by Philip Roth
“I’m at the airport. O’Hare. Just landed.”
“Well, great. You out here to lecture?”
“I’m out here to go back to school. As a student. I’m sick and tired of writing, Bob. I’ve made a big success and I made a pile of dough and I hate the whole God damn thing. I don’t want to do it anymore, i really want to quit. And the only thing I can think of that would satisfy me would be becoming a doctor. I want to go to medical school. I flew out to see if I can enroll in the college for the winter quarter and finish up my science requirements. Bobby, I have to see you right away. I have the applications. I want to sit down and talk to you and see how I can get it done. What do you make of all this? Will they have me, age forty and a scientific ignoramus? On my transcript I’ll show nearly straight A’s. And they were hard-earned A’s, Bob. They’re hard-earned 1950s A’s—they’re like 1950 dollars.”
Bobby was laughing—Nathan had been one of their dormitory’s big-name late-night entertainers and this must be more of the same, mini-performance over the phone whipped up for old times’ sake. Bobby had always been the softest touch. They’d had to live apart in their second year because laughing was murder on Bobby’s asthma—out of control, it could bring on an attack. When Bobby saw Nathan heading toward him from across the quadrangle, he’d raise a hand and plead, “Don’t, don’t. I have a class.” Oh. it had been great fun being funny in those days. Everybody had told him he was crazy if he didn’t write the stuff down and get it published. So he had. Now he wanted to be a doctor.
“Bob, can I come by to see you this afternoon?”
I’m tied up till five.”
“Driving in will take till five.”
“At six I’ve got a meeting, Zuck.”
“Just for the hour then, to say hello. Look, my bag’s here—see you soon.”
Back in Chicago and feeling exactly as he had the first time around. A new existence. This was the way to do it: defiant, resolute, fearless, instead of tentative, doubt-ridden, and perpetually dismayed. Before leaving the phone booth, rather than hazard a third Percodan in eight hours, he took a swig of vodka from his flask. Aside from the raw stinging line of pain threading down behind the right ear through the base of the neck and into the meat of the upper back, he felt relatively little serious discomfort. But that was the pain he particularly didn’t like. If he hadn’t been feeling defiant, resolute, and fearless he might even have begun to feel a little dismayed. The muscle soreness he could manage, the tenderness, the tautness, the spasm, all of that he could take, even over the long haul; but not this steadily burning thread of fire that went white-hot with the minutest bob or flick of the head. It didn’t always go out overnight. The previous summer he’d had it for nine weeks. After a twelve-day course of Bulazolidin it had subsided somewhat, but by then the Butazolidin had so badly irritated his stomach that he couldn’t digest anything heavier than rice pudding. Gloria baked rice pudding for him whenever she could stay for two hours. Every thirty minutes, when the timer rang in the kitchen, she’d jump up from the playmat and in the garter belt and heels run off to open the oven and stir the rice. After a month of Gloria’s rice pudding and little more, when there was still no improvement, he was sent to Mount Sinai for barium X-rays of his digestive tract. They found no hole in the lining anywhere along his gut, but he was warned by the gastroenterologist never again to wash down Butazolidin with champagne. That’s how he’d done it: a bottle from the case that Marvin had sent him for his fortieth birthday, whenever Diana came by after school and he tried and failed at dictating a single page—a single paragraph. Didn’t see why he shouldn’t celebrate: his career was over, Diana’s was just beginning, and it was vintage Dom Pérignon.
He hired a limousine. A limousine would be the fastest and smoothest way in, and the driver would be there to carry his suitcase. He’d keep the car tilt he’d found a hotel for the night.
His driver turned out to be a woman, a very fair young woman, shortish, stocky, about thirty, with fine white teeth, a slender neck, and a snappy, efficient way about her that was gentlemanly in the manner of the gentleman’s gentleman. Her dark green worsted uniform was cut like a riding habit, and she wore high black leather boots. A blond braid hung down from the back of her cap.
‘’The South Side, Billings Hospital. I’ll be about an hour. You’ll wait.”
“Right, sir.”
The car began to move. Back! “Shall I comment on the fact that you’re not the man I was expecting?”
“Up to you. sir,” she said with a lively, bright laugh.
“This a sideline or this your work?’’
“Oh, this is it. this is the work, all right. What about you?” Perky girl.
“Pornography. I publish a magazine, I own a swinging club, and I make films. I’m out here to see Hugh Hefner.”
“Staying over at the Playboy Mansion?”
‘That place makes me sick. I’m not interested in Hefner and his entourage. That to me is like his magazine: cold and boring and elitist.”
That he was a pornographer hadn’t disturbed her at all.
“My loyalty is to the common man,” he told her. “My loyalty is to the guys on the street corner I grew up with and the guys I served with in the merchant marine. That’s why I’m in this. It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand. The sham. The denial of our cocks. The disparity between life as I lived it on the street comer, which was sexual and jerking off and constantly thinking about pussy, and the people who say it shouldn’t be like that. How to get it—that was the question. That was the only question. That was the biggest question there was. It still is. It’s frightening it’s so big—and yet if you say this out loud you’re a monster. There’s an anti-humanity there that I can’t stand. There’s a lie there that makes me sick. You understand what I mean?”
“I think I do, sir.”
“I know you do. You wouldn’t be driving a limousine if you didn’t. You’re like me. I don’t do well with discipline or authority. I don’t want a white line drawn that says that I can’t cross it. Because I’ll cross it. When I was a kid, whenever I got into a fistfight, most every one was because I didn’t want people to say no to me. It makes me crazy. The rebellious part of me says. Fuck ‘em, no one’s gonna tell me what to do.”
“Yes. sir.”
“That doesn’t mean I’ve got to oppose every rule just because it’s there. Violence I don’t do. Children being exploited I find repugnant. Rape is not what I’m in favor of. I’m not into peeing and shit. There are some stories in my magazine I find disgusting. ‘Grandma’s Lollypop Hour’—I hated that story. It was vulgar and vile and I hated it. But I got a good bright staff, and as long as they’re not pissing on the walls and they’re doing their job, I let them do what they want. Either they’re free or they’re not free. I’m not like Sulzberger at The New York Times. I don’t worry what they think up in the board rooms of corporate America. That’s why you don’t see my magazine out here. That’s why I can’t get national distribution like Hefner. That’s why I’m paying him a call. He’s a First Amendment absolutist? Then let him put his power where his mouth is in the state of Illinois. With me money is not the paramount issue the way it is with him. You know what is’.’”
“What?”
“The defiance is. The hatred is. The outrage is. The hatred is endless. The outrage is huge. What’s your name?”
“Ricky.”
“I’m Appel, Milton Appel. Rhymes with ‘lapel’ like in zoot suit. Everybody is so fucking serious out there about sex. Ricky—and there are so many fucking lies. There’s the paramount issue. When I was in school I believed in Civics class that America was special. I couldn’t understand the first time I was arrested that I was being arrested for being free. People used to say to me when I first went into sleaze, how long are they going to let you do this? That’s crazy. What are they letting me do? They’re letting me be an American. I’m breaking the law? I don’t want to sound like Hefner but I thought the First
Amendment was the law. Didn’t you?”
“It is, Mr. Appel.”
“And the ACLU, do they help? They think I give freedom a bad name. Freedom’s supposed to have a bad name. What I do is what freedom’s about. Freedom isn’t making room for Hefner—it’s making room for me. For Lickety Split and Milton’s Millennia and Supercarnal Productions. I admit it, ninety percent of pornography is dull and trivial and boring. But so are the lives of most human beings, and we don’t tell them they can’t exist. For most people it’s real reality that’s boring and trivial. Reality is taking a crap. Or waiting for a cab. And being stuck in the rain. Just doing nothing is real reality. Reading Time magazine. But when people fuck they close their eyes and fantasize about something else, something that’s absent, something that’s elusive, Well, I fight for that, and I give them that, and I think what I do is good most of the time. I look in the mirror and I feel that I’m not a shit. I’ve never sold out my people, never. I like to fly first-class to Honolulu, I like to wear a fourteen-thousand dollar watch, but I never let my money bulldoze me and manipulate me. I make more money than anybody who works for me because I get the grief and I get the indictments and they don’t. They get their rocks off, at my office, calling me an acquisitive capitalist dog—they’re all pro-Fidel and anti-Appel, and write graffiti on my door that their professors taught them at Harvard. ‘The Management Sucks.’ ‘Lickety Split is too intellectual.’ Anarchists from nine to five, with me footing the bill. But I don’t live in an anarchy. I live in a corrupt society. I’ve got a world of John Mitchells and Richard Nixons to face out there, plus an analyst, plus death, plus a fourth wife who’s talking divorce, plus a seven-year-old kid I don’t want to lay my trip on because that isn’t the way I want it. That’s not freedom for him. You follow me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“About a year ago, when my wife started talking divorce, before I agreed to analysis, she took on a lover, the first in her life, and I felt myself destroyed. Couldn’t handle it. I got crazed. Very insecure. I fuck hundreds of women and she fucked one guy, and I was wigged out. And he was nothing. She picked a guy who was older than me, who was impotent—I mean she didn’t pick a twenty-five-year-old stud, and still I was wigged out. The guy was a checkers champion. Mortimer Horowitz. Always sitting there looking at his board. ‘King me.’ That’s what she wanted. We had a reconciliation and I told her, ‘Sweetheart, at least pick a guy next time who’s a threat to me, pick a California surfer.’ But she picks a Jewish nebish—the checkers champion of Washington Square Park. But that’s the pressure I’m under, Ricky: to play games, to sit still, to talk soft, to be nice. But I have never softened my stand so as to be nice and get the rewards that the nice boys get, like staying out of jail and owning legal guns and not having to wear a bulletproof vest every time I go out for a meal. I have never softened my stand to protect my money. There’s a part of me that says. Fuck all that money. I like that part of me. When Nixon came in, I could have softened the magazine and avoided a lot. After they closed down Milton’s Millennia, I could have got the message and quit. But I came back with Millennia Two, bigger and better and swankier than the old place, with its own fifty-foot swimming pool and a transvestite stripper for entertainment, a beautiful girl with a big dong, and let Nixon go fuck himself. I see the way blacks are treated in this country. I see the inequities and it makes me sick. But do they fight the inequities? No. They fight kike-pornographer. Well, kike-pornographer is gonna fight back. Because I believe deep down in what I’m doing, Ricky. My staff laughs: it’s become a polemic in my life that Milton Appel believes what he’s doing. It’s like Marilyn Monroe saying, ‘I’m an actress I’m an actress.” She was also tits. I can tell people a thousand times that I’m a serious person, but it’s hard for them to take at face value when the prosecution holds up Lickety Split and on the cover is a white girl sucking a big black cock and simultaneously fucking a broom. It’s an unforgiving world we live in, Ricky. Those who transgress are truly hated as scum. Well, that’s fine with me. But don’t tell me scum has no right to exist along with everybody who’s nice. Nobody should tell me that ever. Because scum is human too. That’s what’s paramount to me: not the money but the anti-humanity that calls itself nice. Nice. I don’t care what my kid grows up to be, I don’t care if he grows up wearing pantyhose as long as he doesn’t turn out nice. You know what terrifies me more than jail? That he’ll rebel against a father like me, and that’s what I’ll get. Decent society’s fucking revenge: a kid who’s very very very nice—another frightened soul, tamed by inhibition, suppressing madness, and wanting only to live with the rulers in harmonious peace.”
“I want a second life. It’s as ordinary as that.”
“But what are you assuming?” Bobby asked. “That you’re somehow going to be a completely erased tablet too? I don’t believe in that, Zuck. If you’re really going to do it, why pick a profession that’s the most difficult and tedious to prepare for? At least choose an easier one so you don’t lose so much.”
“What’s easier doesn’t answer the need for something difficult.”
“Go climb Mount Everest.”
“That’s like writing. You’re alone with the mountain and an ax. You’re all by yourself and it’s practically undoable. It is writing.”
“You’re by yourself when you’re a doctor too. When you’re leaning over a patient in a bed, you’ve entered into a highly complicated, specialized relationship that you develop over the years through training and experience, but you’re still back there somewhere by yourself, you know.”
“That’s not what ‘by yourself means to me. Any skilled worker’s by himself like that. When I’m by myself what I’m examining isn’t the patient in the bed. I’m leaning over a bed, all right, but I’m in it. There are writers who start from the other direction, but the thing that I grow grows on me. I listen, I listen carefully, but all I’ve got to go on, really, is my inner life—and I can’t take any more of my inner life. Not even that little that’s left. Subjectivity’s the subject, and I’ve had it.”
That’s all you’re running out on?”
Do I tell him? Can Bobby cure me? I didn’t come here to be treated but to learn to give the treatment, not to be reabsorbed in the pain but to make a new world to absorb myself in, not passively to receive somebody’s care and attention but to master the profession that provides it. He’ll put me in the hospital if I tell him, and I came out for the school.
“My life as cud, that’s what I’m running out on. Swallow as experience, then up from the gut for a second go as art. Chewing on everything, seeking connections—too much inward-dwelling, Bob. too much burrowing back. Too much doubt if it’s even worth the effort. Am I wrong to assume that in anesthesiology doubt isn’t half of your life? I look at you and I see a big, confident, bearded fellow without the slightest doubt that what he’s doing is worthwhile and that he does it well. That yours is a valuable service is undebatable fact. The surgeon hacks open his patient to remove something rotten and the patient doesn’t feel a thing—because of you. It’s clear, it’s straightforward, it’s unarguably useful and right to the point. I envy that.”
“Yes? You want to be an anesthesiologist? Since when?’
“Since I laid eyes on you. You look like a million bucks. It must be great. You go up to them the night before the operation, you say, I’m Bobby Freytag and I’m going to put you to sleep tomorrow with a little sodium pentothal. I’m going to stay with you throughout the operation to be sure all your systems are okay, and when you come out of it, I’ll be right there to hold your hand and see that you’re comfortable. Here, swallow one of these and you’ll sleep like a baby. I’m Bobby Freytag and I’ve been studying and training and working all my life just to be sure you’re all right.’ Yes, absolutely—I want to be an anesthesiologist like you.”
“Come on, what’s this all about, Zuck? You look like hell. You stink of gin.”
“Vodka. On the plane. Fear of flying.”
“You look worse than that. Your eyes. Your color. What the hell is going on?”
No. He would not let this pain poison another connection. Hadn’t even worn the collar, fearing they wouldn’t begin to consider him for medical school if they were to discover that he was not only forty and a scientific ignoramus but sick besides. Repetitious pain’s clamorous needs were back on the playmat with his prism glasses. No more looking from the floor at everybody gigantically up on their feet. Percodan if required, Kotler’s pillow for that chance in a million, but otherwise, to all he met in Chicago—to Bobby and the admissions committee certainly—another indestructible mortal, happy and healthy as the day he was born. Must suppress every temptation to describe it (from the meaningless first twinge through the disabling affliction} to your enviable old roommate, dedicated pain-killer though he may be. No more to be done for my pain, no more to be said. Either the medicines are still too primitive or the doctors aren’t yet up lo it or I’m incurable. When he felt pain, he’d pretend instead that it was pleasure. Every time the fire flares up, just say to yourself, “Ah, that’s good—makes me glad to be alive.” Think of it not as unreasonable punishment but as gratuitous reward. Think of it as chronic rapture, irksome only inasmuch as one can have too much even of a good thing. Think of it as the ticket to a second life. Imagine you owe it everything. Imagine anything you like. Forget those fictionalized book-bound Zuckermans and invent a real one now for the world. That’s how the others do it. Your next work of art—you.
“Tell me about anesthesiology. I’ll bet it’s beautifully clear. You give them something to sleep, they sleep. You want to raise their blood pressure—you give them a drug, you raise their blood pressure. You want to raise it this much, you get this much—you want that much, you get that much. Isn’t that true? You wouldn’t look like you look if it wasn’t. A leads to B and B leads to C. You know when you’re right and you know when you’re wrong. Am I idealizing it? You don’t even have to answer. I see it on you, in you, all over you.”