In the early 1980s, you funded your college education by working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the hill from the posh Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. Every one of your coworkers was grotesquely overeducated for a retail gig. They held advanced degrees in literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, and musicology. They read Flaubert in the original French and sneered at anyone who relied on English translations. They believed that submitting to the control of an institution or corporation that micromanaged their time and minds was a spiritual death sentence. Instead, they sold fine wines and imported beers with an attitude that hovered somewhere between snark and superiority.
They all cultivated a highly refined elitism, radiated contempt for the customers—and, more broadly, the human race—and shared a belief that irony was the only sane response to this absurd planet. Their motto? “Service with a smirk.”
Not especially wealthy or muscular, your coworkers prided themselves on their Big Brains. Their verbal dexterity, their intellectual firepower, their ability to quote Adorno while comparing two bottles of Beaujolais for a confused customer—that was their muscle flex. They taught you that there was such a thing as Intellectual Gains, and that those gains could be just as dramatic and awe-inspiring as Sergio Oliva’s “Myth Pose.”
Wanting your Brain Flex to catch up with your biceps, you started reading voraciously and obsessively. You studied their cadence, their inflections, the casual way they’d launch into side-by-side comparisons of wine varietals while citing Camus or dropping a Nietzschean aphorism with the same ease others quoted movie lines.
During slow shifts, you huddled with them behind the cash registers and debated Nietzsche’s eternal return, Wagner’s bombast, and Kafka’s deadpan horror. The job offered no challenge, but it allowed you to indulge the delusion that you were smarter than most of the world. Whatever you lacked in income, you made up for in bottomless self-regard. But the longer you stayed, the clearer it became: if you remained among these brilliant misfits much longer, you might never become employable again.
You wanted to be part of their tribe. Even though you were close to completing your master’s degree in English, you never felt at home in academia. You didn’t read the assigned texts. You read what you wanted. You couldn’t sit still in class. You fidgeted, brooded, obsessed over everything from romantic doom to post-class traffic to the low-protein status of your fridge. You found yourself more anxious in the university than anywhere else. You hated the buildings, the architecture, the odor of institutional bleach. When people asked what you majored in, you told them, only half-joking, that you were majoring in “Get the Hell Out.”
But in the wine shop, you were a professional slacker. You belonged. There, in the cathedral of cabernets and rieslings, your sarcasm was currency, your irony a badge of honor. You could see yourself doing it forever: dodging rent hikes, skipping dental coverage, surviving on occasional antibiotics and a diet of spiritual smugness. Sure, the paycheck was garbage, but your soul—your weird, overcooked, wine-soaked soul—was intact.
You were in your mid-twenties, content to spend the rest of your life chucking Nerf footballs down aisles lined with Chianti and Beaujolais while quoting Borges, Moravia, and Unamuno.
And then, in the late summer of 1987, your comfort zone got drop-kicked. You became the Accidental Professor.
It happened when your friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde—a high-ranking administrator at Merritt College—called in a favor. He needed someone, anyone, to teach a Bridge Program at Skyline High School. None of the real English professors would budge. Desperate, he turned to you.
“But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential,” you said.
“No problem,” the chancellor of community colleges replied. And then you heard it—his dot matrix printer spitting out a California Community College Teaching Credential like some bureaucratic birth certificate.
You stared at the document the way Luke Skywalker must’ve stared at his first lightsaber.
Of course, the credential didn’t turn you into a real professor. That truth hit hard one afternoon while you were still at the wine shop, pouring Braren Pauli merlot for a professor from Cal Berkeley. You confessed your dread to him—your anxiety about starting a teaching job with zero experience, no clue what you were doing.
With his mane of gray lion’s hair and scholar’s beard, the professor took a sip, looked you over, and said: “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and build structures with your students. Sometimes they don’t want to be there. They’ll resist. Their silence will feel hostile. You’ll feel like you’re talking to yourself. A part of you will die inside. That’s when professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism, you push through the resistance and build the damn house.”
Thirty-five years later, you wished you could tell him you never forgot his advice—but you wouldn’t tell him about the times you drove home after those icy lectures, collapsed on your bed in the fetal position, and cried yourself to sleep.
He had been right. The classroom wasn’t always going to love you. You had to show up prepared and exude confidence, even when the students sat disinterested, distracted by relationship drama, hunger, money problems, family conflict—forces beyond your control.
You learned the brutal truth: being a teacher meant accepting their disengagement without making it about you. If you were going to survive, you had to remember—it was their classroom, not yours.
Eventually, you understood that being a good instructor went beyond building metaphorical houses. You had to cut the Self out of the equation. You had to stop needing to be loved and start trying to be useful. You had to shift from the narcissistic slacker with a book of Borges in one hand and a wine opener in the other, to someone capable of service.
Had Felix Elizalde not booted you into teaching in 1987, you might still be at Jackson’s, tossing wine snobbery like Molotov cocktails and cultivating your own smugness like a bonsai tree. You might have played the role of the brilliant-but-doomed clerk until the day you died.
People love to talk about the self-made man, but you knew better. Your life had been shaped by good timing, dumb luck, and the generosity of others. Had those external factors not shown up, your genius might have curdled into long-term mediocrity.
Only with time did you realize: success isn’t just hard work. It’s also who kicks you in the ass and when.
Cinemorphosis 
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