Anything Can Happen (7 page)

To be sure, this hobby of mine did not make me the ideal social companion, but this is how it is when career and popularity are in conflict. The "fat friend" line earned me the everlasting hatred of a plumpish girl in high school, who was standing beside a friend of mine when I tossed in my movie question. I tried to explain that I was merely quoting Stewart Granger as Beau Brummel when he was miffed with King George III, but she seemed uninterested.

The lines I chose were never the garden variety, such as "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or "Frankly, my dear..." and so forth, but rather ones that had a special attraction for me. The other day I heard such a line in a movie called
Jack Frost,
in which someone who was attempting to rid the world of a large maniacal snowman, explained: "We tried blowing him up, but it only pissed him off."

For many years, there were two lines I had never been able to slip into any conversation. The first of these, I never did get in. It occurred in
Earthquake
, one of the disaster films of the 1970s, in which a man was stalking a young woman to do terrible things to her. One would have thought that an earthquake would have been enough to divert his attention, but he was determined. At the height of the quake, he finally cornered his quarry and was about to jump her, when George Kennedy (a cop, of course) appeared, threw the attacker to the ground, and shot him dead. Consoling the shaking woman, Kennedy said: "I don't know what it is. Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys."

The other line was much more unusual and exotic so it presented a much greater challenge. It was spoken by Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in one of the Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s when Watson was attempting to impress a couple on a ship who evidently were not familiar with Holmes's exploits. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?" asked Watson, referring to one of the great detective's most famous cases. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?"

Years, decades, passed, and I never came close to a moment when I might work in that line. The degree of difficulty was steep; there were so many elements to the Watson remark. If one heard an opening for the rat, there would still be the matter of its size. If the rat and the size were there, one still had to contend with Sumatra. Above these concerns stood the context. In order to make the question really fit a situation, the opening had to allow for an attitude of superior surprise. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?" Meaning: "Who has not?"

In the late 1970s I was writing for the
Washington Post,
and I had all but given up on my quest. In all those intervening years not a single conversation had come remotely close to offering me my longed-for opportunity. Then, one day, some friends and I went out to lunch, and it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse. There was some chatter about Mickey, to which I had been paying scant attention—how much he had contributed to American culture. The usual harmless claptrap. Suddenly, one of the guys sat up with a quizzical look and asked, "Has there ever been a bigger rodent?"

First, I smiled.

When the twelve bombs hit the drab, gray hospital, six people were killed and twenty wounded. Two female patients were sliced to pieces by the shrapnel. The year is 1982, spring. The Beirut hospital is for people suffering from mental and psychological diseases. Among its patients are Lebanese, Palestinians, Maronites, Druze, Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Jews. An Armenian lies curled up on the second floor landing near a lateral gap that looks like an expressionless mouth. Flies collect on his bare feet. Nearby, a young woman cannot control her body. Her arms flail, her legs buckle; she smiles sweetly with her writhing lips. An old woman sits up in bed tearing a round slice of bread to small bits and tossing them on the floor. The children are penned in a small, dark space; they smell of urine; their thighs are stained with excrement. One boy shivers, another laughs. A legless girl spoons mush into the mouth of a younger one. A woman lurches forward and shouts in English: "I am normal!"

I think of these people frequently, even now, twenty years later, as I walk the clean, free beach near my home. I think of them because I cannot help it, and I realize: Be grateful for those you meet who seem the most distant from you, the strangest and most alien. They are the closest.

Should your name appear on a list of those about to be executed; should your name appear on a list posted in the town square of citizens slated for execution; should your name be, say, fourth or fifth on the list—there it is, no question of misidentification, it's you, it's your name, sure as shootin'—consider your next step very carefully.

You can, of course, try to escape by boarding the next Greyhound out of town, and, if they haven't blocked the bus stations, train stations, and airports, you'll be in Grand Rapids by nightfall.

You can go to the authorities and protest. You haven't done anything to make them want to execute you. You're innocent, and you can prove it. There must be some mistake.

Mistake! That's it. Another person—one who truly deserves to be executed—happens to share your name. And, indeed, it must be that person, that doppelganger, whom the authorities want dead. So, if they would simply go out and find that other person, the one who has your name, well, this mess would be cleared up, and you'd be free as a bird.

Then again, you can always walk up and tear down the list, tear it down and tear it up. And you can take the torn-up list and walk straight up to the authorities and wake them up and tell them that as long as they're up, they can shove it up their asses.

Or you can be executed.

I can take a punch. Maybe not two punches or three. But one, to the belly or the face. I can take a punch.

And a snub. I've been snubbed a lot, so I know that I can take a snub. Walk past me here. Don't invite me there. I can take it.

I can take extreme heat and extreme cold. The heat was overwhelming in Thailand and in parts of Lebanon and Israel. I climbed the Rock of Masada in a hundred degrees, which was no fun. But I could take it. And the cold, too, in Vermont and New Hampshire, those winters when the gas froze in the tank.

And a slur. I can take a slur. Call me kike, Hebe. I can take that, too, though I'd probably want to find out if
you
can take a punch.

The company of gossips. I can take that, as well. I don't like it, but I can live with it. And the company of fakes and tyrants and amiable accommodators—for brief periods.

Disorder. It's difficult for a Virgo. But I can do it. And nameless fears. I deal with them as well as I can. And shocks, I can take shocks. And I can take a joke.

And ingratitude; I kind of expect it. And cheapness and pettiness. Even rejection. I can take that. And an unlucky streak. Treachery, if you must. It gets me down, but I can take it.

Things I can't take: Your pain, the children's pain, the verdict of your glance.

Everything you did that was worthwhile or worthless will be swallowed up by the same oblivion.

De Bello Gallico

Every first-year Latin student learns from Julius Caesar that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Well, well! All right!

King Lear

It's stupendous, of course. But didn't Lear notice some difference between the characters of his daughters
before
he divvied up the kingdom?

The Prophet

Sophisticates like to make fun of Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet.
I don't know why. Here, for example, is a typical passage: "Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward." What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?

The Bible

From John 3:8: "The wind bloweth where it list—eth." Excuse me?

Pope

Alexander Pope, the proudest, not to say touchiest of men, wrote: "Thus let me love, unseen, unknown; thus unlamented let me die; steal from the world, and not a stone tell where I lie." The stone would have been unnecessary. Here's where he lied.

Shakespeare

If you wish to impress your friends, you can interrupt them every time they unknowingly quote Shakespeare. Here's a sampler: "The dogs of war"; "a charmed life"; "yeoman's service"; "thereby hangs the tale"; "foul play"; "melted ... into thin air"; "cold comfort"; "my mind's eye"; "for ever and a day"; "one fell swoop"; and "lay on, Macduff"—for which one has to know someone named Macduff.

Tocqueville and Dr. Johnson

Even though it is de rigueur to quote either or both of these men in any speech or article, they were not the same person. Johnson, particularly, has been misrepresented in history, mainly because Boswell was easily amused, and so he played up the wise guy in Johnson—"Sir," this and "Sir," that—followed by what passed for a zinger in eighteenth-century London. The real Dr. Johnson was a physically unattractive, tormented man who had a psychotic fear of death and yet showed a magnificent affinity for the underclass, of which he was one. If you want to quote the real Johnson, try this: "The test of a civilization is how it treats its poor."

Kafka's
The Metamorphosis

Probably about a hangover, but still mesmerizing.

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights,
and
Rebecca

As much fun as these three novels are individually, think how exciting they would be if they were combined. Heathcliff storms after Rebecca, who laughs in his face; he kills her. Maxim de Winter marries Jane Eyre and treats her miserably. Rochester hires Catherine Earnshaw, who becomes his first wife and sets fire to the house, aided by Mrs. Danvers, who has set fire to Heathcliff's house. Everybody has a great time, and there is lots of sturming and dranging. And all packed into a single book that in no way violates the original three, which no one can figure out anyway. Narrated by Ethan Frome. Just a suggestion.

If no one had invented time, everything would happen all at once. Your birth, your schooling, your preposterous behavior at the prom, your marriage, the birth of your children, the scorn of your children, your éclaircissements, your denouements—all would occur in the blink of an eye, and everything in life would be accordioned like the paper sheath of a drinking straw, just before a drop of water turns it into a writhing snake.

But this simile is so inadequate. It is impossible to imagine a world without time, where no time hangs heavy, and no hands have time on them, and no one serves time because time serves no one, and there are neither the best of times nor the worst.

Someone, you see, had to think it up—a Cro-Magnon, perhaps, after he had knocked off the Neanderthals because they could not speak and were a waste of something—perhaps one who noticed that this moment was not like the previous moment and who conjectured that the next moment, the moment to come, was likely to be different as well.

I like to think of that person: The mother-to-be who watched her belly swell from month to month and realized that something miraculous was going to emerge; the artist who, displeased with the red ox he had just painted on the wall of his cave, realized that he could do another picture later; or the hunter who, as the lion was about to leap on his head, realized that something was not on his side.

I could spend hours wondering who that person was, and how he or she realized in a flash of invention, that from then on, there would be a then on, and a there was, and an is.

Oh, hell. I'll say what I mean. I want more time.

The monumental degree of athletic difficulty you will encounter when attempting it; the excruciating lower-back pain, nerve pain, and muscle pain you will have as body parts are made to do what they were never meant to do; the exposing nakedness required of you and the shattering embarrassment and humiliation you will suffer should passers-by catch you in the act; the unique conclusion, ending in no pleasure whatsoever, but rather in the opposite, a heaving sorrow, full of gasping and despair, especially when you realize that word of this will get abroad and that others will remind you of your ignoble behavior for all eternity.
That
is why I told you to go fuck yourself.

Groton; Harvard; Ambition; Infatuation; Love; Marriage; Ambition; Self-Inspection; Weakness; Doubt; Disintegration; Fear; Children; Ambition; Groton; Harvard.

Good-bye.

Let's throw a party.

She says: The first known bird is the archaeopteryx.

He says: The Chinese invented the clock.

She says: Larry Doby was the second Negro League player to make it to the majors.

He says: Gyula is a town on the White Koros River near the Romanian border.

She says: I paid the AmEx bill on time.

He says: They say you didn't, and there's going to be a late charge.

She says: They are in error.

He says: There will be penalties.

She says: Fine.

He says: Fine, and flushed with anger, he goes to the bookshelf to take down the
The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball.

Here's what I don't like. I don't like knowing that I will have lived sixty, seventy, or eighty years without having rid the world of barbarians, tyrants, traitors, bullies, murderers, liars, thieves, crooks, and backbiters. What's more, I will not have cured all the world's diseases, from the sniffles to the Ebola virus. Neither will I have prevented droughts, floods, and earthquakes. I will not have eradicated world poverty and famine. I will not have put an end to injustice, or even to casual cruelty.