The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  On the first day, I was easily distracted but energetic. I made my coffee, lit a stick of incense, and put on some Dave Brubeck. I opened my window a crack and let in the sweet, dewy smell of morning. I live directly across the street from an Oyster House, so later in the day it would smell of fried fish for hours. But right then, it just smelled like morning. In quiet moments like this, I actually loved my job.

  The sound of people making their commute outside while I sat barefoot at my desk, the thick aromas of coffee and weed swirling around above my head, the elegant alto sax of Paul Desmond lilting through my speakers, the cursor blinking on an empty page in front of me. This was the kind of picturesque academic moment that made me inhale with vitality and exhale with a sense of contentment.

  It was also the kind of environment where you sat and did nothing for a whole day. You could look up baseball stats, you could illegally download music, you could browse Internet porn, you could IM with friends who hated their jobs and did nothing but “lol” and “brb” all day long. This was usually how I spent the first day of any big project. I’d procrastinate magnificently for hours, then reward myself prematurely for finishing a few pages. After three or four pages, I’d stand up and wander around my office, playing with toys or watching old ball games on the MLB Network. God forbid I should come across reruns of Sanford and Son, because I swear to crap, I’d get nothing done.

  Three p.m. and I’d written just under 7 pages. I sucked.

  I was pretty unhappy with myself. I like sleeping late, so it’s officially a waste of a morning if I’ve gotten up before I want to and still haven’t managed to get my ass in gear. Most nights, the Phillies play at seven p.m., at which point my productivity goes out the window. Friends tend to drop by for most games. At 162 a year, this is quite a commitment, and is in a category of things that I will allow to supersede my work, joined only by Bree and my personal hygiene.

  The thought of a baseball game just a few hours away filled me with joy and focus. I started to connect with the topic. There’s always that moment during a long process like this, when something clicks and I begin to understand more fully what I’m writing about. I’ll read a sentence that articulates perfectly what I need to understand in order to do the bare minimum, which was admittedly a lot in this case. I found that sentence in the late afternoon of Day 1. By the first pitch of the Phillies game that night, I had pages. I felt OK about that. Not great but OK. I kicked off early. Only 138 pages to go.

  Day 2

  Day 2 was fantastic. I woke up at seven a.m. and felt a rush of clarity. I was getting it, and I was cranking. I was feeling upbeat, and as I eased my way into it, I put on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It has the sweeping grandness of a sunrise over the city skyline, and it makes me feel purposive, like somebody with a briefcase or a guy in a commercial about business-class air travel.

  I pulled up all the shades, and spring gushed into my room. I was a young man in my prime. Nothing better than that. This was how I felt on my good days. I felt a genuine strength coursing through my wrists, disobeying the carpal tunnel stiffness and bouncing sprightly out of my fingertips. It would be a stretch to say that I was enjoying my paper on accounting, but I was feeling pretty good about my grip on it. The literature made sense, the facts were coming together, and the structure of the dissertation was laid out across a dozen separate Microsoft Word files.

  My MacBook allows me to divide my screen into six separate desktop spaces. It’s like being able to spin around in your chair and work on six different monitors at once. I dipped in and out of them like an octopus, plugging in a page or two for the literature review, than grabbing a source from an old paper on international trade agreements and inserting it into the background section, then taking a break from these to write an abstract. At one time, I might have had twenty files open at once and four different Web browser windows going, each with five to ten tabs open.

  And of course I was running iTunes. I was no longer trying to concentrate. Now I was power-flowing. I was sprinting. I was running the decathlon. It was all coming with great ease now. I was listening to the Clash and Talking Heads and the Ramones. I had written 20 pages by the time that evening’s Phillies game was about to begin.

  Still, I rewarded myself for a productive day by getting lazy. I did basically nothing during the game. I got out maybe four pages in three hours. Suddenly, it was ten thirty, and I was just a shade more than halfway to where I wanted to be before I went to sleep. The day suddenly caught up with me all at once. Bree was getting ready for bed. She’d be working a double starting in the morning.

  Me, I was getting ready for my third shift of the day. Kraftwerk’s Autobahn took me into the late-night hours. It’s the musical rendering of a fast drive on a neon highway. The glow from my computer screen made my eyes feel like I’d been in chlorinated water all day. They were burning and watering. The pace that I’d enjoyed for most of the day was no longer possible. I stopped after every sentence, my wrists pressing into the keyboard like paperweights. I squeezed out another drop of words… then stopped… then a few more… then stopped.

  Then I stopped looking at the clock. I stopped looking at the page count. I determined simply to write until I could no longer make sense of my surroundings.

  When I heard the tailgate of the beer delivery truck clatter open at the Oyster House, I realized the sun was rising. I had written another 26 pages. I got into bed at seven a.m. with only 92 pages to go.

  Day 3

  My alarm was set for nine a.m., but I snoozed until about nine fifteen. That extra fifteen minutes toyed with me. I blinked and it was gone. I pulled myself out of bed and sighed. I had nothing to look forward to that day. No sleep. No warmth. No sunshine. No time for love, Dr. Jones.

  It was just me and the beast. And on that third day, I was just starting to feel off. I don’t know. Maybe it was the two hours of sleep. Perhaps it was the knowledge that I had to go through this day, the day after that, and some portion of the next day too before I could be a human being again. It’s conceivable that I was falling out of love with the subject matter. It was an absolute battle to get through the morning. My body ignored the coffee. It felt like I had hot sauce on my eyelids. I spent the first half of the day on 10 pages.

  By about two p.m., I was doing everything in my power to get back into it. This was no time to puss out. I put on Fun House by the Stooges. Iggy Pop used to pull his pants off and cut himself with broken bottles onstage. I kind of thought of him as a role model. I stood up and jumped around the house. I stretched and jogged in place and shouted profanities at the mirror. I sat back down coursing with adrenaline.

  I wrote one sentence about how the plan for the U.S. GAAP to ultimately converge with the IFRS is complicated by the implications of the PCAOB and blah blah blah bling blar blar blar. By the time I got to the end of it, I was all out of piss all over again. I was running out of gas right in the middle of the race. I was going to need some help for this one.

  I called my buddy Doc, who showed up in less than an hour.

  “So, how’s it going?” Doc asked.

  “Ohhh, super,” I said with the inflection of a dead man.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah. Totally. It’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s the feel-good paper of the year.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I want to kill myself, but in a way that’s much faster than the way I’m currently doing it.”

  “Catch the Phils game last night?” “Um. I think so. Was that the game where all the players melted into a single swirling ball of psychedelic fractals during the seventh-inning stretch?”

  “Dude, maybe you should get some sleep.”

  “Nah, it’s just there’s so many games a year, they all sort of blend together.”

  Doc cut a few bumps of cocaine, and we blew them off the back of my American Heritage Dictionary.

  “Wooohoo,” I said. “This oughta help.”

  The coke rushed through my h
ead, and my eyes were like tractor wheels. Doc left me with a gram and went on his way. I immediately cut another couple of lines for myself. I vacuumed them up and put on the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The fusion jazz combo is the height of anxiety. It’s heavy, brooding, and hot. It gives me the jimmy leg. So I started bouncing and trembling and typing. And for a series of forty-minute bursts, I was unstoppable.

  But the party ended every hour, so I had to keep ringing the bell. I’m listening to Captain Beefheart and Wu-Tang, and I’m totally relating. Hut one, hut two, hut three, hut! Ol’ Dirty Bastard live and uncut! I am the Dirt Dog.

  By four a.m., I’d had another 40-page day. I had no sensation in the tip of my nose, my teeth felt like they could fall out of my head, and my eyes looked deranged. I’d been running my hands furiously through my hair. I looked like the guy from A Flock of Seagulls if he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

  Fifty-two pages to go. You would have to have gone through those last three days just to know how good that actually sounded to me. I got into bed at four thirty, gnashed my teeth, and stared at the ceiling until six a.m. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was awake.

  Day 4–5

  I woke up at ten a.m., furious with myself for oversleeping. I took my shower and washed the dried blood from my nose. I skipped my coffee and went straight to the coke. If this was to be a bender, there was no point in pussyfooting around it. The greatest influence on my writing at this time was probably Chris Farley’s E! True Hollywood Story.

  And like that, I was back into it.

  The deadline was ten that night, and as I had presumed right from the start, there was no earthly way I was making it. But I hadn’t heard a word from this guy in months, so I wasn’t too worried that he was watching the clock. My expectation was something more like the next morning, though it would all be like one big fat day for me. There would be no friends today, no fraternizing with my lady, no food, no Phillies game. I could do nothing to keep my mind from straying every fifth sentence. I was chewing on my molars and knuckling my temples, trying to force my head to find a new way to say the things I’d already said, trying to find a new avenue down which to spray my bullshit, trying to kick-start my rusted engine.

  At this point, every splash of water on the face, every three-minute stretching break, every new album, every hit of weed, and every line of coke, it was all part of this never-ending struggle to trick myself into being awake. Like when your remote is dead, you know you can always open it up and flip the batteries. It tricks the remote into a few more channel changes. By midnight, my head felt like a construction site. Things were clanging and crashing, whistling and buzzing, building and breaking. I was cracked the fuck out. I felt like a really geeky version of Scarface, or at least the nerd Scarface would have gotten to do his homework. But, I was at the 140-page mark. If I, too, was to die in a hail of bullets over a bag of cocaine, let it not be said that I did not understand the basic principles of international accounting standards.

  The realization that I was this close… that did bring me some real energy.

  So I dropped the hammer down and did me some wordsmithing. When I’m motivated by the thought of being done, I’m like Eddie Van Halen. I just start riffing all up and down the place, playing fast, shredding loudly, never stopping to reflect. Spitting out a blazing chord progression as the next one formulates in my head. There was no way to know whether the words I was writing made any sense. It didn’t matter anymore.

  And in the end, when it was done, instead of relief, I felt like I had malaria. I couldn’t even go to sleep. For about a day, I had post-traumatic stress disorder. You’d think that once you got home from the war, you’d be all “Hooray for my bed. Hooray for my refrigerator. Hooray for my TV.” But no, it’s not like that. Not after the things I’ve seen, man.

  That whole next day was spent trying to reaffirm my connections to humanity, apologizing profusely to Bree for going on a secret cocaine bender, regenerating the vast economy of words that I had surrendered to this one project. And then, of course, writing a five-page paper on the Dutch East India Company and a three pager on apartheid in South Africa. That’s right. It never fucking ends. Even when you’re not in the shit, you’re still at war.

  And then, two days later, and for the first time, I heard from my client, who for two months prior to receiving his automobile-priced paper had provided me with no instructions, no specifications, no details, and no interaction.

  “Hello, I received a work with you, but this is either the wrong work, or there has been a complete misunderstanding from your side in regard to the topic of the work…”

  Son of a bitch.

  13

  Portrait of the Scumbag as a Young Man

  I suppose there wasn’t much of a chance I’d turn out any better than this.

  I did deliver the senior address at my high school graduation.

  I should clarify, though. I was not class president. Student government meant longer days, more hours in school, and even the commitment of some weekends. I’d sooner have stubbed cigarettes out on the back of my hand than voluntarily spent more time in school.

  I also was not the valedictorian. In a class of about 450, I was ranked in the low 200s. I was right there in the middle of the pack. But I sat next to the valedictorian, second in line at high school graduation, because I had won a contest to deliver the speech. Pissed the valedictorian off something awful. She had worked way too hard her whole life to sit next to an asshole like me on the big day.

  My grades were good enough to get by on. I fell in the steady C to B– range. Never got a D. But my high school was deeply competitive and frequently squawked about its graduation rates and the rates at which it sent students off to college. It was your typical wealthy suburban status school. So for a student in honors classes, I was clearly blowing it.

  I didn’t care.

  In elementary school, I was moody and scored poorly in penmanship, but was otherwise a solid A student. While I excelled in my studies, though, I routinely earned the NI for “Needs Improvement” in Conduct. It was said of me often during regular parent-teacher conferences that I couldn’t sit still. To say I was bored is an understatement. But I showed great promise. So have a lot of people.

  Something evil clicked in when I got to junior high. I knew kids whose parents gave them cash money for good grades, which of course blew my mind. These kids around me had money for baseball cards and firecrackers after every report card, and I was shoplifting just so I had something to trade at lunchtime.

  One day, I approached my parents on the matter. “Mom, Dad, I got straight As this time around. Don’t you think this should be worth money?”

  My dad examined my report card as though he were actually considering my proposal.

  After a moment, he looked up at me and said, “What, no A-pluses?”

  “Dad, they don’t give A-pluses on report cards!”

  “Well, see if you can’t fix that and then we’ll talk.”

  It was a good approach. It made me feel the arbitrariness of grades at an early age. By seventh grade, when we had all transferred from our cozy little trailer trash elementary school to the big regional junior high, I was getting hair in strange places and having confusingly vivid dreams about Denise from The Cosby Show.

  I was also surly and suspicious of authority. It was part of my adolescent programming. In the first week at our new school, we all had one-on-one meetings with our guidance counselors.

  Mr. Muscelli was a friendly little guy with a mustache. He looked at my elementary school record.

  “Says here you had trouble sitting still in class.”

  “I’m better now.”

  “Great. Great. Excellent grades. Well, David… I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with you. Welcome to Carusi Junior High.”

  He shook my hand.

  I went back to class and proceeded to deteriorate as a student, shedding any of the compliant impulses that might have survived my first
ten years of schooling. The records that Mr. Muscelli had reviewed belonged to somebody else: a child eager to impress, to receive validation, to be praised. The pimply preteen mope that I had become wanted nothing to do with praise or validation.

  I wanted to question; I wanted to challenge; I wanted to diverge. These impulses were largely unwelcome in junior high. There was a sit-down-and-shut-up vibe that permeated this and every school I would attend thereafter. So I quietly decided to fall through the cracks.

  They did a thing at Carusi called interim reports. These were given to students who appeared to be struggling at the halfway point of a grading term. I got four that very first grading period. I was a C student.

  Mr. Muscelli delivered my interim reports and said, “I’m very disappointed in you.”

  “Whatever, dude.”

  I had officially turned off. Twelve years old, and the whole world had suddenly become clear to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. I just knew that whatever it was, there had to be a better way, that if I started out doing exactly what I was told, I was really only setting myself up to make a living doing exactly what I was told. Even at twelve (or maybe especially at twelve), that kind of a future sounded simply ridiculous to me. Whatever the alternative was—personal struggle, short-term disappointment, or long-term failure—it simply had to be better.

  By the time I got to high school and saw that Pink Floyd video with the creepy masked schoolchildren marching into the meat grinder, I was long lost. I couldn’t be bothered. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, and for eight hours a day, five days a week, I had to go somewhere where you couldn’t take a piss without permission and a hall pass.

  I thought of Gandhi and chose passive resistance as the chief mode of my rebellion. I read nothing. I took note of nothing. I studied nothing. I did nothing… or at least as close to nothing as possible without failing.