The evening meets me with a call from Jasmine. Shuffling my cellphone to my good ear and my car into second, I turn onto Nedderman as she tells me of a cough, some pain medicine, and something about dizziness or nausea that I don’t quite recall. I cast my half-burned comma to the pavement and make a whole-hearted attempt to talk her out of panic.
“But Dann, aren’t we supposed to have our backgrounds finished tonight?” the cellphone screams.
I need to remember to turn that down.
“Remember our last time, Jaz? We do what we know, and we improvise the rest,” I say, fingers fumbling with the phone buttons.
“But what about the group? Is everyone there?”
“Jaz, I’m not even there yet. I’m turning into the south lot now – the meeting doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes.”
“Dann, I’d go, I really would, but I’m sitting here at the 7-11 and I feel sick, just really sick!”
Right. Cough medicine mind fog. I quickly apologize for probably being the one who gave it to her two weeks back. Scholarly journals and jazz will do that to a person.
“Listen, stay there until you feel alright to drive. If you need anything — anything — call my cell and I’ll come down there to help, OK?”
“Sure thing!”
“When you think you can make it home safely, email me your paper and I’ll read it off to the group, just like we do in class. Any notes we have, I’ll write down and send back to you.”
“You’re too good to me, Dann. You really are. I’ll send it to you just as soon as I make it home.”
“It’s all good, Jaz. Call me if you need anything.”
“Alright, Dann! Take care!”
I find a parking spot close to the library, reserved until 7:00 PM for a permit that I don’t have. The clock on the dash reads 6:53. What a rebel.
Encumbered with a cane from last Friday’s back injury, I pass like a kidney stone through the evening crowd. I find Celeste lingering by the door, her comma in flame, all atwitter with Zen bop comic halo and wow-you-look-beat here-let-me-help-you-with-that.
“Do you see anyone from the group?” she asks.
“Not yet, but they may be downstairs. Let’s give it a few minutes before we go off looking. How was work?”
Two weeks before midterms, and the myspacers and facebookers still flicker, strut, and flutter in and out of the digital flame. My group seems not to have condensed from the crowd, so I wave a friendly hello to Sarah and Jen as Celeste and I stake out a cluster of chairs distant from the depots of binary flow.
Rebecca strolls in, meets up, and drops off her bags before bearing in on some social capacity in a small Styrofoam cup. Rachelle breezes by on her way to the printers, pausing only to ask if everyone’s here. I tell her about Jasmine, and gesture towards where Rebecca probably still is.
A few moments later, all are present or accounted for. Hot coffee in one hand and cold paper in the other, Rebecca hands her craft around the table. Rachelle and I quickly follow in kind.
“Warning – this is drafty,” I advise as I spread my paper-clipped madness to those who see fit to entertain my capacity for understatement. I’d only myself finished an hour ago, a half afternoon of word stream piece-mail brainstorm finger painting.
“Yeah, likewise,” Rachelle chimes in. “I only had three hours to work on this today, but I think it’s at least ready for y’all to look at.”
“You know,” Rebecca says, “the professor thinks my paper is too full of fluff. I don’t know what to do about it. I looked through, and didn’t find anything to cut.”
We take pace to read each other’s words and develop first impressions. Most of each looks good, they both have solid topics, but both are peppered with easily fixable style slips and grammatical shortcomings.
“Hey, before we get too into this, you want to go for a smoke?” Rebecca asks, looking at Celeste and me.
“I’m cool with that. Rachelle, can you watch our stuff?” I ask.
“Yeah, no problem. Wow – you’re all smokers? You should really quit. That stuff’ll kill ya.” I quickly deny that smoking is my habit – quitting, on the other hand – quitting is the real addiction.
Celeste hangs out by the door as Rebecca and I stumble to the nearest park bench, plug in, light up, and turn on.
“I can’t wait until I’m out of this place,” she said. “I’m only in this one class this semester, then I’m graduating and heading back to Austin. I was born here and raised here, but that job is keeping me busy 65 hours per week! You’ve seen my papers; you’ve seen how far it’s come. I just don’t have the time to work on this!”
“Yeah, I know how it goes,” I reply, “Though your paper is better than you probably think it is. We had a network system to release last week at the office, and I was up there until two every night.” Some of those folks up there, they just don’t see how work was never meant to be all consuming. You crawl out of the white collar sweat shop cube farm at one in the morning, and people scowl at you for not staying until three. You and I, Rebecca, we both work ourselves to the core. When the flesh is burned and gone, all we have left is to write with is bone.
“No doubt. Listen. I can’t find anything wrong with your paper. I read the intro a few weeks go, and now this background section – there’s absolutely nothing I can tell you to fix. It’s perfect. That’s the only response I can give. That’s the only thing I can write in my reaction paper for you. No notes, no circles or errors – it’s perfect.”
Perfect? Words are sacred, sensual, immortal creation – but they’re seldom perfect. The right words improve upon the paper on which they’re written. The space between should itself be left to speak, in nuance and subtlety between the outlined this and the therefores and thats. What’s left out of a paper tells you as much as what’s left in – I’m at 27 pages already, and I’ve only got 50 to work with. Tell me what to leave out, so the texts and the reader can both have their places to speak. Tell me where my arguments need better structure. Tell me you sent a wild, loose comma back to the punctuation farm. Papers are never finished; they’re only abandoned when the cost of passionate editing ‘just one more time’ at 3am some chance Tuesday outweighs the cost of doing something else – typically something for which you get paid.
Some fellow student wanders by asking for a smoke. Rebecca offers her P-funks, and I my hippie killers. He takes one of each, comments on her hot green zodiac lighter, and we two make our way back inside.
Rachelle is feverishly typing away on her laptop when we return. We re-form the circle, and melt another hour into the life of each other’s words. I scratch my thoughts onto their papers, and they onto mine. We discuss the nature of citations and audience, and try to condense what-goes-where from the vapor of previous interactions.
“It’s nine o’clock – I need to get going,” Rachelle mentions while hastily packing up her things.
“I’ve got to head back to Los Colinas tonight, and I’m going to get there late enough as it is.”
“Yeah, I need to head out, too.” Rebecca’s boyfriend is probably waiting up for her, despite likely warnings to the contrary.
“That’s cool my me,” I found myself saying. “There’s another group from class over there, and it looks like they’ve got someone missing. I’ll go see if they’ve got any cool writing to look at. I’m not done with your papers, though – can you email me copies so I can give you all my thoughts later this week?”
“Sure – I’ll send it along when I get home,” Rebecca replies.
I quickly pull out my laptop and check for email from Jaz – nothing yet. I scribble a note to email it to the group once it comes in.
Rachelle stands up, offering to send hers tomorrow. “Be mean – be ruthless. I like the way you edited my last paper: you didn’t pull any punches. The whole thing was full of red lines – can you do that again?”
Sometimes you throw water on a fire, and sometimes you throw gas.
“Oh, of course – how could I do any less? You both have much better papers than you think. I don’t even like my own paper yet, but we’ll get them all to shine.”
That’s why I asked for this group. I like the people, and I like their topics. I thank both of them for letting me read their work. They stand down, pack up and check out for the evening.
Celeste fidgets with the second to last copy of my paper. She shows me a missing conjunction, a few stranded commas, and two knotted sentences. I make note of all of it as we head over to the other group.
Sarah, Jen, and Bruce sit across the library, exchanging parting words for the evening. Celeste and I say hello, and talk for a few minutes about everyone’s thesis topics. We again exchange contact information while I heartily enjoin both to send me their papers.
“The professor is in her office until 10, right?” asks Sarah.
“Yeah, so far as I know. I’m planning to stop by, too.” I reply. “I sent her some questions a few days ago that I didn’t think I’d need answered for a few more weeks, but I’m running into something that may affect what I hand in on Friday.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover with her as well.”
The crowds fly south for the night as we three wind our way through the commons. Willing slaves to our dominatrix of dialectics, we huddle close and speak only in hushed tones of disciplinary conflicts and higher purposes.