BILL CADY Word Count: 149,227 - At My Friend's Place

Bill Cady, The Early Years … by Bill Cady 79
need for it. Just in school, because I couldn‟t manage to learn it and I was on a college
prep program.
Algebra‟s a class where, if you get each item down cold, in order, you‟ll do okay.
However, if you learn points A, B, C, D, don‟t quite get E, and still try going ahead with
it, you‟ve got a lost cause. You can‟t learn the next one without knowing the last part. I
missed a few parts, it seems. I ended up taking Algebra One four times, three of those
times at other schools.
Miss Fowler was probably new to teaching. I was fifteen, interested as hell in
girls, but not in Miss Fowler. She was the kind of woman who‟d be a rather versatile
date. If you took her to a dog fight, she stood a good chance of winning. She had two
pop bottle bottoms as glasses. She couldn‟t see shit if it was in her hand. She‟d just
wonder what all that gooey stuff was until she smelled it.
A tall woman, over five-ten, she had long, frizzy, dark brown hair and was a good
thirty pounds overweight. I assumed her face caught fire once when she was young and,
glasses burnt up, she ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. She must‟ve wiped her face
back and forth to put out the flames. It was red and scarred.
I felt I was on solid ground with my diagnosis.
The first day of class she gave us our assigned seats. What‟s up with this
bullshit?, we wondered. Assigned seats? When we‟re in the ninth grade? Okay, we
were “mere freshmen”, but why the hell do we need assigned seats? We aren‟t little
kids?
It didn‟t take us too long to figure it out. If a student in the first row stood, Miss
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