Or start with scene 1 at http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?AuthorID=84575&id=61052

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The high school where I taught English and journalism was an oasis in a barrio of simmering street-gang violence.

For seven of the thirty years I was a teacher, I was the faculty adviser for a student-run high school newspaper. In the early ‘90s, as the school year ended at Nogales High School, I wanted to move to another classroom because I had witnessed two drive-by shootings from the portable classroom where I taught. The only thing between my students and the shooters was a thin plywood wall, some foam insulation, and a chain-link fence.

The floor of that coffin-like portable classroom bulged like a malignant tumor, sending the desks in the center—with students in them—sliding into the surrounding desks.

The first drive-by shooter aimed at a house across the street when school was letting out, and the street was full of parents and children.

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune quoted an unidentified district administrator, who said the shooting had taken place several blocks from campus since there were no shell casings near the school. Of course there weren’t, because revolvers don’t spit them out like an automatic weapon does. I was an eye witness.

The second shooting was with the journalism girls.

During the school day, the back parking lot gate next to the portable I taught out of was closed and locked, and the front was guarded. The high school had several campus police officers (CPOs) linked with walkie-talkies, and the CPOs patrolled the campus on ten speeds. When school let out, the back gate was unlocked, opened, and left that way for several hours with no one guarding it.

A teen on suspension, waiting for his expulsion hearing, took a shortcut by climbing the east fence and crossing the forty-acre campus. As he reached the open gate next to my classroom, he took a blast from a rival gang’s twelve-gauge shotgun and died.

Because none of us witnessed the incident, we had nothing to relay to the police. However, an English teacher leaving late was in her car at the gate when the victim walked in front of her and was shot.

That teacher didn’t return for a week, and the principal had to visit her home and persuade her to come back to work.

I was no stranger to violence. The Marine Corps and a tour in Vietnam had conditioned me to deal with it. I didn’t think my journalism students could cope, but on another night they proved me wrong when one of the local street gangs invaded our academic oasis.

It was hot, the air conditioner wasn’t working, and I’d left the classroom door open. I heard the fence outside rattling as if someone were climbing it, so I went to the door and found half a dozen teenage gangbangers inside the fence a few feet from the door, staring at me. They wore white T-shirts and baggy, sagging pants.

"Leave," I said. They didn’t budge, their eyes saying, hey, we know you’re alone in there. You can’t stop us.

The homeboy closest to me looked inside the room and saw the girls; his eyes widened. I shoved him back and started to close the door. Hands reached for the outside knob, and a tug-of-war ensued. Desperate, I forced the door shut, almost smashing a few of their fingers. The gangbangers pounded on the outside walls, cursed, threatened, rattled the door, and occasionally kicked it.

One of the girls crawled under a desk. With fear-filled eyes, the others kept working. What else could we do? The only phone was an intercom to an empty front office—cell phones weren’t common then. We were trapped. For once, I was glad the room didn’t have windows, but I still worried that they might set the plywood portable on fire and attempt to roast us. I glanced at the room’s one fire extinguisher hanging on the wall by the only door.

“Mr. Lofthouse,” Amanda asked, “what should we do next year? Should we start training the cub reporters in July—the week before I go to leadership training—or the first week in August after I return?” The way the tension dissolved, it was as if she had brought out a chocolate cake and sliced it.

I wondered if she had started the conversation to diffuse the fear and decided to play along and act as if nothing was happening outside the classroom.

“You’re going to leadership school?” I asked. “I didn’t know that. Where?”

“At the University of Santa Barbara,” she said.

“Why are you suggesting we do staff training before you go?”

“I'm in Academic Decathlon, and we study all summer, three nights a week. Our coach (another teacher at the high school) has us working until midnight sometimes."

The Academic Decathlon classroom was in a brick building deep inside the campus in a safer location—one I coveted.

The other editors left the layouts they were working on and gathered around my desk. I had been correcting papers and recording grades from the four ninth-grade English classes I taught.

By then, the gang had stopped banging on the walls and shouting, but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were hanging around, waiting for us to open the door.

“If we had a textbook,” Amanda said, “we could train the cubs better.”

“Academic Decathlon is studying in August, aren’t they?” I asked, hoping stupid came with short attention spans and the gangbangers would soon leave. It pissed me off that I had survived Vietcong snipers taking shots at me, and was here now in an American public school at 7:00 PM with a gang of angry, teenage thugs outside wanting in. I should have been armed like I’d been in Vietnam.

“Yes,” she replied.

The girl who had been under a desk was out and working on her page layouts again. “How many of you are in Decathlon?” I asked.

Three raised hands.

“Amanda,” I said, “we’ll train the cub reporters in August. There’ll be enough editors to do the job. We also have enough money left from this year’s advertising revenue to buy that set of journalism textbooks you want.”

“Really?” Lisa, the feature editor, asked.

“We might even be able to squeeze in two new computers and a scanner. Because you seven are in charge of the newspaper next year, why don’t you find the textbook you want. You have my phone number. When you’re ready, call me, and I’ll fill out the purchase order.”

“You want us to select the textbook we’re going to study from?” another editor asked, as if she couldn't believe what she'd heard.

“Why not?” I replied.

“Once we have the textbooks, you don’t mind if I plan the training exercises?” Amanda asked. “After all, I’ll only be a few buildings away.”

She was seventeen.

“Amanda, because of tonight, we won’t be in this room in August. We’ll be in another classroom, behind a brick wall away from this gate and street. I’ll talk to the principal tomorrow. If he wants a school newspaper, he’ll have to move us to a safer location.”

By the time we left a few hours later, the gang was gone.

I had to be careful how I talked to the principal so it wouldn’t sound like a demand or blackmail. But another reason to move was the dead stray cats in the crawl space under the classroom. The rotting carcasses smelled, and the atmosphere in the room gave me headaches and a wheeze—I bought three HEPA air filters that helped with the stench. I turned in the paperwork requesting that building services remove the dead cats, but it wouldn’t be easy. The crawl space was big enough for small animals, but not people.

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Thank you for taking time to read these scenes from Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé. If you read the rest of the book, please consider telling your friends and/or posting a short review on Amazon. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated.

“Crazy is Normal” goes on a promotional tour starting October 1st that ends in the middle of November, 2014. During the promotion, the e-book of the memoir will be on sale for 0.99ȼ. The price will return to $3.99 at the end of the promotional tour.

Scenes from "Crazy is Normal, a classroom  expose" will appear here Saturdays in thirteen installments covering the first ten percent of the memoir or 12,455 words.

The paperback and eBook may be found through its Website: http://www.crazynormal.com/ 

The Introduction, which comes before the Prelude, may be found at: