This is my first story written from a male perspective and I hope it turns out okay.
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The second quarter of the fall semester was turning out to be a bitch. The Dean had laid on another section of European History on me after one of the other profs got herself bent out of shape in an auto accident and I had to take over mid-stream. The prof was one of those radical feminist types who always thought that every event in history was just another excuse for an "assault on womyns' vaginas!"
Naturally, it was my luck to not be at the Department meeting when it was decided who would take over the classes filled with militant neo-lesbians.
I guess a little of my own history is in order. My name is Philistine Smith, or 'Phil', and I am a tenured Professor of Western Civilization at the University of California at Berkeley. That probably explains a lot to you about the militant neo-lesbian component on my campus. I've got another fifteen years to go until I qualify for full retirement, but when you're fifty-one fifteen years doesn't seem all that long a time.
I actually went to this school thirty years ago and was one of the fellows who actually went to class and did okay for himself instead of smoking pot, dropping acid, and protesting "The War" and "The Man". I graduated with my Phi Beta Kappa Key and found a lot of doors in the world flung wide open before me. It wasn't hard for me to pick up a teaching job at Mills College where I spent my days teaching and my nights writing my doctoral thesis on why the Edict of Nantes was actually a good thing for the Hugenots in the end.
My doctoral thesis attracted the attention of the old guard of the faculty at Berkeley as it was one of the few mundane subjects they'd seen in quite some time. They were surprised that I could string together six hundred pages without using the name "Viet Nam" even once. I was offered a tenured position in the Social Sciences Department and that was about it for me.
I rapidly became known for not having a single controversial idea and the more conservative students, those who managed to finagle their way onto campus, all tended to gravitate to my classes. All the better to my liking as I didn't have to deal with walk-outs, sit-ins, drop-outs, and fuck-ups. In thirty years of tenure I'd never been mentioned on the front page of any newspaper nor as the lead story on the evening news. This is a rare accomplishment at Berkeley.
Well, yes. And I also met my darling wife in 1976. We were at a bar along Telegraph where I was grading papers and she was a grad student celebrating the election of Jimmy Carter. As the first Democrat since Kennedy (true Dems don't count Johnson, I've found) there was a lot of hope that Carter would be able to clean up Washington and heal the wounds of Viet Nam and Watergate and Anna was radiant with hope that evening. And no small amount of rum, too, I might add. The rum is how we met, or what caused us to meet, that is.
Anna jumped up on a table as Gerald Ford came on TV to concede the election to Carter and I looked up to see her lose her balance. I caught her head just before she would've hit the fireplace at the old bar and, in the process, doused a number of papers with beer. She laughed her drunken head off and asked me my name before going back to the party. I shook my head at the foolish drunk and gathered up the sodden paperwork to take home and toss in the dryer.
The next day a much more sober Anna came to my office and apologized for her lack of decorum the night before. She'd had to go back to the bar to get my name as she'd forgotten it as quickly as I'd said it to her. Upon visiting the bar she examined the spot where we'd met, took a good look at the fireplace, and realized how close she'd come to dying from a head injury. And I was her hero.
Imagine that. Me. A hero. To Anna, I was better than Superman. I was the first man she'd met who didn't try to get in her pants right away and I didn't make a big deal about saving her life, which seemed to enamor her of me even more.
She took me home to meet her family over Thanksgiving and then I came back for Christmas and New Years. The clock rang in 1977 and I proposed to Anna on bended knee with four years' savings displayed in a little blue box from Tiffany & Co.
It seemed appropriate that we were married on January 20th, Jimmy Carter's Inauguration Day.
The years went by and Anna gave me three beautiful children. All three grew up to be the kind of kids any man would be damned proud to have. Our eldest, Lisa, works for the Justice Department as a young FBI agent. Millie, the middle child, is pre-med at Johns Hopkins. And Darryl, our youngest. What can I say? The son of a radical and a nebbish and he got on the bus for UC San Diego and got off at Camp Pendleton. Right now he's God-knows-where hunting for Saddam and Osama for his Uncle Sam as a United States Marine. He's quite the sight in his uniform, especially when he comes to visit the old man here at Berkeley.
He came to see me last month before he shipped out and he walked proudly into the nest of neo-lesbian heckles and screams that is now one of my classes. It was quite inspiring to me when he kept his calm and walked to the front of the class and saluted me before hugging me. The class was dead silent when they heard him say, "I love you, dad."
The mean faces with short-clipped hair were all mute, probably in fear that I'd retaliate against them come grading time.
And isn't that the joy of tenure? Make no doubt, some of those sick little Rosie O'Donnell wanna-bes will be losing their financial aid when their semester grades come out. I hope their little attitudes are as welcome at Podunk Community College as they are at Berkeley.
Anyhow, I saw my son off after first dismissing the class and I walked him across campus to get him a cab to the train station at Emeryville. I found myself looking at him now and again as we walked and I wondered how it was that I had raised a lean, mean, killing machine. I still remember him crying when his goldfish died.
I still remember him crying at his mother's funeral last year.
His entire platoon, eighty-three strong, came to the funeral and six of them carried Anna from the chapel to her final resting place. Darryl's sergeant ("Master Gunnery Sergeant Ortiz!", as he'd surely remind me) later told me that he'd felt an obligation to show the respect of The Corps to the mother of, as he said, "One damn fine Marine, sir!" Turns out that this is high praise from a USMC Sergeant.
My Anna was the mother of a damn fine boy and I'll never forget it.
Which brings me to Thrusday night three weeks ago. Melissa Courtney, a fetching little lass if there ever was one, comes into my office blathering about her financial aid and scholarships and on and on. She's actually one of the better students, and normal, to boot, in the neo-lezbo class.
Quite by mistake, I'd flunked her thinking she was one of the lezbo mob that had screamed and spat at my Darryl. It would just be a matter of paperwork for me to correct her grade and I'd have simply done that were it not for her sudden clarity of speech.
"Prof. Smith, sir, I'll do ANYTHING, I mean it sir, ANYTHING, to get my grade back!"
She kept talking and I guess I just tuned out the noise and thought about her long, brown hair and her shapely little figure. After all, it had been five years since Anna and I had, well, you know with her illness there hadn't been any sex at the Smith house in some time.
I held my hand up to Miss Courtney and she quieted down.
"Now, Miss Courtney," I swallowed as I crossed an ethical line, "you had a...a proposition in mind, did you? And what, pray tell, would that be young lady?"
The English language with all of its nuances and intonations has the remarkable ability to say something while using words completely unrelated to the message being conveyed. Miss Courtney grasped my meaning accurately.
Her eyes widened and she whispered, "You mean you want me to give you a blowjob?"
I stood up and went to the door of my office. I looked up and down the hall and the place was a tomb. A glance at the clock and I realized it was after eight in the evening! No wonder we were alone. I closed the door and locked it before turning back to Miss Courtney.
"Yes, Melissa, a blowjob shall be a nice start to redeeming your grade. But first," (in for a penny, in for a pound I say) "why don't we see those boobs of yours? Hmm?"
