Fairlee E. Winfield

I used to teach in this room. It wasn't all mauve and soft dust rose colored then. There was no plush carpet on the floor. The desks were small--hard metal and thin wood with a tiny Formica writing space. The room was GI brown and shit brindle. Asphalt tile floor, always dirty especialy when the snows started. It was my first year as a professor of linguistics. No one in the department even knew what linguistics was then.

The department chair was a Shakespeare scholar, an ex-preacher. During my interview he asked me how much of my spare time I would be spending on "women's lib" activities. He should have been fired for that question, but I was too much in need of the job to report him or to give him anything but a polite reply.

I wasn't fond of the English Department, but I used to love the department meetings. The Shakespeare-preacher-scholar-chair habitually tilted his hips forward against a table as he professed. The table hit him just below his genitals making them bulge prominently almost escaping from his zipper. He had great huge cohones.

I taught psycholinguistics in this room. The most notable thing about the room at that time was the pen and ink portrait of Carrigan herself. A stern, plump woman with glasses and stringy hair. Dark dress, lace colar. A real tough looking lady.

She's still hanging here, but I'm leaving. There won't be a portrait of me on the wall. Not even a cheap pencil sketch. I couldn't afford it, and the administration wouldn't want it. I've overheard my cryptic nickname, Katherine of Arrogance.

I'm sitting here, again in this room, in a writer's workshop. My friend Ann suggested it. A workshop guy, Jerry, with beard, tattoos, rings on every finger, bracelets on each wrist reads his short-story. "Fucking, shit, watered down piss...." he says. Jerry has an outstanding four letter word vocabulary.

It's a particularly boring story about dull people dragging the aura of the 60's into the 90's. The counter-culture to multi-culture.

I'm wondering what agreeable things the fellow students will say. Jerry finishes reading and the long silver chain on his belt clanks as he sits again with a challenging look at his fellow workship inmates.

It won't help. We've had six stories so far. Five of them about sad, poor people living in trailer parks. Not marginalized, now main stream. Everyone lives in a trailer park, gets raped, abused, takes dope, and ends up with AIDS. It's a tabloid-show world.