Arnie Grape graduate!

I've been meaning to post the story of the Valedictorian of the City University of New York.

This weird looking girl was in my English class last semester. The first day her eye was all bloody--like, it was red where it was it should have been white. She asked me a question, and I couldn't look at her because it was so gory. It was gross, dude.

Most of the time she was pretty quiet, but it quickly became apparent that she had some sort of disability. Her walking was sometimes a little like lurching. She started occasionally raising her hand in class, and commenting on the books we were reading. Her voice was, well, retarded. It became clear once she starting speaking that she had some sort of 'challenge,' like, multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy. I mean, that was just my guess.

By the end of the class she was one of the top students, despite the fact that it was clear that she wasn't reading the material, and her contributions to the class were off-topic and hard to understand.

In fact, I heard her telling the teacher that she was going to be the senior class's valedictorian, and would be giving the keynote speech at commencement.

When my little friends and I heard this we couldn't believe it. This girl was being made valedictorian of the class primarily because she was handicapped. On some levels, cool, but the part of me that had to listen to her slurred babble about her high school experiences during class was annoyed.

About a week later, she lurched into class and sat next to me. 'This class sucks,' she spluttered in her Corkey-esque way.

'Why yes, it does,' I agreed.

'The teacher sucks!' This time, she sounded more like Geri from 'I'm not drunk I have Cerebral Palsy' Facts of Life fame.

I told her that I thought the suckage of the class lay less with the quality of the teaching, and more with the fact that no one in the class bothered to do the reading.

She got PISSED, Arnie Grape-style. She hit me with her copy of 'Villette' and told me that she usually does her reading, but it was when she leaned in to tell me that 'reading sucks,' that I smelled the alcohol on her breath.

I watched her the entire class the next time the class met. Her handwriting was similar to that of my grandfather, or the guy in 'My Left Foot'. What was noteworthy, however, was as she flipped through her notebook some pages were in perfect cursive, and others were like what I just described. As she leaned towards me I smelled the alcohol on her breath again, and within 15 minutes she had pulled out a prescription bottle of pills, dumped them on her desk and started counting. Once she was done, she did it again. And again. When she was positive she had ascertained the correct amount of narcotics she had in her possession, she took a handfull and proceeded to count the contents of her wallet. Three times.

Around this time I finally realized that this girl was not handicapped or disabled, she was a fucking drunk. The City University of New York had made this girl the class valedictorian in a failed bid to promote some sort of demented equality within its ranks, but the chance of her delivering a decent speech was overshadowed by the likelihood that she would puke on the podium or pull her skirt over her head, ala Ruca.

And that, my friends is the story of the Valedictorian of the City University of New York.