Chaperone
Drew Calvert I took my class to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where you get in free if you happen to be a student or a chaperone. “Chaperone” was one of my titles that year, along with “patient” and “ex,” which captured my roles in therapy and divorce proceedings respectively. “It doesn’t feel like you try anymore,” my then-wife complained one day, referring to my career as an artist, which, the less said, the better. The next day, it seemed, she was gone, and yet I continued waking and eating and reading the news and driving to work and paying our utility bills, which were now my utility bills. I used to make a living off the moneyed schlubs of Silver Lake. Now I teach studio art at a high school with a golf course. We set off just after lunch, although I hadn’t eaten lunch myself, for I had been fetching the school van from Aleksander, the volleyball coach, who had failed to honor protocol and fill the tank with gas. To wit: while everyone else at Canyon Prep enjoyed their vegan Singapore noodles or broiled chicken empanadas, I was perusing the entrees at the Chevron kiosk on Baseline Road, opting for the soggy tuna wrap over the even soggier egg salad sandwich. Yet still I had no time to eat. Instead, I had to search for Shane, who was tardy to every school event and often wandered off into the foothills during lunchtime. The other students waited by the van, recording a TikTok dance in the shade of a jacaranda tree, while I roamed upper campus like a birder courting an Inca dove. Aleksander, the colleague who