Trigonometry

They only come out when I’m drunk. Fortunately, I’m not drunk in class very often. Those damned dancing numbers with great big bulging eyes popped out of the chalkboard and made our old crotchety professor look like a fool. But not today. Today I was determined to come to class sober.

The numerous rocky looking wrinkles on the old professor’s face were something that the entire class of fifty had gotten used to, so when a smooth thirty-something young man in a Nascar shirt walked in that day, naturally there was quite a suppressed tempest of murmurs among the bewildered herd of undergrads. The new professor was quite different from the man they were used to, he had an appreciable beer belly, scraggly black hair that looked like he had wrestled it to get it to lay flat, and was wearing a pair of massive sound cancelling premium headphones that seemed as big as a pair of muffins strapped to his head. He dropped his red striped mp3 player on the podium, took a deep sigh, closed his eyes, and was silent for several moments.

I quirked an eyebrow and leaned over to one of my classmates to eagerly whisper, “What the devil is up with this guy?”

A sandy haired Joel replied, “Strangest looking math professor I’ve ever seen.”

“Not that you’ve ever been inclined to say anything good about math professors in general eh Joel?” I replied with a snicker, and a couple others behind us who overheard my remark stifled a few chuckles at Joel’s expense as well.

The professor finally opened his eyes and smiled at the class. “Mornin’ everyone! My name’s Mr. Rachels, but you can just call me by my first name Frank, if you please. Generic I know, but my parents were never very good at picking out fancy words, and I really hate the nasty formal feeling that comes with being called ‘Mister’ every day.  I’ll be replacing your last professor for this Trig class, who apparently was fired for inappropriate ‘relations’ with the department head.” He said with a chuckle, his gut jiggling in a way that made most of the students cringe a little.

“Anyway, I know y’all have an exam tomorrow, and your old prof had a very specific course plan all drawn up, so we’re gonna stick to it and race through a review. Get yer books and flip 'em to page 667 n’ let’s do as my favorite comedian always says, and get r’ done!” Frank declared, and a general shuffling sound filled the room as the undergrads whipped their books out and flipped to the prescribed page.

The first few minutes of the class turned out to be boring, at least until Frank managed to misplace his mp3 player. While he was reciting the classic trig pneumonic device of SOH CAH TOA, he bumped the podium with his hip and sent said gadget tumbling through the crack between the podium and the floorboards. A few of the students murmured and watched it fall into the little foot high space between the concrete and the raised floor tiles, and five minutes later his beady little hazel eyes caught sight of the missing gadget.

“Fucking shitwaffles, where the hell did my Zyne go?” He bellowed and then began practically tearing apart his stack of papers to see if it had slipped into the pile somehow.

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I watched him bend over and crawl around on the floor looking for it, the way his belly got in the way and made it hard for him to crawl around down there made me think of some of the fat kids back in middle school who would get stuck in their desks and wouldn’t be able to bend down if they dropped their pencils.

“It’s under one of the floor tiles!” An anonymous Good Samaritan called out of the timid crowd of twenty-somethings.

“You get an A for participation today ma’am!” Frank called out back to the student, and then crawled back over to the podium and began prying up a floor tile with his bare, meaty hands.

My chuckles from before had already long since passed, but if they had still been going then what I saw next would have stifled them entirely. Not only did Frank manage to pry the securely fastened tile loose with only his hands, but as soon as he had gotten his fingernails around the edges of the tile, he snapped it free with barely any visible effort. The man was some kind of hulk apparently, only without the freaky green skin and shredded purple jean shorts. I immediately knew I didn’t want to screw around with him, even if I knew that professors weren’t exactly supposed to use capital punishment.

For the rest of the lecture I managed to keep as professional a demeanor as possible on my face and I took notes furiously. As good of a distraction as it was to see a math professor scrabbling for a lost gadget, it couldn’t keep my thoughts away from the exam for very long. As much as I loved to tease Joel for being bad at math, I myself wasn’t any better. I was more of an English person myself, and I felt that I had a stronger inclination for twisting words than numbers. My last semester had resulted in a C minus in algebra and a D minus for poor Joel, who excelled much more in biology and computers. So I spent the rest of the period scribbling furious hen scratches in my haggard math notebook covered in doodles of video game characters, and when Frank called for the end of the period, I slammed everything away, slapped Joel on the back heartily, and shot him an excited smile.

“Ready for our study group tonight, eh Joel?” I asked him, slinging my backpack on and cringing painfully as my vertebrae shifted from the weight.

“Just so long as I’m not the one buying the damned drinks this time.” He replied, pulling the telescoping handle out for his roller bag.

It was an hour later when we arrived at Joel’s place for the study group, and when one of our fellows named Andre dumped out the plastic figurines of the various science fiction characters, tanks, starships, etc. onto the table, it wouldn’t exactly seem like a study session to a bystander.  I grabbed one of the ice cold beers from the cooler that one of our other study buddies had brought, not caring if it would disrupt our studies, and twisted the cap off in my armpit with a muffled hiss. Joel got started writing up the problems we were to use in our session, and I whipped out a few rulebooks to the tabletop game that we were going to use.

“Alright, I call dibs on the Solar Marines!” I shouted, causing a general growl to rise from the group, and Joel shook his head disapprovingly.

“You always call the damned Solar Marines, Alan. If you weren’t getting piss drunk every time we played, you’d probably win.” Joel complained as Andre handed me the figurines that would be my army for the session.

I grunted noncommittally and arranged my army on the hex grid that had been laid out on the table beforehand, then grabbed one of the rule books and his math textbook and settled down in my usual seat next to Joel. After fifteen minutes or so of preparation, all of our armies were ready on the grid, and naturally, my turn came up first. I moved my marines up by the allocated number of hexes denoted by my marines’ speed stats, and made a shot at Andre’s squad of Tyranias Gene-Morpher soldiers.

“Alright Alan, here we go. Here’s the question for your first roll,” Joel said, digging through his papers and picking out one of the math problems. He pulled out a diagram of a right triangle with one of the angles marked as X, and told me to find the Sine of X.

Naturally, the first thing I did was to take a swig of beer, set the bottle down, and then look at the diagram again a little bit longer. Pulling out a sheet of scrap paper, I did my best to crunch the numbers. Naturally of course, I got it wrong, and all the other players groaned loudly like frat boys who had just seen a quarterback breaking his knee during a football game.

“Too bad Alan, your marines miss the Gene-Morphers. The correct answer was 0.7532225.” Joel said, peeking at the answer sheet he had created to go with the problems.

The session went on like this for another good half an hour, and I went through two more beers in that time. Soon those damn numbers began to leap from the page as I wrote them, and from then on the battle that we were playing out in our game plummeted downhill. Cosine of theta, tangent of Y, it all was already pretty hard for me to grasp, but now that the damn numbers wouldn’t stand still on the page, my poor squadron of marines didn’t stand a chance. Andre’s Tyranias and Gregg’s Chaos tanks quickly wiped me out, and Joel waxed poetic about how the planet that the solar marines had been defending was consumed by the fires of chaos and destruction. It certainly didn’t help my mood as I grabbed my fourth beer.

“Geez Alan, you’re gonna drink my wallet dry.” Gregg grouched, and I slurred an insult at him as I picked up my pile of marine figurines and set them up for another game round.

“Maybe next time you shouldn’t bring so many bottles.” Andre quipped in an attempt to be clever, which was lost on my sodden mind.

“Whatever, let’s just keep going. Alan, your move first as always. We’ve got a rather large cliff on the field here,” Joel said, drawing a line on the hex grid, “and plenty of problems left for the next chapter.

That’s where my memory gave out due to the amount of alcohol in my system; the rest of the night was gone to me. By the next day, I had a pounding headache the size of our new professor’s beer belly, and I practically drooled on the exam paper when he handed it out. The numbers weren’t dancing anymore, but the clicking of my classmates’ pens all around me was practically deafening and the sickeningly sterile white fluorescent light reflected off of the paper and stung my eyes. I glanced at the problems with great concentration, forcing the murky soup of my hangover headache aside with all the effort of lifting a lead curtain, but to no avail. While it was true that perhaps my brain of Swiss cheese had absorbed something of the information I needed last night, it was all lost thanks to the beer. I cursed myself in my head repeatedly for a good few minutes, what a moron I had been! Still a freshman practically crying after being pulled from the womb of my parents’ house, I had fallen prey yet again to the age old bugbear of all students. It was time I learned that college was supposed to be more than a few blurry years of dancing numbers, Cosines, solar marines, starships, and Pabst.