around, so I laughed.
“Was it something I said?” he asked me with one raised eyebrow.
“You startled me a bit, sir,” I replied. “Sorry.”
“Perfectly all right, young man,” he said benignly. “Laughter’s good for the soul. Enjoy it while you can.”
I glanced around and saw that fully half the students were grabbing up their books and darting for the door.
Professor Conrad looked at those of us who’d remained. “Brave souls,” he murmured. Then he looked directly at me. “Still with us, young man?” he asked mildly.
His superior attitude was starting to irritate me. “I’m here to learn, Dr. Conrad,” I told him. “I didn’t come here to party or chase girls. You throw, and I’ll catch, and I’ll still be here when the dust settles.”
What a dumb thing that was to say! I soon discovered just how tough he really was. He crowded me, I’ll admit that, but I stuck it out. He was obviously an old-timer who believed in the aristocracy of talent. He despised the term “postmodern,” and he viewed computers as instruments of the devil.
He had his mellower moments, though—fond reminiscences about “the good old days” when the English Department resided in the hallowed, though rickety, Parrington Hall and he was taking graduate courses from legendary professors such as Ebey, Sophus Winther, and E. E. Bostetter.
I maintained my “you throw it and I’ll catch it” pose, and that seemed to earn me a certain grudging respect from the terror of the department. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I aced the course, but I did manage to squeeze an A out of Dr. Conrad.
I was a bit startled at the beginning of winter quarter when I discovered that I’d been assigned to a new faculty advisor—at his request.
Guess who that was.
“You’ve managed to arouse my curiosity, Mr. Austin,” Dr. Conrad explained, after I rather bluntly asked him why he’d taken the trouble. “Students who work their way through college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in English?”
I shrugged. “I like to read, and if I can get paid for it, so much the better.”
“You plan to teach, then?”
“Probably so—unless I decide to write the Great American Novel.”
“I’ve read your papers, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “You’ve got a long way to go if that’s your goal.”
“It beats the hell out of pulling chain, Dr. Conrad.”
“Pulling chain?”
I explained it, and he seemed just a bit awed. “Are you saying that people still do that sort of thing?”
“It’s called ‘working for a living.’ I came here because I don’t wanna do that no more.”
He winced at my double negative.
“Just kidding, boss,” I told him. And I don’t think anybody’d ever called him “boss” before, because he didn’t seem to know how to handle it.
By the end of winter quarter that year I’d pretty well settled into the routine of being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep, but I could usually catch up on weekends.
I finished up the spring quarter of ‘94 and spent the summer working at the door factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few times that year.
The Twinkie Twins were high-school juniors now, and they’d definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it seemed—chemically modified, no doubt—and their eyes were an intense blue. They’d also developed some other attributes that attracted lots of attention from their male classmates.
Looking back, I’m sometimes puzzled by my lack of “those kinds of thoughts” about the twins. They were moderately gorgeous, after all—tall, blond, well built, and with strangely compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind they were never individuals. I thought of them as “they,” but never “she.”
From what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn’t have that problem, and the twins were very popular. The only complaint seemed to be that nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.
It was during my senior year at U.W. that I finally came face to face with Moby Dick. The opening line, “Call me Ishmael” and the climactic, “I only am escaped to tell thee” set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed me. You don’t want to mess around with a guy who could say, “I’d smite the sun if it offended me.” And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.
Moby Dick has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.
Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton’s Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.
Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”
“Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.
“You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.
“Bippie?”
“Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.
I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.
I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.
This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m
