I am not sure why I get sad when I see some people eating.
And that’s how I first saw Chuck Haywood at Boe’s: alone in a booth, devouring a Philly cheesesteak, dabbing at his mouth with his pocket square. Even when I later met with him for a tense interview in his office, where my job was on the line, I kept feeling sad for him.
He was hired as an external expert to advise on restructuring staff needs at Resource Innovation & Technical Education (RITE), a community college where I was toiling as an adjunct. Before the interview with him to review my course’s place in the curriculum (and by extension my adjunct position at RITE), I tried to avoid him whenever I could, including once inside a restroom with a single stall, in front of which he waited for a good ten minutes to use the toilet where I was sitting. Once I noticed it was him waiting by the stall I knew what I had to do to avoid giving up the toilet to him. To my discomfort I made some strained grunts and inhuman noises with both my front and back orifices to give the impression of a struggle of sorts. He stomped his feet like a scolded child, sighed hard, grunted, unbuckled and buckled his belt a few times, and finally left the restroom to hunt for another latrine, while I made sure I stayed anonymous throughout the ordeal.
My only acquaintance with him after that restaurant scene and before the interview was all gossip and drifts of conversations I’d eavesdropped on in the cafeteria where forgetting he was in a public place, he often opinionated loudly about the futility of PhDs in our society. I didn’t quite care about PhDs, having obtained one—at least on paper—just in case, from the East European University (EEU), the mention of which elicited a subtle wince and eyebrow-raising in people, sometimes serious lip smacking, loud and wet, theatrical nodding, etc. Occasionally someone would trouble themselves and ask: “Tell me more about...East European, you said?”
A major reason I dreaded Chuck was simple: he had been hired to fire people, right when, as an advanced adjunct, I was at a moment in my life when I thought I’d almost made it to the Safe Academic Zone, or SAZ. It was also a moment of weakness, a time of self-disgust. In America I had devolved into a pathetic creature. I didn’t recognize myself, the man I had been once, a man of steely resolve, or at least that’s what my inferiors in the army would call me, out of fear or respect I didn’t care, so long as that groveling made me feel superior. After the war I transformed into a refugee and then later an instructor at RITE—not an epic journey, perhaps, but a respectable feat for someone who arrived from a suicidal country with too much history and little future.
On the interview day I went to his office, expecting things to go down some unexpected road. I immediately noticed that he coughed loudly and breathed asthmatically between short sentences. It was stressful to witness someone work so hard only to feed his lungs with bits of air. This struggle was followed by a variety of nervous tics, one of which was to fiddle with his pocket square which I recognized was a miniature American flag. He’d often take the thing out and use it as a napkin to blow his nose or tap his moist forehead, and sometimes he did both in one sweep.
We chatted a bit about the weather and how it might have been similar to or different from the region he hailed from, which I think was a few states away westward, and he mentioned that his childhood town was situated in a former lonesome prairie settlement. He said he grew up among unlettered hicks and their creaking houses, squeezed and battered by the unyielding emptiness of the land, with small clumps of trees materializing here and there, like big mistakes, to stain the memory. He remembered a highway like a long scar with road signs inevitably announcing another “sleepy creek,” of which he said there were so many, you wondered if there ever existed an awakened one. Then there was the banality of sprawling sunsets lighting up some small town named after Paris or Rome, a twist of the knife in the wound of this remoteness from the great centers of culture and history.
Talking about clouds, cows, and cretins, he roared and laughed, shooting microscopic gobs of slimy spit on my face across the table. When he shifted, things behind him groaned; it was hard to tell if it was his chair under enormous pressure, his posterior, or both. He must have rehearsed that childhood story because I didn’t even realize how smoothly he proceeded from “a nippy day this one” to “by the way, speaking of weather, I grew up…,” and went on to summarize his boyhood with some dramatic imagery. The climax of his story was about a tornado back in his humid childhood, a “demented twister” as he called it, which had ripped through his father’s, or it might have been his neighbor’s (memory whoring around), farmhouse compound, including the complete blowout of a barn and a grain silo. The incident was memorable because the twister had twisted away a couple of cows, which were seen lifted apocalyptically over the now-destroyed barn and blown away with debris.
He then asked me about the weather in our country, and the question caught me off guard, as I didn’t have any weather-related stories to tell, much less any memories of something as awesome as his flying cows. Also, I hadn’t seen the old country in two decades, and thoughts about its climatic conditions had never entered my head. In fact, I never thought much about the weather until I got wet, hot, or cold, which is as it should be. Only in America do people talk about the weather all the time and have long stories to relay. I never got used to it.
I remember my initial bewilderment at finding out how the weather people had official names for hurricanes—Alyosha, Bailey, Dimitri, Hugo, Ivan, Lamborghini, and so on —cataloging them like they were characters in a Russian novel or superhero figurines. I should say, though, there was one hurricane I took an interest in. The ironically named Eva was like a raging goddess who might have gone through a nasty breakup and who on a whim decided to create a little mayhem down on a wretched corner of America’s coast. I wonder why Eva didn't take on Palm Beach, rinse and raze those posh neighborhoods along the coast, chew up their mansions, hang their mattresses and BMWs on palm trees, and when done with that, perhaps in an act of heavenly looting, haul out to the open ocean a couple of million Boomers, which would provide a bit of relief to America’s perpetual social insecurity system.
I think I said, “That is insane” and nodded along as Chuck hoisted a few more details onto his story, which I got distracted from, noticing large rivulets of sweat rolling down the side of his temple. I am not sure why he was sweating. His office was freezing, with several invisible AC vents blowing arctic air. I was hoping he’d reach for his pocket square to dab at his perspiration, but he didn’t, and I thought about offering the hem of my shirt to help him out. It’s a curious phenomenon, this sweating business among certain big men, like Haywood, whose soul I imagined squeezed and increasingly crushed under pressure to turn in a nice tale. A man without a story is of no interest to the living. Worse. A man with a tiny story and a big sense of his salience in the world will sweat a story out, raising the humidity levels in the room by several degrees in a short amount of time.
“So, what kind of a name is Ivan, anyway?” he asked me. “Communist? Ivan Ilyich Lenin?” he cough-laughed, after we seemed to be getting back on track. I hahaed with him a bit and also felt like I wanted to squawk in horror, like a chicken trapped in one of those chicken towns he grew up in, but decided to play along and tell the story.
“Well, it’s a great Slavic name. My mother named me after her father, who briefly led a brave uprising in Grad against the Nazis before he got captured and executed in 1941.”
“Hm. Amazing. I mean sad,” he said. “You folks have seen a lot down there. Can’t imagine growing up in a war-torn country like yours. I’m glad you’re up here now. I mean I remember the war, we bombed the bad guys, right, what was his name, Mallardovich, no wait, it was Shostakovich, right? Just kidding. I know who those guys are. Anyway, one of those SOBs. I am glad we did what we did in this human war—humanitarian. I have my disagreements with our government getting involved in other people’s mess, but sometimes we do things right, you know. We’ve managed to do some good things, like in your country. Anyway, I am glad to see some of my taxpayer money go to rescue innocent folks like you from those bloody dictators.”
“But may I ask you,” Chuck shifted, “how was your grandfather killed? Was he sent to a gas chamber, shot and pushed into one of those mass graves? It may be a morbid curiosity on my part, but I always like to know how people died, especially when their deaths are violent.”
I told him that my mother’s father was drowned in the frozen Danube, along with hundreds of others shoved under the ice through a hole. He reacted with a slow nod, followed by a headshake, followed by “unbelievable” and “so evil.” “God’s creatures, demons in disguise they often can be,” he said, with some poetic flair.
“Unbelievable. A hole in the ice. Hm. I can’t imagine. I am sorry. A hole in the ice. Jesus.”
I summoned the melancholy angels to aid me with a sad smile, accompanied by a mewl, “thank you.” By now, I’d become accustomed to telling this story. It just came naturally to me. When I was young my father advised: Son, never let boring facts interrupt a great story. He was right. A refugee with long memories in a foreign land needs to take that advice to heart. Besides, a refugee is a human being, no more of a swindler or truth-teller than your average swine. Moreover, the hole-in-the-ice story could have been true if my grandfather had indeed been fighting the Nazis and not collaborating with them. He could have died that storied death through the hole in the ice, which many did that winter of 1941. Instead, he got hanged by his own people.
“Sad story,” Chuck repeated. “You strike me as a good, honest fellow. Earthly. A good teacher, if not with a bit of that offbeat air and bleak humor. But hearing your story, I see where the habit of dark joking comes from. But generally, I think you are a likable guy in this community. It’s not your fault that your course will have to go. The important thing is to keep good instructors in the house. If you’re willing to work with me, I’d like to explore some options on how to keep you, but we must really find something more attuned to our purposes here. I know that your course was cross- listed in both poli sci and sociology, an odd place to teach humanities, by the way—and both of those units will be axed."
I felt molested.
“Can you do STEM for us? I see that you have some sort of medical background, from EEU…ha-ha sounds like “EW,” sorry, yes, EEU, granted your training at that university may already be outdated and far removed from our medical standards, but perhaps we can work something out with your background.”
Behind Chuck, in a large rectangular window, surged a posh afternoon sky soaked in royal blue and adorned with washed-out clouds, almost transparent, as if it had been a wedding day for Zeus. What would my father say now? Think of another hole, son.
