Chapter One
“Dad’s on your side of the Mississippi River. You’re up.”
Summoned, I roll over and look at the clock. 1:58AM. Way too early for a phone call on a Monday. I only picked it up because I thought it might be a client. Then I heard my brother’s voice saying something about a nationwide Silver Alert for Dad and tracking the GPS on Dad’s car.
“What?” is all I manage to say.
“Highway Patrol found him driving around Kansas City,” Sam says. Based on his gas station receipts – Dad always keeps the receipts in his bulging leather wallet, along with his Eagle Scout Card, some indelibly faded pieces of paper (probably old receipts), and almost everything else he has accumulated over the past seventy-five years – the police guessed he’d been looping on and off of exit ramps around Kansas City for about ten hours.
Sam’s relief comes out as a slight laugh. “He thought he was in St. Louis. No telling where he was before that.”
“Kansas City is almost ten hours away from you guys,” I say. “What was he doing in Kansas City?”
“He was driving out to Colorado to see you.”
Now I’m awake. “What happened?”
“He left Cincinnati sometime Saturday afternoon,” Sam said. “Just drove off without telling anybody. I didn’t know until I went over there that evening to check on him. There’s dog food all over the floor, empty water bowls, and a bunch of puppy pads all over the place.”
“Isn’t that how Dad’s place always looks?” The puppy pads became part of the décor when Mom and Dad started forgetting to let their two extremely overfed Shih Tzu’s go outside. An honest name would be “pads for geriatric dogs with incontinence issues and the owners who love them.”
“Well, yeah,” Sam admitted. “But Dad was not there.”
Dad’s disappeared before, but never for more than a few hours. And he’s always managed to find his way back home. Sam thought he might have gone to this state park that’s about an hour from his place. He’s been going up there more often since Mom died. Sam and I have a running joke about how Dad would be my responsibility if he ended up on my side of the Mississippi River. It was only funny because neither one of us thought it would happen.
Sam’s still explaining. “I called the police when he didn’t come back Saturday night. It took them this long to find him.” He sounds tired. It’s just after 4:00AM in Cincinnati. I’m guessing Sam hasn’t had much sleep since Saturday.
I get out of bed. “OK. I’m on my way.”
I’m getting dressed and wishing we had taken Dad’s keys away. We thought – hoped – that the Great State of Ohio would not renew his driver’s license when it expired a month ago. Unfortunately, they did. Dad was still a licensed driver, even though he got lost on his way home from the DMV that afternoon.
I tie my shoes and look around my place. You can’t call it an apartment. I rented this little office when I started my own business. It has a ratty linoleum floor and walls the color of a nicotine stain, but it made my “business”, StudentResearchServices.com, seem like a real company and not some guy in his bathrobe selling research papers on the internet. It soon became a place to get away from Brooke, my wife of thirteen years. This space had been a lawyer’s office. Before that, it was a beauty shop, I think. There’s no kitchen, no shower, and no real place for a bed. I have a microwave oven and I shower wherever I can.
Even without these most basic amenities, it’s still more comfortable than sharing a house with Brooke. And, since it’s an office and not an apartment, I can tell myself that this is just a temporary setback. I haven’t really moved out. My marriage really isn’t over. I’m just sleeping at the office on a couch that is remarkably similar to the one I slept on at home on most nights.
It’s been almost nine months. I still have not yet looked for another place to live.
They say all suffering comes from either attachment, aversion, or delusion. I’ve got all three. I’m still attached to my wife, averse to living with her, and deluded into thinking my marriage isn’t really ending. Maybe we would have tried harder if we had kids, but Brooke never really wanted children. That’s almost certainly for the best. Neither one of us would have made a great parent.
One door inside my office home opens to a laundromat. I’ve learned to tune out the nearly constant sound of washers and dryers. On good days, the smell of fabric softener reminds me of happier times. On bad days, I hear children screaming about finding someone’s wet underwear in a washing machine. Larry, the guy who owns the laundromat and the rest of the building, was storing junk in here when he showed me this place. We hauled out paint cans, toolboxes, and other landlordy supplies so I could move in.
I cannot bring Dad back here.
I get into Beast, the name I’ve given my special edition 40th anniversary black Mustang convertible. I’m still not sure about what I’m supposed to do with Dad once I get to Kansas City, assuming he hasn’t left by the time I get there. Hopefully, they took a wheel off his car or something.
Sam isn’t any help. “Hey Jacob,” he laughs, “he’s on your side of the river now.”
Sam seems understandably relieved that Dad is safely tucked away for the night. Now it’s my turn to be the caring son. Maybe retrieving Dad will relieve at least some of the guilt of being the firstborn and the only child out of three to live so far away. Everybody else lives in Cincinnati. I’m out here on my own in Colorado. The prodigal son who never returned.
I call the number Sam gave me for the hotel to tell them I’m on my way. It’s been fifteen minutes since Sam woke me up. I have about six hundred miles to come up with a plan.
I am the only car on the street at this hour, so I check my phone for any orders from college students who can’t or won’t do their own homework. My clients tend to be either desperate, privileged, or lazy. A Venn diagram would show a considerable overlap of all three. There are no new orders for papers. Ordinarily, I would be frustrated about not having anything to work on – I turned in yesterday’s assignment before midnight, as ordered – but today’s lack of sales is a convenient inconvenience.
I haven’t always done other people’s homework. I was a high school history teacher until last May. Writing was what I did for fun. I picked up freelance writing gigs when I could, but they weren’t a significant source of income. Still, it was enough to justify the time I spent on my hobby, as Brooke calls it. And I was writing real articles for real publications, not uncredited research papers, although I did write a Master’s thesis for my former boss, the school principal, during what turned out to be the last year I taught. Then my teaching position was eliminated because of budget cuts. Or at least that was the official reason. I suspect it was because I taught actual historical facts and not the glossed over version of history approved by the department chair. Either way, I was out of a job. So much for employee appreciation from my boss and her brand new Master’s degree. I considered blackmail, but extortion did not seem like a sustainable source of income.
As always, Brooke was incredibly encouraging through all of this. When I told her I’d lost my job, the first words Brooke said were “What did you do?”, followed immediately with her rapid assessment of the situation without any input from me. “They fired you because they didn’t like you,” became her go-to line. “They only told you that it was budget cuts. They could have cut somewhere else if they wanted to.”
I decided against looking for another teaching job and to instead work on being a writer. I didn’t quite know what “being a writer” would look like, but I thought I would try. I picked up freelance work on different blogs and websites and was developing a decent portfolio when I discovered a website hiring what they discreetly referred to as “academic writers.” The pay was lousy. Only two dollars a page for most jobs. That might be great for someone in Pakistan or Ukraine, where most of these websites seemed to be based, but it doesn’t cover rent in Colorado. I bought the domain StudentResearchServices.com – I still can’t believe the domain was available! – built the website and transformed myself from a guy hustling for writing gigs into a full-blown company providing high-quality, original undergraduate research papers, Master’s theses, and Ph.D. dissertations. At least that’s how it looks on the website. I reply to orders as Writer0417 to make it look like we have over 400 writers. The “0417” part comes from the month and day of my birth.
That was when I decided to rent an office instead of writing in my basement.
I still struggle with the ethics of plagiarism and academic integrity, but I struggled less once the jobs and the money started coming in. It’s like that Churchill line about asking a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. She says she could be persuaded. Then he asks if she’d consider it for twenty-five. The woman gets offended and says, “What do you think I am?”
“We’ve already established what you are,” the joke goes. “Now we’re just haggling over a price.”
Turns out my price is twenty-five dollars a page for a five-day deadline, with additional charges for rush jobs and graduate-level work. I went from Mr. Martin, ethical teacher of history, to Jacob Martin, intellectual prostitute. The difference, in a good month, is about two thousand dollars a month over what I made as a teacher.
As much as I love that quote about haggling over a price, Winston Churchill was not the first person to say that line. It was some guy named Lord Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook should get credit for saying that, if for no other reason than because he had such a great name. “Lord Beaverbrook.” Think of the jokes you could make with a name like that. Too bad no one ever heard of him.
My increased income comes with a side of increased cynicism. Among the random assortment of papers for general education courses like English or history are several very specific orders for education majors, including experienced teachers working on their Master’s or PhDs. There are criminal justice majors and cops who already have a job and are working towards a promotion. Even a few preachers and seminary students. This is particularly ironic given how thirteen years of Brooke has eroded away my faith to nothing. One of those pious preachers-in-training actually paid for an ethics paper with what turned out to be a stolen credit card. I should have seen that coming. I’ve come to believe that everybody’s faking it, everybody lies, and no one is as smart or as accomplished as they claim to be.
Someday, I will write something with my name on it, and people will actually read it. Another magazine article with my byline. Or a blog. Maybe a book. At this point, I’d settle for seeing my name on a Letter to The Editor of the Denver Post, instead of having to be satisfied with reading my words above the name of the angry person who hired me to write what they didn’t know how to say about their Congressman or saving public schools or whatever. Yes, even political activists use ghostwriters sometimes. Unfortunately, for-hire political propaganda writers are even less respected than for-hire term paper writers. Or at least it feels that way on the rare occasions when I dare to tell people what I do for a living.
Unfortunately, Brooke’s puritan work ethic definition of “career” does not allow for self-employment. It specifically does not allow for jobs you can do from, in my case, the discomfort of your own home. Brooke wants steady, predictable income, and as much of it as possible. She does not share my ethical dilemma of academic integrity. Her only ethical or moral problem with my career change was she didn’t think I could make any money unless I had a “real job.” Brooke’s price is whatever it takes for her to maintain the standard of living to which she would like to become accustomed. No amount of haggling will change that. And, so far, I’ve made enough money to do that and still have some leftover for me, so long as I don’t mind living in a storage room behind a laundromat.
I enjoy being self-employed, even if it means every day I don’t work is a day I don’t get paid. I’m a small business owner, even if I can’t tell anyone what I do for a living. And I really do love writing papers; it’s like being paid to be in school. There’s no telling how many BA’s, MA’s, and Ph.D.’s I’ve earned by now, even if they’re all in someone else’s name. I never got a Master’s of my own. Another dream deferred.
It’s still dark when I cross the border into Kansas. Only four hundred fifty miles to go. I could write ten pages in that time. Who knows how many pages I will have not written before this is over. I’m trying not to think about how much this unscheduled father-son reunion is going to cost me in missed orders.
___________________________________
I pull over at a truck stop outside of Manhattan, Kansas – “Visit the Little Apple!” – to take a shower, partially to wake up but mainly because I don’t want to smell like I’m homeless when I walk into the hotel to pick up Dad. My office has the type of bathroom you would expect in an office. No shower there. Truck stops rent shower stalls. I did not know this when I lived in a house.
I check my phone again and ignore the order for a 5-page paper about Maslow. Easy money, but I have my own hierarchy of needs at the moment.
I’m back on the road with the car’s top down. I like the sun. The wind will help keep me awake, but I keep the windows up. Yeah, I’m that guy, the one with the top down and his windows up. I’m past the point of caring if it looks stupid. I still have no idea what I’m going to do with Dad, but I know that I will buy him a phone so I can at least talk to him when he decides to do this again. If he can remember to keep the phone charged.
A plan begins to form somewhere around Topeka, Kansas. Clearly, Dad can’t drive back to Cincinnati on his own. He’d end up circling another Midwestern city for twelve hours and still end up on my side of the river. I think he could follow me back to Colorado. That’s a straight shot with not many places to get lost in between. But, even if he makes it, he can’t stay with me. There’s no bed, no kitchen, and only half a bathroom. Not to mention unfamiliar surroundings and only one small room.
I’ll leave my car in Kansas City, hopefully at the hotel where Dad is, and drive him back to Cincinnati in his own car. Then I can fly back to Kansas City, get my car, and go home. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Cincinnati. Besides, I could use a break from writing research papers before the end-of-semester rush.
