Following up on yesterday's story, here is a follow up (hopefully without the dingbat problems)

The Kid Who Liked to Play Grand Theft Auto

"Nigger is a bad word, right? You're not supposed to say that word?"

The kid looked up at me from his living room floor where he sat in front of his game. He had been driving around the same segment of a made-up Los Angeles shooting people and stealing cars--and his character in the game had uttered the N-word at least twenty times in the last five minutes.

"Yes it is," I said.

The kid's front teeth rested on his bottom lip and he sucked, a kind of strange involuntary action that creeped me out. I was taking care of this kid at home now, through an independent special-ed care agency I worked for. I’d met him at Meadowbrook High School.
The first time I met him, he was kept in one room all day after he had hit a teacher. He looked at me, made that involuntary suck and said, "Fuck you, cabron!" I, fresh on the job and not sure what to do, waited until he repeated it. Then I said, "Hey, I don’t want to hear that."
He sucked. "Fuck you cabron isn't a bad word."

"Yes it is."

"No it isn't."

"Well I don't want to hear it."

"Fuck you, cabron."

The next day I was assigned to help out the kid’s regular shadow, Jerry, a man who came close to seven feet tall. Jerry had skin like creamed coffee and a set of 'dreds that could have won prizes. He was unfailingly harsh with the kid while I sat behind them in class, keeping up a steady string of lectures. "What are you going to do? You can’t keep getting thrown out of your classes. You need to listen. You need to change. I can’t help you out forever, you know."

"I just want to go home and play Grand Theft Auto," the kid said.

The kid soon decided to hate me. As another teacher asked me where I’d moved from and I told her about leaving Utah, he began a running commentary from where he sat. "Utah is stupid! You’re a gay pussy-ass fag!"

A student who looked Hispanic passed through the special ed department at one point, and the kid shouted, "Nigger! Nigger!" at him.

This inflamed Jerry, and he made the kid stay on a couch. “You don’t get to talk right now,” Jerry said, 'dreds visibly shaking.

Jerry and I sat across the room and the kid kept up his running commentary. "Hey Spencer! Faggot! Faggg-ottt!"

"I wonder if he might have Tourette's syndrome," I said to Jerry.

"Maybe," Jerry said, and his voice was blank enough it was obvious he didn’t give a shit whether the kid had superpowers.

"Touch the penis!" the kid yelled.

I looked up to see the kid masturbating. "Jerry," I said, and Jerry, seeing the display, snapped. He stood in front of the kid, bringing his full shadow to bear. "I don’t want to hear you say or do anything for the rest of the day." Then he drove the kid home.

Months later, while I watched the kid at his home, I imagined Jerry's experience there. It was an expansive suburban house filled with every type of video game controller one could imagine. The kid's mother was an absolute knockout, wrapped in stylish clothes, with hair perfectly coiled and makeup that could have been applied by Monet. When I was there she sat the kid in front of Grand Theft Auto and said, "He is so into games." She looked at the kid. "But it's not okay to repeat things from games, is it?"

I tried to imagine Jerry, dark skin on their white leather couch, telling the knockout mother about the day, about "nigger." What might that word have meant to him? Probably no more than any other obscenity uttered by a mentally disabled person. But what if it didn't? What if he couldn’t disconnect the word from the way Merle had said it, as a sacred identity wrapped within layers of brotherhood?

Jerry quit. I and my boss took charge of the kid. Predictably, within half an hour of our first day he punched both of us and tried to run out of the school. When the principal, a tiny Korean woman, tried to stop him, he attacked her. She lost it as he kicked her. "Bring it on!" the principal shouted, hands going up to a fighting stance. "Bring it on!"

He shouted, "Nigger!"