So here you are, playing hot-puss for a waxy, naked thirty-something schoolboy who—did you just have a white-out?—is talking right in your face. The night is eleven thousand hours long, and he’s still talking. Waving his scabby arms, when he’s not picking scabs on his scalp, examining them, really doing everything but pulling a microscope out of his seedy tweed jacket, like Harpo Marx producing a goat from inside an overcoat. If Harpo were a skin-cracked thirty-eight year old part-time composition instructor and full-time self-styled “semiotic terrorist,” who terrifies no one—but maybe you, in this moment—who lives in cinderblock student housing he is too old for, squeezed between spilled-over shelves full of paperbacks spilling empty glassine packets and unpaid utility bills with IMPORTANT IDEAS scribbled on the back: DEMON = DE-MON = DE(XEDRINE) MONEY Kennedy Mainlined Speed for America. Kennedy Money—Kennedy?… “Don’t you see! Kennedy was one of them. There are links. Werner Van Braun the Nazi V-2 scientist. He fed Pervatin to the slaves in his camp. German speed. Then he meets Kennedy—Kennedy worships him, the man who will take him to the moon. And what do you need to get there? Speed. And what do you need to get speed? In the history of America, you need a connection. You need Max Jacobsen. A German Jew. Who fled Berlin to come to America before the War. Not a war criminal like Kennedy’s New Best Friend, Van Braun. (Jacobsen’s own father died in one of Van Braun’s slave factories. Don’t you see! History folds in on itself like the shell of a conch shell, the same color as vaginas…)

Just to hear the word, vagina. It wasn’t even sex. It was, out of his mouth, as deeply repellant as a dissected frog, repulsive as a cut-away photo of diseased spleens in a health book. Which was…unappetizing. Somehow the fact that Professor Jeff wasn’t even a cunt-hound made it worse. But it was more curious than horrible. Professor Jeff did not have what it took to be a sex freak. He had too much to say. He was too chirpy. He was something else… He was a talker. A describer. And with enough meth in him, a time traveller. He’d get inside of the scene he was dreaming. Not that he could take you…but you’d see him disappear. His eyes blank and inward-looking. So even when stripper triplets were standing in front of him, stark naked, tits twirling, doing kind of butt-shake shimmy in fuck-me shoes, he didn’t notice. That happened at a Christmas party.

The professor liked to dream of meth. Out loud. Recalling the ampheta-greats of yore. That was another project of the Professors: The Stimulant Hall of Fame. Hours, nights, days at a time, he would speak of the giant speed men of yore. Not just abusers, but enablers, prescribers, inventors…the gamut. But what was surprising, eternally, to you, was that he never wrote any of it down. His was an oral tradition. Homeric. Or like Solzhenitsyn-esque, like the legends of the Gulag who—denied pencils, paper, or privacy—concocted, then related their stories, word by whispered word, to other prisoners. Prisoners who, in turn, would memorize what the author, cold lips to lobe, had placed in their ears. Ugly as he was, the professor, who would never get his doctorate, who would eventually be drummed out of university, denied unemployment, and be found dead in a cardboard refrigerator box in Buffalo, New York, was almost beautiful, possessed as he was, transported to beloved, chemical fueled sagas, when speed freaks ruled the earth. Like the Society Doctor, Max Jacobsen. And Hitler’s doctor, Morrell.