Counting by 7s(8)

Dell hinted to anyone who would listen that his family had something to do with starting a university. And they had at one point worn a crown.

Early on, Dell Duke had wanted to be a doctor because he liked TV shows with heroic people who saved lives every week while showing off perfect teeth and great haircuts.

Plus Dr. Dell Duke sounded good. It had three D’s. Which sounded better than two.

And so Dell studied biology in college, which didn’t go well because he couldn’t store facts.

They shifted and then moved and quickly evaporated from his conscious mind.

And if they were buried somewhere in his unconscious, he had no access to that area of thought.

So by his second semester, he’d changed his major for the fourth time, moving from the hard sciences to the soft sciences.

Dell finally graduated, on the six-and-a-half-year plan, with a degree in psychology.

From there, after a lot of searching, he got a job at an assisted-living center, where he was the activities director.

Dell was let go after only three months.

The elderly didn’t like him. He lacked true compassion and he had no stomach for their health problems. On more than one occasion he was seen running from the activities room in a full-blown panic.

Dell was too afraid to work with prison inmates and so he set his sights on the public school system.

Dell went to night classes and after three more years got a certification for adolescent counseling, and that put him on the path to work in education.

But no one was hiring.

Dell sent out literally hundreds of résumés, and after three years working as a bar-back, carrying tubs of used glasses to the surly dishwashers, he finally added some bogus counseling work experience to his résumé and got a bite.

Bakersfield.

On paper, it looked incredible.

The map showed that he would be in Southern California. He imagined a life of surfboards with groups of tanned people eating medium-spiced corn chips on his seaside balcony.

But the Central Valley had entire months where the temperature hit 100 degrees every single day. It was flat and dry and land-locked.

Bakersfield was no Malibu.

It wasn’t even Fresno.

Dell accepted the position, packed up his barely drivable Ford, and headed south.

He didn’t have a going away party when he left Walla Walla, Washington, because no one cared that he was leaving.



As a counselor for the Bakersfield City school district, Dell’s job was to handle the difficult cases.

And by that, the district meant the middle school students who got into trouble, almost exclusively for behavioral issues. These were the kids who caused enough trouble to be dealt with off site.

A typical day for Dell consisted of reviewing dozens of e-mails filed weekly from principals.

Some of the students were reported because they had turned physically violent. They were kids who targeted other kids. This meant an automatic suspension if the incident was on school grounds.

You could beat up someone, but you had to make sure it wasn’t in the school cafeteria or the parking lot.

The sidewalk was a perfectly fine place.

Other cases involved truancy.

It struck Dell as ironic that there were kids who didn’t go to school, and they would be punished for not attending with the threat of being kicked out altogether.

In addition to the violent students and the no-shows, there were the kids who did drugs and the ones who stole things.

But these cases never made it in to see Dell. The system took care of the young criminals on its own. (Dell resented that he didn’t get face time with the real bullies. They had a lot of personality, and could be quite entertaining.)

It was the rest of the screwups who were left to counseling.

There were three educational therapists who handled all the cases. Dell was the fresh hire after Dickie Winkleman, who had served for forty-two years, retired. (Dell never met Dickie Winkleman, but from what he heard, the guy was a broken man when he finally walked out the door.)

As the new guy on the block, Dell was given the kids who the other two counselors didn’t want.

The way Dell saw it: He got the losers of the losers.

But Dell was okay with that because it wasn’t like the students he saw would run and tell someone what a crummy job he was doing. They had already turned against the system before they arrived.

Score!

Dell was now in his mid-thirties, and while he wasn’t insightful or even thoughtful, he knew that this counseling job in Bakersfield would make or break him.

But Dell had always had an issue with organization. He couldn’t throw things away because he had trouble figuring out what had value and what didn’t.

Plus he liked the comfort of possessions. If he couldn’t belong to something, at least something belonged to him.

Looking through Dickie Winkleman’s old files before the whole system had gone electronic, Dell found that Dickie had put kids in categories.

It seemed that the counselor had organized the students in terms of three things:

Activity level

Patience

Ability to pay attention

Counselor Winkleman had elaborate notes and wrote up painstakingly detailed reports where he made an effort to quantify his students’ abilities and deficiencies.

Dell was impressed, and horrified.

There was no way he was going to try to imitate what Winkleman had done. It looked like way too much work.