Marked Soda Cans

In “Impossible Altruism” I alluded to future posts regarding one of my regrets. This is one of those posts. Ms. N, or Señora N, was my Spanish I teacher sophomore year. We were required to take two years of foreign language classes. Bonham High School only offered Spanish, so Spanish it was. Ms. N taught Spanish I while Mr. G taught Spanish II (he may be the subject of another future post, stay tuned, it's absolutely scandalous!)

In Spanish I we watched a Mexican telenovella, Tijuana Toads cartoons and played Spanish word bingo. I never really learned how to conjugate verbs very well. I certainly learned a few words here and there, but my Spanish was never great. It's worse than my pathetic German. Her teaching was fine I suppose, I was just dense and never did any studying.

These guys taught us important lessons on Mexican culture.
https://www.hulu.com/tijuana-toads

There was a popular rumor around that Ms. N was a drunk. She always had a diet coke can on her desk that she drunk out of. Allegedly somebody marked on the bottom of the can with a sharpie marker. Apparently she drank out of that same exact can the whole semester. In hindsight this sounds ridiculous. Surely there are more...hygienic ways to sneak alcohol to school and drink it without getting caught. It sounded believable at the time though.

Ryder, one of my classmates that sat next to me claimed that he saw her at La Mesa Mexican restaurant in Sherman, Texas and she was drunk. Stumbling and slurring in the middle of the day. I never had experience with Ryder as a liar, but maybe he embellished this a little bit. I mean, public intoxication is a crime and servers aren't supposed to over serve. But it fit the narrative and we all took it as fact.

Ms. N missed work and we were taught by substitute teachers on a handful of Mondays. That was the clincher. Ms. N was definitely a drunk in our eyes. This made her the subject of whispers and jokes. I took part in these activities.

Toward the end of the school year we were told that we were getting new Spanish text books. To me this meant our books were garbage. The schools were going to dump them, throw them away. It was a green light for one of my real regrets.

I began drawing and writing jokes in my text book. I would show Ryder and a couple classmates and they'd giggle. This encouraged me. They weren't responsible, not saying that. They never told me to do it. Never said to keep it up. I craved their attention, affirmation and laughter. I would draw stick figures holding bottles with X's on the label. I'd caption things like, “Señora N on a Friday night.” and I did this a lot. I grafitti'd the hell out of the pages. The end of the year came and we turned in our books and that was it.

Part-way though the first semester of my Junior year Ms. N saw me in the hall and told me that when I had time, she wanted to speak to me. Oh crap. I hadn't thought about the cartoons I drew until that moment. It had been like six months since we turned our books in, but what else could it have been? Shame on me. I, more than just about anyone in my school,knew that addiction was a crushing thing. It envelopes the soul and cripples your will. Despite shame and possibly a hope to overcome, it cripples you. It hurts your loved ones. Ms. N may or may not have been an alcoholic, but that was none of my business. She was clearly functioning and I don't think it affected her work in a negative way, other than maybe missing a few days of work a year.

And for her to see that written in books. Books her superiors or co-workers my have looked through. To see what a student thought of her. That would have been devastating. I was scared, I had been caught, but deeply ashamed for what I had done to a fellow human. It was a dirt bag thing to do. I always pretended to be a good person, but this was evidence that I was a fraud.

I never had that meeting with Ms. N. I avoided her and then got sick from appendicitis . I missed so much school, rumors were spread that I nearly died. The next semester, following another surgery, I walked the halls having forgotten Ms. N's request for an audience. One day she flagged me down and told me she heard I had gotten sick. She was happy I was back at school and getting better. She didn't mention my lack of balls to meet her. She had shown me grace. I had truly harmed and insulted her and she had the character to wish me well and let it go. If she had an addiction problem, I pray that she conquered it and was blessed with good health and students that did not besmirch her name.

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The original selfie. 1999

If I had to pick a single song to represent this post it would be...