In my last post, I discussed my early academic relationship with Joe AKA Professor K and how he sought to get me into the program after I proved to be useful to him. Here I’ll continue to discuss the “limbo year,” where I had completed most of the requirments for my degree and was taking graduate courses with Professor K.
What I did not mention was during that fall semester of working for Joe and studying with him in his graduate course was I was also completing the requirements for my BA that semester. I had applied for graduation the previous semester and was declined due to not having enough units. I called the evaluations office and objected. I carried over 100 units and they accepted 70 when I transferred to the university from a local community college. I hoped I could have some of those units count, but they did not find that acceptable. They wanted me to take these units at the university. Since I had satisfied all the catalog requirements for my degree, the evaluation office did not care what classes I took as long as they were at the university.
Joe offered a course on creative writing that summer, but I was not able to take it. I was working at a supermarket at the time and my schedule there would not allow it. A co-worker’s husband was terminally ill and she took an indefinite leave of absence from my department. I remember feeling extremely disappointed that I could not attend Professor K workshop. It would have been a change for me to show him my writing. Though I only knew him for a short period, Professor K became a paternal figure to me. He certainly reminded me of my father, especially with his dry sense of humor. I had never had a good relationship with my father, even when we had managed to get along, so it was easy for me to look to other men to fulfill that role. The class would have been an opportunity to become closer, to get to know Joe, but this would happen very quickly in the fall.
I did, however, take a course on world religions and another on European history. I was already registered in these course when my co-worker’s crisis occurred, so my department head made allowances in the schedule for me. Since my classes were in the morning and afternoon, I could work evenings. On the other hand, Professor K’s class was during the evening, and my co-worker’s situation made everyone else’s scheduling situations very insane. Nonetheless, I kept in touch with Professor K.
During the fall semester, I still had to play the units game for my BA. I enrolled in two English courses – The Tragic Vision and Science Fiction. Since I was still an undergrad, I had to get an add code from Professor K in order to take his Form and Theory course. Science Fiction was absolutely wonderful. I was first exposed to one of my favorite writers in that course: Ursula K Le Guin. We also read Samuel Delaney, Alfred Bester, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. The professor (I’ll call him Henry O’Donough) was a respected expert on post-modernism and we also read his anthology, which contained essays, short stories, and novel excerpts from philosophers, theorists, and literary and science fiction writers. Henry always held bar hours on Thursday evenings, and I showed up to most of them. The Tragic Vision was, well, tragic. Three hours of Tuesday afternoons were always lost to boredom and professorial pedantry. Dr. Tsongas obviously knew a lot and he droned on and on, but he could also be mean. Towards the end of the semester, I missed the deadline for one of the final assignments and he upbraided me in front of class for it. He did, however, let me turn it in late. I had that end of the semester burnout and I wanted to bail out on the Tragic Vision course altogether. One morning, when I was at the office, I talked to Joe on the phone and confided to him my impulse to leave the Tragic Vision course and fail it. He told me to hang in there and to finish it, especially since my application to the MFA program was at stake. I showed up to the final and got a B in the course. The units game was then over.
For thirteen years, I worked for one of the major supermarket chains in San Diego. I paid for my college education with my salary and the employment also provided me with medical and dental benefits. I hated working there, but the pay and benefits kept me working. I spent seven years in the bakery department working the closing shift. I went to school during the day (occasionally an evening) and worked in the evening. I packed baked goods that were not taken care of before I arrived and put them out on the sales floor, took cake orders, sold pastries and last minute cakes, and cleaned up the bakery before I left. I mopped floors every night to pay for my tuition and I was tired of it. The chain was in its first year of a merger with a new parent company and the changes were hard to keep up with. In October, when the changes seemed the most unreasonable, I put in my two-week notice and wrote that I was leaving to complete my BA. One manager empathetically told me many others were putting in their notices. Once I worked my last day, a good friend of mine picked me up to see Bjork’s awful movie and I never looked back.
During mid-December, Joe and Tatiyana, the visiting writer to MFA program, did a reading at the Cottage, located on the northwestern part of the university, right off the Mall. Before the reading, Joe and I discussed my plans for the spring semester. Joe was offering a course entitled “Madness In Literature;” however, I wanted to take Tatiyana’s fiction workshop and the problem was that both Joe and Tatiyana’s courses were offered on Tuesday nights. When Joe asked me if I was going to take his “Madness” course, I told him I wanted to take Tatiyana’s. Joe became very quiet, and I sensed it was out of jealousy. Even though he was friendly towards Tatiyana, some of my friends told me Joe felt Tatiyana stole some of his students. That silence only lasted a few seconds. It would be a year and a half before Joe gave me a longer silence. I would make the decision to enroll in Joe’s course.
To be continued…
