Attitudes. W. Ross Winterowd
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scurried out the door of the office.
“These assholes are barbarians,” muttered Druse. “What a bunch of shitheads. Why couldn’t I have got a job at Johns Hopkins, where I wouldn’t have to put up with these philistines? A homofuckingsexual, probably buggering the goddamn quarterback, or the quarterback buggering him. Christ, what a filthy, rotten mess. And I’m stuck. I can’t get out.”
Druse took a deep breath. The flash of Timmins’ ass in the skintight white polyester flannels, when he flounced out the door of the office, had left the professor with a distressing thought. He had another twenty years before retirement, two decades of the likes of Garth Timmins. Graduate students worked on dissertations under the direction of Alex Hamilton, whose whining voice drove Druse nuts; Potty Tinker had graduate students in spite of the perpetual “hrumph . . . hrumph” that made Tinker’s lectures virtually incoherent; Max Schinken had to deny requests to serve on graduate committees. But Druse had no graduate-student following; hence, he was incomplete, not achieving the status that adulation from advanced students brings about. Mel shook his head sadly. Twenty years of Garth Timmins.
Druse took Mr. Sammler’s Planet from his bookshelf and prepared, this third try, to get through the masterpiece, but he had just opened the book to the first page when the door to his office burst open, and Garth Timmins stood defiantly before him.
“I want to inform you, Professor Homophobe, that I just reported you to Dr. Burden, and Monday I’m going to Dean Amore. There are laws against people like you.”
Before Druse, astounded and trembling, could respond, Timmins slammed out of his office—the dirty little queer sonofabitch, the goddamn fruit. He probably goes around smelling bicycle seats.
Now nothing could rescue the remainder of the waning day, and the only immediate prospect before Professor J. Melongaster Druse was a two-hour hiatus prior to his departure for Adam Adam’s place, where he would meet Bobby, his wife, to endure the rite of the annual departmental cocktail party and get-together. A bleak two hours those would be.
He listened to the sound of a jet overhead, followed by the whack-whack of a helicopter. From somewhere he heard a shrill, brief laugh. Uninterestedly he glanced at the mail on his desk before him.
As he was about to open the first envelope, his phone rang. “ . . . Just catching up on a little work before I go to the party. . . . Nothing important. I’ll be right down.”
Warren Burden, department chair, had asked to talk with Druse. What a pain in the ass. He knew what the subject of this interview would be, and he tensed his system for the walk down the hall and the ordeal of putting up with Warren’s namby-pamby remonstrances regarding the Garth Timmins episode.
The outer office was deserted, and Warren’s door was open. As Druse entered, Warren said, “Sitzen Sie sich. I mean, setzt euch. Assiez vous. I’ve got to run down the hall for a minute.”
Why didn’t the ostentatious jerk just say, “Have a seat”? Druse plunked into a chair by the coffee table, waiting for Warren Burden to reappear. As if in a trance, a deep preconscious state, he stared at an African fetish on the coffee table, an ojet d’art that Burden had brought back from his guest professorship in Nigeria. It was about two feet high, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. At the moment, she seemed like one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He stared at her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protruberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins.
So engrossed was Druse that Burden entered and settled at the desk without disturbing the trance.
“Uh, Mel, are you with me . . . or in Africa?”
“Oh, Warren. I was in Africa, I guess. I’ve seen that hideous figure a thousand times, but it’s new, different every time I look at it. Deep down, I must be primitive. I’m attracted to that horrible thing. If it comes up missing, you can look for it in my office.”
“You should go to the ‘Dark Continent.’ It’s darker now, I think, than when Conrad was there. The old tribes, the old rites, the old ways—they’re dying out slowly, but they still exist. That Dark Goddess there still reigns. The old ways, the savage ways are just a few steps outside of town. Oh yes, Kurtz is still in Africa, but he’s no longer at a station far up the river. He’s in Lagos—where the lights come on and go off according to the whims of . . . of . . . well, probably, of that Dark Goddess there. And Kurtz is chauffeured through impossibly filthy streets, thudding into potholes, in his Mercedes. He does a little banking, a bit of smuggling; it’s even said that he can sell you a slave if you’re in the right place and have the right price.”
“Yes, I’d like to go to Africa,” said Mel. “We’ve been to the Greek Islands, but they’re so tame, so familiar. I mean our family tree goes right back to the Greeks and the Romans, but there haven’t really been any Africans in our cultural woodpile. I mean compare Hitler with Idi Amin: the civilized barbarian and the barbaric barbarian, Hitler worshipping Wotan, Idi praying to our Dark Goddess here. You should bring this goddess to the cocktail party tonight. Maybe she’d elicit a refreshing strain of barbaric savagery from our colleagues.”
There was a silent pause.
“So,” said Warren, “we have a little problem with Garth Timmins, don’t we?”
“No problem that I can see,” said Mel, rallying his full reserve of inner strength.
“Between you and me, Mel, Timmins is a problem child. I wish he’d stay in the School of Business Administration where he belongs. But he’s ours for his general education requirements in the humanities, and we’ve got to deal with him. He’s pretty upset about his interview with you.”
“And I’m pretty upset about his interview with me.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least. He’s an annoying guy. I had to put up with him in my class last semester.”
“We ought to kick him out of the university. I mean the way he came on to me was unforgivable. I couldn’t care less about his sex life. I told him that. He uses his deviation as an excuse for being a goof-off. And you can’t imagine how arrogant he is.”
“I’ve checked his record,” said Warren in a conciliatory tone. “He had a B-minus average. You aren’t thinking of flunking him or anything like that, are you? This is a delicate matter. First of all, there’s Timmins’ charge of discrimination, and you know what that means nowadays. It can be dynamite. How’d you like to have all the gays in West Hollywood picketing the English Department? And then there’s Timmins senior. I happen to know there’s bad blood between father and son—over the gay business, you know—but senior, on the other hand, is very proud of Garth’s position as cheerleader, and isn’t he president of his frat? Anyway, there’s big money involved. Mr. Timmins has hinted to Dean Amore that he’s ready to make a substantial contribution toward the new science complex. We wouldn’t want to be parties to losing that grub stake, would we?”
“Well, so much for Garth Timmins” said Mel. “I need to talk to you about my schedule. Damn it, Warren, you’ve got me down for another section of composition. Look, I’m a senior person, not a lousy assistant professor or graduate teaching fellow. I asked to teach the seminar in Restoration drama.”
“Mel, as far as I’m concerned, I’d like to give every faculty member the classes that he or she wants. But you know that Dean Amore has been looking us over very carefully. To tell you the truth, the last time you taught the Restoration seminar, you had only three students, and that’s just bad economics from the standpoint of manpower invested.”
“My god, Warren, you sound like that Donald Trump—or like Jack Welch. We’re not a real estate empire. We don’t manufacture jet engines. We’re humanists. Teachers. Literary scholars. Of course, Amore probably thinks he’s the Jack Welch of higher education.”