Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  “Now you’re getting the showbiz spirit.” said my cousin the ex-ham. “See, dressing up is fun. I think we can find some buck teeth around here somewhere.”

  “We’re not doing a remake of Rocky Horror, Brad. My life is on the line here.”

  “OK, forget the guitar but keep the glasses. They’re a nice touch.”

  “How about my hair?”

  He feathered a hank of my hair through his fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe a little Vitalis, to give you just a hint of the two-bit down-and-out hood.” He squeezed some clear oil onto my hands. “Run this through your hair, and then comb it straight back. That’s it.” As I combed, I imagined the ghosts of my adolescent pimples being stirred to life by the brilliantine. My scalp tingled. Brad looked pleased. He said, “Now, to complete the effect all you have to do is not shave for a couple of days.”

  “Two days nothing. I’m like Nixon. Five hours after shaving I look like a skid-row bum.”

  “What a man. You’re my hero.”

  “I know. It’s a hard standard for you to live up to. Don’t even try.” I inspected myself in the mirror. We had created a physical persona that would doubtless scare little kids and make upright citizens blench with revulsion. While I was understandably disheartened to realize that such a slight amount of pruning and tweaking could reveal a brutish Harmon who must have been lurking just below the surface all along, I was also satisfied that I could walk amongst acquaintances without their recognizing me. I said, “Now I need a personality, a role to play.”

  “Who’s the most repulsive person you know?”

  Tough question: I knew so many repulsive people. I let my mind wander. It passed briefly and ungratefully over my mother, onto Martin Wolf, past Brenny and Chainsaw and my Uncle Frankie in New York, who picks at his roast beef and then eats the fat, leaving the meat on his plate. Each of them had repulsive qualities, I realized, but each had ample portions of what you might call goodness as well. None was repulsive without mitigation. I shared this insight with Brad.

  “Try harder.” he said.

  I did, and I lit all at once on the sublimely repulsive person I had met—or at least been exposed to, like toxic waste—recently. “Deputy Fumaroli.” I said. “He works at the jail. Brains and sensitivity of a cashew.”

  “Good. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re Deputy Fumaroli …”

  “Do we have to do the Stanislavski thing? It’s so embarrassing. It’s like when my therapist tells me to relive my dreams: ‘Be the big black dog and tell Harmon why you want to bite his ass.’”

  “Shut up. You don’t have to do anything. Just close your eyes.”

  “OK.”

  “Are they shut?”

  “Yes?”

  “No peeking.”

  “Peek at this.” I grabbed my crotch and jogged it up and down, an obscene Italian gesture of disrespect I learned from my oft-repulsive Uncle Frankie.

  “Later. Now imagine Fumaroli in your mind.”

  I did. It was unpleasant.

  “Let yourself experience his experience: his past, his family, his anger, his secret little pleasures …”

  I opened my eyes and shuddered, as though waking suddenly from a night terror. “I can’t do it. It’s too horrible.”

  “All right, skip his secret pleasures. Just try to get into his negativity.”

  I cheated. I plugged into my own negativity, the repressed loathing I usually allow to surface only when I’m having trouble dropping off to sleep and I soothe myself by imagining ladder faculty screaming and falling bloodied, like duckpins, before my car. I took that feeling and overlaid it with Fumaroli’s unique conversational style.

  “Suck my dick.” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me, you little jewboy fuck.” I tried to fart like Fumaroli but came up empty. I swallowed some air and belched instead, and then I laughed, a deep goony laugh.

  “How’s that?” I asked, reverting to my own adenoidal timbre.

  “You had me fooled. A little bit more and I would have gone for your throat.”

  “Perfect. That’s how Fumaroli affects everybody. Now all we need is a name for the new me.”

  “How about something to go along with your new personality. Something tough and hard, like Spike.”

  Brenny’s parents had a huge dog named Spike, an ursine Newfie who used to charge down the hallway of their condo in Sherman Oaks and knock the wind out of me. I hated that dog and didn’t want to be reminded of him. I countered, “How about something completely out of character, to confuse them. Something gentle, sensitive, artistic … painterly.” I ran a quick memory scan over old masters I knew and hit on a guy very much like myself, a genius whose own sensitivity undid him in the end.

  “Lippo.” I said.

  “The birthday clown on TV?”

  “Not Chucko. Lippo.”

  “Oh … Limpo.” he said, obviously not making the literary connection.

  “I said an artist, not a lame Marx brother. Lippo, as in Fra. Didn’t you ever read your Browning?”

  He tried covering up his shame at his own ignorance by exaggerating it. “My little sister was a Brownie, but I never read any of her manuals. I did go to her promotion ceremony, though. I think they call it ‘flying up.’ Very moving, even my father cried.”

  “You’re pathetic, not an ounce of culture.”

  “I know, and I just feel sick about it.”

  “Just tell me what you think about Lippo.”

  He tried it out. “Lippo. Lippo. Nope, it doesn’t fit.”

  I complained petulantly, “It’s my disguise, and I want it. I want Lippo.”

  “Sure, Lippo, whatever the artist wants. Just don’t cry or throw your finger paints.”

  “And then a last name to inspire fear. Maybe something Teutonic, to bring to mind vicious goose-stepping shock troops.”

  We sat silently, thinking. You may have noticed this already, but it’s hard to free-associate Prussian names when you have to. Brad was better at it than I was. Every few seconds he’d come up with one, and I’d dismiss it.

  “Biesner.” He strung out the first syllable, so that it sounded like ‘Beeeeeznair.’

  “Nah.” I said, “It reminds me of my motorcycle.”

  “Wussmann.”

  “I don’t want to crack up when I introduce myself.”

  “Rheingold.”

  “It’s a beer.”

  “Schmeling.”

  “A boxer.”

  “Schtupfer.”

  “Nothing dirty.”

  “Ludendorf.”

  “Nice rhythm. Reminds me of a city where they make cough drops for the Panzer divisions. You’re on the right track, but ‘Lippo Ludendorf’ is too … alliterative, it’s too cute. I like the ‘dorf’ part, though. A lot.”

  “How about Urmandorff? The Rams have an offensive tackle named Urmandorff. Real mean sonofabitch, too. He once cut a Pontiac in half with a pair of tin snips.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the battery died and he got frustrated. Steroids have funny side effects sometimes.”

  I tried it on. “Lippo Urmandorff. Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Lippo Urmandorff, and you can suck my dick. I like it. I’ll take it.” As I spoke, a wave of peristalsis moved in my large bowel. A miracle, His will be done. I farted violently, without effort.

  “Whew, I’m impressed.” Brad said. “I think you’re ready.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  You’d have to agree that the Los Angeles Free Journal has sunk sadly in quality—that is, unless you’re a fetishist, narcissist, pedophile, gallophile, voyeur, frotteur, coprophage, compulsive masturbator, or any combination of the above, in which case you no doubt applaud the editorial direction it’s taken.

  The newspaper was conceived in ’66 as an asexual organ of the political left, a scholarly journal with uncompromising, well-researched a
ttacks on Vietnam escalation, urban police brutality, media brainwashing. In its first incarnation, the,Free Journal admitted no advertising, a noble experiment, which soon went the way of most noble experiments, like the rear-engine Corvair and Social Security: It was a flop.

  The paper was sold in less than a year. The new management’s concerns were more practical, if less politically pure, than the founders’. They adopted a less strident rhetorical tone, ran a few feature articles on topics of countercultural interest, mainly psychedelics and Carnaby Street fashion, and they decided to run ads—nothing tastelessly mercenary, mostly soft-sell blurbs for environmental groups, organic diners, psychic aura readings, herbal laxatives. They also decided to experiment with a classified section at the end of the paper.

  In the beginning the Personals listings were tame and sweet:

  CANDY. Your roommates and best friends in the Dharma wish you a groovy Birthday and Love.

  Et cetera. But not long thereafter the content and tone of the Classies changed. Throw the sexual revolution and the Hollywood flair for the garish into the Cuisinart, and you get a pretty reeky puree. By the late sixties the Freege’s Personals section had gained coast-to-coast notoriety as an open forum for devotees of off-center sex, with come-ons like,

  WHITE male, presently incarcerated and getting out in a week. Happy, and clean. I like sunsets, window-shopping and electrode pain. Seeking guys to boldly go where a few Goodmen have gone before, no holes bard, and bi-gals into creative restraints and chocolate waterfalls. No weirdos need apply, please. Weight not important. Must provide references.

  It was in this atmosphere of murky erotic promise that I began working for the Freege. As the paper’s circulation had grown, the Freege had expanded into merchandising, as any shamelessly capitalistic venture will do. They had opened two bookstores, a main branch in Hollywood and a spinoff in Westwood Village. There I began my brief literary career, not as a writer—the demands of writing gave me reflux esophagitis even then—but as a stock clerk and cashier. I sought the inglorious position and accepted it reluctantly, only because Ma insisted. She said an eighteen-year-old should develop a sense of responsibility. Even though I reminded her that I took out the trash every Sunday evening, she said it wasn’t enough. “You’re spoiled.” she said.

  I argued, and correctly I thought, “I wouldn’t be spoiled if you hadn’t spoiled me.”

  “It just so happens I’m reading a book.” my mother announced, “and Doctor M. Dudley June, M.D., says you are what you choose to make yourself.”

  “Psychology is like fireworks, Ma. It should only be handled by trained professionals. Mothers shouldn’t be allowed to read those kinds of books.”

  “Dr. M. Dudley June says you could be a mensch if you wanted to.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t put it quite that way.” I said. “Besides, his trip is just classic European existentialism chewed up and then regurgitated in a form of psychobabble that’s palatable for the supermarket set. Reader’s Digest meets Sartre and Camus.”

  “Burns and Allen, it doesn’t make one iota of difference to me.” Slow death by nagging. With one dated phrase my mother will plant me like a dahlia bulb some day. My right eyelid started fibrillating, so that it looked to me as though a monstrous fly was hovering, its wings beating frantically, in front of my face. I held the insubordinate eyelid down tightly with two fingers and at the same time tried desperately to rally. “My point is that …”

  “No point. My son comes home every day from school, he eats three bowls of Sugar Pops, not a word to his mother. Then he says, ‘I’m going in my room to study,’ and sleeps or who knows what else until I call him for dinner.”

  “Doesn’t he … don’t I set the table every night?”

  “I have a saint for a son, he sets the table. Look at your cousin Bradford, he’ll make something of himself in the community one day, he’s following in his father’s shoes, going into the office after school and learning the business.”

  “Ma, you hate insurance work. You said Uncle Ed was turning Braddy into an undercover operative for the Gerald Ford Youth Bund, or something like that.”

  “At least Bradford’s not giving his mother heartache.”

  “Aunt Doreen’s dead.”

  “So kill me, too.”

  We replayed this conversation, with minor variations, for weeks. In that time the nervous tic developed into a painful neuritis toward the rear of my right eye socket, where the optic nerve tunnels its way toward the brain. This painful malady gave me double vision and convinced me I was coming down with multiple sclerosis. It was either accept part-time employment or resign myself to becoming the invalid Ma always predicted I’d become.

  Ma beamed when she heard I was going to be working around books, as though she imagined the collective brilliance of the literary masters would somehow reach me through the books’ jackets while I was pushing my dustmop across the linoleum. What Ma didn’t know was that the Freege in Westwood was a “bookstore” only by the loosest definition of the word. It did have a few books, mostly arcana describing conversations between houseplants and their masters, compendia of actual after-death experiences by allegedly normal citizens, tales of travel to extraterrestrial holiday spots. The bulk of the merchandise, though, was drug-oriented. Hung high on the walls of the store were hundreds of psychedelic posters for sale, each with a letter and a number stapled to the bottom, so that we salespeople could find the corresponding rolled-up and cardboard-tubed poster under the display counter. My Escher fish print, a relatively unpopular item, was E-7, and I paid nothing for it: the usual employee’s discount if you don’t tell the boss you’re taking it home. The biggest sellers, the classic Day-Glo yellow “War Is Not Healthy …” flower litho and the blacklight Hendrix close-up with paisley headband, were W-1 and H-3 respectively.

  The cash register, which I operated when I wasn’t reshelving books or taking inventory or sweeping, sat atop the counter that ran half the length of the store. The glass-topped wooden case contained the fruit of inventors’ feverish attempts to cash in on the unprecedented voguishness of drugs. It held water pipes, some of research-lab austerity and others of multicolored Plexiglas fancy, with tubes twisted into graceful, evocative shapes and bowls like rare fungi. There were cigarette rolling papers in a thousand exotic flavors, from banana to carob, cigarette rolling devices machined and assembled with a precision that would rival the finest Swiss watches. There were coke spoons made of silver and gold, coke grinders that resembled pepper mills, brass coke scales for precisely weighing portions for sale, coke vials of sensuous hand-rubbed teak. All this stuff might eventually have swayed me in the direction of heavyweight doperhood, but luckily for my mucus membranes and my immune system, the Freege exploded one morning.

  I came to work at 10 A.M. as usual, only to find what was once a storefront—a metal and glass facade which had been wholly unremarkable in its intactness—being boarded up. A few gawkers stood around pointing and making jokes, while several long-haired workers, some on the sidewalk and some balancing on low scaffolds, were nailing up lengths of grayed, paint-stained pine planking and redwood lath. I looked around, wondering if I hadn’t missed a turn and happened onto the wrong street. I hadn’t. It was the same neighborhood, with the same businesses, all seemingly unaffected by the sudden demise of one of their number. Facing the Freege across Galen Avenue, the Westwood Commerce Bank stood as it had since the early fifties in staunch immovability, with the low center of gravity and expansive squatness that money sometimes effectuates in buildings as well as people; to the north was the ParkRite lot, its kiosk as yet unopened for the day, the heavy, painted chain still across its entrance; and just to the south, on the corner of Galen and Braxley, there still stood the Wanton Weiner,46 a quick-serve eatery where all the employees of the Freege used to get their CornDogs and foamy Orange Frappers for lunch. Thus assured I was in the right place, I turned my attention to the Freege. Through gaps between the boar
ds that had been put up at eye level, I could make out piles of charred paperbacks, incinerated furnishings, splintered glass. A blackened poster of Albert Einstein lay beside the glass paraphernalia case, which had miraculously survived the blast, its only visible injury being one long hairline crack that ran its entire width. Taking in the violently deconstructed gestalt, I reasoned with astonishing clarity that there would be no reshelving for Harmon Nails ever again, nor pushing of brooms, nor petty pilfering of merch. I walked slowly toward the Wanton Weiner and an unplanned CornDog brunch. Above, the sky was a very pale blue. The morning breeze was very cool and felt very good.

  Nobody ever found out who trashed the bookstore, or why, but the explosion, besides liberating me from the rigors of regular employment, also jarred loose any vestige of respectability the Freege might have had. Shortly after the bombing, the Free Journal abandoned all pretense of social involvement and devoted itself exclusively to hardcore sex. The paper’s only saving grace had been a certain self-deprecatory sense of humor about itself; now it was scowlingly pornographic, unreservedly abusive, cruelly demeaning, and as a result more financially successful than it ever had been. Advertising generated so much revenue that management stopped bothering to sell it for a quarter. Today you can pick up the Freege for free on any busy corner in the city, next to other sleazy rags like Singles at Play and the Wall Street Journal.

  I found Sternes notice in the Freege on page five, just below an ad for ribbed condoms. It was an eye-catcher. Two columns wide and bordered in black, it screamed in blocky boldface,

  SEX! RELIGION! DRUGS!

  You’ve Tried Them All

  And You’re Still Unsatisfied!

  The