I’m at university in a far off town. I’m late for class and I haven’t signed up for any classes. I drop into a class. The classroom seems to be open-air. Just desks seated outside the football field.
I barge into class. After class I tell the instructor, who resembles Philip Seymour Hoffman, that I have an apology to make for my revealing the controversy behind a football player (bribe, grade falsifying?). He tells me I should take it up with the dean. He goes out of his way to mention how busy he is with not only this professorship but another even more prestigious one, then another prestigious adjunct professorship. I swallow real hard. It’s hard to take; here I am still struggling to graduate after all these years.
The professor and I are with the dean, who resembles Holzinger. We sit in a car. I show the dean my note of apology, written on a USPS customs form. I don’t even pay attention to the game, I say. I don’t even care about all this. The less time I spend thinking about this the better.
They don’t care. They are focused on the apology, which is god-awful important for the university to help quell the public controversy. The note is a big scrawl with half the lines crossed out.
The dean says, you had better rewrite that. He ponders the inconvenience of going to the post office to get more paper. I reveal blank forms underneath. I can rewrite it right now.