The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Morality is a slippery subject. If I didn’t know that as a boy, I found out when I went to college. I attended the University of Maine on a slapped-together financial scaffolding of small scholarships, government loans, and summer jobs. During the school year, I worked the dish line in West Commons. The money never stretched far enough. My single mother, who was working as head housekeeper in a mental institution called Pineland Training Center, sent me $12 a week, which helped a little. After Mom died, I found out from one of her sisters that she had managed it by giving up her monthly beauty parlor visit and economizing on groceries. She also skipped lunch every Tuesday and Thursday.

Once I moved off-campus and away from West Commons, I sometimes supplemented my own diet by shoplifting steaks or packages of hamburger from the local supermarket. You had to do it on Fridays, when the store was really busy. I once tried for a chicken, but it was too fucking big to go under my coat.

Word got around that I would write papers for students who found themselves in a bind. I had a sliding scale for this service. If the student got an A, my fee was $20. I got $10 for a B. A grade of C was a wash, and no money changed hands. For a D or an F, I promised my client that I would pay him or her $20. I made sure I would never have to pay, because I couldn’t afford it. And I was sly. (It embarrasses me to say that, but it’s the truth.) I wouldn’t take on a project unless the student in need could provide at least one paper he or she had written, so I could copy the style. I didn’t need to do this a lot, thank God, but when I had to – when I was broke and simply couldn’t live without a burger and fries at the Bear’s Den in Memorial Union – I did.

Then, when I was a junior, I discovered that I had a fairly rare blood type, A-negative, roughly six percent of the population. There was a clinic in Bangor that would pay twenty-five dollars per pint for A-neg. I thought that an excellent deal. Every two months or so, I drove my battered old station wagon up Route 2 from Orono (or hitchhiked when it was broke down, a frequent occurrence) and rolled up my sleeve. There was far less paperwork in those pre-AIDS years, and when your pint was in the bag, you had your choice of a small glass of orange juice or a small knock of whiskey. Being an alcoholic-in-training even then, I always opted for the whiskey.

Headed back to school after one of these donations, it occurred to me that if whoring is selling yourself for money, then I was a whore. Writing English essays and sociology term papers was also whoring. I had been raised mainstream Methodist, I had a clear fix on right and wrong, but there it was: I had become a whore, only peddling my blood and writing skills instead of my ass.

That realization raised questions of morality that still engage me to this day. It’s a rubbery concept, isn’t it? Uniquely stretchable. But if you stretch anything too far, it will tear. Nowadays I give my blood instead of selling it, but it occurred to me then and still seems true to me now: under the right circumstances, anyone might sell anything.

And live to regret it.