Hellementary. (Part 2)

Now that you've read of my encounters with my very own monstrous Chewbacca lady, I recount on my second hellementary experience-- first grade.  The minor difference: there were two of them.

The first one would paint her eyeshadow on so dark that if she had gotten a black-eye, we wouldn't have noticed.  She was another one of those teachers who liked to wear long, draping, frilly old lady dresses.  So basically she was a walking curtain with two black-eyes and loofa hair.  And a quick, time-bomb temper.

She always appeared to have that cloudy look about her, as if her the color of her eyelids matched her mood or something.  And she never smiled.  When annoyed, she'd squeeze her eyes shut, so that the bruises were clearly exposed, and shake her head s-l-o-w-l-y.  Knowing her, that was pretty often.

Though I don't remember any particular clash I had with her, I remember that made me feel like a fucking idiot quite a few times.  And I also remember that she had a tendency to be forceful.  Very forceful.

One one occasion I had to write a letter to Santa.  The other kids tackled the assignment immediately.  They all knew what they wanted for Christmas.  But I sat there with a face as blank as the paper in front of me.  And she noticed.

The curtains swished in my direction.  Her bruised eyes melted mine.  Suddenly she clenched my pencil-ridden fist in her fist and scrawled on my paper.  Now there was a deformed "DEAR S" at the top.  

And just like that, the time-bomb went off, right in my ear. "WRITE!"

Wanna know the real reason why I couldn't do the assignment?  Because I didn't BELIEVE in Santa!

However, the black-eyed curtain lady was in cahoots with another woman.  Her skills in child debasement was far superior to her own.  Compared to her, she was just an amateur.

This one didn't wear curtains.  Instead she wore leggy streetwalker dresses, and indigo eyeshadow that could make the cheapest-looking women jealous.  What completed her look was her hellish lipstick and matching nails, complimented by a hinge-like creaking voice.

When I first saw her, my initial reaction was that I was entering a witch's classroom, and she would cast a spell on me and make me look like her.

But now that I've been given some years to absorb the image, I now refer to her as the hooker lady. She could easily flirt with sad, lonely bastards by flashing her legs and blinding them with that eyeshadow, then lifting up that short hem and screeching to them in that shrill, nasal voice, "Eh, you wanna date?"

She was a huge fan of the word "outrageous".  That described her perfectly-- outrageous in appearance, outrageously vocal, and outrageously rude.

She was my reading teacher.  A regrettably frequent assignment: Sit down, listen to her read a story like a broken violin, and retell the story on paper.

I remember one of the first stories she ever read-- When the Goose Got Loose by Steven Kellogg.  The story was so damn difficult to follow, and I couldn't ignore those 15-minutes of her shrieking away like that.  The other students proudly fell into their summaries.  By the time recess bell rang, I was still in there with the Playboy of the Month, issue 1998.

She moved me to her front desk so she could see me better.  I struggled to remember that stupid story.  But half a page was all I could squeeze out.  Recess ended.  She click-clacked over to me and shot me with her indigo eyes.  "Write more!" she squawked.

"I can't."
"Why not?  Are you brainless?  Do you have rocks in your head?"

Since I obviously wasn't the smartest six-year-old, my response was, "Yes."

I don't remember exactly how I finished.  I think I actually snuck away that fucking book and copied from it as she taught the other class that came in.  By the time the lunch bell rang, I showed her a fully-written page, and with a sharp wail she let me go.

That night:  "Mom?  What does brainless mean?"

It wasn't until 7 years later when my mother told me what she had learned from a phone call with the school principal. Turns out that Mrs. Black-Eye had been undergoing the effects of menopause and Mrs. Witch-Whore had been in the process of a divorce.  Well, of course!  ANY six-year-old would understand that!

So basically, these were two women who clearly needed to get laid.  And it was only fair for them to take out their sexual deprivation on a bunch of ignorant six-year-olds.  As fucking fair as the O.J. Simpson trial.

Now you know about the wardens of my earliest years of my hellementary incarceration.  The others?  Well, there weren't any very serious cases.  Probably because they had better sex lives.

So my hellementary teacher stories end here.  

I once heard that normally you're not supposed to remember things from when you were 5 or 6.  How I wish that were true.

But I guess that person also forgot that I'm anything but normal.