What Makes a Nine-Year-Old Start Fires?

“You can sing any song you want / but you're still the same / I can't think of anything that makes me more upset / People talk all this rhetoric” (Hüsker Dü, “The Real World”)


I'm at work. I'm always at work this winter. I work with foster kids with no foster parents. Like, when they are taken away from their parents but have nowhere to go, social services here in Newfoundland will rent them out a house and hire a staff.

I'm in the last hour of a graveyard shift. It's 7:45 in the morning. A nine-year-old is sitting on the couch, glaring at a TV. His hands are around his neck, choking himself. He is turning purple. I'm pretending I don't notice.

“So do you want your eggs boiled hard or runny?”

He stops choking himself and rubs his throat.

“I said I'm not eating anything.”

“Dude, you gotta eat something before school.”

“I'm not going to fucking school.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, I am fucking not!”

The amount of sleep I caught amounted to a two-hour nap on this kid's couch last night. I'm trying to be all level and shit, like be nice and just try to get him fed and not escalate the situation, because I know from reading the report of his last night's behavior that he started one of the recliners on fire with a lamp bulb. Smart kid. He's pissed, but not really at us, I don't think. Angry, nine-year-old destructive pissed.

I put his eggs out on the table.

“They're boiled hard.” I tell him. 'Just how you like 'em.”
“I'M NOT GOING TO FUCKING SCHOOL.”

I'm getting fucked annoyed but I feel shitty about it. I'm worried that I'm annoyed because it's my duty as the graveyard worker to get him ready for school and I think I'm afraid that the day worker will come in and think I am bad at my job, as if a nine-year-old too fucking fed up with his life to go to school would be seen as a fault on either of our parts. Mine or his, I mean. But maybe I'm annoyed because I slept next to nothing and my teeth are started to grind together. It comes out before I catch it. I tell him, “Well, dude, you don't have a choice, do you?”


It's 7:45 in the morning. This is my job. I'm telling a semi-suicidal 9-year-old he doesn't have any choices.


Right now, it's the end of February. A year ago, I was rowing a pretty similar-feeling boat. I was spending a half-week holed up in a secret fancy hotel in Vancouver, wrapping up a stint of jury duty with three days of sequesterment. That was weird. I got my summons right when I was in the middle of looking for a job that didn't involve riding a bike. It was for a month-long trial, paid $70/day, and started immediately after this little tour I was doing. Perfect, except, you know, it was jury duty. Well, whatever, I'd try out.


How did they get your name? Everyone wondered. I turned red, cringed, was embarrassed. Voter registry, I admitted. I swear, it was just once. A referendum about the Olympics. I voted no, my side lost, I was disappointed, I did nothing later except I think that MASS GRAVE show I attended at that infoshop that one time was No Olympics on Stolen Land fundraiser.


Despite doubts that I would even get picked, I did, based entirely on my appearance. No questions asked. First juror. Fuck. What was embarked as a weird, funny job I thought would be hilarious to try to get turned out to be simultaneously incredibly boring and morally overwhelming employment I couldn't stop showing up to one day, like all those other crappy jobs. I couldn't quit because a sheriff would show up at my house and a warrant would go out for my arrest. But maybe if I stuck it out, I could expose police corruption and racial profiling and blow the whole bullshit justice fucking system open, you know? Yeah?! Fuck yeah!


But as it turned out, the rest of my jury was also concerned about these things and we talked about them a bunch and tried to pick out the biases and bullshit in this big clusterfuck trial, a go-between between the racist-slanted prosecution and the classist/fucked-up-about-mental-health defense. I sat beside this Irish man, him and I wanted to rip down the arrogant police chief, this smug, condescending monstrous lady. We were going to tear her from her self-righteous throne of assholism. We were going to expose the utter incompetency of the whole fucking police state. We would find her prime suspect not guilty, we'd embarrass her, we, the people, would have her tarred and feathered. But in the end, we didn't have a lot of choices, we just got to say “guilty” or “not guilty,” and in the end, we sent a man to jail for 17 years because we were convinced, he was guilty, he did the crime, a crime I couldn't even call bullshit. I couldn't say the crime was a tool of the man, meant to protect the rich. Because he was cutting open the throats of homeless people, see? And if there's anyone I think should be removed from society, it's assholes who prey on the helpless and disabled and vulnerable, cold, hungry. But there were a lot of assholes out there preying on the helpless: the fucking city of Vancouver and its cops and the real estate developers. And how does this one dude going to jail help this situation again?


7:45 in the morning, telling a nine-year-old he has to go to school. On one hand, there are some perks about school: a break from a kid's home life, and elementary schools these days seem like a day camp with rotating fun activities. And he's genuinely reading/writing smart and does well when he's not punching his friends. But overall, school fucking sucks. I hated it, you hated it. And here I am, in charge and making a some poor kid go. I'm making him go to school because that's my job. I'm making him go to school because there's no alternative. I believe in a child's capacity for self-teaching but not this kid. Sorry. I've seen him stay home and it only involves Disney's Family Channel. Yeah, sure, I believe the school system should be torn down and kids should be allowed to learn in a casual, open-minded environment outside of a classroom setting wherein their individual talents and passions should be nurtured and explored, but that isn't available. This kid is parented in 8-hour rotating shifts by me and some college girls and some retired nurses, and his mom's parenting- privileges were just rolled back a notch on account of a missing $37 she lost or whatever out of her kids' clothing fund that I signed off to her during one of her visits. We had report it as unaccounted for 'cus otherwise one of us would get fired for stealing.


When I got this job, I was like, yeah, sign me up. Subconsciously, I probably thought I would open some minds on account of my progressive and alternative world view. I'd open some minds. Turns out, everyone is concerned that school sucks, that a nine-year-old wakes up so angry he wants to choke himself. But nobody can provide an alternative. My hands are tied. All I can do is make him eggs and juice for breakfast because I know he likes them and vitamins and protein are good for everyone. But his life is the same and I'm some asshole telling him to go to school.

Quit? I can't, the evening worker is going to quit next week anyway, the recliners on fire were the last straw for her and that'll already freak him out. Plus I know some days he will be happy and we'll go to the mall and he'll point out all the sharks for me at the pet store and be shocked when he overhears someone in the food-court using the eff-word.

“Dude,” I say, “you use that word all the time when you're angry.”

“Yeah, but not in a mall.”

But I'm glad, I'm fucking stoked he's not throwing around fuck while we're here, while I'm buying him at hot dog from some crappy mall food stand. But it's shitty that I'm stoked, I'm worried it's because the girl in the New York Fries kiosk thinks I'm his mom. I'm saying to him, “Do you want anything else, sweetie?” and the girl is trying to make sense of my YOUTH OF TODAY shirt and looking at my dumb hand tattoos and I don't want him to swear around her, around anyone, because I don't want her to think I'm a bad mom. As if that matters. As if a nine-year-old too fucking fed up with his life to watch his language should be seen as a fault on either of our parts.


julsgeneric@hotmail.com