Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Mother’s heroes were always political people, and she took real pride in the fact that Barry copped one quarter of one percent of the primary vote. She worshipped the director of the ACLU, the superintendent of schools, her editor at The Nation, all of whom I’m sure were the leaders of the free world Mother conceived them to be. What got my goat was the way she constantly presented these men to me and Father as exhibit cases of our own inadequacy. I never wanted to be congressman of the United States. I just wish Father had spoken up for us once in a while, but the best he could manage was to memorize a sentence from a biography of the Rosenbergs: On June 19, 1953 two people charged with having transmitted the secrets of the split atom to a foreign power were executed after judgment by a jury of their peers. Particularly just before entering or just after leaving Montbel, Father clung to this line as the embodiment of subjective pseudo-objectivity or something like that. He could sound beautifully rational, explaining all this to you.

  19

  THE ONLY GAME SHOW I enjoyed as a child was called “Jeopardy.” The host of the show and his contestants spoke a pixilated, interrogatory syntax, as if they were aphasiacs trying to reconstruct which word went where. As long as the aphasiac does not regard another’s speech as a message addressed to him in his own verbal patterns, he feels, as a patient of Hemphil and Stengel expressed it: “I can hear you dead plain but I cannot get what you say…. I hear your voice but not the words…. It does not pronounce itself.” This, I suppose, is the appeal of any translation. As a London sophomore and junior I studied Latin, and by my senior year I’d come to love that dead language.

  “But why Latin?” Mother would say. “No one speaks Latin any more except homosexual classics teachers and Vatican Catholics. It’s a shame to be living in California and not know Spanish.”

  “You don’t even know the history of your race,” Father would say, “but you’ve memorized the language of a people that collapsed in two centuries.”

  My parents didn’t appreciate that Latin could never again be articulated. It existed only on the page, on stone tablets in Rome, on metal plaques outside the cages at the zoo, over the archways of marble buildings. It was always capitalized, vertical seeming and squared off, militaristic, masculine, untouchable. It was always silent. I read Cicero, Horace, Livy, Martial, Propertius, Tibullus, Pliny, Quintillian, Ovid, Seneca, Terence, Plautus, Juvenal, but then I read Catullus’ fifth poem to Lesbia:

  Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

  rumoresque senum severiorum

  omnes unius aesteimemus assis!

  soles occidere et redire possunt:

  nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux.

  nox est perpetua una dormienda.

  da mi basia mille, deinde centum

  dein mille altera, dein secunda centum

  dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

  conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

  aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

  cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

  Oh yes, Lesbia, oh Christ yes, let’s live and love and kiss a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then another hundred, then one more thousand, then one more hundred until neither I nor you nor dirty old men can keep count! An extraordinarily loose and attenuated translation, to be sure, but who cares? This wasn’t just third-year Latin: The Alexandrians. It wasn’t just Catulli Carmina Number Five. These were thirteen lines I took absolutely seriously and, against the imminence of Catullus night of perpetual sleep, I resolved to love, if not Lesbia or Lucy, who weren’t available, at least a harlot in the Tenderloin, who was.

  THE BACK PAGE of the Chronicle’s art section was solid every morning with commercials for onanism. When she noticed me going first thing all the time now to “Daily Punch,” Mother praised me for finally taking a lively interest in cultural affairs. I was partial to The Question Man, from whom I won ten or twenty-five dollars at age eleven for submitting the question: “How do you impress a woman?” It was a legitimate concern of mine in the sixth grade, what with Mother seeming to be pretty much unwinnable, and I remember going to school the day The Question Man used my question, seeing Z on the other side of the big ballfield, and feeling intuitively that the way to impress women was to appear oblivious to them while performing a difficult feat intently and well, so I slid down the banister on my hip. I’m not sure I’d answer the question so very differently even now. By the fall of 1973 The Question Man was losing his allure for me, the theater reviews and editorial cartoons had misplaced their pungency, and movies about sado-masochism alone retained my interest. Or, precisely, advertisements for movies about sado-masochism, since I had yet to see one, and less the blurry images in the ads than the words, whose inevitable alliteration (“Debasement, debauchery, and defilement—beyond human dignity!”) sounded like the tintinnabulation of desire.

  The San Francisco Chronicle is perhaps the only newspaper in the world that would have seen a new wrinkle in the technological development of pornography as meriting a full-length review. I remember the review was by someone named John Wasserman, and the beautiful dreamers were the Winchell Brothers, who also brought us Flasher Gordon in Lust in Space. I wish to hell John Wasserman hadn’t written that review. I wish to hell the Winchell Brothers hadn’t pursued the project. I wish to hell they hadn’t, because the Impossibility of Relief from Loneliness presented itself to me like a tabloid headline the night I ventured into the Tenderloin district.

  One Saturday night when Mother and Father were attending a party with Beth in Palo Alto in honor of an English professor who felt he’d been denied tenure for telling a senior seminar that in Typee Herman Melville had produced a Marxist analysis of Jacksonian democracy, I walked toward Market Street. I still walked with a little limp. This was the first time I’d ever been alone in the Tenderloin and I was struck, first, by how turista the crowd was—so many white shoes and colorful shirts with collars folded over sport jacket lapels—and, second, by how self-contradictory the promenade was: on the outside, Denver businessmen trembling to enter movie theaters, equipment stores, whorehouses; on the inside, bored teenage girls committed to methadone. The opposing camps had nothing to say to each other, I didn’t want to align myself with the Denver businessmen, so I looked for the Winchell Brothers, who were situated between a kind of bookstore and dance hall.

  “Let us live,” I said for the last time to the back page of “Daily Punch” I kept in my back pocket, “and love and kiss a thousand kisses.”

  Now, of course, in 1978, phone fantasy booths are a staple of every self-respecting red light district, but John Wasserman seemed to feel the first black box was born right here. Mr. Zorn, come here, I want you. The fact that I didn’t look eighteen didn’t seem to deter me at all once I paid the ten-dollar admission. When one cannot talk, it is advisable for one always to have a piece of paper to point to. I took the ad out of my pocket again and pointed to the booths. The receptionist, an old woman with broken nails, made a broad gesture in the general direction of infinity. Her weary nonchalance was the first surprise among many. A lot of married couples were walking around together, well-dressed Asians, hippies high on life. Saturday night at the sex emporium had less the quality of saturnalia than a Webelos meeting.

  I put in appearances at the bachelor party in a back room and the floor show, but I seemed to know on some obscure level that the test I’d come to take was the phone fantasy booth. There were several women squeaking themselves against their booths: what I’m afraid I’ve come to recognize as the usual Pam Greer lookalikes and geisha girls and dirty blonde morphine addicts. I’m so obvious, I’m as predictable as pain: a snaky-haired, smoky-eyed vixen froze me with an emptying glance. I purchased tokens from a man behind a podium.

  “One dollar—one token,” he explained, like he was talking to a two-year-old. “One token—one minute. Tipping not required.”

  My initial impulse was not to hurt the other girls’ feelings by going directly to the dominatrix holding up the far wall
, so I walked around the phone fantasy area as if the decision were an agonizingly difficult one, clinking my tokens, which were the size and heft of old Kennedy halves. Ridiculously, I imagined myself pursuing some important, transformative purpose.

  The booth was divided by a sheet of glass. When I put my first token in the slot a screen creaked upwards to reveal my bitch-goddess mock-masturbating in an orange bikini and white high heels. She had little purple marks around her lips like poorly applied makeup. When I picked up my receiver she picked up her receiver, and when she picked up her receiver my side of the booth dimmed to darkness. I can’t emphasize that enough. I can’t imagine a more concise statement of what’s gone so riotously wrong with my life: when she picked up her receiver my side dimmed to darkness. So far as I can see, that sums up the situation.

  “Gimme another dollar,” she said.

  “I thought tipping wasn’t required,” I said.

  “That’s only for the black girls.”

  “Oh,” I said and started to slide another token into the slot.

  “No, dummy,” she said. “Cash.”

  All this was on the phone. She wasn’t supposed to be able to see me, but apparently she could spy through the shadows. Maybe she just heard the sound of the tokens.

  “How?” I asked.

  She rapped on the edge of the glass, pointing to a slit in the plastic that joined the mirror. I gave her a five to get things going. I’d borrowed the money from the London Journal emergency fund, of which I was treasurer, bookkeeper, and primary recipient. I planned to reimburse the money sooner or later. I thought the adventure might make an interesting feature article some day and, if this wasn’t an emergency, what was? When you’re sixteen nothing seems quite so serious as sex.

  And yet this was sex and not sex. The purpose of the glass was to insure that you wouldn’t actually have to touch the other person. The process was all pretty self-explanatory as it went along, but it was unclear to me whether the lady on the other line might not break down the glass or come up out of a trap door if I paid her enough money. I even had hopes that, like Clark Kent, I’d swap my pimples and repetitions for a capital red S.

  The screen creaked down, so I spent another token to witness her orange ass rubbing now against the mirror, causing the pane to wobble a bit. She was sticking her finger in and out of her mouth like a little girl with languorous eyes, but she had the receiver hanging down around her waist and I wanted to talk to her, so I spoke up.

  “Hi, my name’s Jeremy.”

  “Hi. What would you like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “just for you to talk to me, I guess.”

  Still facing away from me, she adjusted and readjusted her bikini bottom in apparent discomfort and swayed to one side to show me the shelf of sex toys and hair- and skin-care products behind her. I frequented Mother’s bathroom and self-help magazines enough to know what these various items were: all her eye shadow and black arts. She had an unusual way of moving her mouth as she spoke, almost squinting to emphasize her misplaced purple lipstick.

  “What do you like?” she said.

  I was about to answer when the screen rose again. She insisted on another tip for not turning my “underage ass” in to the management. What did I care? It was the London Journal emergency fund, but her certainty that I was going to pay her aggravated me. She was very sexy, like a witch at the beach. She knew she possessed my penis in her little pinkie and she seemed to need to remind me of this debt every half-minute or so. This aggravated me, but she also seemed to understand that I was the type of boy who didn’t know what he liked other than to be further aggravated.

  “So: talk? That’s what you like?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Like what kind of talk?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Like maybe real dirty talk?” she said, squinting.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

  And then, immediately, she began. She spoke with all the pent-up passion of the lady you get on tape when you call time and hear a perfect replication of human speech only without the pauses between numbers for breath. Which, of course, was the excitement of the exchange: her disinterested control. She scratched the glass with her long nails and, moaning into the mike, repeated degradations through her China-doll smile like she was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. I’m not sure the thesis committee needs to dwell overly long on the details: all kinds of analogies between me and most barnyard animals, my identification with my own waste products, my desire to curl up in a ball at her feet. As I dribbled into my denims she faced me directly, though the idea was that she still couldn’t see my eyes in black light.

  She was supposed to have stayed in her booth until I was visiting valet parking, but she peeked out her door—for one last bonus, I guess. So far I’d spent twenty dollars for the opportunity of hugging myself. I gave her five more dollars and she seemed to take pity on me because I was so easy. She scraped her weird purple lips against mine in a lunge.

  “Come back soon, sugar,” she said. “You’re unusual.”

  The cabby had some trouble finding what he called my “hotsy-totsy address.” After a few wrong turns onto one-way streets, he arrived at the destination and kept the meter running while I went inside to get more money for his tip. I had to hope Mother and Father hadn’t returned yet from the Melville party in Palo Alto. They hadn’t. I tipped the cabby one hundred percent, as if to palliate what I assumed was his acute sense of my eccentricity. For reasons I can’t say I understand, I thought he thought I was homosexual. I watched him drive down the hill, then I just stood in the street for a while, shivering on the sidewalk, watching the blinking lights of the city burn.

  HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED at the Typee party in Palo Alto: Michael, the Berkeley military historian Beth met on the march, came to the protest party with his star student, Charles Ellenboegen, my friend from childhood. Beth attended the event partly to support her least favorite professor but more to see Mother and Father for the first time in a month and even more to see Michael, whom everyone let finish introducing Charles to Beth and Mother and Father before the coincidence inaugurated laughter. The entire party wound up on President Lyman’s lawn around midnight, carrying candles and placards of instructive passages from Typee. President Lyman said he was sympathetic but, at quarter of one, kind of tired. Sunday morning, of course, I was subtly insulted by Mother and Father for not having driven an hour and a half south through date-night traffic, and I was raked over the coals even more thoroughly by a letter apparently written in candlelight by Charles, hand delivered by Father. Charles was two years older than I was, an eighteen-year-old sophomore, and he had a lot to share.

  “I have come to grips with the fact that violence will have to be used at one time against the powers that control this country,” went the salutation. “This is materialism—looking at the objective conditions of a situation and drawing a conclusion. I plan to be very disciplined in my studies with few distractions. I’m learning to look at people not in such a linear fashion but in process. I’ve realized that most of my criticism of others was a result of this oversight and my own egotism. Things are neither good nor bad. They just are. This is the materialistic conception of the world: no matter if we would like a pie in the sky or whatever, we gotta deal with what is there. I am also a student of dialectics, which is the science of transformation where change takes place in a material sense. The act of liberating oneself is a fine and splendid idea, Jeremy, but how is it to happen?” I don’t know, Charles. “Many make a practice of standing above society and expressing themselves in some form or another, doing things they were not taught to do, and by doing so they feel they are in fact liberating themselves. However, liberation is a political act.”

  At the Typee party Mother and Father found Michael grim to the point of being gruff, stiff to the point of being stuffed, etc.

  20

  INHERENTLY UNFULFILLABLE fantasies were one
thing and first love, I wanted to believe, was another. Only in California could she have entered my life wearing a tennis dress in January: Barbie Levine, a mid-year transfer student from a public school down the Peninsula, a junior so Jewish as to be Father’s long lost sister who died at sixteen, standing in the doorway of the Journal office. It was late Thursday afternoon, the paper was being printed on Friday, and I was furiously correcting galley sheets when I heard the words: “Is this the office of the London Journal?”

  Which wasn’t a very intriguing question, so I continued correcting galleys without looking up.

  “Well,” she said, “I hate to bother you, you look real busy, but my name is Barbie Levine and I’d like very much to join the staff of the Journal.”

  I just kept making notes in the margins. “Uh-huh,” I said. “What experience do you have?”

  “Features editor for two years at the Aragon Aristocrat. Teacher profiles, student hobbies, music reviews, Q and A columns. You know, that kind of thing.”

  We received high school newspapers from all over the Bay Area and the Aragon Aristocrat was always the one I threw out first. She was the former features editor of the worst high school newspaper in northern California. She used “real” as an adverb. Her voice was polite. She didn’t seem terribly promising. I still hadn’t looked up.

  “As you can see, I’m actually rather busy right now, Barbara. If you’ll sign up for Advanced Journalism, check the assignment sheet next Tuesday, then write me a two-page double-spaced story I’ll—”