Although I never got very good grades in their classes, I always became friends with my English teachers, especially one Mr. Roesch in my sophomore and junior years in the late 1980s. I still can't diagram a sentence to save my life, but even then I could compose them well enough, and he respected me on that level. We were also both big fans of The Who, and he lent me his vinyl copy of Keith Moon's solo album
Two Sides of the Moon, though he made me promise to keep it hidden from the other students because of
the rather rude picture on the back. He trusted me in a way that he didn't trust any of the other students. (I was hella popular, as you can imagine.)
Mr. Roesch also turned me on to the work of the then-recently deceased novelist Charles Willeford, especially his personal favorite,
Miami Blues. I loved it, and I also greatly dug the movie version, directed by George Armitage, that came out around the same time,
and which Shout! Factory is releasing on Blu-ray on April 28. But it's good stuff even if you don't associate it with your few pleasant memories of high school.
