Holdorff knew by the time he got to the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California that time was running out. In the fourteen years since he'd been discharged from the Navy, he'd gone to four colleges. He got his B. A. degree from Long Beach State College, and after graduation he signed a one year contract to teach English at a Long Beach high school. In the spring of that academic year, he was accepted for the fall semester as a doctoral candidate in American literature at the University of Southern Nevada, his first venture into graduate school.

After his arrival in Las Vegas, he got a part-time job dealing blackjack at the Pioneer Club. One night during his third semester at USN, as he was dealing cards, he met a small-town school administrator who conned him into signing a teaching contract and shanghaied him off to Needles, California. He wasn't really shanghaied. He'd overstayed his welcome at USN and was about to be dropped from the program, so he actually left voluntarily.

The Needles job was short-lived. He started it the second week of the fall semester and only stayed until Easter. About two days after he arrived, he sobered up enough to realize his mistake, and made up his mind to get out of there at the first opportunity. Sensing that his days of "pushing chalk" weren't over, he left Needles on Palm Sunday and headed back to Long Beach and his old job in the produce department of the A & P in Belmont Shore where he worked through the rest of spring and summer. In the fall he got a teaching assistantship in the M. A. program at State. By the end of that school year, he'd been accepted as a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Southern California.

He moved to Santa Cruz mainly because of the university. Living near a college campus was all he knew in life since Long Beach City College after he got out of the Navy. UCSC was a small school compared to all the other colleges Holdorff had attended; thus, he thought it would be easy to get to know a lot of people there. He likened it to one of his more pleasant Navy experiences. Before he got orders to Korea, he spent ninety days in corpsman school. It was a short time, but there were only fifty other men and women in the school, so he knew all of his classmates quite well. He was sure the experience would be the same at UC Santa Cruz.

"You can't hesitate," he'd said. "If you just walk in like you belong, act like you're a member of the club, nobody'll question you. If you hesitate just once, they'll think you're a fraud, and you'll be turned out."

How quickly illusions fade. How quickly reality must be reckoned with. Santa Cruz was more difficult to gain access to than he expected, but it wasn't the first time he was excluded when he wanted in. He'd failed his comprehensives at Southern Cal two years ago, and ten years had come and gone since he left USN under dubious circumstances.

He wanted a Ph. D. degree and to be a college professor, but just when he thought he was on his way to achieving these goals, he would run into a road block. At Santa Cruz Holdorff couldn't even register as a regular student, much less be accepted in the graduate program or work as a teaching assistant as he'd done at USN, LBSC and USC. All he could do was unofficially audit (sit in on) classes in subjects he'd already taken, some of them more than once. But he kept at it, attempting at the start of each new quarter to get enrolled.

He liked the innovative atmosphere at the school, but this only added to his problem. Because of its innovations, it was a popular college, so enrollments flourished. Thus, it was virtually impossible for a well-traveled scholar like Holdorff to receive preferred treatment over promising young graduates from some of the most prestigious universities in the country. He still clung to the distant hope that he might some day be accepted as a graduate student or even better yet as a lecturer because of his extensive academic background. Also, he thought the publication of two of his poems in a little magazine called Moondog should count for something.

His poetry was perhaps the biggest hindrance to his getting a Ph. D. If he got the urge to sit down and write, he would relinquish all other obligations and immerse himself in whatever idea he was developing at the time. He once tried to write a paper entitled "the linguistic significance of lower case letters in the poetry of e. e. cummings," and as usual, he got sidetracked and wound up writing a satirical poem about the subject. He thought of himself as a genuine poet. No slick hype or phony intellectual scam for him. Just honest-to-god poetry. He wrote for the love of writing, storing reams of unpublished, but finished and highly polished verse in his refrigerator.

"If my house burns down," he'd say, "all my poetry will be saved. I may die in the blaze, but my writing will live on to immortalize me."

That's how he talked when he was young, but the older he got, the more cynical he became, and in later years he had the feeling that his poetry (he had a recurring dream, nightmare would be a more appropriate word for it, in which he died in a blaze in his garret, and from somewhere overlooking it, he saw fire investigators sifting through the debris until they stumbled upon the refrigerator, emptied its contents and swept them away) would never be read by anybody except himself and the few people to whom he dedicated poems and thus gave them the original copies. Since he never made carbon copies of his work, these latter poems did not occupy the vaults of his refrigerator.

When he failed his comprehensive exams at USC, he wrote a poem to the graduate dean expressing his outrage at the treatment he was getting. There were five members on his graduate committee, only one of whom knew anything about his specialty, which was the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The other committee members were linguistics and romantics and Renaissance scholars.

He'd been asked to explicate the first seventeen lines from the second section of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." The point of his explication was that the passage is a parody of the scene from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in which Enobarbus describes Cleopatra sailing her sumptuous and lavish barge. He thought he'd argued persuasively in his paper that Eliot's language clearly showed that he was poking fun at Shakespeare's elevated verse style. After all, Holdorff pointed out, wasn't Eliot really describing a twentieth century call girl with "her strange synthetic perfumes,/Unguent, powdered, or liquid–troubled, confused/And drowned the sense in odours"? What else could Eliot be doing but satirizing the elegant, tragic, elevated, dramatic picture that Shakespeare was painting? Holdorff took the satire angle one step further and wrote that Cleopatra herself was merely a high class whore, a woman "O'erpicturing that Venus where we see/The fancy outwork nature."

That explication was Holdorff's undoing at USC. He was failed outright by the committee and told that he would not be permitted to petition to take the comprehensives again. But that didn't stop him. He got possession of the exam, and with his faculty adviser's blessing, he went to each member of the committee and questioned him/her on specific points of his essay. There were three men and two women on the committee. One of the women had taken off to Europe on sabbatical leave, so Holdorff didn't talk to her, but he made the rounds of all the others.

The first one he spoke to was a Wordsworth/Coleridge scholar, who, when Holdorff questioned him, admitted not having read "The Waste Land." The second committee member he spoke to, a man named Amsterdam, taught courses in freshman composition only. He hadn't taught a literature course in five years. The only reason he was even on the committee was because he was the coordinator of the graduate program in literature. He pleaded innocence to failing Holdorff. In fact, he suggested to the committee that they pass him because he knew Holdorff would protest the failing grade. Amsterdam told Holdorff that he didn't stand a chance of getting the committee's decision reversed.

The third committee member he approached was a linguist, and her only comment to him was, "I'm a linguist, and I don't even understand literary interpretation. I merely went along with the other members of the committee who voted unanimously to fail this essay."

There was such a finality, such intransigence in her tone that Holdorff felt like his balls had been cut off. He began to think he was lucky that the other woman on the committee, a short, overweight English Renaissance scholar with bulbous varicose veins popping out at her knee joints, had gone to Europe, thus relieving him of having to deal with her.

The only member who could have known what Holdorff was doing, and therefore could have defended his thesis before the committee, had his own reasons for failing him. He was an American literature scholar whose doctoral dissertation was on the latinate words in Wallace Stevens' poetry. He failed him because he believed Stevens was a better poet than Eliot and he resented Eliot's popularity in academic circles. He rejected anything that was done by anybody about T. S. Eliot. Holdorff had been in the wrong place at the wrong time once again.

Thus outraged and injured, he wrote a poem. He always wrote a poem when he got desperate, when there was no further recourse, when all avenues were exhausted. Poetry was his vent. After all if Ab Snopes could burn a man's barn down over a lousy hundred dollar rug, why couldn't he write a poem to express his own indignation. So, he grabbed a couple of the cancelled postal envelopes he carried around in the breast pocket of his corduroy sports jacket and dashed off "Holdorff's Reply." Then he slipped a clean sheet of white paper into his Underwood and transcribed the poem:

Dear Dr. Amsterdam (and other ships at sea)

He felt so inspired by this burst that he wrote an afterword: