Engaging The Eternal Student:

Enrolled at LACC for the past Seventeen years

Max has a story or two to tell

By. Nellie Marie Nunez

The only thing he understands is words. After sheltered years in high school, he decided on Bowling Green University in his native Ohio, simply because he liked the word bowling. Max Alan Suskind likes to bowl. The longest running student at Los Angeles City College, Max has been enrolled in a myriad of classes, almost as long as most freshmen have been alive.

“One of my top three greatest experiences in life has been simultaneously attending grad school at 22 and teaching people two years younger than me at the same university”. As is, his manner, he never gets around to telling the other two.

           It’s hard to picture Max Suskind at 22. His long gray hair falls along the sides of his face. He looks at you with his chin tucked close to his chest, like a far sighted librarian looking up and over his spectacles. He speaks in gestures. Punctuating adjectives with his hands.

           Max didn’t finish grad school. A five week course away from a masters in English,  he frankly, did not want to take Statistics and Computation.

           “I found it impossible, I didn’t want to learn stats or computers. So I went back home and a family friend, the Rabbi, found me a job in a muffler shop. That was intolerable, so I quit” Said Suskind. 

           The oldest of three, Max Suskind had a special relationship with his mother.

           “She was the only woman in my life, If she was still alive, I’d be with her in Loraine, Ohio”.

             It’s not hard to imagine his child hood home, where he played made up games with the kids in the neighborhood. In his Creative Writing class with Dr. Einstein, he reads his short stories, some of which are centered in his child hood, others around his past mental illnesses. Some of theses stories have been published in the literary yearly, The Citadel. 

            “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterday have lighted fools- the way to dusty death” Those are the poetic words of the protagonist from Suskind’s short story, You Say You Didn’t Run. The story is  based on a man who walks into traffic naked and is subsequently taken to the police psychologist where he discusses phenomenology and the phonetic beauty of the name Molly Ringwald. Suskind is a poet, and he doesn’t even know it.

            Perhaps Suskind’s stories are loosely based on his own life.

“ I have great strengths and great weaknesses,” he says. He’s earned almost every certificate LACC has to offer, yet he finds it impossible to buckle his seat belt or fill the gas tank of a car. “ they don’t teach you that in school, so I never learned it. I used to drive 15 miles away just to go to the only full service gas station in Los Angeles.

By age 33, Max had seen multiple psychotherapists each with their own interpretation for Suskind’s behavior.

“I saw many doctors,” recounts Suskind, “They all had different names for what was going on in my head, anxiety, nervous breakdown, schizophrenia, depression. They had the medication to go with it too”. He was eventually put on Social Security and stayed at home, until his brother and sister convinced him to come to California. It was then, that Max decided to enroll in College. And he’s been here ever since.

            Now, at 57, Max has learned a lot about self-sufficiency.

“I’ve learned that everyone has the choice to pick their own attitude on how you react to things.” He never became a high school English teacher like he wanted.

“ I didn’t look the part”, he says. But Max Alan Suskind doesn’t realize that he is a teacher, his own.

Miss N Main

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