Spanish businessmen during that academic year. By May, I couldn't do it any longer. The problem is that you are being hired by people who are under the misconception that because you speak English natively, you are somehow inherently or innately qualified to teach English to people who do not. I've found that things are actually quite the opposite: I have no idea how I learned English -- the faculties of memory were not yet developed in me when I accomplished the feat -- and thusly I have no idea how to teach anyone else English. I would be a better Spanish teacher than I am an English teacher, and a Spaniard who learned English would probably be better qualified than I am to teach English to other Spanish people, and the weight of the false pretenses under which I was hired bore down upon me.

By May, I was buckling under it.

Or, I had come down with a nasty case of strep throat and because, as an illegal immigrant, I did not have access to the much-mythologized socialized European health care system, I had no way of treating that nasty case of strep throat except with packets of low-dose antibiotic lozenges that you can buy at the pharmacies in Spain without a prescription. The doses in those lozenges were too low to cure the strep infection, although they relieved it slightly, which only made my suffering that much more acute when it gathered force again. So I had to go home where at the very least I could receive quality medical care by way of my parents' medical insurance plan which covered the costs of my health care, as well, as long as I did not earn more than seven hundred dollars a month, until the date of my twenty-fifth birthday, at which point I was unceremoniously ejected from the system.

Either way, by May of that year I was buckling, or buckling under.

After that, I spent two consecutive, uninterrupted years in the United States, years that were punctuated by two summers in New York City, which posed as an escape from my regular American life but were really nothing of the sort. If anything, New York City is just a redoubling of American life much as, according to Foucault, prison simply constitutes a redoubling of the controls and restrictions and sanctions of everyday life in "free" society. That's how I feel about New York City. It's a prison. During those two summers, my girlfriend and I subletted bedrooms the size of prison cells for over a thousand dollars a month. This was in the summers of 1999 and 2000! I can only imagine what a prison cell goes for in that city these days. I last visited New York during the blackout of 2003. It was August. I was on my way back from Spain and had booked a two-night layover in New York. When I booked the layover, I was sleeping with a girl from New York City who, years earlier, had been a student in my creative writing class at the University of Arizona, where I was a graduate student and instructor between the years of 1999 and 2001. In June, on the way to Spain, during a corresponding two-night layover in New York, that girl and I had a falling out -- one of many over the years -- and so by August I was no longer planning to sleep with her or at her apartment during two days and nights in New York which had suddenly become useless. So instead of going to her apartment in Gramercy Park, I caught a bus from JFK to Penn Station and then a cab to the apartment that my friend Periel shares with her boyfriend and my ex-friend Kevin in Harlem. Two hours after I arrived, the lights went out, and by ten o' clock that night I was half-asleep on the floor in their closet-sized spare room, their black-haired dog panting in my face, while they drank and made merry with other blackout revelers at the bar on the corner. The aspiring bohemian bourgeoisie -- a club of which I must unfortunately count myself a member -- seems to enjoy all of its forms of suffering far too much in New York City. Perhaps that is why I find the place so unbearable. Perhaps that is why I think of it, in final analysis, not as an escape from America within America, but rather a redoubling America right at the point of escape. "Stop patting each other on the back," I want to tell the members of New York's aspiring bohemian bourgeoisie. "This sucks."

Because it does. The blackout sucked. Working hard and being poor sucks. Prostituting your soul so you can afford to live in a place that looks radical sucks. Living jammed into prison cell-sized bedrooms inside prison cell-sized apartments, in building stuffed with too many other apartments, with too many roommates and not enough time, sucks. The United States sucks, I tell my students during the summertime. I don't know any other way to put this. It sucks and if I had to live there all year, if I had to stay there year round without being able to look toward this eight or ten week escape to Spain, which is funded by the five weeks I spend working for you people, I would pull my hair out, I would stampede naked through the streets like that guy in Ginsberg's "Howl," and I would probably be howling, too.

"What?" I say to them. "You've never heard of Howl. Well it's a poem. What's it about? It's about a lot of things, but one of those things is how much America sucks. Have you ever heard of Kathy Acker? No. She's a writer, too. A lunatic lesbian writer. She wrote a poem, have you ever heard of it? It goes like this. The sand in Algeria is pink, life in this America stinks!"

I tell them: I will enforce these rules because if I do not enforce them, if I knowingly and willingly allow you to drink, do drugs (or use drugs, if you prefer that phraseology) and have sex, or if I willingly turn my back on such activities, and I am discovered in my permissiveness or my complacency, I will be fired, terminated, I will no longer have this job, and I am not willing to sacrifice my sanity and my happiness, the shred of it that I've managed to hold onto during the past twenty-eight years while life in this America has been trying mercilessly to beat it out of me, for your sakes. I like you. You're fine. You're nice kids. Some of you are nice kids. And some of you aren't very nice, but I like you, anyway. Wickedness is actually likable, believe it or not, and the sooner the aspiring men amongst you learn that, the better you'll do with the aspiring women. But I don't care about any of you, the good and the wicked, those of you who I like and those of you who I don't like, I don't care about any of you enough to make that kind of sacrifice on your behalf, or in your name. So forget about it. To the extent that I have anything to say about it, you'll not be drinking, smoking, doing drugs (or using them), having sex, going out without a staff chaperone after dark, or swearing. Because that's another rule. Violence of any sort, including linguistic violence, is not permitted.

Add that to the rules, and other than those rules you're completely free on this program, free to do as you please.

Also no tattoos or piercings. Can't risk the infection. Your parents could sue the company and we could lose our jobs.

Also no riding on motor scooters or motorcycles. Period. A student on a program in Italy a number of years ago fell off of a motor scooter and died. Dead. It happened during the first week, before allegiances and attachments were fully formed within the group, and so the trip went on, but that might be what was most depressing about it. So we don't want that to happen. Your parents could easily sue the company.

Other than that, you're free to do as you please. Completely free, which is one of the great things about this program.

Then, of course, they drink like fishes and fuck like bunnies, who have a reputation for fucking a great deal, and all of us who are on the staff, including my current paramour and me, scurry in the other direction whenever we suspect that we're going to catch them doing it. We don't want to walk in on two high school students having sex. That would be almost as bad as walking in on our parents having sex. And we don't want to have to deal with punishing people and sending people home, which takes away from our free time, time that we spend drinking, doing drugs (using them, smoking them, whatever you want to call it), and having sex, but not with the high school students, although that has happened in the past, but fortunately not on the Madrid-Barcelona franchise.

If something like that were to happen, it would put all of our jobs at risk.

They look at me with wide, pleading eyes.

"What can I say?" I say, shrugging with self-satisfaction. "Those are the rules."

Next week Mr. Evans makes some rules, breaks some rules, and sends the kids to bed without their dinner.

« Previous Next »