Mark Oppenheimer quit the best job of his young life because his new boss was an unbearable drunk.

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During the March vacation of my sophomore year, I decided the upcoming summer I needed a paying job. The previous summer I had done childhood-type things, things that were either free, like loafing, or things my parents paid for: for example, I had spent two weeks at a tennis camp at Williams College. And my parents probably would have let me loaf and mooch for another summer. But looking ahead I decided that another summer of unproductiveness would be a bit undignified. What’s more, my material needs were growing. I had a compact-disc collection to tend to, occasional books to buy, the very infrequent rock concert to attend. It might be wise to earn some money.

So I spent that March vacation trudging to various places of employment, filling out job applications. But it turned out that while 15-year-olds technically could work in Massachusetts, most businesses wanted you to be 16. The two episodes of rejection I remember best were at CVS and at Steiger’s, the now-defunct local department store. At CVS, the manager gave me some line about how they couldn’t have anyone under 16 handling drugs. And at Steiger’s, where I was actually allowed to fill out an application, the store-marmish lady who interviewed me seemed about to hire me, but I blew it. “You’re 16, yes?” she asked me at the end—and it’s only looking back that I realize she wanted me to lie, because she was eager to hire a clean-cut, polite kid like me. But I told the truth, and was shown the door. Apparently 15-year-olds could not be trusted with Oxford shirts and braided belts.

So I had to make up my own job. As it happened, my high school debate coach, Mr. Robison, was in the process of starting a summer school, to run from late June to early August on our high school’s campus. He was telling me one day how busy he was—this was a solo effort, an idea the headmaster had permitted but given him no staff for—and I said, “Can I work for you?”

This was probably in April. Our school year ended in early June, and the promise of soon having a young helper, especially one he liked, was very appealing to him.

“Yeah, I think that would work,” he said, as he nodded, slowly, the idea growing on him as we stood there. Within five minutes we had settled on a start date in early June and on a salary of eight dollars an hour. In a summer when many of my friends would be getting the minimum wage of $4.35 an hour, I would be the most richly compensated minor I knew.

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It was a marvelous summer. Being the office boy at the Loomis Chaffee Summer School entailed the following responsibilities, roughly speaking: answering phones; giving tours to wealthy Asian and European families hoping that a summer of English-language study in the United States would give their rather average children a prayer of getting into Harvard; depositing the application checks of said Asian-plutocrat and Euro-trash children; sending out their acceptance letters (they all got in); and flirting hopefully with the girls working on campus that summer—most notably Claire Magauran, a tall, strawberry-blond, just-graduated senior who was working that summer for the athletic equipment manager.

I worked for Mr. Robison the next two summers, in 1991 and 1992. During that time I grew about five inches, won some debate trophies, lost a lot of cross-country races, got accepted to college, became very interested in the classic rock played on WAQY, got a girlfriend (not Claire), graduated from high school. I went off to Yale, lost the girlfriend, didn’t make the debate team, learned how to get drunk. Freshman year was one of those formative epochs that simultaneously flies by and seems to last forever. It was thrilling but exhausting, and that summer I needed a rest. I wanted badly to go home and slip back into a comforting old routine. To regress a little. I could go back to my old job at my old high school. It would be work I knew, easy work, and my wage for the summer would be up to $10 an hour. I couldn’t wait.

But Mr. Robison was not to be my boss that summer. In June he began a year-long sabbatical, and his replacement as summer-school director was Ted Niederhoffer (or so we will call him), the school’s Russian teacher. I had never really known him in high school, but I remembered one time when I opened the door to the faculty lounge to look for a teacher who had asked me to find him there, and Mr. Niederhoffer had thundered at me, “You don’t open that door!” I was probably more offended than I had reason to be—after all, I really was not supposed to open that door; I should have knocked—and my pique was enhanced by my sense that I, as one of the school’s academic stars, had a bit of prerogative when it came to my interactions with teachers. I also think I was miffed to have to take correction from a man who, if one believed the rumor, missed the occasional first-period class sleeping off his hangovers.

But $10 an hour is $10 an hour, and I had no other job waiting for me, so in early June I checked back in to my old high school, working out of the orphaned office that Mr. Robison had commandeered three years earlier, once a supply closet for beakers, test tubes, and Bunsen burners, at the end of a sad, forgotten, dead-end hall in the Clark Science Center.

And initially everything went well. Mr. Niederhoffer was grateful to have me, deferring to my institutional wisdom about summer-school operations. At my suggestion, he had hired as my coworker Heather, a friend from high school who had also just completed her freshman year of college. It was good to be near Heather again; we had been on Student Council together, and she reminded me of a year ago, graduation time, when I’d been triumphantly finishing a long race rather than just starting a much tougher one. Also, my girlfriend and I had broken up the past December, I missed her, and Heather was one of my girlfriend’s close friends. The proximity felt good.

But soon I began to worry that Mr. Niederhoffer was sending out acceptance letters with typos in them; twice I caught such letters, which I corrected and had him re-sign. Once he misplaced an important letter, and once forgot that a family was coming for a tour. And I began to notice that all of these mistakes occurred after lunch; and that after lunch—which was always taken alone, at an undisclosed location—he would smell of alcohol.

 

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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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