American Glamour



Chapter 2:

The Move

After some consideration, I gave Jill a call one evening and asked her what she thought of my moving to Port Abella and starting graduate school. We hadn't talked in several weeks, but she was enthusiastic. Indeed, she said she’d start looking for a place where the two of us could live, as she was sick of her neighbors and needed a change. I wasn't wild about living with her, but then again, I wasn't wild about being in a strange town in a strange situation and being alone, so I went along. I started driving down there and, more often than not, spending the night. She took me on a tour of the campus and said I would love being there, assuring me that it was nothing like what I had experienced at UNO. And then she did something I'll never forget. She sat me down and said that all my life I had competed against those who were less equipped than I and that for the first time I was going to meeting and competing with people who were like me. She said I was about to meet the smartest and cleverest people on earth and that while I would find it rewarding, I should be ready for a challenge.

In a way, it was basically my old dream of what I thought college would be, which it wasn’t, which my stint at UNO had not been and which I had basically given up on. Actually I was there not to work on any degree, for I had no desire for one, but to get away from the city, to have time to write, play golf, walk with my dog, and sleep in late. I had wallowed in the things that money could buy in the city for two long and, feeling that they weren't worth the hectic pace that those things demanded, was ready for a more Thoreau-esque sort of existence, at least for awhile. Naturally, if I could get laid by a series of attractive girls, that would be appreciated, but in truth I had more or less given up on that, too. Getting drunk and sleeping with her would suffice. It wasn't what I'd had in mind, but it would do. And when my money ran out, that is if I hadn't been "discovered" in one way or another and had people paying me for being myself because I was so cool, I would take my dog back to my parents' house and drive a truck until I had accumulated sufficient funds to go back to school. In other words, I wanted to be a college town bum and take classes just to meet attractive girls to screw and witty guys to get drunk with and think I was cool.

Thus I spent the next week bumming around with Jill, getting enrolled, getting drunk at night, cruising around to the various bars or cruising the back roads in the country by the light of the moon, sleeping in, and walking my dog. For a couple days Jill had some sort of niece staying with us, and it was kind of fun, acting like we were a family settled down and all.

Jill found us an apartment—a large, fairly reasonable one in a basement of a house not far from the college. She told me that in college towns, apartments are expensive and that this one was a real find. However, she said it was so filthy from the three girls who had lived there previously that she not only wouldn't let me help her clean it, she wouldn't let me see it, claiming I would be in her way. Meanwhile, per her instructions, I was to go around to the various state and federal agencies and apply for housing assistance, unemployment, a grant, scholarship, or at the very least a student loan, food stamps, and commodity foods, and to lie my ass off at each of the various stops. She claimed that was how it was done—simply everyone did it, and it could make the difference of my being able to survive in this new lifestyle.

Among the more notable of these fiascos was my application for food stamps. The guy who interviewed me was probably a nice guy, though I couldn’t be certain because he didn’t speak a word of English but rather mumbled in something I took for some sort of African dialect, as he was black and it sounded like I would imagine Swahili would sound, not that I would know Swahili from Dutch, if you came right down to it. I had to sign a document specifying I owned no property or vehicles, somehow overlooking my three cars and motorcycle in the process. But Jill said everyone lied through their teeth and it was expected, so I went along.

As I noted, I hadn't spoken to Jill in several weeks, and during the time we lived together, she made frequent references to other men she had recently had relationships with. I couldn’t care less about the other men, and I was fairly certain that the only reason she mentioned them was to get a reaction from me, a reaction that was not forthcoming. Indeed, she had introduced me to one of her boyfriends on one occasion, and the two of us got drunk and had a great time. When he left, Jill was sullen and withdrawn, and when I asked her why, she finally confessed that she was disappointed, to put it mildly, in the outcome of our meeting. When pressed, she elaborated that she had truly hoped that we would fight, and the fact that we had ignored her and whooped it up had added insult to injury.

Jill always had a bunch of admirers, some intelligent and wealthy, some merely pathetic, some married but wanting to leave their wives for her, whom she kept around, somewhat on a string. The two things they had in common were that they were crazy about her and that she was bored by them. In contrast, any man who was abusive and arrogant to her, like me, was certain to win her utter devotion. She was messed up in the head real bad.

About this time she was particularly proud of two of her admirers, one of whom had attempted suicide in his despair over never possessing her and who had consequently suffered permanent brain damage, and the other of whom had actually gotten the job done, much to her delight. She also clamed to be recovering from aborting the child of another boyfriend, and at times she hinted that the aborted child had actually been mine after all.

I accepted this all in silence and indifference, knowing well her nature to be

whimsical in the extreme and suspecting that much if not all of it had been fabricated for my benefit and feeling that even if all of it were true, none of it was of the least interest to me anyway.

Therefore I wasn’t shocked when Jill showed up with a dog one afternoon, claiming she was “dog-sitting” for a “friend” who had to be out of town for a couple of days. I'm always glad to see a dog, and this one was a good one, and since Tosca was at my parents’ house, “babysitting” my mother while my dad was gone for the weekend, I thought everything was fine. We did our usual dinner and then cruising with beer and watching TV and then passing out around midnight with the large fan on us to stir the hot, humid air in Jill’s apartment. The next thing I knew, the lights were on and there was a fairly large and very pissed off guy standing at the bottom of the bed, giving Jill hell, which was fine with me. Apparently she hadn’t informed him of her current status with me and had set this up to get the fight she had been cheated out of earlier. When our irate visitor was done with her, he turned on me and gave me a ration of shit for not defending her. I could hardly tell him I was keeping silent because I agreed with everything he’d said and that as soon as he left I was going to leave as well and have nothing more to do with this perfidious bitch. Jill was all innocence, asking him why he was upset and trying to calm him down, and I told the guy that so far, everything was fine and that if he just left, there would be no trouble, and I thought he had taken my advice, for he took his dog and walked out into the front yard, but when I got up to lock the door, he sprang back and hit me in the face. I told Jill to call the police, although I found I was being ignored and she was busy trying to placate our night visitor. The fact that he had given me a black eye was apparently of no concern to her. Finally the guy left, Jill hard on his heels, neglecting to call the police and seeing no reason to when I pressed her about it. While the two of them were gone, I collected my few belongings and repaired to the apartment we were to share, where I bolted the door and passed out on the couch.

I had about a week until school started, and I'd had quite enough of Jill and Port Abella, so the next morning I returned to Pleasant Valley, though the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if Jill decided to be vengeful and a bitch in general, she might try to have my utilities cut off, since they were in her name. Accordingly, I returned to Port Abella a couple days later and spent two hours going around to the utility companies and having them placed in my name.

I still had a few days of vacation left, so I headed south to visit my older brother Hector in the picturesque and tiny town of Anhedonia, Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks. We did a small float trip, drank beer, stayed up late, and in general had a good time. On the morning of my last day there, Jill called to say that I owed her a bunch of money and that if I didn’t pay, she was going to have my utilities cut off. I told her I owed her not a whit, other than a black eye, and as for shutting off my utilities, well, she could just do what she felt she had to do. I took no small satisfaction on the ride home from the shock and outrage she would experience when she discovered I was a step ahead of her and had beat her to the draw. Imagine my shock and outrage when I arrived home to find my gas and electricity had been turned off. I was outraged on three counts: one, someone who had no right to have my utilities discontinued had been allowed to do so; two, I was going to have to make the rounds and have my service restarted; and three, I was deprived of my victory and the smug satisfaction I had outsmarted her. I was therefore somewhat less than polite when I showed up at the electrical company and demanded to know why someone whose name wasn’t even on the account had been allowed to discontinue my service. I was told that Jill had come in and asked for the service to be turned off, and that was that. I then demanded that they turn off her service, as she’d been able to do to mine, but the woman said I could terminate only my own service. I pointed out that this was manifestly untrue, as they had obliged Jill when she wanted to terminate mine. The woman looked at me for several seconds before saying, “So I suppose you’ve never made a mistake in your life.” It was one of those instances when the most ridiculous, inane thing anyone could say proved to be exactly the right thing, and I burst out laughing in spite of myself. My utilities were turned back on, a note was make that I would be the only person to have them turned off in the future, and I was able to salvage all the food that had been allowed to assume room temperature in my fridge.

A few days later, school began, and entered my first class to discover one of my worst nightmares had become a reality. For years I'd had a recurring nightmare in which I'm starting school but am inexplicably and hopelessly late and behind on my work. I walked into class on Wednesday morning to learn that school had started on Monday and I was behind. However, except for the nightmarish quality of the episode, it proved to have no real impact. I explained what had happened to my instructors (not that they cared), made my peace with them, and everything was cool.

On Friday morning I walked into that same class and took my usual place on the front row. The instructor arrived a few minutes late, opened his text, read a passage from the assigned reading, and left the room. I thought he’d been caught short and had to go to the bathroom, but he was gone some time, and I noticed my fellow students were scribbling madly. “What? What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s a quiz!” they hissed in unison.

“A quiz? What do you mean it’s a quiz? Where are the questions?”

“You’re supposed to write about the passage he read. That’s how he gives quizzes.”

“You’re kidding me!” I exclaimed, surprised. “What are you supposed to write?”

“Just write about the passage.”

Well, this gave me no clue whatsoever, but I sat back and told myself to stay calm, and I remembered someone telling me that when you’re required to write an in-class theme, you should spend about a third of the time thinking, a third of the time writing, and a third of the time revising. Therefore I pondered the passage for twenty minutes and had just begun an introductory paragraph when the professor returned and collected the papers. There I was, showing up late for class and botching the first quiz. This was a hell of a way to start grad school. As we left class, the women who were my fellow students, most of them high school teachers taking credits during summer school to increase their income, engaged in incoherent, indignant babble. “It was Joseph Campbell—the heroe’s quest!” one kept insisting.

“No no!” another countered. “It’s the return to the Garden of Eden!”

“No!” a third chimed in with equal vehemence. “It’s the skeleton in the closet—the American subconscious guilt!!”

I hadn’t a clue what any of them were talking about, but I knew that if this were the sort of thing one were required to spout in grad school, it wasn’t for me, and I hadn’t a chance.

When Monday rolled around, I was prepared to put the quiz behind me and make a fresh and better start, and I waited in fear for the quizzes to be returned. “The quizzes were horrible, as usual,” the professor announced. “I know some of you think I don’t give As. Well I give As but only for A work. There was one excellent paper, and I made copies of it so you could see what an A quiz looked like.”

I took the mimeographed copy of the vaunted quiz he handed me and flipped it over with sort of a morbid curiosity and nearly wet my pants when I saw that it was my quiz. “This is a crazy place,” I told myself, and it truly was.

After class the women were outraged. “Who wrote that piece of crap?” they demanded as we exited the room. “It didn’t even say anything.”

“I did. I wrote it,” I admitted, though I had to agree it was a piece of crap that didn’t say anything. As a woman, they tossed their heads, turned up their noses, and stomped away. Later the only other male student in the class told me that the professor liked short answers that stuck to the text. He liked lots of quotes, and he didn’t like all these hair-brained theories thrown in with everything but the kitchen sink. I tried relating this information to the women in the class, but it was like water off a duck’s back, and they continued to make Cs, Ds, and sometimes Fs whereas I made a point of not reading the assignment until after the quiz, so that I would be certain to stay focused on the passage he read, and I made a steady stream of As, that is, until we did Moby Dick, which I'd read before. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the rest of the book out of my head, though I made a special effort to stay focused on the passage he read. But it was to no avail. I got a B- and a note expressing his disappointment. “You weren’t up to your usual response,” it said. Other than that, I made straight As.

My fellow students, for the most part, were high school teachers taking summer classes to earn credits to place them in a higher pay bracket and thus more efficiently augment hubby’s income. They had no more of a feeling for literature, nor imagination or sense of humor, than does the average spruce tree. They were what I would later come to call academic cannon fodder. Yet these were the most dedicated to arcane and complex literary theories, believing their pet critical tool to be the best and only valid approach to literature because it gave them a monopoly on truth, and they were exasperated beyond words when I or the instructor would say something in class that ran contrary to or merely outside their pet theory. They were really quite insufferable, except for one, who bore a slight but adequate resemblance to the hottest girl in the little town I was raised in. Like most of my fellow students, her marriage was in trouble, because graduate school is a jealous master and doesn’t leave much time or energy for other pursuits, like maintaining a relationship. Let me flatly advise the reader at this point that if you or your spouse ever decides to attend graduate school, save yourself the protracted agony by filing for a divorce at once. Of the eight full-time graduate students who were married, only one remained so upon the attainment of her degree. But unlike most of my fellow students, this girl loved her husband and felt her family, including her husband, was the most important thing in her life, so she would stay up all night to ride the tractor with her husband while he plowed (many farmers work at night to save themselves from the heat of the day) just so they could be and with any luck stay together.

Then there was the mystery woman whom we called “Miss Nippers,” who never spoke in or outside of class, who wasn’t gorgeous but wasn’t ugly either, and who invariably sat on the back row and tended to her fingernails during lecture.

The only other full-time male student was Casper (otherwise “Cass”) E. Role, who had gone to college for lord knows what reason and had graduated and gone on to grad school not because he wanted a degree or had any sort of a job lined up which required a master’s degree or even because he thirsted for knowledge or wanted to party and meet girls, as he was happily married, though poverty-stricken, and had a baby boy he was as proud of and affectionate toward as any father could be, but apparently because of simple inertia. He had been a student for so long that he didn’t know when to quit.

One of the more notable among the regulars was Poly Glot, a moderately heavy-set woman in her late twenties. She had black and silver streaked hair, which she normally wore in a bun, and was nominally attractive, reasonably intelligent, and acceptably friendly. Her most notable feature was her loose pink summer smock, which she wore daily, and I mean every day. It always seemed clean enough, and it was low enough to expose a generous amount of cleavage and short enough to expose a generous amount of thigh, so it was probably cool and comfortable, but still, one doesn’t normally wear the same garment daily.

The star of the show was Barbie Que, who was an absolute knockout. Barbie was just above average height and was just a tad on the slim side, but she had all the right pieces in all the right places. She generally wore her dark auburn hair in a ponytail or pigtails and tight white tank tops that were thin enough to see her gorgeous nipples through, and satin shorts and sandals completed her outfit. Barbie was stunningly beautiful, but oddly enough, she wasn’t sexy. Indeed, Poly, though not nearly as attractive, was ten times sexier than Barbie, but that was alright, for in addition to being overwhelmingly pretty, she was friendly and very open and accessible, and she laughed frequently and heartily. Barbie was anything but stuck up, as are so many beautiful women, and she was something of a klutz, which endeared her to me, not that I would have been less attracted to her had she not been. One day she showed up with a nasty scrape on her lovely right thigh and another to match on her left elbow and forearm. When asked to explain, without a shred of embarrassment she told us she and her husband had bought a pizza (she wasn’t the greatest of cooks) and were on their way home with it in their jeep when he took a rather sharp left turn and Barbie fell out. “Why weren’t you wearing a seatbelt?” I asked. Well, she hadn’t thought of it. “Why didn’t you grab something to hold yourself in?” Well, she was busy holding the pizza. I was dumbfounded. Another time she arrived with a nasty bruise on her forehead, and I was ready to drive to Omaha and teach her husband a lesson, but she informed me it was a self-inflicted wound she had suffered while opening a bottle of Coke. “How on earth can you give yourself a bruise while opening a bottle of Coke?” I asked, incredulous. “Well, it was like this,” she explained, holding an imaginary bottle of Coke in her left hand up close to her left temple and then reaching over the top of her head with her right hand, simulated removing the cap with an imaginary bottle opener and then slamming the bottle into her head when the imaginary lid came off. I wouldn’t have believed it from anyone else.

Barbie was wholesome and conventional as the girl next door. She had married a boy her age, the son of the man who ran the most successful chain of used car lots in Omaha, for his money, and commuted from Omaha every day. She claimed to sleep in pajamas with the feet in them, though in the morning they would invariably be in a pile on the floor by the bed, and she hadn’t the faintest idea how they got there. I assured her that if I were her husband, she would know how they got there, to which she simply rolled her eyes.

Our instructors were a typical batch of misfits one would find teaching upper-division courses at a university. Dr. Wilson, whom we had for Hawthorne/ Melville and Modern European Theater, the guy with the weird quizzes that I almost always aced, to the exasperation and downright irritation of my fellow students, was as weird as they come. He was a brilliant man and had formerly been the department chair, but like many brilliant men, he was an alcoholic, and it had taken its toll on him. He had been forced to step down, but he was still considered the smartest person in the department, as far as sheer intellect went. His lectures were characterized by sporadic laughing fits on his part, triggered by things he but only he found amusing, and one day, in the middle of one of the more hilarious of these, he spit out his gum, which landed on the lectern. He stopped in mid-laugh and contemplated the gum philosophically for a few moments, as the rest of us sat in silence, waiting to see what he would do, and then he nonchalantly picked it up, strode slowly to the wastebasket by the door, dropped the gum in, slowly returned to the lectern, and resumed as if nothing had happened. During the regular semester, he wore a sports coat and tie every day and looked altogether professional, but during summer term it was as if the faculty were in a contest to see who could attain the most slovenly appearance. Dr. Wilson invariably wore black slacks, probably the same pair, with no belt, and a pastel short-sleeved shirt tucked in in the front but hanging out in the back, sometimes to the point we could see the tops of his plaid boxer shorts. One day Poly happened to be driving by his house and saw him out in the driveway, washing his gold Cadillac in a bikini. His house was surrounded by tall, thick evergreens forming an opaque fence around his property. I opined that he and his wife did all sorts of Adam and Eve-type shit in there, a speculation that was endorsed by the rest of the grad students.

Another one of our instructors, Dr. Dunlap, taught our 19th Century English lit class, and he was most aptly described as a Tom Sawyer-kind of guy. He was invariably cheerful, although not terribly concerned about us students, and he spoke with a nearly imperceptible lisp. He was a large, loose jointed, ambling teddy-bear of a man who had been a basketball star in college and could have had at least a brief career in the NBA but wasn’t interested. He was a good guy, as long as you didn’t want him to do something for you. You could count on a B in his classes.

Our favorite teacher at the time was Dr. Spaulding, a small man given to poetry and literature having to do with elves and gnomes. His classes were characterized by lots of discussion, into which he interposed the most egregious puns, and multi-media presentations he had put together. As bad as his puns were, I was nearly his match. One day we were watching a series of slides he had taken in Greece and had set to music, forming one of his many presentations that he enjoyed giving in the community, when Barbie asked “What’s that?” regarding an ancient and terribly eroded statue. Most of the class opined it was a seal, but I insisted it was a lion. “Where do you get this lion thing?” they asked. “Well,” I rejoined, walking to the front of the class and pointing to what was left of the head. “The ears are gone, most of the head is gone, the mouth is gone, the ears are missing, and the nose is mutilated. However, the eyes are intact, and when all is said and done, ‘There ain’t no way to hide those lion eyes.’” The class gave a collective groan, but I was pretty proud of myself. In another of Dr. Spaulding’s classes, as a group exercise, we were required to compose a villanell, which is the poetry equivalent of a musical “round.” For the entire semester I had been irritating the class with my assertion that the only true American art form was country music, and whenever we were to critique any form of artwork presented in class, I made a point to relate it to country music somehow, regardless of how farfetched my perspective.

In our class was a foreign student named Hal Alyooya, who hailed from Dutch Samoa. Hal was a good guy and a fabulous poet, and my constantly interpreting art through the glass of country music drove him absolutely insane. On this particular night, we were told to write a villanelle, and when Hal read his, which was excellent, of course, he immediately turned to me and asked if it reminded me of Waylon Jennings. “No,” I mused, “it reminds me more of Villienelson.” His jaw dropped. It was as if someone had broken wind loudly in the room, and Dr. Spaulding dismissed class. It was probably the worst pun of my career, but it was too good to pass up. Besides, Doc Spaulding had stooped at least that low or lower on several occasions, so he had no right to quibble.

His classes were embarrassingly easy and a guaranteed A, which endeared him to us, at the time, as I mentioned. However, even we ultimately concluded we hadn’t plunked down our tuition money for a good time, and we realized he had stopped teaching years ago, using his position for money and to stroke his ego. He was often absent, presiding over some poetry reading somewhere, usually his own. It didn’t take long to realize he was all about himself, and it was a tad irritating. I was so taken with him, initially, that I asked him to be my creative writing coach, which he readily assented to. He had been such a great guy that I wrote a short story about a mutual friend of ours, thinking he would enjoy it. When I showed up for my conference, his comment, which was what he always said, was “I’d cut it.” He liked poetry, remember, especially about elves and gnomes. “Well,” I asked, “what did you think of Frank?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Have you seen him recently?”

“No,” I replied, pointing to his name in the second paragraph.

“Oh,” he repeated. “I didn’t realize this was about him.” It was obvious that he hadn’t read my story, and I learned this was his usual modus operadi. He was far too busy to waste his time with student papers, so he’d glance over the introduction and then slap an A on it and tell the writer to cut it. It was easy money, that’s for sure.

Years later I was working at my first teaching job, one I was not happy with, not the least because it seemed as if my employer were trying to work me to death. I wrote to Dr. Spaulding, asking him to send me a Xeroxed copy of the job listing sheet that hung on the bulletin board in the department. I even included a self-addressed stamped envelope, but I never received a reply. He was far too busy to concern himself with such matters, the asshole. Eventually he became the archetype of the kind of teacher I diligently sought to avoid becoming. Really he had no business accepting his paycheck, for he did nothing for his students and spent all his time in self-promotion.

Something very odd happened to Dr. Spaulding. He was sitting in his office one day when he began to itch and experience shortness of breath. Next he started sneezing, and his eyes watered to the point he couldn’t see. Splotchy blotches of hives began to form on his skin, and he stumbled from his office, told the secretary he was going to try to make it to his doctor’s office, and made his way out of the building as best he could. Strangely, by the time he reached his car, he was normal again, so he returned to his office and once more experienced the same symptoms. This went on for two months, during which we teased him, saying it was obvious he was allergic to work (how right we were), before it was discovered that moles had invaded the building and had nested in the insulation of the ceiling of his office on the third floor and he was allergic to mole fur. Hell of a deal!

At the other end of the spectrum, as God is to Satan, was Dr. Pinnacle, whom we avoided like the plague. This guy had a reputation of being a humorless troll whose idea of a good grade was a C, and his oft-repeated saying was “This was before they started giving MAs away.” Great.

Dr. Titleist was typical of the first-generation feminists who had found their way into academia. She was on a mission, of sorts, though I'm not certain she knew exactly what that mission consisted of. She had retained her maiden name when she married a genius who taught in the philosophy department, and she wanted to be nice and she wanted to be hard and she wasn’t certain exactly what she wanted, and she ended up giving a whole bunch of Bs.

Dr. Maxifli was an orange-haired dwarf of a septuagenarian who taught Shakespeare and who hated my guts, which is odd, since I liked her. Whenever two people meet, there’s an instant chemical reaction, and she simply disliked me from the moment she laid eyes on me. I felt very fortunate to get a B out of her, and I was surprised she didn’t flunk me. She flat couldn’t stand me, in spite of my doing everything in my power to charm and ingratiate myself to her. Such is the world.

Her animosity was somewhat counterbalanced by Dr. Topflight, who knew my parents vaguely and liked me in the same degree and for the same groundless motivation that Dr. Maxifli hated me, so the two more or less cancelled each other, and I was certain to get As in his classes, which were easy. He taught poetry, and like Dr. Spaulding, used his classes as a outlet for his authorial aspirations. In other words, he was not shy in reading his poetry to us, you might say. When he wasn’t reading his poetry, he was talking about all the famous people he knew intimately and the tremendous impact he’d had on their lives. Because of his position at the university, he’d been asked by an arts council in Omaha to be their booking agent for guest readers, many of whom were famous authors. Therefore, Dr. Topflight got to deal with their agents and then the famous authors personally, often picking them up at the airport and having them stay at his house. To hear him talk, he was on intimate terms with them all. As I said, his classes were sure As.

Our fearless and admirable leader, Dr. Ben Hogan, was the department chair and was all in all as decent a human being as you could find. He taught his classes with great professionalism tastefully sprinkled with humor, and he graded fairly. He presided over a contentious department and was an effective liaison between the department and the administration. His one flaw, if it could be called that, was his tendency to switch jobs in favor of the highest bidder, which is hardly something we can blame him for. The cliché is that teachers don’t go into the profession for the money, but I believe Dr. Ben Hogan did, and he did well at it to boot. He was temporarily afflicted by a most singular ailment known as Faulkner’s syndrome, which was a paralysis of one side of his face. You can imagine the kidding he got from the name, and for about two months his left eye drooped, the left corner of his mouth turned down in a weird scowl, and his lips flapped when he talked. He continued to carry out his teaching and administrative duties as usual, and he bore it all with good humor, though I'm certain he was more than happy when it passed.

My days passed pleasantly enough. I arose at six-thirty each morning, which gave me ample time to fix and eat my breakfast of frozen banana milkshake and a couple cups of coffee, bathe and dress, walk Tosca down to a city park a half block away, and get to school in time to review the assignment and visit with the other students before class. I read or visited between classes, returned home at noon, walked dog briefly again, lunched and napped, studied, worked out and swam at the gym or the outdoor pool at the golf course, and every now and then I played a round of golf. After dinner I took the dog for a longer walk and then studied at home or sometimes at the library before taking the dog with me in my car and drinking a few beers as I cruised the back roads, listening to music and exploring the strange tiny towns in the outlying areas. Then it was another short walk for the dog, something to eat for me, and bed. Life was good.

One day something extraordinary happened. I'd been swimming laps at the gym and was sitting on the edge of the pool, my towel draped over my shoulders as I caught my breath. Somehow a conversation sprung up between another guy who had been swimming laps and me. The topic of the conversation was vocation. I told him my plan was to attend grad school, play golf, drink, chase women, and write until I ran out of money, then drive a truck for six months or so, and return to grad school until something happened to break the cycle. He shook his head and mused, “No, no, no—you need to become a teacher.” I'd never wanted to be a teacher; indeed, the thought horrified me. “No,” he told me, “you need to teach high school.” He went on to explain that it was an easy job which paid adequately, especially considering the amount of actual work that was required, which wasn’t much, but the main benefit was the women. This was before the Clarence Thomas hearings and before the term sexual harassment had become such a big part of the feminist vocabulary, but even then I was surprised that this guy was having sex with high school girls, his students to boot. “No, no,” he said again. He elaborated that they are strictly off limits while they’re your students, but once they graduate, they’re fair game. He said they needed to be seasoned a bit by a marriage or going away for college or just working a few years, but by the time they were in their early twenties, they were hitting the bars and the idea of bedding a former teacher seemed to appeal to them. He claimed there was no way he could ever marry, because he had an ever-increasing, geometrically expanding, and constantly replenishing source of attractive young women, and to give that up would be like spitting in fortune’s eye. I'd never thought of it like that, but it sure sounded good. It turned out to be one of those life-changing moments, something that had a profound influence upon me for the next couple decades, though, as I was to discover, there wasn’t a shred of truth to what he had told me, at least as my case was concerned.

A week later Dr. Dunlop asked to see me after class. I was sure I'd screwed something up and offended someone irrevocably, but once in his office, he asked me if I'd be interested in a teaching assistantship. I'd known but had forgotten he was in charge of freshman comp, and I was flattered beyond words. I told him that indeed I was interested and thanked him for considering me and promising I wouldn’t let him down and inviting him to offer any words of correction if he saw me doing anything that he found objectionable or even questionable. He laughed and said he thought I'd do OK before giving me the textbook and telling me to be at a meeting of all the grad assistants a couple days before fall term began. He added that I'd be teaching two classes alone and team-teaching one with him. As I was leaving, he called me back and asked if I'd be interested in being the student representative to the faculty senate. I couldn’t believe what was going on, and I told him I'd be thrilled.

I left with wings on my feet. I'd been glad to be in grad school, and when I’d been advised regarding the bounties teaching included by the guy at the pool, I thought things were finally beginning to fall into place. But now, to be an actual college professor, getting paid to go to school, and having been selected to be on the faculty senate. I felt like Pip from Great Expectations, as apparently I had someone in a high position of influence looking out for me. This was more like it. Surely this was the big break I'd been waiting for. Such were my thoughts and feelings as summer term came to an end.

I won’t allow you to get any false hopes up, as I had. Though years passed before I learned the truth, my resemblance to Dickens’s Pip was more accurate than I realized. I was asked to teach because none of the full-timers wanted to teach freshman comp and the school had state and federal funding for ten graduate assistants, whereas there were only eight of us full-time grad students. The funding was so generous that there was money leftover after our salaries had been paid, so that the school’s motivation for asking me and the other students to teach had been laziness and greed, and I can flat tell you they couldn’t have cared less what kind of teacher I was. As for being the student representative to the faculty senate, I learned he had asked the other regulars and had been turned down, so it was me or no one. Such is the way of the world, and so much for my perceived shining star of destiny.

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