and gulps of Dr. Pepper, he kept the dialectic going, moving sequentially from topic to topic, attacking each one as if it were an enemy to be vanquished. His mind was awesome, astounding in its ability to mine slag heaps of data and emerge with essential nuggets. It was as if his intellect had assumed an identity of its own, independent of the childish body in which it was housed; when he talked, I ceased to be aware of his age.
His questions came at me, as rapid and stinging as hailstones. He seemed to have barely assimilated one answer before a dozen new lines of inquiry had been formed. After a while I started to feel like a Sunday batter facing a pitching machine gone berserk. He fired away for a few minutes more, then, just as abruptly as he'd begun, ended the conversation.
'Good.' He smiled with satisfaction. 'I understand now.'
'Great,' I said, and exhaled wearily.
He filled half his plate with ketchup and dragged a bunch of soggy french fries through the scarlet swamp. Stuffing them in his mouth, he said:
'You're fairly intelligent, Dr. Delaware.'
'Thank you, Jamey.'
'When you were a kid, were you bored in school?'
'For the most part. I had a couple of teachers who were inspiring. The rest were pretty forgettable.'
'Most people are. I've never really attended school. Not that uncle Dwight didn't try. When I was five, he sent me to the snobbiest private kindergarten in Hancock Park.' He grinned. 'Three days into the semester it became clear that
my presence was' - he mimicked a histrionic schoolmarm -' upsetting to the other children.'
'I can imagine.'
'They were doing reading readiness exercises - colour matching, learning the alphabet, stuff like that. I thought it was mind-numbing and refused to cooperate. As punishment, they put me in the corner by myself, which was no punishment at all because my fantasies were terrific entertainment. Meanwhile, I'd got hold of an old paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath that someone had left lying around at home. The cover was really interesting, so I picked it up and started to read it. Most of it was pretty accessible, so I really got into it, reading in bed at night with a flashlight, stashing it in my lunch box and taking it to school. I'd sneak in a few pages during snack time and when they stuck me in the corner. After a month or so, when I was halfway through the book, that bitch of a teacher found it. She freaked out, snatched it out of my hands, so I attacked her - punching, biting, a real fight. They called Uncle Dwight down, and the teacher told him I was hyperactive and a discipline problem and needed professional help. I jumped up, accused her of being a thief, and said she was oppressing me the same way the farm workers had been oppressed. I still remember how their jaws dropped -like robots that had become unhinged. She shoved the book in front of me and said, "Read!" - just like a Nazi storm trooper ordering a prisoner to march. I buzzed through a couple of sentences, and she told me to stop. That was it -no more kindergarten for Master Cadmus.'
He stuck out his tongue and licked ketchup from his lower lip. 'Anyway, so much for school days.' He looked at his watch. 'Oops. Gotta call my ride.' And with that, he was off.
The Friday afternoon visits became regular after that, a floating crap game with ideas as the dice. We talked in the office, in the graduate reading room, over junk food in the Coop, and while strolling the shaded walkways that webbed the campus. He was fatherless and, despite the guardianship of an uncle, seemed to have little awareness of what it
meant to be male. As I fielded countless questions about myself, all framed in the hungrily naive manner of an immigrant seeking morsels of information about a new homeland, I knew I was becoming his role model. But the questioning was one way; when I attempted to probe into his personal life, he changed the subject or emitted a blitzkrieg of irrelevant abstractions.
It was an ill-defined
Back in the Saddle (v5.0)