I'm in a bit of a storytelling mood...
It was the summer of 2001. I had just graduated from Reed. I had just blessedly ended my ill-fated relationship with Simon. I was madly in love with Mark, I knew it, he knew it, but there were several rather large obstacles (like 1500 miles and a long-term girlfriend) standing in the way of realizing that love. Mark and I were best friends/worst enemies, though, and spent hours a day on the phone. My life had fallen down around me, I couldn't find a job, I had no idea who to define myself as if not a student. I was miserable. I lived with Jenny and Natalie and I treated them terribly. The whole situation was bad. I drank more than I should have, I drove when I drank (something I had never done before and have never done since),I engaged in extremly self-destructive behavior, I cut for the first time, I smoked like a chimney...I could go on and on.
At my graduation party, my grandmother very kindly offered me a part-time job teaching basic composition at her school. Teaching two nights a week for eight weeks for $800 didn't sound bad to me, and I certainly had nothing else to do. So I took it. The minute I walked in I knew it was a mistake--my "students" were people going to a washed-up "business" school to get computer credentials. They were all older than me, from a few years to a few decades. They were hard. They didn't want to be there, and, unlike me, they weren't getting paid.
And their writing skills were fucking abysmal.
I fucked up from minute one. I treated them like comrades, I didn't assert any authority. I cursed and told them how stupid and worthless I thought their school was (and it is, but that's besides the point). I taught them nothing (and then graded hard, which is really awful). We left our three hour class 1.5 hours in nearly every time.
And then William started hitting on me. He circled me from the second class. He was tall, Black, sat in the back row, did absolutely nothing but crack jokes during class. Dead fucking sexy. The first time he stayed after class (to "get extra help"_ he showed me the scar where he'd been shot and some of his tattoos. It was all fucking over.
So I started sleeping with one of my students. The sex was good, his stories were great. He'd been a crack dealer back east and moved out west with his brother to get computer skills and "start over." He was clean but drank like a fucking fish. He grew up in an actual ghetto, he'd been stabbed and shot, he had seven tattoos. I was fascinated.
Part of it was about getting Mark to be jealous, which I think worked, to some extent. Part of it was novelty. Part of it was that I was so goddamn sick of being me that I would latch on to anyone who would make me someone else.
So I tried to be someone else. I started listening to Tupac. I wore Nikes with miniskirts and started mimicking some of his speech patterns. I drank more than ever before and didn't think twice about driving, or about riding with William when he'd been drinking. I had a lot of sex and watched a lot of TV. I immersed everything real about me.
And I kept teaching the damn class very very poorly. The rest of the class knew something was up between him and I, but they were chill about it. William and I had agreed to keep it under our hats until the end of the term, but it was pretty obvious.
Then he got kicked out of school, for reasons I am still unclear about, but had nothing to do with me. We continued to "date" for a few more weeks. The novelty wore off, we had a few stupid arguments, we broke up. I saw him once after we broke up (a week or two after, well before Mark moved back to Portland). We got drunk and then went to see "Blow" at the Laurelhurst and had sex in the back row.
Then I went home and realized just how low I'd sunk.
As far as strings of compounding mistakes go, I've made my fair share, but that summer has got to top the list. Embarrassingly, the shit with William wasn't even the most morally reprehensible shit I did. I betrayed my grandmother's trust, I acted in the least professional way possible...everything I did was wrong.
Why I am thinking about that tonight I have no idea, but there it is. It's not a very good story. Mark thinks it is funny that I once-upon-a-time dated a crack dealer, but I don't. I lost myself completely for a while there, everything I believe and stand for. It's one of the scariest things I can ever remember happening, and it was completey my fault.
No moral. I fucked up, I more or less got away with it. I won't do it again.