Free Specimen & Other Stories by Alan Annand

Department. An ex-patriate American, the
Professor had once mentioned in class that, instead of going to
Korea, he’d served stateside in Military Intelligence, implying
that he was pretty hot stuff, and that he’d been in a serious
quandary at one point as to whether he should take a job with the
CIA and become an assassin of Commie agents or continue his
graduate studies to become a professor. Lucky for those Commies
he’d made the wrong choice.
    You could tell, however doubtful his story
was, that there was indeed something of the spy in him, the way
he’d built a dossier on the whole English Faculty, just in case
Canada, as left-wing as it was, turned Commie too and he’d have to
squeal on his associates in order to protect his own tenure.
    Dessert was offered but Ms. Atwood, as
anxious as any sane visitor to escape from a nut-house back into
normal society, said maybe it was best to forego that pleasure and
head off to the university for her reading. The Professor would
drive her, she made that clear, so I headed off on my own. The Bug
was parked on a steep street so it was a breeze to get started and
drive over to UNB, whose campus itself was built on the summit of a
considerable hill. I parked at the highest point I could find in
the lot of the Memorial Hall Building, and made two trips to carry
into the lecture hall my Fender Bassman amp with its huge speaker
cabinet and the 100-watt amplifier head along with my Sears
microphone and assorted cables.
    The lecture hall, which the Drama Club used
for its monthly productions, had a good-sized stage and mezzanine
section, behind which a spectator gallery with built-in wooden
seats rose at a steep incline. I imagined this was something like
the design of old-style English theatres, where the gentry looked
down over the heads of the riff-raff. Little did I know that a
Shakespearean drama of minute proportions was about to unfold this
evening, and that I would play such a villainous, albeit petty,
role.
    As the spectator gallery filled up, I went
about my business as poet roadie. I plugged in my amp and cabled it
up to the speaker cabinet. I ran the microphone cable up onto the
stage where a wooden lectern faced the gallery. In those days,
living on the shoestring of a graduate student’s assistantship, I’d
never known the luxury of a microphone stand. During jam sessions
in my apartment with my brother or some other amateur, I’d made do
with a broomstick handle taped to a chair, and the microphone taped
to the broomstick. Tonight in my haste I had forgotten to bring my
broomstick.
    But as Frank Zappa used to say, necessity is
the motherfucker of invention, and I wasn’t going to let a little
thing like this spoil Ms. Atwood’s big night in Fredericton. I
hustled out to the cloak room where I found a wire coat hanger. I
bent it into an appropriate shape and anchored one end of it around
the lectern’s reading light and, with a generous quantity of
electrical tape, secured the Sears microphone to the other end of
the coat hanger. I switched on the amp and gave it a few minutes to
warm up.
    Although the Bassman was a classic piece of
rock ’n’ roll equipment, practically a collector’s item, it was a
tube amplifier. There were about half a dozen of those tubes, each
one looking like a little miniature city under a dome of glass, the
lights slowly coming on in the little cathode skyscrapers. Compared
to today’s modern electronics, this was almost Soviet-era
technology, but if it was good enough for Jimi Hendrix, I figured,
it was good enough for Margaret Atwood.
    In a few minutes, the Bassman was humming
happily, a steady low-decibel drone like a distant airplane that
could be heard throughout the lecture hall. I thought this might be
a little distracting so I tried reversing the polarity on the power
plug, but that only sent it into overdrive, like the sound of a
kamikaze plane beginning its dive into some hapless troop ship. I
quickly returned the plug to its