Nobody Wants To Uncover
This personal statement helps us become acquainted with you in ways different from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will demonstrate your ability to organize thoughts and express yourself. We are looking for an essay that will help us know you better as a person and as a student. Please write an essay (250--500 words) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below.
He wasn't even going to bother with high school, and now look where being good to his grandma had gotten him. The guidance counselor had looked at his grades and started talking about scholarships, all these words about "opportunity" and "future" that got Grandma hugging him and telling him what a smart boy he was, how proud she was. She didn't know she was manipulating the shit out of him.
"Just fill out the applications," the guidance counselor told him. "See what happens." So he is in the school computer lab with the lights off, clicking check boxes and filling in his GPA. Things that are easy or it's too late to change, but every one puts his heart in his throat. All this weird stuff about activities and awards and stuff that he has to leave blank. The guidance counselor says that's okay, just tell the truth, but nobody really wants his truths. They want a pretty scrubbed cheerleader who can tell them a happy story about how teaching retarded kids to play softball made her understand the love of Christ, not a cholo who should have dropped out at sixteen and saved the taxpayers some cash.
He sits in the blue glow of the computer screen and thinks, 500 words, he can be honest for that long.
1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
Significant experience: falling in love with Lilly Kane. He used to watch the 09er girls with their shiny lip gloss and think, why bother when there are girls with curves and thoughts in their heads. But Lilly, to start with, she had the curves. She had that ass that he had to work not to stare at when she shimmied at freshman mixers. She knotted the bottom of her gym uniform top to show off her navel piercing, and he knew it was an invitation to look.
When she stared, she stared at his bike instead of him, from the beach, for ten whole minutes while he pretended not to notice. She cocked her head to the side and bit her finger while she smiled, and he had to follow her. "I'm going into my bad girl phase," she said, running her hand down his chest to stop just above his crotch. "Want to help?"
Significant achievement: getting her to love him back. He knew from the start he wasn't going to have long. She was going to get back together with her off-again-on-again 09er boy as soon as he was jealous enough. So Weevil left notes in her locker with song lyrics that sounded like poetry. She said "I love you" while he was eating her out, but he likes to think it counted anyway.
Significant risk he has taken: not letting her go that easily. Tattooing himself with her name was only the middle, when he already knew she'd stopped reading her locker notes. She tossed her hair like she didn't give a shit when he smiled at her in gym class, but when she whispered to her friends, she was definitely talking about him. "Why won't you leave me alone?" she finally said in the middle of a softball game, guarding second base while he threatened to steal third.
"I can't turn my heart off like that," he said.
"You got that from a song," she said.
The next day, she switched out of his gym class, and a couple of weeks after that, she died. He burned all the love letters he never sent. He added his gym uniform to the blaze, knowing he'd have to buy another one. The cheap fabric crackled so loud that nobody could hear him crying for her.
Significant ethical dilemma: going over to Logan's for blunts and blow jobs, seeing how long he could go without admitting that he'd had Lilly. Logan could get anything...organic hydroponic pot from Camarillo that knocked you out after three drags, never-aired episodes of Sifl 'n' Olly, Weevil's mouth on his cock...but he couldn't get a clue. So Weevil got himself stoned enough to say, "I fucked Lilly a couple times."
"I figured," Logan said. "You don't have a kid sister, asshole."
"Sorry, man," Weevil said.
"I knew she was fucking someone that time we broke up," Logan said. Weevil braced himself to get punched in the mouth, but he got kissed instead.
2. Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
Weevil's not an issue kind of person. The AIDS Awareness Club or Students for a Cleaner Environment hold bake sales at lunch sometimes, and he'll usually buy a brownie. But he can't help thinking, is there anyone who's really *against* a cleaner environment? And if there is, how stupid are they?
There are things that Weevil is against. Police brutality, racial profiling, zero-tolerance drug laws. But all those things seem to be part of something larger. He realized one morning in the shower that what he's really against is double standards. The thing where the only time he has ever been pulled over in Logan's car was the one time he has ever driven it. Logan was too drunk to steer and almost too drunk to explain that he wasn't being carjacked. The cop seemed disappointed that he couldn't even drag Weevil in for DWI.
They were driving home from San Diego, where it had been a whole night of double standards. Girls in halter tops and too much makeup kissing each other to get guys' attention, but if he and Logan ever tried something like that, well, it wouldn't end with them getting laid. Double fucking standards.
They went to a gay club in Long Beach once, and they felt like aliens. They got treated like frat boys playing tourist. Weevil stuck his tongue in Logan's mouth so they could get served. Veronica loves that story. She gets the thing about double standards. Logan hates that she knows it, but he mostly hates that she has anything on him, let alone so much. He likes having secrets. Weevil thinks that if Logan could tell anybody they were together...anyone beyond Veronica and Grandma...Logan would stop wanting him.
But his own conditions aren't any better. He wishes he could say he was looking for a girl who loved him for his sparkling personality, but he's been pretty consistent with the rich, apparently unattainable, and using him to rebel. White and expensive make him hard. And that's a double standard, but it's his.
3. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
He blames his grandmother for a lot of things. He shouldn't, because everything she's done for him comes from meaning well, but his life would be a lot easier if he didn't have anybody in his life who cared as much as she does. There's the obvious stuff, staying in school and taking her to Mass on Sunday mornings, that make her friends kiss his cheeks and tell him in Spanish how they wish they had a grandson that treated them so good. Their nietos preciosos all dropped out, got arrested for being too stupid to avoid getting caught, knocked girls up and left town. It doesn't take much to be better than that.
He can't live with the bare minimum, though, and that's what he blames her for. He'd be in deep shit, probably homeless, if he stopped going to school, but it's never enough to just keep off her bad side. She drops hints. If he comes home early, there *might* be tamales. In her house, there are always little rewards for being better than he has to be. "This isn't the only time in life you'll get what you earn," she said once, probably during his fourth or fifth tamale.
Weevil wouldn't have earned a thing in his life without her bugging him. It isn't good enough that he shows up to class and does his homework. "One class per semester," she said when he was a freshman, "you do well in. B or better. If not, bueno, I don't have to keep none of you boys under my roof." That winter, he brought her home an A- in algebra. In the spring, it was an A in shop. He picked different subjects all the time, whatever he felt like. Junior year, he got an extra B+ in chemistry when he was trying for English, just because he remembered stuff.
That was when he found out that his cousins didn't have to get good grades. He was so mad he almost dropped out then. But she has always expected more of him. He has to let her down because he doesn't know how to thank her. He has to sneak in her room to take money from the nightstand drawer and see that she's reading, in Spanish, that Chastity Bono book about what to do when your kid comes out. And then put the money back because he sees she has forgiven him for things he didn't know she knew, things he didn't know existed.
4. Describe a character in fiction, an historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
Che Guevara pisses Weevil off. It pisses him off that when people start talking about Latino heroes they're always bringing up a crazy Marxist fuck that they only know because he's on a t-shirt. Usually, the t-shirt is stretched across the fake tits of some 09er girl who thinks he's a guy in a rock band, and who would cry for a month if someone started a socialist revolution in her neighborhood.
Weevil doesn't get why people think socialism is such a good idea. He knows those privileged white girls will grow up and become good Republicans like their mommies, but one of his boys, Alberto, is fucking obsessed with Che, too. He thinks Che was some kind of rebel biker Robin Hood martyr; he named his bike La Poderosa and everything.
"He was a fucked-up rich kid with delusions of grandeur who got himself up in other people's business and helped put Castro in power," Weevil told Alberto. He doesn't know if it was the big words or the inconvenient facts that pushed Alberto over the edge, but the fistfight got them both arrested for disturbing the peace.
"Viva la revolución!" Alberto shouted as the cop pushed him into the squad car.
"Stupid fuck," Weevil muttered.
Logan drove all the way to Mission Viejo to bail Weevil out, bitching the whole time about how he knew that Weevil had only called him because Logan was the only person he knew with enough money to get a Mexican out of jail. But he paid, and he did something else, because Weevil's charges got dropped and Alberto's picking up trash on the freeway. Some fucking revolution. Weevil's seen enough of capitalism to know you've got to work it from the inside: you've got to get down on your knees and get it to fall in love with you, so it doesn't know you're taking it for a ride.
At least, that's what Weevil had in mind when he got into this. He guesses that when you fuck with The Man, he's going to fuck you right back. And the fucking feels so good that you fall in love with what you seduced. The revolutionary martyrs never seem to plan for that.
5. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
He wants to be Veronica's friend.
There are times when they come very close to being friends. She lent him 75 cents once when he needed change for the Coke machine in the cafeteria, then told him she didn't expect him to pay her back. But when he tries to think of something more meaningful than that, he has nothing.
Mostly, they have a working relationship. He makes a great diversion, and she does little things for him in return. She knows he can keep his mouth shut. Like her, he likes knowing things that he can use against people, and he understands that all of the power in knowledge comes from not using it until the time is right.
This, he thinks, is why, when it's just the two of them fighting over radio stations in her Le Baron, she's all, "So, how's Looooogan," but whenever anyone else is around, she treats him like a single man. It's not like she has a whole lot of people who would believe her if she told them, but Weevil asked that Wallace kid she eats lunch with a few leading questions, and even he doesn't know shit. She's proved herself smart about secrets, and Weevil doesn't know anyone else who is.
He's not sure how she figured out about him and Logan, but she has her spy cameras and her wiretaps. She thinks they're sweet; she's covered for them a couple of times. But she uses that knowledge to use them over and over, and that's why he will be her Girl Friday but he will never be her friend.
6. Topic of your choice.
Everywhere Logan is applying to college is really far away. New York and Boston, cities you see in movies and believe in like you believe the world is round. It's hard for Weevil to imagine people who live there, in those columns of light and those houses the Pilgrims built. Logan's been there, obviously, and he says the whole world is as real as California, although the light looks different.
Logan thinks he will be okay with his dad as long as there are a few thousand miles between them. He says "a few thousand" like it may not be enough. Weevil knows that whatever they're doing together is over with when Logan leaves; he knows he's not the reason for it. It's the distance, as an excuse for not admitting that this was anything, for walking away without touching and pretending that this doesn't hurt.
Weevil thought he was going to San Diego State or something, but she won't let him. "There isn't nothing for you here but eses you hang around with. You go up north, where you don't know nobody, or...or no sé qué."
"Grandma, I got a whole life here," he said. "I gotta take care of you."
"Your cousins, they're never going to leave here," she said. "You, you got a way out. And what if, Díos mío, I know what goes on with you and...What if there's another one? I hope I'm not here to see what your boys do to you then."
So he's checking the boxes for Humboldt State, Cal State Monterey Bay, UC Davis. Places with big trees and cable cars and people who think Jerry Garcia is still alive. He's never been north of Bakersfield. His grandma is knitting him a sweater.
Most of the time, he's not afraid. This is how you get out. This is how you become one of them. You learn to walk so softly in their shoes that they don't turn around fast enough to see the flash of the knife.