Sweet Thursday

25 Old Jingleballicks

Doc got back from his collecting about four-thirty. He had over a hundred chitons bound with string to little glass plates to keep them from curling, and submerged in sea water in his collecting buckets were hundreds of brittlestars.

Now, killing is one of the delicate operations of a marine zoologist. You want the animal to resemble its living self, but this is impossible. In death the color changes, just as it does with us. Also, if any violent means of killing is used there is constriction, and in the case of brittlestars the death struggle causes the animal to shed its arms.

In the front room of Western Biological, Doc poured out part of the sea water from his wooden bucket. Then he moved the brittlestars to a large, flat-bottomed glass dish and poured some sea water on top of them. The little animals with the snakelike arms whipped about for a moment and then settled down. When they were quite still and resting Doc added a little fresh water to the dish. The arms stirred nervously. He waited a while and then added a little more fresh water. To a sea animal, fresh water is a poison, and if it is slowly introduced it is as subtle as morphine. It relaxes and soothes until the little creature goes to sleep and dies without violence.

Doc sat down to wait for the poison to act. He sensed that there was something wrong. What could it be? Had he forgotten something? He felt all right, the small hangover of the morning was gone. Of course! It was the case of Bohemia beer over at the Patrón’s. His subconscious must have been reminding him of the beer. He looked out the window toward the grocery. And there was something wrong with that too. And finally he saw. His windows were clean. He turned and looked around the laboratory. The records were piled neatly on the shelves, not falling all over themselves. The floor was shining, and that smell—that was soap.

He moved to the kitchen. His dishes were clean, the pans scoured and shining. A delicious odor came from a pot on the gas stove. He lifted the lid. Brown meat juice bubbled up through carrots and onions, and a stick of white celery swam like a fish.

Doc went back to his table and sat down. His cot was made up and smooth and the turned-down sheet was clean. Suddenly a sense of desolation came over him—a great sadness that was like warmth. The toes of his lined-up shoes peeked out at him from under the bed.

The poor kid, he thought. Oh, the poor damn kid! I wonder if she’s trying to repay—I hope I haven’t done anything bad. My God, I hope she didn’t misunderstand anything! What did I say? I know I didn’t do anything, but what did I say? I wouldn’t hurt Suzy for the world. He glanced around again. She sure does a job of cleaning, he thought. The stew smells wonderful too. He poured a little more fresh water into the glass dish. The arms of the brittlestars were arranging themselves in small spirals. They hardly moved when the fresh poison was introduced.

The clean laboratory made Doc nervous and apprehensive. And there was something missing from himself, something lost. The lowest voice of all was still. In his black depths he was somehow comforted. He went to the record shelf: not Bach…no, not Buxtehude…not Palestrina[90] either. His hand strayed to an album not used in a long time. He had opened it before he knew what he was doing. And then he smiled and put the first record on the turntable: Mozart’s Don Giovanni.[91] It started its overture, and Doc, still smiling, went to the kitchen and stirred the stew. “Don Giovanni,” he said. “Is that what I think of myself? No! I do not. But why do I feel so good, and so bad?” He looked at his desk. The yellow pads were piled neatly and the pencils were sharpened. “I believe I’ll try.” And at that point there were fumbling steps on his porch and Old Jingleballicks burst in.

It is madness to write about Old Jingleballicks, but since he came in at this point it is necessary. People coming out of a session with Old Jay felt slightly dizzy, and the wise ones, after a time, just didn’t believe it. His name cannot be mentioned, for it occurs on too many bronze plaques that begin, “Donated by—.”

Old Jay was born so rich that he didn’t know he was rich at all. He thought everybody was that way. He was a scientist, but whether brilliant or a screwball nobody ever knew, and since he had contributed to so many learned foundations and financed so many projects and served on so many boards of trustees, nobody dared openly to wonder. He gave millions away but he was likely to sponge on a friend. His scholastic honors were many, and there were people who thought privately and venomously that they were awarded in hope of a donation, that he was, in fact, like a football player whose grades have little relation to his scholarship.

He was a stubby man with a natural tonsure of yellow hair. His eyes were bright as a bird’s eyes, and he was interested in everything. He was so close to reality that he had completely lost touch with realism. Sometimes he amused Doc, and at other times his endless and myopic enthusiasms could drive a man to despair. Old Jingleballicks shouted at everyone under the impression that this made for clarity.

“Did you get my wire?” he cried.

“No.”

“Came for your birthday. Always remember it. Same day they burned Giordano Bruno.”[92]

“It’s not my birthday,” said Doc.

“Well, what day is this?”

“Friday.”

“Oh! Well, I’ll wait over.”

“It’s in December. I only have one cot.”

“All right. I’ll sleep on the floor.” He wandered to the kitchen, took the lid off the pot, and began eating the stew—blowing on it violently to cool it.

“That’s not done,” said Doc, and he was irritated to find that he was shouting back.

“Done enough!” cried Old Jay and went on eating.

Doc said, “Hitzler came through. He said you were seen on a lawn in Berkeley, on your knees, pulling a worm out of the ground with your teeth.”

Old Jay swallowed a half-cooked carrot. “Not so!” he shouted. “Say, this stew’s not done.”

“That’s what I told you.”

“Oh! Well, you see I’ve watched robins getting worms. Little beggars dig in their heels, so to speak. I got to wondering how much actual pull was involved. Had a scale with a clamp in my teeth. Average night crawler resists to the extent of one pound six ounces. I tried forty-eight individuals. Think of it! A three-ounce bird pulls twenty-two ounces, over seven times his own weight. No wonder they eat so much. Just eating keeps them hungry. Like robins?”

“Not particularly,” said Doc. “Are you going to eat all my dinner?”

“I guess so,” said Old Jingleballicks. “But it’s not done. You got anything to drink?”

“I’ll get some beer,” said Doc.

“Fine! Get a lot.”

“Don’t you want to contribute a little?”

“I’m short,” said Old Jay.

Doc said, “You are not. You’re a freeloader.”

“Oh!” said Jingleballicks.

“I said, don’t you want to contribute!”

“I’m a little short,” said Old Jay.

Doc said angrily, “You are not. You’re a freeloader. You never pay. You ran the lab while I was in the Army and damn near bankrupted me. I don’t say you stole most of the museum glass, I just say it’s missing. Did you take those specimen jars?”

“Well, yes,” said Old Jingleballicks. And then he said thoughtfully, “I wish you were a charity or an institution.”

“What!”

“Then I could endow you,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“Well, I’m not an institution. So what do you do? You go to a lot of trouble to keep from paying a couple of dollars for beer.” And suddenly despair and humor crashed head-on in Doc and he burst into weary laughter. “Oh Lord,” he said, “you’re just not possible! You’re a ridiculous idea.”

“Your stew is burning,” said Old Jingleballicks.

Doc leaped to the stove and pulled the pot from the burner. “You ate all the juice,” he said bitterly. “Of course it burned!”

“It was very good,” said Old Jay.

In the grocery Doc said, “Give me a dozen cans of beer.”

“Don’t you want the Bohemia?”

“Hell no!” Doc said. “I have a guest who—” And then an evil thought came to him. “A very interesting man,” Doc said. “Why don’t you come over and have a drink with us? Old—I mean, my friend can explain chess to you better than I can.”

“Why not?” said the Patrón. “Maybe I better bring a little liquor.”

“Why not?” said Doc.

Crossing the street, the Patrón asked, “You going to the party tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“I like you, Doc, but I don’t get you. You ain’t real,” said the Patrón.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, everything you do is—well, you’re like that chess. I don’t get you at all.”

Doc said, “Do you suppose nobody’s real to anybody else? You’re going to meet a man who can’t possibly exist.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said the Patrón nervously.

Old Jay shouted as they went up the stairs, “I bring you tidings of great joy. The human species is going to disappear!”

“This is Joseph and Mary Rivas,” said Doc. “Joseph and Mary, this is Old Jingleballicks.”

“Why can’t you rig a chess game?” the Patrón asked.

“Oh, you can, you can! Or at least you can rearrange your opponent. Comes to the same thing. Now, where was I? Oh yes—we are about to join the great reptiles in extinction.”

“Good!” said Doc.

“You mean there ain’t gonna be no more people?” said the Patrón.

“Right, young man. We have played the final joke on ourselves. Open the beer! Man, in saving himself, has destroyed himself.”

“Who’s destroyed?” the Patrón demanded.

“There must be chuckling on Olympus,”[93] said Old Jingleballicks. “We go not to Armageddon[94] but to the gas chamber, and we generate our own gas—”

Doc said, “I intended to work on my paper.”

“Good! I’ll help,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“Oh God! No!” said Doc.

“Man has solved his problems,” Old Jay went on. “Predators he has removed from the earth; heat and cold he has turned aside; communicable disease he has practically eliminated. The old live on, the young do not die. The best wars can’t even balance the birth rate. There was a time when a small army could cut a population in half in a year. Starvation, typhus, plague, tuberculosis, were trusty weapons. A scratch with a spear point meant infection and death. Do you know what the incidence of death from battle wounds is today? One percent. A hundred years ago it was eighty percent. The population grows and the productivity of the earth decreases. In a foreseeable future we shall be smothered by our own numbers. Only birth control could save us, and that is one thing mankind is never going to practice.”

“Brother!” said the Patrón. “What makes you so damn happy about it?”

“It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.”

“I didn’t get one goddam word of that,” said Joseph and Mary.

Doc’s hands were full. In his left he held a small glass of whisky and in his right a can of beer. He sipped from the one and gulped from the other. “Every instinct tells me to stay out of this,” he said, “and every impulse makes me want to get into it.”

“Good!” said Old Jay. “Is that whisky?”

“Old Tennis Shoes,” said Joseph and Mary. “Want some?”

“Perhaps a little later.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a little later now,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“I guess you can hustle with anything,” said the Patrón. “I got a feeling I’m being took.”

“Well, the impulse wins,” said Doc. “You have forgotten one thing, Old Jingleballicks. Indeed, there have been species which became extinct through their own miscalculations, but they were species with a small range of variability. Now consider the lemming—”

“That is a very specialized case,” said Old Jingleballicks.

“How do you know we aren’t? What do lemmings do when their population exceeds the food supply? Whole masses of them swim out to sea and drown, until a balance of food and population is reached.”

“I deny your right to use lemmings,” said Old Jingleballicks. “Hand me the bottle, will you?”

“Deny and be damned!” Doc said. “Is the lemming migration a disease? Is it a memory? Or is it a psychic manifestation forced on part of the group for the survival of the whole?”

Old Jay howled back at him, “I will not be robbed of extinction! This is a swindle.” He turned to the Patrón. “Don’t listen to that man. He’s a charlatan.”

“He sure in hell is,” said Joseph and Mary admiringly.

Doc leveled a finger between the eyes of Old Jay, holding his whisky glass like the butt of a pistol. “Disease, you say? Infection? Down almost to nonexistence? But tell me, are not neurotic disturbances on the increase? And are they curable or does the cure spread them? Now you wait! Don’t you try to talk now. Do you suppose that the tendency toward homosexuality might not also have a mathematical progression? And could this not be the human solution?”

“You can’t prove it,” Old Jingleballicks cried. “It’s all talk—overemphasis. Why, you might as well accuse me of neurotic tendencies and be done with it!” His eyes brimmed with tears. “My friend, my thought-friend, my true friend,” he whimpered.

Doc said, “I wouldn’t even think of such a thing.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Certainly not.”

“When are you going to start dinner?” said Old Jingleballicks.

“You’ve eaten my dinner,” said Doc.

“I’ve got a fine idea,” said Old Jay. “While you start dinner, William and Mary can get a fresh bottle of whisky and I’ll set up the chessmen.”

“It’s not William and Mary, it’s Joseph and Mary.”

“Who is? Oh! My friend, I’m going to teach you the greatest of all games, the ethereal creation of human intelligence. Shall we sugar it up with a little side bet?”

“Why, you dishonest old fraud!” Doc shouted.

“Ten dollars, Mary?”

The Patrón shrugged his shoulders in apology to Doc. “You have to pay to learn things,” he said.

“Make it twenty-five,” Old Jingleballicks said. “You want to live forever?”

Doc opened a can of salmon and a can of spaghetti and stirred the two together in a frying pan. He grated nutmeg over it. Sadly he put the burned stewpot to soak in the sink.

A little after dark the Patrón went back to the grocery and sent Cacahuete to deliver a third bottle of whisky. Upstairs he joined the wetbacks as in advancing and retreating lines they danced the sad and stately measures of the Tehuanos.[95] “Sandunga,”[96] they sang, “Sandunga mama mia…”

In the darkening laboratory Doc and Old Jay went softly into the third bottle of Old Tennis Shoes.

“You’ve had the bed long enough,” Doc said. “I want it now.”

“All right. As I grow older I expect less and less—and get nothing, even from my so-called friends.”

“Look here! You’ve eaten and spoiled my first dinner, stuffed my second, swilled my beer, taken two drinks for one of the whisky, appropriated my bed, broken two phonograph records, and I saw you put my fountain pen in your pocket. And how you razzle-dazzled the Patrón out of twenty-five dollars I don’t know. You shouldn’t have told him that under certain circumstances a knight can jump three squares in one direction—that’s not honest.”

“I know,” said Old Jingleballicks. He patted the pillow lovingly. “Now you lie down here and get comfortable. I’ll bring you a drink. Feel better now?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Doc.

“Say, is that place across the street still running?”

A jagged rage whipped Doc upright. “You stay out of there!” he said. “You old fool! Lie down and go to sleep.”

“Why shouldn’t I go? Am I to deny myself the loveliness of women if the price is right? I can hear the tinkle of their sweet voices and see the heaving of their white roundness—”

“Oh, shut up!” Doc said.

“What’s the matter, dear friend? I don’t remember that you ever starved for love even when it was less near and less reasonable.”

“You go to hell,” said Doc. “But you go to hell here.”