vii
The Dervish Act
In his last years at Busiris Technical University, Charles Creed taught very little. He attended no departmental meetings. He rarely took lunch on campus. He kept minimal office hours. His “stop days” multiplied, after a decade of raises well below the annual rate of inflation, to fill the first and last weeks of each semester, plus half a dozen other days scattered across the remaining thirteen weeks of class. One afternoon you’d glimpse a shadowy figure in a denim jacket passing the Busiris campus gate. You’d hear the boisterous laugh down the hall or around a corner. You’d think of Charles Creed and realize you hadn’t seen him in ages. Jack was a mostly invisible presence, an idea whispered through the corridors. A rumor.
A ghost.
His absence was ostensibly due to a series of necessities: speaking engagements, writing and researching, a stint as assistant to the Associate V. P. A. A., a semester in England, his term as faculty rep on the Bucks Boosters Association. Those were the excuses. In truth, his absence was the result of a conscious decision to withdraw. Or, rather, to a series of alternative periods of sulky withdrawal and quixotic re-engagement, which puzzled students, outraged enemies, and perplexed friends.
Jack began life after Lily Lee with engagement, a commitment to “the New Busiris” as personified by its new Vice President for Academic Affairs, Bertholt Reich the Third.
Not long after the farewell banquet for Lily and Big Jim Oliver, Ted Jones received a one-year leave from his position of chair of the English Department to serve full-time in Vice President Reich’s office. One rumor had the appointment a payoff for Jones’ service in the faculty downsizings of ‘74 and ‘77. Another rumor had Jones the next dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. A third scenario had Reich, a Southern stranger to the treacherous landscape of Busiris politics, tripping a few land mines early in his tenure at Busiris. According to this theory, Jones was nothing more than a hired navigator who was cashiered when Reich felt he could steer for himself. What Reich actually had in mind, we never found out. The deanship went finally not to Jones (who applied for the vacancy) but to another outsider, Ernest Hauptmann.
Ted Jones brought Charles Creed to administration in 1979-80. Jack served nominally as Jones’ assistant, although he was more a consultant assigned to a series of special projects. The position as assistant to an assistant released Jack from half his teaching load to write feasibility studies for programs in mass communications and global studies. Jones had convinced Reich that Jack’s research skills and sensitivity to educational trends, evidenced by the successful Black Studies Program, could be used to the University’s advantage. Possibly Jones was using Creed; possibly he was setting him up. Possibly Jones, who still considered Jack a part of the New Busiris, was trying to bring him into a new administration for which he held high hopes. Possibly Jones was working a favor for a colleague whom he admired. As events unfolded, it’s quite possible that Jones’ association with Creed cost him the deanship. But possibly Reich was merely using Jones and attempting to buy off Creed. The scenarios are endless. Deconstructionists will have a field day. I’m your quintessential unreliable narrator anyway.
“Work the feasibility studies around your other writing and lecturing,” Ted suggested to Jack. “It beats grading freshman themes.”
Jack agreed. “It will free up time for my own writing and lecturing,” he told Lou and me.
Lou gave him a look.
“So they’re using me,” Jack admitted. “I’m using them. Why not?”
“You’re not maybe compromising your position just a little?”
“He who is completely honest can live inside the law or outside the law.”
“He who is completely honest. . . .”
That fall, Jack taught two classes, both “Introduction to the Short Story,” which he scheduled to meet Mondays and Wednesday mornings, 8:00 to 9:30 and 10-11:30. The rest of the week he was a free man.
On paper.
In fact, the feasibility studies freed him from nothing. “I’m studying shit I don’t believe in,” he told me in November, “and I’m writing crap. The meetings are interminable, full of asshole administrators and asshole faculty, one gaggle more self-serving than the other. I’m irritable when I get home. I can’t concentrate on my own work because my head is full of jargon and academic pieties. Nobody in Old Main gives a goddamn about global studies or mass communication, unless either program can generate outside funding. They don’t even care about more students, let alone the best interests of students they’ve got, let alone developing a quality program. They’re interested exclusively in designing programs that will attract an outside funding agency. We’ve got a new Vice President, but it’s the same old B. T. U. Plenty of heat, precious little light.”
By January 1980, Jack had completed detailed outlines of and carefully documented rationales supporting programs in global studies and in mass communications. Once passed by the Busiris Senate, these documents formed the core of seven different proposals to six different government agencies and private foundations. The four of the seven which received funding brought Busiris 2.4 million dollars between 1981 and 1985.
In February 1980, Jack found himself doing a cost-benefit study of the Speech and Hearing Therapy Program. “It’s a solid program offered by very few Midwestern universities,” he told me, “but it’s out of synch with current educational enthusiasms and thus not a money-maker. Old Main wants it cut. There are no grants for sustaining successful, useful, established programs—funds only for initiating new projects of high social but dubious educational value. Also, it’s a rigorous program. Too much work for the new breed of Busiris student. Not to mention the new breed of Busiris teacher. So a perfectly good program—with a competent and nationally respected faculty—is to be axed, and I’m supposed to forge the hatchet blade.”
The job got worse. In March, Jack found himself studying the feasibility of a Women’s Studies Program, to be modeled on the program in Afro-American Studies he had helped create.
“One component of the program is that we sent Victoria off to Vassar or Bryn Mawr or some such finishing school for a Ph. D.,” he fumed in real or feigned exasperation. ‘Two-year leave of absence at full salary, plus—get this—a supplement for having to live Out East. Tuition, fees and book expenses will be paid by Busiris. Victoria comes back A. B. D. in 1982 with an additional two years to finish her degree. But she is promoted immediately upon her return to the rank of associate professor—this is without degree, let alone publications—and directs the goddamn Women’s Studies Center, which is also part of this project. As director, she will receive a one-course release per semester.”
“You have done very well for Assistant Professor Nation.”
“She has tried on more than one occasion to repay me. Or to encourage me. I say no more.” Jack rolled his eyes.
“Victoria has always been hot for you, Jack. She’s probably a very passionate woman. You missed the see-through blouse.”
“Oh, Vicky’s a complicated woman,” Jack said. Then, turning reflective, he added, “Although she’s certainly no Lily Lee Martin.”
“Reich seems to think highly enough of her.”
“Reich would.”
Rumor had Victoria and Reich appearing together in Chicago over Christmas at a conference on “Strategies for Institutional Self-Assessment.” Jack, a favorite of the custodial and secretarial staffs who gave him access to the most private of private information, got the story straight from the business office secretary, who had personally processed the travel reimbursements. “They traveled separately, but only he gave me a hotel receipt,” she told Jack. “I phoned the Palmer House to confirm his receipt. It was definitely a double occupancy.”
“I don’t really care if she’s fucking his brains out, but it strikes me as odd that the only two people on this campus who want a Women’s Studies Program are Bert and Vicky. I can’t see what Bert gets out of Women’s Studies, unless it’s a grant. Or a blow job.”
“Bert’s a feminist. Or claims to be.”
“A male who claims to be a feminist is either a fool or a liar. The self-proclaimed goal of feminism is increasing female power in a world dominated by males. If that analysis is correct, increasing female power necessarily means decreasing male power. Either Reich is too dumb to figure out the program, or he hasn’t figured out his own gender. More likely he’s getting paid off, which means he’s acting out of his own best interests and not women’s, which makes him not a feminist but a paternalistic patriarch son-of-a-bitch. And a liar.”
In April Jack submitted less than carefully written and less than carefully documented recommendations that the Speech and Hearing Therapy Program, “a model in the region,” be maintained and expanded, and that a Women’s Studies Program, “though a trendy idea,” lacked support among both students and faculty and “did not promise to increase significantly Busiris enrollments from the student populations it has traditionally attracted.”
The Women’s Studies recommendation incensed Nation, who regarded it as a kind of personal treachery, and the Speech and Hearing recommendation irritated Jack’s boss’s boss. To nobody’s surprise, Reich—opposed by student opinion, at least as expressed in the Sentinel, but supported by close a vote in the Senate—overrode both recommendations. Whereupon Jack resigned as under-assistant-junior-adjunct researcher to the assistant to the Vice President, to return to full-time teaching.
The department needed him in that fall to cover for Victoria Nation, who was not replaced during her years at Bryn Mawr.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” Jack told me less than a year after his “they’re using me/I’m using them” speech. Experience in the service of the Bert Reich permanently disillusioned Jack on “the new Busiris” and paved the way for the contingency contract explosion in 1982.
And the contingency contract matter was the beginning of the end of Charles Creed.
Initially Jack interpreted Reich’s offer of a contingency contract, and Hauptmann’s handling of his protest, as delayed payback for his recommendations on Women’s Studies and Speech and Hearing. “Quid pro quo,” he told me. “You give ‘em the quid, you got to expect the quo. If I’d played ball with them in ‘80, they’d probably have offered me $3600 for one course. I didn’t, and they didn’t. I got no kicks, no regrets. A man has to learn to just keep out of bad company like that.”
The War of the Contingency Contract, culmination of Jack’s many frustrations at Busiris, was a story famous across campus in 1982. It was a battle Jack fought largely on behalf of colleagues who did not support him, over an issue he personally had settled half a decade before.
The story is as follows.
In the days when Busiris faculty spent their summers alternately teaching and “doing research,” Jack had taught summer school as the rotation required. In 1973 he received a summer stipend to prepare his Afro-American literature course, and when summer research grants ended in 1974, Jack returned to summer school teaching. He taught each summer until the book was published. In 1975 he received, in addition to teaching money, a $1,000 award from the university’s Board of University Learning, Cooperative Research and Artistic Production. (When Age of Faith went to multiple printings, Busiris wanted Jack to repay his BULCRAP money out of royalties—an action he considered the first directly and personally hostile action in the Campaign Against Creed.)
Then came the book, and the reviews, and speaking engagements, and the Pulitzer, royalty checks, more speaking engagements, requests for more essays and stories. Jack appeared to be free forever of summer school, if not full-time teaching. “If Age of Faith won’t do it, sales of other stuff will. I’m out of here, Tucker,” he exalted in 1978. “I’m out of summer school, and if things work out right, I’m out of this graveyard forever.”
Things did not work out right.
Jack applied nearly all of the initial royalty check and much of the second to his mortgage, on the assumptions that 17% annual interest was immoral, if not criminal, and more royalty checks were only a matter of time. He did not understand that bookstore returns of unsold books—for credit—usually produce negative sales during the second and third years of a book’s life. Nor are exemptions granted, apparently, to the winners of Pulitzer Prizes. In 1980, instead of a fat royalty check, Jack received a statement showing him several thousand in the red. Not until 1983 did the book recover this deficit. Age of Faith went out of print in 1984.
Nor was Jack’s writing career developing in the early eighties as he might have projected in 1976. Despite publication in several major literary magazines and familiar correspondence with major American writers whose work he had previously admired from a distance (particularly Ken Kesey and Robert Bly), Jack had not cracked Esquire, Atlantic or the New Yorker. He had reached the level of hand-written and personally signed rejection notes with invitations to “let us see more,” but he hadn’t hit the big time. Far from encouraging Jack, each letter increased his alienation. “I can no longer deal with the East Coast lunacy,” he would rage. “I don’t even bother with any publication east of the Appalachians or west of the Rockies,” he claimed repeatedly, although he continued to offer ideas, stories and finished essays to publications on both coasts.
Clearly Jack’s decade in Riverton had, despite the frequent visits east of Appalachia, cost him his contacts out East. By the early eighties he probably no longer understood the New York mind, and possibly he had lost touch with the mood of the country in and outside of academia. His work, published and unpublished, inevitably regionalized itself in downstate Illinois, the heart of the Midwest, in the country. Garrison Keillor was giving America a new national home town on the Minnesota prairie, and Carolyn Chute was introducing Egypt, Maine, but the literati associated rural Illinois only with Ronald Reagan. Jack’s material was just wrong—wrong people, wrong geography, wrong style, wrong attitude.
Age of Faith had brought Jack an agent, Connie Lingel, who badgered him for years about a successor to Age of Faith. Separate from Lily Lee, however, Jack could not do another Age of Faith. Nor would, his agent agreed, the nation have responded in the early eighties to such a book. That moment was passed. Where next? Jack, who had withdrawn from national politics into himself and his children, into Glen Oak Park and the Busiris Zoo, proposed a collection of rural meditations along the lines of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. He gave it the working title A Country Journal, and fired off a prospectus to Lingel.
She was not optimistic. “New York is desperate for another book from Charles Creed,” she assured him, “but I see zero interest here in a Middle West Walden. I could easily sell them on the idea of something political or popular culture, but more focused.”
Jack suggested a book on Bob Dylan. Lingel had got word of the Robert Shelton biography and thought that even Creed could not compete with Shelton. Besides, Dylan had been done and done again.
“Phil Ochs,” Jack suggested.
Marc Eliot had claimed Phil Ochs.
“How about Country Joe McDonald?” Lingel suggested.
“Country Joe McDonald?” Jack wanted to know. “Why not the Monkees? How about the fucking Bee Gees?”
Lingel suggested a general Charles Creed commentary on the Seventies, to follow Charles Creed on the Sixties.
“Sure thing,” Jack told her. “We’ll give it the working title The Great Slumber. What if they gave a decade and nobody showed up?”
Lingel said she was serious and begged to inform Jack that many individuals, women and gays among them, considered the seventies a decade of enormous and beneficial change. Creed’s hibernation in the hinterlands didn’t mean the whole country was snoozing.
“I’m neither female nor queer,” Jack answered. He had not yet written “Women’s Liberation: the Conservative Revolution”—at least it wasn’t being circulated—so Lingel wouldn’t have known that material, but obviously Jack and his agent were on different frequencies.
Jack suggested that Country Journal was where his head was at, and the mood of the nation—as reflected in its choice of President, the popularity of “A Prairie Home Companion,” and its rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment—seemed closer to his position than hers. If New York couldn’t handle a Middle West Walden, then New York had lost its sense of the Republic and was no longer useful. Connie Lingel promised Charles Creed she’d be in touch, Charles Creed thanked her, and the two never spoke or write again. Lingel was not involved in contract negotiations on Song of the North Country.
Relationships between the Heartland and the Coast remained cordial at best for the rest of Jack’s life.
In 1982, pressed by double-digit inflation, nearly stagnant salaries, a growing family, a house two sizes too large, and the demands of Rose Marié, Jack asked to teach two summer school classes.
His ill-timed request came at a moment when the University was reassessing its summer program. In the mid-seventies, Busiris had developed an ambitious program which, promotional brochures explained, allowed students to attend school all year round and graduate in three years instead of the traditional four. That program attracted students, but it also meant offering a number of upper-level classes each summer for students on the three-year cycle. These highly specialized classes, many of which did not transfer to programs at other schools, were as useless to Busiris freshmen and sophomores as to University of Illinois kids back home in Riverton for the summer. They were high-investment, low-enrollment propositions. Busiris found itself caught between its commitment to a three-year degree and its desire to squeeze as much money as possible out of the summer program by squeezing as many students as possible into each class. How to reduce low-enrollment classes while appearing to support the three-years-and-out program?
The solution was enrollment-contingent contracts. A course would be scheduled and advertised. If it registered enough students, it would be taught. If not, it would be canceled. Since students could enroll as late as the first day of summer school, cancellation could also come as late as the first day of summer school. In those days the University was none too sophisticated about calculations, but somebody in Old Main decided that seven students would be “enough” to confirm a four-hour course. Seven students paying $90 a credit hour (or $360 for the course) would allow Busiris to pay a professor $1,200 for teaching it.
Even English professors could crunch those numbers. We all realized our pay amounted to less than half of the University’s minimum take. “Enroll ten students,” Jack pointed out, “and your salary amounts to exactly one third of what they collect. And what does the average class enroll? Herr Hauptmann will not tell you, but my connections have provided figures. The average class in summer of 1981 enrolled 11.3 students. There were classes smaller than seven, granted, but the average was 11.3. On average, they took in more than three times what they paid out in salary. And they’re bitching that summer school is not cost-effective.”
When Jack received his contract for summer school, both freshmen composition and introduction to fiction classes were designated enrollment-contingent.
His initial response was to draw a red line through the phrase “enrollment contingent” and return the signed contract to Vice President Reich. Reich responded with a memo informing Jack that faculty were not permitted to rewrite contracts and that tampered contracts were considered void. Jack phoned Reich to tell the Vice President that as a laborer, he was allowed to negotiate the terms and conditions of his employment. Reich told Creed that the enrollment contingent clause was non-negotiable. Creed told Reich to double the salary from $1200 a course to $2400 a course, $4800 total. Reich told Creed summer school salaries were standard and non-negotiable. Creed told Reich that on those terms he had no interest in teaching summer, and Reich could go fuck himself.
Jack version of the story, recounted over a Saturday evening dinner at his house, was the first Rose Marié had heard of the business.
“I don’t know how you can turn down $2,400 just like that,” she exploded, “when you know we need the money and you have nothing better to do with the summer. You walked away from two years of house taxes, just because you’re too hot-headed.”
“By the time they’re done withholding, it’s more like $1500. It’s not worth my time.”
“$1500 is a very nice vacation with our folks.”
“It’s the goddamn principle.”
“There is no principle. Your classes always drew at least seven students. They would never be canceled.”
“I resent being paid less than a third of what I earn for that place,” Jack said.
“Basically, the salary sucks,” Linda said.
“The salary is the same no matter what,” Rose Marié told her husband.
“That’s the point. They’re going to pay me $1200 for seven students, and $1200 for seventeen students. I’m bringing in dollars, and they’re handing me nickels and dimes. Because I’m making them a bundle, they should be able to risk a few people who might drop below seven students. But they refuse to take the risks. I’m not bitching about what might happen to me. I’m bitching for what the program does to other people.”
“They don’t feed my kids,” Rose Marié said coldly. “They don’t pay for my vacation. You do. You feel more obligation to some principle involving them than you do to your own family.”
“We don’t need the money that much,” Jack argued.
“In my family, you don’t just walk away from money when somebody offers it to you. You should think more about your children and less about yourself.”
Her last line swayed Jack, although I suspect he reconsidered merely to make peace with Rose Marié. In any event, he was soon in Dean Hauptmann’s office attempting to reopen negotiations on the pretext of proposing a new arrangement. Faculty would teach on a per capita basis: $120 a head for a four-hour class, precisely one third of what the University collected in tuition. “If just one student enrolls, I’ll teach the class for $120 and you make $240,” he told Hauptmann. “If 20 students enroll, I make $2400 and you make $4800.”
“No can do,” Hauptmann told him.
“Class or no class, the rooms are going to be there. How much can electricity cost? You’d make money even off of one student. You can’t lose. Only I am gambling: I risk losing five weeks teaching one student in each course for a total of $240. You risk what? A listing in some summer school brochure.”
“Your proposal would set a disturbing precedent,” Hauptmann told him. “It might, for example, set one instructor to recruiting students away from other instructors merely to earn an additional $120. Such behavior would be very unprofessional.”
“Professional means you get paid for your work.”
“The university is paying you.”
“You want unprofessional behavior? I’ll give you a story about unprofessional behavior,” Jack told his dean. “At least one of my colleagues—I know this for a fact—has been approached by at least one student with the suggestion that if the professor could help the student financially, the student would enroll in the professor’s upper division summer school class, bringing his enrollment to seven and guaranteeing him his twelve hundred lousy bucks. The professor is seriously considering spending three hundred to make twelve, because his class has an early registration total of six students. Now how professional is that?”
“I would agree the situation you describe is not a good idea, but per capita salary is not a good idea either.”
“Neither are enrollment-contingent contracts.”
“Per capita salary is open to abuse.”
“Contingency contracts abuse both faculty and students. You ask faculty to commit their summer three months in advance, and some students plan their spring semester classes based on what they can take during the summer. You won’t commit until the very day of registration, the beginning of June. You want us to commit to you, but you won’t commit to us. That’s abuse.”
“On the contrary,” Hauptmann argued. “By allowing us to offer classes that might not enroll seven students, enrollment-contingent contracts open up the summer curriculum and offer students and faculty both at least a chance at classes that might otherwise not even be offered.”
“There’s nothing fucking open about what you offered me,” Jack pointed out. “Freshmen composition and short story fill every semester they’re offered. The least they have ever drawn during a summer was fifteen, and that was last summer.”
“As a collective whole, enrollment-contingent contracts expand our summer options,” Hauptmann insisted.
“So does my proposal,” Jack countered.
“We’re not going to pay you per capita, Dr. Creed,” Hauptmann told Jack. “You might as well accept that fact. Not you or anyone else. And you can quit your crusading for the rest of the faculty, who entered teaching as a profession, Dr. Creed. Not to get rich, but because they enjoy teaching. They have a good time with it. You too, by all reports, are a good teacher who enjoys his students. Why not join your colleagues who understand our rationale and are more than happy to accept what we offer? Who are not, you may have noticed, in this office complaining with you. You’re not here representing them, and you’re no special case, although you seem to think you are. I’m not going to offer you some kind of a special arrangement just because you’re Charles Creed. You can take the contract Vice President Reich has been kind enough to extend to you, or you can decline it.”
“Ernest,” Jack said, “You know as well as I do that Reich is fucking over faculty and students both. There’s apparently not a fucking thing I can do about it, and not a fucking thing that you’re willing to do about it. I’m going to sign your fucking contract, but the fact that I’m signing it does not alter the truth, which it that this thing stinks. For telling such lies, the ground is one day going to open up and, mark my words, you heard it here first, swallow Old Main whole. I hope you and Bert are in there when it goes.”
“These threats, Professor Creed, do not suit the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history.”
“Neither does my salary,” Jack retorted.
In June-July of 1982 Jack Creed taught freshmen composition to a total of 18 students. He taught introduction to fiction to a total of 23 students. The students paid $360 per course, or an aggregate of $14,760, in tuition and fees. For his labors, Jack received $2,400, less withholding. In August the Creeds traveled east to visit in-laws, their vacation paid for in part by his summer stipend.
The battle cost Busiris far more than it netted on Jack’s classes. It ultimately cost the college Charles Creed. It fixed hostilities between the institution and the professor once and for all, and contributed significantly to the events of 1985 that led to Creed’s departure. If Jack’s resignation from Busiris was bad for Busiris—and that was the consensus in 1985 (and today)—then the summer of 1982 was bad for Busiris.
The battle also marked an end to Jack’s first period of engagement. He retreated to Busiris Hall and to predominantly undergraduate teaching. “Old Main is full of assholes. So, from what I saw of them, is the faculty. The graduate program in English is a joke. Our undergraduates are smarter than our graduate students. This department has you, and me, and Lou Feracca. Period. The only thing left is the undergrad students. Lily Lee is gone, but I’ll have to make do with what there is. All you can do is hit what’s pitched.”
Among the 1980s Busiris students, however, Jack found all too few of the wild, burning ones, more of what came to be known as Yuppies. Like the rest of us, Jack expected the youngsters to be all their older siblings had been and just a little bit more. He found, like the rest of us, that they were less. Statistically, they were dumber: SAT and ACT scores of graduating high school seniors dropped steadily every year from 1963 until the end of the 1980s. Politically they were inept. Their music was not his music; their dope was not his dope; their good times were not his good times. Jack considered most of his eighties students lazy.
Even the blacks. After Lily, Lynette, and J. J. Oliver graduated, Jack resigned as advisor to the Black Students Alliance which, he claimed, had turned “booshie.” Nor did Jack volunteer to advise any other student organization.
He was desperate, of course, for another Lily Lee, and we saw him frequently with his arm around one coed or another. But there were no more Lily Lees in the world, not in the Association, not at Busiris, not in 1980s America. He hung with a young Polish kid named Paul Popowski and, for a time, with a coed named Annie Brower. Their friendship soured when Jack thought she was using him.
Annie had taken Jack for two classes her freshman and sophomore years, and they did a few lunches and some drinking at the Holiday Inn. Or the Heidelberger, although in later years Jack avoided the Heidelberger. Her junior year, something went wrong which Jack never understood. She had registered for Jack’s Modern American class, but then started missing classes. “She was gone two weeks at least,” he recalled. “Gave no specific reason beyond ‘personal problems,’ which she couldn’t share. Wanted to know if she could just skip that stuff and pick up where she left off. I got a little miffed. I considered Annie B. one of my people, and there she was basically blowing me off. Maybe we weren’t as close as I thought.”
“So my reaction was, if we’re no longer close enough to talk, then I’m not bending over backwards to help you make up lost work. And I always get a little testy when friends want special deals. Lily Lee never asked for a special deal in her life. I told Annie she owed me a couple of written assignments, and I told her get them in when she could. She pressed me about in-class material. I told her, ‘Get notes from a friend. I’m not going to repeat two weeks of lectures. Except maybe over beers at the Heidelberger.’ But Annie B and Jack never returned to the Heidelberger.
Then it was a cheerleader named Carolyn McQuillan, whom Lou regarded as Jack’s new Daisy. If their relationship went anywhere, I never knew about it. Jack saw Carolyn mainly at the Bucks games.
Even his relationship with black athletes, whom he had always regarded as hard working and exploited, soured during the eighties, when Jack suspected he was being used to horse sub-par basketball players through freshmen composition.
Jack was still popular with many students because of his character and reputation, and probably could have found more young friends, but he himself pulled back. He seemed to measure everyone against Lily Lee and Billy Jo Allen. And he became increasingly conscious of the distance between his age and his students’.
With the yuppies, Jack was even more dismissive and more abrasive. We all noticed it, including Jack, who attributed the change not to his own character but theirs: “In the old days mediocrity kind of hid itself in the back of the room and hoped to sneak by unnoticed with a C. Now it sits right up front, challenges every idea that is more than a quarter inch over its head, and then demands a B or an A for less work than you used to give C’s for. Mediocrity militant. I can’t believe the balls of some of these kids.’
One student read Age of Faith, found it obscene, and wrote a letter to the editor of the Riverton Standard-Republican. Jack responded by photocopying every review the book had ever received and mailing them to her personally. An older woman found the material in her creative writing textbook—as well as other student work, and Jack’s discussion of both—full of “sex and vulgarity.” Her B in the course, she concluded, was a result of her refusal to be vulgar and sexual. “My minister has read all of my essays and considers them very good,” she told Dean Hauptmann. Her formal complaint remained part of Jack’s personnel file to the day of his death.
In the fall of 1983 a freshman stormed out of his sophomore-level American Literature class in protest over his reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” Within the hour she was in the Dean’s office, complaining about sex poems in the classroom. Within minutes of her departure, Hauptmann was on the phone, demanding from Creed a justification of the material taught in his class.
“It’s the defining poem of the Beat movement,” Jack explained.
“She described it as full of obscenity and sex.”
“It is. That’s the point of the poem. And the movement.”
“The poem upset her considerably.”
“The poem upset a lot of people in 1956. It got banned in Boston. There was a trial in front of the Supreme Court of the United States—you’re a historian, you might remember the trial—which found the poem contained redemptive social value and was therefore not obscene. That was 1957, before this girl was born.”
“Busiris is a private school.”
“Busiris is a university and I teach a university-level sophomore American Literature class. ‘Howl’ is one of the two most important poems of the twentieth century.”
“Perhaps you could describe it and not read it. This woman is a freshman. She comes from a very sheltered background in suburban Chicago. You can’t expose a young woman from that kind of a background to vulgarity and homosexuality.”
“This is not Ma Frickert’s Finishing School for Girls. If she wants a protected environment, let her go to Augustana. Or to Bob Jones University.”
“Don’t teach that poem at this school.”
“I can’t in good conscience teach contemporary American Literature without it.”
“Take some advice, young man,” Hauptmann told Creed. “Don’t teach that poem at this school.”
“This from a man who calls himself a humanist,” Jack added in finishing the story.
Another explosion came in the summer of 1983, with a co-ed who showed up in a string bikini to negotiate her assignments.
“I don’t have a lot of time for class this summer,” she told Jack, “because I’m working as a lifeguard at the Busiris pool. Besides, I was never really very good in English. Could you cut out a paper and a novel? I think I could read the stories, write one paper, and maybe get through one book.”
“The work is the work,” he told her. “I’ve already trimmed quite a bit off what I’d do in a normal semester. I don’t see your case as anything special.”
“Then I want to drop the course. I can get a better deal in my major, sociology.”
“What kind of a deal is that?”
“They are talking no papers and only one textbook.”
“Sounds like a hell of a deal to me.”
“I’d really like to have an English course on my record, to show I can do the work.”
“But if you take the course without doing the work, your record is a bit of a lie, isn’t it?”
“My advisor says social workers write a lot and I should have an English course.”
“You might talk somebody else into a deal on an English course, but to have my course on your transcript, you’re going to have to read all the stories, read both the novels, write the papers and take the exam, same as everyone else.”
“Maybe we could work some other kind of a deal?” the girl suggested. “I finish at the pool around 4:00. Could I come back and see you then?”
Jack eyed her up and down. “You are a sexy woman,” he told her. “If we were sitting in a bar somewhere, I would welcome your offer to fuck our brains out. The joy of sex would be our reward—your reward. But you don’t take the reward for one thing and claim it as the reward for something else. So we’re stuck with the class work deal. Here it is: two papers, two novels, one exam, a bunch of stories. Period. If you write A papers and get an A on the test, you get an A for the class. If you write D papers and get a D on the exam, you’re still going to get a D for the summer. Independent of anything else. That’s the deal. You don’t like the deal, you get drop my class and take sociology.”
“I can’t possibly do this, Tucker, for three more decades!” Jack raged in telling me the story.
Jack was being slightly overly dramatic and he knew it. There had always been problem students, and there had always been complaints. There always will be. It’s impossible for anyone engaged in a public act like teaching to please an entire audience. The larger that audience, the more inevitably somebody will be offended. A good teacher pitches the class at a B level of college work, challenging the C students (but not above their possible level of achievement), boring the A students, bewildering the F students. The more students he handles, the more any college professor will bore and bewilder. Any teacher can hope only to entertain and enlighten the many, while offending the few. He can only hope that the kudos outnumber the complaints, and that the complaints fall on understanding ears.
It is fair to say that Jack, beginning in the 1980s, was either unwilling or unable to adjust his public performance to what was becoming the normal Busiris undergraduate.
It is also accurate to say that the complaints, when they came, received a sympathetic and even eager audience in Old Main. The new breed of Busiris student meant complaints. The new breed of Busiris administrator meant trouble as a result of those complaints.
By 1982 Jack was disengaging himself not only from Busiris administration and faculty, but from most of his undergraduate students. Charles Creed had left Busiris by 1983.
Actually, he left in the fall of 1983.
Summer of 1983 was a repeat of summer 1982, with the inequity between institutional receipts and his summer stipend festering in Jack throughout May and June, as enrollment in his classes swelled past the requisite seven into double digits, into the twenties. Among his forty or fifty students he found no Lily Lee, only the string bikini looking for a better deal in English than in sociology. Jack’s mood continued to sour throughout June and July. So did mine. I also taught two courses, to nearly as many students as he. Jack and I were equally fleeced.
“Summer school teaching may be the major blunder of my life,” he told me a week into the session, “bigger than coming to Busiris in the first place. I can’t write, I can’t think. I’m grumpy here, I’m grumpy at home. I got fifty students, every one a goddamn minimalist. ‘Is attendance mandatory? Do I have to read the books? What is the least I can do to sleaze through this class? How about more time for sun and suds, teach?’ A bunch of asshole minimalists.”
Then an odd question: “If you could somehow get a howitzer into the middle of the Busiris Quadrangle one night, how many buildings do you think you could level—I mean absolutely level—before you were stopped?”
“Not a good idea, Jack. Great fantasy, but not a good idea.”
“Start with Old Main,” Jack continued, somewhere between game and earnest. “One shell, two shells, the whole thing in a heap of bricks. Three shells max would demolish the place. Maybe half a minute to load each shell, fire, eject the casing. Two minutes, the building is a heap of bricks. Maybe there’s a fire. Incendiary shells. One shell and Old Main’s ablaze.
“You start with Old Main because anyone who happened to be inside and got killed would probably be an administrator, and therefore deserve what he got. With any luck at all, you’d catch Reich and Nation in flagrante. Can you see Big Bert, pulling out to peer over his ruined balcony. ‘What was that, my love?’ ‘Oh, fuck me, Bert!’ ” This was obviously a matter to which Jack had given much thought.
“Not even a good fantasy, Jack.”
“Then the academic buildings. Busiris Hall, long and squat. One shell for old Busiris, two more for each of the wings. Bam, bam, bam. Heap of gray facing stones. Five minutes, you’ve finished off Old Main and Busiris. It’s 2:00 a.m. Nobody knows what’s hit the place. You got plenty of time left. You could take out every goddamn building around the quad in ten minutes. Bam. Bam. Bam. Nobody in there anyway. If some academic is working into the wee hours and is too stupid to run out and see what’s happened to Old Main, then he’s got no business teaching and deserves what he gets.
“Take the goddamn dorms, while you’re at it. Do it on a vacation, and you’ve got time enough. Take out the goddamn dorms. Any kid who comes to Busiris when he could get a better education elsewhere for less money is either too stupid to realize he’s being ripped off, or too stupid to get accepted elsewhere. Deserves what he gets. Bam. Bam. In twenty minutes, you could take out the whole goddamn campus.
“Maybe the howitzer is a bad idea. Mine the place. String the wires to a truck in the center of the quad, and start pushing buttons. Bam. Bam. Bam. Five fucking minutes. You drive away. How long do you think it would take to dynamite the whole campus?”
Jack smiled.
“You need a vacation,” I told him.
“And a long one,” he agreed. “A very long one. I’m developing a Bad Attitude, Tucker. And it doesn’t promise to improve by fall. The thing about summer school is that you’ve put in a long year, and then you put in a long summer, and then boom, it’s fall again. Your weary ass is looking at nine more months.”
“Going east in August?”
“I can’t stand that either. I been there before. The river-boat captain was right on: it’s time to light out for the Territory.”
“How about one of those Famous Writers’ Programs? Be a Bread Loafer?”
“Oh, man. . . .”
“Get a sabbatical. Jesus Christ! Of all people on this campus you deserve a sabbatical. How long has it been? Over a decade! Take a semester off and go out to the West Coast, visit your buddy Kesey. Head for the North Country and hang out with Bly. Do an interview. Do a story. That’s legitimate scholarship.”
“Sabbaticals are frozen.”
“Since when?”
“Oh, nothing official. Applications are still being taken, but the idea of a sabbatical is just another empty promise on which Bert and Ernie have no intention of delivering. I have it from my secret sources in Old Main. No sabbaticals. Too expensive. Unpaid leaves, okay, because folks put on unpaid leave will not be replaced. People on sabbaticals would not be replaced either, but Oberführer Reich isn’t going to pay anyone 50% of his salary for doing anything that doesn’t make the university immediate money. Unless, of course, your name is Victoria Nation, who, you will note, is not teaching this summer, and was in fact been granted another year’s holiday at Bryn Mawr, underwritten, directly or indirectly, by summer school profits off courses taught by Tucker, Feracca and Creed.”
“Maybe you should get a degree in Women’s Studies.”
Jack and I spoke often over the long, dry summer of 1983 of our need to escape, recharge batteries, reclaim the vision. Our conversations—and the two rotten summers—underlay his decision to request, in August, an unpaid leave of absence for the upcoming term.
Out of the Age of Faith bonanza Jack had stashed about $5,000. He intended, I believe, to underwrite Lily Lee’s M. A. studies (what he intended after her marriage, I never knew). Nearly a thousand remained of Jack’s summer salary. Renting his furnished house for the months of September, October, November and December would net him nearly a thousand over mortgage and insurance. For six grand over the cost of air tickets, Jack figured, the family could spend four months in England, longer if they stayed clear of London.
“My life has been frozen too long,” he told me. “I’m too tied to what everyone else wants. Now, for just a moment, it’s gonna be what I need. Everyone else is just gonna have to wait.”
I told him he had my vote.
Bert and Ernie bought the idea partly for economic reasons (Jack’s classes, full as usual, could be reassigned to faculty with low pre-registrations, whose sections could then be canceled), and partly because paying Jack Creed only half a year’s salary for half a year’s work was the next best thing to paying him no year’s salary for no work.
Rose Marié was not as opposed to the idea as Jack had expected. Even she could see the changes he was going through, and she accepted at least part of the blame for the summer school debacle. Rose Marié was enchanted as anyone else by the prospect of four months abroad, which she viewed as a second honeymoon. Jack in fact pitched the trip as a time for being together again, although a second honeymoon was the farthest thing from his mind. Mostly Rose Marié worried about the children’s education. But Timm and Jenny Lynn were riding years of nearly straight A’s. Both had I. Q.’s over 150, and both were taking classes in the district’s enrichment program. Jack had no problem convincing the Superintendent of Riverton Schools that four months in England would benefit his kids more than even the most enriched programs that the system could offer. He promised they would keep abreast of reading assignments, and send biweekly letters.
So Jack spent the first week of August with his in-laws, and the next week in Riverton packing and arranging for care of his house. On August 16, 1983 (exactly nine days before we read in the Riverton Standard-Republican of Lily Lee’s appointment as the new affirmative action officer at Busiris) Jack, Rose Marié, Timm, and Jenny May departed Chicago O’Hare for London Heathrow.
The department heard very little of Jack’s adventures in England. Neither did I personally, nor did Lou Feracca, nor did any of his student friends. Rose Marié posted an early letter from London to let us know they’d arrived safely. Jack and I exchanged a couple of letters while he was in London. He indicated the city was more expensive than he remembered it and far less British. By the end of September he had rented a small car—a Simca as I recall—at something like a hundred pounds a month in which he proposed to tour the Isles from Inverness, Scotland to Brighton Beach. Starting around October 3 came a blizzard of picture postcards, posted one each day, each from a different village or town, which traced his journey north and west: St. Albans, Cambridge, King’s Lynn, Lincoln, York Abbey, Whitby Abbey, Durham Cathedral, Lake Windermere, Edinburgh, Pitlochery, Inverness, Fort William, Oban. Warrick Castle. Loch Ness. Some town in Scotland I never heard of, with a photograph of little yellow narrow-gauge railroad.
Then the postcards stopped, and Jack, as it were, blinked out of the observable universe. Since the legs of Her Majesty’s Post are short indeed from the recesses of the Scottish Islands, his disappearance was not immediately noticed. Postcards dribbled in from Tarbert, Salen, the Isle of Iona. Then it dawned upon us: we’d had no news of Jack in—what was it now?—three weeks, four weeks. Where had we last heard from him? Some island off an island off western Scotland? October melted into November, November to December. Not a syllable.
1984 arrived, and still no word from Jack.
Jack had rented his home through January to a couple at the bank. Had they heard anything from their landlord? Nothing. They’d already purchased a home in the Dells, into which they intended to move on January 26th. They would let us know as soon as they heard from Jack.
The end of fall semester approached. Zero.
Final exams. Silence.
“So where are you tonight, Jack Creed?” Lou Feracca parodied at a New Years’ Eve party.
“He’ll be here,” I kept saying. “Remember that department meeting when we voted on the first Afro-American course?”
“A man shouldn’t leave his house unattended,” said Ted Jones. “I hope he’s satisfied with his spring schedule.”
“That would be exactly like Jack,” Feracca meditated aloud. “Take a job somewhere in North Scotland and not bother to tell Busiris.”
“Nothing he’d love better,” I agreed. “But Charles Creed will return.”
Jack returned to Riverton exactly four days before the first day of spring semester, only because his tickets specified a Tuesday through Thursday return. “Would love to have stayed a few days longer, but Sunday flight meant another $120 apiece, and we are running on empty,” he told me. “I was on the verge of wiring you and Lou: ‘sell the house, sell the car, sell the furniture, and send me the money.’ ”
Jack arrived in his office early Monday morning, deposited almost all of his mail in the waste basket, and dismissed his classes for the balance of the week. He explained, as always, his reasons for so doing and gave a reading assignment to busy those who felt cheated. Then he grabbed his Nikon camera and disappeared into the alleys of Riverton and the winter countryside of Central Illinois. His plan, conceived abroad, was to convert the Midwest diary idea into a photo journalism book on Ronald Reagan’s Illinois, a project he hoped would be enormously marketable and liberate him once and for all from Busiris.
Rose Marié reclaimed her job at Helping Hands, and the children returned with almost no effort to their classes. Timm had picked up a slight accent, which made him something of a celebrity, especially after the Standard-Republican ran a feature story on the family travels (photographs by Jack). Most of what we learned about his travels came from that article, and from Rose Marié.
Owing to the cold and the short days, she told me, the family had traveled gradually south from Scotland along the western coast, through the Lake District and into North Wales, where Jack had set up for December and most of January at a bed-and-breakfast in a village named Betws-y-Coed. The family enjoyed a picture postcard Christmas, reading Anglo-Welsh poetry and touring the countryside with Timm and Jenny. Jack, Rose Marié claimed, had ignored her from the start of the trip, and she had been absolutely miserable. “London was just museums, and the rest of England was cathedrals, castles and hiking. We ate okay, especially with the breakfasts, but I put on fifteen pounds. If I never see another pea in my life, or a stewed tomato with a fried egg, that’s okay with me. I wanted to go to Ireland and buy some Waterford crystal cheap, but we just sat there in Wales. In London the shopping was great, but that was at the beginning of the trip. The car was too small to carry many souvenirs. By the time we returned to London at the end of the trip we had no money. And I had only a few days to shop.”
Time not spent feeding ponies, investigating slate mines, and hiking the trails of Snowdonia was invested in exploring Celtic sites, Roman forts, and Norman castles. In the evening, Jack read, and the children watched television or played invented games in front of a coal fire in the small lounge. Jenny Lynn became close friends with the neighbor’s daughter, and spent much of her time grooming the six white horses in the barn out back. Timm grew close to the host’s son Darryl, and spent his days in the local school. Jack and the husband, a clerk at one of the mines and a small potatoes politician, scuttled from mine shaft to town meeting. Rose Marié, odd person out, withdrew into brooding, avoiding the hiking, the travels, and even the lounge, counting days until the end of January. In the end, she had given up arguing for Ireland (three and a half hours by ferry from Holyhead) or a quick return to London. Mostly she read her England on $25 a Day, counted their money, and wrote long letters to her parents.
The impact on Jack of this excursion through the U.K. is difficult to assess. It cemented his relationship with the children, and it completed the break with his wife. It had little impact on his published writing: Welsh literature did not influence his style or material, and his enthusiasm for a photo book on Reagan’s Illinois waned with each publisher’s polite “thanks but no thanks.” The stay in Wales did set him up with a Fulbright position when he needed work. In nurturing his growing affinity for things European and rural, the excursion of 1983 might have been indirectly responsible for subsequent European ventures and for his application to Novum State.
The U. K. trip did not improve his attitude. If anything, it increased his alienation. During the spring of 1984 we saw less of the man than ever, and he did not teach summer school that year. Jack Creed never did, in any meaningful sense, return to Busiris Technical University.
Jack’s trip to England was the reason he missed the return to Riverton in late August 1983, of Lily Lee Martin-Oliver. After his seven-year absence, Jim returned to Riverton as a vice president at First National. Lily Lee returned, with M. A. and two children, to a position as affirmative action officer at Busiris Technical University. Her appointment was part of a package negotiated between First National directors and Busiris trustees . . . several of whom were identical.
My first letter to Jack in England contained the newspaper clipping. His reaction came by return mail: “Ain’t that the all-time pisser? How long have I waited for her, half sick, when I had a million other places to be? And where then was absolutely sweet Lily? Not a word, not a message. I split for a few months, and who shows up but The Lady herself. Guess Big Jim finally delivered what I couldn’t. This deal must have been cooking long before I left, and she did not phone or write. If Lily wants me, she knows where to contact me. If she doesn’t . . . I guess I’ll know where I stand. Not sure what I’d do myself. She’s pretty much got it made now, and why fuck things up by resurrecting ghosts?”
Perhaps the upsetting news of Lily’s return to Busiris was one reason Jack dropped out of touch with us all. One of the things Jack settled inside himself during his sabbatical was Lily. In front of a coal-fired furnace in Betws-y-Coed Jack concluded once and for all that Lily had transcended him. And that he should respect her wishes.
Not once between January 1983 and February 1985 did Lily Lee Martin-Oliver telephone Jack Creed. And not once did Jack telephone or write Affirmative Action Officer Lily Lee Martin-Oliver. When Lily met with the department concerning candidates for a tenure-track position, Jack was absent as usual from the meeting. In critiquing the Busiris Guidelines on Sexual and Racial Harassment, which Lily authored, Jack neither alluded to nor drew examples from their relationship. Jack would eagerly have cashiered his little following of juniors and seniors for just a phone call, but failing some token of grace, he was not about to make himself a problem.
The period following Jack’s adventure abroad were perhaps the oddest of his career. The disengagement of 1983 was followed by another flurry of engagement . . . of a sort. Jack returned from England not to Lily Lee Martin, and certainly not to the department (where Victoria Nation and Ted Jones reigned unchallenged) or the University (where Hauptmann and Reich had cowed everyone, including the President and the Chairman of the Board), but to his cadre of undergraduates, and to a small office in the basement of the library.
And, oddest of odd oddities, to an appointment as faculty representative to the Bucks Boosters Association.
“It’s a dervish act,” Jack explained to me. “I’ve got four or five different places where I can be, where I should be. I go from one to the next to the next, everyone thinks, ‘He’s not in B. Hall 313; he must be in the library. He’s not in the library; he must be in Wales. He’s not in Wales; he must be at a Bucks meeting. He’s not with the Boosters; he must be in his office.” But I’m not anywhere. I’m sitting invisibly in the middle, taking a joint.”
That’s the way it worked. If I had a dollar for every time I heard, “If he’s not in his office, he’s probably in the library . . . or at a Bucks Boosters meeting” . . . well, I’d have more dollars than Jack and I received for summer session, 1982.
Jack’s library office was the gift of his old buddy Roger Holmes, another quid for the Chase papers quo. Holmes had conceived a plan for “permanent faculty study carols” to be assigned for a semester or longer to faculty “needing privacy and access to the university collections in their pursuit of serious scholarly research.” Holmes believed that significant writing and research were possible at Busiris: Age of Faith and Creed’s announced Reagan project were proof positive that significant research and writing could be done at Busiris Technical University. Such research, Holmes reasoned, should be pursued under conditions more favorable than a faculty office (or a student’s bedroom). While Busiris could no longer support research financially, it could offer space. Space would be allocated on a competitive basis, competition would inspire production, institutional reputation would be enhanced, the new Manuscripts and Special Collections room would gather manuscripts and special collections (including, down the road, the Charles Creed papers). Busiris would become a Center . . . all at minimal cost to the school. The whole project could be billed as “faculty development,” and it was far less costly than the old twelve-month contracts with alternate summers free for research. Reich approved the plan upon first presentation.
Even as Jack was recreating himself in rural Wales, a broom closet deep in the recesses of the library basement was being rehabbed into the first faculty study carol. In February, Holmes presented Jack with the key to the room: a windowless ten-by-twelve cubicle equipped with a desk, one set of shelves, and a piece of salvaged gray industrial carpet to warm the cement floor and hide the manhole cover.
“That manhole is the fire exit to this room,” Holmes told Jack. “In case of fire, pull back the carpet, lift the lid, and follow the steam pipes to Old Main. Or Busiris Hall. Or anywhere else on campus.”
“This is right out of Bob Dylan,” Jack mused. “Or The Blues Brothers.”
“It’s no joke,” Holmes told him. “I actually had to give the fire marshals a signed, written statement from Buildings and Grounds to the effect that a grown man can comfortably crawl or walk through these tunnels in the event a fire blocked his normal exit from McKinley Library.
“This is your map,” he said, opening the desk’s upper right hand drawer, “and this is a flashlight so you can see in the dark. Keep the batteries fresh at all times. The City Fire Marshall is watching you. I have also managed to divert a new IBM Selectric typewriter to this office.”
“You always were a generous man!”
“Of the typewriter, say nothing. Nobody knows. Not even Bertholt the Turd.”
“You’re a clever fellow, Holmes,” said Jack, adding two keys—one to the building and one to the study carol—to his key ring. “I appreciate this more than you will ever know.”
Jack spent that afternoon moving several cartons of books and a number of posters out of his old office and into his new. Thereafter we saw him in Busiris only for classes and posted office hours. He was nearly as invisible as he’d been the semester previous.
In the happy solitude of his basement carol, in less than two years, on his shiny new IBM Selectric, Jack produced a hundred manuscript pages on Reagan’s Illinois, eight short stories (including “Daisy” and “The Watchers”), his critique of the Busiris sexual harassment guidelines, half a dozen articles published in the Standard-Republican, Op Ed pieces for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and the two major essays “Women’s Liberation: the Conservative Revolution” and “The Teacher as Nigger.”
These manuscripts never did find their way into the Special Collections Center. Holmes left Busiris even before Jack, and with him whatever personal commitment Jack might have felt to the Library. After February of 1985, of course, Jack was of no mind to leave Busiris with anything short of a Big Damn Mess.
Certainly the most puzzling aspect of Jack’s last year at Busiris was his service as faculty representative on the Bucks Boosters Association, beginning with his return to campus in 1984. The position carried no teaching release, and brought Jack into weekly contact with the kind of crew cuts and blue suits who, as undergraduates or parents of undergraduates, drove him nuts. It also involved what must have been a painful monthly luncheon with Booster bigwigs and former Buck athletes, including the husband of his former lover. To the astonishment of all of us, Jack actively sought the position. Even more astonishingly, Old Main approved the appointment. Either Hauptmann and Reich were unaware of Jack’s withdrawal from all other areas of Busiris life, or they saw this as a chance to extract some form of service from their associate professor of English.
While not exactly Mr. Public Relations, Jack had a well-known fondness for athletes. Basketball coach Marty Miller sometimes used Jack to help recruit key players (the Bucks Belles were a thing of the past), and Jack attended probably half of the away games in 1984-85. When he promised to author a series of articles for the Alumni News, the appointment was his. (Only two were actually written and published.) Why he subjected himself to the two-hour weekly meetings of the Boosters Association was beyond Lou and me.
“For the tickets and the eats,” he once told me. “And as a gift to my kids. Timm likes hanging out with the basketball players. Jenny likes hanging out with cheerleaders. I, as you know, admire talented athletes as much as beautiful women. Beauty and talent are hard work, Tucker. I respect hard work.”
“The Boosters are a bunch of boozing, bigoted, overweight high-rollers who have never in their lives read a book without pictures,” I told him. “What you got to say to them?”
Jack did not answer.
“There’s talk around the Department,” I told him honestly. “Seems you’ve got plenty of time to gallivant around Wales and take in basketball games, but not enough time for a department meeting. Lots of time to recruit power forwards for Marty Miller, no time for prospective creative writing majors.”
“This very semester I am giving a tutorial to a freshman creative writing major. If and when she shows up.”
“Squirrely Shirley? No talent at all.”
“Have not yet seen a thing she’s written, but I’d guess you’re right. If she’s hopeless, all the more pro bono.”
“You know what we mean, Jack.”
“I invest my time where it does me the most good. And, this with a touch of sarcasm, “where I can best serve the institution.”
“Do you really consider those downtown luncheon meetings more important than department meetings?”
“There are intangibles, Tucker. The Bucks Boosters Association is this town’s real power structure. They may be assholes, but they are powerful assholes. These fuckers are more powerful even than Bert and Ernie. I now have leverage within the power structure. I can tell them, ‘Well, the faculty would support this, the faculty would not support that. . . .’ To the extent that they care about the faculty, they listen to what I say. My influence on the Boosters gives me more leverage on the institution than the goddamn English Department or Busiris Senate will ever have.”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “You people in the English Department are always sitting around bitching about getting no support from Riverton. Ted Jones: ‘You never see any of the townspeople at our Poets on Campus readings.’ Vicky Nation: ‘Our Women Scholars Series got absolutely no help from those male chauvinists downtown.’ When did the English department ever support a Boosters Association project? You want something, you got to give something for it.
“Ever see Vicky at a Bucks game? Not even the Lady Bucks, and you can watch them for free. Women athletes are the cutting edge of American feminism: smart, talented, good looking, self-assured. Work their butts off for no support. Vicky should support them. Male athletes are grace under pressure. Poetry in motion. Jones wants poetry, he should watch a Bucks game. The English Department is a bunch of asshole snobs.
“Something else I learned that year in Old Main. Around Busiris, a program gets done not because of its merit, but because of funding. Funding is, in fact, the sole determinant: if funding is available, even a bad, stupid, ill-conceived program will be implemented. Witness Women’s Studies. Failing funding, even good programs will die. This institution is the ultimate whorehouse. We are all flat on our backs. As far as Riverton funding goes, the Bucks Boosters control the bucks. Period.”
“Talk around the campus is that Creed is looking for a way out of Busiris, maybe something downtown. You don’t think for a minute those people accept you as one of their own.”
“I am not one of their own, Tucker. I am not in the slightest interested in a position at First National Fucking Bank, or Timberman Fucking Brothers Fucking Construction.”
“One theory is that you’re following somebody else from the B. S. A. to the B. B. A. . . .”
“Lily Lee is out of this.”
“I know that, Jack. Do you? She’s not going to show up at one of your Booster luncheon parties.”
Jack’s eyes focused on some point in the far distance.
“To tell you the truth, Tucker, I’ve got some reasons. I can’t explain them, but they don’t involve Lily, and I’m not coming in from the cold. Every man has an obligation to go where he feels he has to go, and do what he feels he has to do. If I leave my kids with one lesson, that’s what I want it to be. For my students and for Timm and Jenny. This just feels like something I ought to be doing right now. I can’t explain it any other way except that I have my reasons.”
“It is a remarkable thing to see the author of Age of Faith, Age of Folly and the personal friend of Ken Kesey, Phil Farmer and Robert Bly writing PR pieces for the Alumni News.”
“Well, that’s just shit.”
I didn’t pursue the matter.
So English Department faculty saw very little of Jack during his last year at the school. You might hear him on Radio Busiris during the halftime chat of a Bucks game. If you had money for front row seats, you could catch Jack and the kids at the game itself, alive with the old animation, not far from where Jim Oliver sat, sans wife or kids, with a handful of his old teammates. Or after the game, glad handing some Bucks Booster, cracking jokes with the cheerleaders about the pompom girls. Congratulating or commiserating with Coach Miller, Andre Washington, or some of his other player-friends. Jack met most of his classes, almost all lower division undergraduate courses. Occasionally a small group of us, faculty and students, hit the Friday afternoon happy hours at the Holiday Inn. (Jack had pretty much abandoned the Heidelberger in 1977.) Occasionally he, Lou Feracca and I did a burger lunch at Tookey’s. Occasionally Jenny Lynn would exercise her option not to attend school, and we’d see the two of them watching television in the lounge, or emerging from the student center, or getting into the car on their way to the zoo.
But most of the time Jack was not among us. He was in England. He was in the library. He was downtown with the Bucks Boosters. He was chatting up some coed over a Coke in the Student Center. He was photographing the back roads and villages of Reagan’s Illinois. He was at home. He was not in England. He was not in the library. He was not downtown with the Boosters or with a woman friend. He was not at home. He was . . . gone. Like his own Bernard Feuerstein in “The Watchers,” Jack was simply out there somewhere. A presence, an absence, an accusation, a lesson.
A warning.