Walter Rhein Podcast
The Drunk, Loser English Teacher Who Hated Me With Every Fiber of His Being
Beskrivelse
You all make this newsletter happen! I don’t use paywalls because I don’t believe in restricting knowledge. Your sponsorships keep me going and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Or choose from any of these coupons which are good forever: Thanks for your support: 30% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/b66e5c2e] 💙 40% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/01f1b0e8] 💙 50% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/0d3e6643] 💙 60% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/6a8f4788] Grady told me about Mr. Ambrose. He had him for forensics. I didn’t take forensics because I despised school. I wasn’t about to sign up for any activity that forced me to linger around that loathsome place. I wanted to go home, watch Transformers or Thundarr, read books, and talk to the dog. But Grady took forensics and he was good at it, good enough to go to state. State was an overnight trip. Grady told me how they’d all stayed in a hotel and somebody set off the fire alarm at 2 am. Knowing Grady, it was probably Grady, but he didn’t admit it. Though his eyes twinkled when he told the story. The whole class assembled in the parking lot and as they awaited the arrival of the fire trucks, Mr. Ambrose came stumbling out of the hotel. He had a body like a bowling pin. He was all disheveled and clearly drunk. He found his students, pointed at them, and gurgled, “Go back inside, go to bed.” Then he turned around and returned to the presumably burning building. Grady could only laugh as he told this story. Anyway, the firemen eventually put the building out, Mr. Ambrose slept through it, and the kids went back inside. I don’t remember how well Grady did at state. It was probably pretty well, he was good at things like that. Mr. Ambrose was either our 10th or 11th grade English teacher. I can’t remember which, though I do remember I was coming into my power in that class. I also remember that Mr. Ambrose hated me from day one, probably because I was challenging him. Damn right I was challenging him. I was challenging him to be a better teacher. Long ago I’d given up on waiting for some a*****e authority figure to dictate how I should feel about myself. If they wanted to hold me to a standard, I’d damn well do the same thing for them. “Teach us Mr. Ambrose!” I scowled. “How dare you!” he replied. We did this through hostile staring matches. Teachers could never punish me because my rebellion came in the form of demanding that they actually do their job. “Let’s have harder books! Let’s have more challenging lessons! Show us what you got!” Of course, I was about the only one in the class that cared about my grade, so when the teachers tried to get me by making the exams harder, it just proved the gap that existed between me and the other students. Well, everyone but Grady, that guy was a savant, especially at math. I couldn’t touch him at math. He went on to get put in charge of the missile defense of the entire Western seaboard, I’m not joking. One time Mr. Ambrose forced us all to bring in a story to read. That was no problem at all for me because I could read. But some of the other students were terrified. I remember a couple of the boys from the football team brought in Dr. Seuss. They thought it was hilarious to read ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ They did their best to laugh all the way through, but I could tell that even they were bored at the end. I brought in a selection from ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ by Douglas Adams. It was the part where they find a horse in the bathroom. I got the class to pay attention, they even laughed at the discovery of the horse. I was good at reading, I did things like add in dramatic pauses and change the volume of my voice. All of that really pissed off Mr. Ambrose, probably because he couldn’t get the class to listen to any of the s**t he tried to read. After that, I stopped trying. If he was going to be a jerk, I’d be a jerk too. I’d tried passive defiance, let’s see how he’d like open defiance. The next assignment was to give a lecture on directions. Most of the students decided to explain how to get to their houses. “Go down state street, take a left onto Elm street, then take a right on Pine street, go until you find house 126 on the left.” Yawn. “Walter; it’s your turn,” Mr. Ambrose said. I sauntered up to the front of the class, grabbed a piece of chalk, drew a big circle. “This is the Earth,” I said. A few people giggled. “Walter, what are you doing?” “I’m going to tell you how to get to the moon,” I said. Mr. Ambrose’s eyes narrowed. Screw him. “Here’s the moon,” I said. “It’s far away. We’re here.” I tapped the circle with the chalk. “Now, the key is that you have to achieve escape velocity, that’s how you escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. Once you get approximately halfway to the moon, you can rely on the moon’s gravitational pull to assist in the completion of the journey.” Once again the class was actually engaged with my talk. Once again it only appeared to be defiant. I actually fulfilled every parameter of the assignment. There was no parameter that stated the lecture had to be boring and miserable and everyone in the class had to hate it. Mr. Ambrose just added that in himself, probably because he was irritated he was required to be sober when he taught. Screw him. For the most part, he just sat in the back of the room like a toadstool. He looked like Gargamel from the Smurfs. He had a big round red nose like W.C. Fields. “For your next assignment,” he said, “I want you to write a short story.” What was with these assignments? Did he have some big book of random English assignments for indifferent teachers who’d rather be drunk? I didn’t mind having to write a story. I’d already had a story published in the High School Writer. I was the first kid in my class to get a story published there, though a few of them followed me. Writing a story was no big deal. The jerk wanted a story, fine, I’d give him a story. I got to work. I can’t remember if I wrote the story by hand, or if I just composed it on the typewriter. I probably wrote it by hand. Yes, this was in the era of computers, but the printers were garbage back then. They were dot matrix and you had to buy this special paper with holes in the sides so that the machine could feed it through. It was ridiculous. My father had this fancy typewriter made by IBM. It was jet black and so solid you could tell it must have been super expensive. It didn’t have those little teeth that left the imprints of each letter and which could get jammed up against each other. This one had a ball with all the letters on it. When you hit a key, it whirled around and hit the paper so fast you could barely see it. There were no jams. The best part was turning it on, it just sat there humming like it was gathering up electricity to launch a lighting strike like a wizard. Really, this assignment just gave me an excuse to use that bad ass typewriter. To be honest, I did a pretty crappy job of typing the story out. I made all kinds of mistakes and I wasn’t very good at using the white out. Plus, the white out I had was a different color than the paper. For some reason I had this weird yellow paper. Every time I made a mistake, I blotted out the mistake, but then I couldn’t get the paper back to where it had been so the line of letters was off. It looked awful. But no matter how awful the typing was, it was a million times better than my horrific handwriting. The only person who could read my handwriting was Grady. Not even I can read my handwriting. He probably would have been willing to go over to Mr. Ambrose’s house and read him my composition as long as the two of them could have gotten drunk together, but I wasn’t about to subject Grady to that. Besides, firing up that typewriter was like the writer equivalent of taking out a sports car for a joyride. Only writers understand why that last line is funny. I finished my story and turned it in. In those days, we turned in our assignments by handing them to the person in front of us who then passed it forward. He looked at my offering and said, “You typed it?” “Yeah.” “Why?” “Because I can type faster than I can write.” This was the kid who had thought it was so funny to read Dr. Seuss so I wasn’t worried about him saying anything clever. I stared him down, he shut up, and I went about my day. I knew the story was pretty good. I wasn’t worried about my grade. I knew the grade I deserved, the only thing that remained to be seen was whether Mr. Ambrose was smart enough to figure it out. A few days passed. Back then, life was a constant battle. Every day as I walked through the halls, I had to fend off all sorts of physical attacks. You had to keep an eye out for flying books or sucker punches or straight up puddles of urine on the floor. The guy who read Dr. Seuss thought it was funny to piss everywhere. I swear to god. I went to school with animals. The bell rang and I was walking down the hallway. I never ran. Screw those classes, I’d get there when I got there. I wasn’t about to sacrifice my dignity. Funny enough, I never was sent to detention the whole time I was in school. I think I graduated with only two or three demerits. Anyway, I was walking along and what do I see but Mr. Ambrose approaching me like an animated fungus drifting among the lockers. It was always dark in there, like you were looking at the world from beneath the level of the fern leaves. He saw me, semi hesitated, then continued forward. I tried not to make eye contact because screw that guy, but I tensed as I walked up because you never knew if you were about to be drawn in to a fight to the death. Perhaps this would be the moment Mr. Ambrose finally cracked and tackled you like a jungle panther. That kind of thing was known to happen. But it was quiet enough as he went by, his shoulder not quite brushing mine as we mutually pretended the other didn’t exist. I was about to relax when I sensed him stop and all at once I was on full alert again. He turned. “Walter,” he said. “God damn it,” I thought. “If this f****r wants to start some s**t I swear to god…” I looked at him, “Yes.” “Your story... ” he stuttered, then he paused. I watched his face wage a war between dozens of contrasting emotions. Finally he continued. “Your story was really good.” There was an awkward moment. I might have said thank you, or I might have just nodded at him. Then he awkwardly turned and walked away. I walked away too. I didn’t need him to tell me that the story was good. I knew I was a good damned writer. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that. What surprised me was that he would admit it. That was something new. Having somebody actually acknowledge that I’d done something well was a new experience. Why had he said that? I wonder if he’d had some sort of realization. I wonder if some part of his brain that hated everything about his life had made him aware that I was exactly the type of student he’d wished for all his life as a teacher. Perhaps if it had been a classroom full of students like me on his first day, he wouldn’t have turned into a miserable, raging, self-loathing drunk. Yet, he’d done nothing but fight with me for the whole year. After that, it got better. I got an A on my paper, but like I said, that was a reflection on Ambrose not of me. There’s nobody alive who I concede the authority to evaluate my work. Who the hell do those people think they are? The arrogance. I know what’s good. We didn’t become friends, but he stopped glaring at me. Maybe he figured out that if you let on you actually cared about learning it became a death sentence in that school. He got through it with drinking. I got through it with sarcasm. We came to a grudging understanding of each other. When somebody who likes you tells you you’re a good writer, it’s a good feeling. When somebody who hates you acknowledges your talent, the feeling is more complex. First you wonder if they’re messing with you. Then you kind of feel pity for them. Then I guess I don’t know what you feel. That was the first time I encountered that situation. I knew Mr. Ambrose was being honest because his words cost him something. Perhaps, in that moment of uncertainty in the hallway, he realized it would cost him more to remain silent. That might have been my first sincere compliment. I remember it. Thanks! Or choose from any of these coupons which are good forever: Thanks for your support: 30% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/b66e5c2e] 💙 40% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/01f1b0e8] 💙 50% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/0d3e6643] 💙 60% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/6a8f4788] I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe [https://walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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