Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  My wild laughter was interrupted by the sound of a car driving up and stopping out front, the slamming of one car door, then another, voices approaching. Lissa said, “My father’s home.”

  We jumped like teenagers caught petting, brushed dust off each other’s backs, smoothed out wrinkles. Just as the front door opened, Lissa gave me some words of advice: “Get a copy of Syntax from the library and read it, Harmon. It’s the key to getting at Sterne.”

  PART THREE

  THE DOUBLE

  DOUBLE LINE

  SIXTEEN

  Toward the front of our family album are pasted a few antiquated metallic-gray snapshots of Ma as a college-age camper, the wild-haired urban intellectual at play in knee-length clamdiggers and workshirt. But in spite of this incontrovertible photographic proof, I have always found it impossible to imagine Ma sleeping on a cot in a wood-slatted open-air dorm, or cannonballing into a frigid, snowmelt-fed lake, or taking the point on a nature walk through bunchy, fulsome thickets that could conceal biting snakes or weasels. Yet she did it. Pictures don’t lie, especially when there’s no percentage in it.

  On this morning, I was having more trouble than usual imagining Ma roughing it, as I helped her get ready for her pilgrimage to Tucson. Every year Ma visits Ruth Wrightson, nee Velcoff, her former bunkie and best friend at Civitauqua, a progressive, Indian-theme Jewish summer camp at which they worked as counselors several successive summers before the war. I never attended one of their reunions, but I imagine they spend most of their two weeks lying around the pool and reminiscing about the good old thirties: boyfriends, socialist causes, bobbed hair.

  Today my “helping” her involved listening to Ma fret while she cleaned out whole closets with the sweep of an arm: winter dresses, woolen scarves, tweedy wraps, and all for Tucson—in summer yet, when locals welcome 110 in the shade as a break in the heat, a cold snap. Ma was only going to be in the desert ten days, but she had to cover every meteorological contingency that could possibly arise, including blizzards. “With the weather you never know.” she said. “It can change any minute.”

  “Right, Ma. You don’t want to be caught without your coat when the next ice age sweeps down over Tucson.”

  “Make jokes. Better to be prepared than catch pneumonia.”30

  Ma was on her second valpack, with two or three more to go. The thick redolence of Chanel and mothcakes from her closet was overwhelming. I couldn’t take any more. Gagging, I excused myself, promised her I’d get back in plenty of time to drive her to the airport by 5 P.M., and betook me to the lighthouse jetty to be alone with Doctor Syntax.

  The lighthouse jetty is the southernmost, and the longest, in a series of nine scrap-granite promontories built by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the sand on Santa Monica beaches from being carried away by the powerful north-south current and deposited in the boat channel at Marina Del Rey. Until a few years ago the lighthouse jetty had a—lighthouse. Built in the style of New England lighthouses, stocky at the base, and tapering gradually to a halo of massive glass blocks, it had a basso foghorn blast so forlornly piercing it would wake me before sunrise, through two overstuffed down pillows clutched to my ears, even though we lived at least five miles away. I’m a light sleeper, no question, but that’s still one loud foghorn, baby.

  Surfers used to use the lighthouse as a landmark by which to line up the perfect spot for taking off on waves. But around the time my father died, someone decided to tear down the lighthouse and replace it with a snack bar so that bathers wouldn’t have to walk so far for their Sno-cones. All that remains of the original structure is the block foundation on which the lighthouse perched, converted now to a storage facility for lifeguard gear: four-wheel-drive sand cruisers, surfboards, orange bubble markers on nylon ropes. Of course the jetty remains, too, and when the tide is out you can rock-hop to the end of the spit, a good hundred yards from the surf line, sit hidden among the craggy boulders mottled gray-white and blued with mussels below the surf line, hung with clinging kelp and seagrass. You are cooled by the afternoon on-shores carrying a fine salty mist from waves spending themselves on rock. You study thumb-sized fiddler crabs clinging hard under the onset of each tidal surge, then moving on about their crabby business. And if you look out through spray-haze, across the water, to the scarcely perceptible arc of the horizon, you frame a vastness that can provide answers to profound and unanswerable questions—such as how Combe’s poetry could be considered “sacred” or anything more than emetic. I hunkered down at the end of the jetty, my backpack burdened with turn-of-the-century reprints of the three Syntax books. I had checked out the volumes from the university library, which held a set of originals locked in the Special Collections section but never let the old hidebound volumes out of their glass casement—one more confirmation that my stolen heirloom must be of considerable value.

  Lissa had hinted that certain holy secrets might be couched within the text of the Doctor Syntax series. While this seemed no more likely than that the prophet Elijah was going to visit the lighthouse jetty today with a channeled tri-fin thruster under his arm, I had nothing to lose by following Lissa’s urgently delivered counsel. Besides, I had everything to gain by staying away from home while Ma packed. I therefore started reading The English Dance of Life, the volume I had skimmed earlier and dismissed as artless tripe.

  A second, closer reading did give me new insight. The writing was not artless tripe. It was artless, morally self-righteous, and occasionally anti-Semitic tripe, and the other two volumes came off no better. The rhymes were facile and arbitrary, the meter arthritic. It was obvious that Combe had written the lines to fit the rhymes, instead of the other way around, which, as you know if you’ve ever read or written poetry, is dangerous practice.31 The result of Combe’s relentless devotion to couplets was nothing less than catastrophic: The syntax of Syntax is often so painfully inverted that it really does cry out for a doctor, with a hypo full of Demerol to put the lines out of their misery. Every poet, even the best of us, can be forgiven a few shoddy or cloddy phrasings,32 but with the Syntax books you can close your eyes, flip to any page and point your finger randomly at any line for a verse disaster, thus: A rising mound points out her grave, / The cropping sheep its verdure shave.

  As for Combe’s spiritual message, it was nothing more than a rehash of the usual Anglican preoccupation with humility, chastity and other forms of extreme self-abasement: self-consciously moral, but nothing you could call inspired or inventive. The most ingenious part, and the only one I liked, was where rats stole Doctor Syntax’s wig and ripped it to shreds, and Syntax was “All decomposed awhile he strutted, I To see his peruke thus begutted.33 But when I got to the part in the third volume about Jacob Levi, the Money Lender, a “keen, cautious Israelite”34 who takes advantage of poor, honest, hardworking gentiles in his “usurious dealing.” I realized that Sterne and I must have such divergent definitions of “sacred” that it was pointless to look any further for clues. I’d have to get more information from Lissa when next we had a chance to be alone. I read a while longer, waiting for the tide to come up a little. I got cooled by spray, tasted salt, watched crabs, checked the horizon one more time for answers and got none. I went back to the car and grabbed my board.

  The waves were small, two to three foot and a little blown-out, but they were sucking out nicely over the sandbar created by the jetty’s interposition in the southward flow of sand, creating tight little barrels with enough juice for me and a couple other locals to tuck into if we took off right by the rocks. I got tubed, paddled until my arms became rubbery35 and until there wasn’t an erg of the previous days’ confusion, pain, frustration, fear, sexual tension left in my body. For the first time in what seemed months, I forgot about rare books, traumatized soft tissue, wrecked bikes, true love, mystery.

  The tide kept coming up and the waves eventually got too mushy to ride. I rode the whitewater of one last wave onto the beach, climbed the dirt embankment to the park
ing lot, unlocked the car and laid my board wax-side down across the back trunk ledge and the front passenger’s seat. I got in the driver’s side and peeled off my wetsuit. You’re subject to a “lewd conduct” citation and a stiff fine if they catch you on the beach or in your car with your pants down, so you get skilled at doing the quick change in the front seat. The brief, illegal moments of nudity, as you arch your back and shove your hips forward to pull down soggy boxer shorts, usually go unseen unless one of your buddies happens to be standing by the car and yells “choner alert!” gesturing hysterically for all passers-by to check you out. This day I was alone, and so without embarrassing incident I pulled on dry boxers, a pair of Hawaiian-print walking shorts and my favorite T-shirt: it’s gray with Grateful Dead in snaky letters on the back, and over my ribcage a dancing, top-hatted, pipe-smoking skeleton holding up a hand of cards in his bony fingers and grinning, as though to suggest he had just drawn out on the world in a game of California Lowball, no limit. I think it looks rad on me.

  I made it home in plenty of time to load Ma’s luggage into the trunk of her Volvo and cruise to LAX, where, as the skycap loaded her luggage on a metal handcart, Ma hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks and gave me this parting advice: “Harmon, you’re a mature adult. I trust you and I have no doubts in my mind you’ll behave like a responsible young man while I’m gone. Just be sure you check the stove every time you leave the house in case you should leave a burner on and take off your motorcycle boots before you walk in the house, keep the kitchen counters spotless, remember to separate the whites from the coloreds and turn off the faucet behind the washing machine after every wash, lock the door behind you whenever you leave, I’ve left salad fixings in the crisper so you won’t forget to eat your leafy greens, take your MegaMix36 and get some roughage every day for your stool, don’t open the door to strangers and work hard on your doctoral (she pronounced it doctoral, heavy on the “o.” which always sounded to me like a species of mucus-solvent allergy medication) thesis, I haven’t seen you working on your schoolwork37 much lately, don’t forget you’ve got a deadline, I’ve left Ruth’s number for you by the phone and you know the emergency numbers, my will is in the safe deposit, I’ll call tonight to let you know I got there safe.”

  I let her words wash over me like a Novocaine shower; accustomed though I am to my mother’s neurotic soliloquies, they never fail to have a numbing effect on my vitals. Still, her heart has always been in the right place, her only abuse that of doting excessively, and I couldn’t fault her that impulse since I was currently guilty of it, too, with Lissa. I gave my mother a real hug and kissed her cheek. “Have a great time, Ma.” I said. “I promise I won’t burn down the house.”

  “That’s something.” she said. She kissed me again and beetled down the concourse despite being a good half hour early.

  With the elation I used to experience as a teenager when the folks would go on vacation, leaving me alone for a week of all-night poker games, frozen pizza, little imported Schimmelpennick cigars and Cinzano highballs in front of Johnny Carson, I rolled down the windows of the Volvo, slipped on my shades even though the sun was already down, and ran the needle of the AM-FM up to K-Jizz at the top of the dial. Usually they play decent acoustic stuff, lots of bebop and cool classics—Bird, Monk, Miles, Trane before he got too weird. But every once in a while they slip in some overproduced pop-fusion, I suppose because corporate marketing execs can’t help pandering to the malignant multidenominational cult that is mass taste. The tune currently being aired was one of these, a turdlet of pre-digested piano-bar schmaltz that all the radio stations were playing. The song’s hook, which went, “We’re lost … in a masqueraaaaade.” along with some other instantly forget—table lyrics, burrowed deep into the subconscious, where like some nocturnal arachnoid it took up residence, spinning out infinite loops of fatuous chorusing. Undaunted by the unfortunate selection that Chance had punched up from the empyreal jukebox, I cranked the tune real loud anyway and, drowning out the lead singer’s sappy Vegas lounge-act phrasings, soulfully sang my own liberation in a universe of infinite possibility and a house vacated by my mother.

  “We’re lost .… in a masqueraaaaade.” I sang over and over, as dusk turned the sky redder and redder.

  SEVENTEEN

  While the brat teenager that slouches and revs inside my breast still loves the Euro-groovy image conjured by Schimmelpennick cigars and dark Italian vermouth, the rest of me—the Real Harmon, if you will—must be maturing, because smoke and alcohol both nauseate me in a way neither did before I turned twenty-four. This seems a shade young for the metabolic change-of-life, but when the first symptoms of your mortality drop by like distant relatives with overstuffed suitcases and plans for a protracted visit, you can resent their intrusion bitterly or accept them with humility as I do. Entropy always has the house advantage anyway and will grind you down in the end, so why fight it, is my motto. Besides: Humility, which usually comes cello-wrapped with the wisdom of age, is a much more useful quality learned young, when its application can save you from bragging in bars and having stool frames bent over your skull.

  At least gambling still agrees with me. So when I got home after leaving Ma at the airport, I went directly to the front house, made a dozen calls and rounded up enough players for a medium-stakes game. These days we played Pineapple, a high-low variant of Texas Hold-’em, especially nerve-shattering because you need an eight or lower to qualify for taking half the pot with a low hand, and if nothing but high cards come up on the flop—which happens frequently—your low cards are rendered worthless. You can pay plenty to see those last cards turn, and you often do.

  Playing hand after hand of Pineapple, you lose all sense of time as you fall into a rhythm of dealing, betting, splitting up pots, scarfing munchies, shuffling up the spare deck, kibitzing. As the game got under way, table talk was sparse and superficial, the way guys like it. We played a few hands and heard from Joe Lineholt, a local marriage counselor and hypnotist, and a sensible man; the less generous in our circle call him deadly boring. Last time I was sunk deep in the self-loathing that is the dominion of all A.B.D.38 grad students, Thrasher consoled me, “Don’t feel so bad, Harmon. Just think, you could have been born Joe Lineholt.” and I did feel somewhat cheered. Tonight Joe spoke in glowing praise of his old Honda Civic’s engine, and everyone yawned and agreed with Joe that a hundred thousand miles without so much as a valve job is a miracle, right up there with virgin birth and pasteurized cheese spread.

  A few more rounds, and Chainsaw Chuck Selvy asked me about college girls, as he always does. Chainsaw is a tree surgeon’s assistant, a city kid who has assumed the persona of the outdoorsman and plays it to the hilt—untrimmed beard, plaid shirt, cracked and callused palms. Sometimes I imagine he spends hours working on his hands to achieve that weatherbeaten look, making tiny lacerations with an X-acto knife, painting in the dark ridges with liquid eyeliner, then tinting the whole hand with brown shoe polish. A practicing Zen Buddhist for enough years to call it something more than a passing phase, Chainsaw is devoted to his meditation. But he’s also intensely competitive, an inveterate gambling addict, and the dirtiest backgammon player I’ve ever met. He never cheats, but his cries of “Kill, kill!” while he rolls the dice, or “Geek, geek!” while I’m trying to come in off the bar, always throw me into a pre-ulcerous dither, so that I calculate odds inaccurately and lose big. I rarely play with him anymore, because I don’t take losing well, and I can’t afford any more citations for speeding or reckless driving, which is what I do when I’m mad. Chainsaw brings this same competitiveness to his spirituality, so that Zen in his hands takes on a militancy that I’m sure contradicts the pure intention of the religion.

  But as overzealous as he is, Chainsaw is sexually repressed to an even greater degree, which is why he always asks me about girls. He harbors this soft-porn stereotype of college teachers as having unlimited erotic access to legions of willing coeds, an attitude I find so cens
urable that sometimes I can’t resist unsettling him with preposterous yarns about campus perversion. Tonight I told him about Dana DiSipio, lithe, brown, and nineteen: “.… she shows up at my office after hours with a rough draft of her persuasive essay on improving dorm food. She’s wearing a light, low-cut cotton T-shirt with little red and pink hearts all over it, no bra, and when she bends over to examine her thesis statement with me, she puts one hand on my right thigh, right here .…” I put my hand on Chainsaw’s leg, three inches above the knee.

  Chainsaw’s cheeks turned a homophobic pink, and he slapped my hand away. “Yeah, so …?” he said with hoarse impatience.

  “.… so then.” I continued, taking my time, “she showed her dusky breasts, swaying ever so gently from the momentum of leaning forward, an unmistakable invitation to sex …”

  Actually, the story is true up to this point. Dana DiSipio did in fact come to my office, close the door and dangle herself in front of me. But my overriding sense of propriety, my distaste for abuses of power in any form, and my staunch professionalism—not to mention my fear of being drummed out of the university on charges of sexual harassmenet39—caused me to roll my chair out of eyeshot of her swelling bosom and out of reach of her lovely long fingers … for which missed opportunity I still kick myself sometimes when I think back on it.

  For Chainsaw I invented a more primally satisfying conclusion to the story, one in which Dana lifted the T-shirt slowly over her head and stretched herself out like a cat waiting to be scratched, which tightened her breasts against her ribcage and made her nipples harden and protrude, an unsubtle gesture that she followed directly by lifting her little pleated skirt and simultaneously bending over my desk while resting one of her forearms, fragrant and glistening with coconut tanning oil, on my open gradebook, and so on. In response to my ripe invention Chainsaw’s eyes got big, and this time his face turned the bright red of Dana DiSipio’s fictive panties. He blithered, “Shit, some guys have all the luck.”