If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended--
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
Everything's so gloomy and hell, I'm still early enough back into sobriety, I've got some time between almost back-to-back groups, and I'm filled with nervous energy and writing. A lighter counterpart to earlier.
I had this teacher once. Real creep based on the number of stories I've heard from female classmates over the years. Bragged about how much he'd misbehaved and gotten away with, the stories he could tell about how to push other teachers' buttons, all this stuff. Before winter break, he called me "divine punishment" for his misbehavior. Not too long after, somehow, I got Student of the Month and walked in on him telling outraged students, "I thought it might be an olive branch!"
If so, it was not accepted.
Let's call this guy Randy and for once dip into some levity.
Setting the scene: our summer reading was Les Miserables. An abridged version. But I wanted to really get a grip on the material, so I coaxed my folks into an unabridged. I don't regret that now, but boy did I that summer. Anyway, day one of class comes along and he's telling us all about how this is one of his favorite novels, he's read it multiple times, he loves it; impulsively and excitedly I blurt, "Oh, have you read the unabridged version? Valjean's epitaph..."
He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived
He died when he had no longer his angel
The thing came to pass simply, of itself,
As the night comes when day is gone
I can't recall exactly, but I know I brought up the epitaph because I was working when I read it, needed a minute, and got in trouble for taking too long to get out of the truck. But I mean, come on, read that, it's powerful. Dare I say poignant, I'm gonna regret that soon.
Anyway, Randy goes red and—no, he has not, in fact, read it. The class laughs at him and we got off to a bad start.
Mostly, it started with little comments in class and, "Minus five, James," but that started to bother hm because he held a game for extra credit and I was really good at it, so it all balanced out. It was memory based, around specific incidents in class, kinda like the recollections I'm telling—and, well, I always found it easy.
It was our first big test when things kinda picked up: he gave us a study guide, said if everyone in class filled it out, he'd tell us what was on the test. Personally, I thought the class was a joke so who cares? But it's an honors class, everyone else did, so I took two.
One, naturally, I filled out with the proper answers and didn't tell anyone about. The other one I worked on like the other students, bringing it around with me and laboring on it. Caricature and incredulous are the only words I remember being on our vocabulary, where we were allowed to define or use in an example. Caricature got a greasy-haired caricature of Randy on the back page saying, "Minus five, James," and incredulous got, "Your wife was incredulous when she saw my meatlog." (I liked RR on BJ Shea, what can I say?)
Whole thing was filled like this, wish I still had it. While other students were working on their actual study guide, I was working on making every answer into a quip or joke, It slipped out of my binder senior year and the vice principal was like, "No, I am not giving this back. Not even at the end of the year."
Anyway, the class couldn't believe me and was horrified till I swapped them out at the last minute and a few guys at the back guffawed at the joke one and he checked the real one. Our compromise was that everyone but me would get the test info he'd promised, and no one was allowed to give it to me. I didn't care. It was still an easy-ass test.
He's short, but he's a basketball coach at the school, too, and when I found out he'd pissed off some of his players I got some help locating his car (look, I'm bad with cars, it took multiple times and finally, "He's got huge rims, how could you not recognize this car?") and then I got to work. Before our parting of the ways, I got snake-boiler to sneak me an industrial sized length of plastic wrap from chef school.
My parents kept an eye on TP since they knew I always talked about wanting to TP. So I was able to snag one or two then, but mostly in the fall as we were doing things like exploring in the dark, well, someone had figured out how to get the TP out of Port-A-Potties. That actually might've been snakes, too, honestly.
Eggs were considered but withdrawn as too much trouble risked.
So one night, I sneak up, wrap the car all up in TP, then throw the plastic wrap on top. It's a masterpiece.
Then I go and hide in the nearby baseball field and watch, it's dark after all, as he comes out from practice, tries to cut it off—but he's a midget with a big car and he can't reach the top, so he has to ask the player who, unbeknownst to him, pointed his car out to me to cut it off for him. This is after trying to jump several times and looking like a complete dumbass while doing it.
Stroll into class the next day and trolled the shit out of him by revealing just enough to get that, "You motherfucker," look without quite crossing the line into admitting enough that he can send me to the office.
Around this time we were reading Lord of the Flies and, well, all these years later I can be honest: I asked him if he thought the ending was a deus ex machina to test if he knew the term. He snapped at me, 'I don't know, why don't you? You read more than I do!' or similar. Don't get me wrong: the guy did routinely single me out, it's not like I was picking on some hapless victim.
He was pretty pissed on that one, but hey, I'm not the guy who prided himself on his knowledge of literary terms based on a two-sided single-sheet.
Let's see, I'm trying to do chronological and I think WASL is next. He taught us how to "cheat" the WASL cause he wanted a raise and gave us such great advice as, "You can make up quotes and facts, they aren't checking for that. In college, MLK helped me out by saying a lot of things." (Interesting his invented quotes relied on an argument from authority so often in college—it is a fallacy, after all.) He also told us he wanted to be a lawyer but couldn't hack it into Law School. Maybe that's why he was such a deadbeat.
He also told us that most teachers just skim the work anyway.
Now this last one caught my attention, so I decided to test it when we turned in our class write ups on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
If you've read this book, it's a harrowing tale of life in a Siberian gulag.
If you'd read my summaries from class, it was about an escalating series of shower orgies because the inmates needed semen to get the bricks to stick together. It has a poignant ending that culminates when Ivan experiences ecstasy during a cum and piss bukkake
The final word of my final summary was "poignant" and I remember him saying it stood out. Apparently it was the only thing throughout the course of the fucking book.
Next is coffee. He had a rule that if you brought in coffee, you could be late. So I helped arrange a day when everyone would bring in coffee. It happened and he just had a desk of useless Starbucks. Me, trying to be thoughtful, brought him a straw with mine. It was set aside, untrusted even though I promised I hadn't done anything to it (I hadn't!) but I probably didn't help by saying, "No, I don't like coffee," when asked to drink it myself.
Senior year I find out he's running National Honor Society* and you know ya boy has to kick up some fuss. I did get the job, but I think I lost it around the time of, "James, I keep getting complaints, I can't have my National Honor President drawing dicks and slipping them into the partitions between classrooms." (Classes were connected and there was a hole in the wall, so I'd just doodle dicks in class, furl them up, and slide 'em through. Shockingly, this did not help my calculus grade).
Last time I saw this guy, I was sitting in the passenger seat of an ex's car in the Half Price Books parking lot. He pulls into the next slot over and I glance up from my book, recognize the car, then him, and give a little wave.
He immediately restarted his car, put it in reverse, and left. Unbelievable!
—
*Fun fact: after going to the effort of getting a good enough GPA to join NHS, I was proud of myself. I'd had a 3.4 or something and had to do a bit of work to get it up. Made such a stink of how proud I was I even coaxed my folks into showing up. Well, kinda. Dad got up partway through the initiation thing, made a scene about how there were lawns right across the street waiting to be mowed (we did mow a pair of houses across the street from one another), and left. If that's not parental support, I don't know what is.
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