by
Gary Fincke
I was sixteen the first time I was inside
a police station. My mother took me after I received my first traffic ticket.
My violation was making an illegal
U-turn around a median strip at the end of the block where my father’s bakery
was located. I’d made that turn every Friday after I finished my shift at the
bakery, working until 5:45 a.m. when I then drove the station wagon back home
and gave it to my mother to drive to the bakery and open the store at 6:00 a.m.
But that Friday, because I was
scheduled to take the SATs Saturday morning, I’d worked from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
like I’d done when my mother had picked me up in that station wagon every
Friday from eighth to tenth grade. She’d made that U-turn every time and so did
I, completing it, this fateful night, while a police car sat at the light.
“Whose name is on that ticket?” my
mother said when I showed it to her. She was in her pajamas, but she buttoned a
coat up over them and slipped on a pair of shoes while I tried to make out the
signature.
“Ralph something,” I said.
“Ralphie Stumpf,” she muttered, grabbing
her keys. “You bring that thing with you, and we’ll see about this.”
“Is Ralph Stumpf here?” my mother asked the
policeman at the desk.
“No, Ruthie,” the policeman said, and I
marveled.
“Ralphie Stumpf,” my mother said. “I’ve
known him since he was in diapers.”
“I expect so, Ruthie.” The policeman
suddenly sighed and looked old enough to retire.
My mother showed him the ticket. “Everybody
makes this turn,” she said.
“I
can name people you wouldn’t dare ticket who make that turn. You know who I’m
talking about. Prominent people who have businesses on that block.”
“You don’t know that for a fact,
Ruthie,” the policeman said, but he allowed us to sit down to wait.
A few minutes later, Ralph Stumpf walked
through an inside door. My mother tugged me to my feet as she rose from her
chair. “Ralphie Stumpf,” she waded in, repeating her assertion about the
prominent people who disregarded the law. Ralph Stumpf looked more embarrassed
than angry, and I drifted a few steps away from the conversation, hoping that
Ralph Stumpf didn’t begin interrogating me. I wanted my mother to stop. I
wanted to pay the ticket and get out of there.
A minute later, Ralph Stumpf tore up the
ticket and my mother walked out of the station in triumph. “You see?” she said.
“You have to know how to deal with these people. I hope you learned something.”
Fourteen years later, I tried to remember just what it was I’d learned
when, after lunch near the end of June, I received a call from Sam Stambaugh,
who identified himself as the county constable and said he’d been chasing after
me for a couple of months. “Since April. Almost three months now, and no luck
at all until today. You don’t reside where your registration says you do.”
“What registration?” I asked.
Stambaugh didn’t seem to hear me. “I
went to your apartment on 19th Street,” he went on, “and the people
I talked to said you didn’t live there anymore.”
“I moved.”
“Your registration says you didn’t. I checked it through Harrisburg three
times. You don’t just take somebody’s word on this. You don’t do this job for
long and still believe neighbors. Finding you has cost me an awful lot of
time.”
“I’m in the phone book,” I tried, but I started considering whether
constable was a patronage job, whether Sam Stambaugh was an idiot but had a
brother or an uncle in the right place to hand him something to do.
“Harrisburg finally nailed your address for me. I have a warrant here with
your name on it, and I can drive out there and serve it, but I thought I’d do
you a favor and call to see if you’d come in on your own. I found out you teach
at the college, so I figured you for somebody reasonable. You’re a doctor, so I
can call instead of driving out.”
His tone made me decide to be diplomatic. “I appreciate that,” I said, “but what’s the problem?”
“Scofflaw. A fine outstanding for too long.”
Now I felt lost, like maybe there was some other Gary Fincke who lived in
Beaver County. A long shot, but possible. “What fine?”
“It’s just scofflaw. A couple of minutes at the JPs.”
“Somebody’s made a mistake.”
“Couple of minutes, ok? Help us both out.”
It seemed easy to comply, but I wondered what Stambaugh the respecter of
advanced degrees and college instructors would think if he found out I would be
officially out of work in less than a week. Maybe he’d show up with lights
flashing and sirens wailing.
I didn’t have his enthusiasm for the two-year college where I’d worked. After
five years of teaching the same two composition courses and having to stick to
reading lists and assignments prescribed on a syllabus created by the main
campus faculty, I’d become impatient. The year before I’d received a Ph.D., and
in the intervening months I’d begun to publish scholarship, how-to articles
about teaching, and some stories and poems that found their way into small
magazines. Nobody else in the English department had published a word since I’d
been hired. Six months earlier I’d suggested to the Director of Adjunct
Campuses who visited once a year from the far away main campus that maybe there
were alternatives to being told how to teach, what to teach, and when to teach
it. He looked at me and suggested I should begin to search for another job if I
felt that way
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll do that,” not exactly what he wanted to hear. To make
things worse, I made it clear to the on-campus administrator to whom I reported
that I had to “deprepare” to teach my classes in order to meet the requirements
I had to follow. Two months later I was out of a job.
When I arrived at the Magistrate’s office, it looked empty except for a
secretary who seemed to be expecting me. “A parking ticket,” she said without
prompting. “Unpaid from January.”
“I’ve never received a parking ticket,” I said, so confident in the truth
of that I expected her to apologize when she discovered a mistake had been
made.
“In Monaca. Facing the wrong way. Five dollars plus a twelve dollar late
fee.” She handed me a yellow copy. “This jog your memory?”
“I’ve never seen this.”
“The file says the constable’s been working on this quite some time. Ninety
days delinquent makes you a scofflaw.”
The address was where I had my car serviced. I told her I’d be right back.
The car
dealer said he was willing to absorb the loss. He wrote out a check and told me
that sometimes the guys servicing cars were in a hurry and maybe left my car
where it didn’t belong. He smiled and added that they were expanding their
parking lot so cars wouldn’t be parked on the street in the future.
The secretary took the check, but then she frowned. “Twenty-seven dollars
and fifty cents for the constable’s fee is also due.”
“For a local phone call?”
“According to our records, the constable drove to your residence on two
occasions. He logged several calls to Harrisburg.”
My fragile patience snapped. “He drove to where I lived a year ago. He went
back again when he already knew I didn’t live there. He called Harrisburg
instead of opening the phone book for my address.”
“He performs his duties in a manner satisfactory to Magistrate Luberto.”
Enough was enough, I thought. “I’m not paying for his incompetence.”
A door opened and a man’s voice intoned, “Do we have a problem here?”
“One of our scofflaws is becoming abusive.”
“If he continues, call in a disturing-the-peace.”
“Just like that?” I said. “Raising my voice slightly is nowhere near
disturbing the peace.”
The woman dialed the phone. The police, she said a minute later, were on
their way. I sat and waited.
The policeman, when he arrived, looked
as young as my students. He wore the uniform as if it were as unfamiliar as a
graduation robe. “I understand you have a disturbance here,” he said to the
receptionist, who nodded toward me.
“I’m the guy who talks too loud,” I said. I wondered if I should mention
that I held a Ph.D. and was a college professor, but I counted on being calm
and polite to serve me well.
The policeman motioned me toward the door. He walked me outside and said he
was surprised because I was a professor at the local college and didn’t look
like anybody who needed to be arrested, a quick reminder about how law
enforcement works. I answered him in coherent, complete sentences sprinkled
with polysyllabic words. He told me to forget it, that some people were
touchier than others, and I thanked him and left.
I had bigger problems than unfairly owing a small sum of money to the
county, but when I arrived home I filled my story with obscenities directed at
the Magistrate and Constable who were Fascist assholes and fucking morons. My
wife shook her head and put a finger to her lips. She was holding our ten-month-old
daughter, but our son, who was about to turn four, was somewhere nearby.
Beginning in July I could collect unemployment compensation. I’d worked up
a monologue on humiliation and embarrassment that I declaimed to my wife, but
as the day when I would become eligible drew close, I put on a coat and tie and
drove off to Beaver Falls as if I was about to begin a new job that just
happened to be in a government building.
It was a beautiful summer day. The office was located on a residential
street that was tree-lined and well-kept, as if somebody was softening the blow
by not locating it downtown among the largely abandoned store fronts that led
down the hill to the closing factories or uptown toward the soon to be closing
mill.
The only women in the room were employees. In the summer of 1975, only men
seemed to be out of work. Though I was the one applicant dressed as if I had a
wedding to attend, none of the men looked shiftless or crazy or drunk. Nobody
talked except when their turn at one of the desks or windows arrived. I filled
out my application and answered a clerk’s questions. Very shortly I would begin
to receive a weekly check that would continue to arrive for one year. The woman
I was speaking with looked me over for a few seconds before telling me I
wouldn’t have to report to receive my check. All I had to go on as to whether
this was unusual was her telling the two guys in front of me that they had to
report each week to receive their checks in person.
She didn’t ask me about my months-long
search for another college teaching job. If she had, I would have told her I’d
applied for fifteen college jobs and one high school position as Chair of an
English Department. I’d had one interview so far. That interview hadn’t been on
a college campus. It had been in a New York City hotel room and made me more
despairing than hopeful. I had nine postcards thanking me for my interest while
telling me the position had been filled. So far the rest of the places I’d
applied to had been silent.
A week after receiving my first unemployment check, arriving home from a
day in the park with my wife and two small children, I found a note tacked to
my back door that read: “Because of your failure to complete payment of all
existing, past due fines, I visited your residence today, 7/15/75, to serve a
warrant for your arrest. Please be so advised.”
I crumpled that note into a tight ball, but before I threw it away, I
copied the address and waited until the following day to settle in front of the
typewriter. I wrote a reasonable, educated note to Magistrate Luberto
requesting a formal hearing.
I explained the circumstances for which I was
being persecuted in polite and correct language. I used my title of Doctor both
at the end and, ready-made, on one of the return-address stickers my mother had
bought for me the moment I told her I’d passed my dissertation defense. I
attached a stamp to an envelope whose address I double-checked for accuracy in the
phone book. “There,” I told my wife. “It’s time for at least a little bit of
justice.”
The unemployment checks arrived
exactly on time, but as July closed down, I was in panic mode. For another
month I could tell any potential employer my reason for leaving my teaching
position was that it required obedience more than creativity. Framed in the
right way, I could make myself sound ambitious rather than the arrogant,
over-confident jerk I’d let surface with my superiors, but by September I’d be
susceptible to even a cursory background check.
As August began I got a phone call
from a college in Michigan I’d applied to in June, so late in the hiring season
that I thought they might be desperate. The man on the phone said they wanted
to interview me, and I didn’t hesitate to say I’d be happy to drive to their
Michigan campus. “We sometimes meet our applicants half way,” he said. “We
could interview you in Detroit to save you some miles on such short notice.”
My excitement dimmed. Sure, I lived
near the Ohio border, but it was still Pennsylvania, and Detroit was about 300
miles away. How could that be half way unless it was just a figure of speech? I
told him I’d let him know by the following day. I owned a United States Atlas,
and I opened it to Michigan. I couldn’t find the city. Not at first, at least. Not
until I realized it was located in an insert that contained the Upper Peninsula
because there wasn’t room for the entire state according to scale.
I thought of blizzards and wolves and
every other problem that went with what was essentially the same job I’d let
slip away because I hated doing nothing but teaching the same two sections of
composition over and over with no chance of that schedule changing in the foreseeable
future.
The next day, as I waffled about having the nerve to turn down a possible
job offer, I received yet another early August job opportunity phone call, and
this one, though it was the high school job, at least didn’t sound like a
safety net. There was an on-site interview in upstate New York. When could I be
there? I chose three days from then to make it look as if I had options.
Two days later I answered the door without thinking of anything but the
good fortune of having an interview the following afternoon, and there stood
Sam Stambaugh. He didn’t produce a warrant. He asked if I’d be willing to ride
with him to the Magistrate’s office to get things taken care of once and for
all. When he assured me I’d be having a hearing, I said I’d ride along. “You
ought to have cleaned this thing up sooner,” he said on the way over. “I’m
surprised somebody with your education wouldn’t see the sense of it.”
Luberto showed up looking like somebody who’d just finished mowing his
lawn. “We have the matter before us of $27.50 in constable’s fees unpaid,” he
intoned. “And additional costs of the court to transport you to these
proceedings. Are you contesting?”
I began as evenly and clearly as I could muster. “I sent you written
request for a formal hearing. I put everything in the letter.”
“This office has received no correspondence from you,” Luberto said, and
then, as if he could read my mind, he added, “Did you make your request by
registered mail?”
Anyone could see how this would end, but I soldiered on. “I mail hundreds
of letters a year,” I said. “Every one of them gets through. They’re sent first
class with the correct postage and a return address. It’s foolproof.”
“We have no letter,” Luberto said, and I sensed Sam Stanbaugh shuffling
closer.
“But you received it.”
“But you received it.”
Luberto looked at Stambaugh as he said, “Are you questioning the
truthfulness of this court?”
There was nothing for it but to go all-in. “You bet,” I said.
“Do you have a copy?”
Stambaugh stood so close now I could feel his breath. “No,” I said.
Luberto seemed satisfied. “One of the two parties in this dispute is being
dishonest. The court has no reason to lie. A total of $82.50 is due now. If you
are unwilling or unable to produce payment at this time, I will direct
Constable Stambaugh to transport you to the prison to begin your five-day
detention.”
To save face, I told him to lock me up, but in the morning I had to be up
and out of the house by 7:30 at the latest, and my bravado was extinguished by
the time we arrived at the county prison. Scofflaw in the face of authority was
one thing; getting a job before all of my education and ambition crumbled was
another.
My fingerprints were taken. Like millions
of possible felons, I was “in the system.” When the guard confiscated what I
was carrying, I asked him for my contact lens case. I have to have that, I
explained, and he was reluctant. “Use your call if you wanna,” he said. “Explain
your special needs to somebody else.”
I played tennis regularly with a lawyer. I was wearing shorts and t-shirt
he would recognize if we were meeting at the courts. I looked up his number.
His response was brief. “You have a case. You’d probably win, but it will cost
you more than you’d receive. You could paint yellow lines for all the no
parking zones in the county, but you should get your wife to ante up before the
Magistrate shuts off his phone for the night.”
Never had such perfect sense seemed so readily apparent. I gave him my
phone number so he could call my wife and tell her to pay up.
Shortly thereafter I was led down a hall lined with cells. Every cell had a
couple of residents. Every prisoner was black. Not one of them said a word.
Downstairs was what appeared to be a rec room half-filled with cots. The
rest of the space held a television set and a ping pong table and a handful of
chairs. Every prisoner was white.
“What you bringing us?” one guy said.
“Scofflaw.”
There was laughter all around.
“How much goddamned scofflaw we talking about?” the same guy asked when my
escort had disappeared. I told my story. I included each of the tiny sums of
money. The prisoners seemed fascinated and empathetic. “Ain’t that just the
fucking way the man works?” seemed to be the consensus comment. The room, as I
quickly learned, was populated by repeat DUI offenders and failure to pay child
support deadbeats. Each one of them wanted me to know how “the man had fucked
him over for nothing.”
The Pirates were on the television,
but they were losing, and baseball seemed trivial. But the ping pong table was
available, and I picked up a paddle. During the next hour, until my wife showed
up to drive me home, I won half a dozen games because I was the only person in
the room who seemed to know what topspin could do to the ping pong ball.
Just before midnight, we picked up our
children at our neighbors’ house. My wife accepted our daughter, and I carried
our son back to the house. Neither of our neighbors asked a question. “What did
you tell them? I asked my wife.
“That you had a problem that was running late and you needed a ride.”
“A problem?”
“What was I supposed to call it?”
“We’re going on a trip to New York in the morning,” I told my son. We’ll
wake you at seven. You can sleep in the car.” I found one clean and ironed
shirt in the closet. To get a head start, I hung it and a tie and a sport coat
from a hook in the back of our car.
In the men’s room of the McDonald’s ten miles from my interview site, I put
on my clean shirt and tie. I combed my hair, happy that I’d had the foresight
to have my wife trim it two days before. It was as short as it had been in five
years; without asking, she had halved the length of my sideburns.
Fifteen minutes later, because of the early August heat, I carried my sport
coat inside the high school before I put it on, one more step toward acting
like someone who had qualifications to be in charge of an English Department
even though I was sure my one year of high school teaching and six credits of
education courses made me the least qualified of the other ten current members
to lead.
No matter. I was going to talk to my strengths. What I knew was, no matter
whether students were bad or terrific, few of them could write. I went on about
how I would design a curriculum built around writing. I took a detour to talk
about rapport and large group discipline situations when the principal seemed
on edge about those things not being part of the resume of a college teacher. I
added plans for a literary magazine and sending out PR to the media about
student accomplishments when they entered regional and state-wide competitions.
I was ready to make the school well known for writing, a model other schools
would copy.
The Superintendent of Schools nodded along. When I paused, he sat back in
his chair and said, “I like having my male English teachers carry themselves
like men because English teachers have to work with all kinds.”
I didn’t need an interpreter to understand that I’d passed one large
section of my job test by the accident of heredity. I’d walked into his office
at 6’2, 210. My years as a tennis coach at the two-year college were on my
vita. The conversation switched to sports and how I’d managed to occasionally
come off the bench for a small-college basketball team. “Between you and me,”
he said before I was escorted to where the high school Principal waited to
talk, “some of our male English teachers haven’t earned the proper respect from
their students.”
The Principal, however, needed more than size and a history of sports. He
wanted specifics about how I would handle large-group disciplinary situations,
and I fell back on my one year of high school teaching, the job I’d had while I
finished my Masters Degree. I told him about study hall duty in the school
auditorium, two teachers handling 200 bored and restless students. He started
to nod the way the Superintendent had and let me move on to literature,
reminding me that, for now, the curriculum emphasized reading and remembering
because New York required students to succeed on a state-wide Regents
Examination. I cited writers that I knew were safe choices and added a few
contemporaries. I told stories about tests I’d taken full of spot passages to
identify. When he told me that the test results for each teacher’s students
were published in the local newspaper, I said I welcomed the challenge.
My graduate education was never brought up. Not one question was asked
about my research. Not one question was asked about the handful of essays,
stories, and poems I’d begun to publish in the last two years.
By the time the interview ended, it had been sixteen hours since I’d been
released from jail, but nobody had to know that, not even my children.
A secretary showed me around the
school while the Principal and Superintendent discussed me. When I returned,
the Principal gave me a school yearbook to help me get to know my colleagues. The
Superintendent walked me down to his office for some paperwork. “We work fast
when we think we’re ready,” he said. He made it clear that he liked the idea of
having a teacher with the word “Doctor” in front of his name.
I walked out into bright sunshine and
saw my wife and the kids sitting near the creek that ran across the street. The
town looked absolutely picturesque. Sweat ran down my back and over my chest by
the time I reached them, but all that was left of that day was the drive back
home and extraordinary relief. By the time we reached our house, it would be
nearly twenty-four hours since I’d been freed. Our neighbors would see us
return if they were awake, if they weren’t worn out from staying up late with
our kids the night before.
I’d spent not quite two hours in jail, a time very long or very short
depending upon who you believe you are and what follows. In less than a month I
was going to be the head of an English Department. Now I had to become someone
other than who I appeared to be to my former employers and the local judicial
system. A scofflaw who was full of untested opinions and a disregard for
authority. Someone easily dismissed.
Gary Fincke's latest collection of
personal essays The Darkness Call won
the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and was published in early
2018 by Pleiades Press. His collections of stories have won the Flannery
O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize, and earlier nonfiction books
were published by Michigan State and Stephen F. Austin.
