This bastard has been in my office every day for the past two months.

If I have to say thank you with my lips puckered one more time, I will load my AK, stored right there below my three framed degrees, and start popping students and teachers all the same from the top of this bell tower of a main office I call home.

He showed up at a dinner banquet two months ago with a check and a big shit-eating grin that nobody questioned then, because how much speculation are you really going to put yourself through when you've got thirty million dollars staring you in the face, honestly?

Greed, greed, and stupidity -- plain and simple. Anyway, he showed up at this banquet and everybody knew who he was. What no one could figure was why he was there. I mean Hugh Steadham didn't just drop in on a small private college for a couple of drinks and a look at the new work done on the gym bleachers, you know. But there he was, complete in a Italian made suit, I guess, and a big grin on his face and this check signed and made out to Clearview College for thirty million one dollar bills. Goddam, what was I supposed to do?

I shook that bastard's hand so fast and so hard, he probably thought I was a queer trying to make some kind of screwed up nervous pass behind the scenes, and I might as well been just that, because he's been laying pipe with me and everybody on this campus ever since.

I have the luxury of being the president of Clearview, a title I have worn with pride for all of two years now, a popcorn fart in the world of college presidents, let me tell you. I got the job by fluke. I married the former president's daughter, Jesus, ain't that just perfect.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there, I suppose. No matter how much I would like this situation to fade away and just die, it will be there today. I'm sitting in my office this very second waiting for my secretary-wife to barge through the doors and tell me that prick Steadham is in the biology lab again, fencing goat hearts, or fornicating with another linebacker. A linebacker, for christ's sake!

The magnanimous bastard was found three weeks ago in the campus cafeteria playing butt darts with the football team's only All-American, Josh Boorman. I had to suspend Boorman for that little fiasco and the team's not won a game since. Ticket sales are down and, yet, unbelievably so, Steadham was back on campus again the following morning, having posted bond at the county jail within minutes of being picked up -- just like he had $5,000 cash on him and handy for such an encounter. Surprise, surprise.

I guess it don't matter, though. You see, if the team goes winless the rest of the season and not a single person in town buys a ticket it's not going to put a dent in what has now became our largest, on-hand available funding resource, because even after construction was completed for an addition to the library and named in honor of Steadham, there was still enough money left over to pay my yearly salary until I retire and beyond.

It was the hall dedication that Steadham showed up for the following morning after his one on one game of touch buttball with Boorman, who is still in treatment and complains endlessly with various types of anal problems I'd rather just not think about. His folks told me this just after court proceedings I was made to attend. They're of course suing us. Steadham was nowhere to be found during court that day and was not mentioned during my painfully long conversation with the poor fairy's parents.

All this would lead one to believe that Steadham himself is homosexual, at least that's what I assumed after the incident. However, I quickly learned better when I received a phone call from our only girl's dormitory, Pathway Hall, the same night that Steadham brought his stock broker buddies for an afternoon tour of the campus and the newly added Steadham Memorial Special Collections Series.

The lady who called had just been hired about one week earlier. She didn't even know who Steadham was, hadn't heard of or yet felt the impact of the thirty million dollar surplus which came from the clearly disturbed bastard. So when she called she didn't say, "Hugh Steadham is over here holding four of our girls hostage in the second floor bathroom". What she said instead was a short and sweet, "Get the hell over here."

By this time I was jumpy and nervous and just waiting for the next thing to happen. I could still smell the varnished wood of the courtroom, could still see the look in Josh Boorman's mother's eye trying to slice my neck into pieces at a glance. My wife turned over in bed and I thought about telling her where I was going, but then just let her roll back over on her side. No point in both of us going crazy.

When I got to dormitory it was just past two in the morning. Every light in the building was on, every single room. When I walked through the doors I noticed too that all the sleepy eyed girls were out of their rooms and had somehow managed to gather in the meeting hall, huddled around the fake fireplace gripping their knees. Some were crying, some seemed strangely calm to the point of being entertained, and then some, at least four, I would find out later, were not there at all.

It wasn't five minutes after I walked through the doors when Shirley Stevens came rushing down the hall. Her face was a mess, tears streaming down and streaking the make-up she must have just put on a few hours ago with a small spade shovel. She grabbed my arm and tossed me into the only elevator in the building. On the short trip to the third floor of the dorm I listened to her breathing thick and forced across from me. She didn't say anything the entire way even though I asked over and over what the hell was going on. Every time I asked she would start snotting and crying so hard her big, water balloon tits bounced two or three times fast across her even bigger belly.

It was a headache from the beginning.

When I got out of the elevator on the third floor I expected to hear something -- crying, screaming, breaking glass, anything. Instead, it was too quiet, and then I heard something that sounded like it was coming from a room at the far end of the hallway.

I told Shirley to stand back at the elevator door when I should have asked her to come with me and started down the hallway. When I opened that door my first thought was why wasn't it locked, which says how much I was expecting something bad by this time.

It was madhouse. It was something from a De Sade story. Steadham had three girls meshed up in the floor, naked as the blessed day they were born, and was laying pipe to a fourth one, a skinny redhead against a wall across the room. He was just plying in to her with his head turned on his shoulders looking at the other three girls playing with each other in the floor. It smelled like sweat and stale breath and sex. The redhead was gripping the wall paneling and pushing herself into this godforsaken fat fuck.

What did I do? I told the girls to get their clothes on and join the rest of the students downstairs and then closed the door. They weren't making that much noise, and I was beginning to wonder how the entire dormitory got word of something going on.

Shirley was standing at the end of the hallway with her finger hovering above the elevator button. I waved a nonchalant hand in her direction and tied my coat tighter around my hips as I walked to her. God, if I could only downplay this one. Get the cops here and get Steadham arrested and be done with it. Shirley asked what was going on and I told her to calm down and call the police. There was no problem, I would have to contact a few parents tomorrow and get rid of some students, that was all. No problem.

The cops showed up about thirty minutes later, two men who spent more time questioning half-dressed girls in the main hall who knew absolutely nothing about what had happened than they did talking to Steadham.

Steadham was still in the room rooting the redhead and watching the sweaty trio with the make-shift bed blankets and toys and the moans when the cops showed up. When they opened the door to the room I could see through their matching blue shoulders from my place behind them that Steadham hardly missed a stroke. The three former students in the floor jumped up and covered their tits with their arms, leaving their little trimmed no-nos open and exposed, and the redhead, when she finally did notice, pulled away and gave everyone standing there an embarrassingly good look at Steadham's perpetual vehicle of destruction, bobbing and trembling against the side of his leg.

The girls grabbed whatever was handy to cover with and stalked past me without looking up. There they were, four bare asses trotting down the hallway and out of this mayhem, while me and the cops watched Steadham take his time and gather his high-priced suit and glossed shoes.

He bent over and grabbed his shoes from beside a miniature refrigerator and then slipped his seventy dollar, silk tie off a peg sticking from the wall beside a poster of Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar, all the time with this big, satisfied, and now all-too-familiar grin dripping from the corners of his mouth -- still fully naked and distractingly erect. I could have sliced his throat, then and there, and went straight home and had a great night's sleep, all things considered.

It was almost daylight when I crawled back into bed. My wife asked what was going on and I told her to go back to sleep, hoping to spare her the headache.

Now I've got three documents sitting here on my desk -- a police report and two letters from the local high school. Turns out the three girls were visiting as part of some high school program aimed at recruiting students, perfect. Where's the third letter for the wall-grabbing, skinny redhead? It turns out she's the daughter of Steadham's secretary, Faye Halloway. Devoted Faye showed up at the police station from what I understand and bailed Steadham out. Gary at the station, my one and only contact, said he saw them get in the back of a Lexus after she posted bail. He said he could have sworn the bitch went down on him before the car even left the parking lot.

Turns out he'd been tapping good old Faye and her daughter for about two years -- since she was, what would that be, fourteen?

The husband was one of his bureau accountants, pitiful smuck.

Trustworthy Faye called early that next morning and said if I sent word to the high school about her darling girl, she would sue the college. I thought about telling her to take a number, but then realized the truth in that statement and decided to let the little whore get off.

Police report says sexual abuse, unlawful transaction with a minor, indecent exposure, unlawful imprisonment, statutory rape. It's typed right here in black and white with a big, red stamp across it saying, DISMISSED.

The police report says shit -- we do it; you eat it.

All this in two months, and Steadham is sitting out in the lobby right now, waiting to come in and offer another two million for classroom extensions. I made my wife take lunch when he came in and threw the work-study girl to the lions. She called in just a few minutes ago with a shaky voice and told me Steadham had a check, said he told her to call in and tell me that he had a lunch appointment in twenty minutes and if he couldn't get in then he'd just give the two million to them.

Two and a half months ago I had a nice little college campus here. I mean, the fist-dragging football team -- with the now understandable exception of Josh Boorman -- was basically causing a hell storm here and there with some of the school's female help, but overall it was nice.

I'm looking out my window now and I can see a group of students rolling joints under the breezeway. Just above them, my most academically admired English professor, Dr. Avery Jensen, might as well be rolling his own joint with his double doctorate degrees from Yale and Columbia, because he couldn't have picked a more obvious place to force his tongue down leggy Trish Morehead's impressionable, young throat -- or a more inconvenient time to have asked her to bury her clutching fingers deep into the front of his corduroy pants in the meantime.

I ring out and tell the work-study girl to bring Mr. Steadham in, please.

They walk in and the girl, who is attractive even through her thick, black glasses, is giggling with Steadham. She looks up when they notice me and apologetically brings her hand to her mouth and turns to walk out.

At the same time Steadham and me both tell her to come back in and close the door.

He turns and looks at me, and then both of them look at me with their heads turned just a little sideways. The girl adjusts her short, matching black skirt and takes a seat then crosses her pretty tanned legs. Tiny hints of muscles move while she bounces her foot up and down, but she's smiling.

I flip the latch on my belt and let my slacks fall around my ankles. Work-study girl's still smiling.

I reach my hand out to Steadham, who starts to reach and take hold of me with a confused look on his face. The girl starts to get up, shaking a little, and I tell her to sit down and just hang on.

I snap the check out of Steadham's hand and toss it back onto my desk and nod to the girl.

Look at this picture of an eagle sitting squarely above my desk -- bold, confident, endangered, untouchable.

When I get too close I have to think about something else. That's when I look around the room a little. I use to have to think of Mr. Cartoon on Saturday morning, but the eagle does it this time, even with work-study girl on her knees and sweating like mad.

In some states vultures are protected by law, too. An endangered species, I suppose. A creature that has nearly exhausted its resources or been driven from existence by other creatures, including us -- all basically vultures themselves.

Sometimes, like when Rome is busy burning just outside your window, it's hard to remember the difference.