Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice

Cannon seriously as a novelist. Of course, you folks in the true crime department don’t share those prejudices with the boys down the hall, which is why I like you and feel you will understand. But the point is that in recent years, my students had been piping up more and more about Loose Cannons . Someone would come up to me after class and say, “Hey, um, this might be crazy but were you on TV in like the sixties?” and I, my voice low, would say yes, it was a thing I did, and then the student would inevitably admit that he was an aspiring actor and could I hook him up with my agent? Instances like those were becoming more frequent, until one day—when a student, mid-discussion of Samuel Pepys’s diaries, interrupted to ask what it was like being on TV, and the whole class said, “Yeah, Mr. M.,” not a single person seeming surprised by this revelation—I realized that it was just common knowledge now. This has been quite stressful and I have struggled with different ways of maintaining my (as I’ve said, pedagogically vital) professorial persona (the word “professorial”—adj., relating or similar to a professor—being the closest I can come, it seems, to an actual professorship, since I am not, technically, a professor), and during this first instance, I’m afraid to admit, I snapped at the student, telling him to stop trying to derail the class, and I then spent the rest of the period reading aloud Pepys’s description of the 1666 London Fire in a monotone, defiantly un-actorly voice, though I have now become more skilled at deflecting the issue without appearing so insanely insecure. After that Pepys class, however, I rushed back to the English Department office, paranoid and panicked, wondering aloud to anyone who would listen how it was that everyone suddenly knew everything, and Hazel, a pathologically cheery colleague who competesin a women’s arm-wrestling league under the name Harriet Clubman, said, “It’s the Internet, silly. They look you up. It’s all there. Things are different now. You can’t compartmentalize. I have eighteen-year-old girls coming up to me wanting to arm-wrestle for better grades. You should be flattered, though. If they’re taking the time to type your name into a search engine, it means they like you.” And that was when I started sneaking into Chris’s room to search for myself. It was all there online, my life unfurling on the screen. I had a profile on something called the Internet Movie Database featuring a picture of a very young me from a Loose Cannons publicity still, my hair full, floppy, and feathered, my stomach effortlessly flat. And people (who? devoted fans? archivists? felons?) had uploaded all thirteen terrible episodes for the whole world to see. But as horrible as that moment was, it’s not what turned me into a chronic violator of Chris’s stay out of my room policy (a policy explicitly stated and posted on his door). Peter Matthiessen’s self-searching book The Snow Leopard had meant so much to me when I first read it in the late seventies, and I’d always imagined that I too would disappear into the mountains one day to look for myself. But instead of braving the Himalayas of Tibet, I’d snuck into a teenage boy’s room, and found myself on a dim pixilated screen to the deafening screeches and pops of a dial-up modem—accessing the Internet sounding like such a violent, industrial act—and what I’d found, after all the Loose Cannons stuff, was a website called Grade-a-Prof, where students, as you might imagine, grade their profs. And there I was. No picture in this profile, just my name, my school, and my averaged grade. Paul McWeeney. College of Los Angeles . And my grade? It would be incorrect and lazily cliché to write here that my heart sank when I saw C-. Rather, my heartdid a sort of writhing thing and I experienced a little acid