An Adjunct Down

An Adjunct Down

By

Harvey Havel

Copyright © 2016 by Harvey Havel

All rights reserved. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by Harvey Havel:

Noble McCloud (1999)

The Imam (2000)

Freedom of Association (2006)

From Poets to Protagonists (2009)

Harvey Havel's Blog, Essays (2011)

Stories from the Fall of the Empire (2011)

Two Tickets to Memphis (2012)

Mother, A Memoir (2013)

Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt (2014)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book One (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Three (2016)

An Adjunct Down (2016)

The Thruway Killers (2017)

Chapter One

Life is tough for us. That's the most honest statement I can make at this point. Every morning I see all of these nicely-made cars traveling up and down the avenue while I patiently wait for the bus. The most luxurious of these cars have young teenagers and college students at the wheel - that or the young drug dealers who are easily manipulated by their older overlords. I'm not jealous of these young people, but when I see a couple of young brothers driving a Porsche or a BMW in the ghetto of all places, I get a little upset, because it is usually the honest and highly-principled laboring man who goes without.

I quit a lucrative job that I had at the local bank, and now I work in the mail-room of one of the city's colleges. I was making all types of mistakes at the bank, so I just resigned, because I knew I was incompetent. The immediate executive above me wanted me to stay on, but wisely I quit, because I couldn't function after a while with all of that pressure and stress tied to number-crunching, mortgage applications, and business loans. The mail-room suits me much better. It's a job that I can do.

My mother was disappointed about my leaving the bank. My father, on the other hand, left us a long time ago. I can hardly remember what my father looks like. We were a very poor family. There were no jobs, and we were always broke - and this is probably why he left. He told my mother that he'd be back after looking for jobs. He never returned. My mother was suddenly a single mother, and I was her only child.

I revere my mother as I would a saint. She went through back-breaking work to give me the gift of an education down the road from where we lived. She worked as a nurse's assistant at the local hospital. She cleaned operating rooms and cancer wards. She could have abandoned me, but she never did. And now my mother is disappointed, even though I feel much better working in the mail-room. The people treat me well. I'm happy for once, and this happiness is all due to leaving the bank and latching on to work that I gain some sort of mental relief from. Besides, I like looking at all of the different stamps that are thrown my way, as well as all of the handwriting on the envelopes. When I'm out walking around town, I review the handwriting on the envelopes and imagine how rich or how poor the residents are as I come across their homes.

I am not fooled by delivering mail to the big and wealthy houses, by the way. Sure, I can easily see how wealthy they are, but at the same time I know that many of these people aren't happy with their lives. I know this, because I used to live in a nice house, provided by the bank I worked for. But once a little while ago, my best friend, Reginald Meeks, told me that these rich people are always desperate and depressed. Not many are actually happy, even with their wealth. I would think that the statement, more money, more problems, would apply here.

I have some money that I'm saving, but in comparison to the people who own these nice mansions, I'm really small potatoes. The money that I do have isn't enough to afford a family, and it would take plenty of suffering time to raise that kind of cash as a simple worker in a mail-room. I started working here after I left my job with the Postal Service.

I get plenty of benefits, but it's just not enough. I wouldn't want a son of mine living without a father and relying on social security and food stamps like my mother had to. I don’t want my children to suffer or freak out while making ends meet as our cost of living becomes unbearably high. Sons or daughters who are worse off than I need to have a positive attitude and goals for the future. To some, this may not be possible. Children, after all, will one day have to pull their own weight, and I would have to rely on them as I’m carted away into retirement. They wouldn’t have the time or the tolerance to care for me. They’d lock me up in one of those homes for the elderly.

This is all far away. For some reason, I think about my own funeral routinely. Life here is both good and bad. The suffering is great, but I don’t feel I can do anything to help. It’s very frustrating, and it is equally difficult, at my age, to have a good time. Getting drunk is a good time for me. Joining the mail-room staff the next morning with a nauseating hangover is something else. Nevertheless, I still come in on time even with the worst hangovers - the kind that last two or three days. Every swallow of water is an attempt to keep me from throwing up.

I have an reliable car that takes me to the mail-room. Once again, it came from working at the bank. It’s a used Lincoln. No one knows the American roadways better than these domestic cars. I hop in, turn the ignition, and the engine gives off a quiet noise, almost like a cat purring when held the right way. I then pick up Reginald who’s working at the college as a professor. An adjunct he calls himself. I usually get to his place about five minutes early. I try to smoke some refer before he gets in, and as usual, I never finish the full joint when Reginald, nervous as any paranoid rabbit, opens the door and slides into the soft leather passenger’s seat next to me.

Must you do that here? he asked.

Nothing wrong with it, I said.

In the first place, marijuana is still illegal in this state. Secondly, the car is all stinky with the damn smell of it. My clothes now smell of that stuff. My students smell it on me, and they think I’m some kind of drug addict.

Take it easy, alright Reggie? There’s no better time than the morning to smoke some reefer. Plus, you already smell like your family’s restaurant. At least I don’t smell like fish, onion, or garlic.

Just put it out, please.

Okay, okay.

That’s better.

I put out my joint on my tongue, and then I swallow it for greater effect as I calmly drive Reginald to the college. He had a class at eight in the morning, and I had to be in the mail-room by nine. Carpooling was definitely a good idea, as Reginald usually paid for half the gas. And yet I felt sorry for him most of the time. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, he has to work at the restaurant and put up with his family, and he teaches a bunch of students who always question their grades after whatever assignment was graded. His job is a dead-end job. He’s forever a part of the temporary workers’ economy. He wants to get a doctorate in History, but for that he needs funding.

He asked me a very long time ago, probably when we were razor-bumped middle school clowns, if I could teach him about money. I didn’t offer him much advice except to say that the investors of the world are divided into money-spenders and money-savers. There is a time for each of those. I told him to save his money –‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ I also tried to tell him about the Rockefellers.

I had pulled this out from a magazine: The Rockefellers say, spend 80%, save 10%, and keep 10% for charitable donations. It was that simple, but what Reginald most wanted out of money was the ability to haggle for what he wanted – to be a tough guy while bargaining and not a sorry sonofabitch crying into his glass of beer at an empty bar, hating himself because he didn’t reach that tough-guy level.

Reggie was always shy. He couldn’t be tough while negotiating. He had the deep-seeded suspicion that he was always getting ripped off by those who were prying their way into his wallet. He didn’t like handling money, but he knew how to spend it. He just never learned how to earn it.

I didn’t know that adjunct professors live so lowly, but Reggie filled me in on the particulars of the job. At times, in front of the classroom, he ran out of things to say, especially when there were fifteen minutes left until the class officially ended. He also had a hard time waking up in the morning. There was a time when Reggie and I were dedicated night people. We couldn’t stand the day, and we went to sleep when we returned home early in the morning. All of that ended when Reggie had to prove that his mind was worth saving and learning from. He left me alone to investigate the perils of street-life without him as a partner.

It’s not easy getting an adjunct position either, as many people apply. Interestingly, the job itself is annoying. He didn’t mind teaching his classes, but he did mind when all the teachers had to use PowerPoint or clear slides for lectures. Reggie was definitely old-schooled, and when asked by the chairman of the history department to change his style of teaching to incorporate the new technology, he did it but grudgingly so. This was on top of grading student papers on the weekends. He hated changing his life when he saw no reason to change it. He hated having to adapt, even in the classroom. Nevertheless, he did what he could to add some of the new technology.

Reggie learned much more without going to his local high school as a teenager. His mother taught him everything he knew. As an adjunct, he wanted to have a famous presence, but a lot of this was simply too imaginary. When Reggie dreamed and then awakened, one always had to step away from him, because he would yank anyone in for one of his fierce debates on the dreams that visited him.

I get too tired when he wants to debate, but at times he does pull me in, and I get stuck arguing about historical figures I know nothing about. Reggie always bothered me about it, because I should at least know some of the major Black-American intellectuals besides the same old Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. These were two great men, but there had to be a saturation point where their stories were rehashed over and over again for no real purpose. They belonged within the context of Black History, sure, but Reggie was sick of teaching his students about the two leaders, because the older Black generation forced them down our throats. Reggie wanted to learn something that involved his own generation and not someone else’s.

Reggie’s argument was that these two leaders represented the failure of older intellectuals who refused to hand the torch down to little-known others who had made their mark on Black history as well. If anything, he wanted to find different intellectuals who were unknown and flowered later on, after the Civil Rights Era. The graying mass of the elderly wanted to keep their ideas alive, mostly through pressure and coercion from the top. If one doesn’t include Dr. King or Malcolm X in a lesson plan, then good luck getting any shot at a permanent or tenure-track position. He had to kiss ass this way - to show the higher-ups that Dr. King and Malcolm X still mattered in a low-level course while he lied about it and quietly knew that he would only spend a few minutes of lecture time on each.

Too many black thinkers and academics had been ignored. Reggie wanted to take them out of hiding from the bookshelves in the college’s library. He presented the students with new heroes and not the ghosts within the black mainstream who championed popular ideas from sixty years ago. But he couldn’t do this on his own. He needed me to tell him that it was alright how he changed the direction of Black History within the classroom. He was a visionary in this regard, but at the same time, no one in the academic world would do such a thing.

You just have one class today, right? I asked.

Yeah. And then I have to return to the restaurant for the lunch shift.

You’re straddling two different worlds, I said. I admire you for it, but you may face exhaustion because of it. Your mind will just stop working - all that hard labor you talk about. A mind does labor, which is why no one wants a job where he has to think. Thinking is the enemy, Reggie.

Who told you that?

No one. I came across it myself.

It’s good advice. It’s something my father would say. He says that I have good heart but I’m gullible, a term that I don’t like. The longer he keeps me working at the restaurant, the dumber I’ll get. I need to be challenged, and the challenge is teaching my class this morning. The students have to take it as a requirement, and I’m going to make them interested in black intellectuals they’ve never heard of before. They’ll learn about philosophies and theories that have been forgotten, kind of like old or used CDs or DVDs. The university needs a washing and a scrubbing. It requires a puddle of old and tired history to swirl down the drainpipe of time without clogging.

Sounds like you’re doing this for vengeance. I’m sure if you just told your boss about it, she wouldn’t mind one bit, – but you should tell her first. Ask for advice on the issue. Judge the pros and the cons is what I’m saying.

Who’s going to know? asked Reginald.

That’s not the right attitude, Reggie. People will find out if you are basing the class on minor historical figures. You’ll always win with Malcolm X and that amazing book by Alex Haley. You’ll win big with Dr. King’s writings as well. I don’t know why you’re trying to mess with things. Just do what the head of your department asks of you.

I’m starting with me. If I want to see changes to in this world, then it is up to me to introduce them.

Whatever, man. Just don’t get into trouble.

We had conversations like this for several days in a row. For some reason, Reginald wouldn’t bend. He talked only about the unknown leaders who carved a thin groove in Black American History. Sometimes I’d like to knock some sense into him.

On the car ride to the campus, the dazzling sunlight blinded us. I could only hope that Reggie made the right move. He even wanted me to sit in on one of his classes. It wasn’t because I was interested in these unknown Black Americans. I agreed to it mostly to check out the college girls, but I also wanted to criticize Reggie, as I have done time and again. I’m not that interested in the history of our own people. We learned all that stuff in Elementary school. Why do we have to learn the same things again? So that history doesn't repeat itself? By the time it takes to give a solid course in Black History, we'll all be brainwashed and won’t know what our history is anyway. Permitting past mistakes would be the fascinating experiment of the day. We are doomed to forget as time marches on. Some call it cultural amnesia.

I’ll give Reggie a point for that one, because he at least steers away from boredom in favor of learning new things in the classroom. I tell him, though, that there is no such thing as an original thought in this country. Perhaps it could be found elsewhere. Whatever the case may have been, I’m often surprised when Reggie says that the media can’t be trusted, since government and corporate control of the media push and mold us into stronger characters, without smarts on one end or into highly intelligent academic geniuses on the other end without strong character. Reggie said that he has achieved both.

His passivity, his ambivalence to the type of government we wanted, was Reggie’s way of telling us that it is not humanly possible to have everyone in the world follow the same bipolar system, but at least we can go with the flow and prosper from whatever events or crises come our way, no matter what side we’re on. We move along a tightrope back and forth from one end to the other in our efforts to stay free and clear of making a decision. This is what he means by being ambivalent. It’s the idea of not caring about what the government or its people want. Events and crises are a product of a spiritual phenomenon rather than a corrupt media that overloads these opinions on the yokes of our backs. Hell, half the stuff he watches on television is about politics or government or the corporation in some way. I might as well watch the Cartoon Channel to get my daily diet of news. Sponge Bob anyone?

Seriously, though, he wanted me to visit one of his classes, and he must have had a good group of students for him to be showing it to me. Otherwise, he’d be the self-appointed leader of a class of street people featuring thugs, toughs, rough men, malt beer drinkers, and gangsters from a dangerous school. Although Reggie was a short guy with muscles and worked out at the college’s weight room and worked equally hard at his family’s restaurant, he wouldn’t fight these students. He said his intellect wasn’t leading him that way. It was more a divine spirit and those internet blogs that were once in vogue but were now easily supplanted by other mediocre blogs. Compared to me, and compared to many of his peers, Reggie had everything figured out. He seemed confident on how he viewed the world. For him, the world was one big scam, and then death. The only people who liked this world were those in the pharmaceutical commercials. And even they could be easily spotted as handsome actors, either drugged up with heroin or gay. It made him sick.

Although he is my best friend, sometimes I grow tired of hearing him complain. If it isn't money one week, it's classical painting the next. Now who the hell would accept The Birth of Venus in the ghetto?

After all, the competition in the ghetto was fierce and razor-sharp. People watched television, logged on to the internet, listened to new artists who hadn't gotten a break yet. Now add the cars, their sub-woofer systems shaking apart the avenue and rattling windows. Brand new sounds were heard at the height of their notoriety, filling the streets with immense possibilities over what musicians deserve to become superstars. No one could hear much of anything when the sub-woofers went up and down the avenue. The drive to find one voice instead of many different ones forced young people in the ghetto to carry recordings of their favorite music in CD players, just so other ghetto-folk could hear them. They'd stash their music players in their bags or pockets and play them at full volume. They instilled their own sense of propaganda to anyone within range. Sonic warfare some have called it.

Sound was very important where Reggie lived. Sometimes sound was a savior. At other times, these young people became a part of a crushed landscape that did, I admit, fight over what sounds to hear but at the same time always searched for more. Beyond the ghetto streets there were other worlds to explore, but somehow, and I'm guessing here, but somehow most people in the ghetto just couldn't leave. They knew they couldn't just enter a white neighborhood and expect to live there.

Reggie told me that in the mid-eighties the call for black unity and the call for giving back to one's community became the black mantra and agenda. Interestingly enough, the black unity and giving back to one’s community had already been achieved several years before, and the side-effect of this was cruel segregation among neighborhoods and pockets of poor, unschooled blacks with amazing potential wasted on the refuse of popular music and culture. Reggie pointed to a sign on a telephone pole that wanted homes for instant cash. Who knew who would give in to this process of gentrification, but sometimes it does have to occur to save a neighborhood from decay, to bring more money in, but not to push out a culture that had already been living there for years. People in the ‘hood wouldn’t pack up and be shipped off to a new location. Instead, blacks stayed on the front lines of elite