* * *
The buzzing of my phone on the desk jarred me from the drunken slumber I’d fallen into. The cigarette had burned itself out in the ashtray and my shot glass was empty.
“Fuck” I said, blowing out a smelly breath as I picked up the phone and squinted at the screen. It was Nancy Dorfmann, the head of the English department and my immediate boss. I glanced at the clock on the computer screen before I tapped to answer the call. It was almost nine p.m., four hours after the grades should have been posted.
I tried to clear the whiskey and smoke from my throat and said, “Hi, Nancy. What’s up?”
“Professor Hollander, are you aware that your midterm grades have not been posted to the system?” she asked, her thick air of condescension scraping its way into my ear like fingernails on a chalkboard.
The system she was referring to was the school’s intranet, a private website where professors posted documentation related to classes, tests, study sheets, and grades for tests and exams. Each student had a user name and password that gave them access to everything linked to their account, including their grades. If I had stayed sober long enough to enter each student’s grade into the system, those grades would have been available for students to see. I had never understood the urgency in posting the grades. Most of the little shits didn’t give a rat’s ass about their grades. They took what they got and moved on to torture the next professor. Why bother spending an hour of my time posting grades on a Friday night that nobody gave a shit about?
“Professor Hollander, are you there?” Nancy’s voice was like a swarm of flies buzzing around my ear. “Professor Hollander, your midterm grades have not been posted.”
I almost told Nancy to go fuck herself.
Almost.
Instead, I tried not to slur the words as I said, “I know, Professor Dorfmann, and I apologize. I’ve been trying to get the grades posted for five hours. The internet keeps going down here at my house.”
The moment of silence told me that Nancy Dorfmann knew I was full of shit. She said, “Then perhaps you should go to your office and try from there. The rule is all grades are posted by five. It’s now nine fifteen. That’s four hours and fifteen minutes after the deadline.”
I can tell time, bitch, I thought. I just wasn’t so good at managing it these days.
“Yes, I understand. Okay, I’ll try once more from here, and if it doesn’t work I’ll drive over to the office and post them from there.”
“Perhaps you should call a cab to drive you,” she said. I could tell she was wrinkling her fat nose on the other end of the phone, as if she could smell the stench of the cigarettes and whiskey fuming through the phone line.
“And Professor Hollander, I’d like to see you Monday in my office,” she said. “We need to discuss the status of your tenure.”
I had stuck a cigarette between my teeth and was about to fire it up when the word “tenure” stuck in my ear.
Tenure was just a fancy bullshit academic term that meant you had a job until retirement.
For college professors like myself, tenure was the holy grail. It meant you had a job for life, unless you did something stupid to fuck it up. I had become tenured at Trent State after my fifth year of teaching there, which was ten years ago.
Tenure meant that I could only be fired with what was called “just cause.” Not “just because” Nancy Dorfmann felt like it, but by “just case,” which in my case could be anything from telling Nancy Dorfmann to suck my fat cock on the steps of the administration building (which I was dying to do) to showing up drunk for class (which I had done repeatedly) to having a sexual relationship with a student (I’d come close a few times but had never had the balls to follow through) to being convicted of a violent crime like murder.
I still thought about killing the drunk driver who took Kiley’s life, but only when I was really, really drunk, which was most every night now.
“Professor Hollander, did you hear me?”
“Um, yes, I heard you.”
“Please call my assistant Monday morning to set up a meeting,” she said. “And I’ll expect to see all of your class grades posted within the hour.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said as the phone went dead in my ear.
I tossed the phone on the desk and lit the cigarette that had been dangling between my teeth. I filled the shot glass to the rim and tapped the space bar to wake up the computer.
“I’ll post your fucking grades, you old cunt,” I sneered as the smoke bellowed from my lips and across the top of the whiskey glass. I licked my lips like a wolf about to devour an entire classroom of lambs and entered the first grade.