The Department Chair was a dumbass and everybody knew it. Everyone knew it so well that nobody ever brought it up – least of all, to him.
I’m supposed to see it as one of those All Too Common Petty Injustices of Life. When people find out what I do for a living, they either act impressed or they roll their eyes; construction workers tend to roll their eyes more than anybody else – like, Oh. A TEACHER. Actually, they could almost respect that. But when they hear I work at the university they think Oh. A COLLEGE PROFESSOR – which means I’m further removed from real life than a corpse. It doesn’t matter that I’m not really a professor. I used to try and explain how that’s a rank and not a job title. I used to try and explain how Professors were tenured and taught half the load I teach, with fewer students, and made more money. Then when I talked about money somebody would usually say, “But no one gets into teaching for the MONEY, right?” That’s supposed to make it all okay; but you try telling a pipe fitter that passion for his work is more important than how much money he makes. You’ll get laughed out of the bar. It didn’t do any good to explain that I wasn’t some hot shit PhD, but really more of an academic ditch digger, that I taught general ed classes that everyone had to take but no one wanted to. So I stopped. And I avoided talking about my job as much as possible.
Linda, my wife, tells me I need to be happy. She’s in league with my mother, trying to convince me that the problem is me. Every job, they tell me, has things about it that make it horrible. My mother calls from Ohio to just to tell me over and over that I need to “just play the game.” That I need to do things to improve my standing in the department. “Why don’t you go back to school,” she asks, “and get your doctorate? Then you can get a tenure-track position and you’ll feel better.”
I always tell her the same thing. I tell her there’s no point. I’d been out of school for nearly ten years. I’d have to retake the GRE, find money for application fees, and there was no way I could work full-time. We’d probably end up having to take out more loans, and Linda and I were both still paying ours off. Linda echoed my mother’s sentiments, though not her solution; she’d never say so, but the added financial strain of me going back to school would be too much for us. She doesn’t have to say it because we both know it. Besides, I didn’t really want to go back. Too much hassle for too little pay off.
Linda worked in a home for troubled children; it wasn’t a state agency, but one of those for-profit agencies that state governments use to cut spending. She liked her job most of the time; she enjoyed working with the kids because it fed something inside of her. Maybe it was the maternal instinct that went unsatisfied because we didn’t have any kids of our own. When she first started working there, sometimes she came home and cried because of the stories she heard about the families the kids came from. She didn’t make a lot of money, but there was plenty of over time since turn over was so high.
Usually I beat her home; one night, though, I stumbled home drunk because I stopped off at the bar after work and she was standing in the kitchen waiting for me.
“You need to be happy,” she said to me.
“You make me happy.”
She wasn’t convinced and the expression on her face told me so. It also told me it had been my turn to cook.
I tried to look as apologetic as possible. She just shook her head and opened the cabinets. I took a beer out of the fridge and got out of her way.
“You need to find something to DO that will make you happy,” she repeated after I sat down on the couch. “I can’t be the only thing.”
“I have other things.”
She started banging around in the kitchen – her way of telling me she didn’t feel like cooking, but that she would anyway because she didn’t want me to set myself of the apartment on fire. Christ. One small grease fire after a few scotch and waters and you’d think I started the Chicago Fire. It looked like she was going to make pasta alfredo. “Like what?” she asked.
“The track. The casino.”
She snorted. “Yeah. Between your bad luck at the track and your worse luck at Blackjack, I’m lucky we’re not living in a cardboard box.”
“I didn’t see you complaining when you were do so well at the slots.” She chopping fresh garlic and putting water on to boil. Try as she might, she couldn’t be really upset with me. I was grumpy and crude and, as my nearly adult daughter told me on her last visit, “prone to unhealthy behaviors,” But I always came home, didn’t fuck around, and we didn’t really fight all that much. Plus, she liked that I was a little crude. A little rough around the edges. Sometimes, anyway.
“You need to be happy,” she repeated. “Do what you need to do so you can be happy.”
If only it was that easy. I had stopped off at the bar because I needed to get the bitterness out of my mouth. The previous week, the Department Chair Dr. Nealy announced an instructor meeting. I didn’t usually go to meetings – they were a waste of time. But with all the recent budget cutting initiatives – which included a hiring freeze, enforced furloughs, pay cuts, and ratcheting up class sizes and course loads – not to mention all the gossip about more impending lay offs for the Spring Semester, I thought it was a good idea to go and listen. After all, it was in my best interest, right? It meant canceling my office hours, but it wasn’t like any students were going to stop by anyway; they’d rather send panic inspired emails filled with spelling errors and misused vocabulary. So I left a note on the door of my windowless basement office and trudged upstairs.
When I got to the room where the meeting was going to be held – it was an empty classroom – there were already about a dozen people there. Mostly women, but since the majority of the instructors were women, that was no shock. Colleagues, though I use the term loosely. Collegiality had gone out the window the previous year when the first round of budget cuts put us all at odds. There were more of us than there were jobs. The recession meant less state money and, in the words of the University President, “some belt tightening.” I survived the cut – fuck if I know how – but my year long contract had been reduced to a semester to semester one. Meanwhile, the Board of Regents had been so pleased with the President’s handling of the budget crisis that they awarded him with a $10,000 bonus. I guess their definition of belt tightening was giving him 10 instead of 20.
There were two other guys, sitting near the back. I’d talked to them once or twice and occasionally got listserv emails from them about irrelevant things. I didn’t say anything to them when they looked at me, but I nodded. They nodded back. I found a seat in the back corner, catty corner to the door, wishing I’d had a drink beforehand.
The first three rows were filled with women. Some things never change. During the first few weeks of classes, the girls filled the front rows; they were dutiful, polite, and raised to be people pleasers and respecters of perceived authority. They sat up front so they could make a good impression because they believed that I’d assume they were smarter because they sat in the front. The ditch diggers sitting in the first three rows sat there because they wanted Dr. Nealy to notice them. He was a tall, distinguished black man – the first black man to hold the position of chair in the history of the department. He was authoritative and looked cool at the same time. His PhD was in Southern African-American Children’s Folk Tales. He’d learned public speaking from growing up in a church deep in Southern Georgia; and though his accent had been meticulously educated out of his mouth, he still spoke with the cadence of a southern preacher. And like every sermon I’d ever heard, the cadence meant more than the content. Usually, by the time Nealy was finished speaking, the gaggle of women were absolutely entranced and suffering from the kind of rapture I’d only ever seen in porno movies.
I’d explained this to Linda before; but she just shook her head and told me I related everything to sex. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d think you just didn’t like women.” Then she called me misogynist. But she smiled when she said it.
The room was filling up. More people showed than I expected; but there were always a few hold outs. I was little jealous not to be among them. I didn’t want to care, and the bigger part of me didn’t. I didn’t want to worry; but the bigger part of me was. That’s what becomes of young cocky assholes; we get older and get married and find careers. We set ourselves up so that we have no choice but to wake up and go to work and whittle away the minutes of our lives until retirement or daily frustration gets us in the end.
I had closed my eyes to wait until the meeting started. The usual kinds of chatter was filling the room. I wanted to relax, but the desk was uncomfortable. That hadn’t changed much either. I never remember the desks being comfortable. When I was a student, I thought it was some plot to keep us from getting too comfortable. As an instructor I had come to know that was gospel.
I knew when Nealy walked in because the women hushed themselves. When I opened my eyes, he leaned back and sat down on top of the desk. Like cool teachers did. And then he spoke.
“I understand,” he began, “that there’s been some concerns – some GOSSIP circulating.” He smiled and chuckled. The women chuckled with him. “Some GOSSIP and MIS-conception about hiring and firing and recent economic inconvenience.”
You know you’re dealing with semantics when your boss calls the worst recession since the Great Depression an “economic inconvenience.” I closed my eyes again and kept listening.
“It’s a difficult time for us ALL,” he went on. I could hear him flashing his bleached smile, along with the subtle sound of quickly melting resolve. Nealy’s changed quickly; he picked up the pace. He probably sensed that he was in control of the meeting and he didn’t want to linger any longer than he had to; he probably had a tee time to catch with the Dean. “And I UNDERSTAND, that SOME people MAY BE NERVOUS…”
My head was starting to hurt and my throat was dry. I should’ve brought my flask.
“But there’s NO REASON to be CONCERNED.”
Pompous jackass.
“Excuse me…?”
I opened my eyes because I heard a little birdie speak. The little birdie’s name was Jun Van Oort. By some fuck up of fate shed was one of the most senior members of what Nealy often referred to in mass emails as “the instructor pool.” When I read that it reminded me of some 1950’s office with rows of typists in pleated skirts succumbing to sexual harassment. June had been an instructor longer than anybody, except for another pedantic crone named Teryl Meeks who smiled a lot and spoke up very little except to say “Don’t rock the boat.” And at some point June had decided to take it upon herself to be our representative.
Her voice was tiny and warbly. We’d talked before, and even though I couldn\’t see her face from where I was sitting, I knew exactly what she looked like: a small face, long narrow nose, deeply wrinkled skin, shallow cheeks like pock marks, and little bird like eyes that peered out from behind thick reading glasses that she wore all the time. She liked to wear make-up, but it did more to accentuate her age than conceal it.
“Excuse me?” She repeated herself.
Nealy shined his bleached smile down on her and I thought I saw her body quiver just a little.
“But we’ve heard there will be more cuts in the spring.” I imagined that she practiced her little speech in front of the bathroom mirror while she was slathering on Mary Kay. “Won’t that mean larger classes for those who stay?” There was a twittering of agreement from the rest of the gaggle. “The language in our new contracts is a little vague on…”
Nealy raised his hand in a way that reminded me of DeMille’s Ten Commandments. June and twittering gaggle fell silent.
“I’m not responsible for the language in the contracts,” he boomed. “That comes from the Dean’s office. All I can tell you…”
Here we go.
“… is that we’re still going to need to staff classes, and with our student retention rates improving, chances are we’re going to need all the people we can get.”
I looked over at Teryl Meeks. She was at the end of the third row, close to the door. Her hands were folded neatly on her desk. She wasn’t too concerned. Of course, it helped that her Dad was a Professor Emeritus in Linguistics. She knew she wasn’t going anywhere.
“But,” June chirped. “But we’ve heard…”
“Gossip,” Nealy pronounced with an expression of judgment that shamed June into looking down at her desk. Then he smiled his most radiant, cunt melting smile. “I KNOW,” he said, standing to address us at full height, “there have been RUMORS saying THIS and saying THAT…”
Praise fucking Jesus. The desks creaked and cracked as the women all sat up to take in his every syllable that fell from his lips.
“… but you KNOW what THEY say about IDLE GOSSIP!” He laughed and the gaggle laughed with him.
My head was hurting worse. Shit.
“LADIES…” he spoke grandly, and then, as if he just noticed the three of us who pissed standing up, “… and GENTLEMEN,” he smiled. The benediction was coming soon. “Times are HARD all AROUND.”
Really? I thought. I knew how much money he made. He wasn’t struggling like the rest of us. Not by a long shot.
“But we’re SURVIVING. And we will CONTINUE to SURVIVE.”
I half expected a musical refrain. Maybe a verse of Glory Hallelujah or I Will Survive. The other two guys sat stone faced. They knew Nealy was a dumbass. The women knew it, too – so long as he wasn’t around. Again I was jealous of the ones who had the sense to skip the meeting. I could’ve stayed in my office and surfed the internet or gone ahead to the bar to ring in happy hour. I looked at June Van Oort. She was nodding like a true convert. Teryl Meeks was smiling. Nealy was basking us all in his bleached shiny fucking smile.
Just when I thought the meeting was over and I could escape, Nealy kept talking. He went on and on about how many times he’d been in the Dean’s office trying to get us a fair shake. He told us he was on OUR SIDE and that nobody knew BETTER THAN HIM just how much we contributed and just how important we were. Money and security were important, he said. But he knew we aspired to MORE.
“After all,” he said, “No gets into teaching for the MONEY.” He laughed at his own joke. The gaggle laughed with him.
I groaned audibly.
The room fell silent and everyone turned to look at me.
Nealy stopped smiling. “Did you want to add something…?” He was trying to remember my name. I didn’t bother to fill in the blank for him.
“Yes, Rick,” June said. She wasn’t smiling anymore either. “Did you want to say something?”
My name’s not Rick, either. The bitch had been getting my name wrong since first time I met her. Though, to be fair, if you’re not really paying attention, Rick sounds a lot like Nick Rafferty. I wasn’t going to bother correcting her, either.
“Nope,” I said standing up. My ass was numb from sitting in the desk. “Looks like you all have everything sewn up. But I do have a STUDENT coming to SEE ME, so…” I walked out of the room without finishing the sentence, left the building, left campus, and headed straight for the bar.
After I explained all of this to Linda, she kissed me and told me she knew I was brilliant. I didn’t believe her, but I liked to think she believed it; and sometimes, that had to be enough. Her dinner was fantastic; better than anything I could’ve cooked even if I hadn’t come home drunk. She brought me a large tumbler of ice water – her way of telling me I needed to stop drinking for the night – hugged me, then put her shoes on.
“Where you going?”
She sighed. “I told you,” she said. “I’m picking up an extra shift tonight. Over time.”
I’d forgotten. That was why I was supposed to cook. “Tonight?”
“All they do is sleep,” Linda said. “It’s easy. Somebody just has to be there in case.”
She grabbed her purse and the car key. “Will you be alright?”
I wasn’t sure. “Sure.”
She kissed me. I really like her kisses. I hated when she picked up overnight shifts because I didn’t sleep well when she wasn’t home. But we needed the money, and it would give us the weekend together.
After she left I dumped the water and took out the bottle of cheap scotch I kept stored in the cabinet above the sink. I had class the next day; but I also wanted to be able to sleep, and I didn’t want to have to think about any of it anymore.