Having known of Mr. Niederhoffer’s reputation, I was nonetheless a bit shocked to find out it was true. His problem had always seemed theoretical to me, a fun fact to relay behind his back, as many of us did, but never a disease visited upon a fellow person. I did not in fact want to believe that the authority figures around me were flawed in elemental ways: I did not want my teachers to be adulterers, or drinkers, or gamblers. (Although at least two others were drinkers, and one of my favorite teachers from that era followed the bottle to an early grave.) I did not want them to be addicts: I just wanted to be able to gossip about their rumored addictions. Confronted by actual evidence that Mr. Niederhoffer was drinking, I was startled, then revolted, and somehow offended.
One day, about a month into the summer, Mr. Niederhoffer came back from lunch smelling a bit worse than usual, and chewing vigorously on a piece of spearmint-flavored chewing gum. And it was the gum that did it. It was a weak, ineffectual attempt to hide the smell on his breath, and just like that my last embers of compassion were snuffed. It was one thing to work for a drinker, but to work for a drinker who thought a little gum would do the trick? It was shameful for him, and embarrassing for me. I felt that I was in previews for a bad, ill-cast play, one that should be canceled before anyone saw us on opening night.
So I quit. I told him, right then, post-prandial, that something had come up and I would not be able to work the rest of the summer. I would finish out the afternoon, stamp the letters, deposit the checks. But I would not be in the next morning. I cannot remember what I told Heather, but she had been one of Mr. Niederhoffer’s Russian students in high school; I assumed she knew what was up.
I did not have much to do for the rest of June. Later in the summer, I went to New York City and volunteered for the communications office of the ACLU, which had nothing for me to do. Then I went to Switzerland for three weeks, spending the money I had earned working for Mr. Niederhoffer. On August 1, Swiss National Day, I was in the small town of Interlochen, and I watched as Swiss people got drunk (in that tidy, Swiss way). They were speaking German, and I did not have the courage to attempt the international hosteler language of merry gesticulation. I just watched them party in the pubs, then watched the fireworks, then went back to my hostel and read a book. I spent a lot of time that summer listening to Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” on my Walkman.
Having abandoned Mr. Niederhoffer that summer, and always unable to leave well enough alone, I made him the victim of my greatest email blunder of the early Internet age. A few months later, when I was back at college, Dr. Ratté, my high school’s beloved headmaster, announced his retirement, and a group of alumni began emailing suggestions about who the next headmaster should be. This was before Google groups and list-serves, and so we were all just replying to the same long list of email addresses, separated by commas, that had been compiled by the industrious Chris Sullivan, who had been a year ahead of me in high school.
Late one night, in the Connecticut Hall computer cluster on Yale’s Old Campus—this was before people had Internet connections in their rooms—I offered my contribution to the list. “They should just hire Mr. Niederhoffer to be the headmaster,” I wrote. “They could pay him in Stolichnaya.”
And it was, naturally, right after I hit “send” that it occurred to me that some faculty members were on this list. I scrolled down to the bottom of the string of email addresses, and sure enough, there he was: russianprof @compuserve.com, or something like that.
There is no way to salvage one’s dignity after a shameful act like that. It would have been one thing if Mr. Niederhoffer were not really a drinker, but he was, and calling an alcoholic an alcoholic is just a nicer way of setting his soused clothes on fire. It’s using his debilitating condition to debilitate him more.
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Still, there is great justice in how I proceeded to humiliate myself to a point lower than I had brought him. Panicked, I sent out a second email to the entire list, saying something like, “Sorry guys, some jerk sitting next to me typed that last message while I was off at the bathroom.” Set aside for the moment the implausibility of such a prankster sitting next to me in Connecticut Hall at one in the morning, and ask yourself: How would said prankster have known who Mr. Niederhoffer was?
Most people on the list, surely horrified by the spectacle playing out before them in pixels, averted their eyes, or at least stayed out of it. David Leonard, who had been two years ahead of me and whose approval I had always vainly sought, did send me a private message: “Oppy, just come clean and own up.” And he was right, actually. So I did the only thing I could do. I sent Mr. Niederhoffer a one-line message saying that I was sorry, that I had done something very unkind.
I am not sure what kind of reply I expected, but I know what I wanted: something very harsh, intemperate, alcohol-fueled. Something that would be difficult to read at first—I would have to look away, so sharp would be the recriminations—but then would justify all my worst feelings about the man, and so retroactively absolve me of my crime. If I apologized, and he responded with a tirade, then I would be the better man.
But when Mr. Niederhoffer wrote back, within minutes, his reply was gentlemanly, dignified, gallant. “Thank you, Mark,” he said. “I really appreciate it. And for what it’s worth, I never much went for Stolichnaya. It was never my drink.”
I do not know how this story ends. Enrollment in Mr. Niederhoffer’s Russian classes was on the decline, as it was in Russian classes throughout the world, since the end of the Cold War. Soon, Mr. Niederhoffer was given history classes to teach, and then he left my old high school. By choice or by pink-slip, I do not know. He and his wife, a Russian woman he had married rather late in life, divorced. Last I heard, he was living in New York somewhere, “recovered,” I was told by an old acquaintance of his—recovered from alcoholism, I suppose, or maybe from something else. Whichever the case, I hope it is true. He was a bad boss, but I suspect he is a good man, a far better one than I wanted him to be.
—photo Kim Joar/Flickr
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Read more Men at Work:
Dacus Thompson: Career Changers
Tim Donnelly: In Defense of Dating Your Coworker
Ted Cox: 11 Rules for Working Out of a Coffee Shop
Brian Stuart: Working for the Woman
Hugo Schwyzer: The Myth of Male Inflexibility
Mark Oppenheimer: Life Lessons From My Alcoholic Boss
John Olympic: What It’s Like to Work in Walmart Hell
Tom Matlack: The Illusion of Success
Morra Aarons-Mele: How to Work From Home
Ryan O’Hanlon: Meet America’s Oldest Minor Leaguer
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What the hell was the point of this article?