Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (27 page)

There was, when younger, the time he got even with a bratty little boy who often came with his parents to visit. The kid was supposed to be bright, but he was a handful, darting into rooms whose doors were closed, shrieking for no noticeable reason, picking his nose and wiping his boogers on the curtains if they were curtaining nearby, or the rug if he were playing there, cutting anything innocently flat and cardboardly stiff with sewing scissors, throwing blocks, and making faces at Luther when no one else was looking, thrusting his tongue rapidly in and out of his cupped hand, a gesture Luther didn’t even understand at the time, so it was very unlikely the whiz kid did.

Luther’s father had just painted the downstairs bathroom a glistening white, and the wall under its little diamond-leaded window now called out for a sign. So, with a big black crayon, Luther drew an asshole there. The asshole, which he puckered, was accompanied by an arrow pointing toward the toilet, and by the message: put it there. Then—Luther smiled at this early display of his cleverness—in lighter smaller print he put “looser did this” under the drawing way down by the baseboard.

As if sent by heaven, Jerome Penner discovered the graffiti first and let out an incontinent howl, but to Luther’s surprise it was his mother who shook the brat back and forth like a mop in front of his parents, screaming at him so angrily it sounded like Hungarian (indeed, it could have been, since that was her parents’ native tongue). Luther had to admire the way his mother’s hair flew about her face, and how her arm was working away like a connecting rod. Visible annoyance, even yelling, might have been acceptable to the Penners’ shocked and dismayed visitors, but playing yo-yo with their future Edison was not, nor did they enjoy being ordered into the bathroom to observe its desecration.
The realization that the crayon marks could be scrubbed off was slow in coming, but when that recognition did arrive, it could not save the situation, since the outrage of the image and the spiteful cowardice of its feeble attempt to shift the blame to Luther were fuel enough to make and sustain considerable steam. The little vandal’s father (as Luther jocularly describes him) protested that his boy was too smart to misspell
Luther
, and Luther for a moment feared exposure: what if the kid were asked, or were to offer up a proper spelling on the spot? But there was too much anger in the air for that, and the visit ended abruptly amid the protests and accusations of windmilling wives, and the strutting glares of their spouses, sufficient to peel walls.

This revenge could not have had a better outcome, except that Luther was, though innocent and terribly put upon, still required to scrub the scurrilous drawing from the wall. It turned out that, beneath the more explicit hairy orifice, a gray ghost lurked, and that the arrow also palely remained, pointing its faint way, suggesting a rule of life.

What was the difference between revenge and vandalism? between restoring your damaged honor and behaving like a little prick? Sure, he could put pinholes in ripe fruit, place an earthworm on a deli plate, soak his aunt’s Aspergum in alum, and he could read with pleasure about the dishonored queen who served her husband his mistress’ heart. Poisoning loved ones over long periods held his interest, as well as wars of recovery like that of the Greeks against the Trojans. Sing, goddess, the
Iliad
should have begun, of the revenge of Chryses, the priest of Apollo whose daughter was taken to be Agamemnon’s whore; and of the revenge of Apollo then, who sent a plague to punish the Greeks; and finally of the revenge of Achilleus, who sulked in his tent because his concubine had been taken away to replace Agamemnon’s mistress, since the king had had to give up his new pussy (unentered, he argued, unpetted, unbussed)
to fend off Apollo’s anger; and sing too of how Achilleus remained there, covered with canvas, to play every violet evening with the penis of his pal Patroklos, until Patroklos met death in daytime while hiding in the armor of Achilleus; whereupon the sulker went forth in a rage to revenge the loss of his pal; and how, at last, Hector’s corpse was dragged around the walls of Troy to ensure that the Trojans’ hero would live his afterlife in bruised bits and tattered pieces.

Penner learned that great historical epochs were characterized by an advanced sense of individual honor, the pursuit of
gloire
, and were consequently marked by many imaginative acts of revenge. The Classical Greek, the High Roman, both the English and the Italian Renaissance, were packed with such self-justifying hijinks.

Late in Luther Penner’s senior year, Syph suddenly stopped asking him whether he wanted to buy a duck, and began calling Luther “Mary the fairy!” in the loudest voice he could muster. This required a reply, but it could not be one which would cause more name-calling or earn Penner further blows. Shielded by traffic and safely across the street, Penner shouted: I’ve a riddle for you, Syph. Why is your mother like a police station? The answer to this riddle doubtless perplexed Syph considerably. He was not clever enough to guess the answer, but bright enough to understand that its arrival would not make him happy. To inflict perplexity upon your dishonorer is sometimes enough.

Learning from this success, when he’s called a bad name now, Penner told me, he replies by flaring his nose and saying
“Jou moer!”
in a venomous tone—an expression he picked up out of Afrikaans like a bag lady dips a dainty from the trash. Luther went so far as to memorize several sentences of invincible vileness in a language he said was Cushitic. One expression, he claimed, asserted that your enemy broke wind without pause. I couldn’t tell whether the sounds he made were in a language or
not. He has also invented gestures of which no one else knows the meaning, such as putting a fisted thumb in his ear or lifting his left leg slowly from the ground.

The revenge Penner came to admire most was that of Alcibiades, once a ward of Pericles, called by all the beautiful, a lovelorn lover of Socrates according to Plato, and, as a general and statesman, extolled by Thucydides for intelligence, skill, and courage. Chosen to lead the Athenian fleet against Syracuse, Alcibiades was accused, just before the armada was to sail, of obscenely mutilating the phallic statues of Hermes, and thus outraging the god of crossways and travel. Unjustly removed from his command, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, since only the defeat of the Athenian invasion could satisfy the sort of dishonor he had suffered. There he advised the Spartan king, Agis I, as to strategy, with such success that Athens was brought down like a last-act curtain.

After a falling-out with Agis, Alcibiades did some braintrusting for the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, urging him to enter the war on the Spartan side (thereby doubling his revenge quotient). He was even able to return to Athens and earn more military triumphs there because the Athenians knew he had been unjustly disgraced, and understood his treason as an appropriately proportional response. When that scheming brute, the Spartan commander Lysander, defeated the Athenians at sea, Alcibiades, though far away on another mission, was blamed for the disaster, and exiled once more for his excellence. Luther Penner regarded this as an insult sufficient to justify an entire life bent on revenge. Alcibiades’ days were numbered, however. Seeking safety with still another satrap, this time the Persian pig Pharnabazus (whose name Penner could never bear to pronounce, and whom he referred to always with disgust as that Persian pig, popping the
p
’s needed to produce the phrase like others do bubble gum), Alcibiades was murdered by his host,
the aforementioned Persian pig, at the behest of Lysander, to whom the Persian pig wished to suck up.

What was a man like Luther Penner to do? He hadn’t a fleet to lead, estates to patrol, daughters to guard. He hadn’t been thrown from his home by an angry parent, or falsely accused, or wrongly jailed. He had never been the friend of a revolutionary so he might enjoy a little guilt by association. Even when fired from this or that small job, Penner had in all fairness frankly to admit he deserved to be canned.

Movies were not helpful. Many of them were rituals of revenge, of course; however, rarely did these celluloid reenactments add anything to its understanding. Penner quite liked
Hang ’em High
, a flick in which Clint Eastwood stars as an innocent strung up by a vengeful posse. He escapes that fate in order to do the dirty on the vigilantes, one by one. The venge-film always begins with a crime against the hero: his daughter is raped or kidnapped or killed, wife and child are murdered, his house is burned, a community is terrorized, worse yet, the hero’s horse is stolen, his dog is kicked. The greater the injury, the more violence the hero will be allowed later; and the more painful, cruel, and horrific the eventual recompense is, the better. Individuals may be speared by a harpoon gun, consumed by burning gasoline, plunged into a vat of acid, pulled through a jet engine or torn apart by tractors revved in opposite directions, stabbed in the eye by an icicle, simply beaten and kicked to death, buried in the sand to their neck by Apaches, or by symbolic circumstance the way poor old Winnie is in
Happy Days
, without a trace of guilt appearing on the actor’s murdering hands or any evident darkening of his vengeful character, while applause can be heard coming from an approving, pleasured, and heartened audience. The well-deserved death of Indians can be numbered in terms of burned villages and sabered encampments; red-legged marauding comancheros can
be Gatling’d by the dozens; over-the-border towns are often burned so entirely to the ground the graveyard goes up in smoke and ashes—it’s all quite OK and great fun—we are soaked in satisfaction.

Not everything is permitted. The avenging angel may not bugger the bastard who raped his sister, wife, or daughter. He may not kill anybody’s cow, and he has to keep his hands off kids. But he can shoot the rapist’s cock into kingdom come and then cauterize the wound with a hot iron; he can carve up the cow if his wagon train is starving; he can teach the kids how to set traps and aim guns.

He must not cut the whore’s nose, scald the cat, spill milk, or fail to relish simple greens and homemade biscuits.

Plays, poems, tales, and images of vengeance have pleasured the human heart since God set the standard by sending Adam and Eve out to labor in the dust, snow, and rain. There can be no doubt of that. The reason? because there are way too many wrongs in this world and far too little justice. In any afterworld, Hell would have to be hellish to stay even with Heaven. Moreover, the meek who were not merely meek beneath their meekness, but mighty inside it, were hourly humiliated by an unfeeling multitude.

And by Nature. Which filled them with longings. With bestirrings. And left them in despair. In his journals Penner complained of having naked bodies on the brain. All the temptations of Saint Anthony were paraded past him: he was offered a book of blank checks signed by the Persian pig Pharnabazus; a peach in the shape of a schoolboy’s testicle was then held out to him, into which he sunk his tangle of teeth; next a lectern of teak appeared, behind which he was urged to speak his piece; suddenly he stood in the air above an arena where his tormentors were being eaten by large lizards or strangled by squids, then equally suddenly he’s tripped up by bird wake and falls forty feet
upon his face; a book of beliefs is opened in front of that flattened face, suggesting he subscribe to the tenets of the Paternians, the Marcosians, or the Montanists
tout de suite
; he is beset by daydreams of the Annunciation—not of Mary being entered by God’s angel, but of the winged phallus itself, dew tipped, its wings pulsing like a butterfly feeding from a flower; at last, lifted up again, he becomes a constellation of falling stars. Penner would hit his head with his hands, with a fist strike his thigh, once again be required to tame his member. It occurred to him, finally, that the only way to get even with Nature would be to formulate and propagate fallacious descriptions of it. Philosophers had been engaged in this felicitous enterprise for ages. But at the time Penner came to this conclusion, he did not know what new illusion to promote.

Like someone drowning, Penner flailed away at his world. Always anonymously, he posted envelopes to his enemies (the list grew almost hourly) on which he printed:
how much you mean to me
. Inside, the recipient would find a carefully folded blank sheet. To mail-order houses which had begun cramming his box with their gaudy catalogues, he packaged dried dog turds tied together like small logs with a ribbon and a message which read:
you send me shit I don’t want; I send you shit you don’t want
. The pleasure he felt when he imagined his victims opening their presents was considerable, and he did dwell on the scenes, filling them with appropriate details: the dog dung falling from frightened fingers, yelps of distaste, groans of disgust, each in a cartoon balloon; or he pictured a puzzled gaze flung at the empty page followed by slow recognition and a gradual increase of anger; however, he also understood the inherent crudity of it all, the cowardice too, for the anonymity he had to insist on was not altogether noble; it was, in a way, downright demeaning. To lower yourself in order to get even, he realized, was not an ideal procedure. He was also probably breaking some federal law.
Luther eventually replaced his scatalogical rejoinders with an adaptive one: he figured out a method of getting his marks on the mailing lists of sleazy novelty hawkers, lingerie manufacturers, the floggers of erotic toys and devices, and he brought their addresses to the greasy attention of plain-wrapper pornography peddlers and no-exam insurance companies. The way Penner got a person’s name put on these mailing lists is neat and ingenious, but I don’t wish to encourage this practice, so I’ll not divulge it here. For the few who he judged might be pleased to be placed in the way of such sludge, Penner arranged for them to be solicited by the Knights of Columbus, or hectored by the Seventh Day Adventists, or threatened by the Nation of Islam instead, and, in addition, to receive with menacing regularity the
Mormon Monthly, The Jewish Daily Forward
, the
American Legion Magazine
, or the
Christian Science Sentinal
on a regular basis. It was one of these latter little revenges which provided me with the program by which I might follow in my master’s footsteps.