“You seem to have pissed off damn near everybody in the entire school,” a passing student shouted.
“Not everybody. But I’m working on it.” Controversial Mass Media reporter Gideon Dumas sits back in his chair, done bashing his keyboard into pieces over another article.
Since hitting the campus in Fall 2002, Dumas has exposed incompetence and fraud, writing novel-length exposes that nobody reads except for the swear words in the first few paragraphs. The exposes range from the highest levels of UMass Boston (the Vice Chancellor of Stuff) to the lowest (the Student Senate), and even include himself, writing articles on the numerous essay deadlines he had blown, ironic because the articles themselves were late.
“I live on the thrill of procrastination,” he says, before looking at his watch. “It’s Monday morning, and I’ve got two English essays due, three Political Science tests to take, and four articles to write. It gets pretty crazy down here at the offices Mondays, with our production manager staging socialist revolutions, and the copy editor threatening to kneecap me if I hyphenate ‘Vice President’ one more time.”
Born in the bowels of Boston, supposedly down the hall from a plesiosaur nursery, Dumas grew up in a wordtank filled with a liquid version of E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, and getting Mark Twain’s works injected intravenously.
At age 17 he joined the Associated American Journalists, having been kicked out of the White House Press Corps for asking “too many questions, and in general being a pain in the ass,” according White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer. He trotted around the world with the AAJ, eventually landing in Rome and exposing the Vatican for creating human farms and growing little boys like so much wheat, and selling them to NAMBLA.
His life is detailed in an autobiography, Behold the Giant Octopus, due out in stores April 1. (The book is excerpted at right.) Hollywood is set to turn it into a three-hour-long movie, with Woody Allen in the starring role.
What’s next on Dumas’s plate? “I don’t know. Maybe something else on Billy Bulger. The man’s a goldmine!” he says. “Or maybe an expose on myself. It would have to be done under a different name, of course, and be very praising. That could work.”