Dead Languages (21 page)

She reiterated that, if I could only force myself to speak within certain formal conventions, my verbal violence would vanish. I doubted this, but she pleaded with me to give her plan at least one more shot, so I enlisted in the London Forensic Society. Forensic societies everywhere are collections of outcasts. The forensic society at London was a positive House of Bedlam. The London disputants were the strangest of the strange, the most eccentric at a school insistent upon eccentricity. They were all little guys, prematurely serious with their locked briefcases and navy blue ties. They knew and cared passionately about the raw data of the world in the same way I once knew and cared passionately about the pitching and batting averages of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

We convened twice a week in the social sciences department, where the debate coach, an anthropology teacher, had his office—a desk never not cluttered with spears, masks, Indian arrowheads. He was a very nice, very old man who, regardless of the weather, wore a sun visor, and he spoke to us, although we sat three feet away from him in a semi-circle, through a megaphone. His favorite expression was: “Your affirmative rebuttal, Mr. Zorn, is a ladder without rungs.” Whenever he said that, I’d have to get up, go to the library, and conduct research until my affirmative rebuttal had, in Dr. Hoblock’s opinion, rungs. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the social sciences department, all six of us would sit in soft chairs, pretending we liked the taste of his black coffee, feeling the four o’clock sun on our backs, and arguing, passionately though precisely, whether:
Resolved,
the United States should convert to the metric system;
Resolved,
the electoral college should be abolished;
Resolved,
the Federal Communications Commission should enforce stricter standards concerning prime-time violence on television.

The topics were innocuous, but to a stutterer content cannot easily represent anything more than yet another opportunity to figure out form.
On the contrary, contents are formal and forms are contents. If modern art is appreciated as an experience in psychosis, working with forms is the most radical way to seize the moments of crisis.
Dr. Hoblock wanted the “loud eloquence of London boys bellowing.” What he really wanted was a minimum of two hundred and fifty words per minute out of every one of us, for he had a theory, based on his debating days at Boston College in the late thirties, that rapid speech rate was the only way to judges’ hearts, and toward that end he drilled us in speedy diction.

“Faster,” he’d cough into his megaphone. “Faster. Get rid of those words. Keep your mouth moving. Turn those tongues into silver-tipped trumpets. Faster.”

I spoke weirdly well when forced to speak fast. There wasn’t time to choke, and I started talking the way I’d once imagined the Chinese conversed on the horizon: no gaps, just unintermittent jabbering. I talked so fast I became our first negative. In San Francisco any discipline with a noble or vaguely classical tradition is outlawed before it gets out of hand and there were very few forensic foes we could find to face, so we spent most of our time with Dr. Hoblock, drinking his bitter coffee, answering his arcane questions, debating on Tuesdays and Thursdays until the sun went down.

Toward the end of spring—it must have been April of my junior year because I remember limping onto the platform; no cane, no crutches, just the metal brace belted tight to my leg—Doerner Country Day, a girls’ school in Marin, challenged the London Forensic Society to a two-school, four-person debate upon whether:
Resolved,
the California State Assembly should reinstate the death penalty with reference to mass murder, kidnapping, and the homicide of public officials. Doerner Country Day would argue the affirmative.

For the next ten days, we met every afternoon and sometimes during lunch to increase our speech rate, share our research, and consolidate our argument. Only two of us were actually going to be in the debate, so the other four did nothing but look for statistical evidence that murders-per-capita were directly correlated to death-penalties-imposed, then report back to Leo Gogol and me. Leo was second negative, first rebuttal. I was first negative, second rebuttal. I didn’t like how dispassionate he was about the idea of the death penalty. He had a side to support, he’d support it, he wasn’t going to lapse into, as he said, “asinine emotionalism,” whereas Mother and Father had always taught me that capital punishment was positively medieval, and I was eager to lapse into asinine emotionalism when the time was right.

At seven o’clock on some Friday night in late April the time was right. Only the place was wrong, the amazingly large auditorium at Doerner Country Day, solid with the pert expressions of bright, rich, attractive girls come to hasten the collapse of the London legacy in forensics. Dr. Hoblock was backstage, computing the median cost of a life sentence in North Dakota in
1961
, while our assistants sat in the front row with stopwatches around their necks and flash-card reminders—“Quote your mom’s
Nation
article (
9/22/69
) as evidence of prison rehab,” “Dismiss as naive syllogism all deterrent theory”—in their laps. Leo and I sat onstage in this cold building, waiting for the debate to begin, pouring each other entirely too much ice water from the plastic pitcher, looking past the podium and microphone to our opponents at the other end of the table, who were serious beyond belief: not talking to each other, not drinking any water let alone slurping any ice, not adjusting their skirts but, instead, labeling the monographs in their briefcases, sifting through stack after stack of meaningless material; scribbling in shorthand the crucial points they wanted to make in their case for more death.

The judge took her seat on stage. Dr. Hoblock shook hands with Miss Keil, the coach of Doerner Country Day. Leo and I shook hands with Alicia Stephens and Josephine Nordlinger. The moderator marched to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and said, “Welcome. Contestants, coaches, spectators, Doerner girls, London boys—welcome. Welcome to the first and, I should say, we very much hope, the first
annual
debate between Jack London Preparatory Academy [whole huge chorus of boos from the predictable crowd] and Doerner Country Day School [long pause for screaming ovation]. I should hope, and I do assume, the disputants already know the rules, which we shall be observing strictly tonight, of the Revised Illinois Formal Debate but, for the benefit of newcomers to forensics, I shall outline the format. First affirmative and first negative, ten minutes apiece; second affirmative and second negative, five minutes apiece; first affirmative and first negative cross-examination rebuttal, eight minutes apiece; second affirmative and second negative cross-examination rebuttal, four minutes apiece. Total time: fifty-four minutes. No final summaries for either side. No sarcasm tolerated from the debaters. No heckling tolerated from the audience. Good luck, boys. Go get ’em, girls.”

If Mother had been there, she would have loved the moderator’s last line. Even with Mother absent, the crowd howled its approval of this parting exhortation, then quieted to a hush when Alicia Stephens blew into the mike and commenced advocating not mercy but justice. She trotted out the usual statistics concerning the rising homicide rate in California; the percentage of criminals who, within six months of their release, commit the same crime for which they were initially incarcerated; the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer of keeping people alive and happy in prison. She gave detail after lurid detail supposedly related to Juan Corona’s recent murder of his twenty-six farm workers in the San Joaquín Valley, and mused aloud, with lavish irony, whether in a decade or two Juan would be free to hire a few more farm workers. She finished her affirmation by claiming to have asked “literally hundreds” of potential criminals in the Fillmore district whether the “black specter” of the death penalty would deter them from committing murder, and pretty near all of them said it would deter them from even carrying a gun.

All four of our assistants raised and waved their signs: “Dismiss as naive syllogism all deterrent theory.”

Alicia thanked the audience. She thanked the moderator. She thanked the judge. She thanked the visiting “challengers.” She thanked her coach. She thanked her teammates. She thanked her mother. The crowd, including her mother, howled its approval. Alicia sat down. Confronting five hundred unfriendly and five friendly faces, standing on the stage of an immense cement building on the wrong side of the Bay, feeling the floodlights melt down my fingernails, I was not a little nervous. My tongue bore no relation to—Hoblock’s favorite image—a silver-tipped trumpet. I thanked Alicia for her provocative presentation, complimented her on the passion of her approach and, following these bows to proper form, I felt glib.

I mused aloud, with train-wreck irony, whether the proper function of the state was to embody the highest ideals of humanity or the lowest common denominator of the animal kingdom. I cited case after case of men proven innocent only after they’d been given a guided tour of the gas chamber. I dismissed as naive syllogism all deterrent theory. I displayed a graph that showed, sort of, that in
1971
North Dakota didn’t impose the death penalty and had the lowest murder rate in the country,
.2
per
100,000
people, whereas Alabama did impose the death penalty and had the highest murder rate,
13.7
per
100,000
. I wasn’t sterling. I was adequate and, besides the beginning, I didn’t stutter, so I was satisfied.

I hardly listened at all to Josephine who, when I did tune her in, seemed extraordinarily shrill and rhetorical without saying much of anything: Hoblock’s ladder without rungs. Leo, especially by way of comparison, was the very voice of rational persuasion, using all the right debaters’ transitions (“If, on the other hand, we consider the issue from the perspective of the murder victim’s mother-in-law …”), leaping to pun here and self-deprecation there, pulling graphs out of his hip pocket, quoting from memory the important portion of Mother’s
9/22/69
article on prison rehabilitation, never pausing, never taking a breath, talking a mile a minute until the moderator said, “Time!” and then again “Mr. Gogol, your time is up. Time! Mr. Gogol, you will conclude that sentence and be seated.”

Mr. Gogol concluded that sentence and was seated, but a minute later he was back on his feet as first negative cross-examination rebutter, wondering with a wry smile just how reliable some of Josephine’s sources were, then, eight minutes later, turning around to receive her counter-attack, to defend his own data. Alicia and I sat on the sidelines, not so much listening to our teammates as attempting to stare each other down as we went into the final bout. In romantic comedy, two pairs of lovers disagree about something or other and exchange partners and finally get reunited with their true loves. This was like that except none of us had a true love with whom to get reunited, so we were forced, according to the rules of the Revised Illinois Formal Debate, to argue the night away.

I figured Leo and I had a fairly large lead entering the final round. If I kept Alicia on her toes with an endless series of incredibly niggling questions, then dodged every doubt she threw my way, we’d win. I asked: “Isn’t the rising homicide rate in California a function not of any especially new or terrible trend toward violence but of dramatic state-wide growth in population? You claim, Miss Stephens, that within six months of their release thirty-four percent of all criminals commit the same crime for which they were initially incarcerated, but after serving extended sentences how many murderers ever kill again? You speak of the ‘exorbitant cost to the taxpayer of keeping people alive and happy in prison,’ but exactly how happy are they there? Have you conducted a cost/benefit analysis of a jail cell compared to the price of a decent apartment downtown? If not, why not? If so, do you actually believe it’s possible to place a monetary value on human life? We all sympathize with the farm workers Juan Corona plowed under during harvest season in the Valley, but surely the man is insane, surely you don’t mean to argue for the execution of the criminally insane, or do you? Do you have with you tape recordings of the conversations you had with the so-called potential criminals in the Fillmore district concerning the alleged deterrent value you claim the death penalty would have upon them? Did it ever occur to you that they assumed you were a plainclothes parole officer, and therefore were lying through their teeth?”

My metal brace was belted so tight it had begun to cut off the circulation in my left leg. I wanted to sit down and rest and celebrate the victory, but Alicia sidestepped all the questions surprisingly well and came clawing back. There’s a particular rebuttal technique which, when successful, brings the other person out from behind his barrier of formal language. Through feigned belief and outright accusation, you attempt to force your opponent into asinine emotionalism, into some eleventh-hour plea for compassion and love—the death knell for any debater. Alicia appeared to have heard of this technique.

“Do I understand you correctly,” she asked, “to be saying that,
re
capital punishment, the state should be not just but merciful? Would that be a fair assessment of your position?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I said.

“Then I
am
confused. What exactly is your position?”

“That,
re
capital punishment, the state should be not retributive but just.”

“A fine distinction indeed.”

She meant “fine” in the sense of “minute,” but I decided to receive it in the sense of “excellent” and said, “Thank you, Miss Stephens.”

That was the beginning of the end. That got her mad. She paced up and back on the stage, flipping through her index cards, looking for a loophole somewhere, while I gripped the podium, trying to stay on my feet the final four minutes.

“You claim,” she said, “that in
1971
North Dakota had the lowest murder rate in the country,
.2
per hundred thousand, whereas that rate was actually
1.2
per hundred thousand, and the year must have been
1970
, since
1971
figures have, to my knowledge, not yet been released.”