Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  Although the cliché didn’t apply to me in the case of Dana DiSipio, and although I doubted its validity in universal terms, I couldn’t argue with its applicability to certain guys—myself included—who from time to time find themselves swept up in occasionally prolonged but always fugitive lucky streaks. I therefore agreed with him. “Some guys do.” I said.

  More cards and more small talk, and around five-thirty, as a peach-and champagne-hued morning light was breaking over the pittosporum hedge, the winners started suggesting we break it up. Thrasher was the big winner. He was up about three hundred but too burnt out from pot and beer and no sleep to do his usual gleeful gloating. I had played my usual steady, clear-headed game and was up a modest sixty-five bucks, not counting the twenty or so I collected by raking a quarter from each pot in the first hours of the game, to pay for beer for the guys, organic apple juice for myself, frozen pizza, pretzels, tortilla chips and Oreos. The losers were reluctant to leave and grumbled their demand that we deal once more around the table. It’s customary at the end of a poker game to give the losers a chance to recoup their losses; the losers, in a frantic effort to make big money in the limited time remaining, always play wildly and lose more—which is probably why the custom caught on in the first place. So we agreed: one more round.

  On the last hand of the night, I was holding a ten-seven-six, all clubs. The flop came down ace-trey-nine, one club. I discarded the ten, which gave me long-shot possibilities in both directions; I could make a straight or a flush for high, and, if I got real lucky, the last two cards could make me low. Normally, given my fairly disciplined, by-the-odds style at the poker table, I wouldn’t have stayed with such marginal possibilities (even if I made the seven-six low, it could be easily beaten, and the chances of making a straight or flush were poor) but it was the last hand after all, and betting after the flop was tentative, so I let my brat teenager talk me into sticking around: “Come on, man, just one more card, think of the rush if you make that seven-six stand up, their minds will be blown, besides you can always trash the hand after the next card and you’ll still be up sixty bucks, but you could jam up the straight and sweep both ways and end the night up a hundred or more. It will be fun!”

  The next card, fourth street, came up a deuce of clubs, which busted my straight possibilities but kept alive my chances for a flush and a low. At seeing the deuce, Chainsaw said, “All Right!”40 and came out betting the limit. Joe, consistently stony-faced, raised. I called. So did Thrasher. Chainsaw said, “Let’s rock and roll” and reraised. Joe raised him back, and Thrasher and I found ourselves in the middle, reluctantly calling raise after raise because we were in too deep now to do otherwise—the standard rationalization of the poker damned.

  One more card to flop: the River card, maker of fortunes and dasher of dreams. It came up a trey of hearts, which busted my flush but made my seven-six low. Not a hand to be proud of, given the low cards on the table (any one of the players could use those same cards for a much better low), but adequate to call. Chainsaw said, “All Right!” and came out bet the limit, as usual.

  “Fucking River card,” Thrasher grumped. “I’m drawing to the nut and the River pairs me, as fucking usual.” He tossed his hand in amongst the dead cards.

  “We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t any River,” Chainsaw said, a Zennish sentiment if ever there was one. “That’s where the gamble is.”

  “Fuck the River,’ Thrasher said.

  “Let’s see where the gamble is,” Joe said. “I raise.”

  Feeling like an unloved mongrel being led by the pound attendant to the sleep tank, I called reluctantly. The pot was in the neighborhood of three hundred dollars, by far the largest of the game.

  The table was quiet now. Even Chainsaw shut up. Joe turned over a pair of aces which, along with the ace on the table, gave him trip aces, a decent high hand but no threat to my low. I had only Chainsaw to worry about.

  Joe looked confident that he had the high won, and when Chainsaw slowly turned over his cards, a deuce and a trey, I was so mortified at seeing two low cards that I failed for an instant to realize that his cards were paired. He had a full house of treys and deuces, which beat Joe for high, and I had the only low hand, a lock winner. But in that instant of mortification, Chainsaw’s full house didn’t register with me. I was so angry at myself for having played the hand like some pitiful compulsive loser who needs to prove how consistently bad his fortune is by putting himself in the most hopeless situations and then giving God the finger when he loses, that I tossed my winning hand into the discards.

  Immediately realizing my error, I groveled among the dead cards to retrieve my winning hand. The others watched, amused, and Chainsaw dryly quoted our house rule that once any card touches the discards, it’s dead. I knew the rules, but I kept on digging anyway, throwing dead cards in the air until I found my seven and six, which I waved in their faces, shouting maniacally, “See, I did have the lock winner, the biggest pot of the night and I should have dragged half, I dropped a hundred and fifty bucks on that hand, fuck life and everything thereto appertaining …”

  As Chainsaw raked the whole pot, he commented, “Nice hand, Harmon.” and then the kicker: “Some guys have all the luck.”

  My friends filed out, everyone thanking me for being such a generous host. On the brick walkway Chainsaw turned and said, “I’d stay away from sharp objects tonight, if I were you, Harmon. You probably shouldn’t operate any heavy machinery for a while, either.” His laughter faded as I shut the front door.

  Alone with the dark repressed rage that consumes me whenever I subvert my own good gaming sense with an appallingly dumb move—it takes just one intemperate minute to destroy the work of sober hours—I closed the front door weakly and dragged off in the direction of the back house. The dining room looked more like the snack area at the Lakers’ home venue in Inglewood than the elegant, professionally decorated eating area of a well-to-do laundry tycoon’s widow. Table and floor were littered with candy wrappers, pizza rinds, beer bottles and cans, sunflower seed husks, discarded Oreo cookies (the first sign that Thrasher is stoned out of control is when he starts scraping the creme filling out of the middle of the Oreo with his teeth while carelessly tossing away the chocolate cookie parts). I ignored the mess. No sense cleaning up one mess and then making another the next day, and then having to clean it, too. I’d do one major cleanup of all the accumulated messes just before Ma got back.

  It was pointless to think about sleeping. If I go to bed immediately after losing at cards, I fall asleep just fine, but after an hour or two I drift into a kind of febrile hallucinatory state just below consciousness, in which I’m playing the same disastrous hand over and over, always looking at the same lousy cards, enduring the echoing laughter of the winners, and I eventually wake up soaked in sweat and more exhausted than before I went to sleep. After a bad beat at cards I have to wind down slowly, and so this morning I anticipated a little TV—maybe watch an early-morning exercise program to simulate tiring myself out physically—read some Browning criticism to numb the brain, stuff myself with mini-donuts, and ride the hypoglycemic blood sugar curve from peak excitation into exhaustion and sleep.

  I unlocked and opened the door to the studio. Morning was hurling sunlight through the window in sharp javelin-points, and my eyes hurt. I squinted and started toward the window, intending to roll down the rice paper and bamboo blind which I had backed with black plastic sheeting, to maximize the darkness during my sleeping hours. I was in mid-stride, a few steps into the room, when the overpowering smell of natural gas hit me with the same stunning effect as walking face-on into a thick plate-glass window. I stopped, momentarily immobilized, confused more by the incongruity of my living space being filled with deadly fumes than by any toxic effect of the fumes themselves. Shaking myself into sensibility, I backed outside, where I took long gulps of relatively unpolluted air (this is L. A., after all, and you take what you can get by way of fresh air),
hyperventilating the same way I do when I’m paddling out through shorebreak and I get caught inside by a monster set of waves: The harder and faster you force yourself to breathe, the longer you can hold your breath as you roll under the onrushing wall of churning whitewater. I took a last big lungful of air (actually, it was two last big lungfuls that I took, since I’ve had neither lung surgically removed yet), held it and ran back inside, throwing open windows and drapes. When I got to the kitchen, I could hear dearly the source of the gas: a loud hiss coming from the little four-burner range next to the sink.

  Behind the range, among cobwebs and greasy dust clumps, I could make out two shiny open ends of brass tubing which had, until today, been my stove’s gas line. The pipe had obviously not snapped loose on its own, but had been cut neatly, probably with a hacksaw.

  They were trying to kill me again.

  EIGHTEEN

  Every week from ages eleven through nineteen I went to Dr. Spence’s office for my allergy shot. I spent so much of my adolescence there that Shirley, the registered nurse who administered the shots, became the closest thing I’ve ever had to a godparent. Her hair was graying when my allergies were first diagnosed, a homogeneous white by the time I discharged myself from Dr. Spence’s care, and her sage counseling helped me overcome many of my childhood fears, including that of climbing the ropes in junior high gym class. She told me, “Everyone will warn you, ‘Don’t look down,’ but if you worry about not looking down, you’ll look down and then you’ll fall. Don’t listen to them. While you’re going up the rope, think of a cow, and don’t think of anything else.” Fresh out of grammar school, I was already humiliated by a Vitalis-fed acne condition localized at the forehead and by the Bum-Bl-B multi-color striped T-shirts Ma dressed me in; not being able to get up the ropes would have been one disgrace too many. I had seen other boys, fat ones usually, each stalled a few feet off the gray, cotton-batted gymnastics floormat and whopping around like gaffed tuna while the hoots and jeers of the rest of the class set the hangarlike gymnasium to reverberating. I was willing to try anything to avoid that ignominy, even a crackpot suggestion like Shirley’s. As it turned out, picturing the sadly vacant brown eyes of a veteran Holstein did distract me enough to allow me to shinny my way up. At the top I touched the metal saucer with a flamboyant clang and then slid down fast, with an exhilarating sense of relief and a satisfying friction-burn on my hands. Shirley’s lay psychology turned out to work so well that as a grown-up I still meditate on a cow’s face, or Shirley’s, when I’m engaged in any perilous activity, from surfing to motocross to foreplay.

  Dr. Spence, Shirley’s boss, makes a fortune from the thousands of wheezers, snufflers, hawkers, drippers, honkers, and snorters who parade through his office every Thursday—“shot day”—the theory behind the injections being that if you are exposed to the pure protein of an irritant enough times, and in increased concentrations, you will build up an immunity. This theory may work with house dust, cat dander and cheese mold, but unfortunately it doesn’t carry over into other areas of human experience, because if it did, I would get used to having my life threatened by enemies to whom I’ve never even been introduced. Fear of getting murdered seems to work the opposite way. The more times I’m confronted with the pure protein of my own nonexistence, the more worried I get. Right now I was plenty worried.

  Someone had tried to gas me in my own house, and the implications were dreadfully clear: Shadowy beings were assailing me, and the fiasco on the freeway wasn’t a one-shot grand-geste calculated merely to scare me off the trail of Doctor Syntax. Still holding what was left of my breath, and dizzy more from a rising sense of mortal terror than from a lack of oxygen, I went outside, exhaled hard and got my breathing back to normal—or at least to the rapid panting that’s normal for any small mammal being hunted down by a pack of baying, bloodspoor-delirious hounds. I had no idea where the studio’s main gas valve was, but I poked around outside until I found it, in the closetlike enclosure that held the water heater. I got an adjustable wrench from the toolbox in the garage and wrestled with the valve until it finally budged. Once loosened it turned easily, and the gas was off. I left the door and all the windows open so that the studio could air out, and I went back into the main house.

  I reflected. A message was settling out of the chaos like grounds in a cup of joe: I was a worse flop as a detective than I was as a scholar. I had a whole slew of clues, even a prime suspect in Sterne, yet I was no closer to finding my books than I was the day they got stolen, and I was much closer to a grotesque and untimely death. Going it alone on a few leads and blind instinct, I was getting nowhere; or if I was getting somewhere (and I must have blundered onto something, or shadowy beings wouldn’t be assailing me) I had no idea where it was I had gotten. Even though my experience after the theft at Ernst’s had soured me on putting my fate in the hands of blase authorities, and despite my earlier mistreatment at the hands of the L.A.P.D.41 I saw no other alternative. I touch-dialed the 911 emergency number, and related the story of the gas-filled studio to the police dispatcher. She didn’t sound impressed but said a car would be around soon.

  I sat waiting on the quarry-tiled front porch of the big house. The day was already heating up, and the glare of the sun clawed at my eyes. The air was dry. It was ragweed season, which made my postnasal drip worse than usual. I cleared my throat and coughed some yellow-streaked, tapiocoid phlegm into my hand. I rolled it around in my fingers listlessly until it became a pea-sized bolus—a gross and indelicate image, I know, but who among us has not fingered her own snot at least once? I examined this rhinologic artifact as though it might, like a murky ball of quartz crystal, unfold truths about the human condition—perhaps how to cheat disease and decay out of their ineluctable due. It didn’t. I flicked it into the bushes. A black-and-white rolled up in front of the house, and a cop got out of the car.

  He looked the classic cardboard neanderthal bull, narrow eyes under a massive brow ridge, a vulgar, saucefleem complexion, upturned piggy-nose with a big knot of cartilage at the end of it, and airbrake ears. His face, especially the angle of the nose, gave him the appearance of a wise guy. As he mounted the brick steps I imagined what it would be like to carry around a face like that: If your appearance makes people expect you to be an asshole, they treat you like an asshole, and you probably eventually become an asshole. I expected this cop to be an asshole, and today I was too tired, scared and mad to have any sympathy for assholes.

  I stood up. He extended his hand and spoke in a voice so gentle, so incongruous with his repulsive appearance, that for a moment I had the impression that he was a medium through which someone else was speaking, like a ventriloquist’s dummy or one of those trance-channelers you see on cable TV sometimes. “Mr. Nails?” he said pleasantly. “I’m Sergeant Freitag.”

  I gave his hand a quick pump and quipped, “… and all you want is the facts, right?”

  A look of martyred forbearance came over the wise-guy face, and he said, “What can I do for you?”

  I said, “Oh, I get it, ‘To Protect and to Serve.’ How about a pound of protection to go, a little mustard, hold the mayo, on pumpernickel?”

  “You did phone the police …?”

  “No big thing, just a minor annoyance, it irritates me when someone tries to turn my apartment into a gas chamber.”

  “Can we take a look?”

  “Sure, but don’t bother to dust for prints. I’m sure he was wearing gloves again.”

  Sergeant Freitag looked puzzled at this allusion to a former crime of which he could have no knowledge, but he had obviously dealt with hysterical citizens before—even brilliantly sarcastic ones like me. He made an “after-you” gesture with his arm, and I led him around back by way of the hedge path.

  When we reached the studio, I said, “I opened all the windows to air the place out, but believe me, the gas was thick in there when I walked in.” I led him into the kitchen. “Here’s where the line was cut.”

>   “What time did you get home?”

  “I guess about six-thirty this morning. Late poker game. Look, is that really important? Don’t you want to look for footprints, so you can waste our time making plaster casts or something?”

  “It was already light outside when you came in?”

  “Yes … and from that I think we can deduce that the sun had risen. Are you considering the sun as one of our prime suspects?”

  He looked thoughtful and dodged my shots with dispassionate grace, like an aikido master sidestepping an enraged sot. “No, just a hunch. Which light do you turn on when you come in at night?”

  “I hit the wall switch, here, right by the door.”

  “Which light does it turn on?”

  I shrugged and motioned to the art-deco lamp. He crouched and fingered some shards of broken glass in the rug, by the base of the lamp. I hadn’t noticed them before. He peered under the lampshade and said, “Look at this.”

  I looked. The light bulb was broken. I said, “So …?”

  “Whoever broke in wasn’t trying to gas you, Mr. Nails. It’s an old con’s trick. You figure out which lamp your victim will turn on when he comes home at night. You break the bulb in the lamp, exposing the filament. You fill the room with gas. When the victim hits the light switch, boom, the gas in the room goes up, and so does the victim.”

  “Boom.” I parroted torpidly.

  “That last poker hand may have saved your life, Mr. Nails. An hour sooner, before the sun came up, you probably would have turned on the light first thing … which might have been your last thing as well. If there was as much gas as you say in your house, odds are you’d be on your back in the morgue right now.”