[←29]
I really did say “cahoots” and blushed at my reversion to Hopalong Cassidy matinee cowboy dialogue under pressure.
[←30]
I do make jokes, but to this day, following my mother’s example, I can’t go to the movies without at least two extra articles of warm and impermeable clothing, just in case a cloud of warm, moist air from an unusually sweaty filmic clientele rises to collide with an arctic blast from the air-conditioner, creating an occluded weather front inside the theater, with resulting thunderheads and rain squalls.
[←31]
I dabble in poesie myself from time to time but had to give up rhyming almost entirely because, like Combe, I kept forcing the enjambments—a painful practice even with the advent of K-Y jelly in these modern times.
[←32]
Didn’t Hopkins write, “.… nor can feet feel, being shod”? Didn’t Blackjack Keats pen, “.… every man whose soul is not a clod I hathvisions …”? Didn’tShakespeare himself get away with whining, “0 senseless linen …”?
[←33]
Combe, William, The English Dance of Life. I forget the date and publisher and page and so on, but you can check it out from your library and then flip through the book until you find a picture of some mean rats running away with what looks like the business end of a dust mop, and a baldish dude chasing them futilely.
[←34]
Op. cit., I forget the page here, too, but it’s somewhere after the part with the rats.
[←35]
Only about five percent of surfing time is actually spent surfing. The rest of the time you’re digging out through the shorebreak and back to the lineup, or belly-paddling around for better wave position. All this paddling accounts for my legendary upper-body strength, which makes me an awesome physical specimen despite my shortness and legendary asthma.
[←36]
Ma is big on vitamins. She’s convinced that taking a combination of the trace mineral Germanium and a recently discovered nutrient called Co-enzyme Q-170 is going to take her well into her hundreds, and she swears by a potent multivitamin-mineral supplement called MegaMix, whose only noticeable effect is that it turns my urine a healthy gold against the powder-blue porcelain of our decorator toilet bowl—the school colors of UCLA, by the way.
[←37]
Whenever Ma talks about my Ph.D. thesis, she uses the same language with which she used to talk about my math worksheets in fourth grade. This makes sense; I used to avoid doing my math worksheets, too, usually by faking a bellyache. Nowadays such scholastic dodging requires more ingenuity taken to greater lengths, such as chasing after baddies who stole your antique books.
[←38]
Stands for All But Dissertation, a designation they assign to doctoral candidates who have long since finished their coursework and are terminally enmired in research, like waterfowl in an oilspill.
[←39]
This would create a scandal which would find its way onto front pages of supermarket tabloids, “PRIAPIC PROF PRODS PUPIL.” ruining me professionally, making my mother a laughingstock, and rendering it even more difficult in the future for me to interest women in visiting my studio for maternally interrupted sex.
[←40]
“All Right!” is Chainsaw’s version of the traditional poker face. He always acts as though he’s ecstatic over whatever cards come up, so that you never know whether they really helped him or not.
[←41]
Cf. Chapter 19.
[←42]
I’ve observed this phenomenon close-up, by the way, and not from the bleachers at OceanWorld, either. I was minding my own business, waiting for waves at Brockton Point in Santa Carnera, when a school of killer whales, each the size of a full-grown Caddy, surfaced not ten yards from where I was sitting in the water. This gave me an adrenaline-charged start such as I’d never known. As I’m sure you’ve heard already, killer whales have been unjustly named and are as harmless to people as house cats unless you hit them on the snout with a baseball bat, whichonly an idiot or a bush-leaguer with a death wish would do, but their dorsal fins do look just like those of great white sharks, which have been known to swallow whole surfboards, riders and all, and not just in the movies. So when you’re in the water and you espy twenty or so gray-black fins heading in your direction, all cutting through the water like scythes in Death’s own hand, there’s not much time to explore the morphological differences between sharks and orcas; you yell, “Shark!” and everyone hauls ass out of there. Thus did I shout, and—along with the four or five other surfers in the water with me—I paddled for shore with the kind of dedication that wins Olympic swimmers gold medals. We all stood, bare feet on wet sand, and watched silently as the school proceeded downcurrent with a gliding deliberation, a bearing that suggested they couldn’t be less concerned with anything so petty as our chilled and dripping humanity.
[←43]
…which is why I’m telling you this story, I suppose, instead of discussing authorial self-awareness in nineteenth-century letters as I’m supposed to be doing.
[←44]
Cf. Chapter 24.
[←45]
Relative to my preoccupation with pro basketball, Liz spun the following parable: The Mayas (the Incas? Details, details … ) invented basketball. They had a hard ball made of dried sap, and a hoop made of dried vine. The chief of one clan would play the chief of another clan. To these superstitious folk, the ball represented the earth, and the hoop represented infinity; if you put the ball through the hoop, you brought your clan closer to immortality. The two clan chiefs played to a certain number. Whoever won got to kill the loser, disembowel him, skin him, and wear the loser’s skin over his own body for three days.
After Liz told me this story she sat quietly. From her hourly rate I calculated quickly that the story, plus her quiet sitting, had cost me twelve dollars. I said, “Good story, Liz. Wearing the skin of the loser gives new meaning to the expression ‘one on one.’ But what does it have to do with me?”
“That question.” she said, “is your main problem, and perhaps the problem of your whole generation.”
[←46]
Although the Semitic misspelling was probably unintentional, in this mainly Jewish part of town it was appropriate.
[←47]
I wanted to say “unlike.” but that would be cruel, and only half true.
[←48]
I’ve noticed—and probably you have, too—that my footnotes seem to be getting shorter and scarcer as this story unfolds. They are, it appears, a dwindling resource, the vermiform vestige of intellectual apparatus that is no longer operational in me. If there ever was any reason to persist in the token attempt to make this thing look scholarly, I can no longer see it. While this is one more bit of bad news for the future of my dissertation—which I now realize has about as much chance of ever being finished as you or I have of participating in the colonization of Pluto—it’s good news for my digestive and urinary systems, which have been systematically ravaged by stress, and it’s good news for you, the reader, because I can at last devote myself earnestly to the most interesting subject of all … me, and my gripping tale of deceit and redemption. I figure I’ll turn this improbable narrative in to my committee and then have fun watching them agonize over what to do with it, and with me. Cf. Epilogue.
[←49]
D. Hein,To Hear Her Voice: Artifice in George Eliot’s Novels (Dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1984), p. 79. Hey, I had to include it. It was the only piece of real research I managed to get all the way through, and it didn’t even have pictures.
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Doctor Syntax Page 23