Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts by Courtney Hamilton

once tried to hook-up with me at a party with this “going to be alive” line. When I told him that I knew what it meant to “be alive” and that meant that I had to go do my laundry, he called me a “Fake,” a plastic fake person who only wanted to be with non-real pretty boys. He called me that every time he saw me for the remaining three-plus years until I graduated, often yelling “Hey Fake!” across the cafeteria, or “Hi Fakie,” if he found me in the library, “There’s the Fake, hi Fakie!” if he saw me off campus.
    But something about me must have resonated with him. Maybe it was my refusal to buy his lines. Maybe it was the fact that clearly I wasn’t interested. Maybe it was that I was sixteen years old and I was challenging him, or simply, a challenge.
    Genie managed to get one of his theater students with a work-study job in the registrar’s office to give him my schedule and personal data, information which included my dorm room, car license-plate number, and phone number.
    He appeared twice, sometimes three times a day outside my classes to tell me, “Tonight, you and me, Fakie.” He knocked on my dorm room door at night whispering to my closed door, “C’mon Fakie—let’s do it.” He left notes for me on the windshield of my car which said, “Get Real Fakie—I’m Waiting for You.”
    Although obsessive, Genie’s behavior was not unusual for some of the faculty members at the art school. Sleeping your way through the student body—or should I say, student bodies—was a rite of passage for some of the faculty, a passage which occasionally included dumping your current wife and marrying one of your students, who, on average, was 30 years younger than the faculty member.
    Everyone knew about the music teacher who would sneak up on his students and fondle their breasts as they played. My own violin teacher had dumped three wives, one of them a previous student, during his ten-year teaching career. And the member of the administration who always managed to have the best-looking male students as his chauffeurs, a work/‌study job, was well known for his pretty-boy taste.
    Personally, I was mostly annoyed, and occasionally terrified, by Genie’s behavior. But I think even he knew his behavior had crossed the line on that Saturday night during March of my first year when he started banging on my door at 3:40 a.m. and began screaming, “Fakie—Open the Door.” This went on for 23 minutes, and then he started throwing the furniture in the lounge near my room—a television, an ash-tray, a chair—against my door. When the off campus police responded to my call at 4:15 a.m. and took him away, it seemed to slow him down.
    “Why did you call the police?” said the dean of the music school after I was summoned to his office. “You know, that’s Genie. Boys will be boys.”
    “He’s just having a little fun,” said Roberta after I told her that Genie frightened me. “Don’t be so judgmental.”
    Not long after that, he attached himself to some 19-year-old female directing student, a tiny girl with a head full of bright red ringlets who always wore jeans, white baker’s smocks, and knee-high black leather boots with four-inch heels. She was a transfer from NYU who had crossed the country to work with Genie because she thought he was a genius.
    The directing student kept him busy for a while. Between juvenile victims, Genie made hounding me a sport. Fortunately, there were enough innocents around to regularly supply him with fresh meat.
    It was a lot of activity for a guy who was allegedly the Dean of the theater school, for whom 50 aspiring actors in their late teens and early twenties had entrusted their parents’ life savings and their training in the dramatic arts. I remember wondering how any of them were going to make a living at this on a day when I watched Genie’s students learn how to emote expression in an exercise in which they all played clams at the bottom of the ocean.