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When we left to come back here, the good doctor orated, 'Let's leave like this, Fred. You're going on four years of doing it on your own, and I must tell you: I'm impressed. Let's see you tie down that PhD, and keep your grades, and I think Mum and I might be able to help you and Biggie and little Colm toward a nest egg. That Colm is a dandy.'
And Mum kissed Biggie (when my father wasn't looking), and we all bundled back to Iowa City. Three tires and two fan belts later, we were back in our war-built one-story. The old man didn't give me so much as a dime for the tolls.
Which brings me to something important, Couth - if you could spare a little. The tolls alone ran us twenty bills, and I haven't even paid the credit card companies for the trip east in July. And in Michigan City, Indiana, we had a Holiday Inn Experience which will probably mean the early retirement of my Gulf Card.
But! There is a thin shard of sunlight in this gloom. My thesis chairman, Dr Wolfram Holster, has given me some of the Comparative Literature Kitty, as he insists on calling it. For my piece of the kitty, I run the tapes in the language lab for freshman German. My officemate, and fellow tape-runner in the lab, is a sly little pedant named Zanther, whose interpretation and 'supra-literal' translation of Borgetz is being heralded in this month's issue of The Linguist. I showed Zanther the bulk of my summer's writing on my thesis; he read it all in one afternoon and told me he didn't think anyone would publish it. I asked him what the circulation of The Linguist was; we haven't spoken since. Following my period of proctorship in the language lab - when I know Zanther is coming on duty - I artfully misfile the tapes. He left me a note about it. 'I know what you're doing,' the note said; it was stuck in what he knew to be my favorite tape. I left him a note, too. It said: 'No one knows what you're doing.' Now communication is impossible between us.
Even so, it's a small kitty and I've got a small bite of it. Biggie's back with her old job at the hospital, bed-panning the elderly between 6 a.m. and noon, five days a week. Colm, therefore, is with me. The child gets up about the time Biggie leaves. I fight him off in bed until almost seven. Then his repeated news of what's wrong with the toilet prompts me to rise and call Krotz the plumber again.
We've seen quite enough of Krotz. I sublet the house this summer, you know, to three football players taking a summer make-up course in world culture. I knew football players might be rough types, that they might break a chair or split our bed; I was even prepared to find a raped castaway girl; but I was sure they'd be clean. You know athletes - all that showering and deodoring. I was sure they couldn't live in filth.
Well, the apartment was clean, all right, and there wasn't even a raped girl. There was a pair of Biggie's panties nailed to our door, and the more literate of the three had pinned a note to the panties, saying 'Thanks.' Biggie was a bit resentful; she'd packed all our clothes very neatly, and it disturbed her to imagine football players riffling through her underwear. But I felt enormously encouraged; the house had survived and the athletes' scholarships had paid their rent. Then the plumbing problems started, and Biggie concluded that the only reason the place looked so clean was because the football players had flushed all the crud away.
Krotz has sent his Roto-Rooter down our john four times. Among other things, he's retrieved six athletic socks, three whole potatoes, a crushed lampshade and a small girl's bra - clearly not Biggie's.
I phoned the Athletic Department and bitched. At first, they were very concerned. A man said, 'Of course it doesn't do to have our boys getting a name for themselves with the local landlords.' He said he'd take care of it. Then he asked me my name, and what property it was that I owned. I had to say that I didn't own it, really - that I rented it, and had sublet to the athletes for the summer. He said, 'Oh, you're a student?' I should have seen the put-off coming, but I said, 'Right - getting my PhD in Comp. Lit.' And he said, 'Well, son, get your landlord to put the complaint in writing.'
And since my landlord told me that I was responsible for any subletting, all bills from Krotz the plumber are mine. And believe me, Couth, Roto-Rootering is costly.
I'm afraid you know what I mean ... if you've got some to spare.
I really think you've got the life, Couth. Better the caretaker than them who need to be cared for. Thanks be, though, it's the last damn year of this. My father says, 'With your PhD you'll have a profession that's dependable. But every professional man must suffer his training.'
My father - as I'm sure he's told you before - didn't marry Mum until after college, after med school, after interning and after he'd established himself in Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire. The only urologist at Rockingham-by-the-Sea Hospital. After a six-year engagement to good old Mum - two thousand one hundred and ninety nights of masturbating ago - my father saw the time was ripe to marry.
I said to him this summer, 'Well, look at Couth. He's set for life. A mansion to himself for nine months of the year, his expenses paid. And a mere three-month summer of fussing for the Pillsburys, tidying their ample grounds, caulking their boats and washing their cars; and they treat him like one of the family. Can you beat that?'
My father answered, 'Couth doesn't have a profession, though.'
Well, Biggie and I agree that you look quite professional to us.
Flush all seventeen of the johns once for me.
Love,
Bogus
4
Iowa Evening Rituals
SINCE HIS FATHER disinherited him, he had learned to hoard little injustices, wishing they might merge and leave him with one significant wound, for which he could guiltlessly martyr himself forever.
Bogus flips the record switch. 'A keeper of petty injustices,' he tells the microphone unconvincingly, 'I was exposed to self-pity at a tender age.'
'What?' says Biggie - a low, groggy voice down the hall.
'Nothing, Big,' he calls to her, and notices he's recorded this too. Erasing, he tries to think: From what did he catch his self-pity? He can hear his father saying, 'From a virus.' But Bogus is sure he invented the whole thing himself. 'I made it all myself,' he says, with surprising conviction, then notices that he's failed to record it.
'You made what all yourself?' Biggie asks, suddenly alert in the bedroom.
'Nothing, Big.' But her astonishment at the possibility of his doing something himself is painful.
Blowing hair off the control panel, he gingerly fingers his forehead; for some time he has suspected that his hairline will one day recede far enough to expose his brain. But would that be a significant humiliation?
Into the microphone he records: 'There's a danger in dwelling on small emotional things.'
But when he attempts to play this back, he discovers that he's jammed the announcement too close to one of his father's hospital reports - recorded in the good doctor's den at Great Boar's Head, with a live audience of Biggie and his mother listening to a description of an honest day's fortune. Bogus is sure he's erased this once, but apparently he missed a bit of it. Or perhaps certain parts of his father's speeches are capable of reproducing themselves. Bogus is not beyond believing this.
