In graduate school, watching an internet stream of the National Book Awards with my classmates (one of our professors had been nominated for an award), during a black writer’s acceptance speech on the struggles of her childhood in the South, a white classmate blurted out, “We get it—you’re black.”
On an airplane back from New Orleans with my girlfriend, we were seated in the middle of a college baseball team returning after a tournament. A drunk baseball player asked a black stewardess if she liked white chocolate. The stewardess had said, “Sweetheart, you couldn’t handle this.” The baseball player’s teammates laughed and she walked away. But then he asked her again. And again. And again. She was the only stewardess on the small plane, so she had to walk up and down the aisle every few minutes, passing him every time. Finally, after his fifth loud advance, she crouched down, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “You need to cool it.” When she stood up, he laughed, turned to his friend, and said, loud enough for everyone to hear over the roar of the plane engines, “As if I would fuck that bitch.”
Lying on my couch that day after class, I mentally rewrote each of these memories into scenes in which I’d done something.
* * *
It was near the end of the semester that Alyssa showed up to my office for the first time. We’d been corresponding via email every week, and she had been making great progress on her final essay for composition. Her paper dealt with contemporary sitcom representations of blackness, and many times throughout the term, I’d worried that I’d somehow pushed her into writing about blackness, or that the uber-white system in which she was stuck made it necessary for her to address the subject of race. But she’d recently started incorporating personal experience through an elegant authorial I. This confident personality shining through her prose quieted my fears. It made me think not only that she had picked the topic she wanted, but also that I was a good teacher.
“How is your son doing?” I asked, making the eye contact I was gradually becoming more comfortable with.
“He’s getting big! He’s turning four next month. I can’t believe it.” She took out her phone and showed me a picture of a happy plump boy, who smiled like he knew he was and would always be loved.
“Look at that smile. He’s going to be a heartbreaker.”
“Not yet!” She laughed. “I’m not ready for him to have any girlfriends.”
“So,” I said, transitioning into teacher mode, “do you want to talk about your essay?”
“That would be great.” She took a legal pad out from her backpack.
I pulled up her latest draft on my computer and spent twenty minutes going through it page by page, diagramming her paragraphs, considering their relation to the thesis, and asking how she thought each point might connect to the previous point. We made a list of the areas that she’d want to develop for the final draft, and I said, “I’m really impressed, Alyssa.”
She smiled, looking relieved. “I’m so happy that you like it.”
“Do you have any questions moving forward?”
“No. Thank you so much for your help.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Even if I don’t have anything good to say, sometimes it helps to just hear someone else talk about your paper.”
“You always have good things to say!”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.” I smiled and waited for her to start to leave, but she stayed put. My smile started to hurt. “How are your other classes going?”
She looked down at her notebook. “Two of my classes are with you, as you know, and those are great. But I think I’m going to fail my other class.” She paused. “See, I messed up and now the professor wants to fail me.”
“What happened?”
Alyssa said that this professor, a Dr. Harrison, had given her a D on her first paper. But she probably deserved that grade, she admitted. She hadn’t understood the assignment and she hadn’t asked for clarification. But for the second paper, she had buckled down. She made an appointment with the librarian to help her find sources. She took a rough draft to the writing center for help.
“It’s okay if I didn’t get an A+. But it was a good paper. I think it deserved at least a C.”
But the only comment that Harrison had left was that Alyssa hadn’t cited a quote correctly.
“He thought it was plagiarism. He didn’t even give me a grade.”
She’d cited five sources, but she had paraphrased one point from a writer that she forgot to cite. “I offered to rewrite it from scratch! I didn’t just want a free pass.” But Harrison said you only get one chance with plagiarism. “So now I have a disciplinary hearing scheduled for after finals.”
I was furious. Who did this Harrison think he was? Here was a single mother who, unlike most students, actually wanted to learn, and he was going to ruin her academic career over a missed citation?
“These things tend to get blown out of proportion,” I said, mustering professional calm. “I can talk to Dr. Harrison, if you like. I’ll bet we can straighten things out.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course.”
“Oh my God, thank you, Professor Anderson! You’re a lifesaver.”
“Please, it’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing, and I knew it. I left my office that day feeling better than I had in some time. This good feeling, oddly enough, made me want to get high.
* * *
I walked from my apartment down Shelton McMurphey Boulevard, parallel to the train tracks. The pine-tree-studded hills of Skinner Butte stood to the right and downtown Eugene to the left. I tried to convince myself to keep walking—to get my ass to the NA meeting in the Whiteaker. Life was going well. I was helping students. I was filling my days. I needed to stay clean. I hated meetings—especially evening meetings, which were always overcrowded with young people needing to fulfill a court sentence. But the meetings at least distracted me until the urges passed. I kept dreaming that I found a glowing orange prescription bottle of oxycodone under a park bench. That I had all these units of guaranteed joy waiting for me. It was the guaranteed part that was so exciting. The knowledge not that joy might be coming, but that it would be coming in thirty to forty-five minutes. I’d snorted pills, smoked them, and once Kit had shot me up with spoon-melted roxy. But I preferred the delay that came when you just swallowed them. The time after I took the pill but before the high hit was my favorite. It was all there in front of me.
I walked down into the park under the freeway overpass on Washington Street. On the basketball courts, where the backboards hung suspended from the bottom of the overpass, there was a commotion. A tweaker with a shaved head in a green Windbreaker was kneeling on the court by himself, screaming. He was beating his knuckles on the asphalt. I could see the streaks of red flash through the sky every time he raised his fist. If a person at the meetings recited this story, he would say, “When I saw him on the ground, I knew that that could have been me. That I was one of the lucky ones.”
But that couldn’t have been me. I was better than this tweaker, better than the people at the meetings who’d lost their children to Social Services, their freedom to the state, their legs to car crashes. I had barely lost anything. We may have had similar addictions, but we were not the same.
“That’s what you want to do?” the tweaker yelled, looking up at me. “That’s what you want to do?” He stood up and charged me.
At six-one, I was maybe six inches taller than the tweaker, and his bony limbs couldn’t add up to anything close to my 175. On top of that, a barely dormant rage from pre-growth-spurt smallness and bullying had made my older self stupidly prone to fighting. But when that crazy-eyed, bloody-boned tweaker came at me, I didn’t fight. I ran. I ran in long hard strides, sucking in air as I flew through the park and back out into the street. I didn’t stop running until I got to the meeting.
* * *
“It’s not weird,” Duke said. We were standing in the parking lot after the meet
ing, looking over at the barbecue smoke pouring out of Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen, one of the many establishments in the Whiteaker that was run out of a converted house. Duke was wearing a worn-out Oakland Raiders sweatshirt and had his black hair slicked back with sunglasses resting on top. He had a tattoo of the pound sign on the left side of his neck. He was either thirty or sixty. “You know why doing something good made you want to get high?”
“Why?”
“Because everything makes you want to get high.”
I lit another cigarette. Duke didn’t smoke.
“I was reading the paper the other day,” Duke said as he chewed on a Twizzler, “and it said that Suboxone is so popular in prisons, that at one prison in Tennessee, they randomly drug-tested the prisoners, and ninety-eight percent of them tested positive for Suboxone.”
“Wow.” I knew the number couldn’t be right, but sometimes the exact statistics of a statement weren’t as important as what the person was trying to communicate with those numbers.
Suboxone was the drug increasingly prescribed to recovering heroin addicts in place of methadone. It came in a strip that you dissolved in your mouth for a twelve-hour synthetic-opium flow. The first time that I had bought it, years earlier, Kit had warned me that I shouldn’t take more than a quarter strip at a time, because it was designed for people who shot up several times a day, whereas, at the time, I had never even tried heroin. But thirty minutes after the quarter strip failed to register any effect, I took another quarter strip. A few hours later, I woke up on the floor, wet from sweat, pulsing neon bliss.
“You know how the guys smuggle the Suboxone in?” Duke said. “They get their friends to dissolve it on the page of a Bible. Then the friend gives them the Bible at visiting hours, and they tear off the page back in their cells and eat it. Can you imagine that?”
I thought about it. “Yeah.”
Duke pulled his last Twizzler from the bag. “Yeah. Me, too.”
I liked Duke, even if I never wanted to see him outside of the meetings.
* * *
I walked back home, still sober. I lay down on my bed to write an email to Dr. Harrison, but instead I clicked on Dagens Nyheter to read about Zlatan Ibrahimović leading the Swedish national team through World Cup qualifying. My mother was born in Sweden and had, with great foresight, not only arranged for me to receive Swedish citizenship, but had also gone against conventional wisdom at the time, which said that two languages would stunt a child’s intellectual development, and made sure I learned both English and Swedish. While I was fluent and could easily read Swedish newspapers, I had pretty much only spoken Swedish with her, which meant that when I spoke Swedish, I sounded like a middle-aged woman. Zlatan Ibrahimović spoke Swedish with Bosnian impatience, first-generation swag. He had come from the roughest housing projects in Malmö to become the greatest footballer in Swedish history. Today, I read, he had scored again.
I closed the newspaper window and wrote a draft of a respectful, yet strongly worded letter to Dr. Harrison, in which I vouched for Alyssa’s integrity. I wondered, in the least confrontational manner possible, if a onetime mistake couldn’t be better remedied with a grade reduction rather than a disciplinary hearing. Then I imagined Harrison’s reaction. I imagined him complaining to my department chair that I was putting my nose in other people’s business. I imagined my contract not being renewed. I imagined having to start over again.
I saved the email without sending it.
* * *
When Alyssa turned in her final paper for my course, I read it with a surge of pride. Her sources showed the depth of her research, and her argument was skillfully laid out in four distinct but connected points. I suppressed my shame at not having argued her case yet and wrote, You’ve done such good work on this paper, Alyssa. I’m so proud.
She responded six minutes later with an exclamation-point-laden email full of gratitude. But at the bottom was a PS: I was wondering if you had had time to talk to Dr. Harrison? I know you must be very busy, but my hearing is coming up soon.
I took a deep breath, found the email in my drafts folder, and sent it off to Harrison.
* * *
Few things gave me more anxiety than waiting for an email to be answered. If I had the money, I’d hire an intern to do all my emailing. But then I’d probably end up fretting over the time it took for my intern to reply to my emails. I sat in my apartment and waited for Harrison’s response. In between, I read the Swedish news, the sports news, and the American news. The fascist Sweden Democrats were gaining momentum in the lead-up to the following year’s elections. Harrison had not written back. The LA Clippers, my favorite team since I was seven, when my dad had decided that it was absurd to pay $25 for a Lakers ticket when there was another professional team in town practically giving away seats, had beaten Sacramento in overtime for their fourth straight win. Harrison had not written back. The Syrian government was bombing its civilians to end the rebellion. Harrison had written back. Harrison had written back! The first line of his email glowed bold and black in my inbox.
I’m afraid you’ve been duped, Harrison wrote.
He said that Alyssa’s issue had not been a question of a missed citation, but of numerous sentences taken verbatim from a published paper. He estimated that Alyssa had stolen more sentences than she’d written.
It is the most obvious and appalling case of wholesale plagiarism I’ve seen in thirty-six years of teaching.
I shook my head and tried the breathing techniques that a guy at NA had learned in anger management. I googled Harrison’s name and found his picture on the faculty page. He was white—bald on top with a white ponytail. He wore a beard and glasses. He was late middle-aged, smirking. He looked like the brand of “I’m not a racist” racist who had marched for civil rights forty-five years ago in the warm cocoon of Berkeley and now felt justified interrupting black students midspeech to explain to them what civil rights meant.
I typed out a draft asking Harrison if I could see Alyssa’s paper so I could judge it for myself. I wrote that I had supervised Alyssa’s entire writing process in my class, from topic selection to research, outline, rough draft, revision, and final draft. Which was true. I had been with her every step of the way as she built the strongest paper in the class. I wrote that I had run her essay through plagiarism-checking software and found no oddities. I wrote that I thought it strange that she would wholesale plagiarize one paper while doing such thorough work on another paper written in the same term.
I had never actually used the plagiarism-checking software, since the form of my assignments, with students required to turn in work every step of the way, would have made plagiarism near impossible. But to be on the safe side, before sending Harrison the email, I opened the plagiarism checker, copy-pasted Alyssa’s essay in, and waited while the checker scanned its databases.
When the software finished its scan, it spat out sixty-seven cases of plagiarism.
* * *
“She found a published paper on her topic at the beginning of the term,” I told Louise in the quad the next day, trying to control my pacing. “Then she rewrote the paper to make it sound less intelligent! She deconstructed it, point by point, to make it look like a latent idea! Then she put back more and more of the original paper every week to make it look like she was improving. Then she sprinkled in a few personal sentences about her childhood to make it hers—but those were plagiarized, too! She plagiarized stories of other people’s childhoods!”
“Wow.”
“How did she think she’d get away with it?”
Louise shook her head. “With that kind of plagiarism, it’s not just cheating—it’s an addiction. And there’s no logic to addiction.”
I appreciated that Louise never mentioned that Alyssa would have gotten away with it if not for the intervention of a professor less naive than I was.
* * *
I lay awake listening to the sound of a night train blowing its horn loud enough to knock bir
ds out of the sky. I thought of emailing the eccentric professor from grad school to ask for his advice. But I didn’t want to write until I had good news to share. More evidence of my incompetence, about to be let go from another job, another job he’d recommended me for, was not good news. I tried to think of other people I could talk to, but I hadn’t been good at keeping up with friends. The more time you spent apart, the harder work it was to just have a conversation. Stella was the one person I used to be able to talk to because I would never have to bring anything up with her—she could just tell when something was off. Sometimes she wouldn’t even ask—she’d just put her hand on mine and say something mean about the person she believed to have caused me pain. But if I called Stella now, I couldn’t explain the urge to relapse without explaining the initial addiction. I would have to explain that even though I often texted her stories of the creatively dumb things my students did, I really didn’t want to lose them. Jonathan’s last story had been funny and sad at the same time. Drew’s stuff was getting far less misogynistic. With another semester, I might have him displaying genuine empathy.
But even if they let me teach another year, I wouldn’t get Drew for another term. Why would a business major take another creative writing class? Even if they kept me on, every four months I would walk into a room of new faces—a roomful of kids who would begin to forget me the second the semester ended.
* * *
The following week, I met with my department chair and Alyssa. When I’d explained the situation, the chair had said that these things happened. But I could tell from her tone that she had already heard from Harrison and that she was wondering how she could have hired someone so incompetent.
Alyssa sat down on my side of the desk, dressed in black slacks and a white cardigan, never meeting my eyes. The department chair sat behind her desk and went through the evidence, point by point. Alyssa stared at the clock behind the department chair’s head. She wouldn’t look at me. After going through all the administrative protocols, the chair asked Alyssa if she had taken the sixty-seven cases of plagiarism from other sources without citation.
Such Good Work Page 3