Doctor Syntax

by Michael Petracca

  COMBIST LEAGUE

  Has the Answers!

  It gave a date, an address on Westwood Boulevard, and a time, 8 P.M.

  To prepare myself for the meeting I dressed myself in the Lippa costume that Brad and I had chosen carefully: a shiny gray sharkskin suit as wrinkled as a well-used hanky and a size too small, and a brown Perma-Prest polyester shirt whose gullwing collar turned up and over the coat’s lapels, its points almost reaching to the coat’s shoulders. I unbuttoned the shirt to the solar plexus, revealing a particularly noxious piece of Salvation Army costume jewelry that hung from a chromium-plated chain and winked suggestively from within deep bramble-patch tufts of my own Mediterranean chest hair. Below the pants’ high-water cuffs was a pair of vibrant saffron acrylic socks which, having lost their elasticity, sagged down and bagged out of a pair of black navy-surplus oxfords, scuffed and stained so that it looked as though I had missed the toilet badly while taking a leak—suggesting, Brad and I hoped that scar tissue from some horrible wasting venereal infection had all but sealed over Lippa’s penile meatus, causing urine to shoot wildly in no predictable direction. On my shoulder I carried a beat-up canvas ammo-holder overflowing with dirty clothes, as if I had seen neither home nor laundromat in months.

  I shambled onto the 83B Wilshire bus and sat down with my back to the window. The grayish plastic upholstery was covered in graffiti. Next to my left thigh the seat proclaimed Manny’s love for Gina in black indelible marking pen. By my right thigh Manny suggested by what means I might sodomize myself.

  I was nervous about my confrontation with Sterne. Undigested Raspberry Pop-Tarts, the remains of my hasty dinner a few hours eariler, were working their way past my hiatal hernia and back into my throat, which felt raw, acidic. I re-swallowed the Pop-Tarts and poached out my belly, hoping to keep the food down. The Pop-Tarts started their burning climb anew.

  A heavyset woman in a long blue cloth coat, support hose and heavy black shoes got on the bus and sat down next to me, smothering Manny and his message of love. The woman’s perfume was overwhelming, like sitting inside Ma’s clothes closet with the door closed. I slid open the window behind my head. Grimy air blew in. I got a little souvenir of Los Angeles in my eye. I squeezed my eyelids tightly and tried in vain to recall precisely why I was on my way to infiltrate the lair of a dangerous paranoid psychopath. Something to do with a book, a girl, snipers in Vietnam …

  To capitalize on my dark mood I practiced my Lippo Urmandorff act. I opened up my copy of the Freege. A banner headline across the top of the paper screamed, “WHERE TO FIND IT IN HOLLYWOOD.” and below the headline was a sepia-toned gravure of a hooker on her hands and knees, her tongue out to the camera and an opaque rectangle of glossy black printer’s ink modestly obscuring the ends of her dangling tits. I rustled the paper loudly and grunted as I turned pages. The woman in the blue cloth coat got up from her seat next to me and moved across the aisle of the bus, to a seat facing me.

  Inspired by her reaction, I began moving my hand back and forth rhythmically behind the screen of the open newspaper while making suffering animal sounds to the beat. In reality I had my hand in my pocket and was rubbing my Benzedrex nasal inhaler on my thigh, but it created the illusion that I was stimulating myself. The woman in the blue cloth coat got up and said something indignant but inaudible over the diesel whine, the crashing gearbox and the jarring fulminations of traffic. She moved once again, this time to the back of the bus.

  I watched her recede down the aisle of the bus, bobbing and lurching on her thick black heels. I felt vulgar, seamy, a perfect cad. The feeling cheered me somewhat. The disguise was working.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Westwood Boulevard near its intersection with Wilshire is bounded by some of the city’s most expensive commercial real estate, on which stands a double row of skyscrapers, obelisks of glinting stainless steel and obsidian-dark or Mylar-reflective glass built to bend like palm trees in a storm when the next quake hits, as geologists predict it surely will, and disastrously. If you get off the 83B bus at Westwood and walk a couple of blocks south on Westwood, the character of the community changes dramatically. You get a glimpse of the business district before the high-rise boom, when hopeful entrepreneurs, many of them Depression refugees from the midwest or immigrants not long off the boat or under the barbed wire, tested the tepid waters of the promised land with small capital ventures. The ethnic makeup has changed, but the multinational flavor of the businesses remains. Today on Westwood near Pico you will find Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, Pakistani import bazaars, al fresco sushi bars, falafel and taco and burrito stands, chili-burger joints, and a kosher deli or two interspersed among old, multifamily apartment houses, all waiting to be leveled once the commercial reconstruction wildfire jumps Wilshire.

  The address on Sterne’s ad in the Freege led me to a wooden walk-up that seemed more architecturally appropriate for a residential block of turn-of-the-century San Francisco than for mid-seventies L. A. Here, even in this older and more heterogeneous part of Westwood, the structure looked strange, baroque, occult even, from the ornately carved railings flanking the front steps to the peaked dormers which looked out over city traffic three stories below. The exterior walls were shingled and layered over with a fresh coat of flat white gesso, while the rococo detailing of window trim, door frame, banister posts, rain gutters, and roof spires was painted a cold steel blue. A company of crows massed on the steep slated roof, pacing lethargically and watching the seekers of a better way mount the steps and enter.

  The front door was open. I walked into the anteroom. People were milling around, talking in hushed tones, some of them taking their places at a ponderous oaky table, the kind that knights with names like Hrothgar and Hwaetflath used to sit at and swill mead and eat sheep’s brains from the skull, with their fingers. There was no other furniture in the room, just the long wooden table, high-backed wooden chairs, hardwood floor and a black wrought-iron chandelier suspended over the table. I pulled out a chair and sat honing the finer points of the Urmandorff persona, picking my teeth with little, sharply folded pieces of Freege which I flicked onto the floor when they got soggy. No one seemed interested in seeking out Lippa Urmandorff to engage in lively religious discourse. The seats around me remained empty. Beyond the lecture hall, past a stairway to the upper stories and through a double doorway, I could see a sitting room with some antique furniture and a stone hearth.

  In my Lippo costume I had expected to find myself inconspicuous among a rough assemblage of debased Freege devotees, freaks dressed in baggy olive drabs, puffy-eyed balding men in garish polyester jumpsuits. Instead, aside from me and a thin bearded guy in ripped jeans, a dirty gray hooded sweatshirt and black high-top sneakers, the congregation that filled the hall looked abnormally sober and clean-cut. They spoke to each other confidentially, and I could only make out snatches of conversation: “… yes, but Unitarianism allows for a greater diversity of …”; “… after I told him my mantra, my meditation no longer had the same …”; “… as a tax shelter, convertible debentures aren’t out of the ballpark with …” Sterne must have advertised in the straight papers as well as in the Freege, I figured.

  A couple sat down next to me. They were wearing slim, tasteful gold wedding bands. The groom had short blond hair neatly trimmed and brushed back, clear blue eyes, a manly underbite, and an elongated dimple by his mouth, which gave his face the perpetual hint of a self-satisfied smile. He was wearing a summer suit of a correct linen fabric. His bride looked equally Mormonic, with straight, shoulder-length hair even blonder than hubby’s and a simple blue cotton shift that came to mid-calf. They sat with their hands folded on the table and waited, both half-smiling without a hint of impatience. Their composure had all the vacuity of cows grazing, and it irritated me. I started rapping my fingernails on the table, to the rhythm of the awful pop number I had heard at Ernst’s and a thousand times since, on car radios passing, in news program lead-ins, in elevators, at the su
permarket,

  Taprap rap rap tap rap

  Taprap rap rap tap raaaaap.

  My drumming was just starting to make the groom a little nervous—his jaw muscles under the great trench of a dimple were starting to pulse to the Euro beat—when our host came down the stairs, followed by a huge man, no doubt his bodyguard. Instantaneously I recognized the bodyguard and made a solid association: This massive, pink-faced lumbering devotee was the same bleached-blond thug who had tried to shoot me from the speeding El Camino, the very Robert Sweeney, or Sid Dickey, or Bobby Sweet who had stood by while his partner near-violated Lissa and assaulted me. I was definitely on the right track. The realization made me feel light-headed, dizzy, as though I had experienced a spontaneous onset of infundibulitis, which rendered my senses of balance temporarily inoperative.

  I regained my equilibrium by first thinking of a cow—it works every time, I guarantee you—and then focusing my attention on Laurence Sterne. Until now I had imagined Sterne to be tall, hawkish, predatory, but as with so many of our great psychopaths throughout history, he was physically less than imposing. Pretty Boy Floyd had been on the butt-ugly side of plain, Billy the Kid looked like my Aunt Doreen before the tuck job, and the heavy-lidded Son of Sid serial murderer (who in newspaper photos seemed perpetually to be grinning like Henny Youngman at some private one-liner) could be mistaken for my wacky cousin Martin Wolf, son of Sadie. Likewise, Sterne turned out to be little and doughy, with thick, wavy black hair combed straight back, a sallow, jowly face. He was wearing a black suit, portly extra-short, and glasses with black plastic rims just like the ones Brad had given me to wear as part of my disguise, only Sterne’s were tinted slightly. As Sterne reached the landing, I had the feeling I had seen him somewhere before. I tried to place him, but I could get no further than Kissinger: He looked like Dr. K. on his way to a costume party dressed as a fifties Beat poet. I puzzled. Was there something more corporeal to this wraith of a memory, or was it just another meaningless hallucinogenic flashback, triggered by my having recognized Sweeney, or Dickey, or Sweet? More likely the latter.

  Sterne walked toward the seated assembly the way a tennis ball rolls when it’s wet on one side, a lurching, tipsy gait which pitched his roundness awkwardly onto one stubby leg, then the other. He yawed his way to the head of the table, set his black briefcase down, and popped it open. He remained standing. The bodyguard stood close by.

  Sterne didn’t sound like Kissinger. “Welcome, earnest seekers.” he said in a resonant, well-modulated TV weatherman’s delivery, as though he were practicing his diction lessons. “I am truly gladdened that you decided to take a chance and widen your perspectives on life.” We earnest postulants rustled and settled in our chairs expectantly. I took out a stiff red bandanna and blew my nose in it.

  Sterne cranked up his speech. Even though he was working without notes, the lecture had an overly rehearsed quality, as though he had given it a thousand times and the meaning of the words had worn off gradually, like detail from Etruscan statuary.

  “Like you, I was not always a devotee of Mr. William Combe. My parents were Catholic. I was raised Catholic. I attended confirmation, catechism, parochial schools, Mass on Sundays. But something about it never seemed quite right, did not ring true to what I knew in my soul to be the truth, even at a very young age. I knew that my grandparents had embraced another belief, and I wanted to learn more about this belief, in order that I might make my own choices concerning my beliefs. But my parents wouldn’t tell me anything about it, other than that we mustn’t talk about those things, ever. That of course made me all the more interested—as all small children will be when they are told they must not do something, ha ha.”

  I have an unusually short attention span even for lectures that interest me, but I was losing Sterne faster than I used to lose Dr. Brunkard when he would fawn over Jane Austen’s delicate humor, her common sense, her light and bright dialogue, her keen social insight, her gigantic swollen clitoris. I found myself drifting, thinking about Lissa, the pale white nape of her neck, the soft copper-colored hairs that curled gracefully behind her ears, the smooth, unmottled expanse of cool flesh between her shoulder blades. Daydreaming, when its penalty is no more tragic than a lowered course grade, is acceptable, even welcome diversion, but now my continued breathing depended on my paying attention to Sterne. I shook myself back to the present, as when you’re just about to fall asleep on the freeway and some little kernel of self-preservation grabs you just before you veer head-on into a concrete overpass abutment. The choice is clear. Fight the drowsiness and pay attention, or die. I forced myself to follow Sterne.

  “I obeyed my parents’ dictates, not so much out of duty as because I had no choice in the matter. However, when I was in my early teens.” he droned on, “I was sought out by an old woman who had been close friends with my grandmother. She did not try to sell Doctor Syntax to me as a way of life. Rather, she offered me a course of study in which I could use the Syntax books as a basis, to read and answer whatever questions I had. I began reading, and I discovered what Mr. Combe had to say on certain subjects.”

  Sterne summarized the Combists’ version of the scriptural prophecies, the Betty Broom-Syntax-Genus trinity, and so on. His discussion was reserved, academic, safe. No one seemed alarmed. Some even looked as sleepy as I felt. Sterne paused and closed his eyes, as though gathering his energies or consulting some private dark muse. He looked up at the ceiling, like a building inspector checking for structural flaws. I did, too. It was made of plaster, now cracked and crazed in several places. Probably damage from an earthquake many years earlier, or from a succession of raging parties on the second floor. There was a brownish water stain radiating concentrically outward from one corner of the ceiling. I studied it. Detectives have to attune themselves to meaningless detail, and an overflowed toilet upstairs might turn out to be a case-breaking clue, the one that puts Sterne behind bars for good.

  As I pursued the criminal implications of spilled sewage, Sterne took a deep breath and continued. “What I’ve been considering of late is the whole idea of good and evil. Why, if there is a God, there’s so much pain and sickness and starvation. And why, if—as the satanists say—the devil has the upper hand on this planet, there are so many people with good intentions. No one has any satisfactory answers. Listen to this.”

  From the briefcase he took up a small leatherbound volume of Doctor Syntax. It looked exactly like one of my own stolen books. He opened the book to a dog-eared page near the beginning and read:

  The more I hear, the more I see,

  The more you deal in mystery.

  This Mistress, sure, of which you tell,

  Is an INCOMPREHENSIBLE.

  He clapped shut the book. “Incomprehensible!” he shouted. “Religions, philosophies provide no answers. At least none that satisfies me. Does any one of you have any answers?”

  Sterne pointed accusingly at a tall man at the far end of the table. “Do you?” The tall man shook his head sadly.

  “Do you?” He pointed at the guy in the sweatshirt, who during Sterne’s discourse had been sneezing intermittently, as though allergic to pious drivel. He wiped his nose on his sweatshirt sleeve, a Lippo-like gesture which made me feel a certain spiritual bond with him, and said, “Nope, that’s why I’m here.”

  Sterne pointed at me. “Do you?” he challenged. I felt the same involuntary hot rush of shame that I felt in the fifth grade, when Mrs. Walker called on me to read out loud from At Home With the Homers, and I was astonishing my peers with the fluid ease of my delivery until I came to the word “brazier.” Even though I was Spelling and Vocabulary monitor in class, “brazier” was a new one to me. I hesitated, then took a stab at it. It came out “brassiere.” and the children broke into shrill peals of sadistic laughter. I flushed in ear-burning embarrassment and mumbled something they couldn’t hear and which I’ve blocked from my memory to this day. But I wasn’t little Harmie Nails now. I was Lippo Urm
andorff, fully grown lout, self-confident in his manliness and stupidity. Entering the consciousness of the bull Fumaroli as my cousin Braddy had instructed me, I said, too loudly for polite conversation, “Who the fuck cares why. It just is. The world beats us down, and it owes us. What we wanna know is how to get what’s coming to us.” I hawked up some phlegm violently, for end punctuation. I always knew my postnasal drip would pay off, if I gave it long enough. I swallowed the oyster with revolting gusto.

  A few of the earnest seekers looked at each other and shifted uneasily in their seats. Some coughed. Sterne fixed on me curiously. “Well put, my friend. Syntax doesn’t try to guess why the world is the way it is. He leaves that up to the religious fanatics, to the evangelists and the devil-worshipers. All Syntax says is: Look, there is goodness and there is pain. Organized religions, like Catholicism, say evil in the world is the result of man’s breaking away from God’s guidance and direction. Eve ate the apple, and it was all downhill from there. We should avoid temptation, they say. Buddha.”—he pronounced the name in the same way that Uncle Frankie in New York pronounces “butter.” without the “r”—“goes them one better. He says life is suffering, and you have to accept it. Fine. That’s certainly more efficacious than attempting to be chaste when it’s so abundantly clear that we were not meant to be. Mr. Combe takes this concept to its logical conclusion. He says that merely accepting suffering isn’t enough, because it puts one in a passive position. If one is passive, one gets taken advantage of—’beaten down,’ as our friend here says. Each of you must embrace suffering and evil, even promote suffering and evil, in order to realize your full potential as a human being.”

  The tall man slid his chair back quietly and tiptoed out the front door. Sterne ignored him. He was on a roll. “The son of Dr. Syntax, Johnny Quae Genus, let himself experience all the degradations possible on this earth. He gambled, he assisted a corrupt surgeon in fleecing poor sick patients, he consorted with a Jewish money-lender, he engaged in riotous drinking and fornication … and in the end, because he lowered himself to all this, he was reunited with his father. Mr. William Combe says this is the lot of each of us. Only if we allow ourselves to sin openly and wholeheartedly, will we.” he quoted from memory this time,