“You replied in kind?”
“Yes, but mine were more sophisticated.”
“And she’s threatening you?”
“She’s making outrageous demands. She wants honors. A TA position. She wants to hold hands on campus. She says she’ll go public. I will not have my reputation tarnished, Josh. It means everything.”
I tossed the folder back. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Hudson stopped mid-puff. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Well, I mean, with your busy schedule, dating a younger woman who is also a serious head case could be a challenge.”
Hudson glared hard before responding. “We weren’t dating. We were screwing. Age wasn’t an issue.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, though that’s exactly what I’d meant.
“I intend to have those letters back. Are you in?”
“Look, Hudson, there’s no way. It’s too crazy. I mean, c’mon. Plus, I’ve got somebody arriving into town tonight.” That was true. I was doing one last interview with Hank Watson for my documentary about former prisoners from the frightful penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virgina.
Hank Watson, charged with burglary, kidnapping, assault. And that’s just what got him into Texas’ infamous Gatesville reform school as a teen in the ’40s. He later graduated to much bigger, deadlier things. Hank needed special handling.
“Tenure reviews are next month,” Hudson said.
There it was. Implied, limped around, now it was out on the table.
“I’ve got to pick someone. Joan is just as qualified, and with those legs, nicer to have around. Frankly, I think I have a shot at her.”
“This is unfair. My film went to Sundance.”
“You know how many lousy docs play up there? Doesn’t mean squat. I was a judge at Sundance. Skied circles around Redford.” He waved a beefy, sun-splotched hand at the photos on the wall behind him.
A black-and-white of Hudson with Redford, the Sundance Kid himself, on skis. Hudson was clearly puffing out his chest. It was next to a photo of Hudson holding a big-mouth bass with David Jansen, next to a photo of Hudson karate-chopping James Coburn.
On his bookshelf, enclosed in glass, stood his Academy Award for Best Documentary, Nineteen Seventy-Something.
Hudson had the career and the life that had thus far eluded me.
“My point is, as department chair, I do the picking. It’s completely autocratic. There are candidates you don’t even know about. It doesn’t have to be you.”
“Don’t tell me I’m not good for Chapman. Freedom Kills is going to air on PBS. I’m an asset and you know it.”
“Chapman is your third university in less than a decade, Josh. You’re a newlywed. You don’t want to continue dragging that cute little wife of yours around like a bedouin. Orange is a nice little town. Does Sarah know that with tenure, Chapman helps finance the house?”
“We know.”
“In this market, you’ll clean up. Nothing makes one feel more like a man than buying one’s wife a nice house. Except banging twins in said house when wifey goes to spa.”
“I got the man thing covered, Hudson,” though his words carried weight. The house, like the career, seemed like a dream that was slipping away. “I just can’t help wondering why you’re asking me.”
“Because you want it bad. I’ve been in academia for forty years. I can smell you young guns coming a mile away.”
“I’m a young gun and I didn’t even know it.”
“And we both know the other reason.”
Now it was my turn to glare. “Other reason?”
“Word gets around, Josh. You and Jeannie?”
“Hold on right there. She’s a liar. According to her, she was banging half the faculty, and I don’t just mean the male half either.”
Hudson cracked a smile. “Of course. Jeannie loved to embellish. I just meant you’d understand my predicament.”
“Yeah, I get it. I just haven’t taken the plunge like you. So that’s why you’re asking me?”
Hudson tapped his pipe. “There was love in that little doc of yours. I’d put forth you became enamored of the darkness. Tracking down those ancient ex-cons, getting their nasty little tales, the horrors of the revolution during that prison uprising. You have an interest in things that are out of bounds, young man.”
I couldn’t deny it. The film, two and a half years in the making, had become an obsession. When nothing else seemed to be working out for me, the doc became my anchor.
I spent months interviewing former inmates of that West Virginia prison, delving into their criminal lives before jail, coaxing out their stories of what they did to survive in hell, and describing in pathetic detail their eked-out existences as old, broken, forgotten men. Three of my subjects had already died. Two by their own hand.
But not Hank Watson. There’s a brief montage of him doing his strenuous jail cell work out in the Bakersfield YMCA where he now resides. “Sixty push-ups, sixty seconds,” Hank said, looking into the camera. “Just for starters.”
I made sure to document my subjects’ participation in the bloody prison uprising of 1980 that left twenty guards dead. There had been torture, things done to others that could only have been dreamed up by minds on ice.
There’s a good chance Hank had been manning a blowtorch.
“Without tenure, Josh, it only makes sense for you to leave Chapman. Move on when the semester’s up.”
“Sarah and I were counting on this. You’re really sticking it to me, Hudson.”
My time spent on Freedom Kills had taken its toll on Sarah and me. She had called the engagement off, and she wouldn’t put the ring back on until I was done shooting. Hank especially creeped her out.
“Are you in, or are you out after the next semester?”
“Tonight’s tough, Hudson,” my mind grinding out the possibilities.
Hank Watson, convicted of murder in 1958, was coming over to our apartment. The old friendless relic had appreciated all the attention I’d paid to him. If I asked him to, he’d wait for me in one of those coffee shops in Old Towne spooking the college girls reading Derrida.
“Lifetime employment, Josh. These days, you have to schlep mail to find that.”
I could make this work. Sarah and I needed this. I could turn this for good. “It’s a deal, Hudson. You’re going to owe me.”
“Tenure.”
“Yeah. Who’s driving?”
Orange was unreal in the spring. It wasn’t just the surprise scent of blooming buttercup roses that came rolling into Hudson’s open car window as we drove through quaint Old Towne. It was the preserved Americana of it all. Most of the office buildings dated back to the Roaring Twenties. While neighboring Anaheim was a revolving door of strip malls and booty motels, Orange kept its history intact. I’d never seen more antique stores in my life, but they made sense in an antique, lost-in-time town like this.
You could count on things not changing here. Sarah and I loved it.
“Will you man-up and stop calling your wife?” Hudson commanded.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her I was about to break into a coed’s room to steal a batch of love letters.”
Sarah was working late at the hospital, and wasn’t due back home for hours. I left a message on her cell, hoping I’d be done with Hudson’s little B&E before Hank came calling.
The truth was, I didn’t want Sarah coming home and finding Hank hanging around. “That twisted old ghost loves you, Josh,” she’d said recently. He had become just as obsessed with me as I was about capturing his gruesome stories for the doc. He’d turn up at places I went. I chalked it up to old man loneliness, and he thankfully faded away when we moved to Orange County.