Eureka Man: A Novel (7 page)

“Yeah? What'd you see?”

“Heart. You got some heart. Now there's only
one question?”

“What's that?”

“Can you take a punch?”

“I took Bob's best shot and didn't go down,
so what's that tell you?”

“Bob doesn't hit that hard. You ain't been
hit hard yet.”

Oliver paused at the front door of the little
St. Regis. “I've been hit by guys who could punch a lot harder than
Disco Bob and I didn't go down.”

“I don't know about that. All I know is I
barely hit you last summer and I knocked you on your ass.”

“Come on, man. That was a sucker punch. I
wasn't expecting you to hit me.”

Fat Daddy leaned into Oliver, his hound-dog
face twisted with malice as he tugged on two of his corn-rows. “I
could have knocked you out, but I gave you a break.”

“I doubt that. But what's your point with all
this, Fat Daddy?”

“My point is I'm a better trainer than old
man Luther. If you join my stable, I'll show you how to take a
punch.”

“Is that right? Look, man. I don't want any
trouble. I'm fine with Luther.”

“You think I'm trying to cause you
trouble?”

“I don't know, man.”

“That's right, you don't. Cause if I was, you
wouldn't know it. Trouble's like a sucker punch. You never know
when it's coming.”

“I'll keep that in mind. Meanwhile, I
appreciate your offer, but I'm going to stay with Luther.”

“Suit yourself. Just remember what I said,
Priddy. It's the punch you don't see coming that spells trouble
every time.” He winked at Oliver and strolled inside the block.

Oliver was certain he knew the difference
between advice and a threat and he was sure Fat Daddy wasn't giving
him advice. He walked inside the block and stopped at the
sergeant's desk to see if he had mail. While the guard checked, he
watched Fat Daddy climb the front stairwell all the way to the
fifth tier and when he didn't see him walking down F-tier, he knew
the low-life lived somewhere on the riverside.

LIFE IMPROVED ENORMOUSLY
for Oliver after he
began working in the Education Department. Pushing a broom around
the halls gave him leave to look through the glass walls of the
classrooms and read the chalkboard lecture notes on Shakespearean
tragedies, the seventh president's war on nullification, and
Freud's Oedipus complex. Oliver was young and handsome and he was
friendly, and the professors felt free to tease him when they
walked to the water fountain during the ten-minute break they gave
the students halfway through their three hour lectures.

“Are you writing down my lecture notes and
selling them, young man? They're not free, you know?” said one
professor.

“No, sir. I wouldn't do that.”

“There'll be a quiz next week,” said another.
“Any questions?”

“Well, since you asked, that self-fulfilling
prophecy can work for you or against you, can't it?”

“Absolutely. As in, if you tell yourself
enough times that you're going to be successful, you will be.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He loved watching the classrooms fill up
every morning, afternoon and evening. Each professor brought up to
six campus students to every class and they were usually bright,
curious girls wearing blue sweaters, yellow blouses, plaid skirts,
tight blue jeans and lipstick. Spoiled by his tea and peppermint
candy, they talked freely to him about their love lives: Okay,
you're a guy so tell me what you think. He didn't call me for a
week so I called him and he wanted to come right over. See? So he
does care. Yeah, right. When he got there, I wanted to talk and he
wanted to undress me. He practically ripped off my nightgown. You
can't blame him for that. You're as beautiful as all outdoors, you
know? All he had to do was listen until you made your point, then
he could have used his own tongue. Are you seeing anyone else? Not
really. He wants to take me

home to meet his parents during spring break.
I really like him, but spring break? I don't think so. Can't blame
you there. You're young. Live and have fun while you can. You want
another cup of tea? Want to smoke a joint? Meet me in the Xerox
room.

The smell of pine sol, old books and perfume
kept Oliver in the building during all of his free time. He painted
classrooms, answered telephones and made fresh pots of coffee; he
typed memos and put away files and books for the teachers and
counselors, and once a week he walked down Turk's Street, crossed
Tom's Way and followed the street with no name all the way to the
back door of the bake shop where his order was waiting for him. He
paid in Kools and returned with sweet nutty rolls, bear claws and
donuts. The staff loved him for it. They loved him too, every time
he put his mop down to help a student who was preparing for the
high school equivalency examination. He knew the rules of grammar
and punctuation better than the teachers did, and he was a wiz at
math.

At night, alone in his cell, he read books
until his eyes crossed and then he laid there thinking about all
the new ideas he was gathering. Rather than memorize the meaning of
new words, he made a game out of learning them. Quaint was the
little professor in the green bow-tie, with the flattop haircut and
the caterpillar mustache crawling across his upper lip. Serendipity
was the feeling he got every time one of the campus girls smiled at
him early in the morning and said, “There you are!” And esoteric
was between the lines of the passages he read in a Saul Bellow
novel, Herzog: “With one long breath, caught and held in his chest,
he fought his sadness over his solitary life: 'Don't cry you idiot!
Live or die, but don't poison everything.'” When he read those
words it had been as if they were his very own. In his mind's eye
he had seen the person speaking and the person spoken to, the
watcher and the watched. This moment marked the dawn of his
self-awareness and he was excited to tears at the vein of hope that
opened up inside him. Now he read like a man in search of a cure
for his own terminal illness: stories, novels, biographies,
philosophy. He took notes on Emerson, Pascal, James, Husserl,
Sartre, and Plato. After he had gone through all the books in
Albert's cell, he began finding them in the education building, on
window ledges, in storage rooms and cabinets, and on the heaps of
garbage. The psychologist he was seeing gave him two self-help
books to read and he “got it.” He understood that his life script
was tragic rather than banal, and he genuinely believed that his
life position was, I'm okay, you're okay. When the psychologist
suggested that he could improve his conditions by taking up a hobby
like drawing or learning to play a musical instrument or enrolling
in a college class, it took another year of coaxing from Albert and
Early and his boss, Mr. Sommers, before he associated what they
were all telling him with the long-term goal he once had.

AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of teaching behind bars,
Professor Stanley Manners told his class of literature students why
he continued to volunteer his time to prisoners. He was a free
thinker, he said, and he wanted to open rather than close doors. He
acknowledged his compassion, but in the same breath he said he was
not a bleeding heart liberal. He never got up close and personal
into the lives of his students; he merely planted seeds. His goal
for the semester was to introduce them to the art of juxtaposing
old points of view and new ones, and then determining for
themselves which perspective has greater personal value. Professor
Stanley Manners had Oliver sitting on the edge of his seat not just
because he was blown away by the man's elocution. Oliver was also
stunned by the man's physical appearance and one unusual tic he
possessed. He was fiftyish, tall and lean, with round shoulders.
His gray hair was long and ponytailed and his cheeks were sunken.
He had a waxed mustache fanned across his bony face, and chin fuzz.
He wore a wrinkled cream linen suit, a pink button-down shirt, and
a bottle green bow tie. Cordovan leather wing tips graced his
narrow feet, and when he was standing before the chalkboard his
left foot never stopped tapping the floor. Rapidly. The tapping
seemed as natural to the man as the hand he waved in front of him
to emphasize a point. Oliver had enough natural elegance not to
stare directly down at the man's foot, but it didn't matter. As he
looked intently at the professor's face, he developed a temporary
tic of his own. He couldn't stop himself from looking rapidly at
the man's foot and then back up at one of his facial features--the
chin fuzz, the bright gray eyes, the sunken cheeks, the waxy
mustache.

Then he said something that shook Oliver to
his core. “The stories we're going to read this semester can touch
us as gently as a baby's breath, and, if given the chance, they can
encourage us to extend our boundaries and comfort zones, and rattle
these bars as fiercely as a caged lion.” Oliver was smitten with
inspiration.

For the first three weeks of class Oliver
listened to his fellow students and learned how the upperclassmen
responded to Professor Stanley Manners' questions. He liked the
fact that most questions required reflection and elaboration, and
some had no right or wrong answers. When the professor asked about
the central conflict in D.H. Lawrence's “The Blind Man,” Oliver
raised his hand for the first time. The professor nodded to him and
he rose from his seat but sat right back down after the professor
told him he didn't need to stand. “Well, actually,” he began.
“Isn't there really more than one conflict in this story?”

Professor Manners extended his hands, palms
up, his left foot tapping spasmodically. “You tell me.”

“Well, actually, yes. You have the conflict
of man versus the environment in that Maurice struggles in the
world every day with his blindness. Then there's the conflict of
man versus self with Maurice's friend Bertie who is very
uncomfortable with intimacy.”

“Yeah, but that's the central conflict,” an
upperclassman chimed in. “Not the environment conflict. That's a
given. There's only one real conflict in this story, Professor
Manners, and that's man versus self.”

Oliver had no intention of arguing with a
third year college student.

The professor pointed at him. “You're Mr.
Priddy, right? I take it you disagree with what the gentleman
said.”

“Actually, sir, I wasn't finished. I don't
know if I agree with him or not, but I think there may even be
another conflict at work in this story, and that's man versus man.
Once Maurice exposes his vulnerabilities to his friend, there's
tension between the two of them.”

Discussions like this went on for the next
twelve weeks and Oliver's confidence soared with each one. He lost
his lunch before every exam and bit his nails to the quick after he
turned in each paper and while he waited for their return with an A
scrawled on top. His final essay called for a lengthy discourse on
Kafka's notion that a story serves as “an axe for the frozen sea
within us.” Not only did he earn a perfect grade on the paper, but
the professor said it was so well written that he wanted to publish
it in the undergraduate literary journal of which he was in charge
on the main campus. Oliver was delighted.

When final grades came out and he saw the A
on his official grade form, Oliver said to himself, uh huh, go on,
say it! You knew you could do it, didn't you? But around his
friends, he downplayed the whole thing. Albert, Penelope, and Early
congratulated him until he turned red with embarrassment. His
fellow classmates teased him in good taste, and the campus girls
said way to go, you scholar.

But what tickled him more than anything was
how he was supposed to be doing hard time among hardened cons, and
here he had turned his prison into an Ivy League campus. He
relished walking down Turk's Street every morning with a bale of
books under his arms, flirting with the campus girls who came every
day, and staying up until three in the morning, drinking tea and
reading Shakespeare, writing in his journal or working on his
latest commitment-editing The Wire, the lifers' newsletter. Just
about everything he needed was right there in the prison and what
wasn't came to him once a week, his own college girl Penelope. Tall
and busty, with narrow hips, long shapely legs and a well-rounded
behind, she had a face that banged drums of envy among the young
ladies and awe among the men. Not only was she pleasant to look at,
she was bright and witty, too. During their weekly visits, she
always brought their conversation around to some political or
current topic in the news. Was it right for the United States to do
business with the Shah of Iran? Should we give him refuge if he
should fall? On both of these questions she answered in the
affirmative and proceeded to put forth a sound argument to bolster
her position. Oliver was more than impressed by her logic. Her
knowledge of major league baseball baffled him, too. She was a
Pirates fan, and he was an Orioles fanatic. After she explained to
him why and how her team had beaten his twice in the World Series,
he quickly changed the subject to the shade of her lipstick. “Is
that strawberry?” he artfully asked her. “No. It just tastes that
way. See?” she teased, smiling at him three different ways before
she gently pressed her lips against his. These moments and other
things they shared in common-their Catholic upbringing, broken
families, and the universal need to be needed-had metamorphosed
their business arrangement into a deep emotional connection. Being
with her each week made him feel he still had another part of
himself that had not been taken away. He didn't know how long it
was going to last and he tried not to think about it. When they
were together they made each other feel like they were the only two
people in the world. He never asked her if she had someone else out
there; he didn't want to know. Her lack of inhibition and unending
desire to please was enough for him.