Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (6 page)

“This is palm tree. I'm trying to reach Oliver Kelly.”

“He is unavailable at the moment. May I ask who's calling?”

“Did he move? Is he still at his 201 number?”

“I'm afraid I can't give out that information, sir.”

I hung up. I dialed his home number. The androgynous child answered. “Hello?”

“Oliver Kelly,” I said. “Does he live there?”

“What?”

I hung up. Maybe I was having a stroke. I was pretty sure I was saying the words I thought I was saying, but none of them seemed to be landing the way I intended. Maybe I was actually spouting some incomprehensible Esperanto, a salad of meaningless phonemes. I walked down the hall to Chris's room where some sort of frightening music throbbed against the walls like a headache. I knocked. “Chris,” I think I said.

“What?”

“Do you mean ‘what?' as in what do I want? Or ‘what?' as in what did I say? It's an important distinction.”

“What?”

I opened the door. Chris was huddled over his computer, the screen facing away from me but illuminating his face like one of those light boxes people treat seasonal affective disorder with, and, considering the blackout curtains he'd covered his windows with, he was probably a candidate for this treatment.

“
What
?” he said.

“Repeat what I say.”

“No.”

“Good enough.”

I closed the door. I was running interception. I had to get to Oliver before Edie did. She'd tricked me into giving up his name and was now finding her own way to him, using me as some unwitting reference. She'd mentioned the possibility of him being on the Internet. I could try that. The only computer in the house was Chris's. (I didn't have a computer, still don't. I'm composing this on an IBM Wheelwriter 1000, a sturdy electric typewriter that hums in a soothing way. I tend not to trust computers, with all those ones and zeros that are as ephemeral as fairy farts. With my Wheelwriter, I know that what I type is there, here, in indelible ink, immediately. I am typing this now. It is here now, on the page, real. Look. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. See?)

I opened Chris's door again, and he shouted, “Fucking knock, dude!”

I said I needed his technical savvy to help me get someone's contact info from the Internet, and he begrudgingly agreed.

“Don't pretend you don't know how to use this thing,” he said. “I know you come in here while I'm at school and use my computer—it's all there in the browser history.”

I pulled a chair up next to him, and said, “How's that acne medicine working out? Do you still have an oily T-zone?”

“Who are you looking for?”

“Just type ‘Oliver Kelly' and see what comes up.”

“Oliver Kelly—your friend, right?”

Looking over at his rumbling stereo, I said, “Would you call this music thrash metal or speed metal?”

Chris started typing.

“I think T-zone would be a good name for one of these bands,” I said. “The ‘T' evokes the Christian iconography that these bands seem so fascinated with, while the ‘zone' suggests an almost marshal state of doom.”

“Yeah, so you gonna tell me what this is all about?”

Chris was right to be suspicious of my Luddite claims. Truth be told, I had been sneaking into his room to use his computer. It started when I noticed that my students suddenly seemed more informed about my past than ever before. For years, I'd been teaching at COLA confident that my students saw me as Mr. McWeeney or Prof. McWeeney (which is not entirely accurate, as I am, along with every other member of the COLA faculty, not a professor but rather an adjunct instructor) or Dr. McWeeney (which is not accurate either, as I have only a master's degree, but after a few too many misunderstood jokes asking my students to call me “master,” and realizing that both the “Prof.” and “Dr.” titles have nothing to do with me and everything to do with my students' genuine desire to be at a real four-year institution where those labels would be legion, I now respond to both), confident that my students saw me only as their wise and affable teacher, a tweed-coated man of letters, grader of papers and too-lenient forgiver of absences. I felt—and still feel—that maintaining this persona was important not just for the classroom dynamic but for shaping their understandings of how an educated person looked, behaved, carried himself. There would only occasionally be rifts, chinks in the armor, so to speak, moments when the mask fell, or, to be more precise, was pulled away. Every now and then some plucky young student would pipe up with, “Hey, Donny . . . I mean, uh, Mr. McWeeney, do you think the Ancient Mariner is a
loose
cannon
in this poem?” and I would have to stay unfazed while saying, “Yes, there is a great deal of emotional volatility here,” knowing that an errant episode of the short-lived sitcom
Loose Cannons
(1966–1966) had surfaced late night on some cable channel and my astute student had recognized my name in the credits playing young Donny Cannon, oldest of the Cannon brood whose patriarch was psychologist Dr. Kurt Cannon, played by Fred McMurray in an always-frazzled performance. So yes, I was an actor. In my late teens, having recently lost my father, I was adrift and drifted into the same industry that surely caused Dad's heart attack. It—that ridiculous show and my ridiculous performance—was something I thought I'd put behind me. When the show was canceled I began taking classes at COLA, finished the high school requirements I'd neglected, got my associate's degree, transferred to UCLA, got drunk on the poststructuralists, wrote essays about the evils of the American sitcom, got my bachelor's, then moved all the way to Iowa for writer school, where I thought I'd finally shake off the stigma of my youthful and all-too-public attempts at commercial artistry and claim my bona fides as a commercially unviable artist by writing avant-garde short stories about empty rooms and characters who discovered they were just math equations, but sure enough, the first thing anyone (Oliver Kelly) said to me when I arrived at Iowa—my hair long, my chin hairy, looking as un-Donny-like as I could—was, “Hey, man, fuckin'
Loose Cannons
, right?” And although I don't want to say that I'm ashamed of my brief acting career, I do feel that it has stigmatized me a bit, and I have a sneaking suspicion that when every publishing house in New York rejected first
Season of All Natures
and then
Rarer Monsters
, it had something to do with my past, publishers surely
doubting they could take little Donny Cannon seriously as a novelist. Of course, you folks in the true crime department don't share those prejudices with the boys down the hall, which is why I like you and feel you will understand. But the point is that in recent years, my students had been piping up more and more about
Loose Cannons
. Someone would come up to me after class and say, “Hey, um, this might be crazy but were you on TV in like the sixties?” and I, my voice low, would say yes, it was a thing I did, and then the student would inevitably admit that he was an aspiring actor and could I hook him up with my agent? Instances like those were becoming more frequent, until one day—when a student, mid-discussion of Samuel Pepys's diaries, interrupted to ask what it was like being on TV, and the whole class said, “Yeah, Mr. M.,” not a single person seeming surprised by this revelation—I realized that it was just common knowledge now. This has been quite stressful and I have struggled with different ways of maintaining my (as I've said, pedagogically vital) professorial persona (the word “professorial”—adj., relating or
similar to
a professor—being the closest I can come, it seems, to an actual professorship, since I am not, technically, a professor), and during this first instance, I'm afraid to admit, I snapped at the student, telling him to stop trying to derail the class, and I then spent the rest of the period reading aloud Pepys's description of the 1666 London Fire in a monotone, defiantly un-actorly voice, though I have now become more skilled at deflecting the issue without appearing so insanely insecure. After that Pepys class, however, I rushed back to the English Department office, paranoid and panicked, wondering aloud to anyone who would listen how it was that everyone suddenly knew everything, and Hazel, a pathologically cheery colleague who competes
in a women's arm-wrestling league under the name Harriet Clubman, said, “It's the Internet, silly. They look you up. It's all there. Things are different now. You can't compartmentalize. I have eighteen-year-old girls coming up to me wanting to arm-wrestle for better grades. You should be flattered, though. If they're taking the time to type your name into a search engine, it means they like you.” And that was when I started sneaking into Chris's room to search for myself. It was all there online, my life unfurling on the screen. I had a profile on something called the Internet Movie Database featuring a picture of a very young me from a
Loose Cannons
publicity still, my hair full, floppy, and feathered, my stomach effortlessly flat. And people (who? devoted fans? archivists? felons?) had uploaded all thirteen terrible episodes for the whole world to see. But as horrible as that moment was, it's not what turned me into a chronic violator of Chris's
stay out of my room
policy (a policy explicitly stated and posted on his door). Peter Matthiessen's self-searching book
The Snow Leopard
had meant so much to me when I first read it in the late seventies, and I'd always imagined that I too would disappear into the mountains one day to look for myself. But instead of braving the Himalayas of Tibet, I'd snuck into a teenage boy's room, and found myself on a dim pixilated screen to the deafening screeches and pops of a dial-up modem—accessing the Internet sounding like such a violent, industrial act—and what I'd found, after all the
Loose Cannons
stuff, was a website called Grade-a-Prof, where students, as you might imagine, grade their profs. And there I was. No picture in this profile, just my name, my school, and my averaged grade.
Paul McWeeney. College of Los Angeles
. And my grade? It would be incorrect and lazily cliché to write here that my heart sank when I saw C-. Rather, my heart
did a sort of writhing thing and I experienced a little acid reflux—the latter was probably due to my vending machine diet but it was still emotionally appropriate. I told myself not to scroll down the page—just as an author shouldn't read his reviews—but I found myself doing it anyway. Sixty-three reviews dating back only one year, apparently since the website's launch, proclaiming in all caps and strange phonetic spelling things like
this guy SUXXX
and
I HATED this class mor then life itself
and, simply,
STOOPID!
I kept scrolling. I couldn't stop myself. I read through all sixty-three of those reviews, which ranged from the psychotically angry to the completely indifferent. Most of them veered toward the latter, which made me wonder why so many people would log on to this website simply to say
this man made no impression on me
. At least those who hated me felt something. I heard someone somewhere say something along the lines of: A good teacher will make five percent of his class absolutely hate him, and five percent absolutely love him. So I went hunting for that other five percent. After an hour of scrolling and reading, I found one review that said,
hes nice i liked the class
. I stared at that comment until the rods and cones in the back of my eyeballs had its every pixel memorized. I deduced that the person who wrote it was a female: prefacing the “like” with “nice” revealed as much. She was shy: The lack of capital letters suggested a fear of self-assertion, which probably meant she'd been surrounded by dominating male figures who'd been telling her to keep her mouth shut her whole life. In my experience, women like that are almost always physically attractive (aesthetically unappealing women tend to be loud, thinking that personality can make up the difference). This beneficent commenter was surely small, mousy, not the kind of beauty who'd make every head
turn, but undeniably beautiful once you took notice of her. A brunette, probably, with glasses. And she said I was nice, which probably meant I'd helped her with some assignment she was having trouble with. The comment was dated February 1994, so she probably took one of my classes in the fall of 1993. As I've said, I have on average about two hundred students every semester, so I couldn't immediately bring to mind everyone in my roster who fit that description. But that's not the point. The point is that I had developed a small habit of sneaking into Chris's room every day and checking Grade-a-Prof to see if there were any more—positive—comments posted. In an effort to boost that C-, I started telling jokes in my classes, funny ones, but had to stop when I accidentally made the same Wordsworth pun three times in one class, each time feigning spontaneity, until one student said, “Dude, you're stuck on repeat,” which got the biggest laugh of my teaching career. With seven classes each semester, it's inevitable that you forget which class you said what to, and no one seems to care when it's some note of pedantry, but at the first hint that humor might be calculated—that a quip comes from anything other than a flash of pure inspiration—people get angry.

“There you go,” Chris said. “Oliver's email.” We were looking at the Elkin Media website, a handsome display, sleek presentation, much nicer than Grade-a-Prof, which, graphically, was like a junior high AV club production;
Elkinmedia.com
, however, was a Simpson-Bruckheimer production, each bit of text, it seemed, a link, a wormhole to something else.