After cramming nights and weekends to ace my Graduate Record Exam, after navigating a minefield of identity politics as a gringo in Latin American Studies, after death-marching through four years of doctoral coursework and a 200-book reading list, after learning some French to go with my Spanish, after writing innumerable grant proposals to beg for funding, after leaving a trail of diarrhea and epithets across the map of Mexico, after slaving over a dissertation prospectus until I memorized it word-for-word…

…after jumping through all these hoops of flaming bullshit, I’m still not done with my Ph.D. I’m just getting closer.

This is my oral qualifying examination, when three professors give you the Spanish Inquisition Lite treatment. Their goal? Trip you up. Force you to utter “I don’t know.” Make you look like an undergrad with pretensions. This is their last opportunity to hold you back — or wash you out of the program, even — before you begin your dissertation research. And like the Inquisition, there is no appeal. If your exam committee decides you need to read another 50 monographs about Mexican women’s history, then you do it. And I don’t want to read another goddamn book in my life.

That’s why I scrutinize their expressions and body language as they settle across the conference table from me. So far, so good. Nobody is giving off another-50-monographs vibe. They just look like they’d rather be someplace else.

In the middle, my dissertation advisor and a living legend in the field of Latin American Studies — Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez. Squint at him and you can still see the Brown Panther with a face of dynamited wood, snarling into a megaphone with fist raised, an icon of chicano militancy. But that was the front page of The Los Angeles Times in 1968. Now he’s on the downside of a career in academia, the only place you can trade on left-wing notoriety and frothing Marxist regurgitation. His curriculum vitae reads like an application for political asylum in Cuba. He also feuds incessantly with colleagues, UCLA administrators, even the UC Regents. Most graduate students are terrified of his badass motherfucker act. I think he’s alright if you know how to play him. After four years I’ve become a virtuoso.

To the left, the slouching form of Professor Francisco “Frankie” Chavez. He’s a thirtysomething rico suave with a wardrobe to match. Today he’s wearing a glossy shirt untucked over jeans and ankle boots. His popularity on campus is only skin-deep. The white students wonder if Frankie or affirmative action is responsible for that Ph.D. from Stanford. The Hispanic students call him a “coconut” — brown on the outside, white on the inside — because he dates gringas and his golf game doesn’t suck. Lucky for him he’s the so-called rockstar in the department, teaching and lecturing and publishing like a 60-watt bulb in a 40-watt socket.

To the right, Professor Geena Rausch. She’s my outside field advisor, a “pop culture economist” who made her reputation with an econometric study of female bisexuality. Whether it’s enough to get her tenure, nobody knows. I chose her for my committee because she’s the next best thing to an empty chair. Geena is a junior professor with a crushing workload. She only has time to assign minimal reading, usually articles instead of monographs. And UCLA doesn’t pay her enough to care if I learn anything or not. She colored her dreadlocks orange since I last saw her. It looks like she’s wearing a bag of Cheetos on her head.

“Mr. Roberts, let’s get underway,” Hercules begins in a stentorian voice. He’s always formal, if you couldn’t tell from the suit and tie. Makes me self-conscious that I’m wearing chinos and a PIMPIN’ AIN’T EASY t-shirt.

Minutes drag off my watch as Hercules preambles about the mission of doctoral education. The “Ph.D.’s burden” speech, as I’ve learned to call it. Fight the oppressive structures of capitalism that thrive on social ignorance. Be a change agent for those proletarian dumbasses who lack the political consciousness to be a change agent for themselves. Blah blah fucking blah. Beside him, Frankie and Geena are glazed with boredom.

Eventually Hercules folds his hands into a knobby ball and stares at me. “Mr. Roberts, your graduate coursework doesn’t fit neatly into Latin American Studies. Much of your reading list is drawn from East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. So let me open with a fundamental question about your academic orientation — do you consider yourself a comparative generalist who is currently focusing on Latin America, or a Latin Americanist operating within a comparative framework?”

Jesus wept.

Hercules keeps sidetracking the exam with his “refried beans” — dependency theory this, pedagogy of the oppressed that. He hasn’t triangulated beyond Che Guevara, Emmanuel Wallerstein and Paolo Freire in forty years. That makes it easy to answer his questions, but the cadaverous leftism is upsetting Frankie. Soon he and Hercules are fighting mano-a-mano in the pedantic language of academic discourse. 1960s radical vs. 2000s neocon in a cage match to the death. Between two professors who have brown skin, lifelong tenure, BMW keyfobs, and homes near the ocean.

The irony would be delicious — if I didn’t have white skin, a teaching assistant gig that pays in misery, a Ford Explorer with 150,000 miles on it, and a studio apartment in the Rodney King riot zone of Koreatown.

Meanwhile Geena is doodling on her notepad and struggling to stay awake. I’m beginning to wonder if she pulled an all-nighter to grade papers or catch up on her academic reading. My suspicions deepen when she finally gets a chance to interrogate me. She lets her mouth hang open for an extra beat before launching into a rambling monologue about Hispanic market segmentation. The clock runs out before Geena can ask me a single question. Hercules and Frankie glare at her as if she just abused the institution of the oral exam so profoundly they can’t put it into words.

No whispered consultation about my performance is necessary. Hercules simply announces that I’ve passed my orals, and Frankie and Geena nod like bobblehead dolls. I gust a sigh of relief. I’ve ducked the another-50-monographs bullet. Mission accomplished.

Afterward I endure the usual theater of obsequiousness — handshakes and thank-yous and bullshit honorifics. Their deigned collegiality is the next breadcrumb on the trail to…well, them. Good work, Nick. Keep it up and you’ll be one of us someday.

Only Frankie lingers. We ride down the elevator together and pause in the beveled sunlight so he can fire up a Marlboro. “You made that look easy, chief.” One of the nicknames Frankie uses with me and everybody else. Easier than remembering individual names, he once told me.

“It was nothing,” I shrug. “Just another hoop of flaming bullshit to jump through.”

“That’s the spirit.” His laugh turns into a cough.

Several cute undergrads stroll past. This is southern California, so they’re melanoma-tan and advertising it. Frankie and I ogle them warily. It’s strictly verboten to fuck an undergrad, but career suicide never looked so good.

I shift my gaze to him. “So how’s my funding look?”

“Your funding, hmmm…” Frankie puffs thoughtfully, doing psychological math behind downcast eyes. Trying to find the least bruising words.

“Don’t tell me — Hercules is giving me the grant.” There are only two dissertation research awards in the Latin American Studies department. The grant is $12,000. The fellowship is $24,000. Guess which one I want.

Frankie shields his face with a palm, inspecting my reaction. “$12,000 buys a lot of burritos in Mexico. You’re still planning to live down there, right? Tijuana?”

I’m trying to stay on slow burn, but it’s hard. “Hercules. That goddamn bastard. He’s saving the fellowship for Maria, isn’t he?” Her name is a synonym for female and Hispanic, two competitive advantages I’ll never have.

“Hercules isn’t playing favorites, champ. You’ll be in Mexico. Maria is doing her research in Dallas. It’s a cost-of-living decision, that’s all.”

“You and Hercules need to get off your asses and visit Mexico once in a while. It’s not $12,000 a year cheaper than the United States. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Take it easy, would you? I’m on your side.” Frankie leans in close, giving me a dose of secondhand smoke. “Maybe I can get you the rest of Javier’s funding, since he dropped out of the program. That’s another $9,000. Maybe.”

“I can’t put maybe in the bank, dude.”

“Maybe is all I’ve got right now.” He drops the cigarette and stomps it with a boot, signaling the end of our shoptalk. “So you passed your orals. What are you doing to celebrate? Got anything planned with, uh…what’s-her-face? Your girlfriend?”

“Phoebe,” I sigh.

“That’s the name. Well, you kids have fun. And don’t let this place get to you, alright? Another couple years and you’ll have your Ph.D.” Frankie claps me on the shoulder, all buddy-like, and hoofs toward the faculty parking lot and that gleaming BMW.

Heatwaves boil off the sidewalk around me as I picture my post-exam celebration with Phoebe. Two disinterested participants using sex to fill up the spaces where conversation should be. Trapped in LA, since she isn’t the getting-away kind of girl. Enduring the hipster replicant nightlife until the hour is sufficiently late to play my-place-or-her-place, which has the trump of being 90210 zip code nice. We’ll drink too much before, during and after. But it beats more time in the library, so I fumble out my cellphone and dial her number, half-hoping she’s back from her latest business trip to Hong Kong, half-hoping she isn’t.