The Teachings of Don B.

by Donald Barthelme

  “Righto,” Batman said, and they hurried down the street to the Batmobile, which was parked in a truck zone.

  “Can we stop for a minute on the way?” Fredric asked. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

  “There are some Viceroys in the glove compartment,” Batman said pushing a button. A panel on the dashboard slid back to reveal a fresh carton of Viceroys.

  “I usually prefer Kents,” Fredric said, “but Viceroys are tasty too.”

  “They’re all about the same I find,” Batman said. “Most of the alleged differences in cigarettes are just advertising as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right about that,” Fredric said. The Batmobile sped down the dark streets of Gotham City toward Gotham Airport.

  “Turn on the radio,” Batman suggested. “Maybe we can catch the news or something.”

  Fredric turned on the radio but there was nothing unusual on it.

  At Gotham Airport the jewel merchant Hendrik van Voort was just dismounting from his KLM jet when the Batmobile wheeled onto the landing strip, waved through the gates by respectful airport police in gray uniforms.

  “Well everything seems to be okay,” Batman said. “There’s the armored car waiting to take Mr. van Voort to his destination.”

  “That’s a new kind of armored car isn’t it?” Fredric asked.

  Without a word Batman leaped through the open door of the armored car and grappled with the shadowy figure inside.

  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

  “That’s The Joker’s laugh!” Fredric reflected. “The man inside the armored car must be the grinning clown of crime himself!”

  “Batman! I thought that clue I sent you would leave you completely at sea!”

  “No, Joker! I’m afraid this leaves your plans up in the air!”

  “But not for long Batman! I’m going to bring you down to earth!”

  With a swift movement, The Joker crashed the armored car into the side of the Terminal Building!

  CRASH!

  “Great Scott!” Fredric said to himself. “Batman is stunned! He’s helpless!”

  “You foiled my plans Batman,” The Joker said, “but before the police get here, I’m going to lift that mask of yours and find out who you really are! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

  Fredric watched, horror-stricken. “Great Scott! The Joker has unmasked Batman! Now he knows that Batman is really Bruce Wayne!”

  At this moment Robin, who was supposed to be at Andover, many miles away, landed the Batplane on the airstrip and came racing toward the wrecked armored car! But The Joker, alerted, grasped a cable lowered by a hovering helicopter and was quickly lifted skyward! Robin paused at the armored car and put the mask back on Batman’s face!

  “Hello Robin!” Fredric called. “I thought you were at Andover!”

  “I was but I got a sudden feeling Batman needed me so I flew here in the Batplane,” Robin said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine,” Fredric said. “But we left the Batplane in the garage, back at the Bat-Cave. I don’t understand.”

  “We have two of everything,” Robin explained. “Although it’s not generally known.”

  With Fredric’s aid Robin carried the stunned Batman to the waiting Batmobile. “You drive the Batmobile back to the Bat-Cave and I’ll follow in the Batplane,” Robin said. “All right?”

  “Check,” Fredric said. “Don’t you think we ought to give him a little brandy or something?”

  “That’s a good idea,” Robin said. “Press that button there on the dashboard. That’s the brandy button.”

  Fredric pressed the button and a panel slid back, revealing a bottle of B & B and the appropriate number of glasses.

  “This is pretty tasty,” Fredric said, tasting the B & B. “How much is it a fifth?”

  “Around eight dollars,” Robin said. “There, that seems to be restoring him to his senses.”

  “Great Scott,” Batman said, “what happened?”

  “The Joker crashed the armored car and you were stunned,” Fredric explained.

  “Hi Robin what are you doing here? I thought you were up at school,” Batman said.

  “I was,” Robin said. “Are you okay now? Can you drive home okay?”

  “I think so,” Batman said. “What happened to The Joker?”

  “He got away,” Fredric said, “but not before lifting your mask while you lay stunned in the wreckage of the armored car.”

  “Yes Batman,” Robin said seriously, “I think he learned your real identity.”

  “Great Scott!” Batman said. “If he reveals it to the whole world it will mean the end of my career as a crime fighter! Well, it’s a problem.”

  They drove seriously back to the Bat-Cave, thinking about the problem. Later, in Bruce Wayne’s study, Bruce Wayne, Fredric, and Robin, who was now dressed in the conservative Andover clothes of Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne’s ward, mulled the whole thing over between them.

  “What makes The Joker tick I wonder?” Fredric said. “I mean, what are his real motivations?”

  “Consider him at any level of conduct,” Bruce said slowly, “in the home, on the street, in interpersonal relations, in jail—always there is an extraordinary contradiction. He is dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and a scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and an abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and a puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, Republican and Democrat, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day—I tell you frankly, the man is a mess.”

  “That’s extremely well said Bruce,” Fredric stated. “I think you’ve given really a very thoughtful analysis.”

  “I was paraphrasing what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis,” Bruce replied.

  “Well it’s very brilliant just the same,” Fredric noted. “I guess I’d better go home now.”

  “We could all use a little sleep,” Bruce Wayne said. “By the way Fredric how are the Grit sales coming along? Are you getting many subscriptions?”

  “Yes quite a few Bruce,” Fredric said. “I’ve been doing particularly well in the wealthier sections of Gotham City although the strength of Grit is usually found in rural areas. By the way Dick if you want to borrow my language records to help you with your French you can come by Saturday.”

  “Thanks Fredric I’ll do that,” Dick said.

  “Okay Bruce,” Fredric said, “HI see you next Tuesday night probably unless something comes up.”

  THE AUTHOR

  My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse than the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.

  This one, as I say, is even worse than the others (two American Book Award nominations and a Literary Guild alternate). My poor brother Sampson, who appears as “Rafe,” is found, in the first chapter, performing a laparoscopy upon a patient who had been under the impression she was paying for quite another procedure. My brother is a very busy and popular doctor, and a hiatus in his office staffing was responsible for this understandable if lamentable mixup. What the book does not say is that the laparosc
opy disclosed a fair amount of endometriosis which was then dealt with in a highly skilled and professional manner, thus averting considerable patient disgruntlement. Mother never puts anything good about any of us into her books.

  “Rafe”’s relations with “Molly” (read Callie, Sam’s wife) are, as you might imagine, not spared. Some time ago Sam and Callie had a little disagreement about his conduct during the Miami OBGYN meeting when he was missing for some hours during a presentation on ultrasound and she learned that he had been out drinking with a bunch of heavily armed survivalists who liked to shoot up lifesize plywood cutouts of Gorbachev with their (more or less illegal) Ingram M-11s which they can fire one-handed with a can of Stroh’s in the other. Girl survivalists were also present. OK, so my brother Sam is a gun nut. Why tell everybody in the world? Intervention is what surgeons are all about. How my mother gleans these details is beyond me, as none of us has spoken to her since 1974, when Fumed Oak was published.

  My mother’s treatment of my sister Virginia—“Alabama” in the new book (Mother’s masks are clear glass)—is flatly vicious. Virginia has had some tough times of late, what with the accident and the fallout from the accident. In The Bough “Alabama” has a blood alcohol reading of 0.18 percent immediately after the crash, and that happens to be the right number, as many of Virginia’s friends have recognized. What is truly reprehensible is the (painfully accurate) analysis of my sister’s character. Virginia did her dissertation on Emerson; so does “Alabama.” That certain passages in “Alabama”’s dissertation offer striking parallels to recent work by Joel Porte (Harvard University Press) and Eric Cheyfitz (Johns Hopkins University Press) is announced for the first time in Bough; I had not thought Mother that much of a scholar. The line in the book “They shouldn’t let me go into a bar without training wheels on” is pure Virginia.

  My other brother, Denis (the “good brother” in the book), has asked his lawyers to look into the legal aspects. They have told him that suing one’s mother is an awkward business at best and the appearance of filial impiety more or less cancels, for jurors, any merit such a suit might possess. They also pointed out, very reasonably, that the public nature of such an action, involving a well-known author, would tend to call attention to some of the very things we are not anxious to emphasize: for example, Denis’s practice of purchasing U.S. Army morphine Syrettes from disaffected Medical Corps master sergeants and the ingenious places he finds to hide them in the office (hollowed-out cigars, his computer’s surge suppressor) and the consequences of this for his brokerage business, all finely detailed in The Bough. I must say I have never read a more telling account of the jouissance produced by high-grade morphine. What busy little bee brought her this news?

  The Bough is No. 9 this week on the Los Angeles Times list. Thus does Stamford provide titillation for Santa Barbara, by way of Mother’s bee-loud glade in Old Lyme. Somehow she uncovered the specifics of my “theft” of several inconsequential medicine bundles (cloth, painted wood, feathers) from the Native American Institute, where I am the former curator-at-large. I say “theft” because I wish to be as hard on myself as possible in this matter; others might call it “creative deaccessioning,” and the Ghost Dance material (drum charts, dance notation) received in exchange, which the board would never have realized the value of, will be my monument. Yes, the finder’s fee charged to the transaction was quite substantial, in the high six figures, as Mother does not fail to note, but Willie Leaping Deer and I earned every penny of it. No one who fully understands the Ghost Dance, whose object was to render the participants impervious to the encroachments of the white man (rifle bullets included), would have hesitated for a moment. “Mark” has a ridiculous affair with a Dakota shaman of ambiguous sex, and none of that is true except the trance scene; furthermore, the chanting on that occasion involved no intoxicants save Pinafore, which I was teaching Wokodah and which he greatly enjoyed.

  It is not that we, my mother’s children, lead or claim to lead exemplary lives. But couldn’t she widen her horizons just a bit?

  “Mother, why do you do this to me?” I asked her recently.

  Mother is handsome still, and bears a carefully cultivated resemblance to Virginia Woolf.

  “What?” she said. “Do what?”

  I was holding up a copy of The Bough. “This,” I said, more or less pointing it at her.

  “But you’re mine,” she said.

  I WAS GRATIFIED THIS WEEK . . .

  I was gratified this week to learn that I am a Human Resource. I learned this from a letter I received from the American Bicentennial Research Institute, Inc., of Dallas, Texas. The letter began:

  The American Bicentennial Research Institute takes pleasure in bringing to your attention that you [my name inserted here] have been selected to appear as a reference source in its LIBRARY OF HUMAN RESOURCES. . . . The expressed aim of the Institute is to recognize and methodically classify those persons or groups of persons who have . . . As a part of this effort, The American Bicentennial Research Institute is preparing for publication THE LIBRARY OF HUMAN RESOURCES, a unified compilation of microfiche directories intended to serve as . . . As your inclusion in THE LIBRARY OF HUMAN RESOURCES is by virtue of your value as an outstanding individual at the close of the First Bicentennium of the United States of America, we have prepared for you a beautiful parchment certificate, personalized with your name. . . .

  The beautiful parchment certificate would cost me, I learned, fifteen dollars, and I could order one (but only one) duplicate beautiful parchment certificate for ten dollars additional.

  Well, of course I was thrilled to be certified as a Human Resource, even though I hadn’t done anything particularly resourceful lately except send Ramsey Clark a campaign contribution in the amount of $101.00. A Human Resource—it was very like, and possibly better than, being named a Historic District or a National Treasure, and all I had to do was mail my twenty-five dollars to 6116 North Central Expressway, Dallas, Texas. Then I noticed at the bottom of the letter a line printed in the same elegant script of the letterhead and reading, “Not Affiliated with the United States Government.” This puzzled me. Was it the case that the American Bicentennial Research Institute, Inc., was in some way displeased with the United States Government? Had the ABRI seceded from the U.S. Govt.? And at such a moment, too—a moment when we should all join hands bicentennially and have a party? And was I, perhaps, in some way to blame? (I accept blame from any quarter, just like praise.) Had the issue between the ABRI and the U.S. been precisely my nomination to the high status of Human Resource, with the ABRI championing my candidacy and the U.S. saying, “Well, look, if you’re going to let this sort of person in, this sort of person that we, as a government, view as rather an underachiever, human-resourcewise . . .” Worried to flinders now by the whole affair, I took my twenty-five dollars and invested it in cans of chicken noodle soup, which is appreciating, I notice at my local market, at the rate of something like thirteen per cent a year—a sort of government bond with a considerably higher return than the regular ones. I shall greet 1976 certificateless but with faith in America intact. Where else can one profit either by being bullcentennialish on soup or by bullcentenniuming on parchment?

  WHEN I DIDN’T WIN . . .

  When I didn’t win the forty-one million dollars in the New York State Lottery last week, I had to change my plans a bit. I had gone as far as to just sort of tentatively write out a few checks. (I didn’t sign them, of course, lest one might accidentally get into the mail prematurely—I was prudent.) But now that the results are in I’m kind of just sitting here looking at the checks. And studying them, I think they represent a moderately sound set of decisions—nothing spectacularly wonderful but not the worst I ever made. In short, I didn’t lose my head, or anything. I handled the whole thing pretty well, it seems to me, without a lawyer or a financial adviser, or even a stern, thrifty spouse.

  The thirty-five thousand dollars to Audio Horizons for the pair of Infinity Refere
nce Standard speakers was the main personal item, except for the five hundred and fifty dollars to Lucchese, of San Antonio, for a new pair of boots, and the twenty-three dollars and eighty-four cents to Balducci’s, in the Village, for two pounds of oyster mushrooms. If you sauté the oyster mushrooms in butter and strew them wantonly over your pasta, people think you’re a superb cook, but oyster mushrooms are a shade on the dear side, so I don’t buy them very often. Nobody (to my knowledge) makes better-looking cowboy boots than Mr. Lucchese, and the speakers have twelve midranges each, incomparable bass, and highs that could be bounced off the space shuttle. Self-indulgence, yes, but, proportionately, perhaps not overmuch.

  All the people I saw quoted in the newspapers said that if they won they were going to build a new house for their mothers. Well, my mother already has a pretty-good house, in Decatur, Illinois, and I don’t think she wants a new one. She might want a new husband, because my father has been extremely cranky lately, especially since she made him stop wearing his John Deere gimme hat in public places, but there’s not much I can do about that. I thought it might be nice, though, if she could have a chat with A. J. Ayer, the British philosopher, whom she’s been a fan of ever since she read Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936. So there’s a check here made out to Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, with the amount unspecified, because I didn’t know what his fee for this sort of one-on-one encounter might be. I really regret that this won’t happen. Professor Ayer would probably have had a smashing time with Mother—maybe he’d even have learned a thing or two.

  And all the people quoted in the newspapers were also going to send money to Africa for famine relief if they won. I’ve already sent twenty-five bucks; I more or less felt off the hook there. But some kind of damn philanthropy is indicated when you’re a Max Winner, I figured—it would mitigate the guilt, for one thing. So I wrote twenty checks for five hundred thousand dollars each, dating them 1985, 1986, 1987, and so on, to a wheat farmer I know in Montana, together with a covering letter instructing him to send wheat, in whatever tonnage the money would buy, and carefully packaged, to Africa. I don’t think the crisis will be resolved in twenty years. My friend is a young guy but very reliable. This disembarrassed me of about half my fortune, after taxes, and I felt—well, lighter.