Excerpt from “Althrea Tells Me Gangs Mean Love" by Mark Gozonsky

Tyrane, in contrast, did nothing on the final, which was what he had done in class all year, except for the time when I had them build arguments out of craft sticks. He had said he was good at building stuff, why couldn’t I have them build stuff instead of writing. He built a solid structure involving pathos, logos and ethos. I sent a picture of him giving a big thumbs up to my dad. (“White guys love giving a big thumbs up,” I heard him explain later.) But, since I had sent that photo to my father, I felt I couldn’t give up on or decide to hate Tyrane, even though he was always disruptive in class, feeling up the girls and complaining that I wasn’t teaching shit.

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Mark Gozonsky earned a B.A. in English at Cornell and took a class in journalism at San Francisco State before getting a part-time job covering the A's and Giants with Jimmy Ilson for Calendar, the forerunner to SF Weekly. His essay, "Althrea Tells Me Gangs Mean Love,” which was originally published by Indiana English, was written during the summer of 2011, while Mark worked as a fellow in the U.C.L.A. Writing Project.