It all started with me having to take English 1113 at the Junior College. I know your not supposed to start your story with "it". Mr. Chastain, my teacher made that pretty well clear, but I don’t really know how else to get going. In fact, that’s how this hole mess got started. I turned in my first paper, which I thought was pretty good stuff but, Chastain has other ideas. Anyways, I wanted to write a kind of mystery where somebody got killed and all, but when I got back my paper it was covered with green ink.

Mr. Chastain uses green ink to make us feel better about allthe mistakes we made. he said, "I don’t want you to think I bled over your mispellings and split infinitives, so I don’t use red ink!" He said it real cute like, but this other student told me he says the same thing every year, so its like an old joke.

My first sentence of my first paper started out, "It was me or him"! I wanted to make it real dramatic, start off with a bang, and finish up with a kind of twist at the end. All I started off with was green ink. Chastain circled "It" and wrote about 14 lines about how weak pronouns were and how you should never start a sentence with one if you could possibly help it. He underlined "was", but all he said there was, "Weak verb". Then he had little arrows to show I should switch "me" and "him". After that he added another paragraph about predicate something or other, but that pretty well went over my head. I had 4 pages of writing all toll, and I guess there was about a dozen words he didn’t mark. I think he wrote more than me.

Since he was the teacher, I guess its okay, but I got the idea he never even read the story part. That kind of hacked me off but, the real clincher was what he said at the end of the paper. I want to quote it so you can see how big a jerk he really was - "I cannot grade your work until you employ standard English usage. Please rewrite your composition and deliver it to my office." That was all in green ink I guess to make me feel better about being a total loser in his class.

Anyways, I went by to see Mr. Chastain in his office. His door had cartoons on it that he cut out of some magazine, and none of them made any sense. I guess that proved he was very intellectual(?!) Since I set in the back of the class room, I hadn’t ever been that close to him. But setting there in the office, up close and personal as they say, I could see what a wimp he was. His hands were very soft looking and probably hadn’t ever held on to anything rougher than a green pen. He was soft around the middle to and, his fair was turning grey.

"Mr. Martin", he said to me. "I wonder if you might benefit more from English 1003, than my class. After looking at your writing, I think you could use more work on fundamentals right now. The school will let you change classes with no penalty since the semester is young. What do you think"?

The hole time he was twirling his green pen. Kind of taunting me with it. "You know I won’t get credit for the class. I don’t think my paper was so bad if you just read it instead of marking all over it." I was thinking it was a pretty neat trick to say "read it" because it sounds like "red" even though he uses green ink for marking. I was going to point that out to him and show him how I really could think and how I wasn’t just a lame-brain. I was also going to tell him I took my paper to my old teacher where I graduated High school, and she thought it was good too. she didn’t really have a very high opinion of some college teachers, them being kind of stuck up and over educated.

I wanted to talk about my story too, I was going to tell him about how my main guy gets caught up in the heat of the situation and lashes out even though he doesn’t really mean to. I was even going to tell him how that idea popped into my head when we read "Billy Bud" in High School and how I had been thinking it would make a good story in kind of a modern sitting. I did something like that in my english class in High School and ole Mrs. Dupont really like it. She said I had talent and gave me a A for my paper which brought my average up to a 82 for the whole class.

But every time I got a word started toward mister Chastain - he pointed out some stupid mistake I made on my paper. He even found some more which he hadn’t noticed the first time. I was just kind of popping out little bits of words and, everytime I started, he’d say, "This is a fragment". "This is a run-on". "The word ‘everyone’ is singular, so your pronoun has to be ‘his’ not theirs’". "Avoid all forms of ‘to be’". Each and everytime he showed me another problem, he’d add more green ink with his soft little hand.

I started getting seasick from all that green and, my head started pounding. Mr. Chastain’s pudgy little face was right in my face and he kept pointing to his latest green mark. "Don’t you see, Mr. Martin? Don’t you see"? All I could see was his face. I felt like I was smothering. I couldn’t get any air until all of the sudden I pushed him away and jumped out of my chair. I closed my eyes and was finally able to breath.

I kept waiting for him to yell at me or throw me out of his office, but everything was quiet in a funny kind of way. When I opened my eyes again, Mr. Chastain was laid out on the floor, clutching his green pen which somehow got stuck in his chest when I jumped up.

A faint "help" gurgled from his lips as red stain flowed beneath the green ink splashed across his shirt. "Now there’s some strong verbs", I thought, as I closed the door and left.