Straight Man

and goodwill are the reason for our collective woes. My lack of political acumen, coupled with my perverse inclination to side occasionally with my enemies (much to Teddy’s dismay when he was chair, since mine was often a deciding vote), my inattention to the details of political machination, and my failures of short-term memory made me, my colleagues thought, the perfect compromise candidate for the temporary chair of our hopelessly divided department. How much harm could I do in a year?
    A good deal, as it’s turned out, thanks to Rachel. Nobody imagined what might happen if ever I were aided and abetted by a competent secretary, someone who knew where the forms were and how to fill them out and who to send them to and when. Teddy’s fall from grace after six years as chair was occasioned by what was generally and correctly seen to be his abuse of power, this despite his constant and cloying diplomacy. The rules set forth explicitly in the department’s operating paper, if taken literally, are egalitarian in nature, and render the chair an impotent facilitator, should he or she be foolish enough to obey them. Teddy hadn’t the slightest intention of obeying them, of course, only of appearingto, and the fact that it took six years for this to become manifest was ample testimony to his administrative expertise, as well as to the fact that he desperately wanted to keep the job and its reduced teaching load.
    Not
wanting the job, on the other hand, has freed me to dispense entirely with subterfuge. Whereas the conventional wisdom had been that a year would be too little time for me to wreak much havoc, I have demonstrated that a great deal of havoc can be wrought in two semesters by anyone so inclined, at least if that person is sufficiently insensitive to ridicule, personal invective, and threat. Who could have guessed that I’d take it upon myself to undermine seriously the very principles of egalitarian democracy that have kept us all in a state of suspended animation for over a decade?
    Well, anyone who knew me might have guessed, but no one did, and now, nearly a full academic year after having taken up the reins of abusive power, I am still at large, the subject of vitriolic letters to the dean, the campus executive officer, and the school newspaper, as well as anonymous memos distributed late at night in department mailboxes and the regular appearance of official documents arriving via registered mail, many of which threaten litigation if I do not immediately and with all haste cease and desist. Taken all around, as Huck Finn was fond of saying, it’s been fun.
    When I hear the phone ring in the outer office, I tell Rachel over the intercom that I have just stepped out, and, to keep her from becoming a liar at my behest, I do just that. There’s nobody I want to talk to this early.
    That includes Billy Quigley, who finds me in the corridor trying to locate the right key to lock the private door to my office. He’s on his way to his office prior to his nine o’clock class. He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it. “Are you coming or going?” he inquires.
    “I never know anymore,” I tell him. “Come join me for a cup of coffee in the student center.”
    He makes a face. Apparently the idea of coffee offends him. “Am I getting my extra section next fall or what?”
    “I’m having lunch with the dean today,” I tell him. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a budget.”
    “Screw the budget,” Billy says, genuinely pissed off that I’d use such a cheap ploy to avoid the issue. “We’re talking a crummy three grand, not thirty. Don’t give me budget.”
    I’m on his side, of course. This budgetary danse macabre, a semester-by-semester ritual, is ridiculous. There’s no valid reason why we can’t be told the semester before if the soft money to cover all necessary sections of freshman composition will in fact be made available. To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
    “Like I told you last night,” I explain, “I’ll do what I can.”
    “What do you mean, ‘last night’?”
    Billy Quigley often doesn’t remember that he’s called me, and I can tell by the puzzled, belligerent look on his swollen face that he has no recollection of our conversation, or of the fact that we concluded it amicably, indeed sentimentally.
    “Billy,” I say. “You have a nice day.”
    “Hank,” Billy Quigley says.