West Seneca, NY—Dr. P.F. Pandingham, formerly a Classics and Poetry Professor at SUNY Geneseo, is struggling to hide his intellectual past, which keeps rearing its overeducated head in his new blue-collar gig as a FedEx driver.
Pandingham was relieved of his duties at Geneseo because of the general rot and decay of the American mind, which wouldn’t know the road less traveled from the long and winding road or the Yellow Brick Road. Cuts to staff, programs, and services resulting from budget deficits caused by low enrollment also contributed to his dismissal.
Due to high driver turnover Pandingham was fast-tracked into his new driver position with FedEx, which used to absolutely positively get it there overnight, but now gets it there if the weather is pretty good and there aren’t too many call-ins. He likes the quick-paced, physical nature of the job, but is having some trouble assimilating with his co-workers because of his intellectual past.
An issue arose in his first few days during the mundane task of “balancing” with the delivery routes around him. Balancing ensures that all the routes have roughly the same amount of work on any given day. Pandingham responded to a request for his stop and package counts with some verse:
Packages, there are a-many
Stops there are a-lot
Help, I would take any
That’d save my soul
From this wicked plot…
While the verse produced several curious looks and some whispering among co-workers, a later incident almost turned violent. During the morning sort, where trucks are loaded with that day’s deliveries, the guy who runs the Lackawanna route, Lenny Lazaroni, was caught up with a package that needed retaping, just as Demi Lovato’s “Really Don’t Care” came on the radio. Lazaroni asked Pandingham to forward the station because the song reminded him of his whore ex-wife, who took all his money, his kids, and was living in his house with some fuckhead named Brad.
Pandingham did as requested, and the search landed on the classical station, which happened to be playing “Rhapsody in Blue,” with Khatia Buniatishvili at the piano. Pandingham was over the moon for this version of the classic Gershwin composition. So taken, he waved his arms playfully in the air, on his way over to help Lazaroni with the package, and said, “I just love Khatia’s Rhapsody—she’s so capricious and sensuous.”
Lazaroni dropped the tape gun, grabbed Pandingham by the collar, and said, “Look, man, I don’t fucking go that way—I like girls. If you ever say shit like that to me again, I’ll fuck you up. Don’t try me. I got nothing, so I got nothing to lose.”
Pandingham was able to smooth that over, but just barely, and was making some progress with co-workers—bitching about dogs on his route and Dumper Dave, a co-worker who routinely dumped all his stops and went home early. Then, one afternoon, just as he was heading out to do a pickup run, Laura showed up.
Laura was his old Geneseeo colleague and paramour. She was waiting for him outside the building with her Shakespeare and Keats. Laura refused to go on antidepressants because she didn’t want to dull her senses. She wanted to feel the hot blood course through her veins. She wanted to feel her own fire. Once, she stabbed Pandingham in the side due to a disagreement over a line in Byron.
He was smitten looking at her as she leaned up against her beat-up 2009 Volvo, pulling on her Marlboro, thick with Jim Beam. Though he needed this job, like a bowtie goes to a pretentious windbag’s neck or a beret goes to a self-important asshole’s head, he went straight for her.
Pandingham managed to escape with a warning after blowing off the pickup route. He’s unsure how to keep up this charade, especially if Laura continues to show up. But until they send him on sabbatical, he’ll keep punching in and trying to hide his intellectual past.
