by Craig Smith
But I don’t want it for sixty-four! I told your son, I’ll go five!’
‘He told you the price was seventy-four.’
‘On the phone, it was sixty-four! I get down here, and you all raise it on me.’
Tubs’s smile was gone. ‘The moment you got here, David straightened you out. He told you he’d made a mistake, didn’t he?’
‘That’s what he said.’ Mr Dietrich was good-natured about lying salespeople. He was an old man. He had scalped plenty of liars.
‘He said it because it’s true,’ Tubs had gone just a little red in the face, the way a preacher will when he gets to his favourite verse.
‘Even if it was true—’
‘Whoa, now, wait just a minute, please.’ Tubs held one hand out to command a full stop. His other hand still held a Cross ink pen over a blank contract.
Sometimes it was his lucky pen that no one ever touched except to sign a deal. Today, it was just one of two choices: sign or swing, friend, one or the other. ‘I’m going to tell you something, and I’m going to tell it to you once. My boy’s an Albo, and Albos don’t lie, not out here, they don’t! David here will shoot straight even if it costs him. I taught him that. If anyone catches him lying, I’ll buy the deal and give the car to the person he’s lied to! Then he’ll pay me back every penny if it takes him the rest of his life!’
‘I’m sure—’
Tubs broke over Dietrich’s condescension without waiting for him to set it in stone. ‘The price on my car is seventy-four hundred dollars, and I don’t care if you put a gun in my face, it’s not going for a penny less.’
‘That’s just bullshit.’
‘You think?’ Tubs nearly came over the desk. The two men stared at one another like they were about to fight, then in total dismissal of the man, Tubs walked away. ‘Come on, Davey.’
As I followed, I heard Mr Dietrich crow, ‘You’ll have that car marked down to sixty-nine by tomorrow!’
Tubs didn’t react. I had thought he would. It had taken us some effort, but Dietrich had finally accepted that seventy-four was our list price. The fact that he had mentioned sixty-nine meant he was ready to close. All we needed to do was settle on something in the mid-six-thousand range and Dietrich had a car. And more importantly, Tubs and I had a commission.
Tubs was having none of it though. He put his back to that man and didn’t slow down. In his private office, he sat down at his desk again and resumed looking at his list. I stood next to him quietly. Milt came into Tubs’s office a minute or so later. ‘What happened?’
‘A Gun in my Face Close.’
Milt reeled back the way a kid will when someone farts. ‘Not the Gun in my Face Close, Tubs!’ Tubs lifted his eyebrows, a definite yes in his vocabulary. Milt groaned. He knew a buyer when he saw one. ‘What was your number?’
‘Seventy-four.’
‘Full pop? Not full pop, Tubs!’ Milt was screaming now, albeit in whisper mode. No sense letting the customer know the troops were divided. Tubs’s eyebrows flickered. Full pop and not a penny less. Milt kicked a file cabinet. ‘Nobody pays full price at a car lot, Tubs!’
Tubs was calm. He had gotten full pop before and he would again, but he understood Milt’s position.
Milt wanted a sale, not a long shot. ‘My man will, or he won’t get his Mustang.’
Milt invented sexual positions for the saints of three different religions. He seethed. He sighed. He prayed for someone to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Then he looked at me. ‘How high will he go, David? Best guess.’
I looked at Tubs. Tubs nodded. ‘He said something about sixty-nine. He’ll go sixty-nine, I think, or real close to it.’ I was stretching it, vainly hoping I could move my father down five hundred dollars. I wanted the sale as much as Milt.
Milt spread his hands happily. ‘Sixty-nine is good, Tubs. I can live with it. He can live with it. Can you live with sixty-nine, Tubs?’ Tubs shook his head. He was sitting tight on seventy-four. ‘Everybody likes sixty-nine, Tubs!’
‘He called Davey a liar, Milt. I won’t have that.’
‘How about I send Davey back. It’s out of your hands. You have nothing to say about it, right?’ Milt looked at me. ‘Go back and tell Mr what‘s-his-name he bought a car if he’ll go sixty-nine.’
‘Davey.’
I knew the tone, and I froze.
Milt rushed to my defence with a touch of desper-ation. ‘It’s not you, Tubs. He called Davey a liar. Not you.’
‘You can send Davey out if you want, Milt. You’re the manager. You can do anything you want. You do it, though, and I’ll be selling Buicks before the sun goes down.’
Milt kicked the empty air. ‘This close never works, Tubs! Let me go in and buy the deal for sixty-nine.
I’ll pay a commission for seventy-four. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t care if I sell that car or not. I put my word on it, and that’s that.’
Milt cussed blue smoke in a murderous rage, but he left the office. There was no dealing with Tubs when he got to the issue of his sacred word. I heard Milt on the loudspeaker a few minutes later. He started calling out the specials of the day. He read an interminable list, and then he came to the Mustang. His voice rasped in an awful car salesman’s seduction, cylinders, litres, and miles per gallon, ‘...seventy-four hundred dollars. A steal at that price, folks.’ He named a couple more cars and shut up. He paced on the makeshift tower and smoked. He smoked two cigarettes at once.
Mr Dietrich sat for thirty minutes at my desk, absolutely alone. Nobody approached him. Nobody got within fifty feet of that desk. Finally, Mr Dietrich came to Tubs’s office. He leaned through the doorway, actually. He wasn’t coming all the way in. It was a gesture that announced clearly he was about to make a last offer. ‘I’ll go sixty-nine, against my better judgement.’
Tubs didn’t even contemplate it. ‘Mr Dietrich,’ he said, ‘You need a gun in my face and another five hundred dollars.’
Dietrich was a horse trader from way back, but he laughed. He laughed hard. It was over. He didn’t have a gun, he said, but he thought he could find another five hundred dollars for a car that nice. ‘Assuming, that is, you all pick up my sales tax.’ Tubs smiled and said he could do that, he surely could.
Later, Mr Dietrich told me, ‘You got a ways to go, David, before you’re as good as your old man.’ He thought about it fondly for a minute. ‘Gun in my face and another five hundred dollars!’ Mr Dietrich shook his head and laughed again. ‘I never heard that one before!’
Chapter 14
I WROTE THREE DIFFERENT confessions for Gail to pass on to the committee. I tore each up in turn.
Finally, I found the defence I could live with and scribbled it out: ‘I am innocent of all wrongdoing.’
The next day I took it into Gail Etheridge’s office.
‘You want to type this out or just hand it over like this?’
Gail’s face showed no reaction. She simply stared at me. ‘I take it we are prepared for the consequences?’
‘I have a verbal statement as well.’
‘Great! Let’s see it.’
‘It’s a verbal statement, Gail. I don’t have anything written down.’
Gail looked at my one sentence defence sceptically.
‘Can you give me a rough idea of what you intend to say?’
I played the English professor. ‘I can,’ I said, ‘but I think I’ll wait until the defence and let you hear it then.’
‘I don’t like this, David.’
‘I like it, and that’s what counts.’
She urged me toward ‘a more comprehensive statement’ but I told her it didn’t get any more comprehensive than innocent of all wrongdoing.
We met the VP’s committee a couple of days later.
Gail made one last pitch as we went in. She thought it might be best if I didn’t say anything at all. She would speak to the issue of a complete lack of proof, the lawyer’s preferred method of pleading innocen
t.
By then I had steeled my resolve and shook my head like Tubs. ‘It’s my execution,’ I said. ‘I want to tell them I didn’t do this.’
The meeting did not feel like a trial. In fact, the vice president for academic affairs, Lou Morgan, assured me repeatedly, while not quite looking at me, that I was not on trial, nor were we in a court of law. The committee had examined the evidence, he said, and they had gathered here today to discuss it. I was free to call witnesses on my behalf, but this was not a forum for cross-examination. Furthermore, he said, the administration rejected our request to interview the two women who had originally filed the complaints against me. Their statements had been investigated and verified. There was no point in involving them in what was essentially now a disciplinary action.
As things developed the meeting involved a good deal of back and forth between the vice president and various members of the committee. One prof, who I remember had consumed a great deal of caviar at my party, wondered if it was appropriate that Leslie Blackwell was on the committee. She had collected the evidence. Shouldn’t it be for others to judge it? The vice president made it clear that Dr Blackwell was sitting on the committee as a non-voting member. Gail Etheridge asked for clarification. Was Dr Blackwell to provide guidance? Certainly. Guidance and clarification of law? Of course. Clarification of the evidence as well? That seemed only logical. Gail wrote this down for a future complaint, muttering to me as she did, ‘Imagine a trial in which the prosecutor sat with the jury during deliberations.’ I nodded thoughtfully.
We had already discussed due process. Any break in procedure causing fundamental unfairness in the process would be open season when and if we brought suit against the university.
Curiously, there were no witnesses for the university. This meant the evidence Dr Blackwell presented was the complete case. None of it could be contra-dicted by oral statements made directly to the committee, nor refuted by cross-examination.
Blackwell’s notes about her interview with me had me confessing to calling the breasts of Johnna Masterson bodacious ta-tas. When Gail Etheridge complained that I had said no such thing the vice president informed Gail that Dr Blackwell was not on trial. Gail swallowed her exasperation and tried to explain that the evidence itself was incorrect. Her client, she said, admitted to using the term without explaining the context of that usage. Dr Blackwell had either wilfully or unconsciously manipulated an honest response into an admission. A committee member asked in what context bodacious ta-tas would be acceptable.
Gail was ready for that one, ‘In the context you just used it,’ she said and scored nicely for our side. Another committee member asked if Gail meant to say Dr Albo had been discussing the expression and not a certain feature of the female anatomy. Gail explained that Dr Blackwell had failed to investigate that issue. Without the ability to cross-examine, she said, every piece of evidence put forward was subject to the investigator’s whim, and this was a perfect illustration of whimsy.
A second committee member pushed the issue. Was Dr Albo asserting that he used the phrase ‘in a technical sense?’
Gail finished the discussion with perfect deadpan:
‘I wasn’t aware that bodacious ta-tas had a technical sense, professor.’
Before the affronted professor could respond, the vice president suggested we move on. The committee could discuss that possibility in private.
It was a grim procedure for the very reason that it lacked judicial procedure. Material was not presented, then challenged. The case lay before the committee as a finished product, rather like a dead fish on the verge of rot. Hearsay and gossip passed for facts because the rules of evidence did not apply. Perish the thought that professors pretend at being lawyers. The committee members could speak whenever they chose to, thus directed the course of the hearing. As a result, there was a great deal of concern about the issue of faculty members performing sexual intercourse in their offices.
Rather to their astonishment they discovered the handbook did not address this issue. Instead of discussing the implications of that in my case, one of the committee members concluded, and they all nodded solemnly, the handbook should be rewritten. At about this point, Gail breathed pure rage, whispering to me,
‘These people are morons, David.’
I whispered back, ‘Welcome to my world.’
For nearly an hour, no one doubted the veracity of any of the charges or the credibility of any of the evidence. The chief concern was if such behaviour constituted sexual harassment. A private conversation with another professor, a professor helping a student leave the sex industry and take a Work Study job so she could continue school… it was not exactly time to bring in the feds. Dr Blackwell pointed out a passage in the diary of Denise Conway in which I threatened to fail Denise if she did not perform fellatio. A joke, Gail answered. Was it? Denise had admitted as much in the same passage. ‘Perhaps,’ Blackwell retorted, ‘Denise was trying to convince herself Mr Albo was joking.’
‘It’s Doctor Albo,’ Gail answered with a gratifying touch of outrage. Gail then went on to explain the difference between a complaint and the evidence supporting a complaint. ‘The committee is not free to rewrite the complaint of a student, much as certain non-voting members might desire it.’
Blackwell responded as Gail expected, introducing the concept of a hostile atmosphere. Having anticipated her opponent Gail now attempted to cross-examine Dr Blackwell as to the definition of atmos phere. She got as far as asking if a single remark in a private conversation with another professor constituted atmosphere when the vice president reminded her that this was not a trial. People could decide for themselves what constituted hostility toward women.
We all knew what a hostile atmosphere was when we saw it, didn’t we?
Shortly after this my moment arrived. I held up my statement and then placed it on the desk before me.
Dean Lintz, who sat on the committee, had to play fetch. He actually stopped on the way back to the table where the VP’s committee sat. Turning toward me with a look of astonishment, he said, ‘This is your statement?’
Dean Lintz had not seen such a compact statement since the days his high school English teacher made him read a haiku. I stayed seated and told him that I also wanted to say something. As I had not made copies, my single sentence made its way down the line of the committee members, gathering a look of reproach at every stop. They were quite certain no man is completely innocent, and concluded therefore I must be mocking them.
The vice president told me to proceed, cautioning me to be brief. Dean Lintz could not resist. He said verbal statements, according to the handbook, were supposed to be summations of the written statements.
If that was the case, he expected a very brief statement. There were a couple of smiles among the committee members, but most of them maintained the grim demeanour of the Salem patriarchs in their heyday.
I remained seated behind a little table, if only to conceal the accused. ‘It seems to me,’ I said in a conversational tone, ‘no one, least of all Dr Blackwell, has bothered to investigate the veracity of the diary of Denise Conway. The sole concern of this investigation has been whether the behaviour itself warrants disciplinary action. My position, however, is that I am innocent of all wrongdoing. Denise Conway’s diary is a fabrication first to last.’ I gave them a moment to consider this assertion. ‘If you believe me, then her complaints lose all credibility. Had the committee allowed us to call Ms Conway as a witness or to cross-examine her about her statements to Dr Blackwell, I believe we could have exposed her diary for what it is: an absolute lie. Since the committee chooses to turn this into a case of he said / she said, I can only tell you it is not true.
‘As this leaves you at something of an impasse on what turns out to be the critical issue of this investigation and as this is potentially a very serious matter, the possible dismissal of a tenured professor on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, I believe the solution is for Dr Blackwell to arra
nge a follow-up interview in which she asks a single question of Ms Conway: am I circumcised or not?’
‘I think,’ the vice president announced officiously,
‘that will be enough, Dr Albo.’
‘I’m not quite finished, sir.’
‘I believe you are.’
‘It’s a fair question,’ I said as calmly as I could.
‘According to her diary, Ms Conway got a close enough look. If anyone can answer the question besides my wife, she can!’
‘If you are determined to make a mockery of this proceeding—’
‘If you have no interest in the truth, you’re the one making a mockery of it!’ I shouted.
Having no gavel, the vice president slapped the table with the palm of his hand. ‘This meeting is adjourned!’
I stood up at this and pointed my finger at the man.
‘The evidence against me is a lie,’ I roared. ‘And I don’t care if you put a gun in my face, I’ll still tell you it’s a lie!’
Feeling as though the ghost of Tubs Albo had stepped into my shoes, I turned and walked directly to the nearest door. I never once looked back.
Gail Etheridge met me outside several minutes later and treated me to a grudging smile. ‘You’re beautiful, David. You really are.’
‘You think they’ll ask her?’
Gail shook her head and lit a cigarette. ‘Not a snow-ball’s chance in hell, but I guarantee you this, you’ll be the talk of campus by sunset.’
Chapter 15
‘IS HE OR ISN’T HE?’ WALT shouted when he came back to the apartment that night. He was tuned up. I was already roasted. We turned it into a hell of a night.
On Saturday Walt invited a select crew of debauched professors from across campus, male and female, to join us. Foregoing the usual stages, Walt’s Go to Hell Party, thrown in my honour, was a raunchy affair from the start. Before the night was out, I believe everyone tried to take me into the bathroom for a little look-see, strictly in the cause of truth, of course. I’m not sure how I answered the various inquiries and solicitations, but I had the feeling, shortly before I passed out, I might well face fresh charges come Monday morning.