Authors: Eugene Burdick
The Ninth Wave (10 page)
Mike knew that Hank meant it. At once Mike gave up any thought of ever
trying it.
"O.K. How about calling a cab and riding down to Paly and spending a
few bucks on some ham and eggs," Mike said.
They went to the all-night diner and each had four eggs, ham, pancakes,
hashed-brown potatoes and toast. Hank ate a second order and then they
walked slowly back to the campus.
Mike remembered the poker game long after the money was spent. He
remembered it because Hollis tried to become friendly with Hank. He
invited Hank to go East with him for the Christmas holidays. Hank
refused. Hollis sent Hank a set of cuff links and six shirts with French
cuffs for Christmas. Hank hocked them for ten dollars. When Hollis'
family came to Stanford in the spring he proudly introduced them to Hank
and for two days Hank rode around the Peninsula in a rented Cadillac
showing the family the sights. Hollis tried to get Hank pledged to his
own fraternity and was outraged when he discovered that they did not
pledge Jews and Hank would not join anyway.
Finally Hank got bored with it and told Hollis to stop coming around. Hank
said it in front of Mike and Hollis was embarrassed. Hollis smiled
wistfully at Hank and then he turned and with his confident, easygoing
walk he left the room.
Mike took a piece of paper off his desk and slowly wrote a single sentence
on it: "Freesmith's Unnumbered Principle: People appear to love the man
who humbles them." He looked at it for a moment and then shoved it into
the desk drawer, along with the other abandoned pieces of paper that
contained similar sentences.
CHAPTER 6
Hot Bread and Butter
In their junior year, Mike and Hank rented a small cottage behind a
professor's house on the campus. The cottage was isolated from the
professor's house by a thick hedge, a lemon tree and two apricot trees.
The cottage was very cheap. It rented for sixteen dollars a month.
In their sophomore year they had both gotten scholarships which paid
for tuition. They still had to pay for books, the rent on the cottage,
laundry and, finally, food. The food was the worst. By their junior
year they had spent almost all of the poker winnings on food. And most
of the food had been eaten by Hank.
Hank became hungrier all the time. Even when he had eggs, bacon, fried
potatoes and toast for breakfast he was hungry by the middle of the
morning and had to eat three or four doughnuts and a few cups of coffee.
It was the same in the middle of the afternoon. He would stand by the
counter in the soda fountain and rapidly eat three large ice cream cones;
his teeth crunching the soft shell of the cone, not tasting the ice cream,
but forcing it down his throat as fast as he could. Vanilla, strawberry,
chocolate, coffee, rocky-road; he ate all of them with equal eagerness. He
was unaware that he bunched his shoulders when he ate, bent slightly
forward, as if protecting the food he was eating or sheltering it from
the view of others. All he knew was that when he had eaten he could go
back to his books and study again.
But it was the nights that were difficult. They would be reading in
the cottage and around midnight Hank would look up from his books. In
front of him was the evidence of the night's work; pencil drawings of
intricate ganglia, cross sections of muscle tissues, the beautiful and
exotic shapes of bacteria. He wanted to go on with the reading, but
he could not. Somewhere, at the very outer edge of his consciousness,
the thin taut membrane of his attention had been slit. It was tiny and
faraway, he could almost ignore it, but that was impossible. Hunger came
gushing in on him. His mouth started to water, his stomach turned tight
with hunger, his intestines growled. He looked back at the book and the
words were dim and blurred. His fingertips trembled slightly and he knew
he could not read until he had eaten.
He stood up and spoke in a voice that was falsely casual.
"I'm going over to the Cellar for a bite," he said. "Want to come along?"
Mike would shake his head and Hank walked over to the bureau and took
two dollars out of the cigar box. Forty-five minutes later he would
return and slip into the room. He picked up his book. For a moment he
was aware of the hard round knob of his belly pushing against his belt,
a strange distension that would vanish in an hour and leave him skinnier
than before. Almost with disgust he thought of the hamburgers, malted
milk and pie that he had eaten. Then he would be lost in the book again
and would not think of anything until three in the morning when he stood
up, stripped off his clothes and fell naked into bed. In the morning
he would step out of the bed, brush his teeth and with the sweet minty
flavor of the toothpaste still in his mouth he would be ravenous. He
would trot down the street to the Cellar.
Hank tried everything to cut down his appetite. Once, for a three-week
period, he took little cellulose reducing pills, followed by three glasses
of water. The pills expanded into a huge mass in his stomach, his belly
bulged out round and turgid. But the hunger was still there, cutting
through the soft watery mass of cellulose. He had to eat, forcing the food
into an already full stomach and he felt distended, unnatural. Another
time he tried eating fruit and nuts because someone told him that these
would reduce his appetite. He ate peaches, oranges, apples, bananas,
grapefruit and pears. He ate them until the juice dripped off his chin
and he broke out in a rash. But they did not reduce his appetite.
In the end he gave up and attempted to keep a stock of food in the
cottage. It did not matter what the food was, just so there was plenty
of it. He ate soya-bean cereal with buttermilk, yogurt and cheese. The
cottage was littered with the moist paper cartons in which delicatessens
sell their yellowish potato salad, milk bottles, soda-cracker crumbs,
the skin of salamis, crusts, apple cores and banana peels.
Even so there were nights when there was no food in the cottage, for Hank
did not think of food when he was close to a grocery store. He discovered
slowly all of the restaurants in the town that were open all night. His
favorite was a Chinese restaurant that served a huge bowl of fried rice
and shreds of pork for fifty cents. When this was closed he ate at a
drugstore which featured a hot roast beef sandwich which floated in a
circle of solid, glycerinlike gravy and was flanked by two round balls
of mashed potatoes.
"We have to do something about our food costs," Mike said at the beginning
of their junior year. "If we can cut down on what we are spending there
we can get by the rest of this year and our senior year on what is left
of the poker money."
"What about hashing?" Hank asked. "Lots of guys have hashing jobs. Just
wait on table and you get your lunch and dinner."
"But what about the rest of the time? What do we eat then?" Mike asked.
Hank squirmed in the chair. He looked down at his fingers. They were
dirty. His stomach convulsed, saliva gathered in the back of his mouth
and poured around his teeth. He was hungry. Like an animal, he thought,
Like a slobbering, damned animal.
"I said no crap about money, Mike," Hank said. "For Christ's sake we've
still got money in the cigar box, haven't we?"
"Sure. About three hundred bucks," Mike said.
"Well, let's worry when that's gone."
Hank looked back at his book, picked up his pencil.
"No. We'll worry about it now," Mike said. "It we wait until next year
it'll be too late."
"I'm not going to worry about it," Hank said. He refused to look up from
his book.
"I'll worry about it," Mike said. "I just want to make sure you'll go
along with whatever arrangements I make."
"O.K., O.K. I'll go along," Hank said. He started to copy the complicated,
beautifully involved bones of the knee onto a fresh page. "With anything.
Stop talking about it."
Mike got Hank a job in a bakery. It was a perfect job. Hank only had
to work from eight at night until midnight. When he came to the bakery
everyone else had left. Hank's job was to operate the bread-wrapping
machine. The cooling loaves were neatly stacked in a huge rotating
rack and Hank had only to load the machine with wax paper and press the
button. The loaves came pouring out the side of the machine, each of them
neatly wrapped. Every fifteen minutes a bell rang and the machine needed
more wax paper. The rest of the time Hank could read. It was perfect.
When Hank came to work the first thing he did each night was to take a
loaf of hot bread and cut it in half. Then he went to the refrigerator
and took out a cube of butter. He put the cube of butter between the
halves of hot bread. The butter melted into a warm, yellow pool. When
he bit into the bread he could smell the warm yeasty odor and the
butter ran between his fingers. He usually ate two loaves of bread and
butter during his four-hour shift. When he left at midnight he carefully
selected a big sack of coffee cakes, doughnuts, rye bread, cookies and
cupcakes. During the day he ate out of the bag, washing the food down
with a few quarts of milk. He never became tired of the bakery goods.
During the time he was working at the bakery he actually saved money.
Mike had intended to get a job hashing, but something happened. Mike got
into a controversy with Julius Mardikan, an Armenian graduate student
from Fresno. Mardikan was the section leader for one of the sections of
a large upper-division history course. Mardikan was short, fat, very
bright-eyed and a promising Ph.D. candidate. He received two hundred
dollars a quarter for teaching the section and he was happy.
Hank and Mike were both in Mardikan's section and for the first month
they listened placidly to his lectures. In the second month Mardikan
began to lecture on Luther.
"Before Luther the medieval society was unified and solid," Mardikan
said. "Although people were born into a rigid society, they knew exactly
where they fitted into the society and they were happy. Everyone had a
sense of security, of belonging. Everyone accepted the status quo."
Mike sat up in his chair and put his hand in the air. For a few moments
Mardikan did not see it for he was talking with absorption, almost love,
of his favorite period in history. Finally he saw Mike's hand.
"Yes, Mr. Freesmith?" he said.
"Do you mean that in the medieval society there was no discontent and
no unrest?" Mike said.
"Scholarly work indicates that there was very little unrest and discontent
during that period. Certainly it was a much calmer and more satisfied
period than the present."
"Scholarly work on what?" Mike asked. "How do the scholars know this? What
do they look at?"
"Religious documents, psalm books, monastery records, records left by
merchants. That sort of thing."
Mardikan spoke more slowly and cautiously, careful of a trap, his bright
eyes narrowing with concentration.
"What would a psalm book or a merchant's record tell you about the way
people actually felt? Couldn't they actually be miserable and unhappy
even if the merchant's records showed a profit?" Mike asked.
The class laughed. The smile vanished from Mardikan's face. His teeth
separated and showed his tongue. He licked his lips and looking away
from Mike spoke very slowly.
"The work of Max Weber for one and Tawney for another would seem to
indicate very precisely that the medieval man was a very secure and
intact sort of person," Mardikan said.
This was not altogether true, but Mardikan did not know that. Later he
came to know it well. Mike wrote "Weber" and "Tawney" in his notebook
and then looked up.
"I don't believe they were right," Mike said. "People were always pretty
much the way they are now. Probably always will be."
"And how are they now, Mr. Freesmith?" Mardikan asked.
He was surer now. He felt that he had control again. "People are . . . "
Mike hesitated. Then he went on. "People are scared. I don't know if
that means they're insecure. I just know they're scared. And I think
they always have been."
The class murmured its disapproval. Mardikan smiled.
"I'm sure, Mr. Freesmith, that the scholarly community would be grateful
for your profound views on this matter," he said.
The class laughed. Mike smiled. The discussion went on to another subject.
That afternoon Mike bought Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism."
He checked out three of Weber's books from the library. The next morning
when the section met, Mike put his hand up before a word had been spoken.
"Mr. Mardikani do you know what 'jacquerie' is?" Mike asked.
Mardikan hesitated. The smile froze on his face and then was fractured
by his nervous tongue.
"In a general sense," Mardikan said. "Yes. I know very generally."
"Jacquerie is agrarian or peasant revolution," Mike said. "During the
medieval period there were over two hundred examples of jacquerie in
Europe. Peasants revolting and killing their lords, burning up the manor
houses, raping the women, taking possession of the land. Does that sound
like a secure and happy society to you?"
The class stared at Mike. Mardikan pressed against the blackboard. With
his fingers he turned a piece of chalk and it became soggy in his hand.
"A few cases of peasant revolt do not mean that the total society was
demoralized, Mr. Freesmith," Mardikan said.
"Of course not," Mike said. "But do you know that there were also countless
cases where the people stormed the monasteries and burned them down and
threw the monks out into the snow? What about that? And did you know
that almost every feudal estate had a police force? That most of the
gallant knights spent their time either fighting the serfs or plotting
against their boss?" Mike lifted a heavy red book and turned it slowly
over in his hands. "It's all right here in this book. People then were
just like people now."
"I don't think, Mr. Freesmith, that a few scattered pieces of evidence
are enough to overthrow the well-considered views of the best historical
scholars," Mardikan said.
He was sweating though, and when the class was over and he stepped away
from the blackboard he left a round black shiny circle of sweat and his
tweed jacket was covered with chalky reversed words which he had soaked
off of the blackboard.
trying it.
"O.K. How about calling a cab and riding down to Paly and spending a
few bucks on some ham and eggs," Mike said.
They went to the all-night diner and each had four eggs, ham, pancakes,
hashed-brown potatoes and toast. Hank ate a second order and then they
walked slowly back to the campus.
Mike remembered the poker game long after the money was spent. He
remembered it because Hollis tried to become friendly with Hank. He
invited Hank to go East with him for the Christmas holidays. Hank
refused. Hollis sent Hank a set of cuff links and six shirts with French
cuffs for Christmas. Hank hocked them for ten dollars. When Hollis'
family came to Stanford in the spring he proudly introduced them to Hank
and for two days Hank rode around the Peninsula in a rented Cadillac
showing the family the sights. Hollis tried to get Hank pledged to his
own fraternity and was outraged when he discovered that they did not
pledge Jews and Hank would not join anyway.
Finally Hank got bored with it and told Hollis to stop coming around. Hank
said it in front of Mike and Hollis was embarrassed. Hollis smiled
wistfully at Hank and then he turned and with his confident, easygoing
walk he left the room.
Mike took a piece of paper off his desk and slowly wrote a single sentence
on it: "Freesmith's Unnumbered Principle: People appear to love the man
who humbles them." He looked at it for a moment and then shoved it into
the desk drawer, along with the other abandoned pieces of paper that
contained similar sentences.
CHAPTER 6
Hot Bread and Butter
In their junior year, Mike and Hank rented a small cottage behind a
professor's house on the campus. The cottage was isolated from the
professor's house by a thick hedge, a lemon tree and two apricot trees.
The cottage was very cheap. It rented for sixteen dollars a month.
In their sophomore year they had both gotten scholarships which paid
for tuition. They still had to pay for books, the rent on the cottage,
laundry and, finally, food. The food was the worst. By their junior
year they had spent almost all of the poker winnings on food. And most
of the food had been eaten by Hank.
Hank became hungrier all the time. Even when he had eggs, bacon, fried
potatoes and toast for breakfast he was hungry by the middle of the
morning and had to eat three or four doughnuts and a few cups of coffee.
It was the same in the middle of the afternoon. He would stand by the
counter in the soda fountain and rapidly eat three large ice cream cones;
his teeth crunching the soft shell of the cone, not tasting the ice cream,
but forcing it down his throat as fast as he could. Vanilla, strawberry,
chocolate, coffee, rocky-road; he ate all of them with equal eagerness. He
was unaware that he bunched his shoulders when he ate, bent slightly
forward, as if protecting the food he was eating or sheltering it from
the view of others. All he knew was that when he had eaten he could go
back to his books and study again.
But it was the nights that were difficult. They would be reading in
the cottage and around midnight Hank would look up from his books. In
front of him was the evidence of the night's work; pencil drawings of
intricate ganglia, cross sections of muscle tissues, the beautiful and
exotic shapes of bacteria. He wanted to go on with the reading, but
he could not. Somewhere, at the very outer edge of his consciousness,
the thin taut membrane of his attention had been slit. It was tiny and
faraway, he could almost ignore it, but that was impossible. Hunger came
gushing in on him. His mouth started to water, his stomach turned tight
with hunger, his intestines growled. He looked back at the book and the
words were dim and blurred. His fingertips trembled slightly and he knew
he could not read until he had eaten.
He stood up and spoke in a voice that was falsely casual.
"I'm going over to the Cellar for a bite," he said. "Want to come along?"
Mike would shake his head and Hank walked over to the bureau and took
two dollars out of the cigar box. Forty-five minutes later he would
return and slip into the room. He picked up his book. For a moment he
was aware of the hard round knob of his belly pushing against his belt,
a strange distension that would vanish in an hour and leave him skinnier
than before. Almost with disgust he thought of the hamburgers, malted
milk and pie that he had eaten. Then he would be lost in the book again
and would not think of anything until three in the morning when he stood
up, stripped off his clothes and fell naked into bed. In the morning
he would step out of the bed, brush his teeth and with the sweet minty
flavor of the toothpaste still in his mouth he would be ravenous. He
would trot down the street to the Cellar.
Hank tried everything to cut down his appetite. Once, for a three-week
period, he took little cellulose reducing pills, followed by three glasses
of water. The pills expanded into a huge mass in his stomach, his belly
bulged out round and turgid. But the hunger was still there, cutting
through the soft watery mass of cellulose. He had to eat, forcing the food
into an already full stomach and he felt distended, unnatural. Another
time he tried eating fruit and nuts because someone told him that these
would reduce his appetite. He ate peaches, oranges, apples, bananas,
grapefruit and pears. He ate them until the juice dripped off his chin
and he broke out in a rash. But they did not reduce his appetite.
In the end he gave up and attempted to keep a stock of food in the
cottage. It did not matter what the food was, just so there was plenty
of it. He ate soya-bean cereal with buttermilk, yogurt and cheese. The
cottage was littered with the moist paper cartons in which delicatessens
sell their yellowish potato salad, milk bottles, soda-cracker crumbs,
the skin of salamis, crusts, apple cores and banana peels.
Even so there were nights when there was no food in the cottage, for Hank
did not think of food when he was close to a grocery store. He discovered
slowly all of the restaurants in the town that were open all night. His
favorite was a Chinese restaurant that served a huge bowl of fried rice
and shreds of pork for fifty cents. When this was closed he ate at a
drugstore which featured a hot roast beef sandwich which floated in a
circle of solid, glycerinlike gravy and was flanked by two round balls
of mashed potatoes.
"We have to do something about our food costs," Mike said at the beginning
of their junior year. "If we can cut down on what we are spending there
we can get by the rest of this year and our senior year on what is left
of the poker money."
"What about hashing?" Hank asked. "Lots of guys have hashing jobs. Just
wait on table and you get your lunch and dinner."
"But what about the rest of the time? What do we eat then?" Mike asked.
Hank squirmed in the chair. He looked down at his fingers. They were
dirty. His stomach convulsed, saliva gathered in the back of his mouth
and poured around his teeth. He was hungry. Like an animal, he thought,
Like a slobbering, damned animal.
"I said no crap about money, Mike," Hank said. "For Christ's sake we've
still got money in the cigar box, haven't we?"
"Sure. About three hundred bucks," Mike said.
"Well, let's worry when that's gone."
Hank looked back at his book, picked up his pencil.
"No. We'll worry about it now," Mike said. "It we wait until next year
it'll be too late."
"I'm not going to worry about it," Hank said. He refused to look up from
his book.
"I'll worry about it," Mike said. "I just want to make sure you'll go
along with whatever arrangements I make."
"O.K., O.K. I'll go along," Hank said. He started to copy the complicated,
beautifully involved bones of the knee onto a fresh page. "With anything.
Stop talking about it."
Mike got Hank a job in a bakery. It was a perfect job. Hank only had
to work from eight at night until midnight. When he came to the bakery
everyone else had left. Hank's job was to operate the bread-wrapping
machine. The cooling loaves were neatly stacked in a huge rotating
rack and Hank had only to load the machine with wax paper and press the
button. The loaves came pouring out the side of the machine, each of them
neatly wrapped. Every fifteen minutes a bell rang and the machine needed
more wax paper. The rest of the time Hank could read. It was perfect.
When Hank came to work the first thing he did each night was to take a
loaf of hot bread and cut it in half. Then he went to the refrigerator
and took out a cube of butter. He put the cube of butter between the
halves of hot bread. The butter melted into a warm, yellow pool. When
he bit into the bread he could smell the warm yeasty odor and the
butter ran between his fingers. He usually ate two loaves of bread and
butter during his four-hour shift. When he left at midnight he carefully
selected a big sack of coffee cakes, doughnuts, rye bread, cookies and
cupcakes. During the day he ate out of the bag, washing the food down
with a few quarts of milk. He never became tired of the bakery goods.
During the time he was working at the bakery he actually saved money.
Mike had intended to get a job hashing, but something happened. Mike got
into a controversy with Julius Mardikan, an Armenian graduate student
from Fresno. Mardikan was the section leader for one of the sections of
a large upper-division history course. Mardikan was short, fat, very
bright-eyed and a promising Ph.D. candidate. He received two hundred
dollars a quarter for teaching the section and he was happy.
Hank and Mike were both in Mardikan's section and for the first month
they listened placidly to his lectures. In the second month Mardikan
began to lecture on Luther.
"Before Luther the medieval society was unified and solid," Mardikan
said. "Although people were born into a rigid society, they knew exactly
where they fitted into the society and they were happy. Everyone had a
sense of security, of belonging. Everyone accepted the status quo."
Mike sat up in his chair and put his hand in the air. For a few moments
Mardikan did not see it for he was talking with absorption, almost love,
of his favorite period in history. Finally he saw Mike's hand.
"Yes, Mr. Freesmith?" he said.
"Do you mean that in the medieval society there was no discontent and
no unrest?" Mike said.
"Scholarly work indicates that there was very little unrest and discontent
during that period. Certainly it was a much calmer and more satisfied
period than the present."
"Scholarly work on what?" Mike asked. "How do the scholars know this? What
do they look at?"
"Religious documents, psalm books, monastery records, records left by
merchants. That sort of thing."
Mardikan spoke more slowly and cautiously, careful of a trap, his bright
eyes narrowing with concentration.
"What would a psalm book or a merchant's record tell you about the way
people actually felt? Couldn't they actually be miserable and unhappy
even if the merchant's records showed a profit?" Mike asked.
The class laughed. The smile vanished from Mardikan's face. His teeth
separated and showed his tongue. He licked his lips and looking away
from Mike spoke very slowly.
"The work of Max Weber for one and Tawney for another would seem to
indicate very precisely that the medieval man was a very secure and
intact sort of person," Mardikan said.
This was not altogether true, but Mardikan did not know that. Later he
came to know it well. Mike wrote "Weber" and "Tawney" in his notebook
and then looked up.
"I don't believe they were right," Mike said. "People were always pretty
much the way they are now. Probably always will be."
"And how are they now, Mr. Freesmith?" Mardikan asked.
He was surer now. He felt that he had control again. "People are . . . "
Mike hesitated. Then he went on. "People are scared. I don't know if
that means they're insecure. I just know they're scared. And I think
they always have been."
The class murmured its disapproval. Mardikan smiled.
"I'm sure, Mr. Freesmith, that the scholarly community would be grateful
for your profound views on this matter," he said.
The class laughed. Mike smiled. The discussion went on to another subject.
That afternoon Mike bought Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism."
He checked out three of Weber's books from the library. The next morning
when the section met, Mike put his hand up before a word had been spoken.
"Mr. Mardikani do you know what 'jacquerie' is?" Mike asked.
Mardikan hesitated. The smile froze on his face and then was fractured
by his nervous tongue.
"In a general sense," Mardikan said. "Yes. I know very generally."
"Jacquerie is agrarian or peasant revolution," Mike said. "During the
medieval period there were over two hundred examples of jacquerie in
Europe. Peasants revolting and killing their lords, burning up the manor
houses, raping the women, taking possession of the land. Does that sound
like a secure and happy society to you?"
The class stared at Mike. Mardikan pressed against the blackboard. With
his fingers he turned a piece of chalk and it became soggy in his hand.
"A few cases of peasant revolt do not mean that the total society was
demoralized, Mr. Freesmith," Mardikan said.
"Of course not," Mike said. "But do you know that there were also countless
cases where the people stormed the monasteries and burned them down and
threw the monks out into the snow? What about that? And did you know
that almost every feudal estate had a police force? That most of the
gallant knights spent their time either fighting the serfs or plotting
against their boss?" Mike lifted a heavy red book and turned it slowly
over in his hands. "It's all right here in this book. People then were
just like people now."
"I don't think, Mr. Freesmith, that a few scattered pieces of evidence
are enough to overthrow the well-considered views of the best historical
scholars," Mardikan said.
He was sweating though, and when the class was over and he stepped away
from the blackboard he left a round black shiny circle of sweat and his
tweed jacket was covered with chalky reversed words which he had soaked
off of the blackboard.
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