Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women, nonbinary and gender-diverse writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
The pay was low and my heels were high as I embarked up the steep metal stairs of Nashville Auto-Diesel College, one day in 2014. I paused every few steps to dig a heel out of the stairs as they caught at my feet. H.R. had told me there was a dress code for teachers, so there I was in Easter Sunday attire.
Others who hadn’t had time to eat on their way to class bounded past me, names embroidered on their blue shirts, munching on an apple or chips they’d picked up at the convenience store across the street. Even though the campus has now been demolished, I still half-expect to recognize a few faces crossing the street whenever I drive past that particular stretch of Gallatin Pike. I can still imagine the fumes from the spray-painting that went on below us, when I had a three-hour window once a week to teach writing composition for the school’s associate’s degree program.
I was assigned a room with a dry-erase board, a projector, and car parts strewn around the perimeter and wedged behind my desk. One time I tripped on a piece of a fender as I drilled my students on grammar lessons, clicking the PowerPoint slides forward only after the group voiced the correct answer in unison. One of the guys came to pull me up from my less-than-dignified fall — my peach skirt askew and forehead dripping sweat.
Some students were military veterans returning to school because the government paid for them to continue their education. “Sure, why not?” they’d say. They chose to take classes at a night school that they felt aligned with their values. Class discussions were sometimes heated, and we had a diverse group. But it was a golden time between 2014 and 2016, and if we didn’t have the same politics back then, it wasn’t a conversation-ender — this was pre-Trump era, and people discussed topics civilly.
Some students looked so young that I thought they must be straight out of high school, but they told me they’d already done three tours of duty. Most all of them had been to Afghanistan, and had stories as dark as the grease beneath their fingernails. I found out more through their writing assignments. I found out about explosions. Being in a bunker. Losing a platoon mate. They wrote argument papers that shed light on the damage many said they had sustained simply from the sounds of war — concussion-type injuries that came from noises that shook them so hard their minds felt crushed in the searing heat of the desert.
One guy told me he was on eight different medications, and that he wanted to write but had trouble concentrating. After class ended, we turned the empty desks around and sat down together, sounding it out. I read essays by mechanics who were also drummers — it is Nashville, after all — and one by a man whose father was a famous country artist. His essays were full of gorgeous sensory images of the buses and trailers and music, and he tried his hand at poems. Some were so good that I encouraged him to publish them.
Many might think that being in such a masculine environment would be challenging. But most of the men were respectful — and to a degree I didn’t expect. Those guys had my back while teaching at NADC — sometimes after my near-tumbles while lecturing — and administration had been gracious to me. I was a writer with no real classroom teaching experience aside from community workshops.
I’m the daughter of a steelworker, and the atmosphere at NADC felt more like the industrial North I was used to than the new South I was just getting to know. As I taught the lessons, we found our equilibrium together.
Some of my former students stay in touch. One of them wrote to me on Facebook Messenger to tell me he’d made a million dollars. He said I had something to do with it; I can’t for the life of me figure out how, but I hearted his message.
And now, when I drive by the leveled ground where NADC once was — which will soon enough house hip eateries and shops and apartments — I gaze over from the red light and see that version of myself climbing the stairs at dusk. Though the night-school classrooms and the collision building are gone now forever, I can still smell the fumes.
