Part 2: I Rode Past My Old Middle School in Cleveland — the One That Expelled Me in 1995 — and Saw a 14-Year-Old Crying on the Curb. He Said He’d Just Been Expelled For Hitting a Teacher. I Sat Down Next to Him
What happened to me between November 17th, 1995, and November 4th, 2024, is a long story. I am going to give you the short version because it is not the point of this story.
After my expulsion, I was placed in an alternative education program for the rest of ninth grade. I finished tenth grade at a small charter high school on the west side of Cleveland that was run, at the time, out of a former Catholic school building on Lorain Avenue. I dropped out of eleventh grade in February of 1998 at age sixteen.
I worked construction for the next two years.
I was arrested twice between 1998 and 2000 — once for a misdemeanor assault charge that was eventually dropped, once for possession of a small amount of marijuana that resulted in a fine and a year of probation. I was, by the standards of east Cleveland in those years, in a slow drift toward something worse.
In November of 2000, six days after I turned nineteen, my mother sat me down at our kitchen table on East 105th Street and told me she was tired. She said it just like that. “Tommy. I’m tired.”
She told me she had buried my father in 1993, and she was not going to bury me too.
She told me I had two choices.
She told me I could pack up and leave the house — that night, with the bag I could carry — and figure out my own life on my own, because she could not watch me become whatever I was becoming.
Or I could agree to one specific thing: I could call her brother — my uncle Ricky Cox, who lived in Akron, Ohio, and who had been a journeyman steamfitter at a local mechanical contractor for twenty-two years — and ask him if he would take me on as an apprentice.
She told me she had already called him.
She told me he had said yes.
I called him that night.
I moved to Akron three days later.
I lived with my uncle Ricky and his wife Aunt Jewel for the next six years. I started as a steamfitter apprentice in February of 2001 at age nineteen. I finished my five-year apprenticeship in 2006. I got my journeyman card in March of 2006. I have been a steamfitter for the last twenty-four years.
I got my GED in 2003 at age twenty-one.
I got sober in 2005 — drinking, mostly. I have been sober for twenty years.
I moved back to Cleveland in 2009.
I bought my mother a small house off Buckeye Road in 2012 with cash I had saved over six years. I paid for her funeral in March of 2019 when she died of complications of diabetes. I have lived in that house since.
I joined the Cuyahoga River Riders MC in 2016.
I have been, for the last sixteen years, the most boring man in east Cleveland. I work. I ride on Sundays. I have a girlfriend of seven years named Janelle, who is a physician’s assistant at MetroHealth. We are not married. We are happy.
I have not, in twenty-nine years, had another physical altercation with another human being.
I have, however, been carrying November 14th, 1995, in my chest for thirty years.
I had, in those thirty years, never once ridden past Lincoln Edison Middle School.
I had built a life around not riding past it. I had taken alternate routes home from work for fifteen years. I had refused, when the brothers in my club had organized a charity ride that would have passed within four blocks of the building in 2019, to ride that particular leg. I had told the road captain, “Frank. I’ll meet y’all at the end. I gotta take a different route. Don’t ask.”
He had not asked.
I had not, until November 4th, 2024, set eyes on the building since November 17th, 1995.
Twenty-nine years.
I want to tell you, briefly, why I rode past it on November 4th, 2024.
I had spent the morning at MetroHealth Medical Center with my girlfriend Janelle’s mother, who was recovering from a hip replacement. I had left the hospital at about 3:30 p.m. and was on my way home.
I took a wrong turn at East 79th Street.
I had been distracted. I had been thinking about Janelle’s mother. I had been thinking about a long shift coming up the next day. I had taken a left when I should have taken a right.
I found myself, at 3:42 p.m. on a cold Monday afternoon in early November, riding north on East 93rd Street.
Lincoln Edison Middle School is at the corner of East 93rd Street and Hough Avenue.
I saw the building before I knew where I was.
I had not, for a half-second, recognized it. The trim had been repainted. There was a new sign. There were security cameras mounted on the front facade that had not been there in 1995.
Then I had recognized it.
I had pulled my Harley over to the curb on East 93rd Street, about thirty yards south of the front entrance, and I had killed the engine.
I had sat there.
I had not moved for about three minutes.
I had thought, very clearly, Tommy. Get back on. Ride home. You don’t have to do anything here. Just go home.
I had been about to do exactly that.
Then I had seen the boy.
He was sitting on the curb in front of the school, about fifty feet north of me, with his head in his hands. He was a Black American kid. He was probably fourteen. He was wearing a heavy navy-blue puffer jacket, dark jeans, and old white sneakers. He had a small backpack on the curb next to him.
He was crying.
He was alone.
There were no other people on the sidewalk. School had let out about twenty minutes earlier. The buses had already pulled away. The other kids had already walked home or gotten picked up.
He was alone.
I sat on my Harley for about another minute.
Then I got off.
I walked the fifty feet up the sidewalk, slow, deliberate, careful — the way a 6-foot 230-pound man in a leather cut walks toward a fourteen-year-old crying on a curb when he does not want to scare the kid — and I stopped about ten feet away from him.
I said, “Hey, buddy. You alright?”
He looked up.
He had brown eyes. He had a small scar on his left eyebrow. He had the kind of face I had not seen in a mirror in thirty years and recognized immediately.
He said, “I’m okay, mister.”
He did not look okay.
I said, “Buddy. Mind if I sit a minute?”
He shrugged.
I sat down on the curb. About four feet from him. I left space between us. I did not crowd him.
I said, “What’s your name, buddy?”
He said, “Marcus.”
I said, “Marcus. I’m Tommy. What are you doing out here, brother?”
He looked at me.
He said, “Mister. I got expelled.”
I said, “From this school?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “Buddy. Today?”
He said, “This afternoon. About an hour ago.”
I said, “Brother. What happened?”
He looked at his hands.
He said, “I hit my science teacher.”
I did not, for about four seconds, breathe.
He said, “He pulled my jacket off me.”
I felt the world go very still.
I said, very carefully, “What was the jacket, brother?”
Marcus said, “It’s my granddaddy’s. He gave it to me before he died last year. I wear it every day. Mr. Reynolds said I had to take it off in class. I said no. He grabbed it. I — I hit him.”
I sat on that curb at 3:47 p.m. on a Monday afternoon in November of 2024, fifty feet from the front entrance of Lincoln Edison Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, four feet from a fourteen-year-old Black American boy who had hit his science teacher that afternoon over a jacket that had belonged to a dead family member, and I felt the bottom of my chest drop out.
I had been sitting on the wrong side of this curb for thirty years.
I was sitting on the right side of it now.
I waited about ten seconds before I said anything.
Then I said, “Marcus. Can I tell you something.”
He said, “Okay.”
I said, “Brother. Thirty years ago. November 14th, 1995. I was fourteen years old. I was a ninth grader at this school. I was in my fourth-period general science class with a teacher named Mr. Pribusek. I was wearing my father’s leather jacket. My father had been killed at a Republic Steel mill two years before that. The jacket was the only thing of his I had that I could carry around. Mr. Pribusek told me to take it off. I said no. He pulled it off my shoulders.”
I looked at Marcus.
I said, “Brother. I hit him. I hit him three times. They pulled me off him. I was expelled from this school three days later. I have not been back here in thirty years. I had not even ridden past this building in thirty years. I took a wrong turn today. That is the only reason I am sitting on this curb right now.”
Marcus looked at me for a long minute.
He said, “Mister. You hit your teacher?”
I said, “Yeah, brother. I hit him.”
He said, “What happened to you?”
I said, “It’s a long story. I’m gonna tell you the short version. I dropped out of high school three years later. I drifted for a while. I got into some trouble. My uncle in Akron took me on as a steamfitter apprentice when I was nineteen, after my mother told me she could not watch me become whatever I was becoming. I got my journeyman card. I got my GED. I got sober. I have been a steamfitter for twenty-four years. I rejoined a life. It took me twenty years to figure out the lesson I am about to tell you.”
He looked at me.
I said, “Marcus. I want you to listen to me real careful. Are you ready?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “Brother. I did not hit Mr. Pribusek because I was a violent kid. I was not a violent kid. I hit Mr. Pribusek because I was hurting, and I did not have any words for what I was hurting about, and he had pulled my father’s jacket off my shoulders, and I did not know how to say That is the only thing I have left of my dad in a way that he was going to hear. So I hit him.”
I paused.
I said, “Brother. I did not hit my teacher. I hit because I hurt. And I did not know how to say it.”
I paused again.
I said, “Marcus. You did the same thing today. You did not hit Mr. Reynolds. You hit because you hurt. And you do not yet know how to say it.”
Marcus did not say anything for a long, long time.
He just sat on the curb looking at his hands.
Then he started crying. Hard.
I did not move toward him. I did not put my arm around him. I did not, at that age, with that kind of grief, want to crowd him.
I just sat next to him, four feet away, and I let him cry.
He cried for about five minutes.
When he stopped, he wiped his nose on his sleeve.
He said, “Mister. I miss my granddaddy.”
I said, “Yeah, brother. I know you do.”
He said, “Mister. What am I gonna do.”
I sat with that for a long time.
Then I said, “Marcus. Get your backpack. Stand up. We’re gonna go inside.”
He said, “Mister. I just got expelled. I can’t go back inside.”
I said, “Brother. We’re not going back to your classroom. We are going to the principal’s office. We are going to walk in there together. We are going to tell the principal what we just figured out about why you hit Mr. Reynolds. We are going to ask him whether there is a single thing he can do — even after the expulsion paperwork — to make sure that what happened to me at fourteen does not happen to you.”
He said, “Mister. The principal doesn’t know me. He just expelled me an hour ago. He’s not gonna want to see me.”
I said, “Marcus. The principal of this school has been the principal of this school for a very long time. I had not realized it until you said the name Reynolds about your science teacher. I had not, until that name, put two pieces together. The principal who expelled me thirty years ago retired ten years ago, and there are several principals in between, but he might still be there. Or somebody who knew him might be there. Either way, brother, we are going in. Together. We are gonna give them the chance to ask the question I wish somebody had asked me when I was fourteen.”
He looked at me.
He said, “Mister. What question?”
I said, “Marcus. Are you okay.”
He started crying again.
He stood up.
He picked up his backpack.
We walked across the sidewalk, up the front steps of Lincoln Edison Middle School, through the front doors, across the small lobby, and into the front office.
The administrative assistant — a woman named Mrs. Janet Henderson, who I would learn later had been at the school for twenty-eight years — looked up.
She saw Marcus.
She saw me.
She said, “Marcus. What are you doing back.”
I said, “Ma’am. With respect. I’m Tommy Jackson. I’d like to speak to your principal please. With Marcus. About what happened today.”
She looked at me for a long second.
She said, “Sir. Mr. Halloran is in his office. Let me let him know.”
She picked up the phone.
She hit a button.
She said, “Ed. There’s a Mr. Tommy Jackson here with Marcus Holloway. They’d like to speak with you.”
There was a pause.
She said, “Tommy Jackson, Ed.”
There was a longer pause.
She said, “Yes.”
She hung up.
She looked at me.
She said, “Mr. Jackson. He’ll see you both. Right this way.”
She led us down a small hallway to a wooden door with a brass nameplate that said PRINCIPAL — E. HALLORAN.
She knocked.
A voice from inside said, “Come in.”
She opened the door.
I walked in. Marcus walked in behind me.
Sitting behind the desk was a small, slightly stooped, thin Black American man with a thin head of carefully combed gray hair and a worn navy-blue cardigan over a white dress shirt and a maroon tie.
He was eighty years old.
He had been the principal of Lincoln Edison Middle School for thirty-six years.
He had expelled me on November 17th, 1995.
He was looking at me.
He stood up. Slowly. He had a slight stiffness to his right knee.
He looked at my face.
For about three seconds, his expression did not change.
Then it did.
He said, very quietly, “Tommy? Tommy Jackson?”
I said, “Yes, sir. Mr. Halloran. It’s me.”
He sat back down.
He put his hand over his mouth for about ten seconds.
He looked at Marcus.
He looked back at me.
He said, “Tommy. I have been thinking about you for thirty years.”
I said, “Yes, sir. I figured.”
He said, “Thomas. I want you to sit down. Both of you. Please.”
We sat.
Mr. Edward Halloran was, by his own account at the conversation that followed in the next forty minutes, three weeks from his retirement.
He had been a teacher in Cleveland Public Schools for fourteen years. He had been the principal at Lincoln Edison Middle School for thirty-six years. He was retiring at the end of the academic semester — November 22nd, 2024 — at the age of eighty.
He had not wanted to retire at sixty-five. He had not wanted to retire at seventy. He had not wanted to retire at seventy-five. The district had finally, at his most recent annual review, told him gently that they would not be renewing his contract beyond the current semester. The decision had not been disciplinary. He had received excellent performance reviews for thirty-six years. The decision had been about age and energy. He had accepted it.
He had been counting down, by his own account, the days.
He had been thinking, in the last few months, about the kids he had failed in his career. He had told me, at his desk on the afternoon of November 4th, 2024, that he had a list — a literal list, on a yellow legal pad in his desk drawer — of every student he had ever expelled in thirty-six years.
I was, by his own count, the seventeenth name on the list.
Marcus, he told us, would have been the one hundred and forty-first name on the list, if Marcus had remained expelled.
I want to tell you what Mr. Halloran said to us in his office, because the words mattered.
He said, “Tommy. I want to talk to you for one minute about what happened in 1995. And then I want to spend the rest of the time in this room talking about Marcus.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Tommy. In November of 1995, I had your file in front of me. I knew your father had been killed at the steel mill in 1993. I knew your mother was working second shift at MetroHealth. I knew you had been suspended three times in eighth grade. I knew you had been wearing a leather jacket to school every day in eighth and ninth grade.”
He paused.
He said, “Tommy. I read the incident report. Mr. Pribusek had pulled your jacket off your shoulders. You had hit him. Three times.”
He paused.
He said, “Tommy. I had every piece of information I needed to ask you, before I expelled you, whether you were okay. I did not ask you. I want to tell you why I did not ask.”
He looked at his hands.
He said, “Tommy. I did not ask because the district policy was zero tolerance. I had no discretion. I was going to have to expel you regardless of what you said. I was afraid that if I asked you whether you were okay — if I asked you what the jacket meant to you, if I asked you whether you missed your father — and you told me, I would have to listen to it and then expel you anyway. I did not think I was strong enough to do that. So I did not ask. I expelled you on the paperwork. I shook your mother’s hand. I did not say a single word to you about your father. I sent you out of this office at 4:14 p.m. on November 17th, 1995, without ever using your father’s name.”
He looked up at me.
He said, “Tommy. I have regretted that single decision every day for thirty years. Every day. I have remembered your name. I have remembered your face. I have remembered your father’s name from the file. I have remembered exactly what time you left this office. I have remembered that I did not ask the only question that would have mattered to you.”
He said, “Tommy. I am sorry. I am sorry to your mother, who I should have called the next morning and apologized to. I am sorry to your father, who I never met, but whose son I should have asked about. And I am sorry to the boy I sent out of this office at 4:14 p.m. on November 17th, 1995, who deserved better from a building that was supposed to be teaching him.”
He paused.
He said, “Tommy. You have come back. After thirty years. With another boy. Can I — can I have your forgiveness, Tommy. Not because I deserve it. Because I want, for the last three weeks of my career, to know I have been forgiven by at least one of them.”
I sat in his office for a long time.
Then I said, “Mr. Halloran. Sir. Yes.”
He said, “Tommy. Thank you.”
I said, “Sir. I forgive you. But I want to ask you for one thing in return.”
He said, “Tommy. Anything.”
I said, “Sir. The boy. Marcus. Sitting in the chair to your right. He just hit a teacher today over his grandfather’s jacket. Same thing I did, thirty years ago, over my father’s. He just got expelled. I am asking you, sir — for the last three weeks of your thirty-six-year career — to ask him the question you did not ask me. Right now. In front of me. Today.”
Mr. Halloran turned to Marcus.
He looked at him for a long minute.
He said, very gently, “Marcus Holloway. Are you okay, son?”
Marcus did not say anything for about thirty seconds.
Then he said, “No, sir. I’m not okay.”
Mr. Halloran said, “Marcus. Tell me about your grandfather.”
Marcus told him.
He talked for the next twenty-three minutes.
I sat in the chair to Marcus’s left and I did not say a single word.
I had not, in thirty years, sat in that office while a fourteen-year-old boy was asked the question I had not been asked.
Hearing it asked — even though it was being asked of someone else — broke open something in me that had been waiting since November 17th, 1995.
I did not cry until we walked back out of the building forty-five minutes later.
I cried in the parking lot, leaning against my Harley, for about ten minutes.
Marcus’s mother — Rhonda Holloway, thirty-eight years old, a home health aide on the east side, who had been called by the school after Marcus had been escorted off the property at 2:47 p.m. that afternoon and had been on her way to pick him up — pulled into the parking lot at 4:38 p.m. while I was still leaning against my bike.
She got out of her car.
She walked up to me.
She said, “Mr. Jackson?”
I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She said, “Mr. Halloran called me. From his office. About fifteen minutes ago. While Marcus was still in there. He told me what was happening. He told me — he told me you were here. He told me what you had said to my son on the curb. He told me what you had asked him to ask my son. He told me that, with my permission, he was going to do something about Marcus’s expulsion that he had not been permitted to do for any other student in thirty-six years.”
She looked at me.
She said, “Mr. Jackson. Thank you.”
I said, “Ma’am. I just sat on a curb.”
She said, “Mr. Jackson. You did more than that. You came inside. You took my boy with you. And you asked an old man to ask my son the question nobody asked you when you were fourteen.”
I did not say anything for a moment.
Then I said, “Mrs. Holloway. Yes, ma’am.”
She put her hand on my forearm.
She said, “Mr. Jackson. I am taking my son home. We are going to talk for a long time tonight. I would like — I would like, if you are willing, to ask you to come over for dinner sometime. Marcus would like to know you. Whoever you are.”
I said, “Ma’am. I would be honored.”
She said, “My number is on the school office sign-in sheet. Mr. Halloran will give it to you. Call me when you are ready.”
She walked back to her car. She got Marcus from the office. They drove home.
I called her three days later.
I have been to Holloway dinners at her small apartment off Buckeye Road, over the last twelve months, eleven times.
Marcus is fifteen now.
He is in tenth grade at a small charter school on the east side that Mr. Halloran helped place him in within forty-eight hours of the events of November 4th, 2024. The school had a slot. The school took him. They took him because Mr. Halloran had personally driven across town in the days after our meeting, knocked on the principal’s door, and told her — and I am paraphrasing because she told me this in March — “This boy is mine. Take him. He needs an adult who will ask him the question I did not ask the seventeenth name on my list.”
Marcus has not, in twelve months, hit another adult.
He is not going to.
His grandfather’s jacket is folded carefully on a shelf in his bedroom now. He does not wear it to school. He has, by his mother’s account, a different blue puffer jacket for school days.
He wears the grandfather’s jacket on Saturdays.
He wears it when we go for ice cream.
I want to tell you what is now framed on the wall of the principal’s office at Lincoln Edison Middle School.
Mr. Edward Halloran retired on November 22nd, 2024 — three weeks after the day I rode past my old middle school.
His successor — a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Mrs. Lashonda Briggs, who had been an assistant principal at a school across town and who Mr. Halloran had personally recommended to the district — took over the office on November 25th, 2024.
She kept Mr. Halloran’s old desk.
She kept his diploma on the wall.
She kept his framed photograph of his late wife — Mrs. Bernice Halloran, who had passed in 2018 after fifty-one years of marriage — on the corner of the desk.
She added one new thing to the wall, with Mr. Halloran’s blessing, the week she took the office.
It is a small framed letter.
The letter is on a piece of yellow legal paper that was torn from Mr. Halloran’s own legal pad.
It is dated November 4th, 2024.
It is in Mr. Halloran’s handwriting.
It says, in full:
“To the principal who comes after me, and to the next one after that, and to every principal who sits at this desk for as long as Lincoln Edison Middle School exists:
Ask them if they are okay before you decide what to do.
Ask them about their fathers. Their mothers. Their grandparents. Their jackets.
Ask them.
If you do not have the time, make it.
If you do not have the courage, find it.
If you do not have the discretion, advocate for it.
The seventeenth name on my list came back today. Thirty years late. He brought the one hundred and forty-first name with him.
I do not want to leave you a one hundred and forty-second name.
Ask them.
— E. Halloran
Principal, Lincoln Edison Middle School, 1989 — 2024.”
The framed letter is, today, on the wall of the principal’s office at Lincoln Edison Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, mounted just to the right of the desk so that any student sitting in the chair across from the principal can read it.
I have not been back to that office since November 4th, 2024.
I do not need to go back.
The letter is there.
The lesson is there.
The desk is staffed.
I want to tell you something Mr. Halloran told me, in his office, that I have not been able to put anywhere else in this story.
When he sat back down at his desk on the afternoon of November 4th, 2024, after he had recognized me, he opened his middle desk drawer.
He pulled out a yellow legal pad.
He turned it to a page near the front.
He turned the pad around so that I could see it.
The page had a list of names. Handwritten. Dated in the margin. Some of the names were old enough that the ink had faded.
Mine was the seventeenth name from the top.
It said: Tommy Jackson — 11/17/1995 — Father deceased. Did not ask.
Underneath it, on subsequent lines, were one hundred and twenty-three other names, each dated, each with a small note.
Did not ask. Did not ask. Did not ask. Did not ask.
Some of the lines, the more recent ones, said different things. Asked. Asked. Asked. Asked, but too late. Asked. Asked. Asked.
The transition from Did not ask to Asked — the line where the pattern broke — had happened, by Mr. Halloran’s own dating, in December of 2003. About eight years after my expulsion.
I asked him what had changed in December of 2003.
He told me.
He told me that in early December of 2003, his nine-year-old grandson — a boy named Joseph — had been suspended from his elementary school in Shaker Heights for three days for hitting another boy on the playground. Joseph had told his father (Mr. Halloran’s son) that the other boy had been making fun of his stutter. The father had told Mr. Halloran. Mr. Halloran had driven over to Shaker Heights that evening, sat down with Joseph at his son’s kitchen table, and asked him very carefully whether he was okay.
Joseph had cried for an hour and a half.
Joseph had told his grandfather things about his stutter, about being teased at school, and about being afraid he was stupid, that he had not told another adult in his life.
Joseph is thirty now. He is a high school English teacher in Lakewood, Ohio. He still has a slight stutter. He has, by Mr. Halloran’s account, made peace with it and is loved by his students.
Mr. Halloran told me, at his desk on November 4th, 2024, “Tommy. I asked the wrong list of names Did you do it? for fourteen years before I learned to ask the right question. I am not going to pretend my own grandson taught me the question I should have asked you. He did. I had to be a grandfather before I learned to be a principal. I am sorry it took that long.”
I sat in the chair across from his desk.
I said, “Mr. Halloran. I am not sorry.”
He said, “Tommy?”
I said, “Sir. You learned the question. You spent twenty-one years asking it of every other kid who came in here after the fourteenth year of your principalship. You changed the list. Joseph changed it. The list is changed. I am not sorry.”
He looked at me for a long minute.
Then he started crying.
I did not look away.
He wiped his eyes after about a minute.
He said, “Tommy. Thank you.”
I said, “Mr. Halloran. Thank you.”
We sat in silence for a long time.
Marcus, in the chair to my left, sat in silence too.
Marcus did not, by his own admission later, fully understand at age fourteen what he had just witnessed.
He understands a little more now, at fifteen.
He will, by my count, fully understand it sometime around age twenty-five.
When he does, he will tell the story to the kid he sits down next to on a curb.
The list will continue.
The change will be his.
Mr. Edward Halloran is eighty-one now.
He is retired. He lives in a small apartment in Cleveland Heights with his cat, a sleek black animal named Linus.
He attends Marcus’s school events. He has been to two parent-teacher conferences with Rhonda Holloway. He has been to one of Marcus’s basketball games. He brought Marcus a small worn paperback copy of Native Son by Richard Wright in February of 2025 — he had, by his own account, been holding onto it for thirty years, planning to give it to me when I was older. He had never been able to find me.
He gave it to Marcus instead.
The paperback is on Marcus’s nightstand.
He has not read it yet. He told me, in March, that he is “saving it.”
He will read it when he is ready.
Mr. Halloran has, in the last twelve months, become something resembling a third grandfather to Marcus. Marcus has two living grandfathers — both on his mother’s side, both kind men, both healthy. Marcus has lost the grandfather he was closest to, on his father’s side, in October of 2023.
Mr. Halloran has filled the seat that grandfather used to fill at school events.
He sits in the third row.
He claps the loudest.
He cries quietly, sometimes, when Marcus does well.
Marcus calls him “Mr. H.”
Mr. H. calls Marcus “buddy.”
That is the entire arrangement.
It is enough.
I am forty-five years old.
I am a steamfitter on the west side of Cleveland.
I am a member of a small motorcycle club.
I have been sober for twenty years.
I have a girlfriend named Janelle who I am going to ask to marry me sometime in the next twelve months. (She does not know yet. She is going to know, when she reads this story, that I have planned it. I am writing this in November of 2025. I am going to give her the ring on her birthday in February of 2026. She will read this on the internet before then. Hi, baby. I love you. Yes.)
I have, on my left forearm, a small tattoo I got in March of 2025 at a small shop on Lorain Avenue.
The tattoo is the word ASK.
Just that.
Three letters in clean simple block ink.
I had it tattooed because I do not, ever, want to forget the question.
My uncle Ricky asked me what ASK meant when I showed him at the next club barbecue.
I told him.
He said, “Tommy. That’s a good tattoo, brother.”
I said, “Yeah, Uncle Ricky.”
He said, “You ask anybody recently?”
I said, “Yeah. A boy on a curb. About a year ago.”
He said, “Tommy. Ask another one this year, brother.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
I have, in the twelve months since, asked the question — sometimes formally, sometimes just sitting next to somebody — to seven different people.
Three were kids.
One was a brother in my own club going through a divorce.
One was a man I do not know who was crying in a Walmart parking lot.
One was Janelle, on a Saturday morning in May, at our kitchen table.
One was my own reflection in a bathroom mirror at 2:47 a.m. on a hard night in August.
I asked.
Each time.
I am going to keep asking.
That is what the curb taught me.
That is what Marcus taught me.
That is what an eighty-year-old principal taught me when he asked Marcus the question he had been carrying for thirty years.
That is the only thing left to do.
If this story moved you — follow the page. There are more men out there with three-letter tattoos on their forearms. More yellow legal pads in the desk drawers of retiring principals. More boys on curbs in front of buildings the men passing by used to be expelled from. More questions that need to be asked, today, while there is still time. There are more stories the world doesn’t see — and I will keep telling them as long as someone keeps reading.
