An Unattractive Nuisance

By Martin M. Goldstein

 

At the last General Assembly meeting of the Faculty Association, Lantz Simpson told of his encounter with a paid petition gatherer who was using “Free T-Shirts” as a come-on to get his signatures for Schwarzenegger’s anti-union and anti-teacher initiatives. He then handed out some flyers to us to use to urge students not to sign anything without knowing what it really means, and not to trust someone who’s telling you something just to get you to sign, because his job is to collect signatures and he makes money from each one, just like a used-car salesman.

 

Like a good socially conscious faculty member I took a stack of the flyers, which were originally prepared by the LA faculty union, expecting to hand them out in my Comm 10 classes, and to use them as a discussion point about free speech issues.

 

Well, it didn’t turn out exactly like that. I didn’t even talk about it in my afternoon class, as I had a lot to do, and I didn’t think about it at all until I walked out of class and ran into a paid petition gatherer right at the entrance to Liberal Arts, a young man in his 20’s I’d guess.  He asked me if I was registered to vote in the state of California, and I said I was, and he showed me a clipboard and started to ask me to sign his petition, but instead of signing I asked him if he was a resident of the state of California.

 

He flashed a disgusted look. We’d been told that anyone collecting petitions here must be a resident of California, which I’ve found out is not true, but clearly I was trying to hassle him and knew it.  He looked away, then rather combatively said that he was a resident, and when I asked if could prove it, he shot back, “Any reason I should?”

 

I had no right to make him show me ID, and he knew it, so I let it drop. I then asked if he was getting paid for collecting signatures. How much, I asked. Ten bucks? He grimaced. No way. Five bucks, then? “No,” he said, shaking his head. How much then? I prodded, curious now. What, a dollar? “Yes,” he said, as if only getting a dollar a signature, thus being ripped-off by his employer, gave him the moral right to scam students into signing. Of course he also could have been lying, as two bucks per signature is the going rate now.

 

A small crowd had gathered by this point, new people watching the developing incident as well as those he was talking to when I came by. A few of my own students from the class I just left stopped to bear witness, thought to what was not exactly clear yet. In any case, I turned to the crowd and started to explain what he, the petition gatherer, was asking them,  the students, to endorse, summarizing Schwarzenegger’s union and teacher bashing as quickly and clearly as I could. The petition gatherer then defended himself by saying he wasn’t interested in any of that; he was just interested in getting back to New York -- again finding moral exculpation in his own necessities.

 

In any case,  I’m from the Bronx, and I immediately thought that he belonged there, back in New York, since his in-your-face attitude was so alien to my current Santa Monica sensibilities. Little did I know. Further, by this admission he was clearly stating he had no connection to the issues of the petition, and was just collecting signatures to sell to make money. I didn’t have much time to dwell on this, however, as the situation deteriorated rapidly from there.

 

Feeling trapped and exposed, I would guess retrospectively, the petition gatherer, who was a bit taller than me, walked up to me and stuck his face into mine, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, then opened his mouth and began to wag his tongue at me. If you don't know what that means, I'm not going to tell you, but suffice to say under most circumstances, between two guys, it's an invitation if not the immediate prelude to a fight.

 

I pushed him away with a finger, sensing how out-of-control the situation had suddenly become.

 

“Don't touch me!” he screamed.

“That's assault if you touch me!”  “I'm not assaulting you, you bleeping bleep-bleep”, I said, “I'm just touching you, though I really wish I weren't.”  It wasn't my best line, but I didn't have time for a rewrite.

 

“Yeah,” he said, pushing face into mine again, and again with the tongue wagging thing, which by this time was starting to really bother me, “And I bet my breath smells bad, too!”

 

Fortunately, the appreciative smiles of my students helped focus me, reminding me that I am teacher and a role model whenever I'm on campus, and so I backed away from the guy and reached into my case and took out a handful of the flyers I'd gotten at the faculty assembly, and he gave me that disgusted look “oh bleep” look again as he realized his day here was over.

 

I handed out the flyers, and walked away without further interacting with him, and as I walked off he yelled something after at me, and I just looked  at him and his assistant, completely alone now in front of the building, and said, “Looks like you lost your audience, Jack.”

 

In the days after I've thought about it, fully calm now, as I was most certainly not during the incident. And I still think there's something wrong in someone setting up shop on our campus and selling signatures anywhere he wants to. If I came and set up a hot-dog cart on the steps of Liberal Arts, I doubt I would be allowed to do business. There have to be some rules on who can  do  what on  campus  where, none  of which impinge on free speech any  more than restricting the yelling of “fire!” in a crowded theater does.

 

People are conducting a dangerous business on the steps of our school buildings, and I really think that something should be done about it. The liability issues alone are enough to make your eyebrows curl. I'm doing what I can by trying to make this an issue, but I think this is an issue for the Trustees, and I think we have to deal with it soon, or there is going to be an incident uglier than this one, and that could be a real problem. This is an “attractive nuisance” in legal terms, and it will come back to bite us if we don't deal with properly.