When I was midway through college, I dropped out for a year and then transferred to another school: I transferred from a school that did not have a foreign language requirement to a school that did have a foreign language requirement. I could test out of the foreign language requirement, have it waived, but at that time, rusty from my four years away from high-school Spanish, I had little realistic hope of doing so. So I signed up for Professor G_______’s summer class.

Everyone knew that Professor G_______ was a rampaging lunatic, a Cuban out of control. In his class, none of us learned a word of useful Spanish, but he expounded at great length on mythological monsters and his hypothesis that poor people’s flatulence smells differently from that of rich people; to this day, I can barely navigate a Hispanic street, but I know the anatomy of a kraken from its colmillos to the tips of its tentaculos.

In class and out, Professor G_______ was at once magnanimous and disagreeable, and he bounced between these two extremes with such ferocity that we were all terrified of speaking to him, or even in his presence. He drove around town wearing a construction hat in his car because, as he put it, he never knew when something was going to jump up out of the street and hit him on the head. His favorite word was motherfucker, and he used it often in conversation as a synonym for person, as in, “Who is that motherfucker over there? I’ve never seen him before,” or only slightly more appropriately, “That motherfucker at the cash register overcharged me for these beets.” He could be overheard creating variations on this theme while he alone in his office, muttering, or while interfering in his students’ sex lives at the top of his voice in the crowded hallways.

I don’t know why I think of my old professor now. Perhaps it is the comfort of knowing that people have exclaimed worse things than I have while wandering the streets, or that manifest insanity is apparently not a barrier to an otherwise successful life.