Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  “The higher and more specialized your degree.” I observed, “the less employable you become. All you can do is teach or wait tables, and restaurant work pays more.”

  “So I found out. When I ran out of money, I went to the school placement center to look for work, anything—cocktailing, babysitting. I found an ad for an ‘Editorial Assistant: must be versed in the classics, flexible hours, salary to be arranged.’ It turned out to be Ernst. I found him irresistible-dedicated, brilliant, demanding, warm—I’m sure you’ve seen the same qualities in him.” I said I had. “The work isn’t as creative as I’d like, but it’s a challenge. He’s giving me a research acknowledgment in his next article.”

  “I didn’t know he published.”

  “Actually, he’s considered a kind of authority in his field. Which isn’t easy for someone who’s not connected with a university.”

  “With a reputation like that, why can’t he land himself a professorship somewhere? Then he could afford a house big enough for all these books … and hire an interior decorator.”

  “He doesn’t notice the clutter. He likes it here. It’s familiar. Besides, he did teach in a university once, in Europe, but he gave it up when he came here.”

  “Why?”

  Lissa paused, as though to consider the morality of discussing at greater length a history revealed in confidence, even if our conversation didn’t exactly fall in the category of gossip. Picking words even more carefully than at first, like an outlander working from a dictionary, she said, “I’ve pieced together what I know of Ernst’s life from conversations I’ve had with him and his colleagues. He’s had a hard life, the kind that would destroy most people, and that’s why I respect him all the more. I don’t want to betray his confidence.”

  I wavered between respect for Ernst’s privacy and a dire need for facts. At this point, almost a week into my so-called investigation and nothing to show for it, even irrelevant information would feel like progress. I assured Lissa I would never say a syllable to hurt him.

  She allowed, “Maybe I’m a little too careful when it comes to Ernst. But if you knew what he’s been through, you’d be more protective than your mother.”

  I protested, “If I devoted every erg of my vitality to the project, I could never be more protective than my mother. Her protectiveness is absolute, perfect and complete. Like death.”

  Hyperbole always wins the day, which, I suppose, is how advertising agencies stay in business. Her story came out:

  Ernst Gablonzer was born in Austria but went to England to pursue his education. After receiving his doctorate he accepted a position teaching classics at Kent University. He met and married a girl from the nearby village, a milliner’s daughter who was said to be incredibly beautiful-flaming red hair, ivory skin, mysterious dark eyes—but naive and inexperienced. They had a baby girl, and for the first few years everything was blissful. But it all fell apart. Ernst was working on a series of translations with a female colleague, and he was away from home a lot. At the same time, his wife met this charming man, Laurence Sterne, descended from the famous novelist of the same name.

  Sterne was rich, some kind of a religious figure, and a collector of rare things—art, rugs, books, stamps. If it was scarce and valuable he either owned it or coveted it, and what he coveted he eventually owned. He took one look at Ernst’s wife and decided he had to add her to his collection. Over the course of several weeks Sterne managed to plant in her mind the suspicion, then the conviction, that Ernst was having an affair with his female colleague, that he wasn’t worth her fidelity. Sterne invented proofs, going so far as to show her love letters allegedly written by Ernst. Too gullible, she believed him. Sterne wooed her and eventually took her to America with the child, no forwarding address.

  Ernst followed them across America, determined to show Sterne for the charlatan he was. He got close, but Sterne protects his possessions. He had two of his religious “converts”—thugs, really—confront Ernst in his hotel room. They warned him to lay off, but Ernst refused. To scare him they tied him to a chair and held a bottle of some kind of cleaning fluid over his face, threatening to pour it in his eyes if he didn’t leave Sterne alone. Ernst struggled and upset the jar. The caustic solution got in his eyes. The two guys panicked and ran, leaving Ernst helpless. By the time someone found him, it was too late.

  Not comprehending, or more likely not wanting to comprehend, I said, “But his vision is perfect. He gets around here fine .…”

  “He knows this place by heart. Otherwise, I do his seeing for him. I’m his eyes. Ernst is blind.”

  ELEVEN

  Shaky and distracted, I eased onto the Alvarado entrance to the Hollywood Freeway and headed east, on a roundabout route that avoided the densest commuter traffic on the Harbor Freeway by taking me east to the Pasadena Freeway, north to the Golden State, south to the tangle of concrete fettucine the radio weather-and-traffic-condition jokers call the “downtown four-level interchange.” then west on the Santa Monica Freeway, toward the beach and home. It was almost dusk, the sun a cherry Necco behind bad air, the day cooling down. I had on my old leather bomber jacket for warmth.

  The heartless mistreatment of Ernst, a man I was sure had not an ounce of evil in him, sickened me. Under my mantle of southern California mellow, and deeper, below the thicker crust of my nihilism, flows a secret molten hope: that Camus and the rest of my modern anxiety-age heroes were wrong in positing a universe that snickers quietly at our annoying little toe-stubbings and ghastly suppurating buboes, our catty back-stabbings and atrocious mass exterminations—or worse, that has no consciousness at all, sadistic or otherwise. I secretly want twentieth-century philosophy to be disproved by a sudden and unprecedented epidemic of righteous deeds, a universal power-spike of goodness. But more often than not my closet optimism gets a poetic jackboot in the teeth or a too-real gunstock in the kishkas, and I want instead to puke, or weep, or lash out.

  In such a mood I wound the Beezer out hard, got up to cruising speed, and stayed in the right lane of the freeway. Even though the 250 is a solid enough road machine under sixty or so, there is a noticeable loss of stability at higher speeds, and you start feeling as though the tires are touching the pavement only as a grudging concession to gravity. I’ve driven mad enough times to know that I shouldn’t, because I get crazy. In my current disturbed state it would be easy to find myself airborne, and—as Thrasher says—it’s not the rush that kills you; it’s the abrupt stops. I kept to the slow lane, which in L. A. means sixty instead of eighty.

  In the fish-eye mirror I saw the silver El Camino coming up fast, but I was too preoccupied with moral outrage over the blinding of my new father-surrogate to accord the pickup more than desultory attention. It pulled alongside me in the next lane, and the driver and passenger both leaned over and peered out the passenger’s side window, as though to check me out. I rode on, barely noticing.

  They backed off, fell in with the traffic behind, and the next time the El Camino came into view, it was running parallel with me, at the same speed, but in the fast lane. We continued in his way for a mile or two, traffic thinned out as we passed over Sunset Boulevard and made the transition from the Hollywood to the Pasadena Freeway, and I was still only vaguely aware of the truck, when with alarming suddenness it veered in my direction. It was here I made the instantaneous connection between this silver El Camino and the silver El Camino I had noticed while driving back from the beach with Diane Droddy. I judged that it was just another one of my chicken-bone LSD flashbacks playing cute tricks, that the sudden terror I was experiencing as the car got dangerously close would soon pass, as had all my previous déjà vu premonitions.

  When the right fender nudged my thigh I knew this was no flashback. I had by reflex swerved to the right, thus lessening the force of the impact, but the pickup hit my left leg hard enough to bounce me in the direction of the concrete retaining wall flashing by fast to my right. My initial horror didn’t leave—eve
n with the twin headers howling I could hear, or feel, my heart racing wildly under the leather jacket—but merged with my fury at the abuse of Ernst into a kind of savage determination to survive.

  There wasn’t much shoulder to work with here, as this section of freeway was one of the earliest built in L. A., before a mounting death toll hinted to planners that wider easements might provide speeding motorists a little more margin for error it piqued me momentarily that no amount of reasoning, no matter how irrefutably documented, will budge Highway Department and earthquake-safety paper-pusher types off their plush, stuffed-leather status quo; it takes the grisly evidence of what they euphemize as “sustained creatural spoilage.” or something like that, to get them to make sensible changes, always too late. I dropped the thought, braked hard, threw all my weight into my left hip, cut the handlebars sharply and, smoking the rear tire, slowed my sideways drift enough so that when I hit the wall, I didn’t flip. Instead, I ricocheted back onto the highway.

  I had slowed to a wobbly twenty or so, and the flow of automobiles was moving considerably faster, a dense clot of traffic bearing down on me from behind. The El Camino was up ahead now, its broad panel of brake lights warning me they were going to wait for me to regain speed, traffic be damned—it’s easier to be cavalier about getting rear-ended when you have the cushion of a truck-bed between you and a cresting wave of Detroit and Osaka steel than it is when you’re bum-to-the-breeze on a motorcycle. If I kept at this speed in this lane, I would be mushed in seconds by the fat primer-red step-van at the vanguard of the onrushing pack, its driver already honking frantically and its tires squealing. If I sped up, I would catch the El Camino, and they would probably dispense with the kicky stunt-driving this time in favor of the less flamboyant but more reliable alternative: Just stick a gun out the window and blow me away.

  Danger on all sides, my leg throbbing from the collision, vocal cords raw from screaming wrathful imprecations, I clicked involuntarily into a kind of auto-pilot trance state, not all that different from the pointed focus Buddhist monks and video arcade trolls achieve on their better days. The sensation wasn’t unfamiliar to me: I had had it once before, the day I almost drowned at Point Zero?23 By instinct I got control of the bike, managed to swing right enough to avoid the first car, which sped by just past my left shoulder, and threaded my way somehow between the wall and the traffic. Time slowed, the world got quieter, a cool wind touched my hands and cheek and ruffled my hair like a lover after the act, a weed determined to grow in a seam of the concrete retaining wall was in bright lavender bloom, and there came over me a strange sensation of invincibility, the kind that chronic gamblers are said to get during a winning streak, when they know as surely as their next heartbeat they are going to jam up that inside straight in jacks-or-better draw or, letting ride a stack of casino black, double down on thirteen and then catch the eight they need to squeak past a dealer showing two paints, while a tight semicircle of fans oohs over each succeeding coup.

  I twisted the throttle grip hard. Because the Beezer is geared almost as low as an off-road bike, the full thrust of its acceleration is instant and almost impossible to control, and the torque lifted the front wheel and nearly threw me over backward. I let off the gas just enough to check the wheelie and outran traffic until I came up directly behind the El Camino, so close that I could read the cryptic message on the customized license plate: JQGENUS. We passed over a dry L. A. River24 still heading north on the Pasadena Freeway toward the San Gabriel Mountains, invisible now in the failing light.

  I had kind of a plan: not one which I had laid out carefully, given the milliseconds I had to work with, but more akin to the instinctual series of moves roundball players can somehow anticipate and then put on as they push the dribble downcourt on a fast break. When the El Camino’s driver hit his brakes hard, throwing the truck into a controlled four-wheel skid—no doubt in hopes I would rear-end them, lose control, fall, and be buried by the thick mass of vehicles behind us—I was ready. I veered right and pulled up alongside the El Camino as we passed under the green sign for the Avenue 50 offramp. Just inches from the passenger’s window, I got a good look at the two this time. The driver was dark, with oiled-back black hair and Mediterranean pigmentation, and he was staring intently ahead, absorbed by the rigors of life-and-death pursuit. The rider, larger and bleached blond, was slipping on a ski mask remarkably like the one our assailant had been wearing at Ernst’s. Here I made my fledgling deduction in my new role as investigator, a logical conclusion that would have knocked Holmes’ sock off: This was the same guy that had stolen Doctor Syntax and wounded my cojones, and he was lifting the same (at least it looked pretty similar) shotgun and pointing it at me through the rolled-down window of the same El Camino that had followed me at least once before. I geared down, lifted the front end off the ground once again, and rabbited away from the pickup.

  I heard the gun go off once.

  Mere survival was no longer my goal. I was too angry with fates who had not only had the bad taste to dump on a sweet guy like Ernst, but who were now sending geeks to kill me artlessly. If there really exists collectively within each culture the body of unconscious drives on which post-Jungian and neo-Reichian psychologists base their occult brands of faith-healing, then my Italianness was getting pricked here. I wanted soddisfazione, soul-purging Black Hand-style revenge that encompasses your basic eye-for-an-eye Mosaic civil justice and ritual retribution by one whooping heathen tribe on another.

  I headed for the Avenue 50 offramp, making sure the El Camino was on my tail while weaving and positioning myself ahead of the driver’s side of the truck, to avoid any direct shots from the masked rider. I sped up gradually, so that by the time we hit the offramp, the Beezer was going pretty much full-out, and the El Camino was gaining. All part of the plan … such as it was.

  I eased off on the throttle, and, just when it looked like the pickup would smash me and my bike to spare parts, giblets ’n’ sprockets, I dumped the Beezer. I hit the pavement smoothly and slid on my side, the bomber jacket absorbing most of the friction from the gravelly asphalt. I rolled onto the shoulder of the offramp, which was covered with a thick mat of low-maintenance succulent ground cover. The iceplant cushioned and slowed me, and I came to a stop on my back, among yellow flowers, with some bees circling and stoically relocating.

  The Beezer, meanwhile, accomplished the sacrifice I had planned for it. When I laid the bike down in front of the speeding El Camino’s right fender (a maneuver I had practiced to a polished smoothness by falling down repeatedly while exploring dirt-and-gravel firebreak roads in the San Gabriel foothills, but which I had never before performed on pavement), the pickup’s driver didn’t have time to override his natural inclination to avoid the obstacle, and so he cut left. But unlike the gently sloping and densely planted right side of the offramp where I chose to land, the left side had just a raised tar-and-gravel curb, a few feet of dirt plateau, and then a steep drop down to the freeway. The truck caught the curb, lost contact with the ground for a moment and landed, atilt on the two left wheels, at the summit of the incline. There it teetered for what must have seemed to the occupants of the truck a nauseating eternity, until it began to roll, at first with dignified restraint and then with jarring, bone-snapping rampancy. It rolled out of my sight, but I heard it hit bottom with a curiously soft sound, like the crunch of a single footfall in hard-packed snow.25

  As much ill as avenged (after all, I’m only half Italian) I got up and tested my legs. They ached, but seemed otherwise functional. I limped my way to the bike and righted it. Same story as my legs, a little bent but still in working order. The front wheel was out of true and wobbled, and the front brakes were shot. The gas tank was flattened on one side and leaking at the stopcock valve. The muffler hung limply, held in place by a rivet, from the right header. No one was around to help or even observe me, since morbid curiosity and humanitarian concern centered at that moment on what sounded like a multiple-car pileup
down below: honking and screeching, dull impact sounds, sirens in the distance. I didn’t much feel like waiting for the Highway Patrol, reports in triplicate, and the probability that I’d get hauled downtown and locked up on suspicion of failing to yield the right-of-way to a truckful of homicidal maniacs, so I numbly kick-started the bike and took off into the city. I glanced into the rearview every few seconds, fully expecting a posse of black-and-whites to be closing in on me, but no one cared. For a change, alienation was a blessing.

  Somewhere around Fairfax—I could tell by the proliferation of signs in Hebrew—the bike started showing signs of giving up the ghost. The muffler was dragging on the ground now, sending up little fans of sparks, and the unmuffled engine noise was starting to draw stares from pedestrians. The fuel leak had grown to a steady trickle, gas was spattering and hissing on the cylinder head, and it was only a matter of time before we would have to call the fire department to put down a two-alarm blaze on my right shin.

  I pulled off the street and made a call from a phone booth in an obscure corner of a Mobil station, and a few minutes later Thrasher arrived in his old VW bus, the rear two-thirds of which he had blowtorched a few years previous into a kind of makeshift truckbed. He looked at me, looked at the bike, and smiled with sympathy and admiration. From the condition of me and The Beezer, it was obvious to him that I had spent an afternoon of unprecedented radicality. Thrasher approved. According to his worldview, the closer to the edge, the better. He heaved my mangled Beezer into the back of the van, and we rode back to my house, wordlessly.