Beyond the Ivory Tower

The Bow-Tied Penitent

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By Harrison S. Key

I was sad, and it was February. I might have looked foppish in my topcoat and Churchill bow tie, but I walked in cheap, unsophisticated brogans, and I was looking for cheap, unsophisticated pizza.

Somewhere in the low 80s on Central Park West, I found a Pizzeria Uno. Now, that's a Chicago place, and in New York, you try not to eat in Chicago. But I liked the poetry of it. So in I went, and sat by myself, and drank a beer, and read a book, and ate a very impersonal pizza.

I was awash in the gloom of a former academic, working my first nonacademic job. This was my new career, the one I'd gotten enough guts to leave academe for, the New Dream Job.

I had found a new life in university development, which is to say fund raising, which is to say asking people for money, which is to say ripping your soul delicately from its metaphysical perch within the shell you no longer have a right to call a body and selling it into the maw of Mammon.

All that to say, it paid very well.

That is why I was in New York, asking people for money. And in a town full of fakes, I was the biggest fake of all. I was counterfeit in every way, in my monkey suit and my bowtie.

By all outside accounts and eyewitnesses, I looked like I had made it. I had gotten on a plane in New Orleans, my home, and flew to La Guardia without layovers. That would have been enough to make my mother weep with pride had she known the meaning of the phrase "no layovers." I paid for chicken salad at the airport and kept the receipt, which meant I had an expense account, which meant I had arrived not just at La Guardia but at My Life. I took a cab, not a shuttle, to Park Avenue, where the hotel elevator waited to take me to the 23rd floor, where the curtains waited to part on Central Park.

I walked outside my hotel, past the cab stand and the sad line of tourists, to my driver. My driver! I had a driver! He drove me around, circled the block when I had a meeting. It was nice. And to top it off, after a day full of meetings at the tops of tall buildings, I was to have dinner in the hip East Village with a hip friend of the family and her hip rock-star fianceé who just then had his picture all over Rolling Stone.

That sounds like a good New York story: A man about town, who knows his way uptown and downtown. But sometime before dinner in the Village I let the driver go and decided to walk, mainly to get a feel for what Walker Percy called the "genie soul" of midtown Manhattan, but also to go to see if the J. Crew on Madison Avenue sold the same clothes as the one in New Orleans.

I walked and walked and walked, and I suppose it was a kind of penance -- penance for the perks, the money spent to get me here to do my job. After enough penitentiary walking I found myself up on Central Park West and feeling like a true penitent: feet hurting, stomach hurting, heart hurting. I hated myself and what I had done: Why had I left one horrible career for another one?

I could go into all the reasons I hated my New Dream Job. I could go on about the mutant relationships one has in an office, the poor guy who does his Austin Powers voice to cheer you up, the tiny battles with Microsoft Outlook, the cocktail parties and fund-raising events for people more worldly than you, the way a fund raiser has to beg one rich man to beg another rich man for money without appearing to beg, the way you fly to New York and go to nice wood-paneled offices and shake hands and try not to look like a redneck.

Yes, I could go into all that, but I won't. Because at the end of the day, everybody hates a job for one of two reasons: You're either not very good at it or you don't want to be.

The only thing in the history of the world that I had ever liked doing was teaching and reading and writing and having a little space to think. But becoming a tenured professor in theater was no longer my dream. I didn't want to contribute to the discipline, and I sure didn't want to watch any more long and boring and please-shoot-me-during-intermission plays.

So I found a great balance: I would work for a university, make a little money, and enjoy being called Dr. Key. But guess what? I hated that, too. I had thrown away the Academic Life, which I no longer wanted, for the Administrative Life, which I no longer wanted.

Then, sitting there with my pizza, about the time I finished beer number three, I realized something: It made perfect sense that I hated my new job. I was in a rebound relationship. We all know about rebounds: You've come out of a bad relationship. You're lonely. You meet someone. You rush into it, all ecstasy and pure-as-snow innocence. The warmth and light of rebirth are on your lips, but you're just not ready yet. You don't know what you want, definitely don't know what you need, and if you rush into things you're going to break the heart of someone special.

So that's what I had to do. I had to break up with My New Dream Job:

(SCENE: February, evening, a pizzeria, Central Park West.)

Me: It's just not working out.

New Dream Job: Are you seeing someone else? Who is it?

Me: No, I mean: kind of. I thought about teaching again.

New Dream Job: Ha! You'll blow your brains out in one year. I'm counting. I'm taking bets. Bets!

Me: I thought maybe teaching at a boarding school, you know. I could teach more broadly, I could still write, with all the vacation. It's perfect, and it's still The Life of the Mind.

New Dream Job: The Life of the Slave.

Me: I'm sorry. It's just -- I needed security, I needed a paycheck. And there you were.

New Dream Job: That's what I am to you, a paycheck?

Me: You'll make someone really happy. But I'll never be happy here, with you.

New Dream Job: You look stupid in a bowtie anyway. (New Dream Job rises, takes the last piece of pizza, and exits.)

And just like that, I was free. It was hard to break up with my Old Dream Job in the college classroom, and it was hard to break up with my New Dream Job in the college fundraising office, but man oh man, didn't it feel good?

So I drank a few more expensive, university-endowed beers and decided to walk all the way back down to my hotel. It was a nice long walk, several miles, but it was fun. I was half-drunk, cold on the outside but all embers on the inside, and best of all: I was free.