The immediate past President was a man characterized or, rather, caricatured in the student newspaper by his teeth. He had, as his wife would be the first to admit to the paper’s young reporter, a buxom smile. Jean-Anne, the First Lady as she preferred to be known to the public, had a Molly-get-your-gun spirit. Buxom, though a sexist throw-back to a bye-gone era, was the type of colourful word that she always had on the tip of her tongue. He may have gone on in years, she was reported to have said, but his buxom smile is still as full as the first day he shared it with me. There was a tenderness in her voice. Even today, a researcher could coax it easily from between the printed lines.
Jean-Anne meant this as a compliment, as the kind of warm-heart recollection that would endear the students to her husband, then the new President. It wasn’t to be. In the cartoon that accompanied this first article, the immediate past President was depicted as a man with an impossibly large grin. His own first interview with the reporter hadn’t gone well. He had come off as the stern grandfather. Over time, cartoons of the President gained precedence over accompanying articles and eventually replaced them entirely. At the same time, the grin grew, until his head was nothing more than teeth, which ate the body not long thereafter. As a set of dentures, it — rather, he — would soon be seen biting into the ass of the personified student body. Jean-Anne’s love, it had become painfully clear, was not shared.
That James Fabricante had been a Doctor of Dentistry before assuming the role of University President was, in the collective mind of the student body, nothing more than coincidence. But, Dr. Fabricante was blind to it, perhaps even blinded by it. In other countries, he was aware, a dentist amongst academicians would not have been given the time of day. Yet, here, he had been shown to the President’s Office. His name was on the door. And, he commanded the finances of the institution.
Jim — as he preferred to think of himself — an ordinary man, the kind of fellow you would be happy to be seen with at a barbecue, sharing a joke, slapping you on the back like an ole-boy — Jim preferred to imagine that his detractors referred to him as Drill-bit James. The pretence allowed Jim to confide confidence in himself. Surgical extraction was a skill that this University would need, he told himself, if I am to be able to save if from itself. It would later become apparent that Jim also saw it advantageous to apply the skills of cosmetic as well as corrective dentistry.
The students, closer to their childhood and its juvenile preoccupations than the immediate past President, couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Fabricante’s profession. To them, he had simply become the exaggeration of one of his prominent physical features. He was simply a set of nattering, wind-up, plastic teeth. They issued decree after decree and, for the students, nagging aphorisms. The student body president was heard to wonder if his admonitions — they were endless — telegraphed the near occasion of their own mortal sin.
The worst offense was railing on about alcohol consumption on campus, after it came to light that apéritifs, wine, and whiskey were being delivered to the presidential mansion in quantities required to sustain weekly dinner parties that dragged on long into the night. A defence drawn on the responsibility of grown men and women seemed a sophistry that drew the headline, Father knows best — Bubble of responsibility forms over presidential mansion, from the student newspaper.
It was then that the paper decided to silence Dr. Fabricante. The words of the Presidential Watch column were replaced with a daily picture of the immediate past President. He was always shown beaming. The flash of teeth seemed to grow broader day by day. Drawing attention to the alcohol issue was, in fact, one of Jim’s most adept accomplishments. It obscured the fact that he wasn’t running the University like an academician but like a dentist.
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