Читать книгу Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults) - Michael N Marcus - Страница 11

When my best friend, Howie Shrobe, learned that my junior-year English teacher was Bertha K. Frehse (appropriately her last name rhymes with “crazy”), he told me that his mother and brother were in her classes previously, and that Frehse was NUTS then and NUTS now.

“Crazy Frazy” had day-glow complexion, and orange hair like Clarabell the clown on Howdy Doody. She had been torturing students for decades before it was my turn to be a victim.

It was alleged that she had held onto her job despite countless criticisms because she provided excellent investment advice to the school principal. Apparently Frehse and the principal bought Texas Gulf Sulphur just before a big spike in the share price.

Frehse was crazy about (among other things) cats.

Her house was filled with long-clawed felines that hissed and leaped from floor to furniture to the shoulders of unfortunate visitors. Her classroom was filled with pictures of cats. Frehse even purred like a damned cat.

When she wasn’t purring, this teacher of English frequently talked baby-talk.

Favored cats, and favored students, were called “foofums.” Frehse rewarded the most favored human foofums by showing them cat books, page by interminable page.

When she wanted to point out something that impressed her, she’d murmur like a two-year-old, “Saaay, look uh nat.”

When she was enthusiastic about a book with words, not just pictures, she’d tell us that she’d “crawl barefoot on bloody stumps over broken glass” to read it. She had a very strange obsession with the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga, and often read about it and talked about it.

Hillhouse High School had a central courtyard with a few benches, bushes and scraggly trees. One tree, the foof-tree, was favored by Frehse. A lot of our class time was spent looking at, and at Frehse’s command, waving and purring at and talking to the damned tree.

Frehse punished some students by commanding them to water the foof-tree. Some students kissed Frehse’s ass by voluntarily watering the foof-tree. Many students wanted to chop down or burn down the fucking foof-tree.

We never knew what to expect when we entered foof-land.

Sometimes as we marched in, a student would be pinched on the shoulder and commanded to go to the blackboard and “write ten beautiful words,” or “write 200 words about tobogganing,” or “explain why striped cats are superior to spotted dogs” or “list 500 reasons why Elvis should be president.”

Our English teacher used her classroom power to defend “The King” from showbiz competition. Frehse once caught a girl with a picture of singer Pat Boone in her notebook, and gave her double F’s on a homework assignment. The quick-thinking girl instantly flipped the page to reveal a picture of Elvis, and the lunatic changed her mark from abject failure to double A’s.

One time, a class was ordered to write 500 words on “how Capri pants have been the downfall of western civilization.” (Girls couldn’t wear pants to our school.)

As we sat at our desks writing either ludicrous compositions or serious exams, Frehse would scurry around, purring like a damned cat, and sticking a pin into our arms and shoulders. Fortunately, this was before HIV.

One regular classroom activity was centered on a grammar workbook developed at Manter Hall School in Massachusetts.

Frehse’s “Manter Hall Day” was like a perverted TV game show, and could have been invented by Monty Hall—or Monty Python.

One third of the class would be seated in chairs spread in an arc across the front of the room, with titles like Number Boy, Card Girl, Question Girl, and Third Assistant Alternate Score Keeper. They administered the quiz to the rest of the class.

Frehse was emcee, seated in the middle of the stage.

She’d shout “Number Boy!,” “Card Girl!,” and so on; and if any Vanna White prototype missed a cue, she lost the job and joined the less-lucky classmates who had to answer the questions.

The only relief was to sneak into Frehse’s room, and steal the card with your name on it. Yes, I confess that I did it. I was also half of a two-man commando team that stole the door knocker from her house. Alan Disler was the other half.

Our exploit was too good a story to keep to ourselves, and we could not resist displaying our shiny trophy at school. Word traveled fast and we were quickly confronted by the indignant cat lady. We went back to her house and replaced the knocker. At least we weren’t arrested.

Getting a bad mark from Frehse was no reason to be upset, unless you wanted to satisfy your parents or get into college.

In a strange effort to make failures feel better, she claimed that “an F is the mark of true genius,” and often said, “I only flunk my brightest students.” Unfortunately, very few college admissions officers knew that Frehse’s F was the equivalent of another teacher’s A.

The girl who got double F’s for liking Pat Boone must have been a future Nobel Prize winner.

Frehse lost an exam of mine during the first marking period. Despite contrary attendance documentation, she accused me of playing hooky that day and failed me for several months’ work.

The next term I earned an apparently indisputable A average, but Frehse gave me a C.

The orange-haired cat lady said that she knew I deserved an A, but it was “too great a jump to go from an F to an A,” so I was stuck with the mediocre C.

This was during our vital junior year in high school, when our marks would affect college admissions and influence the course of the rest of our lives.

In my yearbook, the crazy cat lady wrote that I was “a wonderful person,” and maybe I should be pleased that I had an F on my report card to prove that I was one of her brightest students.

One even brighter Frehse failure skipped a couple of grades and went to Yale.