Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I whispered: “Yes, I know.”

  “Sometimes I just want to tell those people: ‘Leave me alone. Leave him alone. He’s like a dancer on that damn court. That’s where he’s king,’ but what I usually tell them, what I really feel, and I guess what I’m trying to tell you now is that I wish you’d dedicate yourself with the same passion to a slightly more refined endeavor.”

  “Yes, I know,” I whispered again, turning and trotting off to sleep.

  11

  THE SLIGHTLY more refined endeavor I decided to dedicate myself to was trumpet. This didn’t meet with Mother’s approval, either, for not only was music, as she’d said before, one of the performing and hence one of the lesser arts, but the trumpet wasn’t even a stringed instrument. Furthermore, most of the band members were black. Although Mother was doing all she could to desegregate the school and loved the way I mingled so well with minority students, she believed each race finally had, as she also said, a discrete realm, had something it did better than any other race did. Band music, even more than basketball, was theirs.

  I proved to be worse as trumpeter than I’d been as back-bench Christmas choir boy. I was always ready to slave away at transcendent sound and spent long spring nights alone in my room, sitting before sheet music, blowing my golden horn, but the mouthpiece would yield nothing, the keys would collapse, the spit valve would spit back at me, and I remained eleventh chair in a ten-chair trumpet section. At the one concert I was allowed to participate in—a flu epidemic had taken the first four chairs—I got so excited I played right through a seven-measure rest. The conductor, a tall, extremely beautiful black woman who wore short skirts and drove a pink Corvette, told me where to put my instrument.

  I informed Mother I was quitting the band—not a dignified enough discipline to devote my time to—but I continued to associate almost exclusively with black boys, especially after Nicky’s withdrawal. I liked their addiction to addictions, their disruption of ordinary syntax, their desire to seize idiom and make it speak for itself. I would hear them use a certain expression, then six months later hear the boys I walked home with use the same phrase as tentative white slang. The boys I walked home with hated my nigger friends, they hated me, and I never knew why. Father said they hated me because I was a Jew. Mother said it was because I let them know I thought I was better than they were. Was that woman never wrong?

  As I walked home with these boys, one of them would slip my wallet out of my pocket and at the end of the block he’d say, “Oh, hey, Jerry, isn’t that your wallet back there?” I’d have to go back and pick it up while they’d keep walking. Or they’d discuss in depth Jack’s thirteenth birthday party, which all of them had quite obviously attended and thoroughly enjoyed, but to which I hadn’t been invited. Occasionally we’d play tag on the way home and I, of course, was always nominated to be It first. They’d try to lure me into running in front of cars, but I knew their tricks and was much faster than any of them, although whomever I tagged would turn around and chase only after me, so I’d have to run all the way home, patting my pocket to make sure they hadn’t taken my wallet again.

  Other times they’d play what was known as the silence game, talking among themselves, refusing to address one word to me or answer a single question during the entire walk to or from school. On Halloween, they made a habit of hurling eggs and flaming pumpkins at our front door. I wanted to believe Mother and Father when they assured me our house was so heavily pelted because it was across the street from the high school, but I knew the Halloween ghouls were my little friends who didn’t like the fact that I both played basketball and quoted Steinbeck. Once, I received an anonymous letter which, mock-homosexual, complimented me on how smooth and brown and strong my legs were; wouldn’t I like to meet in the boys’ bathroom on Saturday?

  They liked to do that sort of thing. They liked to turn the communication process into low farce. One of their principal entertainments was to gather at someone’s house and make witty telephone calls to unsuspecting parties. One Friday night they asked me to join them. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay home and play Scrabble with Beth. I made various excuses, apologies, requests for a rain check, but they insisted, and I feared reprisal if I didn’t participate in their pranks, so I went.

  They were all sitting in flame red chairs in the garage of a boy named Bill. They all had names such as Jack or Bill, Jim, Art, Steve, Mark, Ron, Lee, Hank. Sometimes I think they selected me as their scapegoat because my first name had more than one syllable. The chairs were arranged in a neat circle, and the telephone sat in the center of the circle like some immense insect they were trying to tame. They were all drinking cans of Coors and smoking Camels. I visualized Beth and Mother sitting in the den, eating popcorn, drinking pink lemonade, creating word combinations, and I yearned to be with them, but Jack handed me a beer, Art placed a cigarette in my mouth, Jim pulled up a chair for me, and I had to stay. I didn’t like the taste of beer and I was incapable of either lighting a match or inhaling smoke, so I put down the aluminum can and the cigarette and ate M&M’s, which were consumed in great quantity by the gang so that Bill’s parents—who couldn’t have cared less or known more—would smell sweet chocolate rather than bitter malt or black tobacco.

  These abstentions, of course, did little to endear me to the denizens of Bill’s garage, but I sat back in my flame red chair and watched them dial. They’d request that a large pizza be delivered to the house across the street, then half an hour later rush to the garage window and laugh at the next-door neighbor’s rebuff of the poor pizza man. They’d ask beautiful little girls: if your Uncle Jack was on the roof, would you help your Uncle Jack off? They’d tell lonely old women: I’m from the Electric Light Company—would you please look outside and tell me if your street lamp is on? It is? Well, would you please turn it off? You’re wasting electricity.

  This was a droll enough way to spend a Friday evening and I was starting to enjoy a little the blind dialing, the passing of the phone, the random cruelty of the calls, but then it was my turn. The telephone was placed in my lap and I said, “No, I just came to watch. I told Bill that when he called. I’m not calling.”

  I stood up to depart, but they blocked the door.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Jack said.

  “Come on, Jerry, be a sport,” Art said.

  “Yeah, Jer, don’t puss-out on us,” Jim said.

  “You can’t watch and then not call,” Hank said.

  Perhaps Hank was right. It was unfair to watch the wickedness without doing the deed—in that way, not unlike a night I spent recently on Santa Monica Boulevard watching naked girls dance on dimly lit stages, but running in terror when approached by a coolly attractive and surprisingly inexpensive prostitute—so I returned to my chair, held the phone in my hands, and asked, “Who do I call? What do I say?”

  “You call who you want,” Steve said. “And you say what you want, but it’s got to be nasty.”

  I tried to think of something nasty. At the time, there was a television program in San Francisco called “Dialing for Dollars,” whose master of ceremonies interrupted a very old movie every five minutes to call one of our lucky viewers out there and ask (for progressively larger amounts of money until some spinster finally knew the answer): who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1956? Who is the only person to have been nominated five times for Best Actor and never won? Where was Gig Young born, and who was his leading lady in Last Train to New Orleans? What movie are we showing tonight? Is anyone, is there a single blessed soul, out there watching and, if so, why? To call someone, tell him it was Pat McCormick from “Dialing for Dollars,” ask a perfectly simple question, and—no matter what our lucky viewer said—say I was sorry but that was not the answer we were looking for: wouldn’t this be nasty enough? I thought it would, dialing.

  “Yullo,” an old man answered after a number of rings and burped. Immediately, I saw him: recumbent, in gray socks and white whiskers, on a prickly couch; ove
rhead, dirty red drapes; at his feet, trustworthy schnauzer and trusted Scotch.

  I was thirteen years old, my voice was very high and hesitant—obviously not that of the exceedingly smooth Pat McCormick—but all the boys were looking at me and listening. I said, “Good evening, sir, this is P-P-Pat McCormick on ‘Dialing for Dollars,’ Channel 2 Weekend Movie. We’ve just stopped at the climactic scene of Snowbirds in the Sahara to call and ask you a question worth twelve h-h-hundred dollars. That’s right, twelve h-h-hundred d-d-dollars. We’re looking for the name of a movie that’s currently very popular and stars K-K-Katherine Ross, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. It’s called Butch Cassidy and the Blank Blank. We’re looking for the blank blank, sir. Can you hazard a guess? It’s worth twelve h-h-hundred d-d-dollars. The clock is ticking….”

  I couldn’t tell whether the boys were laughing at the brilliance of my hoax or the obvious schism between who I claimed to be and who I was.

  The old man said: “I don’t know the name of any goddamn Birch Calliope and the Blank Blank, but I damn well know you ain’t Pat McCormick. I know the sound of that man’s voice and you ain’t it. You’re a kid who’s got a speech problem, isn’t that right, kid? Well, whadja callin’ here for?”

  “N-n-not even a w-w-wild guess, sir? Ten seconds and counting….”

  “Whadja doin’, kid? Your speech counselor toldja to make telephone calls, impersonatin’ public personalities or somethin’? Whadja doin’? You ain’t ‘Dialin’ for Dollars’ any more than I’m the ‘Flyin’ Nun.’ But I can tell ya somethin’, kid, you’ve got a mouthful of marbles. I never heard a kid talk so bad as that before. Callin’ here like that, you otter be ashamed.”

  “F-f-five seconds. F-f-five, f-f-four….”

  “I got a solution, though, for you, kid. Read about it in Reader’s Digest. Last month, I think, maybe the month before. Listen good, now, here’s what you do: stick a coupla wads of cotton in both your ears. That’s right, just stick some cotton in your ears. You won’t be able to hear yourself when you talk and it’ll do wonders for you, kid. Really, you gotta try it.”

  Actually, I did try it several years later in the form of an electronic gizmo called the Edinburgh Masker, which was approximately as effective as the cotton cure.

  “No, I’m sorry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is not the answer we were l–l-looking for. Heh-heh. No, I’m s-s-sorry, that’s wrong, sir. We’ll just have to call another one of our lucky viewers. B-b-but as a consolation prize we’re sending you a forty-five of Nancy S-S-Sinatra s-s-singing, on one s-s-side, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’ and, on the other, ‘Love Is a Velvet Horn.’ That’s right, absolutely free. Bye, now. Yes, bye. Goodbye.”

  I returned the receiver to its cradle and tried to laugh a little with the guys—took a sip of Coors, a long drag on a Camel—but I was sweating profusely, my hands were shaking, and the boys understood what had happened. They were oddly commiserative, too. They clapped me on the back, told me it was a good prank, and Mark even picked up the phone to try the same stunt on someone else, but the old man was still on the line. That happens sometimes: one person hangs up, the other stays on, and the connection remains unbroken. All night long the old man reclined on his prickly couch, sipped his Scotch, and said, “Let me talk to the kid with marbles in his mouth. Yeah, Pat McCormick; put him back on.” I had to listen until midnight to the details of the cotton cure.

  12

  THIS DIALOGUE was rather discouraging, but human intercourse is often one person’s obstinate attempt to dominate another person, and one of the unfortunate facts about disfluency is that you never get to dominate. It’s all very well and good to assert that communication comes down to a mad dogfight; it’s something else altogether to confess you’re always the poor pup who loses. Another unfortunate fact about disfluency is that it prevents you from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution. It was precisely this failing, what might quite properly be termed the inability to love anything other than language, that preordained the irretrievable divorce between me and the first girl ever—at the bottom of a heated, heart-shaped swimming pool—to kiss me flush on the lips with feeling.

  Audrey Robbins lived alone in Haight-Ashbury at a time, 1969, when it was still very stylish for eighth-graders to be living alone in the Haight. She was thirteen, a waif, immensely sophisticated, beautiful beyond belief; had tortured ballet toes, Russian ancestors, and a leather purse; but the telling detail about her was that she liked nothing better than blowing Double Bubble at the same time she was inhaling Tareyton 100’s. She was an amazing mixture of pink innocence and smoky extinction: one day, she was all light and dance and Communist bloc folklore; the next, she was all gloom and doom and standing with me on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking down.

  It was she, of course, who made the first overture. I’ve never had the courage to want the world. I’ve always let it come to me, which is a rather negative approach to existence, but the funny thing is: inevitably, it comes. Sooner or later, whether you want it or not, the world comes to you, it comes at you, and in this case it came in the form of someone with a taste for the simultaneity of Tareytons and Double Bubble. She was head cheerleader of the Bayshore Kittens and, although she didn’t know a jump shot from a running pick, she accepted the post—she told me later—not for the enormous prestige it heaped upon her person but because she was obsessed with the color and shape of my legs in the artificial light of the gymnasium in the afternoon.

  All during basketball season, she’d cheer loudly when my name was announced, bring me sticks of grape licorice at halftime, and jump up and down whenever I was shooting a free throw, which caused my free throw percentage to drop a few points, but I didn’t care: she looked so happy, jumping up and down and screaming like that. Week after week of buying gum and cigarettes for her at Safeway, walking her to the bus station, talking on the telephone until midnight, but nothing was ever said, nothing was ever done. Then, two weeks after the eighth grade basketball season was over, in the extraordinary manner in which junior high school romance is carried out, I was handed a letter by Elaine, the assistant head cheerleader of the Bayshore Kittens and Audrey’s nearest and dearest friend, which said:

  Sweet Jeremy: March 27th (Tomorrow!) as I hope u already know is my birthday! I’m gunna be 14! You (of course!) are cordally invited. Pleez! Pleez! don’t bring any presents. All I want u to bring is your ID bracelet and if u don’t have one you’re rich enough to go get a nice new one! I hope u don’t have to ask what the ID bracelet is for, but if u do you’ll just have to wait until the party to find out! (Surly u can guess, you’re so smart!) Also: I got a big! big! check from welfare tuesday, so I’m renting a motel room in the mountains of Marin that I heard about (special heart-shaped swimming pool) where we’re all gunna swim and smoke and drink and lie out in the sun celibrating my 14th! Oh, also: Elaine’s brother volluntiered to drive us all out there (he gets a free dip in the pool as pay-mint) so meet tomorrow at Elaine’s house (u know where it is, doncha?) at 10 am, sharp. All u gotta bring is your ID bracelet, a beach towl, and some snazzy swim trunks!

  XXXXX OOOOO

  XXXXX OOOOO

  Audrey

  March twenty-seventh wasn’t her fourteenth birthday, and she probably hadn’t received a big! big! check from welfare so much as gotten hold of some very high-grade acid and sold it at triple profit. I honestly didn’t know why she wanted me to bring an identification bracelet to the party, but I purchased a silver chain bracelet with my initials etched on the underside, a couple cartons of cigarettes, an entire bag of chewing gum, and a pair of red swimming trunks with a blue anchor at the
crotch. I arrived bright and early the next morning at Elaine’s house.

  Other than Charles, whom I hadn’t seen for a while, I didn’t really have any friends, so I couldn’t say Audrey ran with a different crowd than I did. They were certainly a switch, though, from the kind of people who showed up at Mother’s coffee klatsches. Audrey’s friends all seemed to have parents who were dead, diseased, or sadistic. They all seemed to have spent a night in jail or a month with Synanon. They all loved, absolutely loved, The Dead. There was a story called “The Dead,” which at the time was completely incomprehensible to me but about which in my later, more discursive years I concluded: “When all of Gabriel’s attempts to communicate at a nonverbal level—holiday ritual, music, sex—fail, he returns to overblown rhetoric: sheer language overwhelms, sound drowns out sense, and pathos lapses into bathos.” Have I always had only words to play with? I thought The Dead were maybe an occult group that scavenged shallow graves, looking for dybbuks, since Audrey’s friends liked to say that, at thirteen, they had lived and loved and now were ready to die. They’d gone out in the world and found it a waste, whereas I was still trying to build up the nerve to walk alone through North Beach.

  This discrepancy between my innocence and their decadence made me a little uneasy, but they’d say, “That’s what Audrey digs about you, man. You’re one of the few uncorrupted cats left.” I disliked being called a cat—I saw myself, instead, as an infinitely poignant cocker spaniel—and thought Audrey had selected me because she was obsessed with the color of my legs in the artificial light of the gymnasium in the afternoon. Lately I’ve been attempting to project an image of brooding, masculine depravity, but Gretchen always ends up saying, “Who are you trying to kid? You’re so innocent. You’re such a baby.” I suppose Audrey was unusual only in being the first to perceive this fact.