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When John finally got his PhD I congratulated him and I meant it. John was wicked ADHD. Writing that thing had just about flattened him.
I said: “Now what? Publish it?”
John said: “No. It isn’t good enough to get published. Now it goes on a shelf in the library. And nobody ever looks at it again.” His big Irish Catholic face got merry, a chubby cherub or goblin, and he peered over his reading glasses at me. “What you do is, you tuck like a twenty dollar bill into your dissertation. Then you check back, five years later, and if the money is still there—and usually it still is—you know nobody’s even opened it.”
John moved away. He got some teaching job in Baltimore. Me, I had a rough couple of years. The best place I found in all that time was an old-style hotel room not far across the freeway. It was cheap, but even so, time came when I just hadn’t saved enough, and I was going to lose the room if I couldn’t come up with another hundred bucks by the first. If I could find more than a hundred that would have been better, because that would mean a sandwich, and a sandwich would have gone a long way just then.
I may be without means sometimes, but I’m no dummy, and I have a good memory. It took me an hour to walk to the graduate school library. I found the stacks where they keep the dissertations and I started around the middle. If John knew the trick, others must have tried it too. Within ten minutes I’d scored my first bill, in the pages of Sisyphus on the Columbia: Polity and Semiotics in the Industrial Heartland. It was only one lousy dollar though. Cheapskate! And his dissertation was pathetic. The sentences weren’t even all grammatically correct. I left the dollar in place. It would serve the cheap bastard right when he came back in five years and concluded, correctly and maybe tearfully, that nobody had ever once wanted to read his crappy writing.
I kept looking. Some of the dissertations were pretty interesting, and I caught myself reading when I really needed to be working at speed. The library was mostly empty. I don’t think anybody noticed me riffling through the pages, like a machine, one brain-stained tome after another.
I found fives, singles, a couple of tens, a couple of twenties. By the time the girl came on the speaker system (“Fifteen minutes till closing, please bring your materials to the checkout desk”) I had ninety three bucks. Almost enough.
John was a friend so I thought I’d do him a good turn. I found his dissertation and sure enough there was a twenty between pages 268 and 269. A twenty! I always knew the guy was a class act. I added the bill to my kitty and I left a note.
Hi John. It’s me, Mack. I’ve been collecting US currency from volumes of higher knowledge all afternoon. A good education is ever profitable.
You’re probably wondering whether I found any money here inside your seven-year labor, or whether somebody (seeking knowledge or just a little green paper) got here before me. Well. I leave you this note, as a gift more precious than a bank note or even a yes-or-no answer to a sad question. What I’m leaving you, John, is imagination, curiosity and hope.
After I paid Sondra at the hotel I got myself a Reuben. Oh how I love pastrami, especially with a lot of mustard. It tastes even better when accompanied by the glow of a good deed. A pitcher of beer would have been made it even nicer, but that would have to wait for another day, for more learning.
About Judah Crow
Judah Crow is a writer and a working scientist. His essays have appeared in the Exploratorium Quarterly and his plays have been seen on small and large stages in the San Francisco Bay Area and abroad. His story "Avenue C" recently appeared in Wigleaf and was nominated for the 2024 "Best Small Fictions" anthology.
