"I take it you"re not talking about a lawn."
"Maybe Forest Lawn. Where I believe I still am, hear embalmers coming, hypo needles jingle. Gordon, I"d be greatly in your debt, which I"d be willing to settle for money, a sizable amount, if you"d stop cross-examining me and let me get back to sleep. You get so G.o.dd.a.m.n cross when you examine."
I don"t let people go back to sleep after it"s established that in the course of a social evening they"ve placed calls to Cedars and Times Information. Especially when I learn that in their thinking I was on a par with a great hospital and a foremost metropolitan daily.
"I"ll see you"re stoned, Quentin, out of town, if you don"t clear this up. Why did you call the hospital and the paper?"
"See, now. Oh. There you go. It was about cracking knuckles."
"Sure."
"See, we were sitting around, listening to records, and we got to cracking our knuckles, first I did, then everybody. First in time with the music, then not. Then somebody said, what makes a knuckle crack. We got to discussing it. That"s a scary thing to discuss, Gordon. The more we got into it, the more we realized we"re not so brainy. Your knuckles are more a part of you than Jean-Paul Sartre, say. We know all there is to know about Sartre, not the first thing about our own knuckles that we"ve been hearing all our lives. If I don"t get some sleep my teeth"ll fall out. What makes knuckles crack, Gordon?"
"Bending your fingers backward is the usual cause, Quentin."
"I know what you do do to bring it about, what I"m asking is the to bring it about, what I"m asking is the why why. See, we got into it, and we were absolutely in the dark as to the mechanisms. We started to get panicky. It"s like first hearing your heart without any prior warning you"ve got such a loud organ. You feel you"ve been invaded by enemy aliens. That was when somebody said, call Cedars, get some staff doctor who could give the professional view. n.o.body there would talk, and that"s supposed to be a hospital serving the public. If an inst.i.tution looks out for the public, wouldn"t you think it would have some interest in preventing panic? You know what runaway panic can lead to in these times, once it spreads."
"So you tried Times Information."
"Gordon, it"s the right of the public to be informed, and the duty of a newspaper to give information. The Times people got very wisea.s.s. Said sleep it off and when we woke we wouldn"t be stampeding about knuckles or any joints. That kind of sneery talk is a cover for ignorance."
"So then you called me."
"Did I?"
"You"d better remember before I make liverwurst out of your knuckles." It occurred to me that I should have said Knucklewurst, but this was no time for anatomical niceties. "Think, now."
"Let"s see. Hnng. Don"t threaten my knuckles, Gordon, I resent it. About that time there was was something else. See, now. Fmmp, it"s coming, I was scared stiff, I was sweating. Somebody said, something else. See, now. Fmmp, it"s coming, I was scared stiff, I was sweating. Somebody said, Gnothi seauton Gnothi seauton. I said, that"s Greek. Somebody said, yes, Greek for, Know thyself. Somebody said, the essence of the Greek philosophers" wisdom was, Know thyself, and if you don"t even know what makes the sounds in your knuckles how much can you claim to know about thyself. Somebody said, well, if doctors and newspapermen can"t help, and if philosophers try to study thyselves, call some philosopher. Somebody said, Sartre"s a philosopher and he"s never written a line with any insights about knuckles. Somebody said, Sartre"s no test, existentialists study alienation, so naturally he"d be more interested in fractures than in joints. Somebody said, they don"t list philosophers in the Yellow Pages, even under Thyselfhelp. Sure, course, that"s how it went. Ah, right. I said, I know a philosopher, older man thinks about everything and has looked into all human phases quite deep. Somebody said, well, Christ, give him a call, and I guess that"s when I called, Gordon. It"s not so important now. It can wait, now that I look it over. What"s important is that you stop shaking your fist at my knuckles and I get back to sleep before I have a heart attack, Gordon."
"Not just yet. The answer, in case you"re interested, is, synovial fluid."
"What, Gordon? Synovia? The flamenco guitarist? He flew what?"
"That"s Segovia, not Synovia, besides, we"re discussing fluids, not musicians. The cracking has to do with synovial fluid."
"I"m not going to sit here and have an hour discussion about fluids, Gordon, laying the groundwork for a coronary, my G.o.d. I don"t care how gorgeous a philosopher you are, when I bring up bones, don"t change the subject to fluids, Jesus. I"m begging, Gordon, I"ve got to get me some sleep before I turn blue."
"You were in a panic last night. The panic could come back, you"d better know about this, Synovial fluid is a colorless, viscid lubricating juice. It has in it a mucinlike substance. It"s secreted by the synovial membranes of articulations, bursae, and tendon sheaths. Its purpose is to prevent a lot of sc.r.a.ping in the sockets when you move their parts. This fluid is found in knuckles, as well as knees, elbows, hips, and so on-"
"Gordon, what, for Christ"s sake, would this or any fluid have to do with the cracking sound I"ve been referring to?"
"I wouldn"t know about that, Quentin."
"Ah. Znnk. Huh?"
"I haven"t looked into that end of the thing yet, I"ve had other matters on my mind. I"m just saying that if you"re really serious about Gnothi seauton, you have to know about the synovial fluid in thyself, your most intimate greases, that"s a starting point-"
"You dirty, rotten, miserable, miasma-jawed, thumbsucking-"
All things considered, including the evenness of the score, plus my dazzling outburst on the workings of the skeletal hinges, which told me I didn"t Gnothi much about my own seauton because I never guessed I had such information in my head-all things considered, this seemed the logical time to hang up.
I"d known Quentin Seckley for what is usually called the better part of a year, but I won"t call it that. The part of a year in which you know Quentin, whatever number of months it embraces, is not the better part.
Beware of wellwishers. Often they are people wishing themselves wells, oil or gas, to be obtained through your good offices, in extreme cases over your dead body, so they can flash a lot of money in your face. It was well-wishers of this type, I think, who suggested that after 20 years of writing I should have the profit of teaching writing to the youths. Everybody thought I should be put in touch with the electric new generation. n.o.body stopped to look into the matter of my insulation.
I listened. When I was offered a lectureship in creative writing at Santana State, close by Los Angeles, I took it. My subject, it turned out, was recreative rather than creative writing. Some students took the course for refreshment, as they"d take gymnastics or folk dancing, or a b.u.t.terscotch float. Others were hard at work composing meticulous recreations of Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, net to mention, though I"m obliged to, O. Henry and Albert Payson Terhune.
Quentin, a New Yorker who"d arrived at Santana after being expelled from four eastern universities, sometimes for unplanned pregnancies, sometimes for plans to synthesize STP in undergraduate chemistry laboratories, was the exception. He had no interest in writing for diversion, he was concerned with one thing only, writing for money. Neither was he moved to write imitations of well-known prose, he didn"t care to write prose at all. What he began to inundate me with were rock-and-roll lyrics.
An intimate of psychedelic musicians, Quentin was composing lyrics for one of their groups, for, if it worked out, money. Two of his songs had already been recorded, with results closer to a thud than a splash. He was taking my course, he explained, to learn how to write better rock lyrics. He accused me of deliberately perpetuating the generation gap when I pointed out that, even if "better rock lyrics" was not a contradiction in terms, lyricism of any order, very definitely of this electronic order, was not within my expertise. Quentin had concluded that I was a philosopher of cosmic scope, an authority on you name it, and as such the best guide for rock-lyricism. Lyrics are made of words, aren"t they? I was a word expert, wasn"t I? Well, then? Why, except out of orneriness, plain and simple withholding, wouldn"t I instruct him in bettering his lyrics so he could better his income?
To show the magnitude of the problem he posed to me and to literature, not to mention the English language, I will give here one of his efforts. Its t.i.tle was, After You Get Your Troubles Packed, Don"t Send Dat Old Kit Bag to Me After You Get Your Troubles Packed, Don"t Send Dat Old Kit Bag to Me. It went this way: .
Fire come down the mountaing Burn up all yo house an goods Fire come adown the mountaing Burn away yo house an goods Yeh, dat fire roll down fom de high country Smoke up all yo tangible a.s.sets But you kin give us a smile, a smile, a smile Iffn ye"ll curl up yo lips t"other way .
After you git all yo troubles awrapped in dat?
ole kit bag What"s the idee mailin em to me?
Wouldn"t send dat greasy load to Care Packages, now Whaffo you parcelpost dat mess to me? Huh?
Connin man took all yo money Meddlin man took off yo wife Connin man abscond wid yo money Meddlin man hep hissef to yo missus O fasttalk man walk away wid yo savings Meddlesome man partake of yo better half Now you kin give us a grin, a grin, a grin Jess culr up yo mouf t"other way .
"See some way I can improve it?" Quentin said the night he showed me this work.
"Yes, burn it in the first fire that comes down the mountaing. If the fire doesn"t come down, go up after it."
"Come on, I"m really finding my own voice here."
"Losing, I"d say. Mountaings. I take that to be your best rendering of Ozark hillbilly. The deses, doses, and dems could be Old South Uncle Remus, or Brooklynese, I"m not sure which."
"Little of both."
"A little of either would go a long way, Quentin. Kentucky mountaineer, Dekalb Avenue, blackface patois, backed with sitars, that"s not a voice, that"s glossolalia. They call this the gift of tongues but with you it"s a curse. Many of your tongues should be tied."
"Jesus, these are sounds I maybe didn"t hear around my family"s dining table in the Silkstocking District, but I"ve heard them on records, and records are part of my environment, and my environment"s part of me. Am I supposed to be a sn.o.b and a.s.sume only my Junior League and stockbroker family talks right?"
"Quentin, right now you"re talking more like a Silkstocking than a combination stevedore-cottonpicker-moonshiner. Silkstockings should have some place in the linguistic sun along with Leatherstockings."
"Mr. Rengs, think about this, when I"m talking to just one person I don"t have to sound like more than one person. In song lyrics you"re talking to a whole lot of different people so the trick is to be democratic and sound like all of them."
"All who never went beyond third grade? Why not address a few college graduates, too? Or does your kind of democracy ban the literates?"
"Look, there"s a theory behind this. Most things never melted like they were supposed to in this alleged melting pot. It"s time we at least let the different languages and styles of talk melt down a little."
"Melt is one thing, fracture"s another."
"I know, things liquefy when they melt, have to be hard to fracture. You"re confusing fluids and bones, I wish you"d stop that, Mr. Rengs."
"If you don"t stop pestering me with schizoid lyrics, Quentin, you"ll see some real confusing of fluids and bones, this minestrone will be confused with your skull."
We were at that point sitting in the House of Gnocchi, a ghastly Italian gag-and-vomit on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. It was so far from being a restaurant, or any food dispensary for humans, the gnocchi should have been used to plug leaky faucets and the linguini served in a trough. Quentin had insisted on taking me to his favorite eating place to discuss his writing problems, which he felt were inadequately covered in cla.s.s.
"Mr. Rengs, you"re pretending to be above this language mix that"s happening today. That"s hiding behind the generation gap."
"You"re not mixing words, Quentin, you"re dismembering them. Let"s examine your last statement. How can anybody hide behind a gap? That"s like saying, he camouflaged himself in a vacuum, or, he took refuge in a quant.i.ty of nothing."
"Quant.i.ty of nothing. You just made my point. What"s a gap, by definition, but a ditch, and what"s a ditch but something with nothing in it, no things, no people? If there aren"t any people around in the ditch, well, there"s n.o.body to see you, so you can hide d.a.m.n efficiently."
"Logic, Quentin. No people around, no reason to hide."
"What I mean is, there aren"t any people in in the ditch, they"re lined up on both sides." the ditch, they"re lined up on both sides."
"In that case, the ditch would have to be very wide, say 10 miles, before it could be used for hiding purposes."
"Well, the way you"re digging at this particular ditch, it"ll be 10 miles wide in no time."
"Whatever the dimensions of a gap, Quentin, you can"t hide behind behind it, the best you can do is hide it, the best you can do is hide in in it." it."
"I can"t buy that, Mr. Rengs. If a tree falls in the forest and there"s n.o.body there to hear it, is there a sound? That"s philosophy, now don"t deny it. By the self-same logic, if you"re using a ditch for hiding purposes, and it works, that means there"s n.o.body close enough to see you, so who knows if you"re in the ditch, or behind it, or under it?"
"Whenever I"m within 10 miles of you, Quentin, I"m in the soup, not behind it or under it, and I"m not referring to this minestrone, which isn"t soup, it"s sheepdip."
Over a zabaglione that tasted like detergent Quentin made a sudden announcement. He said, "The omen are interested in the Mah Own Tang lyric." I said I was not aware that he had also written a song saluting his own body odor. He said he still had reference to the kit-bag lyric in which there was mention of the article Sir Edmund Hillary was always going up. I said, "When the subject is one omen the verb must be is, watch those singulars and plurals." He informed me that The Omen were very singular but happened to be several people, they were a raga-rock recording group, some folk-hard material, too, but mostly raga, featuring sitars and tablas.
I was just becoming aware of the trend among recording groups to use common nouns in the singular as appellations for a collectivity. It was a source of concern to me that in time this might lead to a new vocabulary of aggregate nouns: a Jefferson airplane of draft dodgers, a grateful dead of tambourinists, a loving spoonful of schizophrenes, a vanilla fudge of juvies, a holding company of dropouts. Now, it seemed, we had to allow for a new and still more worrisome formulation, an omen of hecklers.
"One thing you"re overlooking," Quentin went on, "this song is a takeoff, and as such a howl."
"A t.i.tter, maybe. To those who know the old song you"re taking off."
"You know it."
"No, I don"t."
"Don"t give me that, you just mentioned it."
"It was my race unconscious talking."
"Your race prejudice, you mean, against the race of everybody under 30. All right, let"s see how prejudiced you get against some lyrics not in the language mix. Here."
He handed me a page with scribblings on it at all angles. I could decipher only two bits:
suppose on the day of days when comes the savior to lead us way upstairs to best behavior his name is mao will we gao?
And:
if h.e.l.l is hot what"s the temperature of heaven seven?
"I can"t go into these political and theological questions on a sick stomach, Quentin," I said. "The zabaglione is giving me ptomaine, I think."
"Ptomaine," Quentin said, quickened. "There"s a great word to work with. Gives me an idea for a takeoff number about the trots tourists get when they go someplace like Spain. This is inspired. Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the- Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the-"
Everything considered, including the sharp pains in my stomach, that seemed a good time to go to the men"s room.
Not long after this takeoff of a dinner, the kind that will make you take off for even the worst ptomaine zones of Spain, Quentin asked if he could stay with my cla.s.s in the second quarter. I categorically refused, on grounds that, though he was up to many possibly stunning activities with words, none could be related to writing or the English language, my two areas of competence. Quentin didn"t fight. He simply said that maybe I ought to let him into some of my areas of incompetence and maybe they"d shrink. My answer was, my areas of incompetence had been too hard come by, I couldn"t give them up. To match that, he decided there was something he couldn"t give up. Me. When cla.s.s ended for the quarter, Quentin went right on. Deprived of me on campus, he showed up almost daily on my doorstep, with batches of lyrics. Once I ventured the thought that his lyrics were for the birds, for example, goonies. He informed me that The Byrds wrote their own lyrics, his efforts were mainly for The Omen. I came to see that an omen custom-made for me had been installed centrally in my life. In the person of Quentin Seckley, relentlessly, ominously, filled with song.
Days after the conversation about knuckles and their sound effects, my phone rang. A girl at the other end said, "h.e.l.lo, Mr. Rengs? Would Ivar by any chance happen to be there?"
This voice sounded blurrily, adrenalizingly, familiar. It immediately made my tongue ache at the root.
"Ivar?"
"This is Mr. Gordon Rengs, isn"t it?"
"Yes, and there"s n.o.body named Ivar here. I don"t know anybody named Ivar. Take that as boasting if you want."
I was nipping at the tip of my tongue with my fingers, as though to pull it out. This was annoying on several counts: I pride myself on having no tics, I had no reason to pull my tongue out, this interfered with my talking. The girl"s voice held bad echoes. That pulled at my tongue through my fingers.
"There"s some mixup, Mr. Rengs. You"re the Mr. Rengs teaches at Santana, aren"t you? You"re a good friend of this fellow I"m trying to locate, his collaborator."
"I am? On what?"
"Lyrics, of course. You write those great lyrics with him. You know."
"Lyrics? What type?"
"Hard, folk, country, jazz, raga, any rock lyrics they need."
"I see. You"re looking for Quentin Seckley."
A pause.
"Quentin what"d you say? Huh? I don"t know any Quentin."