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[derrick-riches]

The God of Pizza

            “Expect the cold front to move over shortly after sunset. Overnight temps dropping down to near freezing.” The voice on the radio droned on. I paid it little attention. Troy listened with bemusement. “As for snowfall? We’re looking for a light dusting in the valleys with two to four inches accumulation in the mountains.”             “Bullshit!” Troy coughed. He laughed heartily. He always laughed heartily, as if there was simply no other way to laugh. I turned my car off the freeway and towards the canyon entrance.

            “Love it!” Troy continued. “Around midnight, a heavy, wet snow will start. The temp will drop. By dawn, all that fake shit they’ve been spraying on the slopes will be buried, and the powder will fall. It’ll be righteous! By this time tomorrow, eight feet at the tops and six down the runs. Powder as deep as your tits.”

            That godawful George Harrison song they played endlessly in ’88 came on the radio. My box of mixtapes sat on the backseat, blocked by Troy’s skies. They fit snuggly in my Honda hatchback, with the tips resting on my dashboard. Troy’s gloves covered the points so they wouldn’t bang against the windshield.

            “Oh, Man!” Troy boomed. “Stoked! First ski of the season and a righteous storm!” He lightly punched my shoulder. “Best Part?”

            “What?” I asked when the pause implied I was supposed to ask. I took the first bend at the canyon base.

            “No one knows but me. Runs are up, but they’ll have to close the canyon for avalanche control. First on the mountain, man!” Troy howled loud enough to make my ears ring for a minute.

            “How much in the valley?” I asked.

            “What! Um, yeah. Like twelve, maybe sixteen inches on campus.”

            “Good.” I smiled.

            Troy stared out the window, looking to the clear, blue sky and the peaks of the mountains.

            “What time?”

            “Time. Oh. Yeah. ‘Bout midnight when it starts.”

            “Good. I’ll be back at my apartment. This car’s shit in the snow.”

            “Yeah. You should get a four by. With a ski rack.”

            “I don’t ski.”

            “Yeah, but I do. I just can’t get a driver’s license.”

            There was debate about why Troy didn’t drive and had no ID. Of course, he just used charm to get into bars or through the line at the liquor store. Troy got around town without ever being seen on a bus. If he wanted to go someplace, he got a ride. Often from people who didn’t know him and weren’t going in his direction. But if you asked any of them, they would say that it just seemed like the thing to do at the moment.

            “But the roads will be shit tomorrow, right? I can skip out on Thanksgiving at my folks?”

            “Nah, man. The feasts the thing. Crash there tonight. Take it all in. Got to love Turkeyday, man!”

            “It’s not the food. It’s the company.”

            “That right? Yeah. I get you. I got a sister. All about horticulture. These harvest fests make her crazy. Cooks for days and then complains that no one helps.”

            “Thanks again for the ride, Thunder,” Troy delivered another punch to my shoulder. This one, harder than the last. The whole time, he never took his eyes off the sky.

            Troy was the God of Pizza. The off-campus Pie Pizzeria’s best cook. Every slice he pulled from the brick oven was perfect. The crusts, hearty and crisp. Toppings, flawless in quantity and distribution. The pile of cheese melted to the exact moment of pull, right before the oils begin to separate. No other pizza cook could do what he did. A single slice from the God of Pizza cured depression or the stress of finals. First dates became instant successes. Waning relationships would rekindle. For the four years he held court in that graffiti-covered joint, it was the best in the world.

            When his shift ended, Troy could willingly drag a group of complete strangers into a night of drinking, feasting, and festivities. He was known to show up at the apartment of an acquaintance, a tower of pizzas in hand, and spontaneously create a block party. He laughed. He drank. He partied. And he made pizza. Pizza worthy of the gods.

            I never knew if Troy was his real name. In fact, I doubted it. A woman who had spent a summer surfing with him in SoCal claimed she knew his real name and story, but no one actually believed her. Partly because running off with a pizza cook to spend a few months riding the waves was so out of character for someone who was prelaw.

            But The Pie always had a thing with names. They served beer, and state law said that any employee serving alcohol had to wear a tag with unique identification. The predominately female counter staff wore tags with a name and number. It was the number that identified them according to the law. Not the name. This explained why the staff included people named Ceres, Flora, Minerva, Aurora, and Vesta.

            Regular customers, similarly, would invariably end up with a nickname. On the day I went from random college kid to regular, I was wearing an X-rated Bambi t-shirt. I got the nickname “Thumper.” A few months later, it was misheard by new counter staff and became “Thunder.” After that, when my order would come up, Troy would shout out, “God of Thunder” over the PA. I liked it better than my usual nickname, Nick. As in short for nickname.

            But let’s be serious. I was no thunder god. Yes, streetlights would turn off occasionally when I passed under them. A phenomenon that occurred just enough to be noticed by close friends and served as a bit of a driving hazard. But I couldn’t predict snowfall with the level of precision that Troy could.

            As the car climbed above the s-curve where White and Jenkins had died in a stolen white Jeep on graduation night, Troy rolled down the window. He stuck his head out to smell the air. The sun was dipping towards the horizon and shone straight up the canyon. The air was getting crisp as we climbed above seven thousand feet.

            I thought about whether or not I had any choice, driving Troy fourteen miles up a winding canyon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I had already done a four-hour shift at the museum, been to both classes held that day, and eaten a slice too many. But as I drove, I wasn’t tired or bored. I thought about Troy. In action at bars, the pizza joint, or on a street corner, he was irresistible. A force of jocularity greater than mere mortals. And yet, he was adamant about consent. He always asked. He always gave space to say no. And he always listened.

            In fact, he was a defender of consent. I had seen him send pitchers of beer to a table of frat boys with unhappy dates to ensure that they, the frat fucks, would be too drunk to fuck. While they puked in the alleyway, Troy would recruit a couple of trusted regulars to get young women home safely. Abusers, the violent, or the simply angry, always seemed to get foiled, sidetracked, or come to trouble around Troy. It was just a thing he did. The party that followed him wherever he went was always happy and safe

            Of course, whether I was coerced into spending my afternoon playing taxi driver for Troy didn’t really matter. After all, there are few things that will improve your college experience like having the God of Pizza in your debt.

[derrick-riches]

Mort the Troll

Mort the Troll froze to death in the early hours of a Saturday morning in early February. A few days later, he was buried unceremoniously in the Veteran's section of the city cemetery. I doubt anyone was in attendance. In the early spring, the site of his winter encampment was relandscaped so that no one else would find refuge next to the grating where the warm air was vented from the library.

            Where Mort spent his summers was a mystery. In wintertime, he came with a large blue tarp that he would tie to the large steel vent. Air flowed out, inflating the tarp into a tent that stayed warm regardless of the harshness of the winters on the mountainside.

            The vent sat under an architectural feature that imitated a bridge. A bridge that went nowhere and was only occasionally used by lost students or Parry the Pervert. Living under this bridge, in a dead-end corner around the back of the library, Mort, which wasn’t his name, had come to be known as the library troll, or just the Troll.

            This was in the earliest days of Berners-Lee’s little computer experiments when only a few computer aficionados might use the term troll to refer to a combative contrarian on Usenet forums. For those who called Mort a troll, they referred purely to the bridge-dwelling type.

            Most of the time, Mort was a ghost. He ignored people, and they him. He moved about campus, digging through garbage cans or simply huddling someplace to stay warm. At times, he became belligerent, yelling at lone students. Often in racist and sexist rants. He had a way of eroding any sympathy his plight might induce.

            This isn’t to say that attempts to aid him were not made. There were, in those days, a number of Vietnam Veterans on campus either as staff or professors. By means I was not privy to, they had concluded that Mort was a fellow brother in arms. They finagled him through the doors of the nearby VA hospital on a few occasions. Mort would refuse to provide his name, rank, or serial number. In kind, Veteran’s Affairs would refuse him care.

            A collection was gathered, and a room at the old-school hotel just off campus was reserved. This was the kind of hotel that had monthly rates. Mort was checked in. He promptly stripped the room of anything useful to him and carted it back to his tarp tent hanging off the side of the library. Further attempts to aid Mort were not made by his fellow veterans.

            A sorority once took on Mort’s case as a community service project. They raised money with car washes and bought him clothes, camping equipment, and nonperishable foodstuffs. During their presentation to him, photos were taken. Their smiles quickly disappeared once Mort launched into a precise and detailed explanation of all the things he intended to do with their various orifices. Still, gifts of food and clothes were left through the winter for Mort the Troll.

            My own encounters with Mort were more frequent than I liked. His section under the bridge was near the staff entrance, so it was inevitable that our paths would cross more than a few times. Usually, he ignored me. Sometimes, we would have a few minutes of conversational clarity. Typically, he talked about the weather.

            Once, he reminisced. He spoke about a time before the war, his war. It was difficult to follow, but what I gathered was of his days in high school somewhere in Idaho. For a moment, he wasn’t Mort the Troll. The person he once was seemed to shine through. It all ended abruptly when he caught sight of a young woman walking to class. I won’t repeat what he said. Suffice it to say, it involved chewing on the part of her.

            The last time I had seen Mort, he had thrown an empty plastic bottle of mouthwash at me. It was a generic brand that could be bought at the Crystal Mart a few blocks away for three dollars. Mort went through several bottles a week.

            That Saturday morning in February had been preceded by a small ice storm that blew out a transformer, plunging lower campus into darkness. The University had a central boiler from which most of the buildings were heated. One year, a pipe had burst, creating the great ice volcano that destroyed the bookstore’s parking lot.

            The power had been restored shortly before the library opened. While heat had flowed to the building during the power outage, the ventilation system failed. I arrived at work that morning to find a building unevenly heated, computers down, and general chaos. Amid the confusion, I didn’t think about Mort. Not until around 11:30. Not that it would have made any difference.

[derrick-riches]

Lightbulb

The 400-watt metal halide arc tube lights were, for unfathomable reasons, stored in a cabinet in the projection room of the art museum’s auditorium. It was a quiet, snowy day in December, just after finals week, and the Miller Gallery was as dim as the sky outside. I walked out the museum doors into the lobby. Bounded down the concrete and brick steps, past a young couple suffering from an inability to keep their hand off each other. Across the auditorium lobby, past the glass display cases of Navajo (Diné) blankets. Then through the northernmost of the ten doors and into the dimly lit theatre. Up the slight incline towards the back of the room, down the oddly shaped eight-foot hall, to the projection room door.

            A single, tiny halogen bulb glowed above the door, providing enough light to see the doorknob but not the keyhole. I fumbled with the lock for a moment, pulled open the door, and groped for the light switch. Despite not being labeled, it only took me a minute to find the correct light bulb from the metal cabinet on the opposite wall. Lock the cabinet. Turn. Thump. Freeze. Think. The auditorium was empty. Right? Slowly, I approached the door. It’s two inches thick. Solid oak. My ear against the door found only a slight ruffling.

            The Museum of Fine Arts Auditorium is occasionally used by the University President’s Club. A group of wealthy donors, emeritus professors, and the politically connected. Put on by a team of volunteers, the projectionist for most of these events was Ms. Carol, the retired stagecraft instructor and a woman with a dramatic flair for fashion. One night, a few years earlier, she had locked up the projection equipment after a poorly attended event to look out the window and find a completely empty room. Something took hold of her. Convinced that someone was waiting on the other side of the door, she became frozen with fear. She was found the next morning dehydrated and confused.

            A solution had to be found, insisted the President’s Club. A phone would have worked. A peephole drilled through the oak door would have worked. However, this was a serious situation. So, instead of the obvious, a small CTV camera was placed on the wall outside the booth, connected to a thirteen-inch monitor hung above the console. I reached over and turned on the monitor.

            It was grainy and dark. I turned on one of the projection console lights and turned off the main fluorescents. Yes. Two figures, silhouetted by the light that hits the wall at the opposite end of the hall.

            “I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, sitting down on the one chair in the room. Then again, I wouldn’t want the disturbance. I waited. Five minutes went by. Five minutes, and the best I could tell, they had managed to drop their heavy winter coats. “Get on with it,” I wanted to yell. Another five minutes passed and little had changed. The fuzzy couple on the monitor, which can only be seen from mid-torso up, are still making out. Then it hits me. Mood.

            I look over the console. Bring up the multi-color stage lights while dimming the main overhead cans. Adjust the stage color to a vibrant violet. Aim the primary spot to stage right and set to a deep red. Through the window, I watch, adjusting the luminosity to maintain a consistent foot candle. The monitor shows a slight color change. I notice the taller figure has its back against the wall. The other figure has disappeared.

            Art history professor Olpin kept cassettes of classical music to give his classes a little class. I thumb through them. Schubert? Too fluffy. Stravinsky? Too avant-garde. Haydn? Too comical. Ravel? Perfect! Boléro? If it’s good enough for Bo Derek, it’s good enough for these two. I punch the cassette into the deck. Forward about ten minutes. Volume to zero. Play. Bring up the volume slowly. One. Two. Three. Problem! I can’t really hear the music in the booth. The dial goes to 100, and I have to think. At what volume will it be subliminal and not obvious? Four. Five.

            The monitor hasn’t changed. I could crank the volume to 100 and scare the shit out of them. A few minutes go by while I consider it. Six. The smaller figure reappears. I turn the volume back to five. The kissing continues, but my hope of resolution is dashed when the smaller figure turns, back against the wall. The larger figure disappears. I mean, fair is fair, but still. I have work to do.

            Perhaps out of boredom, I begin modulating the colors on the main spot. I flip the stage lights to asynchronous rotation. This creates a delightful dancing motion on the stage floor and back wall. Toggle the spot to waver. The light begins a slow pulsing. I check the monitor. The one viewable figure seems to have some alien-like thing crawling about in its shirt. Volume to six. Seven. Eight. I don’t dare turn it any higher. I grab the headphones and put them on. I can hear the music. Its slow movement is building.

            Now, the monitor shows nothing. Did they leave? Was the music too loud? Back to seven. Nothing can be seen through the projection window. Of course, they could have slipped quickly out one of the side doors. I step over and press my ear against the door. Definitely still there.

            Back in the chair, I wait. I toy with the lights. Turn the volume back to eight. Then nine. I keep an eye on the monitor and wait for the culmination so I can grab the light bulb and get back to the task at hand. After a few minutes, a head appears. It’s just the top of a head. Probably the smaller of the two. The head bobbs or nods. Hard to tell which.

            Common on, I think, I have a twelve-foot ladder cluttering up a gallery upstairs. I turn the volume to 10. Then I turn to the lighting. I adjusted the cascading colors of the spot to match the rhythm of the bobbing. Then, the stage lights. They weave through a figure-eight motion that makes a beautiful but chaotic pattern. I switched to a simple circle and altered the rate to match the spot and the nodding.

            Once I have everything perfectly synchronized, I notice that the movements of the head are speeding up. I focus on it and, with one hand on the spot control and the other on the stage lights knob, began racing to keep up. Then, suddenly, the head stops moving and drops out of sight. Finally, I think. I kill the music, drop the spot and the stage lights, and bring up the house cans, returning the room to normal.

            There was a pile of clothes to don and backpacks to pick up. Eventually, the figures passed around the corner and out of sight of the monitor. I watch them walk across the auditorium and exit on the other side of the building. I grab the 400-watt metal halide arc bulb and return to the museum gallery.

[derrick-riches]

Two Degrees of Steven Spielberg

If you look at my sixth-grade class picture, you will find me fourth from the left in the front row. For those of you who don’t know, these group photos start by arranging all the kids by height. The tallest in this picture is in the back, right position. The shortest is in the left front. Yes. In the sixth grade, I was the fourth shortest.

           I am currently dead on six feet, or three inches taller than the statistical average for American males. I reached this height seven months before my twentieth birthday. The proverbial late bloomer. However, by the time I got to high school, 10th grade in my school district, I was still struggling to climb up the hill on the left side of the curve. Norman stood tall and confidently on the other side of the bell.

           Norman fit every stereotype of the high school jock. Imagine a young Lou Ferrigno. TV’s “Incredible Hulk” had been canceled the year before. Of course, Norman played football. Senior year he led the state in sacks. That year, we won the state championship. Seldom did he carry the ball, but he either cleared or obstructed the path of the ball, depending on who had possession.

           To the size and athleticism, add the fact that Norman’s family had money. Lots of money. According to legend, his father had been a mafia accountant now on the lamb in some South American country while his family enjoyed a local McMansion, expensive cars, and a live-in maid.

           The jock trope played out completely with Norman. He was far from the sharpest of cheeses. Classwork was not a high priority, and the coaches and administration understood this. But he was also quick to laugh and only engaged in bullying when it was obligatory, i.e., when everyone else in the clique was doing it. For the most part, hazing was below Norman’s station. He was simply too cool to be a full-time bully.

Like most of high school’s ruling class, stories involving Norman boarded on mythic. As I have said, Norman was big. He spent as much time pumping iron as his school, football, and social calendar would allow. And he quite successfully managed to aspire to the hulking TV figure he resembled. It was in regards to Norman’s size that the most widely circulated story hinged. While variations of the story were told among different groups, the gist was that the father of one of the Stacys (or perhaps one of the Stephanies) had barged in on his daughter and Norman. The combination of Norman's size and the young woman's panic had made it impossible for Norman to extricate himself from her. Much embarrassment was reported to have occurred.

           I had not attended the same junior high as Norman or most of the football players. I knew very little about them. The first time I saw him, I questioned that he was, in fact, my age. I was small in tenth grade, a little pudge, and a wearer of glasses. That tended to make me the occasional target of bullies. The high school I attended was designed to maximize bullying. Two narrow and necessary hallways afforded the shoving of victims into trash cans. But it was the boy’s locker room that was the perfect hunting ground for bullies. At one end, just beyond the showers, was an unsupervised door that led to a boxed-in hallway. This connected to the outside and to the girl’s gym. The doors were one-way. Once they had closed behind you, you could only return by going outside and around to another entrance.

           A popular hazing game was to grab boys out of the locker room and throw them through this door, nude or nearly so. At the right moment, there would be at least half a dozen girls leaving their locker room. The victim would have to exit the building, run down along a popular sidewalk, back into the building, and then into the boy’s gym and locker room. This would facilitate maximum humiliation in front of several screaming and laughing high school girls. It was, as the principal declared, all in good fun.

           Bully avoidance is an art of timing. It requires being in neither the wrong place nor at the wrong time. On one particularly snowy day in January, I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps I had forgotten to wind my Timex.

           It was Grimes, a hanger on of the football team at the front. Grimes’ shoulders carried the kinds of chips, large and plentiful, that conjured images of parental abuse and tormented home life. Then again, he might just have been an asshole. Either way, he never missed an opportunity to slam me into a bank of lockers when he found me walking the halls. I learned never to give him that opportunity. But when he and most of the football players approached, I knew my number was up.

           Grimes and another grabbed me by the arms. I tried to roll out of their grip to no avail. The path to that door was clear. Then, Norman simply said, “Not him.” Everything stopped except my heart. A few seconds or centuries later, I was released. The mob moved on in search of prey they would not find that day. Still trying to squeeze into my shoes, I escaped the locker room.

           Never in my life have I uttered a word to Norman, neither before nor since. Once, we had a class together only because there wasn’t a remedial equivalent. I do not know why he uttered those two words. To be honest, I didn’t give it a lot of thought. In the years after, I never stopped to ponder the encounter. Had things not turned out the way they did, I doubt I ever would have spent a moment thinking about those two words and what did or didn’t happen that day. By twelfth grade, my height had reached average. I was a little slimmer, and I took to wearing my glasses only when I wanted to see something. Even Grimes stopped seeing me as a potential victim of his angry soul.

           I graduated, as did Norman. I went off to college, as did Norman, though not at the same university. I lived my life seldom thinking about high school. Too many things, good and bad, happened afterward to keep my mind’s attention. If it hadn’t been for a chance encounter with a local newspaper fifteen years later, I might have forgotten him entirely.

           Gleaned from news reports, I pieced together something of Norman’s life together. He had gone to UCLA. International studies. The fluffiest of degrees. He turned his sights on acting via modeling. He got glossies and an agent. He auditioned and waited. During this waiting, he seems to have discovered something of himself. He came out. Took jobs tending bars and became something of a regular at LA nightclubs. Perhaps it was the club scene. Perhaps abandonment issues, generated by a father who left when he was six. Perhaps simple insanity.

           In the reportage that would emerge, even the LA Times had to point out that Norman was gay and that he had a history of offenses (at least two). There was also a discussion of drug issues and a litany of romantic partners. I supposed that in the pursuit of a complete story, and given the victim, the media needed to vilify Norman in any way, real or not, that they could. Personally, I don’t care to speculate. Some of the stories got wild, dino fetishism being the wildest.

           I haven’t seen Norman in nearly forty years. I don’t know him, and I can’t say what drove him to do what he did. As lurid as the story is, every attempt was made to suppress it by the immense power of those involved. Not a conspiracy, per se, but a desire to avoid any association with the negative. The parental abandonment angle led to the discovery that Norman’s father was little more than a two-bit conman who had deprived several elderly persons of their retirement savings and was hiding out in the wilds of New Mexico or some such place.

           What is known of Norman is this. He was apprehended by security personnel and the LA police while attempting to scale the gates of Steven Spielberg’s Palisades mansion. Police reported that Norman was in possession of what they called a homemade rape kit. I shudder to think that there is any other kind. They also reported that Norman had apparently been on a cocaine bender for several days and that he stated that he intended to rape the famed director.

           That Spielberg and his family had been in Ireland that night during the production of Saving Private Ryan was not known to Norman. It was also not considered a relevant fact by the prosecution, the jury, or the judge. Spielberg would fly home during the trial to testify to the sheer terror that the sight of Norman produced in him.

           During the sentencing, the prosecution, bolstered by lawyers for Mr. Spielberg, pushed a potentially controversial third-strike ruling. The judge agreed, and Norman was sentenced to 25 years in a maximum-security penitentiary for violent offenders. Shortly after the sentence began, Norman was transferred to a psychiatric facility. In April of 2023, Norman was again denied parole. His case will be reconsidered no earlier than 2028. At that time, he will have spent nearly thirty years incarcerated.

[derrick-riches]

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Test

            Tenured Professor Ron Smelzer taught all his classes from worn binders filled with yellowing paper that crackled as he mindlessly turned page after page. Seldom did his eyes pass over these notes. Decades of teaching the same classes, semester after semester, had burned every bullet point into his brain. And yet, he turned the pages in rhythm with his lectures.

            Professor Smelzer never assigned papers, never took roll, and never accepted excuses. Midterm and final. Always essay questions. Always compare and contrast. Answers requiring details, names, and dates. But also, something more. The elusive “A” required an epiphany. While everything you needed came from the lectures and readings, the exhaustive essay questions necessitated putting together disparate concepts in ways that often seemed counterintuitive. At least he gave the option of answering only two of the three questions on the test handout that arrived promptly the moment the test was scheduled to begin.  

            It was a snowy morning in December when I took a snort from the flask bequeathed to me by Tim the Eccentric when he moved on to graduate school at Berkeley. The mouthful of Irish whisky had been his and now my pretest ritual.

            I entered the classroom ten minutes before test time and found a seat on the left end of a row of desks. Smelzer was nowhere to be seen. He would, as was his custom, walk in a minute before the test, make some announcement, and then pass out the questions.

            Like every other student, I pulled out my notebook for one last refresher in the few minutes before the desks would be cleared of everything but a blue book and a pen. I stared at my notebook, filled with everything I had considered important from each lecture. A wave of futility washed over me. What was I going to learn in the last remaining minutes? Everyone around me flipped furiously through their own unique collection of scribblings. The collective anxiety was palpable. I folded up my notes, stuffed them back into my bag, and put the blue book and pen on the desk. I sat back and waited.

            It wasn’t a calmness I felt. It was an angry frustration. If I was paying to be educated, then why did I have to prove to Smelzer, or the institution for that matter, that I had gotten my money's worth? Why did I have to waste two hours of my Tuesday morning performatively proving my proficiency in the subject?

            Smelzer’s rotund figure in a worn grey suit entered the room. He reiterated the testing rules and the two-hour time limit. His instructions to clear our desks were drowned out by the shuffling of papers, backpacks, and bookbags. I watched nervous students sigh and prepare. Test papers were delivered to each student from the professor's hand. I set mine, face down on the desk.

            All around me, papers fluttered. There was more than one gasp of disappointment as those around me read the questions. I looked around the room. Had there even been enough time to read the questions? People were already writing. Something in me found it humorous. The speed with which pens began scratching on paper. I smiled and turned over my copy of the test.

            I read. I thought. I listened to the scribbling. I watched Smelzer settle into a chair, adjust his glasses, and begin to read from some ancient and probably outdated tome of Slavic history. I reread the questions and cared less and less about the test. Other students were flipping over pages, moving to their second or even third. I thought about two-for-one slices at The Pie. Sure, it was a little after ten in the morning, but pizza and beer sounded better than this. I stared at Smelzer and his oddly perfect salt-and-pepper beard.

            There he was. Tenured and secure. Teaching from twenty-year-old notes while writing esoteric articles for obscure history journals to infuse his static career with the illusion of productivity. I had nothing against the guy, but sitting there, as the minutes wandered by, I grew to dislike him. And then, almost pity him. It took effort to turn my eyes to the paper sitting on my desk. I read the questions a third time, still not considering an answer.

            Don’t get me wrong. It had been a pretty good class. Dated? Yes. A little too much emphasis on diplomatic failings and too little on the kinds of sociological madness that drove people to commit such horrible atrocities. And yet, the overall narrative had been engaging. Some of the books hadn’t been too dry, but the lectures carried their own rhythm that had kept me awake. To be honest, after all these weeks, I just didn’t care about the class or Smelzer anymore. It got me thinking about something Professor Leonardo Alishan had said a few semesters earlier in a course on Classical Literature.

            Professor Alishan was a fascinating person. He had canceled class one day because his daughter was ill, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her side. It was little more than a cold, but still, class was canceled that day. His death in a house fire would be a serious knock to my psyche two decades later, but what he had said stuck with me. Knowledge is not power. Power is a commodity, and to equate it to knowledge did nothing but cheapen the latter. It was simple, but it changed the way I thought about education in general and universities in particular.

            If I was here to gain knowledge, then the whole point of the test was meaningless. I wasn't going to learn anything by taking the test. It could teach me nothing. So why was I here? It was sacrificial. I was sacrificing my time, energy, and mental power in a performative exercise to appease the gods of institutionalization. My obligation was to the ritual. The ritual of education. I took a deep breath, read the first question for the fourth time, and began writing. An hour later, with 40 minutes left of the test time, I dropped my blue book on the desk in front of Smelzer and walked out of the room.

            The temptation to get full-priced pizza and a pint of beer was strong, but instead, I walked through the newly falling snow to the library to start what was left of a day's work. I knew that my test anxiety would no longer bother me. I had a new appreciation for my purpose and my education. All in all, it would have been a good day had Scott Hanson, having bombed his biology final, not thrown himself off the fifth-floor atrium of the library, breaking an oak table and leaving a blood stain on the carpet that wouldn’t be cleaned up for two weeks.

[derrick-riches]

When you are asked to write the introduction for a "friend's" book.

The Count of Monte Christo is being published in the Everyman edition, this work too now placed in the pantheon of the great, alongside, Stendhal and Balzac. What more can one say? This consecration, the acknowledgement that Monte Christo is part of literary history. Must we therefore say that Dumas' work is equal of Scarlet and Black and Madame Bovary? That it is a 'great novel'?             The Count of Monte Christo is of course one of the most gripping novels ever written, and on the other hand one of the most badly written novels of all time and of all literatures.             Dumas' writing is all over the place. A mass of fillers shameless in its repetition of the same adjective only one line below, incontinent in its piling on of these same adjectives, quite capable of entering into some sententious digression that can never be got out of because the syntax won't hold, and huffing and puffing on like that for twenty lines, it is mechanical and clumsy in its descriptions of feelings. Its characters either shudder or turn pale, dry great drops of sweat that run down their brows or, stammering in a voice no longer human, rise frenziedly from their chairs or fall back into them, with the author always, obsessively, bent on telling us that the chair they had fallen back into was the same one on which they had been sitting a second before.

-Umberto Eco's introduction to the Everyman Edition of the Count of Monte Cristo (2009)