In Fear of Praise

By G. S. Richter

Food. Alcohol. Pornography. The films of Aki Kaurismäki. These are Gordon’s addictions. He’s divorced, he’s depressed, and his dog is dead. (Of lesser concern, his career as a professor of film studies is coming to an end.) There isn’t much left of his life to ruin. That is, until the daughter he always knew he had—but never wanted to meet—comes mysteriously creeping into the picture.

Her name is Dresden, and her mother is dying. Gordon would rather not engage. But romantic embarrassments with Monica Barnes, a colleague in the Media Arts department at Copperhead College, amid an eruption of hysterical student activism, drive him to flee back East. Back to his homeland. Back to the scene of his only true crime: procreation.

Against all of his instincts, Gordon plunges into a noirish search for Dresden, through a seedy New England underbelly crawling with drug dealers, pimps, and dreamless destitution. Finding her means learning that she lives in squalor—and that she is raising a son, Reggie, all on her own. In the face of these revelations, Gordon must search himself for untapped reserves of responsibility and grace. Most of the damage is done, yet perhaps something can be salvaged from the wreckage. His whole life now boils down to a single question: Is he man enough to be a father?

Even if so, it may be too late.

In Fear of Praise is at once a profane tale of middle-aged dating, a scandalous send-up of modern campus politics, and an irreverent take on father-daughter relationships. Above all, it is a scathing investigation into the deepest, darkest heart of manhood itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. S. Richter
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463667040

G. S. Richter

G. S. Richter is the author of the dark sci-fi novella Nihil's Retina and the forthcoming In Fear of Praise, a work of depressive realism. He occasionally writes reviews and other garbage for Toilet ov Hell (an underground metal blog, not a shit fetish site) at www.toiletovhell.com.

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Part One

Via Negativa

One

As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.

—William Blake

My daughter tried to contact me in December. It was a shock to hear her voice on my answering machine. I hadn’t heard it in nineteen years. Inasmuch as she was nineteen years old, what I’m really trying to say is that I had never heard it.

In a sense—a very general, abstract sense—I had been aware of her existence all along. However, it was only when dropping the child-support check in the mail each month that I would acknowledge that she was alive. And then, upon her eighteenth birthday, when this financial yoke was finally lifted from my neck, she faded from abstraction into sweet oblivion. I don’t often celebrate anything—least of all my own birthday—but on the night my biological successor legally entered adulthood, I tried my hand at baking for the first time in my life with a tres leches cake. (Alas, in both structure and flavor, the cake was a disaster.)

There is no good time in a man’s life for him to be hailed by a child he did not raise. My child in particular could scarcely have chosen a worse time to attempt first contact. For starters, my dog had just died; he’d escaped the apartment in the night and survived the five-lane dash across a busy street only to be murdered by a pack of coyotes near the twelfth hole of a nearby golf course just as the Phoenix Valley was plunged into another violet half-night. My grief was still fresh, filling every second of waking life and dreams alike. Even as my daughter’s call rang out in the blankness of my bereavement, I could still hear poor Roscoe’s death cries, grinding all of the world’s meaning to ash.

This, against the backdrop of December, a month that always heaps a certain amount of anxiety upon the faculty of Copperhead College (myself included). For us, December’s onset signals not only a palpable winter but also the descent into the holidays and the various pressures this entails (reading final papers, awarding final grades, finalizing the syllabi for next semester—a wealth of finality). Even for demagogues of the Media Arts Department (myself included), whose jobs consist almost entirely of showing movies to doomed future indentured servants of the federal government, December is a curse.

To compound these considerable woes, I’d been working behind the scenes of the annual Phoenix International Film Festival all week. It was only for the sake of job security—that is, to promote the illusion of dedication to the cause—that I’d volunteered my assistance, which mainly consisted of posting flyers for the event around the campuses of Copperhead, Arizona State University, Mesa Community College, Scottsdale Community College, Phoenix College, etc. On the closing night of the week-long festival, I was almost too nervous to leave the apartment. It had been rumored that the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki was in town; the festival’s organizers had sent him an invitation to speak after the screening of his latest opus. I just so happened to be writing a book about him—or I’d been planning to for close to a year—and meeting him in person would have been a real make-or-break moment. I alone among my colleagues was relieved when there was no response from the Kaurismäki camp. And when at last, the filmmaker neglected to appear, I was very nearly elated. (Although elation would sublimate into a sense of betrayal soon enough.)

On the following night, a Saturday—the very night of the call from my daughter—one of the festival organizers threw a party at her home in Tempe. The call came just as I was about to reach the conclusion that it would be better not to attend. Naturally, I allowed the phone to ring until the answering machine picked up. According to the caller ID, the call had come from an unfamiliar number with an outlandish 860 area code. To whom did I still owe money? No one; I was up to date on all my bills that month. No doubt it was a telemarketer, some philanthropic soul seeking to ease my suffering, improve my life.

Something prevented me from erasing the message immediately, without even listening to it. I won’t call it a premonition or divine intervention (I won’t stoop to vulgarity), but the fact stands that I still don’t know what it was. I had two choices, then: (1) Stay home and grapple with all of the horrors intrinsic to messages from unknown callers, or (2) go to the party. After mechanically refilling Roscoe’s water bowl and then realizing my mistake and kicking the bowl across the kitchen, I chose the latter, unwittingly granting myself a few hours yet to live my life before my daughter’s voice, my daughter’s words, would spill forth into my little world like pestilent vapors from history’s grave.

◦

A funereal mood had already settled over the soirée in Tempe by the time I arrived. Was Kaurismäki to blame? Or was it a simple case of contagious seasonal affective disorder? The heat had dwindled, Christmas was near; people had a right to feel depressed. I spent most of the evening hovering near a table of hors d’oeuvres, attempting to look busy piling pepperoni and sharp white cheddar squares onto little wheat crackers. There were finger sandwiches too; if mingling was out of the question, you could always fall back on the finger sandwiches. Although I was not new to the Phoenix film studies community, I had so far failed (systematically it seems) to enter the circle. I was not prone to talking about film outside of the classroom. Frankly, I was sick to death of talking about film.

There were about ten of us standing around the living room, an even mix of graduate students and faculty, most from Copperhead—nobody with whom I felt especially inclined to speak. To my left, a professor and her graduate assistant were deep in a gratuitous lament, instigated by who knows what, over the current state of American film. It was the professor’s feeling that there was something a little sad, a little unselfconsciously nihilistic about this current trend of dark and glossy prestige pieces that dominated the independent sector, these aesthetically sumptuous yet manifestly empty depictions of tragedy unfurling in a vacuum. To which the T.A. added that the whole trend was a crypto-corporate backlash against the free spirit of the independent movements that had dominated the 2000s: a malicious attempt on the part of petit-Hollywood (the major-studio subsidies masquerading as independent entities) to squash the vitality of truly independent cinema. Wedging himself into the fray, a nearby director of photography from Sedona (ponytail, palm-print shirt, shorts, and sandals in December) stipulated broadly that nothing produced by the quote-unquote American independent sector felt true anymore; he was squirming with nostalgia for the noble violence of the American cinema of the ’70s.

I could easily have noted that what American cinema was missing, what it had always been missing, was a sense of carnal innocence. Sure, there was plenty of prudish sensuality on one end of the spectrum (let’s call it the unabashedly commercial end), and plenty of cynical eroticism or outright rape on the other (the aforementioned petit-Hollywood), but the center was absent, and this absence spoke thick volumes about the American audience’s prevailing shame and loathing over its own carnal essence—its own humanity. Alas, there was no need for me to toss in my proverbial two cents; the pontifical rheum was already thick enough.

Nibbling nervously on a wedge of cheddar, I turned away and almost plowed into a woman from my department who taught a course in digital editing. Early-thirties, unmarried, a bright smile and soft voice, the face of an angel perched atop a woebegone surplus of flesh: Monica Barnes. She apologized effusively for the collision. I offered a tight smile.

Strictly speaking, not our first encounter. She had come by my office one afternoon near the end of the previous semester under the pretense of borrowing my DVD copy of A Clockwork Orange and lingered on after the transaction’s completion in order to update me on the irrelevant details of her life: the cat she had just adopted (Boots); the deteriorating structural integrity of the one-bedroom apartment she had lived in for the past three years; the house in Maricopa she was thinking of buying now that the housing market had officially bottomed out and prices were, on average, one quarter what they had been three years prior. . . . Since then, she had made a few similar attempts to befriend me, to which I’d found it difficult to respond. On the whole, I think I treated her coldly, with disinterest; I didn’t want to lead her on. I couldn’t really picture going to bed with her; at best, I could conjure up some bleary image of allowing her, out of pure compassion, to suck me off in a vacant classroom, in the quiet evening hours. . . . It was not even her modest obesity that repelled me, for indeed, I too was moderately obese, perhaps even immodestly so. No, the true obstacle to our hooking up was her naked, screaming availability, unsurreptitiously signaled and bordering on solicitude. To her credit, I suppose, she persevered.

How are your students? she asked.

Passable, I said.

She looked into the glass of punch clutched in both hands. For some reason, she had started to blush—or maybe she was always blushing, suffering some problem with circulation or some hereditary skin disorder. Or perhaps it was evidence of a little alcohol problem—which is understandable in these harsh times of economic and political uncertainty. If I remember correctly, she said, you mentioned you were thinking of writing an article about Aki Kaurismäki.

A book, actually, I corrected her, perplexed as to when or why I had divulged this bit of deeply personal information. I couldn’t remember doing so. It must have been a momentary lapse of character; it does happen from time to time. In any case, I had absolutely no intention of talking about it now, in part because I’d hardly written a single thing. I’d spent all summer and fall trying to view the filmmaker’s oeuvre from some kind of fresh perspective . . . but alas, all thoughts of Kaurismäki had quickly led to nothingness, sucked into the all-devouring heat and light of the Sonoran Desert, where all articulated dreams of civilization go to die. It’s going well, I summarized, sealing the lie with a more relaxed, reassuring smile. I’d already knocked back two and a half vodka tonics; smiling no longer presented a substantial difficulty.

Contrary to my plans, the conversation did not end there. I ran into Monica again on the stairs, on the landing between floors, coming back from the bathroom. This time, she had me trapped. It was stupid of us to think Kaurismäki would ever show up in Arizona, wasn’t it?

I could tell she was tipsier than when last we’d crossed paths; the top button of her sweater had come undone, her elocution was suffering. I think so, yes, I offered. I can see him visiting New York, Seattle—San Francisco at a stretch. But, sadly, Finns are not biologically equipped to survive even brief exposure to a desert climate.

Monica laughed, an involuntary little chirp that she tried to muffle with her hand. Did she get the feeling she was getting somewhere? The sad reality—the truth of the pall hanging over all of us—was that there was no place for cinema in Phoenix, no scene, no reason at all for any filmmaker (or artist of any kind) to bother visiting. For the past few years, certain desperate and deluded individuals had been circulating rumors that Phoenix was coming up in the world, that it was the New Hollywood. I’d been living in the valley for nine years; if there were a solitary grain of truth to the hyperbole, I’d yet to witness evidence of it. (They’d shot some scenes for a recent blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage in a desolate stretch of southern Gilbert, but that was about the extent of it.) Had dear Monica been involved in attempts to foster this chimerical Phoenix Scene? I didn’t ask; I was anxious to get back to the hors d’oeuvres.

Anyway, she said, the festival was a success, don’t you think? There were more people than last year.

I nodded sagely, looked down into my drink, focused on an ice cube with something small and black frozen near its center. The narrow design of the staircase presented a dilemma: I couldn’t simply push past her, which limited my choices to (1) standing there and enduring her increasingly inexplicable insistence upon keeping the conversation alive, or (2) fleeing back the way I’d come. But how to extract oneself courteously? In the end, I shrugged and held up my glass, jiggled the ice around to emphasize the absence of vodka or tonic. The signal went straight to its mark. You need a new drink, she said with deep empathy, stepping aside.

It was getting late, and I was a bit more intoxicated than I’d planned to get. I wasn’t the only one: Someone had unloaded a liter of Everclear into a batch of sangria, which took everyone down a notch or two. Thinking it best to catch a light nap before driving, I wandered out onto the back patio. There was no one else out there, it was too cold to socialize outdoors; a thermometer hanging near some wind chimes read sixty-six degrees. I fell onto a wicker bench. Like that of virtually all houses in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, the back yard was a small, depressing square of red and brown gravel with a few treelike weeds sprouting along the perimeter, climbing up the high stone wall that encased the property. Beyond the wall, the second story of a house identical to the one I’d just exited was visible: Its reflective shades were drawn; it looked more like a large mausoleum than a home. Although my view of the night sky was clipped by the awning that shaded the patio, I could just make out a few slivers of pinkish, starless light pollution.

I don’t know exactly when I passed out or for how long. When I woke, Monica Barnes was sitting next to me. The smell of sangria—half fruity, half caustic—drifted off her in waves. Apparently, neither one of us was getting along well with our colleagues; she had unilaterally decided that it was us against them.

I’m sorry—did I wake you? she asked.

I shook my heavy head, looked about groggily. She took this as her cue to resume whatever conversation she imagined I’d cut short on the stairway. Though I couldn’t make much sense of it, I remained polite, attentive; in any case, I turned my face toward her as she spoke. Bizarrely, she was talking about herself: She’d been born in Utah, studied film production at UCLA; she was slated to teach the Hitchcock course in the spring; she hoped she would be considered for tenure next year. It seemed to confuse her that I had no similar goal in mind—which did nothing to stop her from abruptly pushing her hand down my pants. I froze, unable to respond, forced into a space of tangled cognitive signals by her audacity (fueled at least partially by the high-octane sangria, no doubt).

After a bit of a search, her fingers found their prize. Haphazardly milking it, she put her mouth next to my ear and whispered, either nervously or seductively, Am I taking advantage of you? I groaned with total ambivalence. On the one hand, despite the Venusian splendor of her face, I was not sexually attracted to this woman in the least; on the other, to balk at a free hand job would have been tantamount to spitting in the face of every man who has gone his whole life without being presented with such an offer. . . . And while I dithered between acceptance and repugnance, Monica’s tactations intensified.

There was a rather large window of opportunity for me to return the gesture out of courtesy or sheer pity. She’d undone two or three more buttons on the sweater, and underneath she wore something uncharacteristically low-cut, showcasing her full B-cup breasts, their corporeality maximized by some sort of gravity-defying brassiere. I allowed the window to close. There was no chance of achieving a full erection: I was too shocked, too inebriated—and, let’s face it, too depressed about being blown off by Kaurismäki, by Roscoe’s brutal demise. Monica persisted for another minute, although I could tell she’d grown discouraged with the semi-flaccid thing in her grip. Are you okay? she asked.

I touched my brow as if to check my temperature. I could only imagine what my face looked like in that moment: a bewildered rictus, pale and diseased. It’s the cold, I murmured idiotically, adding for good measure: Or I think I drank too much.

With a whimper, she withdrew her hand from my pants. She looked away, as if to shield me from the transient flicker of anger (at me? at herself?) that suddenly marred those divine features.

Guilt pierced me—guilt and atrophied gentlemanly instincts—and I tried to repair the moment by telling her the story of dearly departed Roscoe. He was . . . a mutt of some kind, I fumbled. He . . . well . . . the damned coyotes got him.

Oh no, Monica gasped, hand to heart.

I was in too deep. Her compassion was as intolerable as her ire, the wound of Roscoe’s murder too fresh. I stood up, muttered something vaguely apologetic, and rushed straight to my car. As I braved the gauntlet of police cruisers between the party and my apartment, I was disheartened to realize that the odds of crossing paths with Monica again before the end of the academic year were high, and that when it happened, I would stand in the umbra of shadows cast by my limp dick and my dead dog.

Two

First thing in the door, I poured myself a gin, straight up, and stood staring at my answering machine, at the digital reader that indicated that I still had only one message. Only one, as if its singular nature could somehow diminish its potential—at present infinite—to ruin me. . . . The only relevant character who ever called me on the land line was my older sister, and at that only twice per year, once in December and once on my birthday; otherwise, the line had fallen into a twilight of disuse. My reluctance to part with it altogether was not so much a case of nostalgia for obsolete technology as one of indifference to innovation.

I would usually wait at least a week to listen to any new message, in the hope that the passage of time would render the content irrelevant and thus more or less harmless. Or, as often as not, I would forgo listening altogether, purging the answering machine of unheard messages every month or so, a sort of head-in-the-sand approach to avoiding the pitfalls of belonging to a social species. So far, this method had suited me just fine.

In this light, what happened next was absurd. I swallowed my drink in a single gulp and, depriving myself of further deliberation, of further refinement of my reasoning for avoidance, pressed the playback button.

That is when I heard my daughter’s voice for the first time, preceded by ten or fifteen seconds of dead air. Apparently, her name was Dresden. She didn’t seem to have much else to say, or perhaps she was too distraught to make herself clear. After stating her name and her relationship to me, she made a choking noise and said no more; the sound of her breath went on for a long time before she hung up.

Strangely, I didn’t doubt her claim to being my one and only genetic successor. It was as if I had been waiting for this bomb to drop all along, since that day twenty years prior when I’d learned that her mother had no plans to exercise her federally protected right to choose. The unexpected does happen in life, yet rarely (so rarely) twice at once, so that as I went on to replay my daughter’s message four more times, between four more gins and four bean and cheese microwave taquitos, I began to perceive some occult correlation between her voice and the sexual interest of Monica Barnes. For my inability to delete the message or to allow Monica’s designs to reach completion or to chase off paranoid visions of these two figures—my daughter and Monica—as conspirators in some cosmic plot against me, it would have been easy enough to blame Kaurismäki once more. And while for certain he was partially to blame, having thrust me into a vulnerable and subsequently volatile state by simply declining the opportunity to make an appearance in my life, I can’t deny that I was at the mercy of two decades of repressed curiosity about my daughter. After all, I had never made even the most cursory attempt to find out anything about her. She was the only mystery left in life, the only variable. I understood immediately that this would not be the last I’d hear from her. And that, despite the fact that the eighteen years of financial distress she had imposed upon me were over, there was yet more ruination to come. Our connection to each other—tenuous to the extreme—was about to pass from the administrative to the adversarial.

◦

Regardless, I was looking forward to a gentle Sunday. Nothing to prepare for the next week of classes, nothing more serious to worry about than how to play it should my future attempts to avoid Monica at all costs prove futile. I poured an entire pot of coffee into an empty stomach while my idle gaze oscillated between the phone and a blank text file on my computer screen with the mystifying title of Kaurismäki and Kieślowski: The Haptic Disconnect. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I didn’t know; all the thinking I’d done in preparation for the book seemed to have evaporated; everything had been erased by a single phone call, by my daughter’s frail, mumbling voice—an omen from below. Gentleness would never find me again; she was going to call again any minute, I could feel it coming, I could almost smell it, like a disturbance in the ionosphere. I was clenched with dread. Each minute that passed without further incident was pure hell.

There are things you can do at times like these to avoid full-tilt panic. You don’t have to suffer. You can find someone with whom to waylay the anxieties resulting from your poor life choices. Maybe you’ve made friends. Maybe you’re too old for friends, in which case if you own a smartphone, you can download an app that will put you in instant contact with hundreds of single strangers in your area. Not that anything reminiscent of a human conversation is bound to result: If you happen to be a woman, most of the people you contact will immediately request to see your tits; if you’re a man, they’ll want to know up front about the size of your cock. In the latter case, honesty will get you nowhere, unless you can skate by on a joke: Four inches, you might say, but you’ll only need the first three . . .

To continue with the latter case—and with the added stipulation that you are heterosexual: Even if you can’t relate to women in the real world, you can find them on the internet, in prerecorded videos or, if your suffering is particularly acute, on live webcam channels (that is, if you have a Wi-Fi account or a neighbor with an unencrypted network). If you’re feeling communicative, you can even open a chat channel with the girl and bark orders at her: Now three fingers, Show me your asshole, etc.

Or if women aren’t your thing, you can shove a bunch of nutrient-weak garbage into your face and wash it down with alcohol—which I do more or less constantly. I was raised by a man who could not be bothered to boil a pot of water, much less prepare a balanced meal; his predilection for microwavable products became mine, yet whereas he was something of an anorexic, my path diverged toward a bottomless, agonizing, constant need for these products. As I understand it, many overeaters use food in order to engender a yawning mental blankness inside of which pain no longer registers: The brain’s ability to process pain signals, emotional or physical, is diminished during the act of eating, just as it is during sex. I believe my case flirts more openly, more abjectly, with masochism, even mortification. My insides are as ugly as the thing that appears in the mirror any time I can bear to look; I am generally good for nothing beyond the mass consumption of disgusting, processed, packaged shit, which I am more than happy to puke back up whenever I’ve gone too far. The vomiting has nothing at all to do with fear of weight gain and everything to do with the cleansing effect. The pain is magnificent, there is nothing like it, nothing comes close, not even ejaculation. Once sated, I am able to return with calm and confidence to my classroom—or to my office—or to my contemplation of Kaurismäki.

I must admit that with a PhD in semiotic film theory, I am not exactly well suited to delve deep into what’s going on with Kaurismäki. Semiotically speaking, his films are not very interesting, an assessment that boils down to the fact that they are neither terribly symbolic nor terribly constructed. Other filmmakers across cultures and aesthetic traditions generally lean on either tensions in perspective or the wonders of montage in order to communicate meaning to the viewer from the bowels of the connotative layer. Kaurismäki, on the other hand, and at almost every turn, offers us the very same perspective we might experience while watching a play: His camera does not move much; his use of lighting is masterfully unobtrusive, verging on dull; his cuts are almost brutally economical, never aesthetically contrived. He is concerned with characters and characters alone, so that rarely does a single shot appear that does not contain or indeed center upon a human figure or face. Regarding the theories of Kuleshov, for instance, which pertain to the possibilities of inviting audience participation in the creation of meaning: Either they are lost on Kaurismäki, or he simply does not consider them worth the trouble. Nothing much seems to interest him beyond regular people leading small, quietly desperate lives in grinding anonymity. In effect, he does not appear to care for the medium of film very much; one is led to imagine that he bothers with it only because it is, at least potentially, far more lucrative than theater.

Could another scholar from a theoretical tradition of Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Masculinity, Multiculturalism, Marxism, or Race have more luck making a mountain out of his molehill of works? Maybe, but I rather doubt it. To put it bluntly, Kaurismäki eludes theory at every turn. Why do I bother with him then? My colleagues don’t understand it, and neither do I. If I could stop, though, I might be able to identify in which direction true happiness lies and take steps to go there.

On Sunday evening, ensconced in the same light depression that terminates any weekend, I devoured a family-size broccoli and cheddar quiche with three quarters of a package of Hydrox cookies and, before vomiting, tried to masturbate a little. It was not a success. First, in deference to Kaurismäki, I conjured some images of Kati Outinen, his favorite actress, perhaps his muse, a creature whose on-screen nobility is all the more daunting for the fact that she is no male American’s idea of a sex symbol. When that led nowhere—primarily on account of my respect for Outinen as an artist—I tried wanking to some random webcam girls. On the plus side, none of them were great actors; on the minus, all of them appeared to be near my daughter’s age. Thus, having inadvertently caused me to imagine Dresden in their place, these lazy, tech-savvy girls left me flaccid. Wasn’t it enough for my daughter to drain me financially? No—now she would drain the blood supply to my cock as well. In defeat, I rounded out the night with a liter of trashy Chablis and a viewing of John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles, the pinnacle of his fetish for Molly Ringwald, which I owned on both VHS and DVD. Hughes’s films are nowhere near as insoluble as Kaurismäki’s, and of no critical interest unless you’ve got a hard-on for trends in youth culture. Hughes remains aesthetically neutral—one might even say perfectly aesthetically neutral. Thus, it is possible—if not preferable—to watch his films on mute, so as not to corrupt Ringwald’s photogenic purity with a shrill voice regurgitating the innocuous lines it has been fed.

Three

For ten minutes I remained in my car in the Copperhead faculty parking lot, slumped against the wheel and struggling to breathe. This kind of thing happens periodically in a man’s life, whenever he senses that his existence has caught the attention of the Fates, that a definitive trajectory into misfortune has been selected for him. The simple act of removing the keys from the ignition and stepping out of the car seemed insurmountable. Otherwise, it was a remarkable day, bright but not blindingly so. The cold had abated somewhat, and students were bustling around in light winter wear; it was sixty-nine degrees. After nine years in Arizona, my blood had thinned out considerably, to the point that I agreed that sixty-nine degrees was a bit chilly. Still, as a New England native, I was appalled by the relentless absence of distinct seasons; I felt oppressed to be living in a place where winter consists of three months of slightly less than blistering temperatures. By late January, the mercury in the thermometers would be rising again, signaling the onset of another nine months in Hell.

It must have been the apparition of Monica Barnes weaving between the cars on her way to the Media Arts Building that finally snapped me out of paralysis. Already late for my first class, I hurried toward the campus café, where standing in line for a coffee proved the usual demoralizing experience: surrounded by people half your age, their youthful eyes moving over you with barely masked disgust while they assess your biological and social obsolescence, forming quasi-Darwinian judgments. Sometimes I would catch one of the students peering at me as if I were some rare or cryptozoological specimen that had strayed from the obscurity of its natural habitat.

Finding the sensation of being looked at unpleasant, I found it difficult to justify to myself the choice to teach, and yet I went on teaching, went on standing in that line every day, surrounded by the inaccessible genitals of America’s future. Whenever I glimpsed an attractive young student, I would feel an icy pang at the bottom of my chest (this occurred about once every twenty seconds on campus—they were everywhere). Basically, I felt old, or like some delegate from a foreign land sent to some backward desert to enlighten its savages. Youth always gives the impression of deep stupidity. In my eyes, the boys were a murky, sinister mass of dumb animal impulses, and the girls: cunts on legs.

There are things about the classroom tableau that repulse me: the sound of my own voice; the preservation of established thought; the hard and shiny eyes of the students who seem to me, in more acute moments of pedophobia, like a horde of insects, indistinguishable from one another, poised to swarm. My own education had been a source of idle distraction and little else. I’d never pushed myself, never acquired any valuable skills. Nor had I been pushed in that direction by some parental tribunal. I belonged to an entire social class for whom the term survival was a blank collection of phonemes, devoid of significance. I’ve always felt that before we teach a child to think for itself, we should teach it to fend for itself. For instance, no child of ten years old should be unprepared to be dropped into the wild, alone, perhaps with a knife for company, and to survive: to find food and water, to erect a shelter, to master the immediate threat of our animal reality. Then and only then should the fledgling graduate on to matters of culture and intellectual finery.

Out of the handful of classes I’d consented to teach that semester, only the Screenwriting Workshop seemed to serve any real purpose. I arrived just shy of twenty minutes late. A mere five students had bothered to show; not a good sign, given that there were eleven on the roster—at least eight of whom usually managed to put in an appearance. They were waiting for me in the usual contemptuous, defensive silence that always separates fellow writers. As soon as I walked in the door and looked at them, I knew it had been a mistake to skip breakfast: My limbs were trembling from a confluence of hunger and the caffeine buzz. I threw my bag on my desk and announced: I’m going for a piss. Back in five.

This is bullshit, one of them blurted, a stuck-up, portly girl who was always wearing sweaters with kittens on them (a diehard Chaplin fan, if memory serves). She gathered her materials and stormed out, huffing all the while. That was fine; I could only hope this would be our last goodbye.

I followed her out, hooked a left, ducked into the men’s room. Locked in a stall, I removed a package of miniature chocolate-covered donuts from the inside pocket of my leather jacket, opened it, stuffed all five of them down my throat in quick succession. Then I removed the package of miniature powdered donuts from the other inside pocket and did the same, washing it all down with swigs from the pint of cheap gin concealed in yet a third pocket. I considered vomiting right then but, after some soul-searching, found it unnecessary. With another swig I was ready to cope with my students at last, perhaps even to seize the day.

There were still four of them, seated around the long workshop table in various states of boredom, listening to music through earbuds or mucking around with their smartphones. These were the die-hards, the ascetics, the disciples whose faithful endurance of even the most egregious of my abuses sprang from the delusion that I was in possession of some great and secret wisdom, that I held the keys to their success. For their commitment to the vow of poverty that is any young filmmaker’s lot, if not for their talent—which was debatable—I suppose I should have treated them with more respect, more compassion, than I did the kids in my less demanding classes. On the contrary, it was this faith of theirs—so dear, so inspiring—which rendered compassion impossible: In contrast to the presiding indifference of most of my other students, it was intolerable.

I joined their circle, pulled an untidy wad of papers out of my bag, shuffled them around, signaling that playtime was over. I licked the residual dusting of powdered sugar off my lips and cleared my throat. Right. Anyone manage to write anything over the weekend?

Yawning, arid gazes, the chewing of fingernails. No one is ever quick to climb up onto the pyre.

One of them, Jameson, whose name I remembered only for its reference to the mid-level Irish whiskey, finally raised her hand with foreboding confidence. She alone had already taken her manuscript out; it was sitting before her, unruffled and unblemished, like an offering of enemy entrails. Directly across from her, another young woman scoffed audibly from behind her phone and sank lower in her chair. With a pointed pause meant to signal that she had registered the scoff and was unmoved by it, Jameson began: I think I reached a workable turning point for my first act.

I found it difficult to make eye contact with this girl for many reasons, some of