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only Elizabeth has. Ah, she’s real nice. She’s a good egg. Good
egg
.
    When you’re eighteen, you realize that—there’s also a part of us that wants to be the president. And there’s also a part that wants to fuck every attractive person of the gender of our choice. I mean, you know … Just, I think she’s gotta be more—it’s not an accident that she’s depressed all the time. I don’t know. Maybe I just project all kinds of weird stuff onto her …

• • •
DAVID’S CLASS
CLASS: “ADVANCED PROSE”
    [Doesn’t want a tape. Is comfortable with note-taking.]
    Fluorescents, desks, steel wastepaper cans, boot smell, sweater smell, clock on wall, big table that David doesn’t sit much behind. Fifteen students. Women sit, as at an old-line synagogue, slightly apart from men. David wearing Fryes, blue bandanna. Carrying Diet Pepsi.
    Dave has noticed some surprising student errors this week.
    D AVE: Before we start, let’s do a moment of Grammar Rock.
    They laugh. He’s the ideal, the professor you hope for: lightning writer, modern references, charming and funny and firm.
    The students know another thing: he’s become, their bandanna-wearing teacher, during these past three weeks a suddenly celebrated man. And they want somehow to acknowledge it.
    S TUDENT 1: Done being famous yet?
    D AVE: (Blush smile) Two more minutes.
    K ID FROM BACK, SUDDENLY: I knew him
well
, Horatio—a man of
Infinite Jest
…
    D AVE: OK, you’re allowed
one
reference.
    Quick chatter about his media appearances. It’s exciting; a piece of their private life—this room and class—has gone suddenly public.
    S TUDENT 2, FEMALE: I love the way the
Trib
described your office.
    S TUDENT 3, FEMALE: Did you wind up, like, next to Dick Vitale and Hillary Clinton?
    Dave says he got real nervous on the flights, kept picturing grave etc., from tour.
    S TUDENT 4: Just put pepperoni and mushrooms on my Tombstone. (A take-out, grocery pizza sort of joke.)
    D AVE: The words “pop quiz” is what’s good about that.
    They talk about his magazine photos. Dave blushes more.
    D AVE: I didn’t think, I didn’t think—you can see my smiling maw. I thought, “Really? Is that me?”
    Dave fishes out a Styrofoam cup after pawing through two wastebaskets, for someplace to put his chewing tobacco. Is also drinking a Diet Pepsi.
    Class begins with a jump from celebrity into the supernormal, the administrative.
    D AVE: Office hours next week. Bring light reading material, if you have to wait in the hallway.
    Begins work on student stories.
    D AVE: (Offering Very Sensible advice. Lots of jobs for fiction, you have to keep track of twelve different things—characters, plot, sound, speed.) But the job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the
wall
, during the first eight pages.
    He paces around the classroom. Happy, energetic. At one point, thinking, he even drops into a quick knee bend. Class laughs; they really like him.
    D AVE: I know—I get real excited, and now I’m squatting.
    First story: by pretty student with a Rosanna Arquette mouth. Dave on story, always using TV: “I submit, it’s kinda like a Sam and Diane thing. Or
When Harry Met Sally.”
    Classroom fluorescents flicker on and off, quiet flashes. Dave glances up.
    Another story he likes: it’s very open, but needs to be controlled. “This is just a head kinda vomiting at us …”
    Less likable story: “This is just a campus romance story. And to the average civilian, I’ve gotta tell you, this is not that interesting …”
    Now at desk. Craning up and down when discussion and story get him excited.
    The student being workshopped is a punkish guy: mohawk, silver-and-yellow collar.
    D AVE: It’s really hard to create a narrator who’s alive. Take it from me.
    S TUDENTS: How?
    Dave’s advice is a kind of comedy, and makes them laugh.
    D AVE: To have the narrator be funny and smart, have him say funny, smart things some of the time.
    He