Michael chose the Sears job. It was obviously the better option—far easier to get to than the job at LAX, and more reliable and promising, too. It was also a bigger operation, so it offered more opportunities generally, social and otherwise.
Having secured a job, our attention turned to school and housing. We had a checklist, a mission, and expected teamwork to get us through. The goal was for Michael to work full-time and to enroll in one of California’s famed community colleges. About half a century earlier, these junior colleges had been a remarkable pathway to opportunity, a true engine of mobility for the Golden State. By 2006, they were no longer free, but they were still a good deal.
Now I was in my element. After all, I was the one who knew about schools. Michael’s mother Karen hadn’t completed college. His brother Nicholas, an on-again, off-again security guard, had tried but not made it through Los Angeles Community College in Culver City. His sister Roslyn had never started. As for me, pretty much my deepest expertise was in going to school. That summer I had reenrolled, only this time with Michael.
Los Angeles Valley College, in Valley Glen, was the obvious target, a decent school with good general education courses and a fire technology program. Its alumni included Tom Selleck and Kevin Spacey, and the subway’s Red Line had stops at Santa Monica and Vermont, about a mile from the Sears, and in North Hollywood, not too far from the campus.
During his first year in prison, Michael, a compulsively good and imaginative writer, had completed his GED at lightning speed and over the eleven ensuing years had completed a handful of liberal arts correspondence college courses from the University of Indiana. We reviewed the L.A. Valley College courses with an eye to laying the path toward the school’s fire technology program. That was the goal. We battled our way through the thicket of federal financial aid forms, which also required that Michael register for the Selective Service, which he hadn’t yet had occasion to do, because of having been in prison. But as we hurdled one after another bureaucratic obstacle, we also found the peaceful quiet of the campus—nearly empty during those dog days of August—to be the balm of Gilead. We found an especially quiet spot, a single maroon picnic table boldly placed amid tumbling boulders and desert plants. Relieved that the July heatwave had broken, the most intense and deadly in over half a century, we sunned ourselves there without talking. After we rested, we would tackle the next event. We visited the tutoring center and library and hungrily collected and studied the various flyers posting internships, jobs, and apartments for rent.
HERE WERE THE GATES of opportunity. In Homer’s ancient Greek poem the Odyssey, dreams that tell you the truth are said to have come through the gates of horn; the ones that deceive you, through gates of ivory. We believed that the entrance portico to Los Angeles Valley College was the poet’s fabled gates of horn. And Michael was poised to pass through.
THE ENTRANCE TO LOS ANGELES VALLEY COMMUNITY
COLLEGE—THE POET’S “GATES OF HORN”