I'd known Quentin Seckley for what is usually called the better part of a year, but I won't call it that. The part of a year in which you know Quentin, whatever number of months it embraces, is not the better part.
Beware of wellwishers. Often they are people wishing themselves wells, oil or gas, to be obtained through your good offices, in extreme cases over your dead body, so they can flash a lot of money in your face. It was well-wishers of this type, I think, who suggested that after 20 years of writing I should have the profit of teaching writing to the youths. Everybody thought I should be put in touch with the electric new generation. Nobody stopped to look into the matter of my insulation.
I listened. When I was offered a lectureship in creative writing at Santana State, close by Los Angeles, I took it. My subject, it turned out, was recreative rather than creative writing. Some students took the course for refreshment, as they'd take gymnastics or folk dancing, or a butterscotch float. Others were hard at work composing meticulous recreations of Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, net to mention, though I'm obliged to, O. Henry and Albert Payson Terhune.
Quentin, a New Yorker who'd arrived at Santana after being expelled from four eastern universities, sometimes for unplanned pregnancies, sometimes for plans to synthesize STP in undergraduate chemistry laboratories, was the exception. He had no interest in writing for diversion, he was concerned with one thing only, writing for money. Neither was he moved to write imitations of well-known prose, he didn't care to write prose at all. What he began to inundate me with were rock-and-roll lyrics.
An intimate of psychedelic musicians, Quentin was composing lyrics for one of their groups, for, if it worked out, money. Two of his songs had already been recorded, with results closer to a thud than a splash. He was taking my course, he explained, to learn how to write better rock lyrics. He accused me of deliberately perpetuating the generation gap when I pointed out that, even if "better rock lyrics" was not a contradiction in terms, lyricism of any order, very definitely of this electronic order, was not within my expertise. Quentin had concluded that I was a philosopher of cosmic scope, an authority on you name it, and as such the best guide for rock-lyricism. Lyrics are made of words, aren't they? I was a word expert, wasn't I? Well, then? Why, except out of orneriness, plain and simple withholding, wouldn't I instruct him in bettering his lyrics so he could better his income?
To show the magnitude of the problem he posed to me and to literature, not to mention the English language, I will give here one of his efforts. Its title was, After You Get Your Troubles Packed, Don't Send Dat Old Kit Bag to Me. It went this way:
Fire come down the mountaing
Burn up all yo house an goods
Fire come adown the mountaing
Burn away yo house an goods
Yeh, dat fire roll down fom de high country
Smoke up all yo tangible assets
But you kin give us a smile, a smile, a smile
Iffn ye'll curl up yo lips t'other way
After you git all yo troubles awrapped in dat?
ole kit bag
What's the idee mailin em to me?
Wouldn't send dat greasy load to Care Packages, now
Whaffo you parcelpost dat mess to me? Huh?
Connin man took all yo money
Meddlin man took off yo wife
Connin man abscond wid yo money
Meddlin man hep hissef to yo missus
O fasttalk man walk away wid yo savings
Meddlesome man partake of yo better half
Now you kin give us a grin, a grin, a grin
Jess culr up yo mouf t'other way
"See some way I can improve it?" Quentin said the night he showed me this work.
"Yes, burn it in the first fire that comes down the mountaing. If the fire doesn't come down, go up after it."
"Come on, I'm really finding my own voice here."
"Losing, I'd say. Mountaings. I take that to be your best rendering of Ozark hillbilly. The deses, doses, and dems could be Old South Uncle Remus, or Brooklynese, I'm not sure which."
"Little of both."
"A little of either would go a long way, Quentin. Kentucky mountaineer, Dekalb Avenue, blackface patois, backed with sitars, that's not a voice, that's glossolalia. They call this the gift of tongues but with you it's a curse. Many of your tongues should be tied."
"Jesus, these are sounds I maybe didn't hear around my family's dining table in the Silkstocking District, but I've heard them on records, and records are part of my environment, and my environment's part of me. Am I supposed to be a snob and assume only my Junior League and stockbroker family talks right?"
"Quentin, right now you're talking more like a Silkstocking than a combination stevedore-cottonpicker-moonshiner. Silkstockings should have some place in the linguistic sun along with Leatherstockings."
"Mr. Rengs, think about this, when I'm talking to just one person I don't have to sound like more than one person. In song lyrics you're talking to a whole lot of different people so the trick is to be democratic and sound like all of them."
"All who never went beyond third grade? Why not address a few college graduates, too? Or does your kind of democracy ban the literates?"
"Look, there's a theory behind this. Most things never melted like they were supposed to in this alleged melting pot. It's time we at least let the different languages and styles of talk melt down a little."
"Melt is one thing, fracture's another."
"I know, things liquefy when they melt, have to be hard to fracture. You're confusing fluids and bones, I wish you'd stop that, Mr. Rengs."
"If you don't stop pestering me with schizoid lyrics, Quentin, you'll see some real confusing of fluids and bones, this minestrone will be confused with your skull."
We were at that point sitting in the House of Gnocchi, a ghastly Italian gag-and-vomit on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. It was so far from being a restaurant, or any food dispensary for humans, the gnocchi should have been used to plug leaky faucets and the linguini served in a trough. Quentin had insisted on taking me to his favorite eating place to discuss his writing problems, which he felt were inadequately covered in class.
"Mr. Rengs, you're pretending to be above this language mix that's happening today. That's hiding behind the generation gap."
"You're not mixing words, Quentin, you're dismembering them. Let's examine your last statement. How can anybody hide behind a gap? That's like saying, he camouflaged himself in a vacuum, or, he took refuge in a quantity of nothing."
"Quantity of nothing. You just made my point. What's a gap, by definition, but a ditch, and what's a ditch but something with nothing in it, no things, no people? If there aren't any people around in the ditch, well, there's nobody to see you, so you can hide damn efficiently."
"Logic, Quentin. No people around, no reason to hide."
"What I mean is, there aren't any people in the ditch, they're lined up on both sides."
"In that case, the ditch would have to be very wide, say 10 miles, before it could be used for hiding purposes."
"Well, the way you're digging at this particular ditch, it'll be 10 miles wide in no time."
"Whatever the dimensions of a gap, Quentin, you can't hide behind it, the best you can do is hide in it."
"I can't buy that, Mr. Rengs. If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, is there a sound? That's philosophy, now don't deny it. By the self-same logic, if you're using a ditch for hiding purposes, and it works, that means there's nobody close enough to see you, so who knows if you're in the ditch, or behind it, or under it?"
"Whenever I'm within 10 miles of you, Quentin, I'm in the soup, not behind it or under it, and I'm not referring to this minestrone, which isn't soup, it's sheepdip."
Over a zabaglione that tasted like detergent Quentin made a sudden announcement. He said, "The omen are interested in the Mah Own Tang lyric." I said I was not aware that he had also written a son
g saluting his own body odor. He said he still had reference to the kit-bag lyric in which there was mention of the article Sir Edmund Hillary was always going up. I said, 'When the subject is one omen the verb must be is, watch those singulars and plurals." He informed me that The Omen were very singular but happened to be several people, they were a raga-rock recording group, some folk-hard material, too, but mostly raga, featuring sitars and tablas.
I was just becoming aware of the trend among recording groups to use common nouns in the singular as appellations for a collectivity. It was a source of concern to me that in time this might lead to a new vocabulary of aggregate nouns: a Jefferson airplane of draft dodgers, a grateful dead of tambourinists, a loving spoonful of schizophrenes, a vanilla fudge of juvies, a holding company of dropouts. Now, it seemed, we had to allow for a new and still more worrisome formulation, an omen of hecklers.
"One thing you're overlooking," Quentin went on, "this song is a takeoff, and as such a howl."
"A titter, maybe. To those who know the old song you're taking off."
"You know it."
"No, I don't."
"Don't give me that, you just mentioned it."
"It was my race unconscious talking."
"Your race prejudice, you mean, against the race of everybody under 30. All right, let's see how prejudiced you get against some lyrics not in the language mix. Here."
He handed me a page with scribblings on it at all angles. I could decipher only two bits:
suppose on the day of days
when comes the savior
to lead us way upstairs to best behavior
his name is mao
will we gao?
And:
if hell is hot
what's the temperature of heaven
seven?
"I can't go into these political and theological questions on a sick stomach, Quentin," I said. "The zabaglione is giving me ptomaine, I think."
"Ptomaine," Quentin said, quickened. "There's a great word to work with. Gives me an idea for a takeoff number about the trots tourists get when they go someplace like Spain. This is inspired. Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the—"
Everything considered, including the sharp pains in my stomach, that seemed a good time to go to the men's room.
Not long after this takeoff of a dinner, the kind that will make you take off for even the worst ptomaine zones of Spain, Quentin asked if he could stay with my class in the second quarter. I categorically refused, on grounds that, though he was up to many possibly stunning activities with words, none could be related to writing or the English language, my two areas of competence. Quentin didn't fight. He simply said that maybe I ought to let him into some of my areas of incompetence and maybe they'd shrink. My answer was, my areas of incompetence had been too hard come by, I couldn't give them up. To match that, he decided there was something he couldn't give up. Me. When class ended for the quarter, Quentin went right on. Deprived of me on campus, he showed up almost daily on my doorstep, with batches of lyrics. Once I ventured the thought that his lyrics were for the birds, for example, goonies. He informed me that The Byrds wrote their own lyrics, his efforts were mainly for The Omen. I came to see that an omen custom-made for me had been installed centrally in my life. In the person of Quentin Seckley, relentlessly, ominously, filled with song.
Days after the conversation about knuckles and their sound effects, my phone rang. A girl at the other end said, "Hello, Mr. Rengs? Would Ivar by any chance happen to be there?"
This voice sounded blurrily, adrenalizingly, familiar. It immediately made my tongue ache at the root.
"Ivar?"
"This is Mr. Gordon Rengs, isn't it?"
"Yes, and there's nobody named Ivar here. I don't know anybody named Ivar. Take that as boasting if you want."
I was nipping at the tip of my tongue with my fingers, as though to pull it out. This was annoying on several counts: I pride myself on having no tics, I had no reason to pull my tongue out, this interfered with my talking. The girl's voice held bad echoes. That pulled at my tongue through my fingers.
"There's some mixup, Mr. Rengs. You're the Mr. Rengs teaches at Santana, aren't you? You're a good friend of this fellow I'm trying to locate, his collaborator."
"I am? On what?"
"Lyrics, of course. You write those great lyrics with him. You know."
"Lyrics? What type?"
"Hard, folk, country, jazz, raga, any rock lyrics they need."
"I see. You're looking for Quentin Seckley."
A pause.
"Quentin what'd you say? Huh? I don't know any Quentin."
Simultaneously I bit my tongue viciously and remembered this voice, the bite in it when vicious.
"Miss, I have no dealings with an Ivar. I don't do business with Quentin Seckley, either, but from time to time, when he holds a gun on me, I point out the shakier lines in his songs, the Parkinsonian ones."
Another pause.
"Mr. Rengs, could I trouble you to describe this Quentin?"
"Yes. Sandy hair down to the eyes. Looks like shredded Naugahyde. Decided stoop, slight list. About five-ten. Mole on right cheekbone. Sneaky air. Writes his lyrics for The Omen. Also—"
"That's Ivar. Well I'll be."
"I'll join you, if there's room. What do you want Quentin for?"
"Well, he was supposed to sleep with me, it was made very clear it had to be promptly at three, and he hasn't shown up, and they're all asking questions."
"All. How many are there?"
"Well, all the regulars, six, at least. They've been waiting for an hour for us to get started, they don't like to just sit around."
"Who does? I'm curious as to where you got my name."
"Well, Ivar, Quentin talks about you and what a help you are in his writing. I knew you teach at Santana, and right now I'm out here at UCLA, of course, so I called UCLA Administration and they had a Santana faculty directory—"
"You're at UCLA? That's where Quentin was supposed to, ah, join you?" I thought about synovial fluid. Flamenco guitar in the background. No sitar.
"Sure, that's where we always do it. It wouldn't work out anyplace else, this is where they've got all the apparatus. So, in short, you don't have any idea where he might be, Mr. Rengs?"
"None. Unless he's found some other place where they have the apparatus."
"Not likely, Mr. Rengs, you don't find machinery like this any old place. Well, case you hear from him, would you tell him call in right away to the Sleep Project? It's very important, he's throwing our whole schedule off."
"Sleep Project. Certainly. I'm sorry about your schedule."
Yet another silence, potently pulsed.
"Mr. Rengs, I know this sounds crazy, but would you do something for me?"
"Miss, of course you'd want to get back on schedule, it's only natural, but I have a very complicated lecture to prepare for tomorrow, it deals with the quantity and quality of broken bones in the collected works of Hemingway, did you know that in his first 49 stories alone there were 28 cases of physical mangling, 15 involving legs, 5 hands, 4 groins—"
"No, what I want to ask is, would you say some words for me? I'm beginning to remember something about the name Quentin. Would you do me a big favor and just say the words, Hello, is Quentin there?"
"First say some things for me. Child molester. Filthy degenerate. Rip your tongue out. Pincushion."
The longest pause yet. Calibrated with emotional exhalations.
"Well I'll be triple flogged. You're the man called me the other night."
"You're the 300-year-old lady."
"When I'm woken up from a deep sleep I sound about 600. See, knocking myself out like I do on class assignments and all the hours at the Project in addition, by dinner I'm beat, so some nights I just take a pill after dinner and crawl into bed. Wow, I'm sorry I spoke that rough way to you, Mr. Rengs. I had no idea who it was, you can appreciate that. Also, I'd never heard of any Quentin, I knew the fellow in quest
ion as Ivar Nalyd. Oh, oh. Wait a minute. How'd you happen to get my number that night? What gave you the idea of calling me to locate him under any name?"
"I had a message to call him. The number he left was yours."
"Now that's real funny, Mr. Rengs. First, he's never been to my place, second, I never gave him my number, though God knows he's asked over and over, why I hardly know this guy, just see him at the Project and sometimes talk about rock lyrics and that's all. My number's not listed and my friends don't give it out, they know how I insist on my privacy. This is in the category of weird."
"Yes. Tell me, could you in any way be linked in Quentin's mind with the idea of cracking knuckles, Miss—I'm afraid I don't know your name."
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 49