My left eye is twitching uncontrollably. The lid wanted to close so long ago. But I fight it off. I make another cup of coffee. I roll another blunt. I put on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I pull out a few of the hairs on the back of my neck. I slap myself across the face.
But the eye, it just wants to be done for the night. I close it hard, I jab my finger into the eyeball, and I press it there until all those little black spots start vibrating with color. I open my eye, shake out the blurriness, crack my neck, and hunch back over my computer. It’s one a.m., and I have another five pages to go on a paper about the Baltic states of the former Soviet Union.
If that doesn’t sound too bad, bear in mind that I woke up early this morning to a twelve-pager about Andrew Jackson, I had a three-page SWOT analysis of Chick-fil-A for lunch, and I spent the evening snuggled up to a seven-page paper on teaching English as a second language.
Once I’m done with my journey through the Baltic, it’s back to America for a seven-pager on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, then a four-page lesson plan for an aspiring special ed teacher. That one is due by five a.m.
My face feels like it’s going to melt. I admit I’m not bringing my “A game” at this point, but I’ve been here so many times before that I already know what’s going to happen. I’m going to do the work. I’ll finish with the sunrise. The dread that some experience just imagining themselves in this scenario—I don’t have that. I just have hours and words.
I’m automatic. I go into a zone. Sometimes, while I’m writing a paper, my mind will start to wander. When it does, my hands just keep writing—stock academic phrases, mostly. At this hour, I’m just stringing words together to get to the end. So if I get distracted and my thoughts stumble off to the comfort of my bed or the items in my refrigerator, I start typing stuff like “insofar as this framework serves to contextualize the subject at hand, we can see the degree to which this may be remarked upon as an effective way of approaching the research addressed here throughout.”
Seriously. My eyes just glaze over, I start thinking about how nice a sandwich would be, and my hands just keep typing academic nonsense. I’m a paper factory, a sweatshop of one, a warehouse of industrial machinery humming over an endless assembly line where the stack of incoming parts never gets smaller.
I’m self-employed, so I’m always on the clock.
One can find me huddled in a corner of the room punching out the last words of an essay before the start of a holiday dinner.
On a romantic getaway, I sneak in a last-minute assignment while the lady gets dressed for dinner.
When I ride the bus, I type furiously while apologizing to those around me for my flying elbows.
I write papers in crowded bars. I write papers in the midst of drunken debauchery, pausing between paragraphs to hit the blunt going around the room. Sometimes during my Thursday-night poker games, I write a few sentences every time I fold a hand.
Once I wandered through an antique garden in New Orleans searching desperately for a wireless Internet signal via which to submit my paper on toxicology. I battered my keyboard furiously at the edge of a hotel bed in Las Vegas, reasoning out an assignment on the cognitive psychology tool known as the Johari window just before the strippers showed up for a bachelor party. I wrote a paper on improving English curriculum design midflight to Chicago, buzzed on Valium, scotch, and acrophobia.
My laptop is a bionic organ always connected to my fingertips. I’ve had my current computer, a MacBook Pro, for just over three years now. The E, D, C, A, S, and L keys have all been rubbed clean of visible lettering. Deep grooves have forged into the plastic. N, I, O, and M are going fast. The acid from my palms has corroded the slick silver coating from the empty spaces on either side of the touch pad. When I do manage to get a few hours of sleep, I just put it on the floor next to the bed, its eerie glow casting visions of lapsing deadlines into my anxious dreams.
The computer before this one was a Dell. I absolutely murdered that piece of shit. I ran it ragged. I never shut it off. The lifestyle was simply too strenuous for it. By the end, the fan ran so loudly it was like writing on top of a dishwasher. It emitted a squalling white noise that sometimes moved me to nausea. Finally, the thing just refused to turn on anymore. I said good riddance and kicked it to the dumpster.
I have yet to find the computer that can keep up with me. I work almost every day of the year. Sometimes I’ll squeeze in one hour. Sometimes, twenty hours. Sometimes I trudge through several twenty-hour days in a row, sometimes weeks of them. Every day is another three, four, or more deadlines. Every week, another hundred-plus pages. Every moment of my life for the past decade has been financed by and grounded in the unending march of assignments that might have enlightened a generation of students.
I started taking blood pressure medication in my mid-twenties to compensate. I don’t recommend it.
But I have my reasons.
I have my reasons for making a living in a way that some would call objectionable, that many have called despicable, that others still would consider intolerable. I have my reasons for working at an hourly rate that many of my better-educated peers would no doubt consider embarrassing; for remaining in this field in spite of my greater aspirations as a writer; for participating directly in the wholesale destruction of American education. And I have my reasons for desiring to be done with it; for deciding to make a clean break from the strangely addictive game of writing papers; for choosing to resolve my long-standing grudge against America’s educational system.
At no point while doing this job have I felt guilty. Don’t flip through these pages searching for remorse. It isn’t there. But I also have not felt particularly proud. A writer does not aspire to this profession so that others can be praised (or ridiculed) for his work.
In any case, this is how it happened. Take what clues you will from it. I spent ten years defrauding the educational system. It would be disingenuous to tell you that I did this out of some strict sense of principle. But the story below is told with principle. I have dedicated my adult life to exploiting the weaknesses in a deeply flawed system. I am no moral authority. But I permeate this flawed system, I feed off of its vulnerabilities, and I know what about it is broken. If you feel compelled to fix it, or simply to avoid exploitation yourself, let my story be instructive to you.
So how did I get to this place, and why does it matter?
Much of what follows is the story of America’s schools. I assure you, I am not the only wasted potential out here in the wilderness. There is a whole generation of malcontents, swindlers, bunglers, cynics, pragmatists, mama’s boys, basket cases, narcissists, and underachievers on the make. I have made my living off of a disaffected, insecure, and dependent generation with no sense of itself, its obligations, and the challenges ahead of it. It will inherit a fading empire, and it will have no concept of what to do with it other than blog its feelings on the matter.
I am often asked how I got into this line of work. I can assure you, it happened quite organically. I hated school and I was broke.
College was a combination of disappointments for me. I went to Rutgers University, the state school of New Jersey, which is often referred to as one of the best schools for your money. If that phrase isn’t a euphemistic kick in the crotch …
Rutgers is a university of great cultural diversity. Its residents will have journeyed there for higher education from far-off places like Vineland, New Jersey; Manalapan, New Jersey; and Metuchen, New Jersey. A veritable melting pot, Rutgers has students from South Jersey and North Jersey. Often we were pushed to the boundaries of cultural tolerance on such heated battlegrounds as whether it should be called a hoagie or a sub and which turnpike rest stop had filthier urinals, Molly Pitcher or Joyce Kilmer.
If you were from in-state, the tuition was low enough that you might’ve had loan money leftover for 40s of malt liquor. Not me. I didn’t manage my money well enough for malt liquor. I once went to a gas station a half mile away from my dorm. The attendant began pumping before he ran my card. He had gotten to a dollar and thirty-seven cents’ worth of gas when my card came back declined. He stopped the pump and told me I had to come up with another way to pay. I told him I had my checkbook on me, and of course he insisted that the gas station did not take personal checks. I offered him back the gas, but he wouldn’t take it. Finally, with no other option, he relented and accepted a personal check in the amount of one dollar and thirty-seven cents. Naturally, the check bounced, and that is the story of how I scored three-quarters of a gallon of gas for little more than the thirty-two-dollar NSF fee assessed by my bank.
I never bought a book during college. I couldn’t afford them, and I certainly wasn’t going to read them. Before college, I went to a fancy high school where the parking lot was sectioned off according to make and model. I parked behind the dumpster, an area specifically reserved for people who only had cars because some older relative had died. I had the same periwinkle Buick Century as the janitor. My high school was competitive, and the people who grubbed for grades there genuinely gave a crap. Truthfully, it was a lot more academically challenging than college. So I decided I could live without the books.
In terms of survival, though, I learned a lot at Rutgers.
College was a financially bleak time for me. My first stab at personal independence was marked by unpaid bills, undone laundry, and unpopped bags of popcorn for supper. So I was down-and-out in the ghettos of New Brunswick. And while I was down, Rutgers University kicked me repeatedly in the ribs and stood over me laughing while I tried to get my bearings.
It locked me out of my classes, so I switched my major. It shunted me from main-campus housing, so I lived on a periphery campus and took buses to my classes. I couldn’t afford basic educational commodities like notebooks or Rutgers pep paraphernalia, so I got a job off-campus. When I applied for a parking pass, I was refused. I spent my first year of school looking for places to hide my car. When I accumulated a sufficient number of parking tickets, my transcript was withheld.
When I called the Office of the Registrar to have my transcript released, I was told to contact the Office of Academic Affairs. When I called the Office of Academic Affairs, I was told to contact the registrar. When I called the registrar back, they told me to consult the head of my major’s department.
All of my classes graded for attendance. All of my classes were so big that the professors had to speak using microphones. All of my classes used multiple-choice tests with Scantron forms so that grading could be done by machine. All of my professors gave lectures with content lifted directly from the text. All of my courses seemed extraneous, unnecessary, and uninteresting. When I was counting down the last days of high school, I never imagined that freedom would be so mediocre.
Rutgers is like so many other schools of its size. It’s a money farm. I didn’t have a class with less than one hundred people in it until I was a senior, and by then I was too angry to care. One of the best schools for your money…
It’s like saying that McDonald’s has great deals on food. Just because it’s relatively cheap doesn’t mean you’re getting a good deal. You could still develop heart disease.
I don’t mean to complain. I’ve made peace with all of this. And it wouldn’t be a big deal if it was just me. I could be nothing more than one loudmouthed jerk with a gigantic chip on his shoulder. But I got ripped off, and I don’t think my experience was unique.
I was a young, aspiring, and arrogant writer. I was doing album reviews for the entertainment insert in our university paper. I was writing a weekly political humor column called The Monkey Goes Where the Wind Blows for the multi-campus publication the Outside World, which was founded by the future great sportswriter and my old high school mate Howard Megdal. I had a small but nerdy following.
I had written the manuscript for a novel but was unable to gain approval for an independent study at Rutgers. “There’s nothing like that here,” they told me.
At this age, I was fairly confident that I would soon be a long-awaited revelation to the world. My first book was going to be a monumental success, and it would force America to examine its own psyche. It would not be very long before I was sleeping atop a mattress made of money on a yacht crewed by beautiful naked women. You know, like novelists do.
Incidentally, I couldn’t sell my work to pay for Q-tips. I started college in 1998 assuming that by junior year I’d be able to dispense with taking classes and move right on to the lecture circuit. But by the arrival of fall semester 2001, I regularly considered faking my own death to get out of paying campus parking tickets.
In 2001, the cost of getting your car out of tow in New Brunswick was ninety dollars. This was pretty close to a year’s wages for me at the time. I indicated as much to Erin, my fellow communication major. We had three classes together, so we became study buddies. We’d check in for attendance, then sneak out to get high. One day, as we sat out on her roof passing a joint and listening to Bob Dylan, I lamented the loss of my car. I told her of my desperate predicament and the sad reality that I would probably never see my beloved periwinkle Buick Century—Slow Lightnin’, I used to call her—again.
She offered to lend me ninety dollars. My friends were mighty generous to me in those days. But I refused. I couldn’t even think of when I’d be in a position to repay that money.
“Hmmm,” she reflected.
“Eh?”
“I’ll give you ninety bucks to write my sociology paper.”
Well, now. This was something new. This wasn’t charity. Somebody was willing to pay for my work. My first commission!
Suddenly, everything changed. Would you believe it if I told you that people started begging to give me money for my writing?
Erin was happy with her paper, so she recommended me to a friend in a fraternity. He too expressed interest in paying money for my work. I established a formal pricing structure. I charged him ten dollars per page and an eighth of weed. He was thrilled to do business with me.
I came over to his frat house at eleven a.m. to gather up his text and the details for his assignment. He mashed up an OxyContin and snorted it through a twenty-dollar bill. He took a big gulp of Busch Light and said, “Hey man, there’s a ton of guys around here that would love you.”
Dude was right. I became quite the popular man around the fraternity. By the middle of the fall semester, I was carrying a significant portion of its course load. Word got around fast that there was a way to get out of doing work without being placed on academic probation. Giving a frat boy an easy way to cheat is like putting a preschooler in the priesthood. They were all over me.
Of course, this did not make me a suddenly wealthy man. But now I had money for malt liquor and even some food. Anytime I could top that off with a little action on the side… I am a simple man of simple needs.
My quality of life changed. I was getting less sleep but more of everything else. And finally—and really for the first time in my postadolescent life—I was actually doing homework. It wasn’t mine, but I was doing it.
And I was writing for a living. So my name wasn’t on the work. So what?
I was in high demand.