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YOUTH NOW
I Was Scared Straight by Judge Judy’s Bailiff
In a former life, Mr. Byrd was my high school narc. This month, I flew to Los Angeles to thank him.
There was a moment, during my sophomore year of high school, when I grew up.
By my 15th birthday, I’d already dropped acid, been busted for shoplifting from JCPenney, and lost a friend to a heroin overdose — all while enrolled in one of the most prestigious public high schools in the country: Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California. I was on a bad path and determined to stay there, and I had a nemesis who kept getting in the way. His name was Mr. Byrd.
Mr. Byrd arrived at Monta Vista High in 1993 by way of Brooklyn, tasked with keeping the kids who were on the margins of our nationally ranked school from falling off the page completely. Our town was a suburban idyll, its leafy streets lined with modest midcentury ranch homes. It was affluent even before the dotcom boom, but it was decaying from within, and you could see it in the student body. Friday nights were for house parties, where there was always someone in a back bedroom selling nitrous balloons for a buck from a tank they swiped from their dad’s dental practice. Senior year, a bunch of jocks got busted robbing a string of local banks, and just before Byrd was hired, one of the most popular girls at school was murdered by a jealous boyfriend on Super Bowl Sunday.
Mr. Byrd had his work cut out for him. We used to call him the “narc,” even though he was a grown man and nothing at all like Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street. A six-foot-four, honey-voiced black man in his thirties, Byrd was different from the other vice principals and school administrators, who were so hopelessly unhip that it seemed like they were born old. Byrd got it; he was someone a kid could confide in about that racist comment they heard on the bus or that hookup last weekend that maybe wasn’t quite so consensual. Despite his nickname, Byrd rarely narced us out or even punished us for our transgressions. His style, as I remember it, was softer. Often it was just a look that said, “I see you, and you’re making a bad choice.”
The Day When I Grew Up was Career Day 1994, which, naturally, I ditched. When I was two…
