The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III Read online

  Romantic things aside, my suspicions were growing that something altogether much fishier was going on with that grammarian’s manuscript than I’d first imagined. Not only did the warped errata fail to fizzle out, as I’d been hoping, they seemed if anything to be getting worse. As Forward with English! indeed made its forward progress—rising like a glass-and-chrome mall escalator from the basic rudiments, up through the various levels of proficiency toward the shining Advanced Certificate—far from disappearing, the bizarrities just got wilder, more insistent, attaining new heights of scramble. What on my first day at the office I had taken charitably to be the as-yet-unculled flaws (due to the pressures of some in-house publishing deadline or a sloppy printer’s glitches?) on subsequent days looked more likely the result of deliberate, not to say mischievous, tinkering. By the Vocabulary for Beginners section, tinkering had already reached chronic proportions.

  There, on the surface of things, the prospective student is being invited to limber up with some light calisthenics. By invoking universally recognized household objects (all rather tellingly orphaned bric-a-brac from the Hash dwelling-of-residence), by employing a deceptively conventional format, and by disguising himself as a lexical midwife, the thus-far anonymous but suspiciously Bob T. Hash III–like compiler seems to be hoping to lull the learner into a state of passive receptivity. The planetary metaphors, the almost hallucinogenic insistence on color, and the entirely gratuitous preference for the indefinite article, however, should put us on the alert—for God-knows-what ribald acrobatics to come.

  The question was: What did the Bob Hash I thought I had known—champion of the stock phrase, purveyor of lite-speak—have this unwarranted mumbo jumbo sitting on his desk for in the first place? Absconding from the picture book like a romantic Gauguin is one thing; mixing with malefactors who wish to throw mud at the unimpeachable picture world of Acme is another. Could it be I was discovering a playful, if not downright seditious, side to the man? Could it be that Bob had even himself taken a hand in their composition?

  “Goodness to Betsy,” I said out loud to myself, banging my fist on the desk (I was back in the office). “Hash can’t be the prankster!”

  12

  Buying a Newspaper

  In this skit, the student has to imagine that a business colleague has not been seen for a number of days. The situation becomes more serious when the missing colleague fails to turn up at an important meeting where he was due to present last quarter’s sales figures. To find out the very latest developments, the concerned student goes to the newsstand for a newspaper to check over the missing persons list and obituary sections.

  STUDENT: A New York Times, please, Bert.

  VENDOR (doffing cloth cap): Sorry, Miss. We don’t stock The New York Times.

  STUDENT: Well, then, I’ll take a Washington Post.

  VENDOR: We don’t stock that one either.

  STUDENT: You wouldn’t stock the Belmont Gazette, by any chance?

  VENDOR: I’ll just have a look. (Sounds of rustling from under the kiosk counter.) Yes (peering at date), here’s today’s edition of the Belmont Gazette!

  STUDENT: Okay. I’ll take the Belmont Gazette, please.

  VENDOR: That’ll be sixty cents.

  STUDENT: Oh (on impulse)…and I’ll take a Cuban cigar too, please.

  VENDOR: That’ll be one dollar fifty, Miss Scarlett.

  STUDENT (handing him two crisp dollar bills): Just keep the change!

  (CASH REGISTER: ching-ching!)

  VENDOR: Much obliged, Miss Scarlett. (Doffs cap again profoundly.)

  13

  And there might have ended my involvement in the matter: Comenius the mascot African gray parrot returned, serene as a guardian angel, to his perch, the manuscript tucked back into its manila envelope and returned to the out tray, Matilda a waving widow on the veranda—if it weren’t for the fact that I appeared to now be actually trapped in the role of Bob T. Hash III. Not that Bob’s role was disagreeable in itself—I had after all tried very hard to get aboard a human adventure like this in the first place. I had learned how to open windows and doors. I had thrown my own Frisbee. I had driven Bob’s car to the office and attended to the quarterly sales figures. Plus, of course, there was the serendipitous boon of being able to mate, as freely, with as much abandon, and as often as I wished, with his wife.

  But as the extent of the damage done to the new course book material came to light, as did the perhaps less than innocent role that Bob had played in that damage, might not I one fine day be accused of those very scramblings myself?

  Initially I had supposed my own species-flipping might take the same seesawing format as in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the cuttlebone playing the part of villainous toxin. And now, well, short of that, it would be nice to at least have the option of being able to flip out if things were to become too complicated in due course. I discovered that the metamorphosis was this time irreversible, and that that option was alas to be denied me!

  Meanwhile, any remaining hopes that Bob had himself been unaware of the distortions taking place inside the new Forward with English! were pretty much dashed by a phone call I received in my office at eleven o’clock on the first Thursday morning of my new job. It was Mr. Gleason, the printer’s assistant. In a barely audible voice Mr. Gleason was asking what had happened to the “package” that I—that is, Bob T. Hash III—had promised to send. “It hasn’t arrived yet, and we’re getting worried it’s been lost in the mail,” he said. “By the way, that last crop of crazy infringements you sent takes the cake!” I resisted the impulse to get annoyed with Mr. Gleason and ask him what in the devil’s name was this “package” of crazy cake-taking infringements he was talking about. Quick-thinkingly, literally leaping ahead in terms of the plot pace and, in a voice as steady as I could manage, I told Mr. Gleason that, on a late rereading of my work, I (that is Bob T. Hash III) had decided to hang on to the manuscript for a few days longer in order to make some last-minute adjustments. I assured him that the moment it was ready I would have it FedEx-ed over to him.

  “No problem, Mr. Hash,” whispered Mr. Gleason. “Do bear in mind the master printer will be coming back from leave in a fortnight. If you want to get this stuff through unchecked then you’ll have to get a move on.”

  I recradled the receiver, and tried to remain calm. I picked up the framed photo from the desk and tried to square the familiar image of the bland-browed businessman in his stolid thick-rimmed Clark Kent glasses and weekend cardigan in front of the veranda, with an emerging, and quite different profile altogether. I felt a very large penny drop inside me. It made a satisfying, old-fashioned kedge-jing-click sound.

  One evening a few weeks before this, I remember Bob announcing that he had received a commission to compile the new eighth edition of Forward with English!—“That’s wonderful, darling!”—the seventh being deemed threadbare, pallid, dog-eared, and in urgent need of an update. As popular protagonist, fulcrum, and trustworthy citizen of the then current seventh edition, Bob would have been the natural candidate for the task. All he’d really have to do would be to pluck a few examples from his daily routines, throw in a few rudimentary observations about the people around him, switch around a few names here and there, throw in a few token concessions to the advances in technology and prevailing moral fashions, and leave it to the picture book artist to refurbish the furniture and give the white picket fences a fresh lick of paint.

  That same evening after dinner, I had watched him sit down at his living room desk to embark on the task, apparently with no motive ulterior than dispatching a competent, regular grammar book to the specifications the update required. After a few days of an initial and enthusiastic drafting, however, Bob’s work pace began to slow down. It began with some idle doodlings in the margins. Innocent enough, you will say—the emarginated juxtaposition of his “This is a table, this is a chair” with a badly drawn three-dimensional hexagon, or his “Someone has left a banana peel und
er the window” coupled with a haywirish galaxy spiral. Next thing, scrunched-up sheets of discarded paper began to brim from the proverbial—and albino cornucopial—wastebasket (Br. Eng.: “bin”). You knew then that something was wrong. Bob looked bored, an impression not helped by his perching his previously swashbuckling chin on upturned palms, elbows resting on the evening desktop. And well might he be. The very act of writing down the routines and phrases from his life revealed to him what can only be described as the stultifying banality contained therein, to which he had hitherto been—astonishingly—purblind. I watched him from my various perches growing annoyed at himself for having accepted Acme’s drudgely commission. As an aspiring man of letters he felt chained to the humdrum—but worse was the realization that his plan to embezzle from Acme—subsequently abandoned—and run off with his secretary who as we know turned out to be the lascivious Miss Scarlett—subsequently executed—might now by the clay feet of his progress, or lack thereof, on the updated eighth edition of Forward with English!, be put into jeopardy.

  It was time to pull out the finger (see Idiomatic Expressions) from that stagnant becalming, and get on with his course book. Finish the course book first, then the elopement: no reason given why Bob might have things in that order—other than a congenital dash of good old-fashioned work ethic (see Hobbies and Pastimes). And that it lets us ratchet in a bit of motivation on the old plot front—which so far holds about as much water as an episode of Commissioner Rex, about an Alsation dog that’s convinced it’s Sherlock Holmes.

  Bob had arrived at the conclusion—a kind of purple epiphany—that the only way he would be able to resume the project at all was by composing not just one but two versions of Forward with English! and to work on them in tandem. As per the terms of the commission, he would continue to work on the original version, which had thus far only instilled in him that heightened sense of ubiquitous absurdity. But, alongside that version, he would now also compose a second version parallel to the first that, thanks to its indeed Joycean tidbit and free-jazz exuberance, would act as a kind of lightning conductor for his fresh existential insight—thus neutralizing any sense of disaffection that the first version gave him and thus allow him to finish in time for his scheduled elopement with Miss Scarlett. He would submit the regular innocuous version to be published (as the eighth edition) keeping this second one aside for his own private amusement—and that way keep himself sane.

  I remember seeing a documentary about Christopher Columbus, the great explorer, on the living room TV. Apparently, on his voyage across the Atlantic, Columbus had kept two ship’s logbooks, not just one. He’d had one logbook that charted the actual progress of his vessels across the ocean, which he kept locked up and away from the superstitious eyes of his crew, who might break into mutiny should the ships’ true trajectory be disclosed. He had a second logbook too, in which he plotted a course showing his ships to never have strayed out of safe charted waters, and so placated his shipmates. What, I now wondered, if Bob had used a similar ruse himself?

  As his two versions of Forward with English! progressed, so pleased must he have been with his own private version that at a certain point Bob must have decided it was actually better than the original version, the one that adhered to the terms of the commission. The little demon on his shoulder, with its tiny cartoon devil’s trident, like a pirate’s mad bad parrot, was gaining his ear. And on its advice Bob came to defenestrate (to throw out the window) any notion of Hippocratic oath for compilers of grammar course–type books: he’d get his own warped-out version of Forward with English! into print instead!

  In its various phases, Bob would let Acme’s publisher see some fragment of the so-called regular, or decoy version. More important, by sending off fragments of the canonical primer for approval, he was able to build up between himself and the master printer a bond of trust—while at the same time he could sound out which of the master’s assistants was perhaps amenable to corruption. Now and again Bob would slip in the odd sample of his apocryphal version to see if anyone would notice. In many ways it resembled the canonical original—in the same way Columbus’s logbook would have looked very much like the true version—employing the same basic, verisimilitudinous format, only distorted through the prism of Bob’s perverted imagination. At first he’d slipped in just a page or two to get the green light, but by now having brokered a little deal with Mr. Gleason, Bob was able to submit ever larger sections of his bogus version, his darkly comic Pandora’s proofs, without an eyelid being batted. In this, fragments of the original illustrative example from the canonical version still showed through like a resilient palimpsest. Model exercises of sober practicality in the orthodox grammar book, tourist-guide-style, only now overlaid with Bob’s zany and ever more elaborate incursions and miscreant spannerisms. This was no mere sprinkling of playful forgeries—but sabotage on an industrial scale!

  The enormity—the ingeniousness!—of the whole business was now beginning to dawn on me. That elopement in large part was a smoke screen, timed to coincide with the master printer’s absence, leaving corrupt minion Mr. Gleason in charge. On its eve the by-now-dastardly Bob was able to slip into his out tray the vandalized entirety, that Trojan horse twin, in the knowledge that it would pass through the printers unchallenged.

  All this, of course, had serious implications for my own situation. For soon there was going to be trouble—for Mr. Bob T. Hash III—on account of those pernicious corruptions. That is if they weren’t removed before somebody found them.

  I put that framed photo of the Hashes in front of their veranda that I’d picked up at the start of this chapter back on the desk and resolved to come to the rescue of Forward with English!

  14

  At the Dry Cleaners: Taking Things in Your Stride!

  In a previous skit, student discovered a rather nasty stain on his jacket, most likely an ink stain from a leaking pen, though he did have suspicions it was something more sinister, such as blood. At the end of the skit, student left the jacket at the dry cleaners, who assured him that the stain would indeed be removed. It is now Thursday afternoon and time for the student to return to the shop to see if the dry cleaner has lived up to his word.

  (DRY CLEANER DRYLY CONSULTING STUB; CHIEF PROTAGONIST REMAINING MUTE, INCIPIENT AGHASTNESS): “Yes, sir, the stain came out beautifully. However, I think you’ll find you already collected your jacket this morning.”

  15

  Having decided to set myself up as troubleshooter to the orphaned grammar, the first thing was to devise a working method and to sort out my basic approach. I decided the best thing was to divide the task into two distinct phases. The aim of the first, Forward with English! phase one, was to clear the ground. Clearly, before I could begin to turn things around, I was going to have to get rid of the virus intrusions by eliminating all traces of the saboteur’s regurgitated squib. Even that first morning at the desk in Bob’s executive office, casually flicking through the manuscript, without really knowing what I was reading yet, my pen had more than once instinctively leaned in toward the more glaring errata, itching to score out the prankster’s nascent tidbit. As editor in chief, I needed now restrain my censor’s pencil no longer. In the many free hours I had at my disposal in the office, I now began sifting through the material, teasing out anything untoward that might prove confusing to the student, making ample use of the little Wite-Out brush (just like the one for Matilda’s nail varnish). I removed the titanic typos. I jettisoned the hokum outcries and outré pokum. I showed politely but firmly to the door the “all-Greek-to-me”s. I sniffed out like verbal truffles the oases of claptrap, winnowed out the drunken glitches, extirpated the carbuncular bunkum, expunged the archipelagos of bafflement, shepherded the pyrotechnics off to the side, and excised the beachheads of baroqueries and engibberated potpourrificatory errata—to leave a scaled-down but most sensible rump in their stead.

  It is on the foundations of this sensible rump that the revised version of the eighth editio
n of Forward with English! has been reconstituted, in a no less valiant phase two, wherein the eliminated bric-a-brac has been replaced with their down-to-earth bright dinky cousins. In the composition of replacements I have commandeered material from a range of sources. Armed now always with a notebook and pencil, I jotted down fieldwork notes from the hundred bright little routine eventlets that made up the mortal days of Bob T. Hash III—anything from the wording of everyday greetings (“Great to see you again, Janet!”) to the purchasing procurement procedure for a silk-lined narrow-brim brown-felt Sinatra-style fedora hat with its ribbon and its infamous dimpled crown. In the office canteen I would interview colleagues. At mini-conferences I would hand out little informal questionnaires. Staff newsletters and trade magazines also came in handy. I have been able to cite a multitude of Bob’s own Formica-surfaced clipped-together stock phrases retained in my parrot’s memory.

  In addition, I had at my disposal a glossy protocopy of the proposed eighth edition of the accompanying pictures, to which the written sections make copious references, and which of course remained immune to Bob’s nefarious graffiti. Please note that in several pictures, like a saint in a fresco, Bob can appear more than once, but do not be alarmed. Here he is, for example, getting his hair trimmed at Harry the barber’s—while through the barber’s window in the same picture you see him buying a newspaper from Bert at the newsstand. In another picture, you see Bob, after a morning’s industrious toil, standing in line at the staff canteen—look carefully and you can see him on his way out, stacking his empty tray. In another, Bob’s at the department store in Belmont purchasing a new trilby, but at the same time at a background counter of the same store he’s returning a defective pair of cuff links. In another, he’s taking his wife out to the theatre—but only two rows behind them he’s sharing an industrial-size bucket of popcorn with Miss Scarlett. In yet another, Bob’s on the golf course—but that’s not Bert on the tractor mowing in the background, it’s Bob T. Hash III in dungarees and rolled-up lumberjack shirtsleeves.