The world seems to conspire against you when you’re an adjunct. Yes, that’s my situation now that I’m a few years down the road in graduate school. It’s a classic Catch-22: If I get a full-time job for the financial security, I’ll never finish the dissertation; adjunct teaching gives me time to write, but puts my health and bank account in an extremely risky position.
On top of that day-in, day-out tension, I recently had a strict deadline to meet, one that would determine the possibility of grant support for my final year of grad school. I worked off the stress by going to my fitness club, perhaps the last thing that labels me as middle class in any way. And I had a good workout. In fact, I was feeling quite chipper as I walked through a warm spring dusk. But then I saw granules of shattered glass coating the cement next to my car.
The interior of my car was naked to the world, as the rear window on the passenger side had been completely staved in. Oddly, though, nothing seemed to be missing at first glance: For example, my hoodie was right where I’d left it, coated with glass shards, but otherwise unscathed. My first response was sheer paranoia. Had someone I’d cut off on the highway followed me into the lot to do his dirty work? In these straitened economic times, had a Deleuzian taken his ire against a Rawlsian to the next level?
When I eased myself into the driver’s seat, though, I saw it was, indeed, a case of theft. My wallet was still snugly hidden under the seat. My watch was still on the floor beneath the glove compartment. The thief had, however, absconded with two library books, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, both of which were in my now-missing backpack along with my binder.
Then I saw the small dent on the front passenger window—the thief had tried to go in through there first. He must have thought my backpack contained a laptop. Still, it didn’t make sense. Why not break into the cool new Audi parked next to me? It took me a few days to figure out that the thief had correctly guessed that my car wouldn’t have an alarm. I’d always thought my 20-year-old Honda Civic made me vaguely bohemian in a postmodern way. It was a new idea that the car made me a traveling criminal target.
I got out of my car and just stood there in a daze. A curious gym member came by to look, and advised me to do the obvious thing. Two squad cars pulled up a few minutes later. As I was trying to put a dollar value on the stolen Pynchon and Stephenson for a sympathetic officer, a CSI van rolled up. After she’d finished dusting for fingerprints, the officer told me that I could get the goop off the window frame with soap and a paper towel. “Or you can take it to a carwash. But make sure you get the window fixed first. Hey, just thought I should mention it! Some people, you never know.”
Did I already look like an absent-minded professor? I hadn’t even told her my occupation. But I wasn’t offended. Being the center of attention for a change was gratifying. In fact, I almost expected a TV truck to roll into the lot.
I even started to pat myself on the back as I drove home. I’d collected essays from my students that day and left them on the floor of the car instead of inside my backpack. So I would be able to return their graded papers at the end of the next class, instead of having to use the teacher’s equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.” I smiled, musing that in the larger scheme of things, I was doing OK—maybe God didn’t hate me after all.
But following that epiphany, things got worse in a hurry. After showing my vandalized car to my roommate, who was suitably impressed, I opened the front passenger door to collect my watch and gym bag. When I shut the door and turned away, a violent crack echoed across the apartment complex, making us freeze in our tracks: The front passenger window had spiderwebbed and shattered.
I suppose if my life were a sitcom that scene would have been hilariously funny. (“Granting the robber’s intense interest in postmodern fiction and sci-fi, did he really have to break both windows to get at it?”) But now I was looking at around $500 to get the two windows replaced—probably about what the car itself was worth—in addition to the backpack and what I could recall of its contents: the library books, two zip drives, and a checkbook from the bank that I now had to call. In fact, about half my monthly paycheck was now gone.
Then, as I mounted the stairway to my apartment, I froze. Oh gosh. My grade book. How clueless, how antediluvian to be dependent on a paper-and-pencil construction in this age of Excel spreadsheets.
This petty thief, whom I’d been laughing at minutes before, had now turned into a demon who was ruining my life. My sense of violation increased as I began to think of the personal things I’d lost. For example, although I’m not a pick-up artist, two years ago I’d seen a beautiful woman in the library whom I just had to talk to. Amazingly, she’d written her e-mail address on a piece of paper and handed it to me with a shy smile, although the relationship that followed didn’t work out. Now she’s back in her hometown in Japan, and ever since I’ve kept that piece of paper. Somehow I doubt that too many readers will be sympathetic to my little version of Weezer’s Pinkerton, but what the heck, it was my big grad-school romance, and now my memento was in the hands of a thief.
Of course he was most interested in my checkbook. Initially I blocked my account instead of closing it, as I was expecting a tax refund to be direct-deposited. That meant that I was able to see the initial forgeries when I visited my bank a few days later. The bank manager zoomed in to the image of the first bad check, and my blood ran cold as I saw my own name in the bottom corner, signed in an alien hand: a payment for $30, written out to Domino’s Pizza.
Apparently, the thief had a serious case of the munchies, as I’ve since received a letter from an agency seeking to collect on a $220 check I apparently wrote to a supermarket. Unfortunately that is only one of several bad checks the thief has passed off. Either local businesses are being incredibly negligent in reviewing checks, or he’s bought a fake driver’s license, one with his picture and my name.
Needless to say, this development brought out my latent sense of middle-class entitlement. Why weren’t the police doing more to bust this guy, I wondered. He was a menace to society. If the cops were too busy, I’d even be willing to call all the Domino’s Pizzas in the area myself.
All the same, when I reviewed my to-do list for the week, I wondered if I should cross out “Rent The Punisher/Dirty Harry.” I’m not one of those Marxist professors who’s grimacing as his 401(k) takes a nosedive, but there’s nevertheless an irony in my situation. This semester I’d assigned students in my writing courses Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of low-wage America, Nickel and Dimed. In the book’s final chapter she talks about Americans’ misplaced priorities: Instead of spending our tax dollars on welfare programs, we’re more likely to finance prison construction, which becomes a vicious cycle. I pointed out to students that the mass media often conceals the social inequality that fosters prison growth, using as an example Michael Moore’s funny and scathing send-up of the TV show Cops in Bowling for Columbine.
“What kind of crime do you never see on Cops?” I asked the class. A few seconds passed before a student volunteered, “White-collar crime.” I nodded significantly. “So from Ehrenreich’s point of view, when we watch Cops we’re sort of laughing at the lower class. Maybe some guy gets laid off and steals something, but who’s doing the most damage to society?”
But the students seemed nonplussed. One raised her hand to say, “Well, I don’t feel guilty about watching Cops at all. The fact is that those people did something wrong.”
I tried to treat her contribution with respect, though inside I had a condescending response. But now that I’d been the victim of a crime, well, it wasn’t so easy to write off the thief’s action as due to “neoliberalism” or “globalization.”
In short, the theft was challenging the intellectual convictions that motivated my teaching. Of course I don’t try to force my students to follow a specific political view. As I tell them over and over, I’ll give an A to a paper written from any political perspective—liberal, conservative, socialist, whatever—as long as the argument is a good one. After all, even the most committed libertarian, who believes that government should largely disappear and that social interaction should be left to the market, needs to persuade others that that is indeed the good life. (That’s why we have thousands of pages of writing from Ayn Rand.)
What’s unforgivable is having no politics at all—spending hours and hours in one’s living room, playing games on the Xbox or Wii, watching videos of high-speed freeway chases and of policemen chasing people across lawns. That consumerist passivity is truly the life of an idiot. I’d been just such an idiot at age 18, despite the best efforts of my high-school teachers, and I credit college for making me link my personal life to larger social issues. That is my understanding of the purpose of a writing course; it’s not just to learn grammar (although that’s important), but also instruction in citizenship.
Despite that intellectual conviction, I’d been having a rather idiotic response to the theft. A fantasy of catching the robber myself was only the beginning. Outraged at the violation of my privacy, I’d forgotten that in this time of budget crises, my story of hardship is only one of thousands. And my losses, those irreplaceable things that can’t be measured in money? Well, they weren’t so tragic. It’s probably apparent to the reader that I’ve romanticized my love affair somewhat—in fact, if you were to contact my old flame, she would probably offer a far less romanticized version.
What I had to do now was reread my syllabus and practice what I preached. My students might have different ideas about how, or whether, we should change a society in which financial insiders steal billions at the top of the social pyramid and petty thieves break into cars at the bottom. But in my case, I have to start paying attention to those pesky e-mail messages I keep getting from various grass-roots organizations that I’ve dabbled with and then forgotten about.
So I’m going to try to hold to this public-minded view of my situation. I’ll deal with the collection agencies on a case-by-case basis, mailing them copies of the police report, hoping that a detective won’t accost me during a job interview at my discipline’s annual conference. And even though I don’t have any valuables to speak of, I’ll keep anything that looks like it contains them in my trunk.
