Preface To Glue: What Is That Delicious Smell?

One day, in 1982, when a certain insensitive American Literature teacher made a certain sensitive schoolboy run out of class in tears, the history of the Trinidad, Texas, Independent School District was changed forever. That crying schoolboy fled to the boy's restroom, where he found a small group of young toughs sniffing airplane glue. Though slight of build & smart, the weeping schoolboy fell in with that crowd, & a series of personal disasters & run-ins with the law surely followed. There was death, disease, unhappiness, hospital visits, & a lot of sex for some reason, & with some rather attractive young women, including one who I swear looked exactly like Phoebe Cates in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. There were fights with parents, clergy, the mean man at the cigar store, even with his closest friends. By the time everyone had given up on that sensitive schoolboy, he was alone in the world, with only one functioning nostril & one last drop in that tube of glue.

But he let that drop go to waste. Determine, still a little fucked up, he pulled himself together that lonely night & turned his life around. It wasn't easy, but since he was a white kid whose parents had been saving money for him for college, it wasn't really all that difficult, either. In any event, his addiction cured, he went to school, determined to make school safe for everyone, but especially sensitive schoolboys with addicitive personalities.

& that sensitive schoolboy turned out to be none other than Dr. Jack Scrawfelter, Superintendent to the TISD! & his first duty: he fired the teacher who had hurt him so!

Interestingly, that teacher, Elmyra Crabtree, was only a few weeks from retiring, but due to a trumped-up charge against her by the superintendent, she was denied a large portion of her retirement, & spent her savings in court challenging the ruling. The judge was a good friend of the Scrawfelter family & also had two kids in the school district, so she basically lost everything when he ruled against her. She now works in the bean section of a school lunchroom in Corsicana.

Let that be a lesson to you, glue sniffers & mean teachers alike! I can make up a story about both, & have the weight of my trumped-up moral make you feel weird! It's true! It's not true! What do you know?