To say that Professor Lenny Fuller has an irreverent attitude to dusty, unimaginative, uninspiring academia is an understatement. But he carries on handing out his A+ grades to new tranches of anthropology students, one eye set on his students' horizons and the other on his imminent retirement. Meanwhile the university hierarchy has its eyes set on him. So, when he swaps his staid corduroys for hip hop polyester and starts lecturing in explicit rap, the powers-that-be are ready to swoop.
His secretary's son (described by author John Coetzee - Pulitzer and Booker Prize winner) as "a superb creation") finds society looks different when he's dressed for the day in Fuller's cords, in a surprisingly ground shifting anthropological experiment. Or is it therapy?
In any case, Lenny Fuller is too preoccupied with a more domestic mystery to worry about his changing employment status. A rather intimate mystery, possibly involving Julia Roberts, that gets solved with the help of Juan, the Mexican campus gardener.
March 1999
Fuller sat on the desk and watched the last students trickle out the door. He observed, for the umpteenth time, the balancing act of the absurdly oversized jeans hanging across the middle of most of the male butts (to his surprise, he had still never seen a pair fall to the floor) and the girls’ bare midriffs bounce-floating above their jeans that seemed glued to the widest part of their hips. He knew a few names, but not many. It was an Anthro Intro 101 class and there were about sixty pupils. He had noticed years before that the older he got the fewer students hung around him after a lecture, especially the females. On this day a handful said goodbye, but no one made a move in his direction. Class ended at four; by four-oh-two the room was empty except for himself, the desks, and the chairs.
To try to wake up the group of bobbing afternoon heads, he had closed out his discourse with an anecdote about an African tribe where the witch doctor cuts off the head of a chicken, analyzes the pattern of the blood that has squirted on the ground between himself and the patient, then, on that basis, solves whatever problem the person sitting in front of him might have. It seems to work quite well. The doctor’s powers are rarely, if ever, questioned. Fuller had heard the story when he was a student thirty-odd years prior. He couldn’t remember the name of the tribe – the “Arunti” or Ashunti” or whatever – but he didn’t care. He hadn’t and wouldn’t bother to look it up. The story had stayed stored in some soft corner of his noggin. The teacher’s name, however, he remembered: Dr. Merlin Myers, a Chicago School man. It was Myers more than anyone else who had pushed Fuller into the field of Cultural Anthropology. Images like the miniature geyser of chicken blood falling on the dirt inside an African hut had always taken his mind off the war in Vietnam and sex for a while. His junior year he switched his major from engineering to anthropology. Dr. Myers liked his senior thesis, “Symbolic Reality: A Socio-Anthropological Essay on the Nature of Reality” and nudged him into following his tracks to Chicago to do his doctorate. That was in 1969.
“Strap-on, 69ers,” he thought as he picked up his battered briefcase. He hadn’t heard this expression since his freshman year in high school. When he heard it then, mostly coming out of the mouths of football players or guys that were trying to look like Elvis, he didn’t know what it meant. He turned off the light and walked out into the spring air. He often wondered why he still carried the briefcase to classes because he almost never opened it. His lectures were like rocks rubbed smooth and slick by the flow of eons of water. In this case the eons were twenty-five years of teaching the same crap. Three decades of anthropology had essentially done one thing to Fuller: it had made him lose respect for the human race. This isn’t wholly correct. He had lost respect for man as a “free” being, but still had great respect for what man was able to make. On the one hand, man was a slave, but on the other hand he was a great builder.
The campus for example. It was beautiful and beautifully kept up by a team of gardeners that Fuller admired as much or more than his fellow professors. Most of the gardeners were Mexicans who likely hadn’t had many breaks in life, but who mowed lawns, trimmed trees and planted flowers with wonderful results. Fuller always held his small seminars outside when the weather permitted. He figured that if he and the students were boring each other, at least they all had the landscape and the sky to look at. He only knew one of the school gardeners by name, Juan José Carlos Rodriguez. He looked to be long past retirement age, but because he had come into the country with wet feet and no passport, he had probably invented an age that had allowed him to work well into his seventies. Fuller had once asked him how old he was and he had laughed and said, “Old enough to know I don’t be planting fucking flores forever.” Over the years Fuller had invited him into his office on a number of occasions for a hot or a cold drink.
It was warm out and Fuller took off his jacket and held it over his left shoulder with a finger. He asked himself why he still wore a sports jacket to teach in. He decided it must be the pockets and he had to wear something. The Anthropology Department was at the extreme south end of campus. Fuller lived on the north side, but he enjoyed the walk. He wandered toward the student union building and decided to go in for a cup of coffee. He had papers to correct that evening, maybe. He sat down at a table next to a couple that were touching fingers and staring like owls into each other’s eyes. Strap on, 69ers. Anthropology had taught him another thing: in most societies, the guys in power are, one way or another, usually sexually very active. How often had he studied tribes in which the chief had to deflower all the virgins before they were passed on to their husbands? Often. Or tribes in which the chief’s list of wives was as long as a Denny’s menu? Often. Was Western civilization an exception? wondered he more than once. Openly, yes. Behind closed doors it was hard to know. Kennedy had shacked up with quite a few evidently. But had Nixon? Had Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? Certainly not Carter. He felt guilty just thinking about a substitute for Rosalyn. Reagan? Hard to say. Nancy seemed like she kept those handcuffs on pretty tight. Clinton? Probably not nearly as much as he hoped for. Too many eyes on the White House. Who knows? The French and Italians seem to wield a different stick. Mitterand’s mistress sat next to his wife at his funeral. Chirac and Berlusconi look like they’re doing their face-lifts to capture more than votes.
Fuller dropped a sugar cube into his coffee. The couple were now leaning over the table kissing. One of them knocked a glass on the floor which brought the embrace to an end. Serves them right, Fuller thought only meaning it halfheartedly. He was all for love. What bothered him was that in spite of the risks that seemed to pop up every decade or so, it seemed like this young generation was getting it on like rabbits. MTV made the youth culture look like a non-stop merry-go-round orgy. When he was a kid they carried chewing gum and Certs in their pockets; these kids carry ten-packs of rubbers.
The boy and girl were picking up the pieces of the broken glass. Fuller noticed that a G-string, sliding purposely above the girl’s pants, looked like it was made of see-through plastic. Plastic underwear? Is this possible? But they did have those plastic brassiere straps. At least, they looked plastic. When they were back in their chairs, Fuller considered asking the girl what her undergarments were made of, but they never made eye contact. Fuller noticed that eye contact and age were inversely proportional: the older you became the less people looked at you. He still tried, tried all the time, but now that he was in his late fifties, the only people who looked at him were people trying to sell him something or doctors and dentists. Fucking flores, he thought.
Fuller’s second wife had died along with their Toyota minivan five years earlier. They, wife and minivan, hit a tree – a tree hit them – one night while they were coming home from her aerobics class. A patch of ice was deemed responsible for bringing the three together. So the police said, anyway. Fuller had been devastated at the moment, but later realized that maybe people over fifty are better off living alone. They had been married for six years, and after the honeymoon had ended, he had felt he was in his wife’s way most of the time. Her incessant complaints about his dirty shoes, toothpaste marks in the basin, rings around the bathtub, and poorly-scoured pots and pans all ceased with her death. Though he never made it public, he secretly concluded that their separation had been a good thing. He just wished it had come about more peacefully.
His first wife, with whom he had lovely twin daughters, moved in with her psychiatrist the day after her daughters went away to college. Fuller remembered, September 1st, 1984. They had agreed to stay together until the girls were gone. Dolores wasted not a day. On September 2nd she loaded the Saab with three suitcases and a duffel bag and drove three miles to Dr. Arthur Barnes’s apartment and scotch-taped her name under his on the mailbox. Sixteen months later the mailbox said “Dr. and Mrs. Dolores Barnes”. Fuller couldn’t have been happier. His wife had somebody to talk to and the psychiatrist had somebody to screw. Every now and then it was the other way around. So Dolores said anyway.
Fuller still lived in the house he and Dolores had bought when he got the job at the university. Dolores always complained that it was his job that decided where they lived and not hers. She had been a pregnant fashion designer then. Fuller had no beef about following her to New York or Los Angeles or wherever fashion gets fabricated, but she had quit her job with a difficult pregnancy while Fuller was offered a full-time position on a Colorado campus. They moved from Chicago to the foot of the Rockies. Dolores became an interior decorator.
When Fuller opened the door the radio was on. He never locked the house using an anthropologist’s reverse psychology that if the door is locked and the thieves don’t get an answer when they ring the doorbell, they’ll rob the place; if the door is open they’ll think somebody is home and they’ll go rob somebody else. Besides, there was nothing to steal anyway. His TV barely worked, he didn’t have a computer or a DVD player, his paintings were abstract, his clothes were mostly bought twenty years ago, his music system was a turntable and bulky speakers, and he didn’t wear jewelry. Fuller wondered why the radio, his clock-radio (the only radio in the house), was on. He turned it off and looked at the bedding. Were the sheets and blankets the way he left them that morning? He never made the bed before he went to work. He didn’t know how he had left things. He pulled up the covers, bent over, and put his nose to the sheets to see if he could detect a foreign odor, to see if someone had been sleeping there. He had left that morning at seven and now it was five. Somebody had definitely had time for a good snooze. Was this a new fad he didn’t know about – taking naps in foreign beds before the owners get home? He smelled nothing unusual, but he did find a strange foot-long reddish-brown hair near the pillow on the side of the bed he didn’t sleep on. He checked the time on the alarm: 4:00pm. He hadn’t had anybody in that bed for months. And the last person, Sarah Fletcher, a student from years before who was now a divorced graduate assistant, had short blonde locks. Somebody had been in his bed and had left before the alarm went off forgetting to turn it to the “off” position. That somebody had long mahogany hair. At least it was most likely a female. But had she bedded down with another somebody who wasn’t losing hair? Or who had the cool Charles Barkley shaved head look?
Fuller rubbed under his ear with his left hand and went into the kitchen. Nothing had been touched as far as he could tell. Idem for the living room and bathroom. He went back to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Chardonnay. He went into the living room and put on Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishermen”. He finished the wine, lay down and tried to think of who he knew who had hair like the one he found in his bed. He couldn’t think of anyone. He fell asleep before the two heroes who are in love with the same woman could sing their famous duet.
The next day at school Fuller began to observe people and their hair more closely. Though it was possible that the person who had borrowed his bed was a complete stranger, the odds favored somebody who knew whose bed they were sleeping in. He was in his office at eight. By eleven-thirty the only person he had seen with long reddish-brown hair was the campus mailman who delivered a stack of anthropological journals to his secretary’s desk at ten-thirty. Fuller happened to be walking past his secretary to the rest room when the mail was delivered. The mailman was a male, new on the job, to whom Fuller had never said a word in his life, and who had never said a word to Fuller. But he did have a long reddish-brown ponytail. When he left Fuller asked Sharon, “Sharon, do you know the new mailman”?
“No, why?”
“I found a long reddish-brown hair in my bed yesterday.”
“Lucky you.”
“We know each other too well.”
“What was her name?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking about the mailman.”
“What’s the mailman got to do with it?”
“Didn’t you see his hair?”
“No, why?”
“It was long and brown with a red tint.”
“Dr. Fuller, if that guy was in your bed yesterday, I’ll sign up tomorrow to turn my flesh into McChicken sandwiches.”
“Maybe he just came to town and doesn’t have a place to stay yet. You know, delivers mail until noon then finds a house with an open door and sacks out for a while in the afternoon.”
“There are other people in this town with hair like that.”
“I know. You’re right.”
“You don’t remember who you went to bed with?
“That’s just it. I didn’t go to bed with anyone.”
“Oh. So someone borrowed your bed, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“You sure?”
“No. But I found this hair.”
“Was it pretty?”
“As pretty as one hair can be.”
“You say it was long, reddish-brown... I’ll bet on Julia Roberts.”
“I don’t even like Julia Roberts.”
“I know. You’ve told me. Too much mouth. Too many teeth. I’d say start examining your students. That sounds like something one of them would do. Watch who comes up to your desk.”
“Nobody does. Hardly anybody anyway.”
“It only takes one.”
“True. Thanks Sharon. I’ll keep an eye out. By the way, have either of my daughters called?”
“No.”
“Just wondering. It’s my birthday.”
“How could I forget? Maybe that explains the hair. An early birthday present. Happy birthday Lenny.”
“Thanks. Can I take you out to lunch on my birthday?”
“You can take me out to lunch on your dog’s birthday. How soon?”
“In an hour. I’ve got a one o’clock class.”
“That’s right. Eleven-thirty then?”
“You’re an angel Sharon. You just haven’t grown your wings yet.”
“If I had them I’d probably fly away and leave you.”
“That’s why you don’t have them yet.”
“They’d better hurry. I retire next year.”
“They’d better. Meet you at Tia Rosa’s at eleven-thirty. Mexican okay?”
“It’s your birthday.”
“That’s right. Don’t forget to wear your sexy dress.”
“Heil Hitler.” She saluted with a flat palm and Fuller went down the corridor to his office to think about the hair and whatever else was clogging his system.