No Such Thing as a Free Basket

Every morning on the way to my office, I walk past the business school, which is built like a hilltop crusader fortress, replete with battlements, a machicolated inner wall, turrets, crenelations, and arrow-slit windows. Somewhere inside, between accounting and management, there must be a dragon and a mountain of gold.

Headshots of rich and influential graduates flutter around the outside. They’re all smiling. Day in and day out, this becomes unsettling. Sure, it’s part of the business school’s self-promotion (you, too, can be this smug if you study here and make a load of money), necessary marketing perhaps because an MBA typically offers less concrete knowledge than a BS in peace and conflict studies or a semester at sea and because there is not, nor has there ever been, an education requirement for entering most business careers.

To make money, you have to be good at what you do. You do not need a certification saying that you are. You can get that peace and conflict degree, study basket weaving for 15 weeks in Spain, and still join the firm. But no disrespect: management courses surely have things to teach (I took some and learned a thing or two) and to become a certified professional or para-professional in the business world, like a CPA or a project manager or a contracts specialist, you do need the piece of paper. Ergo, the fortress, the pictures, the smiles.

Lots of smiles. They haunt me. One woman in particular has a grin that radiates a kind of dark energy. By any estimation, she seems attractive and smart, but that grin says, I’m clever and, not only that, I’m crooked. More importantly, I’m richer than you. Richer than thou. Richer than god. Study here, my young apprentice, and together we will discover many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

By the time I reach my office, I often find I have to cleanse my aura if I’ve allowed myself to notice that woman’s picture. Bring on the crystals and the sage. I also think about the sullen post-adolescents sitting in their cars along the street—not the shitbox deathtraps my friends and I drove in college, but SUVs, Teslas, Audis, high-end Accords with factory tint, and occasionally a Beemer or a Benz paying homage to the classics—cars that have been bought for the children because no 20-year-old can afford a $43k Tesla 3 in freshman year. Maybe their parents studied crusader management in the fortress.

What are these sleepy, sour-faced kids thinking as they stare at me through their windshields? At least some of them have to be considering the cost of things. How could they not? The cost of their education (having been lectured many times by dad that money is found in crusader castles, not growing on trees), the cost of their sweet ride, the cost of messing around the way they did two years ago in senior year, opportunity cost (when I was your age, I was in the Army and look at me now—what you need is self-discipline, son, not a cruise to Costa del Sol), maybe the lab fee for Basket Weaving 210. Everything costs money. Even money costs money. No such thing as a free basket.

I have no doubt that more than a few of them are picturing their own faces up on the battlements, smirking down at hapless students with all the condescension of success. And even more than the implications that flow from our illustrious school of business, that’s what gives me pause. What does a post-adolescent undergraduate know about what she wants for the next 20 years? For that matter, what do any of us know? We know what mom and dad have drummed into our heads (if we’re even that lucky) and we often fail to understand that they know about as much as we do, which is to say, nothing.

At some point, if they’re solvent enough to buy that new Tesla 3, they did what they were told and got rewarded for it. But what is the nature of such a reward? What does it mean? We know what we’ve assumed along the way. Sometimes, we know or think we know which educated guesses have worked out and which ones haven’t. Usually, we’re blind, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and hopefully doing our best.

When I was as young as these kids, I had a friend named Chris, who came from a family of classically trained musicians. He, too, had a gift for music and was getting ready for the long uncertain life of the creative artist with an all-consuming vocation that might not earn him enough to buy lunch at Taco Bell. He also had a wisdom that, compared with the insight of most college kids, seemed far beyond his years. Once, he said to me, “Some people get exactly what they want. The rest of us become philosophers.”

I’ve been smiling at that for almost three decades. It’s funny and absurd, especially in the exasperated, road-weary way he said it. Now I’d laugh and say, shit, kid, last year you were a teenager. Try to have a little fun before you say something like that. But I wouldn’t deny the evident truth of it. Though, I might modify it a little after all my years of philosophizing: some people get what they want; some people don’t get what they want; everybody becomes a philosopher. Because I got everything I wanted in my 20s and I’m still asking what it all means.

Just don’t make me go to business school in a fortress. By the time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop, I am, once again, infused with the immortal wisdom of Guitar Slim: “The things that I used to do/ Lord, I won’t do no more.” Preach, brother. For me, it’s not about what I wanted back then. It’s not even what I want right now. Because I acknowledge that I have no actionable grasp of what the world is.

I only have subjectivities and assumptions. I see through the filter of my memories, beliefs, and preferences, many of which are subtly irrational. I try to do the best with what I think I know and keep in mind that, because my knowledge of the world amounts to existential spit and bailing wire, anything other than humility is a failure state.

So you have to be good at what you do. But how do you know you are? Are you making money? Is that the metric? Maybe. Maybe not. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? Do you have any idea? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you even know what you don’t know? The ghost of Donald Rumsfeld was here just a moment ago and said there are unknown unknowns. I believe him. I’m taking it on faith.

Eating

Everything eats. That’s not the problem. The problem starts with what lies beyond that fact. And there’s no solution: what we don’t consume has no value. What has no value does not exist. Consider the cafeteria. I’m sitting in it with my friend, Hector, facing the conundrum of life over mashed potatoes and meatloaf for him, a boxed ham sandwich for me. Who are we to complain? It’s not horrible food. It’s edible. Kind of stiff. A little stale. Somewhat undercooked. But don’t cry for me, Argentina, it’s a campus lunch. If it goes down and stays put, I’ll bow in gratitude to the bounty of celestial providence.

“That’s a dry sandwich,” says Hector.

Yes. I know. I’m eating it. “Those potatoes look runny.”

He nods slowly, regarding his mashed potatoes the way one views an autopsy subject. Damn shame, such violence. But at least it’s not a dry sandwich out of a plastic box. He got his meatloaf and potatoes from the food line, ladled out of a metal tray like in every prison movie right before the commissary riot. Greasy steam rises from the food-line entrées and they never smell good. Runny potatoes. Feral carrots. Dubious peas. Condemned meatloaf. Overcooked bok choy in a forlorn soy sauce. Bricks of peaked mac and cheese so dense they have to be chipped off with the tip of the spatula. I’ll suffer the dry sandwich, thanks.

Hector and I meet in the campus cafeteria about once a month, ostensibly to discuss the renovations being done to the building where I work, but in reality just to insult each other’s food choices and make disparaging comments about the students.

“Look at them snakes,” he says as two undergrads dressed like ice cream cones float by. Not actual ice cream cones; though, I’ve seen that and many comparable absurdities on this campus, but looking like they just went nuts at a discount white sale in June. Something out of the director’s cut of Zardoz—new age Egyptizoid background extras in a dystopian shopping mall, while Sean Connery runs around in a red diaper shooting people. The one wearing a huge amethyst pendant glares at us.

The gun is good, I think to myself, but I don’t say it because Hector won’t get the reference and anyway he’s still going on about them snakes.

“We didn’t see snakes like that when we were in college, am I right?”

Hector’s a large man, completely bald, and, as far as I know, has been faithful to his wife for 25 years. But he talks like he’s still working on gen ed requirements and an internship. College females are “snakes.” College guys are invisible. The university is “this shit,” as in, “This shit wants me to supervise over Christmas to make sure the HVAC gets in. Can you believe it?”

I can believe this shit.

“Snakes like that—it’s the social media, okay? The TikTok.”

“Chinese spyware.”

“China don’t care,” he says. “Look at them robes. They look like Stargate. Leisure studies majors. You think China cares about leisure studies majors? That ham’s killing you by inches, brother.”

“China wants me to eat this ham.”

He frowns at my sandwich, cuts into the meatloaf slab with his plastic fork. “That’s not even ham.”

I came to this job over two years ago because I was starving. Let’s not say, “starving.” Let’s say facing the prospect, such that boxed cafeteria lunches came to seem like mana from on high. My old life got invalidated by a bat virus doing what it was engineered to do—eat. The freefall unreality of the pandemic, where going to the grocery store felt like dicing with death, ate my finances. I didn’t like how broke I got, how politicized everything got, didn’t feel like the virus cared much about feelings, opinions, theories, or rent.

All I knew was that, when I got Covid, it was the worst flu of my life. I hallucinated conversations with dead people, ancestors, goddesses, spent a few weeks in a delirium where I thought I was probably going to die, then managed not to. After it cleared up, I found a job on campus—not the university teaching job I’d always wanted, but still. Still.

“That meatloaf looks more loaf than meat.”

“Cute. This fantastic repast is straight from heaven.”

“Send it back. Make god eat it.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

And now, a new life of blasphemy and snakes. As Dante wrote in La Vita Nuova, “If I bethought myself to seek out some point at the which all these paths might be found to meet, I discerned but one way, and that irked me; to wit, to call upon Pity, and to commend myself unto her.” Those of us who lived through the pandemic will never know why we did while others didn’t. All we know is that chance or fate took pity on us so that we could sit on college campuses and watch self-conscious children glare and parade around in costumes.

“If I tabulate all the money I’ve spent on bad campus food, it’s like I’m giving back my paychecks.”

“That’s what you do,” he says. “They give you money. You give it back. They give you things. You eat them.”

On that note, we do. Perhaps, as we consume our vital sustenance, we ask ourselves what we’re feeling. Perhaps, as we are sensitive individuals, in touch with our emotions, we turn inward as we eat, content to probe the range of personal meaning inherent in the act. Or maybe we just shovel it down as quickly as possible. I set the last quarter of my ham sandwich aside. It is truly dry and I didn’t get anything to drink.

“Linda says she thinks she might be a lesbian.” Hector stares across the cafeteria, through the beige wall, over the landscape, beyond at least one ocean, at an image in a distant land that holds the truth of that statement. Maybe a better meatloaf. He puts the last chunk in his mouth and chews.

“You getting a divorce?’

“Maybe. She said don’t worry, though. Right now, it’s just a thought she’s having.”

Two boys with skateboards sit at the table in front of us. They don’t have any food. And I wonder why they’re here, why, of all places they could go, they’ve chosen a space that smells like rancid creamed corn and burned toast.

“Thoughts are just thoughts.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

I look at the scar that runs up his right forearm, perfectly dividing the sun tarot card tattoo surrounded by cherry blossoms. I look at the red-and-white Aloha shirt and the heavy gold chain he wears on the outside of his black undershirt so it will stand out in the “V.” And I think sometimes I must not be the loneliest person on campus.

Hector and I are both 30 years older than these students. We’re in the gray area, marked “staff.” We’re not on the academic food chain. We don’t consume. We are not consumed. We merely facilitate the consumption. And that which is not consumed cannot exist. We’re ghosts.

A couple dressed in skin-tight gym wear starts to make out at one of the central tables and everyone in the cafeteria stares, but only for a moment. It’s a new life, I think, a new world. It intersects my old, dead middle-aged life that barely sustains, that nobody wants, that tastes like something from a cafeteria food line. Hector stares a little longer then looks over at the last of my sandwich.

“You gonna eat that?”

I tell him no and he picks it up with two fingers, puts it in his mouth.

“Peace,” he says, still chewing. “Stay healthy.”

I wave and watch him move toward the door, a foot taller and two wider than everyone present. No one looks at him. He’s not an entrée.

I sit there for the remainder of my lunch, empty plates in front of me, watching young love in action. The outer part of me wants to feel contempt for them doing that in public, but when I ask myself what I’m feeling, I have to remember to be grateful. I’m alive. I’m still here, for what it’s worth. I still get a boxed sandwich, a little more time, and a table off to the side.