Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  But the revelation would fade fast, so he’d have to do another balloon. If one happened to walk in on the end of such a session, he would see what looked like the aftermath of a twisted birthday party, with spent multicolored party favors all over the floor, Pepsi bottles, crumpled spittle-soaked tissues, seeds and stems and papers, Thrasher spread-eagled and burnt-out on the divan, and Lauren, who never indulged in but never seemed to mind my best friend’s excesses, puttering around cleaning up the debris.

  We sat on the floor in front of the TV, on what Russ called his “tubie seats.” garish discount-store orange corduroy cushions with armrests and covered with just enough Moby fur and house dust to make my bronchial tubes contract asthmatically. I sneezed, and Russ passed one of the three or four boxes of Kleenex he always had nearby, mostly to attend to the mucous exigencies of his cocaine-ravaged nasal passages. He brought a small wad of tinfoil out of his pocket and uncrumpled it. Inside were four small white, purple-flecked tablets. Thrasher said, “It’s psilocybin. The guy I bought it from said it’s pure, pharmaceutical. Sandoz labs made it to experiment on convicts or prisoners of war or something.”

  Even I, a naïf in such matters, knew all homemade tablets advertised as exotic varieties of psychedelic were almost always garage-brewed LSD cut with some other medication, like amphetamine or Borateem. Dealers could get a higher price for what they called mescaline, which was supposed to imitate the distinctive psychoactive properties of peyote cactus; you would see beings’ souls as glowing eggs and be able to launch yourself off cliffs and glide safely to the ground on cables of pure energy emanating from the power center in your navel. Or the dealers would hawk their acid as psilocybin, synthetic “magic mushrooms” famous for their ability to destroy the ego: In smaller doses it was rumored one could attain a profound and uplifting sense of one’s place in the natural order, a role no more or less important than that of a dragonfly on a rock; in larger doses, you feel like your skin is frying off your skeleton as your essence rises to heaven in tiny sizzling soap bubbles.

  Of course I knew all of this drug lore not from experience—my usual caution in the arena of pharmaceuticals had kept me from having allowed myself to trip—but from reading books. Since hallucinogens had the reputation of forcing one to let go of his constipative patterns of non-behavior, I imagined they could be an immensely liberating influence, making me slip out of my too-tight wimp wrapping. I researched the subject exhaustively, read all the books on the subject, and learned that some psychiatrists were using acid as a means of catapulting clients out of their neurotic impasses, like jet pilots ejecting from a flaming wreck. I concluded that it would be worth the risk to try some myself … a small bit, just enough to change my point of view by a degree or two, but not enough to make me freak.

  Russ said he had saved the psilocybin for this football game, to intensify his viewing pleasure. Televised sports are better when you’re high, he said. “It’s like you’re right on the fucking field, you can hear the animals grunting, the collisions are incredible, you really feel the impact, like a JBL auditorium horn cranking Led Zep real loud …” He offered me some.

  Thrasher never forces his drugs. This is one of the reasons I’ve maintained my friendship with him beyond our two years as roomies. He respects—or more likely doesn’t care one way or another about—my own reservations, proffering his stash with the nonchalance of a smoker extending his pack. I considered the current offer and said I’d eat a little bit. Russ gave me one of the pills, which I accepted in a piece of tissue paper, carefully avoiding contact with my skin.19 I broke off a tiny crumb, no larger than a sesame seed. This I swallowed with considerable apprehension, while Russ blithely popped three of the double-domes into his mouth, washed them down with Pepsi, and settled down in his tubie seat with a translucent tar-blackened pink lucite marijuana carburetor at his side. American manhood watchful and prepared.

  Nothing happened. The game started, the Broncos scored a field goal, Thrasher babbled no more incoherently than usual, and I hadn’t seen God yet. After a half hour or so I told Russ that the drug wasn’t working. He looked at me strangely, as though I were a hat rack that had somehow been granted the gift of speech. “The shit works.” he said. He liked the way it sounded. “The shit works.” he said again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Try some more.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh.” he repeated, grinning at something on my nose, or at my nose itself. Reluctantly I unballed the tissue and broke off another crumb, this one a little larger than the last, and ate it. Another half hour and still nothing.

  I became convinced that Thrasher’s reaction to the so-called psychedelic was purely self-induced, that marijuana and the power of suggestion made him believe he was tripping. I took the rest of the tablet with confidence and then forgot about it.

  Denver scored another touchdown.

  I drank some Pepsi, remarking to myself that the corporation’s Creative Department had made some interesting changes in the graphic design of their label. They were using some new and opalescent pigments in their printing ink, and the type fonts were tilted oddly. As I studied the cola label, the whole can began to stretch out like warm taffy and then rotate slowly on an axis about a third of the way down the can, leaving spectral, prismatic afterimages as it turned.

  The words were animated now, crawling around on the can like escapees from an overturned ant farm. Sometimes they would roam randomly and other times arrange themselves in intricate patterns on the can, forming arcane religious messages that broke up quickly the instant before I could comprehend them and act on their instructions.

  The sudden wash of stimuli confused me, and I probably would have been terrified at having thrown myself off the perceptual precipice in a flailing, free-falling header, but two things saved me. When I decided the drug was impotent I let go of my fear, and so what Leary used to call the mental “set” was clear. Also, even when I was at my most dissociated during the succeeding hours, enough of a kernel of superego remained to remind what was left of me that this was just a chemical, and that its effects would wear off—which turned out to be comforting but inaccurate, at least in the case of déjà vu.

  Thrasher was right about one thing. Football was different. At various points in the proceedings I took on the roles of prosimian linemen, hyperactive referees with persecution complexes, fleshily seductive cheerleaders, Bermuda grass suffering with saintly grace the horrible trampling by the cleated herd above, a flea on Moby’s ass. By the final gun the rush was well behind me, and I had settled into a groove wherein I straddled the noetic and the mundane fairly comfortably. I was hallucinating, but I knew I was hallucinating, and I could to my astonishment accomplish complex tasks like walking and even tossing the Frisbee, which would take forever to drift in my direction as though across a bruised blue galaxy, then loom up suddenly like a newborn moon whose orbit my hand would somehow manage to intersect through no conscious effort on my part but by a neuromuscular program visibly blueprinted in detailed superimposition over my field of vision.

  “Good catch.” Russ said, also impressed by my skill.

  “Thanks.” I said. “Watch this.” I threw the Frisbee into the ivy, which swallowed it like a vast sea anemone.

  “Good throw.” said Russ.

  Russ laughed when I got in my car to drive home. Lauren looked worried. No cause for concern, though, because driving was easy. I just had to steer my U-boat between mines while making sure I kept a safe distance from allied sub-chasers who lobbed depth charges.

  Brenny knew something was up because when I came in, I stripped in the living room and went directly to the bathtub without so much as a hello. I filled the tub with steaming water, dumped in a double dose of Brenny’s Sardo scented oil, grabbed Enzo and Rashid (the two kittens we had rescued from the gas chamber at the county animal shelter) and perched them on the closed toilet seat lid. I climbed into the tub and led a lucid seminar with the ca
ts for two hours, covering topics ranging from kibble versus canned liver ’n’ fish, to the elegiac conventions as reworked by Milton through Tennyson. We all came out of the discussion enriched, I think, and I smelled like a bower of wild jasmine or a hooker on Fountain Avenue.

  When Dee and Peter Trottoir arrived for our dinner date, I was close to halfway sane and feeling a mixture of arrant exhaustion and silly good humor. I went into the bedroom to dress, while Brenny apologized for the situation to our guests. Peter—who, it turned out, was himself a freak in the late sixties, before he got married and settled down to write data-processing programs for a hospital service evaluation firm—was amused and supportive. The women clearly were not. They sat whispering on our rattan couch and shot what I interpreted to be disapproving looks my way. Thus, instead of spending the evening gazing longingly at Dee, I stuck close to her hubby, as an infant chimp does its mother, and he lavished an empathic, loving solicitude on me, leading me around by the arm, coaching me through dinner, explaining what I could expect to follow.

  “You’re still stoned but coming down pretty fast now,” Peter said. “In a few hours you probably won’t be able to keep your eyes open. You can expect to feel tired for a couple days, but then you’ll be back to normal.” A nice promise, but not true: At the seder the following night I had my first in a long series of acid-induced fatal premonitions.

  It was a large gathering of “family” which, since most of my mother’s family lived in Atlanta, consisted of cousins-thrice-removed, the spouses of some of them, and a couple of liberal gentile acquaintances who sought a taste of the “Jewish experience.”

  Bradford conducted the seder well, with relaxed dignity and not too much orthodox pomp, and it proceeded smoothly. We went around the table reading short passages from the Haggadah. Mine was the part about how God gave the pursuing Egyptians a case of boils. Still hung over, I read with such a lugubrious, cotton-mouthed delivery that Ma said to me in a concerned aside, “Harmon, you should take it easy with the Manischevitz.”

  We ate the eggs and bitter herbs in their time, and my cousin Martin Wolf, a lonely nebbish of forty extremely odd years and a man whose actual kinship to us is shadowy,20 delivered his traditional “horseradish-the first Dristan” joke, and we all laughed ritually. Dinner over, we sang. Three choruses through “Dyanu” everyone was ready to stop, except Martin, who led enthusiastically into one reprise after another, and it must have been the peculiar endless circularity of the song that touched off my fatal premonition in the same way a stroboscopic light can cause a grand-mal seizure by synchronizing with the brain waves of epileptics. Suddenly I knew I had done all this before, and that on the previous seder I had died by choking grotesquely on a small, sharp fragment of chicken bone. I flushed hot with adrenaline, tensed up, nearly blacked out anticipating the mortal stroke.

  It never came, of course. I cried out in relief, “Lo, I am delivered.” or “Praise be on high.” or some like, and all the relatives seemed to take this ejaculation as evidence of a rare personal appearance by the reclusive Jaweh through one of His less devout creations, because they nodded approvingly or beamed or clasped my hand. The evening broke up on this note of spiritual elevation.

  I slept fourteen more hours to go with the eighteen of the previous night, and, as Peter had promised, the effects of the LSD faded, with the exception of one. Through the intervening years between then and now, déjà vu has always followed the same pattern with me: mortal terror followed by blessed relief.

  So naturally, when I saw the metal-flake gray El Camino, the same one I had seen on my busted date with Diane, drifting dangerously close to me and my motorcycle across two lanes on the Hollywood freeway, I dismissed it as just another pseudo-paranormal ghost-vision, which would inevitably evanesce. This time I was wrong.

  Dead wrong.

  TEN

  A nice day, like every other Santa Monica summer day, except this one ended with my near death by a silver El Camino. Slate-gray morning overcast, still and gloomy, followed by increasing heat in the afternoon as the clouds burn off and the sun mounts in the sky. On such afternoons I ride the Beezer, a classic BSA 250 with the stability of larger cruisers and the jumpy maneuverability of a dirt bike. I stuffed my army-surplus bombardier jacket in the saddlebag and rode to Ernst’s, enjoying the cool sting of wind against my bare arms and under my T-shirtsleeves, and savoring a faint smog-ache deep in my lungs.21

  I had passed much of the preceding week at Ernst’s, not because I was making any headway in turning up useful clues there, but because I had no idea where else to look. Ernst’s was as good a place as any to wait for inspiration. Besides, I was feeling less awestruck by and more comfortable with Lissa, and Ernst had taken an almost paternal interest in me. Given the absence of my own pop, Ernst’s attention felt good, as though in my brain a crucial neural receptor, agape like a starveling sparrow, had been filled. Ernst also appeared to condone and even to promote my blossoming (at least in my own mind) relationship with Lissa, because he made a point of leaving us alone frequently and for extended periods, under pretexts more and more exotic, as, “I hoff a suddn crrraving to sit on see porch unt lissn to automobile sounds,” or, “I hoff been meeening to polish mein shoes für some time now. Phon’t you two excuss me?”

  Lissa’s current project was typing up some taped criticism, dictated apparently by Ernst, who was aiming to prove that certain so-called “Lesbian Poems” were not only not written by Sappho, but that they are actually primitive folk-verse dressed up to look Sapphic, whatever that meant. I offered to help Lissa with her work, explaining that for my required classical language I had selected Attic Greek as an alternative to the tedium of reading Beowulf in the original Old English,22 and that I still remembered some of it.

  Mercifully, Lissa declined my offer of help and said she’d rather we spent our time alone getting to know each other, at which suggestion my heart leapt up. She asked me about my past, and I regaled her with the usual packet of true-life adventures: my first bicycle, near-brushes with fatality while surfing and motorcycling, Pop’s long terminal illness that resulted in my devout existential nihilism, high-stakes poker, my attraction to my recently-deceased kitty named Newton, my marriage, divorce, and subsequent utter nervous explosion, the missing scrap of newspaper that could change my life if ever I could find the maggot who’d stolen it along with Doctor Syntax.

  Lissa was a good listener. She didn’t interrupt except to laugh where appropriate or to offer a murmur of consolation during the sad parts. She seemed truly interested and, at times, moved. Surprisingly, the process was cathartic for me, too, in the way I suppose psychotherapy should be but rarely is because you always know in the back of your mind that you’re forking over a dollar a minute to this schmeckeleh who’s nodding attentively while thinking of tasteful ways to tile the bathroom in the new wing of his house, which construction project your shrinkage over the past six months financed. Talking with Lissa lightened my psychic burden instead of my billfold. I told her I was grateful for her attention. “Now it’s your turn to talk.” I insisted.

  She began slowly. Of her past she said there wasn’t much to tell. “Pretty normal midwestern stuff, I guess. Nothing to complain about, but nothing memorable, either. I came to California to go to school. I wanted to find out for myself if everything I was hearing about this place was true …”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, and much worse.” Her narration picked up momentum. “I was sharing a studio with a bio major. She had birds. Never have two birds at one time, by the way … at least two parakeets.”

  “Parakeets have never been high on my list of life’s goals.”

  “Mine, either, but there I was,stuck in a little studio apartment with two of them. One, she called him Leonard, the little flyaway fringe of feathers on his head reminded her of Leonard Bernstein conducting. Leonard used to fly around, usually into the bathroom. The other one, Dukie, had his wings clipped, so he had to st
ay on his perch. There they’d be, Leonard in the bathroom, Dukie on his perch, screeching at each other across the room.”

  “It sounds delightfully cheerful. Did you kill them?”

  “I felt like it. They made this annoying ‘chit-chit-chit’ scolding noise all the time.”

  “I know that sound. My mother makes it when I scuff the kitchen linoleum with the heels of my dirt-digging boots. It’s like an old washing machine in the spin cycle.”

  “With an unbalanced load.” she extended the metaphor.

  “Precisely. And shot bearings.”

  “It was driving me insane. I spent all my free hours in the library, just to get away from the racket, so I ended up studying a lot. I got good grades, thanks to Leonard and Dukie.”

  “Maybe I should borrow those birds next quarter.”

  “I’m afraid Leonard and Dukie are in birdy heaven now. The neighbor’s cat got them.”

  “Too bad. I could really use their help. I have to take Dr. Brunkard’s Browning seminar.”

  “Browning is good. You’ll enjoy it.”

  “Browning’s all right, he limps along. But you’ve never truly suffered until you’ve read Peble’s simpering essays on the prosodic style of his later dramatic monologues. Most literary criticism is unreadable, but …”

  “I like criticism.” At this admission my adoration of Lissa eroded a perceptible bit, like a chunk of aquamarine-flecked plaster falling from a Giotto fresco. Unaware of the offense, she picked up the thread of her story: “Anyway, last year, when I graduated, I didn’t know what to do with myself. A bachelor’s in comp lit, high honors, fluency in ancient and modern Greek, Latin, some French. Everyone warned me my skills wouldn’t be marketable, but I didn’t want to believe it.”