Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic Read Free Book Online Page A

cardigan ventured a rather nervous comment. “My teacher always told us to turn our introductory paragraphs on their heads. She wanted us to use the same words, but mixed up, for the conclusion.”
    She was about my age; this was the sort of McGuffey’s Readers stuff teachers used to spout.
    â€œIf the last paragraph is just the first in disguise,” I said, “then why even bother with the middle? We haven’t progressed even slightly.”
    The students made notes. They wrote a first draft. They got up and stretched and wrote a final draft. They worked with great industry and seriousness of purpose. They thought before they wrote. They twisted their bodies as they wrestled with their undoubtedly twisted prose.
    My first night of class, it seemed, was an unalloyed triumph. Christ, I thought. How fucking inspirational am I? Look at these people go! I sauntered down the hall, in the direction of the other teacher. I peeked into his room. He was instructing up a storm, teaching some sort of accounting. He was very tall and bulky, in a suit and Rockports and aviator glasses. His classroom had a whiteboard, which was covered with numbers in various colors. He held three colored markers clawlike between the fingers of his left hand. A rhombus of light from the overhead projector shone in the middle of the board. He nodded to me and went right on teaching. That man—God knows what his name is—has now been with me for a decade, teaching a classroom or two away. We greet each other tentatively when we pass in the hall. We chat while waiting for photocopies. We talk of the weather, and jovially complain about the work ethic of our students. We note the passing of time every September, and commiserate over the midsemester doldrums, and laugh together almost giddily when the term is over. We laugh, but it is clear that we both want more classes. I long to ask him: why are you here? Are you, too, under a house? Is it divorce, or gambling debts, or a civil judgment? Did you back your sensible Toyota out of the driveway and over a child?
    Class drew to a close. The students handed in their papers. Some hung back, wanting to talk. Some of the older students burned to talk to me. They were nervous. Writing has always been a challenge. They said it various ways: I’ve got it up here [pointing to head] but I can’t get it to come out here [making handwriting motions]. When I write I feel like I’m drunk. I never have enough to write, says a nurse’s aide, but my husband can’t understand it because he says I never stop talking. Such is the mystique of writing that the biggest men—the building contractor too bulky for his seat, for example—are reduced to jelly by its difficulties. Writing is so boring, one said. I want to jump out of my skin, said another; I feel like my body is inhabited by crawling insects of boredom.
    I liked that last one. That’s not pedestrian at all.
    Oh, Dean Truehaft: leave early? Hah! We were twenty minutes over. Has a college class, in the history of higher education, ever been as excited about a curriculum? I was feeling pretty full of myself. I was happy. This wasn’t like work. This was undiluted spiritual satisfaction.
    â€œOkay,” I said to the class. “Are you happy you signed on?”
    â€œAll we want is three credits,” someone said.

3
    Revelation
    E VERYONE AT HOME WAS ASLEEP: the children upstairs, my wife in the downstairs bedroom, scant feet away. Her door was open. I could hear the sound of her light snoring, such a comforting sound, a gentle rasp followed by a pleasing gurgle. Two window air conditioners whirred upstairs. The roof of our Cape Cod house sliced through the bedrooms, not unattractively, in a 1950s sort of way, but since there was no attic, the rooms, pressed against the surface of the roof, were virtually uninhabitable without air-conditioning in the summer.
    I put down my mug of coffee. I looked over,