Chapter II: Nolan Grasso Gets Paid

Nolan Grasso—a stocky Sicilian who more adequately resembled a bulldog than a human being—lived a few miles from Morgenthau in one of the three cities known locally as the Tri-Towns. He hadn’t been back to the college since his run-in with the addicts in the woods, which ended a three-year run as the university’s de facto landlord, a position later filled by his brother Simeon.

Nolan’s family had been instrumental in the demise of the University in its previous life as a thriving academic community. Back when The Professor’s hair was still a salt-and-pepper gray, The Grassos had stepped in to save the university from fatal bankruptcy, buying the property from the Board of Trustees and assuming financial control of the University. It seemed like a wise idea at the time. Nolan’s father and uncle were both Morgenthau alums who had parlayed their graduate degrees into successful careers in the local real estate business. Had the board of trustees not been so desperate to pass the hot potato, they might have suspected a trap.

Nobody could have possibly saved Morgenthau, and it was more expensive for the Grassos to keep the school open than it was for them to close the school altogether. They could have slowly bled the campus to death over ten years, but Nolan’s father and uncle accelerated the process so quickly that by the time it picked up momentum, it could not be stopped by anyone or anything.

The Grassos were the rightful owners of the property, and once they closed the school they intended to sell the plot—the largest undeveloped piece of real estate in the county—to sub developers and builders that would convert the 80-year-old campus into a classy, gated community. The Professor, a dozen of his colleagues and a hundred students launched protests and received some media attention, but their cries for action fell on deaf ears.

Once the school closed, the Grassos found themselves in an awkward legal fight to redevelop the property. Morgenthau alums—as the Grassos were well aware—were in just about every facet of life in the region. Everyone from surgeons and teachers to businessmen and architects had once walked the sprawling brick walkways and studied in the Gardens. Several alums ended up on the county’s Zoning Committee, which would be a key player in re-classifying the property for residential space. A generation ago, when the school went through a minor fiscal crisis, the school’s trustees lobbied the county to classify the property as farmland, virtually cutting the school’s property tax burden in half.

Altering the property’s zoning required a majority vote from three panelists, two of whom were Morgenthau alumni. On two occasions, the board refused to grant the zoning change to the Grassos. The family had tried to wait out the Democratic administration that appointed the committee, but two elections had kept the ruling party in power. A year before The Professor’s death, the GOP finally won power in the county, thanks in small part to heavy donations from the Grasso family. However, there was still no guarantee that the deal would finally be approved, and the Grassos were faced with yet another long waiting period.

Even though the property was losing them money every year, the farmland zoning of the college meant that the Grassos paid miniscule taxes that were unheard of in the large suburban county. They did not pay for water, electricity, sewage, trash removal, heat or any other amenities. Yet, to the surprise of the Nolan, Simeon, their dad and their uncle, people continued to live there. By the third year of the standoff between the Grassos and the county, a large group of squatters had taken up residency in the main residence hall of the abandoned Morgenthau campus. Early attempts to remove the squatters proved to be quite frustrating. Those who were kicked out normally moved back within 24 hours.

The hot-tempered Nolan, 25 years old at the time, began demanding rent from the squatters who were living on the property illegally. Nolan demanded a steep rent of $100 a month from the residents, punishable by the penalty of an ass kicking and a painful eviction. For the first month, nobody paid Nolan, and many nights were filled with screams and the sound of pounding fists. Nolan and his band of neighborhood goons were merciless at first. By the second month of the collection, at least half of the residents paid him in full, while others paid partial rents. Those who did not were still subject to the brutal smackdowns by Nolan.

When Nolan started collecting the rent, close to 70 freeloaders were squatting at Morgenthau. The collections allowed the Grassos to make a few grand a month, which eased the family’s cost of owning the campus while they waited on the zoning board to rule in their favor. Many squatters left, but many more moved in. The Tri-Town area that bordered Morgenthau to the east, west and south produced some of the nation’s finest academic talent. Those left in its wake tended to end up as part of the new freshman class of no tomorrow.

For about two years, the collections continued on the first of every month. Nolan—who was ironically a freeloader himself, living off the fat of the land provided by his wealthy father—became increasingly bored and dissatisfied with his job. He stopped coming around in the winter because it was too cold for him and the smoke from the oil drum fires refused to wash out of his Guido dress shirts.

It was that spring that Kendra Keane moved into the neighborhood after meeting The Professor at a soup kitchen in one of the Tri-Towns. Kendra quickly became one of the biggest thorns in Nolan’s side. Nolan had become comfortably apathetic with the squatters in Morgenthau, but after Kendra appeared and began her righteous crusade, Nolan’s Old Testament antics came back in full force. In all fairness to Kendra’s ghost, she was only trying to help her adopted brothers and sisters. However, as my father once told me, “no good deed goes unpunished.”

All summer and fall Kendra and The Professor became close friends and tensions began to grow between the residents and the Grasso family. Nolan, now accompanied by his younger brother, Simeon, was bringing home smaller amounts of cash every month, in spite of the fact that the population of the hovel continued to rise. The reason was simple. The residents had taken advantage of the fact that Nolan had gone soft as well as the fact that Kendra had taught them the magic words to get them out of paying the rents.

By the middle of the autumn, close to 100 people were living throughout the campus and Nolan couldn’t even make a grand off them. In the same autumn, the family had been denied the zoning permit for the second time, adding insult to financial injury. The Grasso’s dream of turning a quick profit off their investment had officially become a complete disaster, and they were very angry.

Nolan didn’t care for any of his so-called tenants. He was just another white boy from the suburbs who had only ever associated with people who were just like him. Having to wander through a multiracial and multilingual group of druggies, whores and scavengers made him sick. However, there were people in the squat that Nolan was able to tolerate more than others. His closed mind couldn’t rationalize somebody like Kendra, a black, feminist professor who was smarter, wittier and as tough as Nolan. In contrast, Nolan could completely empathize with somebody like John Scuzzi, an ex-convict who went by the name of Watcher. Nolan liked The Watcher because he paid on time, even though Kendra had let him in on her free rent secrets. The Watcher was used to discipline, and now that he was free of the slammer, Nolan had become his new warden, and his word was gospel.

Nolan needed somebody like The Watcher to begin asserting some authority on the residents—especially those who were refusing to pay the rent. Nolan couldn’t kick everyone’s ass month by month. At the time, Nolan would have to kick three asses a day just to make the quota. He was good at it, but he certainly didn’t like it. To make matters worse, Nolan had become increasingly paranoid about getting into a scuffle with one of these junkies who might give him HIV if he bloodied them up.

As the summer wore on, Watcher became the hired muscle of Nolan and his family and the results were immediately fearsome. It didn’t take long for The Watcher to make the deadbeats resume their regular payments. Unlike Nolan, who was satisfied with partial payments, The Watcher was all-or-nothing. Either the residents paid him the full price or they paid the full physical price from his fists. Most of the deadbeats did not last long after one of these encounters. A fair amount of squatters surrendered and relocated to the homeless shelters in the Tri-Towns. The centers were just as dangerous and just as filthy, but at least The Watcher wasn’t there. Others ditched the comfort of the residence hall and moved out into the woods with the addicts, from which they were rarely, if ever heard from again. The rest succumbed to the fear and paid Nolan. For his services, Watcher was granted a rent-free exemption, keys to the pump house on the north side of campus as well as a bimonthly stipend.

Despite all of this, Kendra continued her crusade against the Grassos. Nolan had developed a formidable weapon with The Watcher, but Kendra didn’t fear anyone. If anything, Kendra became more determined to reclaim the squat for the squatters.

Nolan was becoming increasingly fearful of Kendra. This simple woman was turning out to be a lot smarter and cunning than the average lowlife that called the campus home. The more and more Watcher induced fear into the heart of the residents, the more serious she got, and the more Nolan got paranoid.

Nolan began to realize that he had a big problem on his hands. The problem had evolved from a single celled nuisance to a full-fledged clusterfuck with arms, legs and a big mouth. Once she pledged to make good on her threats during their great confrontation in the rain, he was left with no choice.

Chapter I: The Professor's Final Exam

I had always assumed that the rain had driven The Professor to the brink. It had been raining for close to two weeks straight when he finally lost it. Just about everyone else on the third floor had moved out that fall because of the problems with the roof, but The Professor was famously stubborn. He predated the fogged windows, the cracked sidewalks, the rusted-shut doors and the ivy covered courtyards. He was there before the lake dried up, before the fieldhouse burnt down, before the quadrangle was overrun by snakes and before the clock tower was permanently stuck at 9:44. He had been here forever and most of us assumed that he always would be.

We were the class of no tomorrow, and he was our valedictorian. He was not our leader, but we followed him. He never offered his advice, but he was our mentor. He never cared how much we secretly admired him, how we grew silent when he spoke or how we came to his defense when he was challenged. We were his pupils, but we could do nothing but fail in his eyes. Our mere presence only reflected The Professor’s own sense of disappointment and regret. He saw himself in all of us, repeating the mistakes of the past and following down similar paths of peril. We disgusted him to no end.

The Professor’s entire life had been spent within a 20-mile radius of his cramped room on the third floor. He was born at the University Hospital and was immediately given up for adoption. He was adopted the University’s Dean of Student Affairs and his family. He grew up in the Dean’s residence in the now condemned East Campus and was home schooled by his father and mother. Although he had options, he elected to attend the same college his father worked for, and spent four undergraduate and two graduate years earning a Master of Arts in English with minors in psychology and philosophy. He immediately transitioned from student to teacher’s assistant and became a tenured professor of English by the time he was 27. He taught at the college for more three decades before a series of financial scandals—born during the tenure of his late adopted father—bankrupted the school and forced it to close.

He was one of a dozen resident professors and a few hundred students who moved into the main residence hall and refused to leave in protest. Most lasted a week before they ran out of water and electricity. Others barely made it through the first winter without heat. The protesting professors eventually gave up the cause and found new jobs. The students either transferred or dropped out altogether. The campus itself became entangled in property tax loopholes, land ownership disputes, and became inhabited by local squatters, addicts and others who had simply lost hope. The Professor refused to move. He was born there. He grew up there. He was going to die there.

The Professor had spent more than five years on the third floor by the time I started my freshman year at the dilapidated hovel once known as Morgenthau University. He was the campus’ celebrity, even though he refused to get to know anyone who attempted to make his acquaintance. The Professor had no friends at the University; at least no friends that were still alive.

It grew colder every year on the third floor of the main residence hall. The Professor was rarely seen outside during his last summer at the school. In years past, he could always be spotted at dusk walking along the fearsome pathways that no one else would dare travel after dark. The Professor was untouchable, even by the lowest of lowlifes. The addicts feared him more than they feared the ruthless landlords and their lawless self-proclaimed deputies who terrorized the campus. Some of the addicts claimed that The Professor had mystical powers that he drew from the puffs of smoke that emanated from his worn pipe. The Professor was never seen without it. On misty spring evenings when he walked along the campus thoroughfares the smoke seemed to swirl around his head like long, flowing locks of snow-white hair. It was easy to see why the crackheads mistook him for a wizard. But The Professor wielded no special magical powers. He was as vulnerable and weak as any 70-year-old man.

The Professor’s real mysticism was in the mystery that surrounded him. Just about everyone who lived at Morgenthau had a long story, some tall tale about where they had gone wrong and why they had ended up in such a godforsaken place. The Professor offered up no back-story or explanation for who he was, what he really thought or why he remained here. He could have left anytime, but to The Professor, Hell was a place that you made a conscious decision to go to, and a conscious decision to stay.

That was the subject of The Professor’s final exam.

By the time the rain finally surrendered to a brilliant blue October sky, the mood around campus remained as damp as the moldy room that The Professor kept on the third floor of the main residence hall. Of all the people who cared about The Professor, it was the squat’s unmannered de-facto landlord Simeon that discovered his body no more than a few hours after the old man had taken his own life with a combustible combination of pills and 100-proof liquor. The Professor was neither a drinker nor a pill-popper, but he had gathered this arsenal over the years for the specific purpose of carrying out this action when the time was right.

Simeon, furious that he was out a month’s room and board from The Professor, kicked a hole in the door and yelled random obscenities on his way out of the building. Grover, who lived below The Professor and occasionally ran errands for the old man, came up to see what the chaos was about and fell to his knees at the sight of The Professor’s lifeless body, clutching a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in one hand and two silver dollars in the other; his fare to cross the River Styx.

Grover spent a good half-hour at The Professor’s deathbed before mustering the courage to wipe away his tears, get up off the ground and begin the long process of alerting his fellow residents. There were few stable individuals who called the abandoned campus their home. There was no way of knowing how they would take it. By midday everybody who cared knew.

Deaths at the university were just a part of the life of a squatter; be it the typical overdose, the common suicide or the less-common homicide. It was always best not to get the police involved. Just about everyone who ended up at this place had nowhere left to go on the outside. They had no family to pay for a proper burial and few friends who would speak at their funeral.

On the west side of the campus sat several shallow graves that had been kept by the residents over the years. West Campus had housed the chapel, the service building, and The Gardens. In the campus’ heyday, The Gardens was a picturesque, exquisitely maintained study cove filled with flowers from all around the world, said to inspire deep thought and concentration with its stunning beauty. It was now where we buried our dead.

By the early afternoon, Willie, Grover and Alistair had begun preparing a section of the Gardens for The Professor. Willie had always secretly reserved a space in the center of the garden—next to the fountain and statue of Dionysus—for someone like The Professor. Up in the main residence hall, Eva, The Steve and I had pieced together a long stretcher and began the slow, careful process of moving The Professor’s body from his third floor room, down the crumbling stairwell, and across the entire length of the 3000-acre campus.

With winter quickly approaching, the night fell faster than any of us wanted. By dusk, a small pack of people, some of whom we had never met before, began a slow funeral march across the snake-infested quadrangle, through the archway of the library and down the hillside to the Gardens, where Willie and his friends had finished preparing the site. Even Simeon watched from a distance, cloaked by darkness, careful not to show any signs of life from his black heart. In the woods, the whispers of the addicts grew silent. The snakes even showed their respect, and slithered along the edge of the tall grass, not daring to cross the path of The Professor’s makeshift casket.

He was born there, he spent his life there, he died there, and on that night, we gave his body back to that which gave birth to him. Lit by flashlight and the harvest moon, we slowly lowered The Professor’s body into the grave. He was wrapped in one of Winston’s finest canvases, a painting he had commissioned on behalf of Kendra, who lay in one of the nearby graves. Although The Professor would surely be furious with the pomp and circumstance we paid to his passing, he would secretly have wanted to be buried next to her.

Nobody spoke after Willie and Grover pulled the ropes back up from the ground. The addicts and the maniacs descended back into the woods or to the tunnels where they would sink their sorrows in chemicals. The snakes returned to the pathways, not ready to offer us the same respect as they had The Professor. Simeon went home and reported the passing of the old man to his brother Nolan, who offered few—if any sympathies. And everywhere on that crisp autumn night, the property formerly known as Morgenthau University suddenly felt lonelier, and a gaping void grew deep within the collective consciousness of its residents, who—with The Professor—had lost one of the few scraps of hope we had left. In losing The Professor, we lost the only connection the campus had to its glorious past. So long as he had been alive, it was still Morgenthau. Now, it was just an overpopulated crackhouse on the verge of being bulldozed and sub developed into luxury townhouses, the likes of which might one day come to rest on top of the very graves of our deceased brothers and sisters.

Nobody was going to move into the third floor, let alone to The Professor’s residence. Lots of people had spooky superstitions and spoke of ghosts that haunted the buildings. Grover and I went back to The Professor’s room to talk after the funeral. Lined floor to ceiling with books, papers and a few of Kendra’s old drawings, it was by far the most attractive residence in the entire building, albeit for the two dozen buckets, jars and containers that collected the rains that poured in from the moldy, leaking ceiling.

The Professor had not left a suicide note. He would never have allowed such a welcome insight into his famously guarded psyche. Instead, The Professor had left us a challenge. He had left us a mission. He had left the class of no tomorrow their final exam.

On a single sheet of paper, typed with black ink, read a simple question.

It is better to die in the real world pursuing the dream of a better life—to struggle, to bleed, to go without sleep, food and love; with no guarantee of success, only the guarantee of knowing that you lived for something, and that you were willing to die for something—than to spend 75 years of your life rotting away in a hopeless, colorless world like this.

A.) True B.) False

There was no answer key.