I worked twenty years in the factories before I reached my outer tolerance for manual labor and willful ignorance. The day I quit, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Write fiction. Which is basically what I had been doing while working in the factories the past two decades. Having reached the conclusion that I was not going to suddenly start getting paid for what I’ve been doing for free all this time, I decided teaching English at the high school level seemed more financially lucrative than social media networking.
I immediately enrolled in the local community college and dived into the challenging curriculum prescribed by the satellite college’s classes. First thing I noticed, the six or seven other students, recent high school graduates, in each class were dumb as shit. I didn’t expect these cats to be conversant in Dostoyevsky, but how the hell you get into your late teens without ever hearing any Bob Dylan?
Before devoting too much of my time and financial aid to writing argumentative essays, I got a job substituting at the local high school. I figured if I were going to devote the rest of my life teaching these willfully ignorant little jackasses about the dactylic hexameter used in the Odyssey, I’d better see if I could stand to be in the same room with them for seven periods. Fortunately, the only criteria needed to become a substitute teacher in Alabama is a background check and the ability to print your name and address in the proper boxes on the application.
On my first day substitute teaching, I watched a kid gnaw on a raw puck of Ramen Noodles, sprinkling beef flavoring on the stiff noodle cake as he chewed. Finishing the meal, he withdrew a debit card from his wallet and gathered the loose flecks of beef powder into a line which he proceeded to snort up his nose as though it were cocaine. The artificial beef flavored pain hit him immediately.
He ran up to the desk behind which I reclined with a copy of J.G. Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company
I gave him the old, benevolent, two finger Pope wave. “Be gone, dumbass.”
Later, I overheard him bragging to a classmate about his 2.2 GPA and how it didn’t concern him any on account of his Meemaw being rich. One of the drawbacks of teaching, I think, is that you can’t physically be present when sometime down the road they epically fail, or Meemaw’s money runs out.
My interactions with the students was relegated to a brief roll call. The school provided each student with an iPad, granting them unfettered access to the internet and an incredible array of games meant to ensure education was kept to a minimum.
I substituted several times when there was absolutely nothing else going on in my life that I couldn’t use as a viable excuse not to go in to work. The kids were well-behaved for the most part. If a class got too rowdy, I would calm them with a prepared speech, explaining how this was the only job I could find which expected nothing more from me than my presence and I wasn’t going to allow a bunch of knuckle-headed teenagers to jeopardize my shot at a fifty-two dollar windfall by acting up and incurring the wrath of the assistant principal.
Most times, it worked. There was this one emo-looking kid who wanted to be a rebel, going so far as to utter the “fuck” word in my vaunted presence. But he was wearing a pink find-a-cure-for-cancer sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and I couldn’t take him seriously. I just reminded him that he would be graduating soon and we lived in the same very small town. No telling when he might find himself out and about, weed-whacking a property for seven dollars an hour, when suddenly the Polish Hammer (me) appears with twin katana swords and a grudge.
My college classes required only slightly more focus than substitute teaching. There were no Ipads, however, the teachers tended to turn a blind eye to the smartphone Google apps during tests or anything else that might bequeath points toward our final grades.
I was well on my way to becoming something other than what I had been when the unthinkable happened. In one of the classes I substituted, a little rat motherfucker Googled my name. Now while I’ve never been convicted of any major crimes, displayed no dick pics to impress the anonymous internet hordes, or behaved in any way detrimental to my loving wife and children, I had, for the last twenty years, written extensively about sex, drugs and violence. And judging by the stories, I was definitely in favor of them. Especially the sex. Certainly the drugs. And mainly the violence. By the end of the school day, I was celebrated primarily as a pornographer.
The school administration learned of my literary bent quickly and decided I couldn’t be trusted around teenagers or Amish women, librarians, female equipment managers, homeless ladies, paranormal investigators, clown groupies, or horny check-out clerks.
The superintendent seemed to believe I should feel some sort of shame for having written a string of stories detailing my erotic adventures among the electrically-challenged. Shame, however, did not exist on my emotional palette.
The fear, it seems, was not that I would bring my lustful ways to the classroom, but I would corrupt the pure morals of the youth with my sordid depictions of what life might be like outside the classroom. When I pointed out the musical theatre department might be guilty of corrupting the youth by churning out enough homosexuals to repopulate Wrigleyville’s North side, I was met with silence. Maybe they never visited Chicago. More than likely, they didn’t care for my derision toward the crown jewel of their school system with unrivaled musical productions of Oklahoma! and Sweeney Todd.
So ended my idea of becoming a high school English teacher. Sitting in my online math class, watching a video of a fella who could be a mass murderer for all I know (didn’t care enough to Google his name) explain the complicated ins and outs of matrix multiplication while I take my tea, I’m left with the same discomforting question. What’s next?
There is an endless list of what I don’t want to do, but not so many entries below the what-to-do-with-my-life heading. There’s a large part of me wants to score an eight ball and snort cocaine all night. The thought of seducing a hairy Amish woman while her husband raises barns also has its charm. A kill crazy rampage following a bank robbery attempt also has a nice ring to it. But mostly I want to write about these things, and, maybe, one day, earn the kind of big money from my literary offerings that substitute teaching once raked in.
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