ISSN 1758-6488
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Men in Love Fiction |
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WHEEL OF FORTUNE.
The war is over. Mayday, 2003, 6:32 a.m. by my dashboard clock, beginning of the beginning this story. Bouncy boop-be-boop music, NPR’s Morning Edition is on the air. The war is over, but we won’t know till Bush tells us from his aircraft carrier. Bob tells Cokey (or Cokey tells Bob) our troops are searching Falujah to flush out pockets of resistance, but none have been found. Analysis will follow. I’m driving grubby Route 9 to Wildwood-by-the-Sea. Eliza my ex-wife-to-be is on my cell saying I’m going to jail unless I pay $500 monthly child support for our cute little curlyheaded detestable five year old that I detest. I tell her she’s said this before, she says it again, gently, persuasively. Her Daddy says jail would be good for me, I’d see I can’t survive on my own and come home to her and our curlyhead, who still says every night in the bathtub, “Why isn’t Daddy here to scrub my backie?”
May Day. M’aidez we say in French, end of semester and my latest temporary no-tenure-track job, teaching Conversational French at Walt Whitman Community College. There’s no funding for Summer Session. I’m out for the season or for keeps, depending. For me and my fellow-failures in the post-cold-war, post-history, post-9/11, post-safety-net, post-education market, everything depends – on budgets, enrollments, grants, funding, never us. I am that New World Orderly, the faculty prole. We teach at two schools, or three, or five – in slow but restless motion, sad, removed, jeering, envious, begrudging, obsessively bored. Useless. Broke.
I make up a budget. $500 a month child support must be paid. $500 a month, if I can, on student loans that got me my Ph.D. in English Lit. I teach French because I drink with the dean, sleep with her sometimes, when we’re both in the mood. She throws me odd jobs as a crumb. Five classes, one hundred kids, fifteen hours a week, dictations and midterms and finals to mark, lesson plans to fake, slow painful tonguetied student readings aloud to listen to: $27,000 a year. We do Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I like that they can’t get jokes they don’t know are on them. But even the dean can’t get me summer classes when funding dies. I need big money, fast.
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