I Like...Surprises

I believe I have mentioned my awful summer night class in which we eat pizza, watch movies about gangs, and get 403 emails per day from our professor (many of them completely indecipherable). Last night was the LAST CLASS, thank the sweet pickle, and it ended on a positively FABULOUS note. And by fabulous I mean we watched a 2.5 hour documentary about a pediatric cancer ward that detailed the lives of three kids with end stage cancer and their families. Most depressing movie in the history of the world, and oh wait, COMPLETELY irrelevant to a class about gangs. We were all very confused, and our professor tried to rationalize it by saying that the parents of these kids have to struggle with a lot of the same things that the parents of gang members do...umm. Really I think he was sick of listening to presentations and was out of movies.

But I digress.

The point is, there is this guy in my class, we'll call him O. He plays basketball and is 6'11", which made me sitting next to him hi-larious (I'm 5'2", yup). O comes to class some of the time, listens to his iPod all the time (yes, in class), carries full conversations with his fellow teammates and big shot football player friend while the professor is talking, and doesn't turn in assignments. Huh.

O brings family-size jars of apple sauce to class (yes, the huge size that you can only buy at Sam's or something) and eats the whole thing with a tiny plastic spoon. We learned that he can eat 4 pieces of pizza, a Big Mac and fries, and two ice cream bars in one sitting. O also carries a giant box of Froot Loops in his backpack and eats them quite noisily during movie time. He wears his sunglasses in class sometimes (but not during movies like his superstar friend). He is also very witty, says "Amen" a lot, and likes to shout BLESS YOU at the top of his lungs every time anyone sneezes. He has offered on several occasions for me to stand behind him and shuffle along while he walks out of class 2 hours before it ends (and I assure you, I would be completely hidden as he is humongous). Basically, he exudes "athlete," and carries off that persona quite well.

All of these things make O quite endearing and funny, and I initially wrote him off as a semi-thuggish, amusing dude who fit the stereotype of college athlete who doesn't care about school in every way. I'm not proud of that, but I did.

But. Wednesday night was the Horrible Night of Presentations, in which people got up and read the slides they had prepared two weeks before and lots of people slept or slipped out of class. Professor man called on O and asked him to come give his presentation, to which O replied that he didn't have a presentation to give (again, it was due two weeks prior to that). He would, however, be happy to go to the front of the classroom and talk about himself. Literally, that's what he said. We all laughed and prepared ourselves for a humorous "presentation" that he would make up as he went and get out of the assignment as a result.

O started off by telling us how he grew up in the worst part of a large city in the Midwest, and how he was standing next to his favorite older cousin when he was shot in the head on the street corner in a drug deal gone bad and had brains splattered all over him at the age of eight. He told us how he went home that day to his mom, who told him that the only way to survive their neighborhood was to become the toughest guy on the block, so he spent the next ten years doing just that. He started getting in fights with people, taking boxing lessons, growing to be almost 7 feet tall, and beating people up if they looked at him wrong in passing.

O told us how he came home from a fight one day in seventh grade to find his mother sitting in the dark on the floor of their living room, sobbing. When he asked her what was wrong, she informed him that she didn't know what they were going to eat for dinner. That there was no money. That the electricity had been cut off and she didn't know how she would get it turned back on before it got cold. At that point, O tells us, he decided that he couldn't let this happen again, and did the only thing he knew how to do: at age 13, he began selling crack.

After a few months of selling, O found out that he was quite good at this crack trade thing, and he experienced something he never had before: success. He told us how he is not proud of it now, but at the time he felt useful for the first time in his life. When he was dealing, there was enough food to go around every day. When he was dealing, there was always gas in the car, heat in the apartment, and a safe apartment to call home. When he was dealing, his mother could take her children to the doctor and not worry that she would be refused or taken advantage of because she couldn't pay. This new lifestyle was as addictive as the drug he dealt, and O quickly became wrapped up in it. At one point, during a deal that involved $300,000 of coke, a "friend" of his stabbed him multiple times in the stomach in a back alley - if O hadn't been able to crawl onto the street where a nice old man found him and took him to the hospital, he'd be dead.

Then came basketball. O's mother was desperate to get him out of this lifestyle, so she approached several basketball coaches in the area to try to find a school who would take him. Eventually, someone decided to take a gamble, and O started playing his junior year. This eventually led to a scholarship to a junior college in Texas, where O said he realized that there were "actually good people in the world." He realized that not everyone you pass on the street is out to get you, and some people actually care and want what's best for others. In his own words, "I had no people skills, I didn't know how to relate to others, all I knew how to do was fight, because that's all anyone ever did to me and that's what you had to do to survive." He learned how to function in society from basketball and a bunch of random people who reached out to him in a way that no one ever had before. He also realized that he was capable of acting kindly, and that he had the potential to be more than just another drug dealing statistic who dies before the age of twenty. This realization softened him, and he believes that living in this tiny, Southern little town literally saved his life, as ironic as that sounds. At the age of 21, Big O found his real life in Paris, Texas.

From there, O decided to really try this school thing, raised his grades, and won a scholarship to play basketball at OU. Here, he has a 3.4 GPA, is set to graduate a semester early, and plans on getting a master's degree as soon as he graduates. He told us that he is saving money to bring his mom and siblings to the South so that they can experience the life that he has found and get out of the 'hood. He wants to start speaking to youth about the possibilities that exist outside of drugs and gangs for kids like him.

By the end of this "presentation," several people were near tears, and I was feeling quite guilty for pigeon-holing him so quickly into the thug/slacker/athlete box, writing him off as someone who was just there to play basketball and didn't realize the importance of the education he was getting. But I was wrong, way wrong. For whatever reason, it's habitual for us to stereotype people and slap a label on them based on a few, selective pieces of information. The entire point of the career I've chosen is to dispel these stereotypes and fight against them, and yet I still do it more often than I'd care to admit (or even realize). However, it's way more fun to be wrong about these things and to be served with reminders of how little I know about people and how capable they are of bouncing back from lives that, by society's standards, are worthless or lost causes. I guess the point is to always be looking for these surprises, because there might be a heartrending story and a whole lot more behind those giant apple sauce jars, size 39 shoes, and boxes of Froot Loops.