Doctor Syntax
Page 22
“Yes, that means two weeks, Karl.
“I don’t know. Two weeks from today, I suppose.
“I am aware of that fact.
“Yes. But our young friend insists we consider this effort the final version of his dissertation, and he instructs us to render judgment on it accordingly.
“Yes, he is. Absolutely serious.
“Indeed. However, you must realize it’s all we can ever expect to receive from him.
“I know.
“Certainly.
“I agree. But he’s finished his course work three times over.
“Yes.
“He does.
“No, and he never will. He told me, ‘Anyone with a certain plodding intelligence can produce a doctoral thesis. Libraries are full of them,’ he said.
“Not his exact words, no. But a fairly accurate paraphrase, I believe. He insists on turning in this so-called ‘creative’ effort.
“Absolutely firm.
“Yes, I have read it in its entirety.
“Yes.
“Hardly.
“Of course it isn’t. But.
“Granted. The way I see it, we have two choices. We either confer the degree on him, in spite of his. Shortcomings.
“All right. Gross failures. Or the other alternative is.
“That seems rash to me, Karl. The department frowns on violence by tenured faculty on its grad students.
“Yes, Karl. Even with the Vaseline. We must remain decorous.
“Yes.
“Yes, I am aware that he alluded to me as a ‘complacent tenured pedant.’
“I recall he said that, too. And ‘pompous ass.’
“I had forgotten that. Uncalled-for, that.
“It goes without saying. Any reasonably intelligent person would have a hard time believing his story.
“Preposterous.
“Insurmountable.
“No argument there. And fraught with plot gaps and inconsistencies besides. Clearly it’s fantasy.
“But is the ability to suspend our disbelief the issue here?
“I don’t know what. It has more to do with. Integrity of intention perhaps.
“Perhaps even suffering.
“His and ours. I’m not as young as I once was.
“I wouldn’t say nuisance is too strong a word.
“Yes, I’d say that is too strong. Even for Mr. Nails.
“Of course. But.
“I know. Uniform standards. I am his committee chairman, after all. “Seven years.
“Yes. Seven. This is his eighth.
“No. Not a record. But it is close.
“Certainly, I will confess to feeling a certain fondness for Mr. Nails.
“Sincere but misguided.
“Well put.
“No.
“No, it’s never been done before. No one has ever dared submit a fiction as a doctoral thesis. There is precedent, however.
“Yes. It has been done. One of our own non-tenured com position instructors, in fact.
“Dan Lewsite.
“I was surprised, too, when I found out. “Not a novel. Worse. An opera.
“Correct. Our own Dr. Lewsite wrote an opera, both the libretto and score, as his thesis. And produced it in conjunction with his university’s music and drama departments.
“University of California at Fiesta City, I believe.
“That may help explain the oddity of it, but it is nevertheless a precedent.
“No.
“Why on earth not?
“No.
“It boils down to this: Can we in good conscience give Mr. Nails the gate. After all. It comes back to.
“I’m not sure I want that responsibility.
“Certainly not, but I have no doubt he’ll make a damn fine teacher. His students’ evaluations of his teaching performance are always top-notch.
“Exactly.
“Very well, if you insist on leaving it up to me, I say, ‘Congratulations, Doctor Nails.’
“Take a deep breath. Pour yourself a scotch.
“You’ll be accustomed to the idea in no time.
“You see. Pour yourself another.
“Oh, absolutely.
“Yes.
“I don’t believe that’s a strong enough objection to warrant booting him. Dan Lewsite never attends meetings, either.
“No.
“Once, last spring.
“Right. He woke up only when the secretary taking the minutes nudged him.
“Carla.
“Damn fine ones. Lovely long legs, too.
“I wouldn’t turn her out. Heh, heh.
“Under her desk. On my hands and knees.
“Karl, you’re a scoundrel. Don’t let Mary.
“Nor I. Heh, heh.
“No.
“No, I am by no means certain we’ve arrived at the right decision, but it is a decision I can live with.
“From whom?
“I really don’t anticipate any problem. Usually they file without reading beyond the title page.
“Yes, I have as well, I must admit. Would you read three hundred pages on a phenomenological study of time in ‘The Fall of Hyperion’?
“Keats.
“Keats. The English poet.
“Yes, that Keats. Ha ha. You see. I rest my case. “
Yes.
“Agreed.
“Yes.
“So. We are in accord, are we not? Mr. Nails finally has his degree. And we have a new colleague.
“Nor do I.
“I am. I will. I think you will, too.
“Have another drink.
“Yes.
“Oh. The inflatable cushion really is quite comfortable. All the difference in the world.
“So do I. Chronically inflamed tissues seem to be a punishment for the sedentary lifestyle we academicians have chosen to lead.
“Indeed it does. Like magic. Why don’t I lend it to you for a day?
“Of course not. And if you find you enjoy it, I’ll give you the address of the medical supply store where you can purchase your own.
“Yes.
“Say no more. Say no more. What are friends for?
“No.
“Yes.
“No, I believe we’ve done the right thing by Mr. Nails.
“Albeit unorthodox. Best to Mary.
“Thank you. I will. Good-bye, Karl.
“Good-bye.”
Notes
[←1]
George Eliot never said this. I invented it. But it sounds like the kind of penetrating insight for which George is famous. I’m sure I can pass it off somewhere in my thesis, verifying its authenticity with a bogus footnote.
[←2]
My sometime analyst, Elizabeth Browner, Ph.D., refuses to let her patients call her Dr. Browner, joking, “If I wanted to be called Doctor, my couch would have stirrups.”
[←3]
A blessing, it appears in retrospect, given Braddy’s former habit of crawling into my bed and yelling, “Peeny patrol!” while making bawdy stabs at my privates under the covers.
[←4]
Admittedly, as will soon be revealed, the twin muses of dope and sex aided me in this lofty enterprise.
[←5]
This was, incidentally, also the infield of the ’51 Yankees, if memory serves, with Moscardini in the pivot.
[←6]
You probably never have, either, but Combe really existed. Here’s what I know about him, to the best of my recollection: He was born around 1750 and lived until sometime in the nineteenth century—1833 I think it was, or maybe ’23; who’s counting? One encyclopedia I read about him called him a “miscellaneous writer.” which in English means he was a hack, I guess. He was perpetually in debt—a gambler like me, maybe, and (unlike me) a loser—and he issued the Doctor Syntax and Johnny Quae Genus series anonymously, to avoid his creditors’ attachi
ng the proceeds. That’s all I remember. You can look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me or if you want to know more. There’s also a book about Combe in the library, by a biographer named Hamilton or Haarwhal or something. I never took the time to read it, but you can check it out and op cit it to your heart’s content, if research gets you off.
[←7]
To be truthful, the glories of the Nails estate have declined somewhat since my father died, and what was once a verdant bower that would have inspired a sonnet or two out of Coleridge has become a largely untended, unpruned tangle of impenetrable ceanothus, avocado bushes and trumpet vines.
[←8]
People who say “climatic” for “climactic” or “relator” for “realtor.” or “nucular” for “nuclear.” reveal in themselves a singular lack of attention to the one thing in the world I really take seriously: spelling. In Diane’s case, however, the eloquence of her riding hemline and sleek quadriceps made up for her faulty orthography.
[←9]
Like the time I walked into the bedroom where she and Pop were locked in an apres-sex embrace, he on top asleep or at least inert, she underneath, on her belly; both smooth, sweaty, naked. Ma lashed out, “Hahmin, yew gayet otta this room rot nah, and don’t yew ewvaaah come in heah agayan withaht knockin’ .…” This is not by itself a prominent event in my developmental history, but one of many like degradations that contributed to my feeling during adolescence and marriage that sex is something not to be undertaken without a heavy dose of embarrassment. Through hard work with Liz, though, I made progress toward overcoming that hangup, and, following my customary reactive pattern, I swung to the opposite extreme. I slept with anything that would have me, until I finally caught the Laotian clap from the waitress at the health-food restaurant I always used to go to. For five weeks my gonorrhea resisted courses of Dicloxicillin and Amoxicillin until some broad-spectrum sulfa derivative finally knocked it out. Five long weeks: which explains the urgency I was presently feeling in getting down with Diane.
[←10]
I was at the point in my thesis—the first chapter, actually—where I was trying to prove that George Eliot takes herself as the first object of her scrutiny, and Browning was an especially boring example of this.
[←11]
Which I tried once years ago with the result that I still have cold sweats whenever I see a chicken bone at a Passover dinner. Cf. Chapter 9.
[←12]
I usually leave it on KJZZ (Thrasher, my former roommate who likes nothing but Led Zep and other sixties proto-thrash, irreverently calls it “K-jizz”), the hip, low-power jazz and soul station coming out of Compton.
[←13]
Unlike my own Mandeville Heights where movie stars, real estate developers, linen rental service executives and their progeny have settled the twisting chaparral canyons from which, on high, they hold off the Third World with immaculate pansy beds and armed-response alarm systems.
[←14]
The allusion here is to my high-school advanced placement lit teacher, Mrs. Convoy, a superannuated Emily Dickinson type, dried up from disuse in the passion department but uncannily accurate in her personal insights (which is probably why she never got married in the first place). She told me, in front of the whole class while I was doing my carrot-swallowing act, “Mr. Nails, you are a neurotic starfish.” She never elaborated, apparently trusting that the maturing process would clarify the metaphor for me, but I was never sure what she meant until I started writing this narrative.
[←15]
This lack of pigmentation usually brings up a vision of my first girlfriend, Janet Bunson, and specifically her breasts, pale and translucent, and all the bluish circulatory geography seemed to point to and converge on the aureole, also lacking in melanin and itself blue-tinted, until the nipple tightened up and became champagne pink: a digression I can’t help but take whenever I see a redhead. Liz the shrink got excited when I first made this admission. She said it was a breakthrough and pantingly pointed out that I chase women who look like Ma, who also has red hair. This of course is nonsense. I’m not attracted to older women.
[←16]
Everything I know about investigation—and most other things-—comes from extensive firsthand experience with the succession of TVsets my family has owned over the years, from the first tiny oblate tube in the mid-fifties, to the huge, clunky color console in the early sixties, to our current sleek black solid-state Nanotron with oodles of microchip-generated frammies, digital remote control, digital tuner pad and chronometer. From TV I have an admittedly stereotyped and no doubt laughably naive view of detective work. “Dragnet” and “77 Sunset Strip” and “Kojak” taught me that you talk to people methodically and patiently, get the facts, eat burgers,and then the crook confesses or else tries to kill you and you kill him instead. But I’ve also spent enough time around my cousin Bradford the insurance investigator to have learned that success in detective work is usually the result of pure chance, lucky breaks, being at the right place, stumbling onto the right computer code: the same scenario as most successes in life’s big crapshoot.
[←17]
Simple physical functions like evacuation must be extremely painful for such backward folk. They must have to suck their excreta up into their bowels like industrial-strength vacuum cleaners, which hurts, as you know. But on a backward planet, pain must be felt as pleasure and vice versa … which is often the case here on earth, too, if the Personals in the L. A. Free journal’s classified ads section are any indication. Cf. Chapter 24.
[←18]
Can I justify my tone of social outrage? Wasn’t it my own father who supplied the linens to convention centers, high-rise resort complexes, restaurants, and country clubs during the voracious, visionary salad days of urban circumfusion, the fiscal gains of which efforts paid for braces on my teeth, summer camp on the Trinity River in northern California, private tennis lessons at the Brentshire Country Club, and a trip to Europe after my high school graduation? A minor inconsistency: I accepted those gifts before my social conscience was fine-tuned in college. Would I accept them now, you ask? Would you?
[←19]
Red-scare alarmists were at this time hysterically warning legislators that LSD can enter the body through the skin and suggesting the commies might infiltrate Jergens plants all across the country and render us helpless by drugging our strategic stockpiles of moisturizing cream. While I’m not as gullible as Congress, I bought the part about LSD entering through the semipermeable membranes; better to be safe than psychotomimetic.
[←20]
He’s the son of my Aunt Doreen’s adopted sister Sadie Friedkin, by her second husband, Morris Wolf, in case you’re interested.
[←21]
If you grow up in L. A., you come to associate chest pain with happy childhood sensations, like playing touch football in a first-stage smog alert, when an end run is cut short not by opposing players but by your inability to extract any oxygen from the filthy air. Hands on knees, you bend over gasping from the exertion. But you think nothing of it; in the city, emphysema is as natural an adjunct to play as poison ivy itch is to a country kid. In a strange way the irritation feels healthy, a reminder that you’ve been out running around.
[←22]
As it turned out, Greek literature, with its inane declensions and grotesque conjugations, was far dumber than anything composed by even the most superstitious, grunting, greasy hartskinned and soot-blackened Pict. I had to repeat Classics 10 twice before I passed, as I never saw any percentage in knowing that frogs say “brekkekekek-koax-koax” in Thebes, nor could I manage to stoke up even a little interest in following Xenophon from one killing floor to the next.
[←23]
Cf. Chapter 29.
[←24]
The River has been the unfair butt of too many easy jokes. I’ve seen days of sudden rain when the concrete aqueduct runs awful with a muddy turbulence, the surface littered with uprooted trees,
a thunder of sandstone boulders carried along by the current, and it’s as impressive in its power as any of your major rivers, or at least any of your major sewers.
[←25]
I’ve never actually been in snow, but I imagine that’s what it sounds like.
[←26]
I was exaggerating here. Until I started pursuing Doctor Syntax, no one had ever worked me over. But I had had some unpleasant run-ins with the authorities, which made me more than a tad mistrustful of our men in blue. Cf. Chapter 19.
[←27]
I had apotheosized the musical Brenda Garbacs as the soul of easygoing cool, only to have her emerge shortly after the wedding as a carping neatness-freak who complained when I left the toothpaste on the wrong side of the sink. Before we got married I couldn’t keep my mind or my hands off Brenny, who was all secret love—flush and public tushy—grabs. A month later she cut out sex with astonishing thoroughness, blaming pain in her Bartholin’s gland, an organ so tiny and insignificant I had never even heard of it until one day it swelled up to wreck my sex life.
[←28]
Whenever I hear a news story about one of those innocuous types, “He was a nice guy, kept to himself, didn’t talk much.” who walks into a restaurant and guns down customers doing nothing more offensive than standing in takeout lines or sitting in booths, I give myself a powerful adrenaline-squirt of fear: I could belong to that elite group of crazies who plod along in life, taking thump after thump and only dreaming theirbloody getbacks until, after one thump too many, they snap and make their dreams come true. I console myself by recalling the words of Thrasher, who used to drive us up the coast to Fiesta City in the old Austin America he named the Octopus (he had glued a clump of junked vacuum cleaner hoses to the roof of the car, so that they created an absurd Medusa-head effect as we rounded the curves by Point Mugu). We were overriding the agricultural monotony around Oxnard by discussing New Age heroes like Fritz Perls, father of the don’t-push-the-river Gestalt ethic that was in vogue less than a decade ago but which has been supplanted by a more traditional American frontier spirit: Grab everything you can before the next asshole does. We were talking morality. I was in the twilight glow of my “love is all you need” phase, and I said something vapid, like, “The only thing that really matters is to leave behind you a wake of good deeds dancing in life’s polluted bay.” Thrasher warned me, “No good deed goes unpunished.” quoting Perls or improvising his own homily which sounded Perls-like, “and every violent fantasy is a murder averted. The more brutality you think, the more you purge the world of it.” At the time, I thought this heresy. But as the seventies wind down, his words help get me through evil times like these: I can see my frequent dreams of vengeful mayhem as nothing worse than a healthy form of discharge, self-inflicted psycho-therapy rather than rehearsal for mass slaughter. I hope.