"SIR, THERE ARE NO DOGS ALLOWED IN THE SCHOOL"

"I know." I yelled back at the young teacher. "It's kind of an emergency."
She looked irritated as she began to walk down the hallway towards me.
"What is your emergency?" She asked me again, walking towards me, but still a good 75 feet away. I sighed.
"I don't want to yell it down the hall." I called out to her. She finally got to right in front of me. She was cute too. A Latina. I was struck suddenly by the smell of oil paint, and the late afternoon light glowing the ceiling of Micheltorena School. How familiar it seemed to my own schooldays.
The young teacher stood before me. She looked skeptical. Her eyebrows arched with the question.
"There's a kid in the schoolyard with a gun." I told her finally.
"Really?" She asked me. Her eyes had widened.
"Really." I said. "I saw them with it, over there in the corner of the yard when I walked by with my dog on Sunset."

It's one of those funny things. Was it a real gun? They didn't get to the kid in time to snatch it from him. He handed it off to another kid when the coach was yelling across the schoolyard at him. HEY YOU, YEAH YOU the coach was saying. They braced him, and he even admnitted that he brought a toy gun to school that day, but gave it to one of his friends to take home.

Beautiful excuse. It's simple. It's old school. It can't be proved or disproved. The teachers and the coach seemd pretty doubtful about it, when they reported back to me after confronting the kid I'd fingered. But it wasn't a toy gun. I saw it with my own eyes. I know toy guns and I know real guns. I know what a real gun sounds like when you pull the slide or move the action. And this wasn't a toy gun. I wondered if they'd tell the kids parents that a citizen saw him with a pistol in the schoolyard. Would the parents even believe it? Or care?

Whatever. I was on my way out of there. Fucking L.A. sucks. It's so ghetto it just makes me mad. I'm looking for my own way out of here. Someone else can try to solve the problems here. I hate gangster kids so much. I think they should be sent to camps in the desert or something.