Chapter One of "99," from Publish and Perish
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"Would you like to hear an American joke?" Martin said, over drinks. He and Gregory were in a smoky pub around the corner from the BBC. "Perhaps it'll do you good."
He spoke in that same British sing-song with which he always said, at the end of a day's shooting, "Fancy a pint?"
"Will it make me laugh?" said Gregory, an American. He lifted his sharp chin and tossed his hair back, not meeting Martin's eye, but watching himself in the mirror behind the bar.
"Well, it pertains to your present situation," Martin said.
That got Gregory's attention, and he swung his gaze back to his producer. Early in the project Martin had made a pass at Gregory, who found it understandable but not especially welcome, and deflected it politely. I have no theoretical problem with it, he began, but... Martin simply shrugged and said, if you ever change your mind. Now he was smiling, with a puckish, I-told-you-so look in his eye, amused at Gregory's pain.
"Do you want to hear it?" Martin said. "The joke, I mean."
Now it was Gregory's turn to shrug. Martin wouldn't rest until he had told it.
"Right." Martin leaned forward, folding his hands. "A man is jumping up and down on a manhole cover. As he jumps, he's shouting, 'Ninety-eight, ninety-eight, ninety-eight.'"
Martin moved his shoulders up and down to simulate jumping.
"Now, another chap comes along and says, 'What on earth are you doing?'
"The first man keeps jumping up and down on the manhole cover, and he says, 'Ninety-eight...it's wonderful fun...ninety-eight...you really should try it...ninety-eight...'
"So the second man says, 'Really? What's fun about it?'
"And the first man says, 'Ninety-eight...try it and see...ninety-eight...'
"'Alright then,' says the second man, 'step aside.'
"So the first man jumps aside, and the second chap steps onto the manhole cover and starts jumping up and down, shouting out, 'Ninety-eight, ninety-eight, ninety-eight...'"
"I get the picture," Gregory said. Martin had little sense of pacing, an unfortunate lack in a documentary producer.
"Of course you do." Martin smiled. "So the first man says, 'Jump higher.'
"'Like this?' says the second man, crying, 'Ninety-eight, ninety-eight, ninety-eight,' and jumping as high he can. And as he jumps higher, the first man reaches under him, pulls away the manhole cover, and down falls the second chap into the hole. Then the first fellow puts the manhole cover back over the hole, and starts jumping up and down and saying, 'Ninety-nine, ninety-nine..."
Martin dissolved into a sort of wheezing laugh, but Gregory had to force a smile. He pushed his hair back from his forehead and looked away. It was like hearing a joke in another language.
"How exactly does this pertain to me?"
"You Americans are so thick sometimes." Martin lifted his pint.
Gregory sighed. He wondered if his British friends would ever stop marking his foreignness in every conversation. He'd known Martin for a year now, and it was still right-hand drive versus left, warm beer versus cold, pram versus baby buggy. Gregory hated being identified as an American. He flattered himself that he looked the part of the European guerilla intellectual, at least from a distance, with his distressed leather jacket, his wool trousers by Helmut Lang, and the goatee he'd grown to blunt the sharpness of his face.
"Your teeth give you away," Martin had said, when Gregory complained. "The relentless and all-pervasive dental hygiene of North America." Not to mention, he went on, still trying, your height, your blue eyes, and your pixieish smile.
"Let me make it easy for you," Martin was saying now. He put down his pint and licked his lips. "Fiona is the chap jumping up and down and counting her victims."
"And I'm number ninety-nine."
"Precisely. Clever lad."
Gregory felt that odd, acid bubbling in his stomach again. He could never decide if it was rage or pain, or both. He peered at Martin through the haze of cigarette smoke.
"Did you know this about her before?"
"Of course. A number of blokes have fallen down that hole."
"But not you."
"Well," said Martin, trying not to smile at the foolishness of heterosexual passion. "I've fallen down others."
"Thanks for warning me." Gregory lifted his drink and glared at Martin over the rim. He even indulged in a bit of paranoia, wondering if Martin had pushed him in the direction of Fiona as revenge for Gregory's brush-off early in the shoot.
"Don't give me that look." Martin crossed his arms, giving Gregory a superior smile. "You told me yourself you were happy to get out of the States because of..."
"Yes, yes, yes," Gregory said, cutting Martin off.
In his other life, when he wasn't the on-camera host of a BBC series, Gregory Eyck was an anthropologist at the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota. He was an apostate child of Holland, Michigan, the ambitious son of an ambitious father, Greg, Sr., a successful minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. After an adolescence alternating between blowing away his classmates in Bible Study with his encyclopedic knowledge of scripture, and raising the right amount of hell required of a Preacher's Kid, Greg, Jr. walked away from the church and out from under the immense shadow of his father to find his own spectacular success in secular scholarship. Greg, Jr., PK, became Gregory, the critical theorist. But even he admitted, at least to himself, that his upbringing had stood him in good stead for a postmodern life. He had come away with two invaluable gifts from his father and the DRC: a cheerful ruthlessness in the practice of institutional politics, and a capacity for intellectual rigor within a closed theoretical system. Thus he saw no sin against the Holy Ghost—and certainly no sin against Foucault, quite the opposite—in happily twisting the knife in his enemies, who were, after all, mere backsliders and reactionaries. And parsing Derrida line by line on the difference between différence and différance was a piece of cake after a youth spent parsing Calvin, line by line, on justification by faith.
In the secular academy, Gregory only rose and rose. The year before, he had been poised to ascend to the peak of his profession. He was already the de facto chairperson of his department—though not the actual chair, since that involved a level of responsibility that Gregory found tedious—his grad students got the most grant money, junior faculty were tenured only with his say so, the final decision on new hires was usually up to him. Already a national figure in the discipline, now came an opportunity to make himself an international one: in the running debate over the meaning of the death of Captain Cook at the hands of the Hawaiian islanders in 1779, the two most important figures were friends of Gregory Eyck. One was Joe Brody, his grad school mentor from Wisconsin State, a stubborn old Irishman who argued that the Hawaiians murdered Cook because they mistook him for the god Lono. The other was Gregory's old grad school friend, Stanley Tulafale, a massive, soft-spoken Samoan who bristled eloquently on behalf of Third Worlders everywhere at the imputation that level-headed Hawaiians could mistake a bad-tempered Yorkshireman for their god of renewal. The debate had been born in a bag-lunch talk, escalated to an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books, and erupted at last into a full-blown, intercontinental, multiple warhead exchange of dueling monographs, while the predoctoral and the untenured cowered among the bouncing rubble and looked on in awe.
Gregory conceived of a conference at which the two of them could hash it out in public, head to head, knowing that most of the important anthropologists in the world would want to be there when they did. He took care of all the details himself, from ensuring that the two combatants had equally plush accommodations, to providing a touch of theater. The debate over Cook was pretty prosaic in itself, focusing on the mere facts of his fatal misunderstanding with the Hawaiian chief Kalaniopu'u, so Gregory added some dramatic touches. Since the controversy hinged on the coincidence of Cook's arrival in the islands with the start of the Makahiki festival, which in turn was heralded by the appearance of the Pleiades on the horizon at sunset in mid-November, Gregory scheduled the conference in mid-November. And since Cook's fate was reputedly sealed by the further coincidence that he had sailed around Hawaii with the land to his right at the same time as the god Lono made his annual right-hand circuit of the island, Gregory arranged that each successive seminar was to take place in a different building, in a right hand circuit of the campus. Finally, Gregory called the conference "'Captains' and 'Cannibals': The Cultural Constructions of the Death of Captain Cook." The poster, which Gregory designed, featured an imperial-era engraving of a brutish Hawaiian chieftain wielding a nasty-looking wooden club, juxtaposed with a modern, black and white photograph of a skull. Purely in the interest of evenhandedness, Gregory awarded himself the privilege of giving the keynote address, a witty and cogent intervention which he called "Eat Me: Captain Cook and the Ingestion of the Other." He stopped shaving three days before opening of the conference to give himself a more glamorous look, cultivating just the right amount of postmodern stubble.
But he never had a chance to deliver the paper. At the opening session, just as Gregory was at the podium lubricating his throat with a glass of water, a graduate student in his own department, a woman of Third World ancestry, stood up in the audience and denounced the conference poster as racist.
"Why is the Pacific Islander represented as a brute," she declared loudly, "and the European captain as a starkly beautiful white skull?"
Gregory was nothing if not savvy, and he realized instantly that the irony he'd intended by the poster was lost on this crowd. His chief regret, of course, was that he hadn't thought of this earlier. He was forced to abandon his paper and stammer an impromptu reply to the woman in front of the assembled conference. In the end, none of the scheduled papers was presented; the conference itself became a two-and-a-half day shouting match over the conference poster. The conference started on a Friday, and by Saturday afternoon Gregory was aware of the gleeful whispers that followed him down the hall, of the embarrassed silence that greeted him every time he walked into a room. He could feel his professional reputation fluttering after him like a shredded flag. Neither Brody nor Tulafale got a chance to speak, and by Sunday, neither was speaking any longer to Gregory. It came back to him, in fact, that Stanley Tulafale had been heard to say that pace Cook, Gregory ought to be beaten to death by his graduate students, for mistaking himself for a god.
What made it worse was that he happened to have been sleeping with the graduate student who had raised the question in the first place, a lovely if lugubrious young woman from Sri Lanka named Catherine. Later, in a more private setting, he asked her plaintively why she hadn't mentioned the poster to him long before the conference?
"It's not my job," Catherine declared, "to explain the world to ignorant white men."
"That's grossly unfair," protested Gregory, his political vanity stung.
"You guys are all alike," she said. "You think that if you fuck a dark girl, it takes the juju off your white skin. Like, you're absolved of guilt. Well, Cook thought he understood the natives, too, and he ended up as just another roast pig at the luau."
Worst of all, Gregory's presumptive fiance, a brilliant crusading feminist lawyer—who was, personally and professionally, the most suspicious person Gregory had ever met—had sniffed a lover's spat the instant Catherine stood up, even before she opened her mouth. It was only a matter of hours before her suspicion became public, and by the following day some wit had retitled the conference "Captain Cook, the Chief, Greg Eyck, and His Lover." Almost overnight his grad students stopped coming round to see him, his colleagues "forgot" to tell him about departmental meetings, and his imprimatur was no longer sought for hiring decisions. And for months afterward Gregory awoke shuddering from a nightmare of himself being barbecued alive like a pig, with Catherine turning one end of the spit and the lawyer turning the other. In the dream, the famous British explorer himself stood by, basting Gregory with a bottle of Open Pit, and wearing over his naval uniform an apron that read, in big black letters, "Kiss the Cook."
Luckily, one of the other participants at the conference had been Martin Close, a documentary producer for the BBC, and when he idly suggested over drinks on Saturday evening that Gregory might be interested in hosting a series Martin was doing on the cultural uses of archaeology, Gregory decided on the spur of the moment that a sabbatical overseas might be a wonderful thing.
"And what about that dusky young woman of yours?" Martin was saying now, in the pub. "What was her name?"
"C-Catherine," Gregory said, pretending to choke on his olive.
"There you go. You told me in the taxi from Heathrow that you were here to cut a swathe through the women of London. Your words, Gregory. I want to be a loose cannon for a while, you said, mixing your metaphors."
"I never mix my metaphors," Gregory said, with some heat. He prided himself on the elegance of his prose. His first book had called "lucid" by Edward Said.
Martin shrugged.
"Whatever you say. I simply thought you'd settle for a dirty weekend with Fiona. I didn't expect you to fall in love with her."
"Well, love," protested Gregory.
"Oh, of course, I forgot. Love is a bourgeois affectation, isn't it?"
"No," said Gregory, "but it is a bourgeois affectation to reduce a complicated ideological position to that sort of epithet."
"Save it for your graduate students," Martin snapped, and there was a moment of awkward silence, as each man regretted letting the conversation come to this pass. Gregory considered apologizing, and decided to wait for Martin to apologize first. Which he did: Martin was a television producer, after all, and practiced in degrees of servility to which an academic could only aspire.
"Look, I feel the tiniest bit responsible," he said, "though I shouldn't. So I'll make it up to you."
"You've been a lot of help so far."
"I have actually, so I'll ignore that remark. Get out of town, is my advice. Go see bloody Stonehenge or walk across the moors or whatever it is you Americans like to do. We don't really need you anymore, quite frankly. We're well into post-production, and the last thing we need is the lovelorn host mooning about and tripping over the cables."
"Maybe next week," Gregory said, a little panicked at the thought of his own company, even for a few days. He was a man who needed onlookers, even if he chose to ignore them.
"No. Right now. Drink up." Martin stood and lifted his coat off the back of his chair. "We'll go get you packed, and I'll drive you to the station tomorrow."
He moved behind Gregory and lifted his leather jacket from the chair so that Gregory was forced to stand and push his arms through the sleeves.
"There's some wiggle room in the budget," Martin added, murmuring seductively into Gregory's ear. "We'll call it 'research.'"
At this Gregory turned abruptly; nothing catches the attention of an academic like the prospect of a free trip.
"I thought you said we were down to the bone on the budget," he said, instantly relishing the thought of going nearly anywhere at the BBC's expense.
"My dear," Martin said, taking his arm as they stepped into the evening air, "there's always wiggle room in a budget. Especially when it comes to coddling our star performer."
Gregory smiled and said nothing and let Martin keep his hand in the creaking leather of his elbow.
"Now aren't you ashamed of yourself," Martin said, "for being beastly to me?"
Copyright © 1997 by James Hynes