LAST SUNDAY, I HAD JUST FINISHED my route and was lying in bed peering over the mountain that is my 62-year-old gut watching “Ancient Aliens” on the History channel when I got a text from Heald College: They were going out of business the next day and I was to pick up my transcript Wednesday. It caught me by surprise — not the flatfooted, dumbfounded surprise like when you realize you locked your second key in the car, your primary was lost for a week and you were too “busy” (really?) to get a new one and you have all the stuff you had just bought in your arms at 4 p.m. on Saturday and your AAA membership (not the drunks, the other one) has lapsed and you have a hot date, the first one in a really long time. Not that bad, but bad enough to force your fear into the back of your mouth so that you can taste it.

The first thing I did was call 20 of my closest friends to freak out with, only to find their voicemail ready to receive my blathering. Spent, I called my department head at Heald, Ms. Z, only to find her ever-patient voicemail waiting to take my call. I asked it what was going on and would it please get back to me because my the aftertaste of my fear was fierce.

Ten minutes later Ms. Z texted me back that her phone was being blown up and that she learned about the school being shut down like we all did. She would be there for me and she would call later, after she had taken the other phone calls. I texted back thanks and that I would keep her in my prayers and signed off.

I slumped back and lost myself in “Ancient Aliens” for an hour. It always calms me down, a more wholesome distraction than my former diversions when fear has gotten the better of me. But by the third episode I switched the bloody channel off and let the fear come through. It came up and sat in the middle of my mouth like tepid swamp water and stayed there. I found the courage to let it speak. What came out was that I was afraid that what Heald had given me — a sense of accomplishment in school — was a cruel joke, like the kind a schoolyard bully would play. I was afraid that I couldn’t make it in a regular school and wouldn’t be able to retrain and would die on disability, Social Security and minimum wages, in poverty and disgrace. I could hear the bully’s laughter like a triumphant trumpet in Leon Russell’s horn section and felt the well-worn old knife in the gut opening the scar tissue.

Nightmares of one more failure realized. Impoverishment and dying alone in a VA hospital. Horror and loathing — horror at the nightmare bleeding out into my bones and loathing at myself for being played like some punk in a two-bit dope deal.

The fear finally bled out into self-pity and the loathing finally ran out of steam, too. All that was left was acceptance and the feeling that everything had happened for a purpose, a purpose I had yet to comprehend. I got up out of bed, got into the truck and went to the First Street Pier to stroke a gull’s belly.

What Heald and other FPO (For Profit Organization) schools did or didn’t do was no worse than Enron, predatory lenders, corner crack dealers or used car salesmen: make a profit any way they can. It was taught to me in grade school in Illinois 50 years ago and my kid learned it from Donald Trump in junior high in Berkeley 20 years ago. It is America.

As for me guess I have to go to Solano Community College and figure how much credit they will take and take it from there. Am I mad? No. I am too old and fat and have listened to too many drunks, madmen and poets to fall prey to fear. I know fear is not real, that it is only between my ears.

I would like to thank all those at Heald-Concord, the administration, faculty and students, for believing in me and my writing. It was and is much appreciated. Until we meet again.

M.R. Merris is a Benicia resident, writer and poet.

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