beg you to have mercy.”
“Notify campus security,” the Dean said to Veronica, who entered behind me. She nodded with a smirk and left the room.
“Let me clarify something,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor.”
“What?”
“I could hurt you a lot more.”
I kept begging, but the man kept ignoring me. He was talented at it. Arrogantly, he inspected a gilded portrait of some rich cocksucker. Soon the campus security, the large dumb animal in a uniform, grabbed me and forced both my hands behind my back. He pushed me out. As the security guard walked me past Veronica, she murmured, “Call me.”
He took me to the phony-marble steps and let me calmly return to my decimated life. I walked down the steps and took a seat on a marble bench near the small, dry, penis-shaped fountain donated by alumna Margaret Dodge.
What the hell, I thought. Ever since I’d entered the graduate program I had pondered over a subject for a thesis. I was supposed to write one this semester and I had neither the subject nor the inclination; it was a good time to be thrown out of school. What was I going to do with a masters, except bullshit around academia? Maybe try for a teaching spot in some exclusive Alpine girls school, like Sly Stallone in his pre- Rocky days, and try to do as many of the religiously crippled virgins as possible? Be that as it may, this expulsion put some new possibilities into what otherwise might have been a life of joy and waste. As I passed through the gates donated by alumnus George Delacorte, I thought to myself, I can’t let all this go. I mustn’t. I took the subway downtown to Whitlock’s office and waited outside of his glass-and-steel castle. An hour passed and then another, just like the first. A succession of limos came and went, until finally the door of one opened, and he got out.
“I beg you, Mr. Whitlock,” I said, running up to him. His driver walked in interference between him and me.
“I only meant to appeal to you, but you kept walking away,” I shouted around the stocky driver. But Whitlock walked toward the rhombus-shaped building and wouldn’t even look at me.
“Please, Mr. Whitlock, you are obviously a very powerful man, but don’t you agree that, in the words of that innovative financier Michael Milken, ‘with power comes the veneer of responsibility’”—Milken, who used three-card monte as a model for the investment banking industry, never said any such thing, but I figured that Whitlock might respect one of his own—“For a miscalculation on my part, you’re sentencing my whole life to incompletion! I beg you…I had no preconceived plan, and whatever embarrassment or damage I might have caused you was, ironically, only self-inflicted by your humongous ego.”
But Whitlock entered his palace without acknowledging my words.
Upon my entering the building, security blocked my entrance. I took position across the street and waited out of view, watching covertly. Another hour came and went before Whitlock exited the building. I raced over. This time, his driver grabbed me and cranked his arm back, about to punch.
“No!” said Whitlock.
“Mr. Whitlock, I am not going away. I will be here every day, every waking hour, until you rethink this!”
“I am warning you. Leave me alone.”
“I can’t. You hold my future. I will be here every day, I warn you. Mr. Whitlock, Andrew, if I may call you that, the worst thing you can do to a person is to empower him and then knock that power away.”
“You think so?” he asked matter-of-factly, and for the first time, he seemed to really hear me.
“Yes sir, absolutely.” He smiled, got into his car, and drove away.
A tall order of sleep was the prescription. But New York was an awful city for sleep. Added to which, sleep had a bad rap. People who slept were assumed to be lazy. But sleep was the seat of man’s power. His prophesies, his fantasies, his visitations to death, his real confrontations, his magical