by Dave Tomar
“No online sources, eh?” Ethan observed.
“Yeah,” I said. “So what do you suppose is the point of this research exercise? To learn the Dewey decimal system?”
“Maybe it’s to justify the grant money for the university’s recent library renovations?”
“Maybe this professor hopes to restore the card catalog to its former glory?”
“Yeah, what the fuck is his beef with the Internet? I mean, besides all the misinformation, hearsay, libel, vitriol, and fringe lunacy?”
“Well,” I ventured, “I’d say this professor is one hundred seventy-eight years old and thinks the Internet is some type of support undergarment.”
Thinking back now, though, I’m sure that wasn’t it at all. This professor knew exactly what the Internet was. The Internet was this big, terrifying, spinning vortex that would someday soon swallow him up and swallow up all of his kind. It would swallow up the hierarchy of intellectual property, leaving behind a significant opportunity for the entrepreneurially spirited.
Our little paper-writing company on South Street was a product of pure market science.
7
Thanksgiving and the Great Depression
I love Thanksgiving. The smell of the cold air coming through the garage as my dad carries folding chairs into the house. The tacky din of the Macy’s parade marching from the television to nobody’s direct interest. The promise of football, belt loosening, tryptophan, and a general artery-hardening good time.
But it’s different when you have to work. By the fourth Thursday of November 2004, I had been doing the job full-time for a little more than a year, and I was already starting to experience the burnout that would become an annual event.
At this time, my commitments were particularly fleeting. I had a girlfriend, but we weren’t great together. Besides, my computer and I both suffered frequent separation anxiety. For me it was that sense that, as a self-employed man, I never punched out, that without me out there working, I was making nothing, that there was no limit to how far I could fall.
And yet here I was, a crutch for the unrepentantly lazy. In my self-righteous exhaustion, I hated them, I judged them, I considered their money put to better use in my pockets.
Each of my clients seemed to be a case in underdeveloped ambition and parentally sponsored postadolescent assisted living. I resented them all.
I had a great-grandfather who passed away when I was eight. He left a trust fund for me and one for my older sister. Great-Grandpa Lou lived to be ninety-eight and maintained the clarity and control to sketch eerily accurate penciled likenesses of his attending nurses until just days before his death of natural causes. Even so, he didn’t seem to realize that my younger sister existed, so the poor girl was summarily screwed out of any portion of her would-be inheritance. Mine covered a year and a half of tuition and housing. It’s a shame to think that the legacy of a man’s long and remarkable life could be funneled into eighteen months of low-grade, high-fiber dining hall food and Yankee Stadium–size lecture halls.
When Great-Grandpa Lou’s money ran out, it was on to loans. When my Sallie Mae loans topped out, my parents cosigned on a private NJCLASS loan. I was now on the hook for a huge sum of money and the health of my parents’ credit rating. I don’t wish that kind of pressure on any other stupid kid.
Still, I learned in college what I would need to know as a self-employed writer. There are no handouts for a guy like me. It was probably the greatest gift my parents ever gave to me. My independence was a function of my desperate determination.
I can’t say my parents were particularly proud of what I had become. I assume that when people asked my dad what I did for a living, he would brag that I was tops in my prison license-plate-making class. But they were not the types to interfere. I had been raised on the premise that you are free to make your own mess so long as you’re willing to clean it up. I had become quite the chambermaid: always tidying up, sweeping dirt under, pushing back this bill, ripping up that one, and hoping the gesture was sufficient to make the debt disappear.
I may not have seemed tough to the World War II vets in my family tree, but neither had I been raised to be fragile. Not compared to my customers, anyway: They were an experiment in twenty-first-century child rearing, more often than not the product of attachment parenting ideology, shortsighted good intentions, and life cycle micromanagement. My parents had many years prior washed their hands of my poor decision making.
Speaking of poor decision making, at the time I was dating Hope, a sweet girl whom I had no business being with. I was doing Thanksgiving dinner with her family this year.
Our relationship was frivolous, temporary, and occasionally miserable. We had been together long enough that her parents already didn’t like me. At first, all they really knew was that I was a writer and that I needed a haircut. That was bad enough. As they got to know me better, they just found me confusing.
Her father was a teacher in an affluent suburban elementary school. He was a Republican, an occasional hunter, a frequent fisher, and a man of strong faith. I was none of those things. He looked at me like I was a space alien.
As we pulled up to the house for dinner, I was finishing a paper on the Great Depression. My work, it seemed, always faintly echoed my life.
I folded my laptop into my backpack as Hope parked the car. Dad was standing on the porch with his hands on his hips, wearing a festive holiday scowl.
“Thanks for having me tonight, Mr. Klein.” I extended my hand. He shook it.
“That’s fine,” he said. I could see he was thrilled to have me.
“Hi, Daddy,” Hope said.
“Hi, baby. Happy Thanksgiving.”
The Klein family never wasted time with predinner chitchat. Nobody was ever there to prolong the event. Getting it over with was an annual family tradition. We sat down right away. Hope’s cousin Kevin got there late and found that we were all sitting at the table already, peering impatiently at the door.
They were the kind of family where you could hear forks clinking on plates, people sliding platters over, scooping with slotted spoons, and clearing their throats. Every once in a while, somebody would raise an eyebrow from their plate and look around at everybody else in quiet contempt for conspiring in this awkward showing of thanks. This kind of quiet always made me nervous that I might accidentally cut a fart. So I clenched my butt cheeks, looked down at my plate, and concentrated on my stuffing.
It took two bottles of wine for things to open up, for aunts and uncles to start complaining about their jobs, complimenting the food, and updating one another on friends who were now sick or dead. I kept mostly to myself and, as was often the case, planned out the next day of work in my head.
When the conversation finally fell on me, I longed for those precious minutes of awkward silence now passed.
Hope’s dad was a griller. He was a math teacher. He liked to call on you when your hand wasn’t raised, when your face was twisted with a perplexed expression, when he could tell you hadn’t been paying attention, when he was sure to catch you with your pants down and make you look like a huge asshole.
This guy. I’ve had lifelong friction with guys like him.
“So, I saw you working on that computer of yours. What’s that you’re working on right now?” he asked me with an unspoken air of “Something stupid, no doubt.”
“Well, I just finished an essay on the Great Depression.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, very troubling stuff.”
“How so?”
“Well, more than anything, just the thought that it could all come crashing down around us and that we’d be powerless to stop it.”
“Right … so you’re back in school, then? Good for you. That should help you find some direction.”
“Dad!” Hope said.
“No,” I said. “No. I’m not in school. And I’m not really looking for direction right now. I’m hoping to get by on charm.”
“
What’s the depression got to do with it?”
“Well, I’m writing a study guide for a student to use when writing his paper about the depression.”
“And somebody is paying you to write about the depression?”
“Yes. Well, not just the depression. About lots of things. I write papers for students.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, I write these ‘study guides’ for students so that they can hand them in at school. I work for a company. I’m an independent contractor, and I get work through this company. They pay me at the end of each month.”
“So wait …,” said Cousin Kevin, with a sly sort of grin that I’ve seen a lot during this type of conversation. “So people hire you to do their homework?”
“Mmhmm,” I replied through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.
“So what do you write about, then?”
“Anything, really. Almost anything. I don’t do, like, computer programming papers or hard math or anything like that. Though other people do that kind of work.”
“Other people?” Mr. Klein asked.
“Yeah. I work for a company. That’s how I find the work, or how the work finds me or whatever.”
“And you make a living doing this?” Kevin asked.
“Well, I don’t have prime rib for dinner every night, but y’know … I pay the bills … mostly.”
“Hah! That is awesome!”
Mr. Klein glared at him.
“What?!” said Kevin. “I wish I knew how to do that. Shit. I wish I’d known you when I was in school. That would have saved me some time.”
“Kevin!” his mother said.
“So you help people hand in work that they didn’t do? You help them cheat?” Mr. Klein asked, his voice rising in anger.
“Well, I don’t know what they do with my ‘study guides’ after I submit them. That’s on them, not me.”
“Don’t give me air quotes. Study guides, my ass. That’s just disgraceful.”
“Well, sir, please excuse me if I differ. I happen to think American schools are disgraceful.”
“Well, you’re just a cheater.”
“Not me. I don’t cheat. I genuinely do all the work.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass. You know what you’re doing. How do you get away with that?”
“Get away with it? This is wide out in the open. I pay taxes. I could give you the company’s website. You can read our disclaimers. We just sell study guides. I can’t be held responsible if a few bad apples are going to use our research for impure purposes.”
“You think it’s funny now. But one day your doctor will be some moron who cheated his way through school. So when he botches your operation, you’ll have yourself to thank.”
“With all due respect, sir, if some incompetent schmuck who doesn’t have the qualifications manages to coast his way through life and in spite of all his obvious deficiencies somehow gets to perform surgery on people because he got good grades, there’s something terribly wrong with your system, and it’s much bigger than cheating.”
It was getting heated, which got Hope pretty excited. She was having a great time with it.
“Hope,” Mr. Klein said, looking at his daughter like I had just left the room. “Where do you find these assholes?”
“Rick!” Mrs. Klein shouted.
“I should go.” I started to get up.
“Sit down,” he said calmly. “Everybody eat your turkey.”
“It’s really delicious, Mrs. Klein. So juicy.”
“Thank you, David.”
This type of hostility was nothing new to me. I have made no secret of my job, and I’ve received my fair share of harsh judgments. I’ve been called evil by complete strangers. I rarely get defensive. I tend to respectfully disagree, and more often I try to avoid being drawn into such confrontations if at all possible.
It was not possible with Hope’s father. He always got under my skin, and I let it get the better of me. I enjoyed pissing him off. And I understand where he was coming from, obviously. He was just defending his profession. In the end, the fact that my job even existed was an indictment of what he did and how he did it. Certainly, he could sit in judgment. But he didn’t know what I knew. I dealt with a far greater diversity of students than your average educator.
He had no idea. He didn’t know the extent of it. He couldn’t know how it permeates our schools. He didn’t understand why students would take this way out, or why somebody like me would do a job like this. To him, this was a subterranean racket.
It isn’t. It’s mainstream. It’s popular culture. It’s taxable income. It’s googleable.
Hope’s dad was a department head, a sponsor of extracurricular activities, and a joyless prick. In this world, we were cast as ideological and strategic enemies.
“Sorry about my dad,” Hope said on the ride home.
“Nah. Don’t worry about it. I’m used to that shit. Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t have a point.”
“Fuck him.”
“Well, I agree with that, too. But seriously, what can I possibly say to defend myself?”
“You don’t have to defend yourself. A lot of people would love to be able to do what you can do.”
“Yeah … great … I’ve squandered more ability than most people ever get. I should feel really good about that. I’m a real fucking revolutionary.”
“Don’t let him make you feel that way. You know it’s all bullshit. You think he’s changing lives? His students hate him.”
“It’s not him. It has nothing to do with him. It’s not even that I feel bad about what I’m doing. I don’t. I’ve had much worse jobs. It’s just, I can’t take pride in this. I’m doing nothing of value with my life. Even if school is bullshit and what I’m doing isn’t wrong, I contribute nothing. Even if I can rationalize what I’m doing, I can’t take any pride in it. Your parents are right. My parents are right. I’m trash.”
I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I was just thinking, maybe I really was trash. But I was marketable trash, the kind of trash that sells like crazy as first-semester finals approach.
Let me explain finals.
By the end of Thanksgiving, cheating in school is as pervasive as Charlie Brown specials, Salvation Army bells, and songs about finding love on Christmas Eve. The students come to us in droves with their end-of-semester work, willing to pay a premium for a holiday season uninterrupted by school-related tedium. Holidays are for family-related tedium.
Every year, I have to find a way to fit in both. This is when I turn it on full blast. I am a robot. I am a machine. I am the evil T-1000, Johnny 5, and Max Headroom. I am a cybernetic organism sent from the future to help John Conner ace his Environmental Design elective.
I churn out pages upon pages of academic material for days on end. Twenty-hour days; two-hundred-page weeks; six dozen courses; fifteen majors; ten minutes of stretching here; forty minutes of sleep there, however my face lands on the keyboard. Sometimes I’ll stop in between assignments, crack my back, hop around the room, and listen to James Brown. Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.
Sometimes I don’t have the time for funk. I’ll just send off one assignment and open the next without pause. It takes me five seconds to breathe out my ten-page reconciliation on the simultaneous existence of God and evil before I start to breathe in a six-page consumer report on the best hybrid cars on the market.
This is finals. These are my darkest moments. When you study and write and defy personal reflection for enough hours over the course of enough days and without rest through the duration of a month … well, it can be an almost disembodying sensation. My fingers seem to melt into the keyboard; my eyes have stretched across the void between the monitor and my face; I feel nothing below my shoulders. I am a floating head; a living, breathing Wikipedia; a composite of facts, errors, opinions, and lies, available to the public for use at its own risk. I’m open all night.
But finals pay for my holiday shopping. I rock it ou
t during finals. I admit, it’s not exactly working on an offshore oil rig, but sometimes I actually feel like kind of a hard-ass.
Yeah, I’ve got a thirty-page paper to write tomorrow. No, I don’t know what it’s about yet. Yawn. Shot of tequila. Bong hit. Late night. Late start. Long day.
Some papers are harder than others. Sometimes I’m in the mood to really give it the old college try. Sometimes I’m in the mood to try less hard. The guy who contacts me two days before the deadline and asks, “Wheres my paper at!”—you’d better believe I’m trying less hard for him. I don’t need the aggravation. I can write a five-page paper in thirty minutes if I don’t mind producing a piece of donkey excrement.
And I admit, sometimes the sleep deprivation makes me a little moody. My life during finals is a prison sentence: solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, and yard detail. But I do it to myself. I choose my own deadlines.
And I can’t get enough. Anything that looks interesting, that looks easy, that pays a good rate, that I’ve already written about … anything. It hardly matters. I just fill my calendar up and deal with it when the day arrives. I have deadlines every minute of every day. Deadlines own me. I write on car rides. I write on airplanes. I write in hotel rooms. I write in restaurants and bars. I write anywhere with an outlet, I write until my battery dies, and I write on other people’s computers when I have to. My friends understand. They’ve seen me during finals before. I work until my neurons are fried.
And I am hopelessly, incurably optimistic. I think I can fit in everything. I never say no to work. A lot of work is scary, but no work is downright terrifying.
So I was buried in work when Hope’s mother called me, not more than a week after Thanksgiving dinner.
This was strange. She had never called me. Not once. Panicked thoughts raced through my head. What had I done? Why could she be calling me? Oh god. Hope was pregnant, and her father was coming to kill me with his shotgun.