BY
After a long day of wearisome toil for the Recording Artists Project clinical where he listened to eight hours of music from unsigned artist Angon Novhere, Fenno slumped into his LazyBoy and snapped open his favorite section of the Washington Post. To his horror, he discovered that Post columnist Lloyd Grove had caught wind of the tale of Harvard’s feuding professors and had written a column as to the absurdity of it all.
It all came down to Jesse Jackson, an offensively early Tax class and the self-described lover of mischief, eon.
Fenno enjoyed getting his jollies from eon’s antics, but this incident had taken the madness a bit too far. Three HLS professors were effectively airing the law school’s dirty laundry to a national audience.
And what of the U.S. News and World Report? Rumors had already begun circulating that if HLS fell yet another spot in the rankings mass campus-suicide lurked just over the horizon. The damn Internet. Eon and the Internet — deadly.
Fenno decided that he should do something to quickly to confront the threat. He grabbed his cell, brought up the phonebook and pressed the “d-e-f” button.
T.J. Duane. No living thing that had ever stepped onto Harvard Law School soil had more to lose from the law school’s decline in stature than the HLS hustler himself.
Fenno pressed “OK” to call, then realized that the digital clock on his phone read “7:58 p.m.” Damn that Sprint. “Boop!” He lost the signal. Damn them.
He picked up the land-line phone and dialed the number from his cell phone book.
“Fenno, what’s the word?” Fenno pulled the phone from his ear and look at it, puzzled. “I know we’ve never met, but I spent a couple days placing every student’s number into my cell phonebook. That’s not weird, is it?”
“T.J., we have more important things to concern ourselves with than your peculiar obsession with HLS students,” Fenno yelled. “The Washington Post published an article on the Nesson-Warren-Ogletree tiff and — you’ll appreciate this — placed an unapproved link on the Post website to Nesson’s Evidence class website where the email war is posted IN ITS ENTIRETY!”
Fenno heard heavy breathing on the other end of the line and, he thought, even a soft whimper.
“A man pours his soul into this damn place, and this is how these spoiled megalomaniacs repay me.”
Fenno hung up the phone immediately. Clearly, the HLS hustler was not the one.
He went back to his phone book and hit “j-k-l.”
After three rings a warm voice answered.
“Hello.”
“Jesse, it’s me.”
“Fenno? How the hell did you get this number?”
“No time for that, Jesse. Up here at HLS we’re in a colossal mess after your visit. You have to help, Rev. We need you to come out here and clean this up. I saw what you did in Serbia. A blood-thirsty war criminal was no match for your political savvy. We need the ultimate diplomat. That’s you, Jesse. Jesse, the rankings are at stake, and rumor has it that Tree may pack his bags.”
Fenno could hear Rev. Jackson tapping his heavy index finger on wood.
“Stop stammering like your in Miller Civil Procedure. Just relax, boy. Now Harvard will not, I repeat, will not fall in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.”
Fenno took a deep breath and responded calmly.
“Wait. But how can you be so sure?”
“I’ve done the research.”
Fenno scratched his head. “But what on grounds are you basing that claim?”
“I’ve done the research,” Jesse snapped back. “Now I insist that you drop this ‘Save the Law School’ campaign immediately.”
Fenno’s eyebrow raised. He looked down at his phone and, to his horror, realized that in his haste he had pressed “m-n-o”.
A Freudian slip? Perhaps.