Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Frank McCourt,

he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas . . .

Working at a state university provides certain unasked-for pleasures, certain unwanted fringe benefits, and a wide assortment of things you thought you’d left behind a long time ago, not unlike drinking turned wine instead of putting it in the compost. Why do you do it? You’re not broke anymore. But you have various poor-person habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. You don’t throw the past-date wine out. You drink it or it’ll go to waste.

Likewise, you know better than to have idle conversations with students dressed in black in punishing tropical humidity outside the big humanities building. But you have certain adjunct writing instructor habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. 87% of your digestive system knows better, but the idealistic 13% that’s still refluxing with teaching takes an interest. You don’t avoid an inevitably stupid and pretentious conversation. You start right up.

Oh, you’re MFA students? Fiction writing? I was something of a fiction writer myself a long time ago.

Working Monday through Friday in the admin wing of an academic department far removed from anything you studied, before you got old and late-stage adolescents stopped taking you seriously, adds an unmistakably robust bouquet with fruity secondary notes. But striking up conversations with grad students who actually are in your field—which should be a better experience but isn’t—finishes with a mouthfeel of straight vinegar. You meet Eden and Zan and speak to them about their writing program. You know you shouldn’t, but you do.

It’s hard being the sort of person who can find meaning in anything. Zan explains this when you ask him why he wants to be a writer. He snaps it out, the elevator pitch of a theater kid, which is what he was before he arrived to do a master of fine arts in creative writing. He smiles, condescending and awkward at the same time. He asks what you’re studying and you tell him you aren’t. You’re an admin in Obscure Social Sciences Related Department. Ah. He smiles again and puts his arm around Eden, who has the same smile, though perhaps slightly meaner, and gives off tentative girlfriend vibes or lost soul with boundary issues vibes. Because you are old, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Makes you think of something Harry Bryant says to Deckard in the first act of Blade Runner: “You’re not cop, you’re little people.” In that noir retroclone cyberpunk world, Bryant can back up his elitism with violence. In the insecure incubative MFA world, Zan backs it up by continuing to smile while meticulously rolling a cigarette. You’re a university admin office drone? You’re little people.

College kids these days don’t really smoke, which is why he does. Eden doesn’t, though. Her thing is just staring intensely at you over his shoulder until something happens.

Nothing’s ever going to happen. You ask if their names have always been Eden and Zan or if those are stage names or pen names. Zan says he doesn’t like being limited by personal history.

You notice Eden has a very thin ring through her septum and you try not to look at it. Every other student seems to have one. It’s not so edgy. It’s like a tramp stamp or various pronouncements etched on the upper arm, almost compulsory now. E Pluribus Unum. To thy own self be true. In loving memory of the world’s greatest grampa, Leonard Johnston, 1958-2020. Brad Is My Love. The Truth Hurts. Sure, sure, don’t be a jerk. She might have technicolor Foghorn Leghorn playing a harp on her inner thigh but she’s got the soul of a poet. You’re just old and cynical.

She does have Foghorn Leghorn on her thigh. Or a menacing chicken wearing boxing gloves who looks a lot like him. But you’re not staring at the nose ring. So don’t even start with the thigh. Let the kids smoke and sweat like they’re supposed to and tell you about how much meaning there is in the world.

You make things worse by asking what they’re reading. He’s reading the Marquis de Sade’s stories. Because of course he is. She’s reading We Were Liars, a YA horror novel. Zan asks what you’re reading and in a flash ofpreventive insight you say, “Spreadsheets, mostly.”

He expects something like that. Or, “Nothing. I don’t read,” which would also have been acceptable in the grand calculus of the little people, the wee folk up in some administrative office, who putter about in a haze of Obscure Social Sciences Related data. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, ye Schweinehund. Cast ye them not. Nay.

She says she’s reading Angela’s Ashes in her narratology of memoir seminar and it’s cool because Frank McCourt was, like, 60 when he published it and then he won the Pulitzer. You say you think he might have been 66, not 60. And she looks at you.

But who gives a shit about Frank McCourt? “Not I,” said the cat.