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I was going to name this Me and the English Teacher, but I did Me and the Math Teacher so... I was in Adult Ed and it was all pretty easy (except the math part), by the second or third week i was spending lunchtime correcting papers for the Social Studies teacher. There was a class that was supposed to be Economics which was pairing up and picking stocks to track... something I was interested in anyway, so everybody wanted to be my partner. Yup is was all going pretty good until I fucked up.

There was a class in English Literature taught by this hippie chick named Marlena. Basically it was reading short stories and writing a short synopsis about the story. This was going really good too UNTIL Jack London reared his ugly head! I hate Jack London! For one thing every one of his stories takes place in the frozen tundra where no sane person would go anyways. This particular story, To Light a Fire, or something like that, was about an idiot who gets stuck in a blizzard with one match. Who cares??? He's a fucking idiot, he deserves to freeze to death... what's he doing in the middle of the woods with no matches? What's he doing there in the first place?

So I beg Marlena, "please don't make me read Jack London. I'll read anything else... I'll read four stories, just not Jack London."

"But he's a really good writer," she says.

"I never said he wasn't," I told her and I voiced my previous objection.

"Well," she says, "I think you should read the story."

Here's where I really fucked up. "He sucks," I tell her, "I write better than he does." That was it!

"Oh, you write?" she asks.

"Oh yeah," I tell her.

"Why don't you bring in some of your stories and we'll talk about it."

Well, I was fucked! Of course I didn't have any stories to bring in... it was the old open mouth, insert foot syndrome. What could I do? I went home got my wife's old typewriter out from under the bed and went to work. I was up half the night cranking out stories. I think it was three or four. I only remember one, it was called A Case of Mistaken Identity, about some rich guy who's in the Middle East on business and gets captured by some radicals who think he's some James Bond type guy. They torture and kill his chauffeur and torture him before he finally escapes. I go in the next day and turn them in. Marlena reads them and says they're really good and wants to send them to her friend at Central Michigan. I figure, what the fuck, I don't want them.

About two weeks later I get a letter from this professor who teaches Creative Writing saying... you should really come to school here, you'd be a great addition to our department, blah, blah, blah. So I got my GED, sent in an application and bang! Just like that. I went for an interview with the admissions officer, a really cool black guy who was into mutual funds. CGM out of Boston had just come out and was starting to skyrocket so I told the guy about it. Long story short... I was in. I asked about taking a test or something and the guy said: "I think you'll do just fine." Now I have my MA so I guess he was right. And that's how The Kid got into college!


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