DOCTOR SYNTAX
DOCTOR SYNTAX
by Michael Petracca
JOSHUA ODELL EDITIONS CAPRA PRESS 1991
Copyright © by Michael Petracca
All rights reserved under international and Pan American
Copyright Conventions.
Published by Joshua Odell Editions, Capra Press.
Box 2158, Santa Barbara, California 93105
Typography: Cragmont publications
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petracca, Michael, 1947–
Doctor Syntax / by Michael Petracca.
p. em.
Includes index.
ISBN 1877741-03-5 : $9.95
I. Title.
PS3566.E779D63 1991
813’.54—dc2091-4639
CIP First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
For my parents who would have kvelled
if not plotzed outright:
abbracciandovi con tutto il mio cuore.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the people who lent editorial support and /or encouragement to this project: Linda Allen, Christopher Buckley, Mark Comstock, Mark Ferrer, Dr. Deborah Hein, Valerie Hobbs, Chris Ingram, Jan Ingram, John Landsberg, Francess Lantz, Otto “Baba” Laula, Mike and Annie Lorimer, Penelope Maddy, Steve Marx, Lee Morgan, Joshua Odell, Peg O’Donnell, Frances Petracca, Gary Soto, Judith Spencer, Craig Spirka, Albert Sweet, Betsy Uhrig, Marianne Walker, Noel Young, Donald Pearce, Stephen Williamson.
PART ONE
MY OWN PLACE
ONE
A slow death by nagging: My mother would kill me if she knew I was dogging Doctor Syntax.
In the Nails family, long champions of doomed liberal causes, investigation means sticking your nose into other people’s constitutionally guarded business, and that’s a public shame as damning as canvassing door-to-door for Ford’s reelection. The only other family member who does anything even remotely resembling detective work is my cousin Brad the insurance man, and Ma speaks of him always with contempt, as, “… that Bradford hocked me two hours about adding a trailer to my policy, he’s already got a fortune out of me, isn’t it enough he’s always snooping around poor unfortunates, accident victims no less, trying to save his company a few pennies, he ought to get a real job …”
Ma is proud of my job. My still-unfinished dissertation on authorial self-awareness in George Eliot’s novels doesn’t bother her. Just the fact that I have a master’s and a part-time lectureship at UCLA gives Ma license to call me “Professor” to her card club, and that makes her happy enough to complain with mitigated frequency that I’m twenty-eight, divorced, and living with her again.
But while my academic life gives Ma pleasure, it gives me none and is in fact a source of aggravation I can measure precisely by the frequency of the bladder spasms I get when I’m torturing a passage of Eliot into supporting my thesis or having to listen to some complacent tenured pedant like old RearWind Wessex discuss the Homeric allusions in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. School, literary criticism—deconstructobation, as my ex-roommate Thrasher calls it—doesn’t gratify me … one reason, I suppose, why I got involved solving this crime in the first place. It’s more fun than studying.
But if George Eliot teaches us anything, it’s that “there is always a deeper cause for human behavior than the one we just posited.”1 When I was eight, I wanted a bicycle, not an outrageous request from the son of an almost-wealthy commercial launderer. Philip Meer next door had had one for three years, and only once did he brodie into the middle of rush-hour traffic, causing front-end and frame damage to a Buick Skylark. Philip’s parents believed that pain builds character, and toward this end they gave him every opportunity to mangle his body, in Pop Warner’s tackle football, on Boy Scout overnighters into the Santa Monica mountains, and on his Schwinn, among cars. The Meers valued pain as an instructional aid; my father, by contrast, believed his own Brooklyn childhood had given him enough hard knocks for several succeeding generations, and so he wanted to spare me even the slightest hurt. Ma, meanwhile, knew that all L. A. drivers had but one goal: to run innocents off the road, causing them to dash their heads against the curb and therefore to spend the rest of their lives as drooling invalids dependent on their mothers. By the time I got a bike at thirteen, so convinced was I that I was going to kill myself in traffic that I spent months turning timid circles and figure eights in our cul-de-sac before I ever ventured out onto city streets.
This is just an off-the-top example of how my parents’ smothering protectiveness turned me into a wimp. Ironically, this pathological timidity of mine turns out to be the root of my attraction to danger—recklessness, some would call it; “idiotic foolishness” by Ma’s standards—because as much as I was (and still am) abnormally scared and reserved, I have become to that same degree a risk-taker.
Liz2 once theorized that something snapped in me seven years ago, at my father’s deathbed. He was comatose, but I imagined he might be able to hear me, so I talked anyway. I talked about the kid practicing his skateboard moves in the parking garage across the street from Pop’s private room; I talked about Ma, who was holding up remarkably well considering her usual hysteria about such relative trivialities as dustbunnies and scuffmarks, and who, exhausted by the too-real rigors of the deathwatch, was presently crashed in the unoccupied room adjacent to Pop’s; I talked about the odd tensile stillness of the ocean’s surface under the kelp beds despite a stiffly squalling downshore wind, an effect I had marked on my drive to the hospital that morning; and I talked about the even odder gift the night nursing staff had left my father: They had inflated a surgical glove into an udder-shaped balloon and knotted it off, had written, “Have a Nice day From Your friends on 4-West.” in magic marker across the glove’s edematous-looking skin, and had suspended this grotesque artifact from my father’s bedside lamp, presumably with genuine bonhomie and no conscious intention to lampoon his own moribund bloat. I talked about these and other things in equally slack association, and as I talked an unexpected feeling surfaced and mingled with my love for this man of stubbly cheek and jaundiced flesh, this passionately opinionated salesman-philosopher who had once stormed out of a restaurant because an acquaintance disagreed with Pop’s assertion that Mark Twain was the greatest writer in the history of American letters, this gentlest of gentlemen who never once upraised a hand to discipline me (although he did once dropkick me halfway across the living room when my relentless sassing took him beyond the wide bounds of his patience), who raised his voice only to make a point and then rarely in anger, who kept things light, sometimes even giddy, in the midst of Ma’s cyclonic moods, and who, despite having to hold down a day delivery job to support several younger siblings, had managed to educate himself at night school, to claw his way out of Brooklyn’s squalid Wallabout Basin and to establish something of an empire in the West Coast linen rental industry, a stately Mediterranean villa-style home with an olive-lined drive, a lovely wife, a neat stack of dollars, and a son who was a hell of a kid, if you could get past his backtalk and his chronic ambivalent lethargies born of too many talents.
The intrusive and unanticipated feeling that surfaced in me, along with the o’erweening love, was contempt. As my father had sheltered me, so had he protected himself. Or maybe it was the other way around. In either case, he hadn’t walked a flight of stairs for twenty years, worrying that a heart weakened by infantile rheumatic fever would give out. Although he had enjoyed smoking for years, he quit, fearing cancer or stroke. He claimed that drinking depleted his body of its immunological reserves; club soda was his usual. Pop played safe, dealt honestly in linens, raised a family,
never cheated (as far as I know) on his wife, and all it got him was a bed in the intensive ward at St. John’s, intravenous morphine in his mercifully infrequent waking moments, a rich man’s funeral in his fiftieth year.
What galled me was that I had bought his whole neurotic’s bill of goods, of which every piece of inventory will sit in the psychic warehouse until I die, Liz’s sunny promises of my self-actualization notwithstanding. Worse, for every one of my father’s fears I invented five of my own. I brood about tumors, cringe at the sight of spiders. I dread insanity, avoid potluck dinners because the food might have psychoactive chemicals in it, which would lead to my becoming even more fearful, insanely so. I’ve shunned peanuts ever since a former roommate warned me that goobers sometimes grow a fungus containing one of the most potent carcinogens yet discovered; I switched to almonds and dumped the roommate. Also left over from my childhood is a chronic insomnia which, when I was younger, made it impossible for me to sleep over at Braddy’s3 and which now causes women confusion, sometimes anger (and occasionally, I suppose, relief) when I anounce, after rounds of transcendent loving, that it’s time for me to go home. To be sure, a burdensome pack of neuroses to carry for a lifetime, and one whose weight would certainly have crushed me even sooner than my father’s destroyed him. But the cruel tedium of Pop’s last days and hours enervated and scourged me, admitted me into a kind of decisive yawning anarchy out of which I emerged not necessarily transformed—that is to say, not any less fearful—but mutinous and determined not to live scared and therefore die young.
By dying my father saved me, pushed me in the direction of abandon. If once I had been timid on my ten-speed, I swung to the opposite extreme, collecting speeding tickets, arms hairline-fractured and knees scraped raw on my semi-chopped Triumph Bonneville. If, as a child, I had a terror of the Deep End in swimming pools, I took up bodysurfing the Newport wedge, where two double-overhead swells hump up into one wall, fat as it is high, that pitches abruptly forward as it hits land, dumping me in three inches of water over concrete-hard beach and jagged granite-block jetty.
In short, I came to embrace the edge, a life constantly surging against the granitic seawall of my fear … which is why I sometimes find myself in big trouble, as I did when Doctor Syntax disappeared.
TWO
Usually I make it a policy not to think about psychology, especially my own. There’s little percentage in trying to come up with explanations for self-destructive behavior so firmly rooted that there’s no way (Liz again to the contrary) to change it even if I did understand. A sound rule; any rule is worth obeying that promotes mental health. But sometimes I can’t help myself: When you’re lying face down on a Chinese rug and a lout with a ski mask is pointing a pump-action Remington at the base of your skull, you arrive at unusual answers—such as the preceding discourse concerning the origin and nature of my quirky doubled-edged personality—for crucial questions, such as what am I doing on this floor, possibly thinking my last obsessive thoughts?
The gunmen had had practice. Or else, if this was their first time holding up innocent strangers, they had an innate aptitude for thuggery, real career potential, as you might say. With the shotgun under an arm, the short one kept guard over his three prone and trembling (if I could use my own behavior as a touchstone) charges, while the hulking one, also masked, moved with surprising nimbleness around the study, rummaging for valuables. Apparently irritated at his partner’s finding nothing worth stealing, the short one began to lift our possessions roughly. He started with Ernst’s digital wristwatch, at which he glanced, then complained in a voice that bore an uncanny resemblance to talk-show host Dick Cavett’s—a smooth, slightly nasal patter as flat as the corn belt, with an irritating hint of snide mirth, “A Timex. A Timex. I hope the rest of you can come up with something better than this. The docs in the joint said disappointment makes me mean.” He stuck the muzzle of the shotgun into the small of my back.
I was following my imagination through lurid yellow-tabloid stills of my lifeblood splattered across this quaint Victorian office, when Dick Cavett broke into my reverie, “And where do you hide your cash, sweetheart?” He had moved on to Lissa and was addressing her now. From my prone position I could see in my right periphery the barrel of his rifle poking her, beginning at the head and moving deliberately down her body. He was laughing quietly to himself. Each time he jabbed her with the gun, he elicited from her a squeak, the kind of sound bath toys make, which might have been comical in other circumstances but which made the situation here seem all the more unreal and therefore more nightmarish.
When he reached the area of her rump, he stopped chuckling and said, “No jewelry? Too bad. Let’s see what you have in your purse.” Hefting the shotgun like a tent-pole, he raised the hem of her dress with dramatic deliberation, so that I could see the material draped over the end of the weapon like a species of pastel-flowered ghost. Then it disappeared from view, and Lissa’s thin squeaks turned to increasingly shrill cries. I couldn’t see what was going on, but it was obviously starting to get brutal.
Enraged, Ernst said, “Schtup sat at fonz. Sat iss an orrrder.” Cavett ignored him, and I admit with some embarrassment that I developed a swelling that pressed into the rug, a condition that had nothing to do with sex but which arose rather from an encounter with the basest human drives gone out of control, the kind of engorgement that visits men when they’re forced to witness a lynching, or are themselves strung up by a mob, and all the valves and sphincters open simultaneously at the savage inhumanity of it.
This condition didn’t last long, however, because someone shrieked, “No more.” and in a mindless fit of bravado charged at Cavett, to rescue Lissa from whatever unspeakable indignities were about to be performed on her. Remarkably, the someone turned out to be your narrator, who found myself stationed bristlingly, in a kind of pseudo-karate horse-rider stance, between the shotgun and the supine Lissa. Real martial artists stand this way to lower their centers of gravity, so that they might launch powerful kicks quickly from either foot. In my case, the exaggerated straddle did nothing more than offer the gunman a convenient and obvious target: the crotch of my trousers, whose resident member was still one-third swollen. This unhappy addendum he found without hesitation with a violent thrust of the thick wooden gunstock’s butt-end cap. No pain. I coughed out all my air and collapsed over Lissa.
As compensation for a childless future I had at least succeeded in distracting our short assailant before he got as far as violating Lissa. It didn’t seem to matter to him whose privates he savaged, as long as he savaged someone’s; in this case mine were handy. Looking down on my crumpled formlessness atop Lissa, he exclaimed, “What a cute couple!” He nudged my ribcage with the steel-reinforced toe of his boot. “Hey, I think the babe’s hot for some action, bigshot.” he said to me in a mock-confidential tone. “Do her for me, will you? I got business.”
I heard Ernst say, as menacingly as possible given his compromised, butt-skyward posture and his silly accent, “You fill regrrat sis, Dill.” and in the middle of this impotent and cryptic warning I checked out.
THREE
A couple of white-smocked paramedics were kneeling and busy, one with some kind of aromatic ampule in the vicinity of my nose and the other deep inside my choners. My brown Levi cords were lying nearby, looking like the carcass of a small deer that had been savaged by coyotes. The medic nearer my face asked me how I felt and I said I didn’t know. He continued his ministrations and after a while asked me again and I told him fine this time and arose by stages—side, elbow, knee, knees, chin, knee, knees, foot, feet—and walked unsteadily around the study, feeling a dull tightening in the neighborhood where my maleness used to live. Lissa put an arm around my waist to steady me, and the medic who had been puttering with my genitals like a garage mechanic tuning a carburetor said, “You took a hard blow, but nothing seems ruptured. You’ll have some pain and swelling for a few days, but it should go away pretty fast. If it lasts
more than a week or so, you ought to see a urologist.”
As the medics left, they admitted a uniformed police officer, who addressed us generally, “Whose house is this?” Ernst introduced himself and answered his questions patiently: How did the thieves get in? Did we recognize them? Was anyone else hurt? Did they take anything of value? To the latter question Ernst volunteered, “Mein Timeggs voss schtöllen. It voss off no fallyew.”
“They stole your egg-timer?”
Lissa patched the momentary breakdown in communication. “He means they got his watch. It was a Timex.”
“Oh.” Impatiently the cop scratched out something on the notepad, presumably the egg-timer entry, and wrote something else, presumably the Timex.
Lissa continued, “After the smaller man hit Harmon, he tore the room apart.” A glance around the ravaged study confirmed this piece of testimony. “Then he threw some things into Harmon’s tennis bag and they both left.”
“What kind of things?”
“Just junk, mostly—a letter opener, a brass elephant … knickknacks. But they also got Harmon’s books. He brought them here to be appraised, but we didn’t have a chance to look at them. It all happened so fast.” As she listed the stolen stuff, the cop made some notes in a small bluish notebook.
“How much do you think they’re worth?”
Lissa said, “Who knows? Maybe not much, maybe a lot.”
“How much is a lot?”
“I can’t really say. We can tell pretty quickly if an article is authentic, but gauging the market takes time. You have to make inquiries. His books might be quite ordinary, but if there’s some interest among collectors, a mint Syntax could be worth thousands of dollars.”
Doctor Syntax Page 1