NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
After I left a brief message on his answering machine yesterday, he left me an invitation to visit him on mine. “Finderelli here, come by the Ben Middlesex building about 2 PM Monday” the voice said.
The Prestige University campus is about twenty minutes south of here and the new glass and aluminum clad Ben Middlesex building stands out several stories above its surroundings. A plaque outside the entrance indicates that Ursula Middlesex named the building she had endowed after her late husband Ben. I am told she also funded the chair in Gender Studies out of the fortune he made as CEO at Fibonacci Corp.
A woman in a loose purple tee shirt with spiky black hair and orange highlights is sorting stacks of CDs at a desk in an outer office. Her long deep-purple fingernails click on the plastic. “Shit!” she exclaims, as I walk up to her desk, “Is this Professor Flower Finderelli’s office, Gender Studies?” I notice a broken nail on her right forefinger as she holds up her hand, palm out, spreading the fingers to examine the damage, almost as if to wave at me.
“These fucking things are supposed to be sealed in plastic! Now my nail got caught. Look at that!” She gets up, waving the open plastic case at me. The CD slides out and the tip of her broken nail falls on a white envelope on the edge of her desk. The loose CD rolls across the floor and falls against the wall. “Shit!” she says again, and then assures me in an impatient voice that I have found the Gender Studies Dept. Her hip-low black jeans are tight under her slightly protruding belly. A length of silvery cloth passing through the wide belt loops is tied on the left side of her narrow hips, its long ends hanging down below the desk-top.
“Are you Fong?” she asks in a skeptical tone, and turns to step out from behind the desk.
I explain who I am.
“Is the Finn expecting you?” she frowns distractedly, rubbing her finger.
She gestures to my left with a head toss, toward an open office door only a few feet from my elbow. She reaches up to her spikes and scratches the top of her head, revealing a Logo on the front of her shirt. It is an acid-green cloud-shape with ‘Toxic’ written across it in scarlet, and the word ‘Blob’ in small white letters inside the ‘O’ of ‘tOxic’.
“You look lost.” She remarks sympathetically and then, becoming more animated, “So you’re Fred.”
“Yes”
“Liberty told me about you.”
“What exactly?”
“That you would be here to meet her” she said sweetly. “You the new guy?”
“What?”
“Her new guy! She doesn’t fuck girls. You came to find Liberty right?”
She points her broken nail at an informal laser printed sign taped on the wall behind me saying ‘Gender Studies’, and also pointing those interested in ‘English Literature and Criticism’ further down the hall. A swish of her silver sash brushes white envelopes off her desk on to the floor as she moves from her seat. “Shit” she repeats, walking over to pick up the CD. She sits down again, ignoring the envelopes around her feet, and further examines her finger.
“I am not her new guy, but was hoping to meet her here after seeing Professor Finderelli.”
“You want to meet Fong? Thought it was Liberty.”
“No not Fong, Liberty.”
“Every one wants to be with Liberty. You missed them. They had to take off early.”
“She had the band with her did she?”
“No she is with the band, not band leader. Let’s not go there. That bitch Tessa can’t even play worth a damn.”
“I don’t know Tessa or any of them except Liberty.”
“Finn” she shouted it out extending the “i” sound as if in song. “You got Fred.”
Looking towards the open office door, my eyes follow a long column of buttons upward when a friendly bass voice asks:
“Are you the blog guy?”
“I am” I said, and looking up still further, I find an amiable face angled against the lintel above me. The doorway is filled with broad cloth and vertical yellow stripes and a column of buttons as I listen further.
“Hi, I am Finderelli” he says, ducking from under the doorway and turning, moving with the grace of a dancer. He walks across his big office, making the ceiling seem too low, and covers the long seat of a couch against the far wall, stretching out his legs over the cushions.
“Sit over there.” He points towards some office chairs spread out between the couch and his desk.
“Big office you have.”
“Yeah, they are very generous.”
“What is ‘Gender Studies’?”
“Interesting” said Finderelli as if he were going to say more, but he stops there. His expression prompts me to ask more.
“What interests you about gender Dr. Finderelli?”
“The way language is used.”
“What about the sex aspect”?
“ Go down to the ‘Crotch of Lit.” for that.”
There is a moment’s stillness before he guffaws in a huge burst of energy that shakes his thinning black ringlets hanging from a domed forhead. Then he adds gently, “No, they are OK with me down the hall”
He is quiet. I look around for fire ants, sit down and wait for him to speak. The office door is still open. “Shit” says the woman in the outer office. The bass voice starts up again.
“You said something in your phone message about a concert?” He enquires with a rising intonation.
I thank him for his invitation to visit, and explain that I am interested in the summer bug incident here on the Prestige campus, and I have read his name in a press release.”
“Yea” says Finderelli vaguely, “think I‘ve got an idea of what you are talking about.
“Only an idea?” I ask.
“What’s your story? I mean this thing is the subject of litigation.”
“I understand. Just wondered if you can give me some background for the blog?”
“Yea” he says with a little more conviction. “I can give you that”.
There’s another pause.
“I don’t see any ants about.” I observed, looking around the floor of his office. He was in no hurry to go on.
“Have you any trouble?”
“Trouble” repeated Finderelli.
“Yes, the clipping I read said ants have been found in offices and class rooms.
“That is a legally loaded question at the moment.”
He breathes in loudly and pauses, then after exhaling for a remarkably long time he belches and excuses himself. Finally he adds, “Well, look over there in that thing in the corner.”
He nodds towards a small carved wooden totem under the window by his desk. It’s a few feet high, not heavy, and moves easily. I tip it slightly towards me. Light shines into the carved recesses and I can see a lot of dead flying ants in the hollows.
”See anything?”
“Yup”
“How much trouble are they causing you?” asks Finderelli with a big grin.
“They are very helpful, now I’ve actually found some.”
“Helpful” “Repeats Finderelli.
“Yes, I mean I came up to see what was going on and here they are.”
“Care to testify on their helpfulness”?
“Is my opinion really germane?”
He shakes his head agreeably and seems quite comfortable remaining silent, and relaxing on his sofa with sunrays brightening his yellow striped shirt. I look at some snapshots on the wall by my chair. One is framed in huge pieces of elaborately carved dark wood, neatly mitered, and making the print look tiny within. I see a very big man in jeans and no shirt brandishing an ax in one hand, and he has his arm around the shoulders of a boy approaching his own height, but very much thinner. There might be a beer bottle buried in the hand that hangs from the boy’s shoulder.
“Your looking at Joel the giant McAllister”. Finderelli informs me.
“Who’s the kid?”
“That’s me.”
“Any relation?” I enquired.
“Hard to say.”
“What’s the difficulty?”
“One problem is the remains of Mrs. Infante’s piano bench.”
“What piano bench?”
“Made the frame out of the remains of her bench.”
“Oh that’s where the carving comes from. Yes it is so big it does kind of hide the picture. You might also say I am a hidden cost of the free love that was going down.”
Finderelli’s smile had emerged, and the lines radiating from his eyes seem to add to the warm reflection off his shirt, but he is serious.
His mother married Finderelli in the end, but as he put it ‘the big guy was around a lot back in 64.’ That is, on the commune where his parents met. “Joel used to swing by with moonshine and acid, play his fiddle and enjoy his popularity with the girls.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
“Oh, down in Virginia, near Winchester.”
“Yes, are you saying that this chap in the picture might be your natural father?”
“The thought has crossed my mind” said Finderelli.
Well how did this picture get taken. You must be what, 17 or 18 there?
“I went back there with Mom in 82 and she introduced us.”
“Was the commune still going?
“No, long gone”
“But you met there for old time sake?”
“Yeah”, said Finderelli. There was another pause. I looked at the picture of a lake, surrounded by trees, with a dilapidated dock in the foreground. It was framed with massive bits cut from what looked like railroad ties. The spikes had been skillfully driven into the sides to add to the effect. The image was almost buried, set well back in the thickness of its frame, as if it were in a box. I sniffed the wood and stroked the coarse grain.
“Creasote” said Finderelli.
“Yes, I thought I could smell something.”
“That’s where it happened” remarked Finderelli watching me from the couch.
“What happened?”
“That railroad tie was cut from part of the dock.”
“How interesting” I said, “putting the picture against a piece of its subject.”
“Conception,” said Finderelli
“Yes the concept might go far, now I think about it aesthetically.”
“Me,” not a concept” said Finderelli, amused by my confusion, but not unfriendly.
“Are you saying you were conceived on that dock?”
“Under the stars” said Finderelli.
“How romantic” I remarked.
“Skinny dipping” said Finderelli.
“Oh diving off the dock and all that you mean?
“Hot summer.”
“You seem to know a lot about your parent’s antics”
“Yea, Mother made it right for me” and then he adds “As right as she could.” In a more thoughtful voice “She was honest.”
There was another long pause, which Finderelli seems to enjoy.
“Pearle is a gem” says Finderelli.
“Who?” I ask “Are you talking about a person?”
“Yes” Said Finderelli in a distant sort of way.
“Well, I mean, what I am asking is, who is Pearle?”
“Mom is raising hell in Ohio now” said Finderelli with some satisfaction.
“Are you telling me that Pearle is your mother’s name?”
“I told you what she is doing now” said Finderelli with a very broad grin.
“Okay, Okay, for some reason I got the implication that your mother’s name is Pearle.”
“You got it right too.”
“So she is in Ohio you say. What kind of hell is she raising”
“Politics.”
We play on. To summarize: I ask him how he came to be called Flower. He explains that he was born on the first day of spring, and his mother called him her first spring flower. He was known as flower ever after. I was just getting back to the subject of the bugs when he interjected “You ‘ll have to excuse me… in a minute…expecting a student….”
“Fong!” he shouts. I look away from the photos towards the doorway. Fong looks in.
“Hi Flower.”
“Pull up a seat” said Flower gently.
Fong is tapping her cell phone as she sat down, rustling in a black track suit, with a Snaz logo on the shoulder.
“Why does this guy rate so much couch time?” she asks in mock outrage.
Flower frowns in mock anger, and they banter on and I leave. It dawns on me walking out, all that interesting background on Flower, ‘The Fin’, Finderelli doesn’t say anything about the bugs.
