About a Teacher: Joe Rauser

 This is definitely a rough draft right now and I appreciate your forbearance, dear readers, as I work on this. I hope to polish up the rough edges and work this into a nonfiction essay.

I want to first preface this story with some information about a beloved teacher from my middle school, Chaminade Preparatory in Chatsworth, California (I would go on to graduate from Chaminade). His name was Joe Rauser and he recently passed away at the age of 82. By far, he was the finest, most compassionate teacher I have ever met, wildly engaging, devoted to bringing out the best in his students, the kind of teacher they make movies about. The outpouring of love and memories expressed on my high school’s Facebook page was astounding, but not surprising. Joe had that rare gift of presence: when he spoke to you, you were the center of a quite safe and loving attention. It is a quality I would not see again until I began to go to the Santa Cruz Zen Center and recognized it in the people I met there.

This is a story that begs to be told somewhat backwards and so I will begin with something that might shock people who went to the University of San Diego, my undergraduate college, with me:

I wish with all my heart that I had not gone to USD. My realization has always been at the back of my mind, but really emerged during the time of my teacher’s death, and it is definitely a part of this story. I always felt, even as a student, that USD was not a place I ought to be, and though there are a few people I met there whom I still consider friends, I am sure I would have met them somewhere else. As for Santa Cruz (the place I have lived for nearly forty years) my very first choice of colleges was the University of San Francisco, so it’s not implausible that I might have found my way there. Further, I believe my children, meant to be, would have come to this earth in a healthier way, certainly into a much happier family atmosphere. I would likely not have borne soul-crushing trauma that I carry to this day. And yes, this has much to do with Joe Rauser.

So, first a regret, and then an artifact. I have almost nothing from the time when I was in high school; indeed, almost nothing from my childhood at all. What I have is my class ring from Chaminade: it nearly fits my ring finger still. It’s one of those standard Jostens rings, with the Gemini birthstone, alexandrite. Alexandrites are blue in natural light, deep amethyst-purple in lamplight, a trick of wavelengths. Long before mood rings, there were alexandrites. The ring’s here, on my desk next to me, a talisman, something to show the ferryman on the way into memory’s underworld: I have this, it is mine.

So a regret, a talisman, and to begin:

When I think of Joe Rauser, I “hear” his voice first: slightly hoarse, with a subtle underlying rasp. Then I remember his height: short. I doubt he was over 5’5” And, though his later photographs show a man with snow-white hair in a Prince Valiant haircut, I remember him as he appears in the above photograph, when he was in his thirties: sandy brown hair, longish and a bit floppy (and of course, his beaming smile, and that ubiquitous corduroy jacket). Joe had a lovely wife and a son, just a toddler. A couple of years before, the Rausers had lost another son. I remember Joe mentioning that the priest baptized the baby with an eyedropper full of holy water. Many years later, when I visited with the Rausers, they told me they still thought of their son, and talked about him with each other. I know other, personal things about his life, not to be told, but emblematic of the “wounded healer.”

Most of all, I remember this: he had a heart so boundless in caring and compassion, a devotion to teaching so great, that I can find no metaphors to attach to those qualities. 

When I think of the year I met Mr. Rauser, I remember myself, too: fourteen years old, already buried in a grave of family secrets. My father had left home exactly one month after I graduated from elementary school. My mother then embarked on a mind-boggling, hedonistic life worthy of our Roman ancestors: drugs, dealing cocaine, drinking, affairs with a procession of shady men and with boys as young as sixteen. I took over caring for my brother, a toddler, and because I was fourteen and did not know how to cook anything beyond Kraft macaroni and cheese, we ate that, and Cocoa Puffs.

Trauma gorged itself on my family just a handful of years before I entered ninth grade. My grandfather, John, an actor and stuntman unable to accept his inevitable aging, hanged himself when I was nine years old. Three years after that, my beloved grandmother (long divorced from John) died a horrifying and prolonged death of uterine cancer.  Just a year and a half after that, one of my sisters had an illegal abortion—luckily for her, arranged in a hospital—which tore my family apart. In addition to the culture of violence and addiction, there was an invective to never spill a word about those things. My siblings turned to substance abuse; I turned inward, carrying trauma like a bellyful of coal, heavy and bituminous.

To top things off, less than two months after I entered ninth grade, my mother’s boyfriend beat up my older sister. She fled our home and I would not hear from her again for almost two years.

I’m surprised to find some self-consciousness, even a touch of shame, about my appearance at fourteen and how strange I, in my cicatrix of trauma, must have seemed to people. My older cousin, Denise, described how she went around school with her head down and her hair covering her face. Because Denise was the only, infrequent role model around, I decided that was a good idea, too. I saw nearly all of ninth grade through a curtain of brown hair. I had nothing to say in class, in fact did not know what I might say, because silence and invisibility were my defenses at home. I carried around my absent sister’s journals like a totem of grief; I obsessively kept one of my own (something I still do). One slight quarrel I have with Mr. Rauser and a few other faculty members was their encouragement, years later, to rip up that journal. I wanted my teachers to be proud that I had released my past. Years later, I realized how important it was to keep that record of my young self, look squarely at each shadow I had cast in the world. 

One of my teachers that year, a Marianist brother, was a sick and violent man whom I’ll call by a slant-name to his real one: Brother Henker. He resembled the Death figure from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and targeted the boys, sadistically beating them for infractions as slight as writing their name in the wrong space on a paper. Like the Death character in the film, no one escaped him, whether by directly experiencing physical violence or witnessing it; I know people approaching their seventies who carry trauma about him to this day. One of the boys made up a story that Brother Henker had worked in a Nazi death camp prior to his career in education, something I, at fourteen, found utterly believable. Certainly the judgment now seems ridiculous and cruel, but at the time I could imagine him in a black uniform, with a silver Totenkopf decorating a black, peaked cap.

Perhaps it’s more charitable that I should pity the man for whatever abuse visited on him that made him, in turn, an abuser. At the end of his life, I was told that he made beautiful wooden toys and donated them to children. Was it a form of atonement? Was the guy a drunk (probably 3/4 of the brothers were) who had found recovery and embraced toy-making as an amends to the countless young people he terrorized? I will never know. What I do know is that there were no consequences at all for this man; despite parental complaints and even a student or two ratting him out, faculty and administration protected him in a cocoon of denial. Mercifully, Herr Henker’s class took place in the morning.

Mr. Rauser taught American History just before lunchtime (he kept his classroom open during lunch, and so my friends and I—and probably half the middle school student body—spent their time in his classroom then, too). He had, not exactly charisma, but (as I said earlier), presence. The first afternoon I walked into Mr. Rauser’s classroom, I felt a shock of recognition—some would say he was a figure from my past life, but I think it was simply a resonance, a sensitivity to a truly kind person. My ability to sense such a thing about a person had not yet been completely muted. He recognized in me a salvageable young person, someone with worth, set me up with a counselor (a patient Marianist priest I’ll call “Father Francis”), kept after me about homework, often stayed with me when my mother was over an hour late to pick me up from school. 

When I entered 10th grade, I “moved over” to the 10th-12th grade campus, some miles away, but kept in touch with Mr. Rauser. Indeed, I got to know his entire family, as he lived just a few blocks away from me, across the road from what was, back then, the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. I’d call on weekends—just enough not to wear out my welcome—and if the Rausers were home and it was okay, would walk up to their house, play with his son, talk to Mr. Rauser and his wife (who was also a teacher). They always invited me to dinner, but I—too shy to accept—always declined and then left. My mother, forced to watch my brother, complained when I headed over to the Rausers, but I still went off, cutting through a couple of vacant lots to get to their large, comfortable house.

At some point during high school (I’ve searched my memory, but can never figure out what year), Father Francis sat me down in counseling and said he noticed my depression deepening, that teachers were getting worried about me, my grades were slipping and I had begun to occasionally miss school. Teachers reported I never seemed to have a packed lunch or money to buy one in the cafeteria. I finally broke down and told him my mother had begun disappearing on weekends, leaving me to take care of my brother alone, not telling me where she was or when she might be back. Before that, she had at least been home, though preoccupied with substance abuse and men. I said I was getting frightened at night: my brother’s friends would come into my room while I tried to sleep, kneel down by my bed, make fun of me, pull my blankets off me, laugh at me when I screamed for them to go away. I told them about the increasingly frightening men coming into the house, friends of my mother and brother.

My counselor called my mother, whose response was a threat to remove me from my school. She told Father Francis that she wanted me to stop having therapy, that I was lying about all the men, the drugs, the lack of food, about being left by myself to take care of my brother. At that point, Father Francis gave up on trying to reason with her. He did tell her that leaving a teenage girl alone on weekends to care for a toddler was illegal, and at some point, her weekend “vacations” ended. Her threats proved empty: I remained in my high school and Father Francis continued as my counselor.

Soon after talking to her, Father Francis called me into his office. He said that my home life was undermining my mental health. He said teachers were more concerned about me than ever, that he wanted me to achieve my potential. Father Francis told me that I needed to leave my home immediately (note that he did not speak of calling Child Protective Services, which would have been mandatory today for someone in an educational setting: in the mid-seventies, CPS was reserved for cases far more extreme than mine. But who knows? Maybe they were going to be called, and my "rescuers" didn't want to frighten me or somehow tip my mother off).

Shocked, I said, “But where will I go? I have nowhere to go.” 

Father Francis said, “The Rausers have offered to take you in.”

I remember taking in a breath. Was the offer real? Father Francis assured me it was. Then I had questions, one after the other, spoken rapidly, and based on worry. Where would I sleep? A couch, maybe? Would I have food to eat, or would I have to somehow buy my own? Would I have to work for the Rausers, to earn my keep? How would I get to school every day?”

Patiently, Father Francis answered my questions. There was a spare bed for me. The Rausers would feed me, make sure I did my homework, went to bed on time. I would be part of their family for as long as I wanted to be there. I would not have to find a job and pay them rent, or give them money for food, or anything else. They would make sure I got to school. Reassurance after reassurance, trying to help me believe in an offer that seemed completely unreal to me, like a fairytale.

Though I wanted with all my heart to jump on the offer, I said, simply, that I would think about it. I went home, struggled to put a meal together for my brother, got him ready for bed. I hugged him and gave him all his stuffed toys—he slept with a lot of them, and I had to make a sort of stuffed-toy “wall” between him and the edge of his bed. My mother came home late that night (she would, to her credit, watch my brother when I was in school).

The next day, I went to my counselor, sat down, and said, “I can’t leave my little brother.” 

Father Francis said, “You are not responsible for taking care of your brother. That’s your mother’s job, not yours. We will find a way to help keep him safe.”

Still, I feared that if I left, my little brother would somehow get hurt. My mother might just leave him alone in the house, or with one of my older brother’s druggie friends. I also knew my mother depended on my father’s child support, which would be reduced if I left. I feared my older brother and his friends could find out where the Rausers lived and hurt us. They’d hunted down my sister the night she was beaten up; she’d gone to friend’s home and asked him to drive her to a safe place. Somehow, my brother and his friends, on my mother’s orders, found my sister and her friend driving on the freeway and tried unsuccessfully to ram into the back of their car. My fears of retaliation were not unfounded.

Father Francis looked down at his desk. He said, “Look, if you change your mind, the offer is there. It’s always there. Please think about it.” I seem to recall Joe Rauser himself coming to campus to talk to me. Perhaps nobody understood that forcing my mother to be a parent wasn’t necessarily going to make her one, that the household I lived in had gone far beyond a situation of simply making someone live up to their responsibilities.

I never went to live with the Rausers. I remained friends with them, and they definitely kept an eye on me. As things grew worse in my home, I thought often of their offer, wondered if I still could go there, but never again asked. On my own, I chose a private university, well out of my means, to attend. With little to no support from my parents, I somehow graduated—but not after falling into the hands of a predator, someone I trusted and should not have, at all.

Let’s look at “what might have been,” though. Let’s say I did choose to go live with the Rausers. Let’s say somehow my brother ended up in a situation where he was cared for and happy.—how, I don’t know, but let’s say it happened. Let’s say I really did pack a bag of clothes, a few books—I am sure I would not have taken much. The Rausers would have been made aware of the extent of my trauma, my serious nutritional deficiencies (I weighed 95 pounds in high school), that I never had a regular bedtime and studied only after my brother had gone to sleep. Let’s say they’d set a schedule for me, kind expectations: that I would be in bed by a certain hour, that I was given a place to do my homework, that I had reasonable chores. My meals would have been healthy, not Cocoa Puffs and macaroni and cheese from a box, and in fact, I would sit at a regular dining table while we all ate together, something that had ceased in my own family the day my father walked out the door.

 Certainly there would have been tensions—Mr. Rauser wasn’t a saint and had a notable temper, though not a toxic one—but never would I have been in danger of being thrown out or hurt. Let’s say, in sum, that I became another member of the family, a chosen daughter. It wouldn’t have been a fairy tale, realistically. But it would have been a life where I was treated with love, where perhaps my self-esteem would have risen to the point where I could actually function and not just survive. 

Here’s what I think. I would have gone to college, and afterwards, graduate school (long before I, in real life, did in my forties). I may have gone to Cal State Northridge. I might have gone to the University of San Francisco (and can imagine, in an utterly idealized way, what it could have been like to hit the town with the Rauser family, going on a ferry boat ride beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, taking an Alcatraz tour, visiting the zoo, eating clam chowder at the wharf, and having too much Ghiradelli chocolate for dessert). I would almost certainly have become a writer because I already dreamed of that and was encouraged throughout high school.

Whatever the case, I know this: I would almost certainly not have become a student at the University of San Diego. I would not have attended Mass and taken music classes from a priest who ended up being a major player in the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church. I would likely had the good sense not to have gone to alcohol-infused parties with professors (something absolutely tolerated at USD, along with predatory behavior). The Rausers would have almost assuredly warned me about dicey, dangerous situations. I may never have met the friends I made at USD (or they might have come along later in life, if meant to be)—but to take a different path would have obviated much suffering for me and many others.

Reflecting on all this, I realize was not offered a fairytale but a normal life—a life where a young woman graduates high school and goes to college. The extraordinariness of this story rests squarely, first, with Joe Rauser, who recognized my worth, and then with the Rausers as a couple: teachers, not wealthy, raising a family, driving used cars, and yet willing to take on a teenager who had never lived in a circle of guidance and love. 

And for that one bright chance, the one I should have taken, I am eternally grateful.