Village Squire, 1973-05, Page 5Genloos Maximus
a short story
by William Keith
'As I sweated out the las
chapters of my novel,
the last thing I needed
was Max
the disaster area '
You meet some strange characters in college, but Max was the
strangest I ever met.
Of course to Max and the rest of the freshmen who shared the
third floor of the men's residence, 1 must have seemed a little
strange at first too. I still wonder how I ended up being the
only country boy among a herd of city -bred slickers. And when
they found out I was a writer, one or two even expressed dis-
belief that I could even print let alone write.
But in time we adjusted to each other and an uneasy state of
truce held for the rest of the year. Despite what the others may
have thought I did use the right toothpaste, mouthwash and
deodorant and I dried behind my ears every morning.
It was Max who caused the real trouble. Max was Lerman
and far back in his ancestry he must have had one of those fam-
ous German physicists because science was so thickly embedded
in his blood that the corpuscles could hardly find room to move
in his veins. When it came to writing a physics or chemistry
paper he was a master, and if it hadn't been for his atrocious
grades in his arts subjects he could have had the highest marks
in the history of that college.
But brilliant as Max was he had a problem. You see, when
it came to applying his knowledge to practical things he was
hopeless. Although he was top of his class as an electrical
engineer he couldn't change a light bulb without getting a
shock. But somewhere else in his family Max must have had a
little Irish for he was one of the stubbornest, most self-confident
men I have ever had the occasion to meet. He THOUGHT he
could fix anything with a plug, from a toaster to an IBM com-
puter.
Max had another problem. He liked to keep informed with
everything that was going on with every one of the fifty-two
people who shared the third floor. In plain, uncomplimentary
terms, Max was a busybody.
He became so bad that nobody wanted to share a room with
him. Poor Max didn't know why he was being shunned. He
thought he was just being friendly.
After my freshman year I didn't see Max much. I heard
about him now and then and as usual he was breezing along in
his studies, except for a little trouble he had in electronics lab
when he nearly electrocuted one of his instructors. When I did
run into him it usually took me nearly an hour to escape his
cross-examination.
But Max graduated at the top of this class and after that pul-
led down a nice fat desk job planning circuits for some big
electronics firm.
I graduated too, though not at the top of my class by a long
shot. Somehow I wrangled a job with a women's magazine
writing articles on how to stain furniture without getting dirt
under your fingernails. But the job had an advantage and her
name was Marion, a secretary in the fashions department. Six
months later, fashions and fruniture united in a little ceremony
down at city hall.
Another year and I had had enough of the strain of stain so we
moved into the country, back to the rolling hills of Western
Ontario where I originated. We bought a little 25 acre estate of
mostly rock and swamp and managed to piece the old farmhouse
back together after 20 years of deteriorating abandonment. The
land was so poor it couldn't grow enough grass to feed a self-
respecting grasshopper . We managed to reclaim some of the
swamp from the mosquitoes so we could have a back yard and
to transplant enough top -soil over the rock out front so that we
could have a little green besides moss.
e were happy there. I settled down to write the great Cana-
dian novel and Marion tried to cope with the problems of a
city girl in a home without all the conveniences. I even
managed to sell a few short stories so that we ate at least once a
day. In fact everything was beginning to LOOK rosy. I was on
the verge of closing a deal with a major publisher to print my
first novel which was in the critical stages of the sixteenth re-
write. I almost had it made.
Then came that horrendous decision to go to the alumnae re-
union at the college. I had always had a premonition that I
should never have joined that organization but everyone else in
my graduating class was joining so I didn't want to be a killjoy.
1I hadn't even been to any of the reunions for years._ But this
time I had to go down to the city to see the publisher anyway
and I thought there might be a reason to celebrate. AND I
thought it might be nice to rub it in to those slobs who had
voted me "Man most likely to end up writing toothpaste com-
mercials,' so I took Marion along to make a weekend of it.
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