Joseph Looking for a Manger
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
My uncle has a locker on the third floor of Chaloner’s with his name on it. Sometimes I sit up there with him; the waitress knows him by name, and brings us two Bunnahabhains. We smoke cigars from my uncle’s humidor. The last time I was there, before all this started, I saw Jeff Docking, President of Adrian College. He was alone, sitting by the window in a low-backed leather chair, grinning like a cow-skull. My uncle shook his hand, because my uncle is a very kind man––but I am not, and did not.
Jeff Docking has a Wikipedia page; it’s a languid, self-congratulatory biography that reads like an obituary written by co-workers, but was probably written at gunpoint by one of the College’s final surviving English Majors. It’ll tell you, if you read it, that Jeff was hired because of his experience developing a relationship between institutions of higher learning and their communities; the man in question can be seen at Chaloner’s cigar bar, drinking alone.
Docking was a hockey guy, and his unique and revolutionary idea was that people like hockey, and want to both see and play it. All sports can be good moneymakers for small colleges, and Docking made Adrian College the home of the largest hockey program in the country. The plan, probably, was that turning the school into a sleep-away camp for hockey players would lead to a prosperous college. It did not. Last year, Forbes ranked Adrian College 930th out of 933 colleges in terms of financial stability. Docking is the author of A Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America.
As part of his plan to save Adrian’s small Liberal Arts College, Docking gutted the departments of Communication, History, English, and Art: those disciplines that thugs and tyrants everywhere cannot understand, and thus do not fear. So you might not get to study any of the Liberal Arts this semester, but if you’re on one of the hockey teams at Adrian, you might actually still get to play. You’ll wear a special face-mask that looks about as convincing as hydroxychloroquine, and play other colleges with skyrocketing infection rates.
If you’re a student at Adrian, Docking won’t tell you that his salary is worth sacrificing your life for—but you’ve lived in America long enough now that you should know that’s what he means. At the time of writing, Adrian College students with Covid-19 are quarantined alongside healthy people in two-person dorms with communal bathrooms, one per floor. At the time of writing, the Detroit Free Press says that 8.9 percent of Adrian College students have contracted Covid-19, which as you may have worked out, is many, many times the national average. In my hometown, the most dangerous place to be is almost certainly Adrian College.
And what was Adrian College? In the 1850s, Methodist Abolitionists founded a liberal arts school out of two brick buildings in the swiftly-expanding town of Adrian. Their first president, Asa Mahan, was an abolitionist in the days when being an abolitionist could get you shot. Solomon Northrop gave his first speech at the college after he escaped his twelve years of slavery. During the Civil War, the 3rd Michigan Infantry was mustered on the college grounds, upon a grassy mound at the south end of campus. Adrian College was stately brick and stone-adorned buildings with creaking, well-loved floorboards, open fields and maple trees.
Out of the same nervous, depressive tendency that makes me re-organize the furniture in my bedroom every few weeks, Docking led sweeping reconstruction efforts to reorganize the campus. These efforts (hilariously named RENAISSANCE I and RENAISSANCE II) comprised the construction of the Arrington Ice Arena, and a new football field: Docking Stadium—named after Docking, by Docking. The student union building got a terraced, outdoor portico that looks like a place Real Housewives would throw wine at each other; styrofoam-fill pillars and trellises, crowded plastic Adirondack chairs. The centerpiece of all this is an ever-burning flame, like the kind they stuck on JFK’s grave, but with the added benefit of bro-country played from hidden speakers. They brought in dirt to make the mound bigger, and there’s new campus art. Ominous metal spikes in the median strip of Michigan Avenue, which weep fountain-water from orifices on the top, and a copy of The Thinker that Docking picked up, from Hobby Lobby. The Thinker is poised at the edge of campus, facing inward, bending to show the city his ass.
Jeff Docking is in Adrian, and he is everywhere. He is everywhere something beautiful is sold for scrap, in every meeting where the bad haircut and expensive tie makes the glib speech. To come out and tell you that the President of Adrian College is just as derelict, incompetent, and cruel as the President of the United States would be to insult your intelligence. You know this already, and you already know who Jeff Docking is—he’s the kind of person who names a football field after himself.
Jeff will resign someday—maybe soon. Maybe they’ll actually fire him; and as much fun as it would be to watch him carry his office things away from Adrian College in a little cardboard box, remember that he knew it was a long-con before we did, and that like any conman, he knew that it had to end sometime. He has money and fallback plans; speaking engagements with other grifters, board-memberships and other parasitic, mostly-ceremonial positions, a desperate retirement hobby like parasailing, or RC planes — the kind of hobby only rich men with no imagination ever take up. You’ve lived in America long enough to know there’s no justice. Jeff Docking will slink to some locked room with an expensive bottle and a cigar, pretend he likes the way they taste, and stare lovingly at the reflection of his desiccated smile.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer from Michigan, a former domestic violence counselor and current MFA candidate at Columbia University. He’s going to hit the highway like a battering ram in his stealth-gray Pontiac Vibe.
