The problem with not knowing the truth is that your imagination might run wild.
You know, like “Girls Gone Wild” wild…
It was like a moment straight from the Oprah Winfrey show: “You get a car! You get a car! And you get a car–everybody gets a car!!!”
You remember that, right? Here, let me refresh your memory:
Yeah, except, instead of “cars” everyone in Rolla High School’s Sophomore1…or was it my Freshman year? Computer/Typing class was getting letters from their very own pen pal. But not from any old boring place like Kansas, though—we got hooked up with a sister class from Apopka High School–that’s in Apopka, Florida, my friends!
And, instead of “Oprah Winfrey”, it was good ol’ Mrs. Hansen handing them out. You remember Mrs. Hansen right? The teacher who once accused me of “murdering a baked potato“? Yeah. Her.
And, instead of “everybody” it was “everybody…except you.” As you might have guessed, that “you” here was spoken directly at me. Yeah. Me.
“Oh, boy!” I thought, “Maybe I’m so special that I get to have two pen pals!”
“So…I’m not getting a letter because I’m getting a couple of letters, right, Mrs. H.?” That was simply the only logical explanation.
“Uh…no. Well, I actually have a letter for you…”
I could tell she was searching for the right way to let me down gently.
“…I just can’t…um…give you the letter.”
I took a moment to try to figure out what in the tarnation2That’s Kansas for “the f*ck”. she was going on about.
Taking my blank stare and trembling lower lip as her cue, Mrs. H pressed forward.
“Your pen pal? Well, she wrote some inappropriate stuff…”
Hmmph. That was odd. What could this person that I didn’t even know have to say that was too much for a 15-year-old to handle?
“Surely you could give me a censored version, right? No need to leave me out in the cold here.”
“No…It was bad. Like, real bad.”
“Seriously, I don’t mind a redacted version. I’ve been so looking forward to having a pen pal–it’s been a childhood dream of mine.”
In the Five Stages of Grief, I was squarely in the Bargaining Stage. I couldn’t let this dream die so easily.
“That’s physically impossible…there would be nothing left after censorship…”
“Just a tiny hint? Please oh–“
“I SAID I CAN’T.”
Whoa. Mrs. H. wasn’t messing around.
“Please oh please?” I whispered meekly with a tear forming in my eye.
“Look, I hate to use foul language in the classroom, but I can’t seem to get my point across to you: she straight-up wrote some nasty sh*t.3Okay, I don’t think she actually said ‘sh*t’ in the classroom. But I very distinctly remember her using the term ‘nasty’. There. I said it. Now end of discussion…”
“The Great Nasty Sh*t Mystery of 1996.” To this very day it haunts me, taunting me even unto my deathbed, forever depriving me of true closure in this lifetime.
WHAT DID SHE WRITE?!? Mrs. H. was so steadfast in “protecting” me–or whatever favor she thought she was doing me–that I was I never able to get even the slightest of clues out of her.
But instead of protecting me, she only left me with an unsolvable puzzle that would go on to slowly eat away at my sanity well into adulthood and beyond. And this is all on top of adding to my long history of childhood trauma in which I was left out yet again (that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms entirely, and beyond the scope of this text, though).
Why would she do that to me? Now I’m left to forever wonder: “I may never know the exact details of that Nasty Sh*t, nay and alas, I’ll never even know the broad nature of those loathsome and despicable words sent slowly in my general direction through the old-fashioned snail mail.”
So my first assumption was that my pen pal was just foul-mouthed–you know, kinda like me, sprinkling an NC-17 word in here or there to liven things up a little and more fully express one’s self. Nothing like an occasional f-bomb to drive your point home, amiright?
I wouldn’t even minded it if she had called me a “melon-farmer“, as we all know that can also be used as a term of endearment.
But the main problem with this theory is it seems like there would have been at least some redeemable text that could have survived the censors and been passed on to me…pitiful ol’ little me…
Then there’s the idea that she was just being hateful and rude. You know, insulting my mom’s weight, farting in my general direction, calling me a cousin-loving hillbilly, telling me to kill myself. Stuff like that. Uncalled for, yes, but unimaginable? No, that is very well within the capabilities of a 15 or 16 year old girl (one with a whole litany issues, admittedly).
At the time, I had one other idea of what she might have written, and I’ll get to that in a second. First, though, I confess that only within the last year or two another possibility crossed my mind: absolute and unabashed racism.
I was (am) just a honky from Kansas after all. She? She was from the cosmopolitan metropolis of the Greater Central Florida area. If she was perhaps, say, a young woman of color, it is very possible that she had experienced enough racial trauma in her young life that she could have seen me as an anonymous outlet for her righteous anger at a very broken system that favors “people like me” at the expense of people like her.
“You cracker-ass mother ----- , putting ghosts to shame with your whiteness! Where’s my reparations, you patriarchal boot-licking he- ----- ?!?”
Ya know, your standard Caucasian-based racial slurs, combined with historic-grievance-based justified rage. Run-of-the-mill stuff, actaully.
The other hypothesis that I came up with back then was that, given that my pen pal was a she/her, perhaps…perhaps it was nasty in a, uh…”sensual context”. I mean, she was from Florida, the birthplace and world capital of erotic 1-900 phone numbers in the 90’s…it’s not that outlandish of an idea.
This is both one of my favorite and most feared scenarios I was able to fathom at the time. On one hand, can you imagine being the one to discover it?
Editor’s note: Mom, you might want to skip this next paragraph.
I chuckled very heartily at the thought of Mrs. H. getting blindsided when reading such classic lines as: “Then I’ll slide off my panties…the panties my mother laid out for me,“4 “Boy, Ima suck your ----- so ----- hard your brains gonna come out my nostrils,” and “Oooh, baby, just your fist? Honey, no. You ain’t stopping until you’re elbows-deep…”
You know, standard naughty-talk.
On the other hand…you can imagine how tortuous it would have been for a 15-year-old hormone-driven youth such as myself to know–or at least suspect–that such a letter existed, literally with my name on it, and to know that I would never be able to see it.
There’s only way to express my hypothetical suffering and woe:
Indeed, folks, the true tragedy here is not an exploding hydrogen-filled floating sea mammal, but that I–no, we–we will never know what was in that letter. We’ll never know what warranted a public school teacher to say, aloud, in class, to a student, “…that was some nasty-ass sh*t…”
“Oh, can you just imagine the look on our girls’ faces when we tell them ‘We’re going to Disney World!’???”
“Pffttt! No way, Jose! Disney is for suckers who like to be parted with their monies. The only reason we even went to Disney Land last time was because, on account of my cleverness and shear will to not accept the status quo, we were able to do it for 10% the price of what it would cost your everyday chump.”
“…plus, I hear the Disney World–you know, the one in Florida–is way better than California’s Disney Land…”
Something the Boss Lady just said snapped me back to full attention:
“Wait…Florida you say?”
*checks map*
*Double-checks map*
“Wait, what are you doing in the middle of our conv–“
“LAY OFF ME, I’M BOOKING OUR PLANE TICKETS!”
The point of the story is, before you go and drop a sizable sum of money on a Disney World vacation because you’re using it as an excuse to hunt down4Auntie Amelia, this is how this post relates to the Spanish laptop post, otherwise you’ll be wondering where part 2 was until the day you die. a retired teacher of your long-lost foul-mouthed pen pal, you might want to step back and think this one through.
Young Grasshopper, the Knowledge You Seek isn’t to be found in some far-off exotic swampland called “Florida”. Nay the Knowledge may actually lie closer to home…
*Ahem*
Mrs. Hanson, if you’re reading this, I’m begging you PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE–tell me what my penpal wrote to me. I’m a grown-ass adult now. I swear I can handle the truth. No matter how nasty it may be…
Content created on: 17 March 2022 (Thursday)
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